Interiority Policing: _When Governance Reaches the Source Rather Than the Act_

Some governance moves are not merely about how widely a rule reaches but about where in a person it lands. This paper develops a general theory of interiority policing: the structural shift in which regulatory attention extends from acts (what people do) to sources (what they imagine, intend, or dispositionally form). I define this shift as a category violation: a regime treats a source-condition of agency as though it were a conduct-event while preserving the consequences appropriate to conduct regulation. Drawing on a tightly bounded reading of the diagnostic field announced in Genesis 6:5 — “every intention of the thoughts of his heart” — and on three contemporary cases (predictive policing built on inferred mental states, radicalization-prevention programs that monitor disposition, and workplace and consumer-platform sentiment governance), I argue that interiority policing is not a quantitative escalation of conduct regulation but a structurally distinct governance type. Its signature has two parts. First, it expands the assessed field beyond the visible: the relevant data is no longer behavior but the formative substrate that produces behavior. Second, it makes defense structurally asymmetric: an agent cannot demonstrate non-intention or non-imagination in the way an agent can demonstrate non-performance of an act, and the standard moves available to a defendant under conduct law (denial of act, alibi, justification, mitigation by character) lose traction because the regulated phenomenon is the producing layer rather than the produced surface. I argue that this asymmetry of demonstration, rather than any particular abuse, is what makes interiority policing a category violation rather than an ethical excess. The paper closes by proposing a principled boundary: the capacity for refusal — the structural veto that converts a forming desire into a non-act — is the one interior signal a legitimate governance system must treat as inviolable. I operationalize this boundary through three minimal institutional tests: a conduct-rooted trigger requirement, a no-confession constraint, and a demonstrated-non-act requirement. Where regulation begins to subordinate refusal-capacity itself, governance has crossed from policing acts to policing the agent.