"Why you buggin' about being monitored if you ain't doin' nothin' wrong?"

The Patriot Act, which resembles the idea of the Panopticon in its pervasive monitoring, came to my mind while reading Foucault. Among most of the people that I know, the reaction to the Patriot Act has been negative—it is seen by many as a threat to privacy and liberty. While I am personally not comfortable with the idea of being monitored, I can understand fairly clearly the argument for a constant monitoring, namely that it is a powerful tool in preventing unwanted activities (specifically coordinated terrorist activities in the case of the Patriot Act). It does, however, clash with the idea that the State should remain out of my hair unless I do something to harm someone else. As far as I understand, though, two arguments of those in favor of constant monitoring would be that 1.) Why wait until after the harm is done? Should we not try to prevent harm? And 2.) If it is known that we might be monitored at any given time, we may be deterred from doing what we think might get us in trouble.

Number 2 is straightforward enough, even if it results in a general unpleasant residue of worrying over whether my behavior and actions are appropriate. Number 1 is tricky, because it’s unclear how successfully harm is prevented when someone is arrested for something that they did not yet do. While reading Foucault, I also thought of the movie Minority Report (I haven’t read the book), wherein people are arrested, shaved, and stored in tubes for the rest of their lives BEFORE they commit any crime. In the movie, the murder rate drops to zero, which is a pretty clear indication that their methods worked. There was the implication that some people were put away even though they were not going to actually kill anyone, but that was not very bothersome, as the number of people saved from being murdered was higher than those unfairly put away in a tube forever. Now, this “Pre-Crime” system happened to be able to utilize supernatural siblings that could see into the future. That’s something that we are lacking (for now).

Foucault writes of the various failures of the prison system in the 19th century, which, as far as I can tell, are still problems today. The main point seemed to be that, as the prison was an area for desperate, angry “delinquents” to congregate, and since the lives of these delinquents were made very difficult after release from prison (e.g., not being able to get a job due to ex-con status), the whole prison system seemed to breed more crime. The implication is that this kind of prison system makes enemies, and so the vicious cycle of recidivism grabs hold.

So then perhaps classical Liberalism puts the people in too much danger as they sit and wait for harm to be done to them before the criminal can be dealt with. Perhaps the State should be involved at all times, constantly monitoring or being thought to be constantly present so that we, the people, mind ourselves better. Perhaps people who are brought to prison should be treated more nicely, educated, and helped back onto their feet while being constantly monitored so that they don’t wind up back in prison.

My stance is a resounding I Don’t Know. I don’t see very much public or government interest in the matter regarding prisons, beyond the comment that the prisons are getting very full. I did appreciate Foucault’s attempt to grasp the complexity of the matter, though I myself don’t feel that I have enough of a grasp of how and why people today end up in prison to gauge how fully he grasps the matter.