Before we can begin to understand transparency (or even really define it), we first need to understand disciplinary systems. I know, that connection makes no sense from the outset, but I promise it is crucially important. It will become abundantly clear in a moment, but why it’s a big deal to become transparent—to volunteer our privacy away—has a whole lot to do with how we are watched.
Now, this can be a matter of literally being watched—I just spent a year in England, the most surveilled nation on Earth—or, more importantly, it may be a matter of the perception of being watched. That one might be under observation is a much more important tool than actively watching.
Jeremy Bentham was one of those really interesting Late-Enlightenment, Early-Industrial-Revolution thinkers. Interesting because he was one of the folks who helped solidify what we regard as granted ethical norms. Bentham’s especially cool because he stated plainly some stuff any modern writer in his position would dance around. What’s the purpose of schools? The same one as prisons, factories, hospitals, and the military—obedience. We would all argue stringently that there are degrees of obedience and independence within each institution—and of course, there are—but when it comes down to a question of organizing large groups of people for any reason (even their own benefit), discipline is key.
So, Bentham created a model. He called it The Panopticon, and it’s still with us.
This:
Is also this:
Which, too, is this:
Don’t buy it? Well, the basic idea of the Panopticon is that you can have a ring of cells—a cylinder, I guess, if you want to get technical—surrounding a central guard tower. The cells are all backlit, so that an observer can always see plainly what the inmate (be they a prisoner, student, patient) is doing. The guard tower itself, however, has foils on the windows such that no one outside can see in. This ensures that the inmates never know when they are being observed, but are aware that they could, at any point, be watched.
Bentham calls this the “inspection principle.” The possibility of observation results in the same behavior as absolute observation. Closed Circuit Televion cameras (CCTV), airport security, and even the police rely on this principle. The threat of observation, punishment, and shame is usually enough to coerce obedience. It isn’t very likely that one will be caught, but the possibility is enough to deter most people.
Now, the argument can be made that it is fear of punishment alone, not getting caught, that makes us obey, and to some degree that’s true. Michel Foucault, a social theorist, discusses this in his book Discipline and Punish. Time was, there was no such thing as a standing police force, so punishment was harsh for ALL crimes. Sell your city out to the enemy? Sentenced to death. Kill some guy? Death. Hunt in the King’s private warden forests? Death. Steal some bread? Get your hands cut off, probably die. Not a lot of middle ground, but there couldn’t be: for as little as people got caught, there had to be some high prices to pay if the powers-that-be wanted deterrence.
So what happened? Well, we reformed how that system worked. Foucault goes into great depth, but here are the cliff-notes. We made our punishments almost poetically appropriate to the crimes. Punishments are so reasonable that it’s actually kind of infuriating to victims seeking justice (hence our fantasies about vigilantes like Batman and the Boondock Saints).
Because we value reason so highly in Western cultures, such logical punishments lend authority to the whole system. We naturalize—that is, make to seem natural (very different from something actually being natural)—the values that this system espouses. Since laws generally come from either logical abstraction (civil law) or tradition and precedent (common law), there is already a great deal of status-quo pressure to obey. Add into that mix the seeming proportional response system of punishment, and such a legal system simply seems right.
This is possible through disciplining—the internalization of social rule-sets. Foucault likes to talk about, well, Foucault likes to talk about a lot of things a lot. One of his focuses with discipline, though, is the place of policing. Police represent societal more than they enforce it. Visible reminders of structure and order help us create the idea that all of society is watching us. We are visible, and what we do is judged. As such, we (to quote a favorite teacher of mine) “internalize the policeman.” We police ourselves, as individuals, out of both agreement with the law and fear of public shaming. Combine those two pieces and you have guilt—a fear of personal shame.
And that’s the logical, if metaphorical, extension of Bentham’s inspection principle. We don’t need to be watched, we need to be reminded that we could be watched. We don’t need to be reminded that we could be watched, we need to be reminded that there is behavior that warrants watching, and we’re not going to engage in it, because it is wrong.
In Bentham’s model, the whole point is that there needs not even be a guard in the guard tower—since the inmates can’t know anyway, a guard’s presence is irrelevant. In disciplinary regimes (like the ones we all belong to by virtue of being modern citizens of the developed world), there need not be external observers—we’ll watch, judge, and shame ourselves.
So we’re all Catholics, it seems. We are subject to our inner guilt. But the system isn’t perfect. Far from it. There’s a lot more tension in the power structure of a disciplinary regime than the Panopticon model actually allows for—who, for instance, are the wardens in American society? From where do they derive their power? And how do we actually manage disobedience?
Show me, in the comments, why this model is flawed. Pick it apart. In the next piece in this series, I will answer specific arguments as I can (clarifying, agreeing, or debating), and would love to work with some ideas I haven’t considered before.
Bibliography
Bentham, Jeremy. 1787. ‘Panopticon, or, the Inspection-House’. In Criminological Perspectives: Essential Readings, (eds) Eugene McLaughlin, John Muncie, Gordon Hughes, 1996. (Thousand Oaks, California, USA: Sage, 2005)
Bentham, Jeremy. 1791a. ‘Panopticon: Postscript Part I’. In The Panopticon Writings. (ed.) Miran Bozovic, 1995. (London: Yew)
Bentham, Jeremy. 1791b. ‘Panopticon: Postscript Part II’. In The Panopticon Writings. (ed.) Miran Bozovic, 1995. (London: Yew)
Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan, 1977. (New York: Vintage, 1995)
Genghis Philip
Gordon Levine
My first thought is that with the guard tower example (i.e. never actually needing a guard for it to be effective), eventually the inmates would figure out that no one was being disciplined after a while. The illusion of “being watched” needs to be sustained by occasional disciplinary action, and for a variety of different trespasses (crimes, what have you). It can’t just be “Oh Inmate Bob shanked his cell mate, so he gets punshied, but Inmate Sally who’s been stealing towels goes unnoticed.” Inmate Sally’s gotta be caught every once in a while alongside Inmate Bob, or the technique ceases to be effective.
That’s my only thing. Looks good otherwise! Thanks for the post.
That’s absolutely true–there needs to be an established pattern to ingrain the crime/punishment system. There is an argument that says because the inmates are only in their cells and can’t see each other, they actually never know if anyone’s being punished or not, but in a disciplinary regime (read: society) you can’t actually compartmentalize people enough to make that viable.
It would also seem then that in society the method would need to be changed slightly. We would do best by hiding the evidence of people getting away with things and over publicize people being punished. This brings about the idea that a scapegoat for a crime is just as important as getting the real guy. Taking this train of thought further why aren’t we just punishing people very publicly for crimes even if they didn’t do anything. Does there have to be a strong belief that the system is doing things “for good”? Does the idea of fairness come into play so the harsh punishments of yesteryear are no longer valid? You’re painting an ugly picture here.
FS, you’re describing the other system mentioned in this post. Disciplinary regimes -require- that the populace buy into them. Without that, it falls apart because the deterrent factor– the shame mentioned–isn’t there.
The actual punishment process is nearly irrelevant. Since we aren’t set off in our own cells with zero contact, there needs to be SOME indicator that people are punished, yes (as Caitlin mentions above). But the focus isn’t on strict, vengeful consequences. A disciplinary system relies on just that–discipline. We’re -trained- to believe in the system. Resentment comes, in such a system, when the regime is seen as benefiting only a privileged few; in current incarnations, disciplinary regimes are based on democratic or representative systems. Those systems inherently make us -all- the watchers, and to indict the system is to indict ourselves.
So no, in a disciplinary regime, you don’t want swift, brutal punishment. That’s why there’s such a ruckus about torturing Guantanamo prisoners–there’s dissonance between an executive system and a democratic one. We need fairness and justice, because it makes the system trustworthy. The system need to be believed to be “good,” it needs to be believed to be “right.”
As far as ugly pictures: I disagree, but will cover that in future posts. For now, I’ll just say this– Power is generative. It creates. Power structures are not inherently good or bad; they provide a context for interaction. Just because something is consciously manipulated doesn’t make it bad or dishonest.
Hehe. Catholics. You so silly Genghis.
This falls along the same lines as your response to FS, to an extent. Disciplinary regimes require that the populace buy into them. But it’s not just the deterrence factor that could be missing, you could also not have the idea that what you’re doing is wrong, which is something bred into people from their youth. If it isn’t bred in, which is widespread in some cultures in the US, a sort of cultural isolationism exists to the extent that the system is subverted because they simply don’t care, or don’t feel shame because they don’t see a wrong in it, or are surrounded by others who support their actions. Gangs would be an example.
Greg
Take this with a grain of salt…I know little about Foucault and Bentham. I really like your general premise, but I think another issue comes to bear on your discussion–which is the perceptions of surveillance, punishment, and by extension of the system you describe. In American society, there is a distinct separation between the way the criminal justice system is supposed to work and the way the system actually works. As a result, different people see the system differently. When you discuss logically reasonable punishments – proportional amounts of jailtime or fines, or community service, or creative sentencing for varying degrees of crime -you’re speaking from the former standpoint.
Of course, the real situation differs. Look at the disparities in our justice system. One out of every one hundred adults in America is in prison. Large groups of the prison population come from specific socioeconomic strata with specific offenses (read low-income African-Americans and drugs). In this context, surveillance comes through video cameras, officers on the beat, etc. As the statistics indicate, the punishment is uniformly jail. And although prisons are supposed to act as reformatory environments, they don’t. Prisons are brutal, but ironically, you still see a large portion of repeat offenders, some of whom go back to jail because they cannot function in society at large.
Compare the above situation to drug use in the suburbs. People don’t go to jail, they go to rehab, which may or may not be court-ordered. Surveillance may come from the same sources, but the punishment is different.
Or at the risk of sounding like a liberal cliche, look at white collar crime, which always involves more money or more deaths than inner-city robbery or violence. Surveillance comes through auditing, investigative journalism, whistleblowing, etc. The crime incurs much less of penalty i.e.) fines which perpetrators can easily afford or jail time in minimum security prisons, where the dangers are much less if not non-existent.
I know the situation is not as neat as the rich/poor dichotomy above, but it leads to this point. We have a relative situation where different groups of people view the panopticon differently. They are subjected to different kinds of potential oversight and face different kinds of external punishment. As such, they weigh their actions differently. Not having extensive experience with sociology or critical theory, I can’t tell you exactly where the differences lie. However, I assume that they are there.
But when you say, ‘We don’t need to be watched, we need to be reminded that we could be watched. We don’t need to be reminded that we could be watched, we need to be reminded that there is behavior that warrants watching, and we’re not going to engage in it, because it is wrong,’ I want to ask who “we” are. Society as a whole? What is the “behavior that warrants watching?” All crime? In the end, the term “watch” seems to serve as an umbrella for a variety of modes of surveillance that different groups weigh differently.
Again, this isn’t necessarily a flaw in your argument–just a suggestion for expansion. I think you could identify how your proposed system operates with respect to different groups of people.
Damn, I need to edit better…”former standpoint” refers to the way the criminal justice system is supposed to work; “Prisons are brutal, but ironically” should say “prisons are brutal, and ironically;” and it should wrap up with “So when you say” as opposed to “But when you say.”
Visibility is indeed a trap.
man are not born as criminal
So there is no need of Jail only reform Houses
Awesome blog! Good read, I’ll be back again.