system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
According to Foucault, what factors led to punishment shifting from public torture to more ‘humane’ and private forms of punishment?

I’m reading through Discipline and Punish and am finding some of it quite dense. A brief summary of some of his arguments would be very helpful :)
gpt
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault appears to put forward the proposition that, while judicial respect for the humanity of the criminal certainly draws support from the empathic inclinations of the psyche, the transition from excessively brutal public executions to highly constrained and inconspicuous legal procedures resulted mainly from the necessity to maintain social order, during the unprecedented growth of technologically-complex economies. 

That is to say, in relation to the health of economic and political structures, the unmitigated power of the sovereign, manifested in the barbarous acts committed on the judicial scaffolds, was as destabilising a force as the criminality it intended to suppress, due to its despotically inconsistent nature and the empathy -induced anarchy that it tended to elicit among the witnesses; therefore, an increase in economic complexity, lead to the necessary development of an increasingly differentiated and consistent judiciary.