Isolation and enforced visibility in the carriage induced self-regulation in days, not years.

Evidence

If only for its mildness and speed, this machine ‘would have done honour to the sensibility of its author’; but its merit lay in the fact that it was a veritable penitentiary carriage. By its external effects, it had a quite Benthamite perfection: ‘In the rapid passage of this mobile prison which, on its dark, silent flanks, bears no other inscription than the following words – Transport of Convicts – there is something mysterious and gloomy, which Bentham requires in the carrying out of criminal sentences and which leaves in the minds of onlookers a more salutary and lasting impression than the sight of those cynical and joyous travellers’ (Gazette des tribunaux, 15 June 1837). It also had internal effects; even in a journey lasting only a few days (during which the inmates had not been detached for a single moment), it functioned as an apparatus of correction. One emerged from it astonishingly calm: ‘From a moral point of view, this transportation, which lasts no more than seventy-two hours, is a terrible torture whose effects on the prisoner seem to be lasting.’ The convicts themselves support this view: ‘In the cell carriage, when you don’t sleep, you can only think. And when I thought, I came to regret what I had done; in the end, you see, I would have been afraid to mend my ways and I don’t want to.’ — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 399

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s core causal claim: the panoptic structure itself produces self-policing thought, exactly the mechanism Orwell dramatizes in Winston. — connects to: Self-binding as first move lets a present self control a future self; The mere feeling of being observed shifts behavior from selfish to reciprocal norms; Modern transport created sustained mutual looking without speech
• DEEPTHINKING: The convict’s testimony — ‘you can only think… I came to regret’ — is first-person confirmation that the surveillance apparatus works by collapsing the subject into self-discipline. Dense, paradigm-level confirmation of Foucault’s thesis.

Broader Connections

• Modern transport created sustained mutual looking without speech #expands (0.82)
• Self-binding as first move lets a present self control a future self #expands (0.80)
• The mere feeling of being observed shifts behavior from selfish to reciprocal norms #exemplifies (0.78)