Why Foucault is more relevant than ever

Peter Gratton, a Philosophy Professor, writes -

 in Discipline and Punish and in The Punitive Society, Foucault argues that it was not theoreticians or philosophers who set the stage for the prison in their theories. Instead it was the workmanlike petit managers who built an incipient criminal science that made the prison possible. For Foucault, there is no prison without criminology and vice-versa, nor are there mental institutions without the medicalization of the mind: no power without certain forms of knowledge and vice-versa.

We, of course, know better than Foucault because we have access to the Wikipedia article on prisons. Theoreticians or philosophers never 'set the stage for the prison'. Benjamin Franklin took an interest in the subject as he did in many other subjects. He was a practical man but his belief that solitude was good for criminals was wrongheaded. He was over-reacting to conditions in local jails where rape and violence were commonplace. Solitary confinement, however, was ineffective and mentally harmful.

Jeremy Bentham's brother came up with the notion of the 'panopticon' but it was in the context of running a factory such that a small number of supervisors could visually verify the activity of the workers without alerting them to their presence. Bentham's ideas had little influence. It was the older tradition of the House of Correction which in turn was connected to the Poor House or Asylum which influenced subsequent developments. Dickensian Beadles were quite innocent of any 'incipient criminal science' but sought to feather their own nests by means fair or foul. Not being great thinkers, they fell by the wayside. Mr. Bumble, it will be remembered, ends his days in the very Poor House over which he presided.

Quakers and Humanitarians- like John Howard- did call for the reform of the Prison system and some of their suggestions were implemented in piece meal fashion but it isn't the case that any 'theoretician or philosopher' had anything to do with the prison system. Criminology developed later but it had little influence on Prison administration which evolved on the same principles as any other bureaucracy- i.e. regardless of considerations of power or knowledge but in a blind and insensate manner. No doubt, at a certain point, credentials were introduced so as to increase wage differentials and create an endogenous interessement mechanism angling for larger disbursements, but those credentials became worthless once a fiscal crunch was experienced.

Foucault could not have known that he lived through a peculiar period in Western Capitalism when the State was able to fight a rear guard action against reducing its share of GNP to pre-War levels. However, the tide had turned by the time he died. Had he lived on to see the burgeoning of private prisons and 'contracting out' of work-related programs in public prisons, as happens in France, he would have understood that Professors of Sociology or Criminology or any other ology had no salience. Nor did 'petit managers'. It was big MNCs with very well rewarded Managers who shaped policy. The only relevant 'Science' was Management Science as taught at leading Business Schools.

Professor Gratton has a different view. He believes Foucault is still relevant, not because he provides a template to complete worthless PhDs in shite subjects, but for some other reason. What might that be? Let us see-

'To understand morality—considerations of justice and therefore of crime and punishment—he avers we would do well to look less at Kant or Mill than the development of the police. Moreover, power since the invention of the prison, according to Foucault’s early to mid-1970s work, operates less through the top-down machinations of a king and his lackeys than through the conformism of mass society. By pulling together disparate events here and there across our landscape—the discipline involved in schools, the military, and the prison—we find the means by which our seemingly most implacable institutions first crystallized. 
The conformism of mass society can't be created by 'schools, the military, and the prison' if there is free exit- i.e. emigration is unfettered- & significant adult entry- i.e. immigration is sizable.
A homogeneous society- like Japan- with a neighborhood policing system, might well be more 'conformist' and thus have lower incarceration rates, but such a society is also likely to hit an abiding fiscal crunch and thus have to rely increasingly on privatization- more especially for low risk or first time offenders.
Apparently, Japan faces a geriatric crime wave featuring lonely elders, unable to feed and house themselves, who are desperate to get sentenced to prison. 
It seems 'the conformism of mass society' isn't a bulwark against even very elderly Japanese people choosing delinquency on the basis of pure economic rationalism.

For this reason, Foucault still remains outside the mainstream of political thinking that predominates on our editorial pages and too often in political theory courses. The state is not the locus of all power in society, whatever the back-and-forth on CNN and the Sunday morning political shows might suggest. Ours is a civilization of constant, localized surveillance, both of ourselves and others, all to bring everyone to heed to unwritten norms guiding the most intimate parts of who we are: our sexuality, our notions of self, and so on.

Right! That's what's happening, sure enough. The TV is watching me. So is the neighbour's cat. OMG, was that a black helicopter I heard just now? Well, I'd better put my todger away. I was going to express my sexuality and my notion of the self by doing something unspeakable to the vacuum cleaner. Sadly, mine is a civilization of constant, localized surveillance mainly carried out by the cats in the neighbourhood. Mainstream political thinking is silent about this feline surveillance which constrains our polymorphous perversity and establishes the conformism of mass society but for which we'd all fuck our Dysons but good. That is why Foucault is still relevant.