Return of the panopticon? New super prisons in the UK

New Titan super-prisons have been proposed for the UK to deal with overcrowding:

 And yet the next generation of prisons is to be the Titan, giant super-prisons packed with biometric scanners and other gadgetry. Despite all this new technology, a quick glance at the early plans for the Titans conjure up echoes of their Victorian ancestors.

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Dwarfing anything in the current system, a key quality will be “optimal sight lines which would result in better staff utilisation and deliver staff savings”.

Such a demand harks back to a crucial crossroads in the development of Britain’s prisons at the beginning of the 19th Century.

“To induce… a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary.”

This could be a criticism from one of the opponents of Britain’s “CCTV society”. In fact, it is from French philosopher Michel Foucault’s attack on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a landmark concept in the British prison system.

Via BBC 

Review: Psychiatric Power

Metapsychology Online Reviews Psychiatric Power:

In these lectures [Foucault] sets out the program for a genealogy of psychiatry, of its characteristic knowledge/power relations. Thus, Psychiatric Power pursues the history started with Madness and Civilization which undertook the archaeology of the division between the insane and the sane in Western society.

In order to give an account of this form of psychiatric and medical knowledge about madness, one must start with an analysis of the apparatuses and the techniques of power that organized the treatment of the mad in the period that spans from Philippe Pinel to Jean-Martin Charcot. Psychiatry is not born as a consequence of progress in the knowledge of madness but from the disciplinary apparatuses within which the regime imposed on madness is organized. From this point of view, Psychiatric Power continues the project of a history of human sciences.

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At the very end of his course, when Foucault returns to the relations of power between hysteric and doctor, to hysterical resistance to medical power, the scene of sexuality is center stage. And Foucault draws the remarkable conclusion that “this sexuality is not an indecipherable remainder but the hysteric’s victory cry, the last maneuver by which they finally get the better of the neurologists and silence them” (p.322). But, in the final diagnosis, this great pleasure of hysteric’s victory becomes the great misfortune of our subjection to the apparatus of sexuality. And Foucault focuses our attention on that moving stratum of force relations that underlies the instability, of relations of power/resistance.