Visibility is a Trap The Panopticon of Police Power
Constant Surveillance from the prison to the streets, communities of color are the targets.
An article from the Atlantic called “Prisons without Walls” states prisons are not simply about detaining those who break the law; they also function to inculcate social rules into those who have not been successfully disciplined in other institutions such as the family, school, and workplace. In “Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison”, Michel Foucault analyzed the famous model prison proposed by the 19th Century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Bentham’s “Panopticon” is a circular building with a central guard tower that can look into all the cells lining the perimeter. The cells are kept illuminated but the observation tower is dark, so that prisoners can be observed at all times but can not tell when they are being watched. The goal is for them to learn to act as if they are constantly under surveillance. Once this self-discipline is instilled, prisoners can be released into society with the capacity to regulate their own behavior through a socially beneficial form of paranoia. As Foucault puts it, “as opposed to the ruined prisons, littered with mechanisms of torture the Panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious cage it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form.” It is time for architects to find new means of building a just society, and new buildings for a better set of institutions. The disciplinary model of the prison/Panopticon is a failure. Constant surveillance of mainly people of color has been the answer to having power and control over them. Is surveillance the answer to justice?
In the article, “Visibility is a trap…” Foucault writes: “It was the perfection of managing and controlling bodies, not through the brutality of public torture, but through the psychology and efficiency of surveillance. The Panoptic gaze moves out of the walls of the prison and is “very soon taken over by the police apparatus,” creating a technology of “generalized surveillance.” This is where stop and frisk comes from the police think by racially profiling people that they can prevent future bigger crimes happening. In the Atlantic article called “Is Stop and Frisk Worth It” states how the police’s policy has made communities safer, but is it racially profiling? The percentage of blacks and Hispanics stopped in New York turns out, in fact, to correspond to the city’s percentage of black and Hispanic index-crime suspects. Many more blacks and Hispanics are naturally going to be questioned, the police maintain.
“It’s not racially driven profiling,” DeMaio told me about Newark’s practice. “It’s crime-driven profiling.”
Because 88 percent of the people stopped in New York were innocent, Darrious civil rights lawyer says, the department was in effect arguing “that law-abiding black people are more suspicious look more suspicious, behave more suspiciously than law-abiding white people.” Scheindlin’s decision is grounded in this numerical proof of discrimination. The prejudice may not be willful or even conscious, but in the practice of stop-and-frisk, as Charney frames it, “race is a proxy for reasonable suspicion.”
From the prison to the police to the citizenry, it is the “perfection” of discipline where the lines between the prison and the streets, ostensibly public and free, become blurred.
The Panopticon became “a faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere,” where “the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.” We become the prisoners and the wardens at the same time, locking ourselves in a cage.
In the article, “Black Lives under Surveillance” Thompson asks the question of how then can we transcend capitalism and challenge the strictures of surveillance was raised? Browne employs the term “dark sousveillance” to introduce the “tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight.” Dark sousveillance, she argues, is a productive space “from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance.” At the same time, exposure and visibility can be tactics of freedom, as for example in the use of camera phones to film police. Dark sousveillance can be a means of achieving parity with the state, Browne contends. Audre Lorde asks, “What does it mean,” though, “when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” Lorde also provided an answer: “It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.” Dark sousveillance offers critique, but not resistance. Acts of witnessing racializing surveillance have severe penalties. The civilians who filmed the state-inflicted deaths of Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, and Philando Castile were all subsequently arrested. None of the police officers has been convicted.
Surveillance isn’t always bad we can use it to our advantage of capturing the unjustice crimes that stem from police brutality. But constant surveillance will not stop the violence just like in the media there’s more awareness of police brutality, but the justice system doesn’t do anything about it. Look at the cases about Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin whose families never got justice. People of color are a victim to this while moving through public space, of being always marked by skin color, manner of dress, or physical comportment. Such surveillance has become normalized and distributed, into our own pockets, onto our own bodies. When police have to have constant surveillance of prisoners or civilians through camera’s to make sure they make better judgments, than that’s when we are in trouble when we have to rely on surveillance to get us justice and freedom. Stop and Frisk is another policy that the police use to control and have power over citizens specifically black and brown bodies. Will this protect the citizenry and help to reduce racism, classism, and abuses of power? Poor communities where most of the bodies are brown experience “public” and “free” space as surveilled space, controlled space, a space where their bodies are not their own but perpetually disciplined, fragmented, and examined by the various modes of power. Is having more eyes an answer or the problem?
