“Take a completely simple penal law in the form of a prohibition like, say, “you must not kill, you must not steal,” along with its punishment, hanging, or banishment, or a fine. In the second modulation it is still the same penal law, “you must not steal,” and it is still accompanied by certain punishments if one breaks this law, but now everything is framed by, on the one hand, a series of supervisions, checks, inspections, and varied controls that, even before the thief has stolen, make it possible to identify whether or not he is going to steal, and so on … at the other end, punishment will not just be the spectacular, definitive moment of the hanging, fine, or banishment, but a practice like incarceration with a series of exercises and a work of transformation on the guilty person in the form of what we call penitentiary techniques: obligatory work, moralization, correction, and so forth. The third modulation is based on the same matrix, with the same penal law, the same punishments, and the same type of framework of surveillance on one side and correction on the other, but now, the application of this penal law, the development of preventive measures, and the organization of corrective punishment will be governed by the following kind of questions. For example: What is the average rate of criminality for this [type]? … What, therefore, is the comparative cost of the theft and of its repression, and what is more worthwhile: to tolerate a bit more theft or to tolerate a bit more repression? … first form … is the system of the legal code with a binary division between the permitted and the prohibited, and a coupling, comprising the code, between a type of prohibited action and a type of punishment. This, then, is the legal or juridical mechanism … the second mechanism, the law framed by mechanisms of surveillance and correction, which is, of course, the disciplinary mechanism … a series of adjacent, detective, medical, and psychological techniques appear which fall within the domain of surveillance, diagnosis, and the possible transformation of individuals … third form is not typical of the legal code or the disciplinary mechanism, but of the apparatus (dispositif) of security … Rather than imposing a binary of permitted and prohibited “one establishes an average considered as optimal on the one hand, and, on the other, a bandwidth of the acceptable that must not be exceeded. …”
— | Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 19-21 |