Now that both The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic have done similar pieces on "outpatient incarceration" or the use of swift and certain sanctions and monitoring devices to mitigate the fiscal, economic and social costs of mass incarceration, I think it's fair to say that I was ahead of the curve, having written about this back in December. The question remains whether or not the burgeoning ideological consensus among intellectuals that mass incarceration is costly and ineffective will carry over into Congress, which remains as dumb on crime as ever.
Props to Graeme Wood, though, for bringing it back to Jeremy Bentham and the concept of the "Panopticon," which is an idea that loomed heavily on my mind both in New Jersey and at Camp 6 at Guantanamo Bay, the latter of which has to be the closest thing to the physical prison Bentham imagined that I've ever seen.
In a way, the goal of Panopticon justice is as old as morality itself. It aims to install a tiny voice in each offender's head, a warning that someone is watching and that wrongdoing will be punished. Most of us call that tiny voice a conscience. But for some that voice is overwhelmed by other, louder voices expressing need or impulse or desire, voices less bound by reason or consequence. If a device strapped to an ankle can help restore the balance, can amplify the voice of conscience relative to the others, is that such a bad thing? For optimists of human nature, it is a melancholy realization that the highest function of humanity can be, to some extent, outsourced to a plastic box. But the American criminal-justice system has become in many ways a graveyard of optimism. And surely it is better to outsource the fragile voice of conscience to a plastic box than to do what our brick-and-bar prisons so often do, which is to extinguish that voice altogether.
Wood hints at this, earlier in the piece, but the criminal-justice system is really behind in terms of utilizing advanced surveillance technology compared to our national-security apparatus. The FBI doesn't even need to prove you're relevant to an investigation before soliciting massive amounts of information from private companies.
The problem with constant surveillance is that people become habituated to it and don't realize the freedom they're losing or even that their privacy is being violated. In a criminal-justice context, what that means is that what seems like a really cost-effective way to deal with the social and economic exigencies of mass incarceration now may someday become so widespread that its no longer effective. At least, that's my worry. A plastic conscience is like any other prosthetic; it's never the same as the real thing.
