Surveillance

• •Surveillance is another type of crime prevention strategy.•Surveillance can be defined as ‘the monitoring of public behaviour for the purposes of population crime control. It involves observing people’s behaviour to gather data about it, and typically, using the data to regulate, manage or ‘correct’ their behaviour’
• Michel Foucault (1977) (postmodernist)

  Discipline & Punish: The birth of the prison’

  •Foucault is very critical of modern forms of punishment and the use of surveillance.•His notion of a ‘surveillance society’ is  similar to George Orwell's 1984 where the government hold so much information about us that we are all like prisoners.•Foucault describes 2 types of power:1)Sovereign power2)Disciplinary power
• SOVEREIGN POWER- was typical of the period before the 19th century when the monarch had power over people and their bodies. Inflicting punishment on the body was the means of asserting control. Punishment was a spectacle, such as public execution.
• DISCIPLINARY POWER- becomes dominant from the 19th century. In this form of control, a new system of discipline seeks to govern not just the body, but the mind or soul. It does so through surveillance. Foucault illustrates disciplinary power with the idea of the Panopticon.

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• The Panopticon is a metaphor for surveillance and power in modern society: because anyone is potentially under surveillance at any given moment, the state has power over everyone.

  As a result they have to behave at all times as if they were being watched, so the surveillance turns into self surveillance and discipline becomes self-discipline. Instead of being a public spectacle, control takes place 'inside' the prisoner.
• THE DISPERSAL OF DISCIPLINE

  •Foucault argues that the prison is one of a range of institutions that, from the 19th century, increasingly began to subject individuals to disciplinary power to induce conformity through self-surveillance. These include mental asylums, barracks, factories, workhouses and schools.••In Foucault's view, disciplinary power has now infiltrated every part of society.
• Eval

  •Surveillance is less effective than Foucault suggests – evidence suggests that CCTV is not very effective at preventing crime:–Norris (2012) CCTV reduces crime in car parks, but has little effect on other types of crime.–Gill and Loveday –(2003) found that few shoplifters or burglars were put off by CCTV.–Feminists have also argued that CCTV surveillance subjects women to the ‘male gaze’ in everyday life. 
• Synoptic Surveillance

  Mathiesen (1997)

  -Surveillance is a two-way process:-Panopticon = allows the few to monitor the many-Synopticon = allows the public to monitor the few
• However, McCahill argues that occasional bottom-up scrutiny may be unable to reverse established ‘hierarchies of surveillance’. For example under anti-terrorism laws, police have powers to confiscate cameras and mobile phones of ‘citizen journalists’.
• Surveillant assemblages= a combination of surveillance technologies
• Surveillant technologies no longer just observe physical objects but can manipulate virtual objects in cyberspace and communicate with each other – e.g. CCTV footage can be analysed using facial recognition software.
• Actuarial justice

  = calculation of risk

  •Simon & Feeley focuses more on the risk for groups (rather than individuals), and intervention for preventing crime
• Actuarial justiceCategorical suspicion

  •Gary T. Marx highlights the effects of this social sorting are to place entire categories of people under suspicion.•A problem of actuarial justice is the problem of the self-fulfilling prophecy –