Book Review: Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390201100211 |
| Date | 01 June 2002 |
| Author | Roy Coleman |
| Published date | 01 June 2002 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
mass imprisonment will become a new “iron cage” ’ (p. 179). This is a useful way of
conceptualizing possible future developments in penal policy. However, he also asked:
‘what can we set against this mechanisation to preserve a certain section of humanity
from this fragmentation of the soul. . . ?’ (cited in Giddens, 1971: 236). While no advo-
cate of radical social change, Weber’s words are nonetheless perfectly suited to think-
ing about preserving the human spirit and the souls and minds of the detained as they
contemplate the ‘Mount Everest of time’ (Martin, cited in Franklin, 1998: 345) that
unfolds before many of them. It could be argued that criminologists in the UK, for
example, and their professional organizations, should be ‘set against’ more prisons by
demanding a moratorium on prison building and the actual closure of specific insti-
tutions. This could be underpinned by disengaging from the endless pursuit of state
grants and the pernicious lure of evaluation studies. Instead, they could engage in
refusnik criminology until there was some official indication that building more
prisons is no longer an option in controlling crime. Idealistic, perhaps, but there is a
serious political and moral issue here about the public role of intellectuals and the
institutions in which they work, and what both are prepared to countenance in the
drive for research money. This collection should, therefore, give grant-obsessed aca-
demics and their institutions pause for thought because, while it describes the penal
atavism that underpins current US crime control policy, it also provides those of us
in other countries with a glimpse of a brutal and bleak future unless direct action is
taken to construct and mobilize alternative strategies for dealing with offenders.
Positioning themselves as moral agents first, and as grant holders second, would be a
small but important step for academics to take on the road to developing a criminol-
ogy of resistance rather than partaking in a criminology of acquiescence. This excel-
lent book provides the ammunition to do just that.
REFERENCES
Davis, A. (1998) ‘Race and Criminalisation: Black Americans and the Punishment
Industry’, in J. James (ed.) The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
Frank, T. (2001) One Market under God. London: Secker and Warburg.
Franklin, H. Bruce (ed.) (1998) Prison Writing in Twentieth Century America.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Giddens, A. (1971) Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
JOE SIM
Liverpool John Moores University, UK
DAVI D LYON, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Buckingham: Open
University Press, 2001, vii + 189 pp., £15.99 (pbk).
Lyon’s Surveillance Society develops the insights and arguments laid down in his
earlier book, The Electronic Eye. The book offers a useful starting point in discussing
the ubiquity of surveillance practice and in raising questions of the relationship of this
practice with power. In tracing the development of ‘surveillance societies’, it ensures
that a whole range of surveillance and monitoring practices fall under its remit. Thus,
surveillance practices ‘pervade all societal sectors’ that stretch ‘well beyond the state’
(p. 30). Surveillance is a fact of modern life and not ‘intrinsically anti-social or repres-
sive’ (p. 31). For Lyon, then, surveillance societies are defined by their double-edged
314 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 11(2)
07Book reviews (bc/d) 5/17/02 8:50 AM Page 314
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