Social Control
Alternatives to Prison or Alternative Prison?
Electronic tagging techniques and how they affect social spatial relations
In the present day and age we can witness ever expanding control mechanisms constantly sweeping through society, catching, processing (tagging, surveillance, labelling) and recycling populations. Rather than seek individual ‘rehabilitation’ these techniques perform a paradigm shift, which allows them to be oriented toward the slightly different task of monitoring and managing intractable groups and individuals.
Historically the movement of these techniques has been brutal, overt repression to rational, scientific, covert and bureaucratic control. Of course, this rationality can itself be a pretext for irrationality, as the ‘war on terror’ demonstrates, providing the iron fist within the velvet: the totalitarian potentials within ‘democratic’ structures.
The technique which concerns us here is the emergence and implementation, first of all in the US, and then in Europe, of supposedly ‘community based sanctions’ involving ‘electronic monitoring’ or ‘home detention curfew’ or what is colloquially called ‘electronic tagging’ or just plain ‘tagging’.
The use of house arrest electronic monitoring began in the early 80’s and since then different and increasingly more complex electronic monitoring programs have become a steadily increasing alternative to incarceration within the prison-industrial complex; new target populations are continuously proposed and, of course, it has significant commercial possibilities for any electronic companies looking to broaden their horizons and profits.
The spread of electronic monitoring is taking place within a social context in which the converging technologies of computing and communication are increasingly tied to all aspects of social life. All around us we can see how diverse but converging cultural and economic forces are actively promoting those emerging technologies which are already embedded to some extent within official devices of control and surveillance: not only tagging and location and surveillance systems, but also the more and more common generic application of CCTV; not to mention the creeping technologies of biometrics, heat, light, motion and sound sensors, drug testing, genetic and neurobiological risk assessments, and pharmacological assessments in order to manage or prevent any form of undesired behaviour.
In other words, those concepts which were once part of the dystopic imaginary of the science fiction realm now are without a doubt part of the hard reality of everyday life; these once unbelievable figments now represent current techno scientific innovations which are constantly transmuting and becoming part of our ever-growing ‘surveillance landscape’.
This new and growing paradigm can be best understood using the Benthamite concept of the panopticon. However, as this concept grows, spreads and mutates though the application of technology, a more apt moniker may be desired to describe the implementation of this supreme panoptical schema: - the omnicon, polyopticon or superpanopticon perhaps.
The prison as geometry
However, we are getting slightly ahead of ourselves here. This all concerns the
extension and spread of certain technologies of power, or disciplinary
techniques, of which our most common and prevalent example is, prison itself.
Let us then confirm the idea of current disciplinary techniques by looking at
Foucault:
“‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor an apparatus; it
is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of
instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a
‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology (...). It might be said that
the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human
multiplicities.”
When speaking about the advent of the disciplinary society, we are not talking about a ‘generalised enclosure’ but about the advent of a disciplinary continuum: a homogenous extension of a technology of power, named discipline. Disciplinary society is governed by the image of confinement, extremely clear in the case of prison, but through the normalisation of these disciplines society is transformed into a succession of interiors, interiors that become interchangeable spaces. It is this succession of spaces which makes prison something familiar: as Foucault astutely notes, ‘is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?’
So then, ‘what is a prison?’ According to Foucault, in his seminal text Discipline and Punish, instead of seeing the prison as something possible because of the generalisation of disciplinary techniques, we have to see the prison itself as in institution that offers to modern society its authentic image.
A prison is then a disciplinary institution that became a paradigm of modern ways of social ordering, and sketches a way of ordering multiplicities and in doing so offers a good condensation or microcosm of the logic of the disciplinary society.
One of the central issues that define institutions such as prisons, hospitals, asylums, schools or factories is clear and intense subdivision of space that they require. In fact, some population geographers have argued that prisons, according to their confining role, must be seen as an ‘inherently geographical phenomenon’. This kind of study underlines that prisons’ geographies, particularly their internal spatial arrangements, both as set in the stone institutional layouts and as expressed in the daily movements of its corporeal victims within these dispositions, are absolutely central to the overall workings of such carceral establishments.
In his description of disciplinary society Foucault points out the many
spatial dimensions integral to them, stressing the importance of space in order
to produce disciplined individuals or what he called ‘docile bodies’: ‘In the
first stance discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space’.
Investigating the ‘art of distributions’ he describes different techniques: not
only enclosure - the confining of target populations behind walls, but also more
detailed spatial techniques, like that of ‘elementary location or partitioning’:
Each individual has their own place, and each place its individual. Avoid
distributions in groups; break up collective dispositions; analyse confused
massive or transient pluralities. Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as
many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed. One must
eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance
of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unstable and dangerous
coagulation.. Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know how to
locate individuals, and to set up useful communications, to interrupt
others..(..). Discipline organises an analytical space.
Speaking of enclosure institutions is in this sense equivalent to giving a geographical definition of events in order to create an empty and impersonal spatial surface to contain, classify and organise human actions. Discipline then, requires a spatial-temporal site, maybe not because of space itself, but because of the individualising consequences that can be found in space management and time control.
As Foucault further says, discipline is an ‘anti-nomadic’ technique: ‘One of the primary objects of discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique’. Anti-nomadic does not refer strictly to immobilise, but to avoid nomadic movement. In short, defining a disciplinary institution such as a prison means to define a space to move in.
Enclosure institutions have immobile walls, places to rest, to sleep, to eat, corridors to walk along. They define a geometric stable disposition, a pre-figured space, which makes the movements of those who are inside something one can foresee. This geometric layout translates movement into repetition, into stability. Taken as a simple collective mass, people are unpredictable and dangerous, but within a geometrised surface - within institution - it becomes possible to view rising populations as predictable objects. In this sense institutionalising means creating a spatial-temporal layout that can purify and order heterogeneity and multiplicities.
Maybe one of the ways of understanding the operation that brings about this disposition is to think about this repetition, this stable layout, as an inhabiting - in other words, in a social and geographical sense we inhabit geometry. An institution produces the conditions that we are forced to inhabit; movement becomes a habitat within a geometric distribution.
Enclosure institutions, because of their geometric definition, evoke the logic of solids: buildings, walls, the outside/inside dichotomy, the aim to concentrate, to separate, to mark, the aim to inscribe discipline in individuals in order to translate them into ‘docile bodies’ are all part of the language of solid Euclidian geometry.
Tagging as topography - alternative to prison or alternative prison?
In a sense electronic monitoring can be seen as a prolongation of the prison.
Although we can witness continuous attempts from within the penitentiary system
to find penalties of substitution (at least, and for the moment for ‘soft’
crimes), and of the increasing use of electronic tagging and surveillance
techniques to monitor offenders, prisons are most certainly not disappearing. In
almost all countries the prison population is continuously increasing, and
incarceration is still the dominant form of punishment. In fact, a short look at
the facts and relevant statistics shows us that any attempt to justify the
implementation of electronic control techniques within wider society as a
solution to the overcrowding of prisons is nothing short of a fallacy, a
semantic and implementation sleight of hand. Electronic tagging is simply an
extension of the logic of the prison - more of the same, but ‘better’, a
complementary or sophisticated extreme form of prison.
However tagging is not merely another extremity of the prison, it offers a much more versatile way of dealing with a multiplicity of individuals; in other words when electronic monitoring is employed it surpasses the criteria necessary for a disciplinary schema.
The implementation and use of electronic tagging translates, modifies, and changes the disciplinary institution forms, functions and objectives.
To understand this we need to reconfigure our conceptual landscape - to change the concepts and perspectives needed in institutional and spatial thinking in order to grasp the kind of relationships that define this kind of paradigm shift.
As we said previously, defining a disciplinary institution such as a prison means to define a geometric space to inhabit. Electronic tagging doesn’t define a surface capable of geometrisation. Of course, curfews impose spatial and temporal controls over those victims who are tagged: they are required to be at home at certain hours; but the activity of mapping is entirely different. It is pointless to attempt to find the inside or the outside of such an entity. There is no main/unique space-time to be in. It is possible to be a prisoner and live at home, to continue to be a wage-slave, to socialise and generally fit into your allotted place in society. It is true then that tagging does not imply prison confinement, but it is also true that the prison can now become anywhere - especially with the implementation of GPS tagging, where it becomes impossible for the person to leave any area of confinement as that area is every and anywhere.
We can see a dual movement here, a convergence: home becomes a quasi-prison; whilst at the same time prison becomes a ‘walking prison’ or a ‘virtual prison’. These disparities strongly redefine the sense of the old inside/outside institutional dichotomy and re-draw the boundaries between the private and the public. We are faced then with entities that are here and there at the same time - inside and outside at the same time. So, where does electronic tagging take place? How do we map a space that contradicts laws of place assignment? Can such a place be mapped and represented?
Maybe the answer is in community; but within community we cannot talk about a surface capable of geometrisation, as within institutions. Electronic monitoring refers to a knot of tendencies that we cannot map as we would prisons. Electronic monitoring requires to be thought of not in a geometrical way, but a topological one. We are then talking of a radically different way of inhabiting: in fact it is not possible to inhabit within such an entity. In short we cannot identify electronic monitoring with an institution, with a building; we have to think of it not as something closed, but as something open.
In this schema, nomadic movement is not something to avoid through a geography of fixed walls, but something to manage, precisely because movement is no more a problem. There is no need to translate multiplicities into stable habits, into routine through space geometrisation, because a device like a tag translates nomadic movements into information: instead of implementing a regime in an active role, the State can collect information in a passive role.
In other words, to keep in order is not to keep in place. The exponential rise of technology has provided techniques for control whereby power needs no more to occupy space tangibly; power is no longer bound, nor even slowed down, by the resistance of space. Space no more sets limits to action and its effects, and counts little or does not count at all - it is increasingly losing its strategic value.
Of course, this irrelevance of space is not absolute. For a start it Of course, this irrelevance of space is not absolute. For a start it only applies to the Euclidean geometric space that we see around us in the form of enclosed ‘private’ property; space that can be inhabited by the tangible face of power, by its walls, its bars, its guards. Tagging, along with CCTV (which only inhabits the space that the camera occupies geometrically, yet potentially offers control over any area within the range of its lens), transcends this, giving us a space that moves and changes, a space which is translated into something not fixed.
It is however, premature to talk
of the end of disciplinary societies, as discipline is still blatantly
operational within our time. Nevertheless as Foucault says:
While, on the one
hand, the disciplinary establishments increase, their mechanisms have a certain
tendency to become ‘de-institutionalised’, to emerge from the closed fortresses
in which they once functioned and to circulate in a ‘free’ state; the massive,
compact disciplines are broken down into flexible methods of control, which may
be transferred and adapted.
It seems reasonable to propose that we can find, in our present age, a mixture of these logics, some of them resembling enclosure institutions and evoking the logic of discipline, and some others nearer to the control model of ordering posed by practices of electronic monitoring.
It is perhaps preferable to use the term ‘societies of control’ to refer to our present epoch. In such societies control replaces discipline. This control is exercised ‘in the open air’. It does not need an enclosure base, it is not localised but dispersed, and whereas discipline produces individuals, control modulates and manipulates them. Control doesn’t see subjects as unique and with a personality that expresses some inner fixed quality: control deals with elements, capacities, potentialities, risks, probabilities, tendencies. Modulation is a changing and fluctuating activity: modulation adjusts or adapts to many patterns or forms. Control is a matter of accommodating to heterogeneity, translating populations as both singular and multiple, not to avoid heterogeneity as with discipline.
If the prison is the institution which offers to modern society its authentic image, then electronic tagging offers to present society another image, and taken as a whole, we can contemplate entities and practices as the ones defined by electronic monitoring as closer to societies of control than to a disciplinary society.
Electronic tagging (and CCTV) then are the harbingers of a new form of generic social control: a situation where the housing estates, the shopping malls, the very boundaries of the State itself (if not beyond) form the topography of an insidious abstract which aims to control our lives in the most Machiavellian of ways.
Our watchword must then surely remain
FIRE TO THE PRISON!!
FIRE TO THE STATE!!
(The ideas and concepts in this article have been stolen, realised, invented, borrowed, inverted and misrepresented)