Week Nine Blog

This week we discussed the use of surveillance for monitoring crime.
 In Jewkes article, "Crime and Surveillance Culture", she delves into how the use of surveillance in our culture has adapted to the change in our culture. She discusses surveillance and how it applies to controlling the body of people, Governance and governmentality, profit, voyeurism and entertainment, and the idea of panopticism. Over time, society has used surveillance techniques to have control, power and authority over people in order to keep society safe and to have order. Surveillance techniques have been used in prisons, and see this in Bentham's panopticon design so prison guards can monitor the prisoners.  As the advancement of technology has changed, so has surveillance techniques. We have switched from reactive to proactive measures in surveillance in crime control. instead of catching the criminal after the fact, we now use surveillance techniques to look for precursors to criminal activity in a way to try and stop the criminal before he commits the crime. However, this switch in proactive measures has created some bias as to what indicators that people look for such as specific races, appearance, etc. Crime is also seen as occurring out of opportunity instead of strictly blaming the individual for criminal activity. if people can better track the whereabouts of criminals by using surveillance to see what areas are more conducive for crime, then we can possibly reduce the crime rate. Surveillance can also be applied to everyday lives of people. For instance, the use of baby monitors and other high-tech advancement are used to keep track of a child's wherabouts. However, there are also downsides to this increased use of surveillance. Society has felt the need to become hyper-aware of what people are doing all the time, and as a result, this has made many people paranoid.
I thought this was an interesting article about the surveillance culture because i don't really think about it that much in my day to day life and the idea that my behavior is being monitored to a degree is interesting. Societies preoccupation with human activity and the need to monitor our behavior is an interesting phenomenon in our culture that has become more prevalent with technological advances, and it will be interesting to see where this leads in the future in attempting to control criminal activity.