The Platonic-Benthamite Logic Of Total Visibility: Haryana Community Service Guidelines

“If no one could see us, would we still act justly?” Plato posed this in the Republic through the parable 'The Ring of Gyges', where a shepherd's invisibility tempted him to abandon justice. Visibility, the fable suggests, dictates conduct. Centuries later, legal positivist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18^th Century made the intuition concrete, both in reality and metaphorically, into the Panopticon, laying an architectural design of modern-day prison and a theory of disciplinary control. In a Panopticon, a man in the structure believed that visibility was constant and obedience was rational. Foucault later radicalised the Panopticon, reading it not as a prison design but as a diagram of modern power itself, an architecture that produces docile bodies through constant visibility and internalised scrutiny.

On August 16, 2025, the Haryana Government, through a notification, introduced the Haryana Community Service Guidelines, 2025. The notification serves as a guideline for courts or other competent bodies to impose a sentence of “community service” under the Bhartiya Nagarik Suraksha Samhita, the Juvenile Justice Act, or any other provision that allows for community service as a form of punishment. The objective of the notification is to structure a framework and monitor the performance of community service. For compliance, the Notification's stated objective is to provide a structured framework for monitoring community service. Compliance, however, is reduced to bureaucratic attestation of daily attendance, geo-tagged photographs, and GPS-enabled videos of offenders sentenced to community service.

The compliance mechanism turns Haryana's community service guidelines into a cell without walls, where bureaucrats serve as watchtowers and biometrics as a constant optic of surveillance. The flaw is not in the aspiration to create a non-custodial sanction but in the method and its far-reaching downstream effects. By tying community service to the regime of total visibility, the guidelines collapse restorative justice into disciplinary surveillance.

American criminologist Howard Zehr, commonly known as the grandfather of restorative justice, insists that accountability is relational. It is built through storytelling, recognition and reintegrative practices that condemn the act without stigmatizing the actor. Haryana's design tilts toward stigmatizing visibility, especially where placements are in public and high-surveillance spaces.

For a first-time adult offender committing a petty offence, it produces conformity without dialogue, substituting surveillance-verified attendance for dialogue and repair. By branding and stigmatizing people, the ostensibly non-punitive measure drifts towards retribution, and rather than restoring or rehabilitating, it risks aggravating recidivism.

The stakes are higher and are further compounded by the extension of guidelines to the Juvenile Justice Act. By treating a child in conflict with the law with the same apparatus as an adult offender, the guidelines dilute the objective of the JJ Act. The enactment, which is firmly grounded in the model of reform, rehabilitation and regeneration, effectively replaces reflective accountability with performative compliance. The branding and stigmatizing of the child in conflict with the law would place the guidelines squarely at odds with the Act's objective.

The JJ Act, along with community service within it, seeks empathetic reflection on the harm a child in conflict with the law has caused and to reintegrate the child into society. The guidelines reconfigure this intent into a system of control, one that conditions a child in conflict with the law to comply out of fear of being watched rather than to assume responsibility through an understanding of their action.

The daily biometric scan, geo-tagged photographs, and GPS-enabled videos of the juvenile create a large reservoir of highly sensitive personal data trail, and with it, the possibility of grave misuse. The Notification also risks contravening the protective ethos of a new beginning in the JJ Act and effectively converting a reformative disposition into a permanent digital stigma. In a broader context, it may have implications on the constitutional mandate under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, emerging from data protection and informational privacy recognized by the apex court in K.S Puttuswamy vs. UOI.

Foucault's point was blunt that power doesn't restrain, it trains into docile bodies. Strapping the same compliance apparatus onto first-time adults and children dilutes the rehabilitative focus of the provision and confuses obedience with responsibility. In the present case, it births a generation that mistakes obedience with responsibility, which is unlikely to inculcate civic habits for which the provision was introduced. In this configuration, the law metamorphoses into a managerial conduct, eclipsing the essence of restoration, and getting subsumed into plain managerialism.

The measures of compliance prescribed in the Notification borrow exactly from the Platonic-Benthamite lineage, where people will comply in visibility. Exactly what Foucault dissected. Rather than fostering genuine responsibility or advancing the ideals of restorative justice, the framework is engineered to make docile subjects trained in obedience. It forces an imperative question: Has justice been quietly annexed by a regime of discipline, and has the law slipped from repair and rehabilitation into the management of bodies and conduct?

Authors are Advocates. Views Are Personal.