Week Nine

In Jewkes article "Crime and the Surveillance Culture" The author talks about how surveillance has changed from being reactive to proactive. That surveillance is part of risk calculation crime control strategies including rating the dangerousness or prisoners, those on probation, and a national register for sex offenders. These risk calculating strategies have led to zero tolerance of crime and tough on crime initiatives. The author also discusses the idea of governmentality which is attempts to govern crime and to involve government through crime. One objective of governmentality is to develop situational crime control and to single out and exclude those who do not belong rather than tolerate and rehabilitate. This makes no sense to me, I think everyone deserves a second chance and the right to prove they have changed. This also makes crime worse since it targets poor whites and ethnic minorities and segments them into places where all facets of life depend on participating in crime. Another idea Jewkes discusses is using a DNA database as surveillance. This would establish identity and provide a complete genetic profile. There are problems with doing this the first is equality. In the UK 40% of all black men are in a DNA database while only 9% of white men are in a database. There are other concerns about using the databases to further segment society by using them to predict substance abuse and criminal tendencies.