During the early Pahlavi period, punitive control extended over the spirit and psyche of Iranian society. The most significant feature of this punitive dominance was the emergence of a society based on surveillance, emphasis on detention, hierarchical observation, scrutiny, and normalization. This intellectual system not only involved the physical torment of the body but also the torment of the spirit and mind. Based on this premise, the research question of this paper is: How and through what mechanisms did the path to the subjugation of Iranian society through institutions become smoothed? In response to this research question, the following hypothesis is proposed: Reza Shah, through institutionalization, exerted all his efforts to structure the political existence of Iranians and, more than any other monarch, deciphered the secrets of bodies. Initially, he used the body as an army against rebellious bodies and then confined political bodies. Michel Foucault, the renowned French thinker, has highlighted the importance of such research through his extensive studies on disciplinary technologies. According to him, in a prison-like society, through these relations, the ruling power's apparatus and its supervisory and punitive tools, which were employed against society, were developed. This transformation turned Iranian subjects—who enjoyed relative freedom of action in the pre-modern era—into tame, obedient, and visible objects. The method used in this research is genealogy, and the data were collected through library and archival studies and analyzed within the framework of Foucault's genealogical theory of punishment and technologies of power.