Surveillance

• Birth of the prison - Foucault:

  • Sovereign power = monarch had absolute power over the people and their bodies. Control was asserted by inflicting disfiguring punishments on the body. Punishment was brutal, emotional spectacle e.g. public execution
  • Disciplinary power = a new system of discipline. Seeks to govern not just the body, but the mind or 'soul'. It does so through surveillance.
• Birth of the prison - Foucault:

  • rejects the liberal view - claims disciplinary power replaced sovereign power simply because surveillance is a more efficient 'technology of power' - more effective way of controlling the people.
  • disciplinary power through panopticon
  • Foucault sees experts as having an important role to play in applying their specialised knowledge to correcting the individuals deviant behavior
  • social sciences were born at the same time as the modern prison
• The 'dispersal of discipline' - Foucault:

  • prison is just one of a range of institutions that increasingly began to subject individuals to disciplinary power to induce conformity through self-surveillance - asylums, school.
  • Disciplinary power has now dispersed throughout society, penetrating every social institution to reach every individual.
• AO3 - Goffman:

  • shows how some inmates of prisons and mental hospitals can resist controls
• AO3 - Norris:

  • review of dozens of studies worldwide found that while CCTV reduced crimes in car parks, it had little or no effect on other crime, and may even cause displacement
• AO3 - Gill and Loveday:

  • found that few robbers, burglars and shoplifters were put off by CCTV.
• AO3 - Koskela (feminist):

  • CCTV is an extension of the 'male gaze' - renders women more visible to voyeurism of the male camera operator, it does not make them more secure.
• Synoptic Surveillance - Mathiesen:

  • Foucault's account of surveillance only tells half the story when applied to today's society
  • media enables the many to see the few. In late modernity, there is an increase in top-down, centralised surveillance that Foucault discusses, but also in surveillance from below.
  • 'Synopticon' - where everybody watched everybody.
• Synoptic Surveillance - Thompson:

  • argues the most powerful groups such as politicians fear the media's surveillance of them may uncover damaging information about them, and this acts as a form of social control over their activities.
• Synoptic Surveillance - Mann et al:

  • 'sousveillance' - panopticism cannot account for this surveillance from below. - recording by a member of public
• Synoptic Surveillance - McCahill:

  • occasional bottom-up scrutiny may be unable to reverse established 'hierarchies of surveillance'
• Surveillance Assemblages - Haggerty and Ericson:

  • surveillance technologies not involve the manipulation of virtual objects in cyberspace rather than physical bodies in physical space.
  • 'surveillance assemblages' - moving towards a world in which data from different technologies can be combined to create a sort of 'data double' of the individual.
• Actuarial justice and risk management - Feeley and Simon:

  • a new 'technology of power' is emerging through the justice system
  • focuses on groups rather than individuals
  • not interested in rehabilitating offenders, but simply in preventing them from offending
  • uses calculations of risk and 'actuarial analysis'
  • applies this idea to surveillance and crime control
  • apply surveillance to 'identify, classify and manage groups sorted by levels of dangerousness'
• Actuarial justice and risk management - Young:

  • actuarial justice is basically a damage limitation strategy to reduce crimes by using statistical information to pick out likely offenders
• Actuarial justice and risk management - Lyon:

  • purpose of 'social sorting' is to be able to categorise people so they can be treated differently according to the risk they oppose.
  • Places social groups under....
• Actuarial justice and risk management - Marx:

  • calls 'categorical suspicion' - where people are placed under suspicion of wrongdoing simply because they belong to a particular category or group
• Labelling and Surveillance - Ditton et al:

  • in one major city center CCTV system, the cameras could zoom in on vehicle tax discs from hundreds of metres away to see whether the tax had expired
  • however - the systems managers did not think it was a suitable use of the technology and so the offences of motorists were left untouched
• Labelling and Surveillance - Norris and Armstrong:

  • there is 'a massively disproportionate targeting' of young black males for no other reason than their membership of that particular social group