In the middle of the eighteenth century, the classical school of penology initiated
widespread reforms in punishment and policing. Foremost among these theorists was
Cesare Beccaria, whose Enlightenment ideals spawned a new penological science
based upon reasoned, economical deterrence rather than brutal retribution. Beccaria
plays a bit part in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as a penological reformer,31 but his
ideas on police and punishment span beyond Foucault’s gloss. Whereas Foucault is
interested in Beccaria’s utilitarian theory of punishment, which instead of wreaking
bodily retribution sought to discourage potential criminals into inaction, we are
more interested in the policing implications of Beccaria’s axiom that ‘‘It is better to
prevent crimes than to punish them.’’32 Describing an alternative economy of crime
prevention, Beccaria writes:
It is not possible to reduce the turbulent activity of men to a geometric order
devoid of irregularity and confusion. Just as the constant and very simple laws of
nature do not prevent perturbations in the movements of the planets, so human
laws cannot prevent disturbances and disorders among the infinite and very
opposite forces of pleasure and pain. ... Do you want to prevent crimes? Then see
to it that enlightenment accompanies liberty.33
By attributing the criminal impulse to human nature, Beccaria resigns society to a
certain degree of criminality. It is better to accept the fact of crime, he writes, than to
impose upon broad society an overtly disciplinary geometry of control that attempts
to stifle human ‘‘nature’’: ‘‘What would we be reduced to,’’ he asks, ‘‘if we were
forbidden everything that might tempt us to crime?’’34 Thus we see an evolution in
criminal response from retribution to surveillance and deterrence, such that the
liberal policing apparatus is imagined in its capacity to prevent and detect crime
while protecting citizens’ ‘‘liberty.’’ As we will show, Beccaria’s enlightened liberalism*and
the economic theory of intervention and resources that accompanies it*
helps thrust media to the fore of the modern policing project, as it is used as a means
to mediate between disciplinary control and liberal governance.
Beccaria had a profound influence on the development of utilitarian thought, and
he was especially influential on Jeremy Bentham’s theories of policing.35 Hence in the
1790s, when Bentham was commissioned to develop a policing method to prevent
theft on the Thames River, he developed it upon the foundation of a Beccarian police
economy based in preventive surveillance. With magistrate Patrick Colquhoun and
Justice of the Peace John Harriot, Bentham devised a policing system that was unlike
anything that existed in England, and indeed the rest of Europe, at that time. While
amateur bands of watchmen armed with clubs and organized by horns and shouts
362 J. Reeves & J. Packer
ad policed England’s communities since the Middle Ages,36 the idea of a sovereign,
salaried patrol of police officers was unheard of; in 1798, there were fewer than 100
police employees in all of England, and the majority of these were privately employed
by West Indian merchants.37 The advent of the public police force, then, was a pivotal
and unprecedented development in European governance, and its exercise was at first
severely constrained: in their early days, officers were even prevented from carrying
weapons. The three principal factors that restricted the size and vocation of the early
police force were: first, the rise of a liberal political order that transferred economic
rationalities to the domain of governance; second, the fearful opposition that English
citizens voiced to the rise of a sovereign police force38; and third, the profound
demand that patrols made on public resources, forcing experts like Bentham and
Colquhoun to devise ways in which technological and human resources could be
maximized to ameliorate the time/space challenges faced by a sparse, liberal police
patrol.39
The rationality that undergirded the rise of the new police force was made clear in
Colquhoun’s treatise on one of the earliest policing experiments in England, the
Thames River Police. Colquhoun used this 1800 work, A Treatise on the Commerce
and Police of the River Thames, to explore how the increasingly restless working class
could be better governed:
The mass of labourers became gradually contaminated. ...The mind thus
reconciled to the action, the offence screened by impunity, and apparently
sanctioned by custom, the habits of pillage increased: others seduced by the force
of example, and stimulated by motives of avarice, soon pursued the same course of
Criminality, while the want of apposite Laws, and the means of carrying into
execution those that existed, gave an extensive range to Delinquency. New Converts
to the System of Iniquity were rapidly made.40
Faced with the upheavals in politics and labor that occurred in the late eighteenth
century, Colquhoun and Bentham