Fears & anxieties are the greatest marketing devices, in economics & politics, easily trumping utopian hopes & dreams (except in the stock market), especially in the age of neoliberalism. We've had enough TVs, refrigerators, washers & dryers, etc. Now we must improve the "quality of life," making our streets safe, defending our homes from undesirables, & keeping adults as well as children "innocent." As Foucault might have argued, had he been a Marxist, a disciplinary society creates many conveniently labor-intensive jobs in the public & private sectors (e.g., policemen, prison guards, social workers, secretaries, private security guards, lawyers, judges, law professors, sociologists, criminologists, forensic psychiatrists, etc., to concentrate on the crime-fighting industry alone). Personal services are the growth industry in rich nations, especially in America, compensating for the end of the post-WW2 economic boom, and (real or imaginary) crime-fighting services are part of it. At the same time, the wars on crimes & drugs have made cities less potentially explosive, by taking away "masterless men" from the streets (who might riot or revolt given a chance); you need the reserve army of the unemployed, but you can't afford to have too large a part of the reserve army freely loafing & making mischief. See, all good for M-C-M'.
"Freedom, Equality, Property, & Bentham" demand the Panopticon. It is no coincidence that it fell to Jeremy Bentham to invent the most striking blueprint of it. With enclosure came the vicious capitalist use of the originally feudal Game Laws (see Michael Perelman, _The Invention of Capitalism_, Chap. 3 "Primitive Accumulation and the Game Law"); and with the Industrial Revolution arrived the modern police (Sir Robert Peel organized the Metropolitan Police of London in 1829) & prison reforms (see Michel Foucault, _Discipline and Punish_). And neoliberalism rests on the generalization of the Panopticon (all social institutions come to resemble model prisons -- an insight offered by Foucault as well as Samuel Fuller's _Shock Corridor_); in the case of the USA, however, the reintroduction of retributive, in contrast to rehabilitative, justice makes model prisons a vanishing point of criminal justice. A parallax view on crime & punishment is what we need to see what's happening.
Yoshie