Social theory regarding the emergence of late modernity can be characterized as incorporating three core themes. Governmentality involves replacing the instruments of government with those of governance and reducing the size of the liberal democratic state while simultaneously increasing its penetration into everyday existence. Individualization reflects the decline in singular group and community-based identities, to be replaced by reflexively constructed individual identities constituted by lifestyle choices. Risk represents the intersection between governmentality and individualization: the emergence of a discourse and its accompanying practices that organize the social world around the assessment and management of risky situations and decisions. Research situating penology into its social and historical context focuses on the emergence of a “discourse of risk” within offender assessment and management, and looks to decode the increasingly formalized and standardized techniques used in this task in terms of the governmentality and individualization that characterize late modernity. The article examines the emergence of these practices, with specific reference to exemplars available over the World Wide Web. Notes