Mass supervision, misrecognition and the ‘Malopticon’
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474518755137 |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Punishment & Society
Mass supervision,
2019, Vol. 21(2) 207–230
! The Author(s) 2018
misrecognition and the
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474518755137
‘Malopticon’
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Fergus McNeill
University of Glasgow, UK
Abstract
This paper aims to contribute to debates about ‘mass supervision’ by exploring its penal
character as a lived experience. It begins with a review of recent studies that have used
ethnographic methods to explore how supervision is experienced before describing the
two projects (‘Supervisible’ and ‘Mass Supervision: Seen and Heard’) on which the
paper draws, explaining these as an attempt to generate a ‘counter-visual criminology’
of mass supervision. I then describe two encounters with ‘Teejay’; encounters in which
we explored his experiences of supervision firstly through photography and then
through song-writing. Both media are presented alongside Teejay’s commentary on
what he sought to convey, inviting the reader to engage with and interpret the pictures
and song. In the concluding discussion, I offer my own analysis, arguing that Teejay’s
representations suggest a need to recognize mass supervision as ‘Maloptical’ as much as
‘Panoptical’. Through the ‘Malopticon’, the penal subject is seen badly, is seen as bad and
is projected and represented as bad. Experiences of misrecognition and misrepresen-
tation constitute significant yet poorly understood pains of supervisory punishment.
The paper concludes by suggesting several ways in which a counter-visual criminology
might follow Teejay’s lead in exposing and challenging of mass supervision.
Keywords
creative criminology, mass supervision, misrecognition, parole, probation, visual
criminology
Corresponding author:
Fergus McNeill, Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of Glasgow, Ivy Lodge, 63 Gibson
Street, Glasgow G12 8LR, UK.
Email: fergus.mcneill@glasgow.ac.uk
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Punishment & Society 21(2)
Introduction
This paper aims to contribute to important contemporary debates about the emer-
gence of ‘mass supervision’ (McNeill, 2013; McNeill and Beyens, 2013; Robinson
et al., 2013; Robinson and McNeill, 2015), ‘mass probation’ or ‘mass penal con-
trol’ (Phelps, 2013, 2017a). Even in the world-leader in mass incarceration, the
number of people subject to probation or parole far exceeds the number impris-
oned; of the 6,741,400 people under some form of penal control at yearend 2015 in
the USA, 4,650,900 were being supervised in the community (Kaeble and Glaze,
2016). To place this in some historical context, the total population under penal
control in 1980 was less than 2 million (Glaze, 2010).
In the very different jurisdiction in which this paper is based (Scotland), similar
trends are apparent, albeit on a very different scale. In Scotland, in 2013–2014,
20,400 new community sentences commenced alongside a further 2,000 new cases
of statutory post-release supervision.1 In the same period, the average daily prison
population was 7,675.2 That suggests a total population under penal control of
over 30,000 people. In 1980, that figure was less than 8,000, with the Scottish
courts making less than 3,000 probation orders and the average daily prison pop-
ulation standing at under 5,000. Similar penal trends are apparent in many other
European jurisdictions. Aebi et al. (2015) suggest that the expansion of these forms
of sanction has led to widening of the net, sweeping more European citizens into
diversifying forms of penal control.
Behind these numbers, there are people. This paper’s central purpose is not to
analyse the reasons for the emergence of ‘mass supervision’ but to deepen our
understanding of how people experience its penal character. More specifically, in
pursuit of depth rather than breadth, I focus mainly on how one man (‘Teejay’)
chose to represent his experiences of supervision in photography and in song.
In the first part of the paper, I offer some broader context for Teejay’s repre-
sentations by reviewing the findings of other recent ethnographic research explor-
ing supervision mainly in the UK and the USA. In the next section, I discuss the
wider research and knowledge exchange projects (respectively, ‘Supervisible’ and
‘Mass Supervision: Seen and Heard’) through which Teejay’s creative representa-
tions of supervision were produced. These projects are analysed as an attempt to
develop a ‘counter-visual criminology’ (Schept, 2014) of mass supervision.
The third part of the paper adopts an explicitly emic approach, seeking to
present Teejay’s visual representations of supervision and to report how Teejay
(and two other supervisees) made sense of his pictures. I then go on to describe the
process by which Teejay and I collaborated in writing a song inspired by other
photographs representing different people’s experiences of supervision.
In the concluding discussion, I offer my own analysis of what the pictures and
the song reveal about the penal character of mass supervision. I argue that while
ethnographic studies like those reviewed in this paper have contributed much to
our understanding of the penal character of ‘mass supervision’, Teejay’s represen-
tations push us a little further, suggesting a need to recognize ‘mass supervision’ as
McNeill
209
‘Maloptical’ as much as ‘Panoptical’. The ‘Malopticon’ is intended as a metaphor-
ical penal apparatus or process through which the subject is seen badly, is seen as
bad and is projected and represented as bad. As such, it produces experiences of
misrecognition and misrepresentation that constitute significant yet poorly under-
stood pains of supervisory punishment; pains that rely neither on an architecture
of confinement nor on continuous surveillance to produce their effects. Ironically,
the pains of super-vision might be as much about being distorted and degraded, as
they are about being disciplined. The paper ends by discussing why and how a
counter-visual criminology of mass supervision must seek to challenge the
Malopticon’s dispersal of degradation.
Supervision: Discipline, control and domination
The notion of disciplinary power has been central to explaining the evolution of
probation and parole (see Cohen, 1985; Garland, 1985; Simon, 1993). Discipline, in
Foucault’s (1977) classic Discipline and Punish, is a translation of the French
surveiller. Although this has no direct English translation, it connotes terms like
surveillance, observation and supervision; methods of mastering or training the
human body, not via the use of force or constraint but by influencing or training
‘the soul’. For Foucault, the prison is a case study of discipline: an institution
evolved to deliver these ‘gentler forms of control’. Here, disciplinary power is
exercised through the principles of individualization and constant visibility
famously characterized by Bentham’s eighteenth century ‘Panopticon’ prison
design. These twin principles work together to create ‘normalized’, docile subjects
who habitually behave in the required manner.
The ways in which these disciplinary mechanisms have evolved or been sup-
planted in late-modern societies is, of course, a matter of much debate. Deleuze
(1990), in particular, has drawn attention to the shift from disciplinary societies to
‘societies of control’ in which:
the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of
variable geometry the language of which is numerical. . . [Disciplinary] Enclosures
are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast
that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose
mesh will transmute from point to point. (Deleuze, 1990: 4, emphases in original)
Both Deleuze’s (1990) invocation of these more fluid, shifting and interminable
forms of control, and his analysis of how they operate on ‘dividuals’ (as units of a
mass that is to be controlled, rather than as individualized subjects of discipline) in
many ways seem consistent with contemporary accounts of penal control. In rela-
tion to imprisonment, for example, drawing on earlier work by Downes (1988) and
King and McDermott (1995), Crewe (2011) has distinguished between the depth,
weight and tightness of imprisonment. Depth refers to degree of physical security
to which one is subject and to the distance from release and from the outside world
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Punishment & Society 21(2)
that this implies, represents and constitutes. Weight refers to the psychological
burdens of imprisonment; to how heavily it bears down upon prisoners.
Tightness is the dimension that Crewe adds:
The term ‘tightness’ captures the feelings of tension and anxiety generated by uncer-
tainty (Freeman and Seymour, 2010), and the sense of not knowing which way to
move, for fear of getting things wrong. It conveys the way that power operates both
closely and anonymously, working like an invisible harness on the self. It is all-
encompassing and invasive, in that it promotes the self-regulation of all aspects of
conduct, addressing both the psyche and the body. (Crewe, 2011: 522)
In Crewe’s analysis then, tightness relates to the pains of indeterminacy, of psy-
chological assessment and of self-government that have become apparent in
modern prisons (especially for those serving longer sentences). The concept of
tightness resonates clearly with both Foucauldian discipline and Deleuzian con-
trol; it describes the psychological straitjacket created by correctional regimes –
one which, paradoxically, must be continuously woven and...
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