What relationship does the new production and labor mobilization regime have with the proliferation of innovative forms of control, with the multiplication of segregation and surveillance devices and with the new mass incarceration that we are witnessing today? This could be the question that opens this book and a whole project of discussion on the new political economy of punishment. The government of the exceedance advances an answer as unexpected as daring. The current exacerbation of criminal rigidity, of the logic of exception and of the media atmosphere of preventive securitism, could well be due less to a capacity for totalitarian control over the social body, than just the opposite. The powers could be contemplating a society that escapes them beyond the blind spots of video surveillance networks and preventive punishment. The identification of crime with risk groups (migrants, minorities, youth), the definitive selectivity of the penal hardening towards these groups and the emergence of what is increasingly a large punitive metropolis, would thus obey a strategy of reducing the complexity, of destruction of an unthinkable social alliance (the crowd?), potentially lethal for the post-Fordist accumulation regime.