Surveillance involves monitoring behaviour for the purpose of control. E.g. CCTV, however, Norris found that CCTV has little or no effect on most crimes and may even cause displacement.
Foucault; the panopticon
A prison design where prisoners cells are visible to the guards, but the guards are visible to the prisoners. Not knowing if they are being watched means the prisoners must constantly behave as if they were. This turns into self-surveillance and control becomes inside the prisoner. Foucault argues that other institutions followed this pattern and has now infiltrated every part of society, bringing its effects to the human soul itself.
Synoptic surveillance
There has been an increase in both the top down surveillance that Foucault discuses, and in surveillance from below. Mathiesen calls this the synopticon, where everybody watches everybody. This includes media scrutiny of powerful groups, and members of the public monitoring each other e.g. dashcams and filming the police wrongdoings.
Surveillant assemblages
Haggerty and Ericson point out that surveillance technology now involves manipulation of digital data, rather than physical bodies (prisoners in the panopticon). They note the trend towards combining different technologies into powerful surveillant assemblages e.g. cctv footage can be analysed using facial recognition software.
Actuarial justice and risk management
Feeley and Simon see actuarial justice as a new form of surveillance. It uses ‘actuarial analysis’ to predict the likelihood of people offending. Unlike disciplinary power, it focuses on groups, not individuals; it is not interested in rehabilitating offenders but simply in preventing them from offending. Individuals can be profiled using known offender risk factors (age, sex, ethnicity), giving each person a risk score. Anyone scoring about a given level can be stopped, questioned etc. The purpose of this social sorting is to categorise people so they can be treated differently according to the level of risk they impose. However, offender profiles are often complied using official statistics, which show certain groups as more likely to offend. Profiling leads to police targeting these groups who are then more likely to be caught and convicted.
Labelling and surveillance
Norris and Armstrong found that CCTV operators target young black males based on racist stereotypes. This creates SFP; criminalisation of black youths is increased because their offences are revealed, while criminalisation of others is lessened because theirs are ignored.