Surveillance

Question 1

How do we enforce surveillance in today’s society?

Answer 1

• CCTV cameras
• Biometric scanning
• Automated number plate recognition
• Electronic tagging
• Databases

Question 2

Foucault: birth of the prison

Answer 2

• Contrast between 2 different forms of punishment, which he sees as examples of sovereign and disciplinary power
  1. Sovereign:
• Typical of the period before the 19th century
• The monarch had absolute power over people and their bodies
• Control was asserted by inflicting visible punishment on the body (such as branding or limb amputations)
  2. Disciplinary:
• 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

Question 3

How does Foucault combat the view that brutal bodily punishment disappeared from Western societies because they became more civilised?

Answer 3

• He denies this liberal view by saying that surveillance is a more efficient ‘technology of power’

Question 4

What is the Panopticon?

Answer 4

• A design for a prison in which each prisoner in his own cell is visible to the guards from a central watchtower, but the guards aren’t visible to the prisoners
• As a result, prisoners must behave at all times, so the surveillance turns into self-surveillance and discipline becomes self-discipline

Question 5

What does Foucault mean by the ‘dispersal of discipline’?

Answer 5

• Prison is just one of a range of institutions that increasingly began to subject individuals to disciplinary power to induce conformity through self-surveillance
• ‘Carceral archipelago’: non-prison social control practices, such as community service orders… A series of ‘prison islands’ spreading into other institutions and wider society, where professions exercise surveillance

Question 6

What are the criticisms of Foucault?

Answer 6

• The shift from sovereign power to disciplinary power is less clear than he suggests
• Goffman (1982): some inmates of prisons and mental hospitals are able to resist controls
• CCTV cameras aren’t necessarily effective in preventing crime. Norris (2012): CCTV reduced crime in car parks but had little/no effect on other crime, even causes displacement
• Feminists: CCTV is an extension of the ‘male gaze’ and render women more visible to the voyeurism of the male camera operator

Question 7

What is Mathiesen’s (1997) synoptic surveillance?

Answer 7

• While the Panopticon allows the few to monitor the many, today the media also enable the many to see the few
• Late modernity: there is an increase in the top-down, centralised surveillance, but also in surveillance from below (the Synopticon)

Question 8

What is evidence of the Synopticon?

Answer 8

• Thompson: Political groups such as politicians fear the media’s surveillance of them may uncover damaging info about them, so this acts as a social control over their activities
• The public monitor each other: have their own CCTV, video cameras mounted on cycle helmets/dashboards, filming police wrongdoings (sousveillance)

Question 9

What do Haggerty and Ericson argue which clashes with Foucault?

Answer 9

• Surveillance technologies now involve the manipulation of virtual objects in cyberspace rather than physical bodies in physical space
• Clashes with Foucault’s view that surveillance involves the manipulation of physical bodies in physical spaces

Question 10

Give an example of a surveillant assemblage: Haggerty and Ericson

Answer 10

CCTV footage can now be analysed using facial recognition software

Question 11

How does Feeley and Simon’s (1994) ‘technology of power’ differ from Foucault’s disciplinary power?

Answer 11

1. It focuses on groups rather than individuals
2. It isn’t interested in rehabilitating offenders, but simply in preventing them from offending
3. It uses calculations of risk (ie actuarial analysis). This concept derives from the insurance industry, which calculates the statistical risk of particular events happening to particular groups

Question 12

How do Feeley and Simon apply this idea to surveillance and crime control?

Answer 12

• For example, airport security screening checks are based on known offender ‘risk factors’
• Uses factors such as age, sex, religion, ethnicity
• Passengers are profiled and given a risk score- anyone who scores above a certain level is stopped, searched and questioned
• Different to disciplinary power in that it just seeks to predict and prevent future offending
• Young: it’s a damage limitation strategy

Question 13

What is one effecct of this ‘social sorting’ according to Gary T. Marx?

Answer 13

• It creates categorical suspicion: where peopleare placed under suspicion of wrongdoing simply because they belong to a particular category or group
• 2010 West Midlands Police: introduced a counter-terrorism scheme to surround 2 mainly Muslim suburbs of Birmingham with about 150 ANPR cameras

Question 14

What is one problem with actuarial justice?

Answer 14

• There is a danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy

Question 15

Labelling and surveillance

Answer 15

• Research shows that CCTV operators make discriminatory judgements about who they should focus on
• Norris and Armstrong: there is a massively disproportionate targeting of young black males
• Such judgements are based on the ‘typifications’ held by those operating surveillance systems about who are likely to be offenders