Foucault: Surveillance and Crime Control

Last Updated on August 31, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Michel Foucault argued that crime control in modern societies works through surveillance rather than force. There are four ideas you need from him:

1. The shift from sovereign power to disciplinary power
2. The panopticon — Bentham’s prison design, which Foucault uses as a model for modern control
3. Self-surveillance — we discipline ourselves because we might be being watched
4. The spread of disciplinary power beyond the prison into schools, workplaces and families

Foucault’s account of surveillance is taught as part of crime control and prevention within the crime and deviance module, examined on Paper 3.

From sovereign power to disciplinary power

Foucault’s argument starts with a change in how punishment looks.

Before the eighteenth century, punishment was a public spectacle carried out on the body. Executions were staged in front of crowds, and the point of the cruelty was to display the monarch’s power over the condemned person. Foucault calls this sovereign power — control through the visible threat of force.

Discipline and Punish (1975; English translation 1977) opens with an account of the execution of Robert-François Damiens in Paris on 2 March 1757, in which Damiens was tortured over several hours and finally dismembered in public. Foucault gives the description at length deliberately. Eighty years later, he then reproduces a timetable from a Paris reformatory — a list of hours for waking, praying, working and eating. Nothing in between explains the change. The contrast is the argument.

That contrast is the exam-relevant point. In under a century, punishment moved from the public destruction of the body to the private regulation of the daily routine. It became hidden, drawn out, and aimed at the mind rather than the flesh. Foucault calls the new form disciplinary power — control through the continuous monitoring of populations.

Foucault is not arguing that this was straightforwardly kinder. His claim is that it was more efficient. Sovereign power was spectacular but occasional; disciplinary power is unremarkable but constant, and it reaches far more people.

The Panopticon and disciplinary power

The panopticon is a prison design in which a single observer can potentially watch every inmate, but no inmate can tell whether they are being watched. It is the central concept in Foucault’s account of surveillance, and it is the one most likely to appear in an exam question.

The design belongs to Jeremy Bentham, who set it out in a series of letters written in 1787 and published as Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House in 1791. Cells are arranged in a ring around a central inspection tower. The cells are lit from behind so that each prisoner appears as a silhouette, fully visible from the tower. The tower itself is screened, so the prisoners cannot see in.

Why the uncertainty is what does the work

This is the part students most often miss, and it is where the marks are.

The panopticon does not depend on the guard actually watching. It depends on the prisoner being unable to tell. Because observation might be happening at any moment, the rational response is to behave as though it always is. The prisoner ends up enforcing the rules on himself.

Foucault’s point is that the mechanism runs on its own once it is set up. Power stops being something a person exercises over another person and becomes something built into the architecture. In Foucault’s terms, the inmate becomes the principle of his own subjection.

Self-surveillance and the spread beyond the prison

Foucault argues that the panoptic principle escaped the prison. Schools, hospitals, barracks, factories and workhouses all developed along similar lines during the same period — timetables, records, inspections, examinations, and the constant possibility of being observed and assessed.

The results are visible today. Electronic registers and behaviour points in schools. Performance monitoring at work. Health visitors and developmental checks through pregnancy and early childhood. Most of it is accepted as normal, and most of it produces the same effect: people regulate themselves.

A precision point worth getting right. It is common — including in earlier versions of this post — to write that surveillance is disciplinary power. Strictly, it is not. Surveillance is one of the techniques through which disciplinary power operates, alongside classification, examination and the keeping of records. Disciplinary power is the broader process that produces what Foucault calls docile bodies. Getting that distinction right is the difference between a description and an explanation, and examiners notice.

Surveillance and social inequality

Surveillance is not distributed evenly, and the difference runs along class lines.

Wealthier people increasingly live and spend their leisure time in privately secured space — gated developments, managed city centres, shopping centres, airports, hotels. These places are heavily monitored, and the monitoring is a service being bought.

Poorer neighbourhoods are monitored differently. They receive surveillance directed at them rather than provided for them, and where private security follows money, some areas receive very little of either.

I have not been able to source the more specific version of this claim that appeared in earlier drafts of this post — that poorer estates have become unprotected ‘badlands’. The general pattern of privately secured affluent space is well established in the criminology of the last thirty years, but treat the stronger version as an argument rather than a finding until you can attach a study to it.

Contemporary evidence: live facial recognition (2026 update)

Foucault died in 1984. The obvious test of his argument is whether the technology that arrived afterwards fits the model he described.

Live facial recognition is the closest thing yet built to a working panopticon. Cameras scan the faces of people passing in public, convert them to biometric templates, and compare them against a watchlist in real time.

What the Metropolitan Police report

Between September 2024 and September 2025 the Met ran 203 live facial recognition deployments. These generated 2,077 alerts and 962 arrests, with 10 recorded false positives.

The force then trialled fixed cameras rather than vans. Across 24 operations between October 2025 and March 2026 in Croydon, the Met made 173 arrests — which it presented as one arrest every 35 minutes.

What the figures suggest about Foucault

On the face of it this supports him. Surveillance is continuous, automated, and directed at the general public rather than at convicted offenders. Nobody being scanned is told whether they are on a watchlist. The uncertainty is the same uncertainty Bentham designed into the tower.

HOWEVER, the numbers also complicate the picture in a way worth using in an evaluation.

Met data reported in July 2025 showed that of roughly 715,000 arrests made by the force since 2020, around 1,035 were made with the support of facial recognition, of which 773 led to a charge or caution. Set against total arrests, the technology accounts for a very small proportion of enforcement. As a piece of crime control it is marginal. As a change in how ordinary people are watched, it is not.

The campaign group Big Brother Watch, which opposes the technology, has argued that the resources involved are disproportionate to the results and has challenged its expansion. Reporting on Met deployment records has also raised the disproportionate representation of Black Londoners among false alerts. Both are contested, and both are usable as evaluation.

Big Brother Watch campaigns against surveillance technology and its analysis reflects that position. Attribute it in the text rather than presenting it as neutral, which is what an examiner would expect you to do with any pressure group source.

Evaluating Foucault’s theory of surveillance

It is usual in A-level sociology to evaluate one perspective using others, but Foucault also attracts a set of criticisms of his own.

The model is pre-digital. Foucault describes surveillance carried out by human observers in enclosed institutions. Contemporary surveillance is largely automated, dispersed, and carried out by private companies rather than the state. Your phone tracks you more thoroughly than any prison ever tracked an inmate, and no one is watching in the sense Foucault meant.

It says the few watch the many, but the reverse also happens. Writing in Theoretical Criminology in 1997, Thomas Mathiesen argued that Foucault had missed a parallel development running at the same speed — the mass media, through which the many watch the few. This is the synopticon, and it is the single most useful evaluation point available on this topic.

Surveillance does not reliably prevent crime. Foucault’s model predicts that visibility produces compliance. The evidence on CCTV is more mixed than that, and displacement — offenders moving to unwatched areas rather than stopping — is a persistent finding. If people simply relocate, self-discipline is not doing what the theory says it does.

Marxists would argue Foucault is vague about who benefits. He describes power as dispersed through society rather than held by a class, which makes it difficult to say whose interests surveillance actually serves. Marxist criminologists would answer that question directly: surveillance is concentrated on the poor and largely absent from corporate and white-collar crime.

Left Realists would add that people in high-crime areas often want more surveillance. Treating CCTV purely as a mechanism of control ignores the residents asking for it.

In defence of Foucault, the growth of surveillance since he wrote has gone in exactly the direction he predicted, and the concept of self-surveillance explains behaviour that other theories struggle with — why people moderate what they post, how they dress on camera, or what they say at work, with no one issuing an instruction.

Surveillance has also been developed in directions Foucault did not anticipate. Actuarial justice uses data to predict and manage risk before offending occurs, and the shift into digital surveillance and predictive policing takes the argument further again.

How surveillance comes up in AQA Paper 3

Surveillance appears in the crime control, prevention and punishment section of Paper 3, and it can turn up in three forms.

As a 10-mark question with an item. For example: Applying material from Item B, analyse two ways in which surveillance may be used to control crime. Remember that both points must come from the item — see the exams and past papers page for the difference between the two 10-mark types.

As part of a 30-mark essay on crime prevention and control. A typical structure would run: situational crime prevention, then environmental approaches, then surveillance — with Foucault providing the theoretical account of why surveillance works, and Mathiesen, actuarial justice and the CCTV evidence providing the evaluation.

As theory. Foucault is usually taught as a postmodern or late modern theorist, so his account of surveillance also does work in questions about post and late modern criminology and about how crime control has changed with the shift out of modernity.

The mistake to avoid is describing the panopticon and stopping. Description gets you AO1. The marks are in explaining why uncertain observation produces self-discipline, and then in evaluating whether it still does.

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Signposting and related posts

This post has been written for students studying crime and deviance as part of the AQA’s A-level sociology course, specification 7192, examined on Paper 3.

The main criticism of Foucault on this topic is synoptic surveillance and Mathiesen’s synopticon, which argues that the many now watch the few.

A related development is actuarial justice and risk management, which uses data to manage risk rather than to discipline individuals.

For the contemporary version of the argument, see security, surveillance and crime control in digital society.

For Foucault’s wider social theory, including discourse and the claim that where there is power there is resistance, see Michel Foucault on power and resistance.

Surveillance also connects to how offenders are dealt with once caught — see how criminals are punished in England and Wales.

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