timelets

Michel Foucault discusses a major change in the punishment system (end of the 18th century - the Walnut Street prison, Philadelphia, 1790): from crime to criminality:

A whole corpus of individualizing knowledge was being organized that took as its field of reference not so much the crime committed (at least in isolation), but the potentiality of danger that lies hidden in an individual and which is manifested in his observed everyday conduct. The prison functions in this as an apparatus of knowledge.

Knowledge becomes power.