Technical forms of surveillance, enabled by developments in microelectronics, databases and computer networks, have increased the surveillance of our daily life. Our communications, movements and even the functioning of our bodies are constantly recorded: communications in public telecommunication networks are tracked by mandatory data retention legislation, physical movement is monitored by video in public places, by GPS vehicle trackers, location-enabled body wearables, body-based location technologies, ambient intelligence and radio-frequency identity tags placed in items of everyday use, while the functioning of our body is screened by devices such as security body-scanners. In many Western societies, technology-enhanced surveillance has become perceived as a means of solving social problems, particularly those of crime and terrorism.
COBISS.SI-ID: 12013137
Crime policy innovations in the form of new legislation, new legal institutes or crime policy decisions are regularly accompanied with power struggles that obscure a clear sight on the nature, dimension, scale and effects of a particular innovation. We are witnessing struggles and confusions stemming from outside a particular innovation. For instance, some claim that theorists do not address the right problems of practitioners; others, on the contrary, claim that practitioners do not read theory or at least not “in a proper manner”. Sometimes theorists fight their own struggles for social or economic resources and this obstruct a more objective analysis of a particular innovation. ”Fathers” sometimes merely defend their intellectual offspring or simply stick to social, financial or other power positions. And lastly, innovations are sometimes under attack merely because they had been introduced in the “totalitarian” past. Such accompanying power struggles obfuscate the very nature of innovations and their impact on society they might have. The paper thus identifies and analyses several crime policy innovations, such as supermax prison paradigm and confinement industry; paedophile-sex offender registers; extended confiscation of proceeds of crime; compliance detention; court TV; and video surveillance of public space. Innovations are contextualised in the Slovenian socio-legal framework and critically evaluated.
COBISS.SI-ID: 11329617