Another justice system post, as that seems to be the theme of the weekend: Parents Get Two Years in Jail (Each) for Serving Alcohol to 16-Year-Olds. Remarkably, this has been knocked down; originally the sentence was eight years. Via MeFi, where some people actually think this is the right idea.

There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communication, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the other, from a scheme of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society.
—Foucault, Discipline & Punish