A study of prisoners: from Bentham's Panopticon to modern electronic surveillance. Problems and perspectives

Although in the last decades of the twentieth century modern and evolutionary technology has allowed the introduction of new forms of prisoner surveillance, both in intra-mural and extra-mural terms, the study conducted, starting from the brilliant intuition of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon and its functional prison engineering, The study, starting from the brilliant intuition of the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham and its functional prison engineering, has investigated, in a comparative perspective, both the first methodologies of control of prisoners and the modern and technological processes of surveillance that appear, however, far from the general and disciplinary purposes of the past, fulfilling, today, only tasks of mere control of the person in a well-defined space. Electronic surveillance shares with the prison the effect that Foucault recognised in Bentham's Panopticon, that is, to induce in the prisoner a conscious state of visibility that ensures the functioning of power, making surveillance permanent in its effects, even if discontinuous in its action. No other substantive purpose is discernible. The application of the electronic bracelet, which represents the most evolved form of remote electronic surveillance in Italy, still raises doubts as to its effectiveness and often clashes with problems of material availability of such devices and with the limits of applicability, albeit technologically supported by GPS technology. If the imperative, today as in the past, is that of a containment or repression of the freedom of the prisoner locked up in a cell of a few square metres or inside the house with an electronic system of remote surveillance, the question remains whether such measures really contribute to the re-education and re-socialisation of the convicted person, or whether they are a timed instrument only to maintain social order.