surveillance

• surveillance - the monitoring of public behaviour for the purposes of population or crime control

  • involves observing people's behaviour to gather data about it and often using that data to regulate, manage or correct the behaviour
• birth of the prison

  foucault - suggests there are two contrasting forms of punishment

  • sovereign power - typical of the period before the 19th century when monarchs had complete control over the country, disfiguring and visible punishments were inflicted on the body as a brutal and emotional spectacle
  • disciplinary power - dominant from the 19th century, a system of discipline that seeks to govern the mind as well as the body through surveillance

  foucault argues sovereign power disappeared from the uk purely because disciplinary power was more effective for controlling people
• the panoptican

  foucault - a design for prisons in which inmates were visible to guards from a watchtower but the guards weren't visible from the cells

  • the prisoners don't know if they are being watched but they know they might be, so they have the behave as if they are being watched at all times
  • the surveillance becomes self-surveillance and discipline into self-discipline so control takes place inside the prisoner
  • disciplinary power - intense monitoring with a view to rehabilitation so experts play an important role in the process
  • psychologists and social workers were born with the prison
• the dispersal of discipline

  foucault - prison is one of many institutions that increasingly began to subject individuals to disciplinary power from the 19th century to induce conformity eg. psych wards and schools

  • non-prison based social control practices like community service orders form a carceral archepalego - prison islands where professionals such as teachers, social workers and psychiatrists all exert surveillance over society
  • disciplinary power has penetrated every social institution and individual so the panoptican is the way all of society functions
• criticisms of foucault

  while foucault has stimulated much research into surveillance and power, particularly into the 'electronic panoptican' of modern surveillance, it is criticised for

  • the shift from sovereign to disciplinary power is less clear than foucault suggests
  • wrongly assumes the expressive and emotional aspects of prison have disappeared
  • goffman - inmates are able to resist controls
  • overestimates the power of surveillance to change behaviour
• criticisms of foucault - cctv

  cctv cameras are a form of panopticism as we are aware of their presence but not if they are recording, however they may not be effective

  • norris - reviewed worldwide studies and found cctv only reduced crime in car parks and often led to displacement
  • gill + loveday - few robbers or burglars were put off by cctv
  • the real function of cctv may be ideological as it falsely reassures the public about their safety
  • koskela - cctv is an extension of the male gaze as it renders women to voyeurism without protecting them
• synoptic surveillance

  mathiesen - in late modernity the panoptican allows the few to monitor the many but the media also allows the many to see the few

  • thomas - powerful groups fear surveillance from the media as it may uncover damaging information
  • the public monitor one another through widespread phone ownage and ring doorbells (mann - sousveillance)
  • mccahill - this scrutiny may be unable to reverse established 'hierarchies of surveillance'
• surveillant assemblages

  haggerty + ericson - surveillance technologies now involve the manipulation of virtual objects and digital data

  • there is now an important trend of combining technologies eg. cctv footage can be analysed using facial recognition software
  • these combinations are surveillant assemblages and we are moving towards a world in which a 'data double' of the individual can be created
• risk management

  feeley + simon - a new technology of power is developing in criminal justice which differs from foucault's theory because

  • it focuses on groups not individuals
  • is interested purely in preventing offending not rehabilitation
  • uses calculations of risk which determines the liklihood of events happening to particular groups eg. new drivers getting higher insurance

  this theory is applied to surveillance and crime control eg. airport screening checks based on risk factors
• acturial justice

  feeley + simon - the aim of surveillance is purely to predict and prevent future offending without any focus on rehabilitation

  • young - it is a damage limitation strategy to reduce crime using statistics
• social sorting and categorical suspicion

  lyon - the purpose of risk management and actural justice 'social sorting' regimes is to categorise people so they can be treated differently based on how much risk they pose

  • g. t. marx - this places entire social groups under categorical suspicion - people are viewed as suspicious purely because they belong to a category or group
  • in 2010 west midlnds police installed 150 cameras around mainly muslim birmingham suburbs in an anti-terrorist scheme
• evaluation of feeley + simon's acturial justice

  • there is a risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy as surveillance conclusions lead to a tougher stance on crimes committed by those groups, so more people from that group appear in statistics
• labelling and surveillance

  ditton - in one major city cctv cameras were able to zoom in from long distances to number plates, but the managers of these cameras didn't believe it was a good use of technology

  • norris + armstrong - there is a disproportionate targeting of young black males by surveillance operators purely because of their social group

  there are judgements made based on suspects' typifications which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where these social groups are arrested more often - the results of surveillance are socially constructed