alex@am.sublink.org (Alex Martelli) (06/18/91)
rcbi12@muvms3.bitnet (Michael J. McCarthy) writes in comp.admin.policy: ... : The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, in : his book DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: THE BIRTH OF THE PRISON :explains the prison model called a panopticon (I forget the original :architect). The panopticon consisted of a ring of cells surrounding :a central guard tower. The cells had glass walls on the outside :and the inside of the ring, with the effect that light passing :through these walls into the central tower rendered the inmates :constantly visible. Conversely, they could not see into the guard :tower, so they never knew when they were or were not being observed. : : Consequently, the inmates behaved as if they were constantly : being watched, to the point where actual observation was :almost unnecessary. They began to internalize the idea that they :were constantly under the watchkeeper's eye, and thus modified :their OWN behavier. The inmates became, therefore, their own :jailers. For a more modern and personal example, ask yourself why :you stop at a red light on a deserted street at 4:00am (assuming :you do). It's because even though your eyes tell you that NOONE :is there, you worry that maybe, just maybe, behind that billboard, :is a police officer waiting to meet his or her ticket quota for :the week. It was an idea of Jeremy Bentham, 18th-19th century English philosopher, better known for his enthusiastic advocacy of Adam Smith's laissez-faire ideas, and as the inventor of the phrase "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" (to describe the purpose of Law in his philosophy of Utilitarianism); his penal philosophy, similar to Beccaria's, was based on the idea that MINIMAL punishment sufficient to outweigh the utility of the crime, but with CERTAINTY of apprehension, was the way law should evolve, as opposed to the savagely "cruel and unusual" punishments common at the time, which did NOT deter offenders since they hoped to escape detection (and might PUSH them to further crime - "as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb"). The panopticon was an implementation of this philosophy - by making detection certain, it would allow to show that minimally-sufficient punishments would suffice. The idea was NOT to the liking of Britain's government, and was dropped. I think the only extant panopticon-like prison is in the U.S.A., I believe in Illinois. If you accept the early English liberals' ideas about the rationality of (wo)man, it then follows that you can deter crime, either with moderate punishment, with a negative utility to the punishee barely above the positive utility s/he got from the crime, but then you have to give him or her a virtual certainty that any crime WILL be, indeed, detected and punished - thus, privacy has to be curtailed; or, you can preserve more privacy, but then detection and punishment probability diminishes, so the punishment, if/when it comes, must be far more severe, to have a deterrent effect. Suppose the "crime" is goofing off at work. Would you rather have constant-monitoring (as a possibility), with penalty being a small fine, just above the cost to the firm of the stolen work-time (just enough to cover the general monitoring cost, say); or, more privacy, but IF you happen to be caught goofing off, you're immediately fired and sued for punitive damages of some huge amount...? You can of course argue that the model of rationality leading to this dilemma is FAR too simplistic, and I would agree; the adversarial relation which the dilemma implies between firm and employee, for example, is a caricature. However, I don't think one can dismiss panopticon-like, "zero-privacy" ideas as an open-and-shut case, particularly given their distinguished ancestry. (I have taken the liberty of removing comp.unix.admin from the Newsgroups line, since I think these are definitely policy questions rather than unix-specific, and adding comp.org.eff.talk. I would also like to underscore that these are my own personal ideas only). -- Alex Martelli - (home snailmail:) v. Barontini 27, 40138 Bologna, ITALIA Email: (work:) martelli@cadlab.sublink.org, (home:) alex@am.sublink.org Phone: (work:) ++39 (51) 371099, (home:) ++39 (51) 250434; Fax: ++39 (51) 366964 (work only), Fidonet: 2:332/407.314 (home only).
ryan@ra.cs.umb.edu (Daniel R. Guilderson) (06/20/91)
The panopticon sounds good on paper but in the real world it would not have the desired effect of prisoners policing themselves. I say this because there will always be a few risk takers who will be willing to test whether or not they are being watched. From my own experience I know that I would be one of them. I like to do stuff like speed past known speedtraps just for the hell of it. If I do it often enough and I don't get caught, I figure it is no longer being used as a speedtrap.
kadie@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu (Carl M. Kadie) (06/21/91)
In <1991Jun17.201213.324@am.sublink.org> alex@am.sublink.org (Alex Martelli) writes: [...] >If you accept the early English liberals' ideas about the rationality >of (wo)man, it then follows that you can deter crime, either with [...] Now instead of assuming rationality, the state exploits irrationalty by sponsoring lotteries that pay back less that 50 cents on the dollar. - Carl -- Carl Kadie -- kadie@cs.uiuc.edu -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign