ABSTRACT
Allegedly, we live in ‘new times’. Post-Fordist means of production and the emergence of new technologies, particularly communications technologies, have led to a profound restructuring of the late modern world. There has been a significant shift towards the privatisation of public space, as well as radical changes to the organisation of urban environments and to the sources of identity formation. According to Giddens (1990), the disembedding of social activity from localised contexts, and the changing of sources of trust from localised systems to abstract systems, have resulted in a heightening of what he terms ‘ontological insecurity’. Correlatively, security has become ‘commodified’ (Jones and Newburn 1998) and new technologies of surveillance, particularly CCTV, have become increasingly prominent as the means of governing particular (especially public) spaces. Such technologies have enabled the emergence of a form of ‘digital rule’ (Jones 2000), where ‘at-a-distance monitoring’ becomes a key element in electronic crime control. Criminologists have been much taken by these new technologies. Hitherto, however, their gaze has rested primarily on the impact of such technologies on public space, and has been characterised by a somewhat dystopian view of such developments. In this chapter, I wish to depart from this trend, first by focusing by the use of CCTV in a different form of space and, secondly, by adopting what I consider to be (philosophically) a more critical approach whilst resisting some of the
easier normative judgements about such technologies. This chapter arises out of the early stages of an evaluation of an
experimental project that is taking place in the police station in Kilburn, North London.1 The project involves the introduction of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) into all the cells in the custody suite at the station. These cells are to be subject to continuous 24-hour CCTV surveillance by custody officers and gaolers working in the custody suite. This is an unprecedented use of CCTV in a police station in England and Wales; previously, CCTV has been confined, at most, to one or two cells within a custody suite for particularly ‘vulnerable’ prisoners. I begin by briefly considering the history and explicit purpose of the experiment and then go on to consider what appear to be some of the emerging issues. I conclude with some reflections on how this project fits within existing criminological discourses around risk, surveillance and policing.
