So there is no need of Jail only reform Houses

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.

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.

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.

That’s my only thing. Looks good otherwise! Thanks for the post.