Social Control Organizations
Using data from items A, B and C and elsewhere, discuss how far
methods of social control have become bureaucratised in the last two
hundred years.
From the information provided it shows how different methods of social
control have developed over the past two hundred years from public
displays of control to the development of early prisons up to present
day with CCTV and computerised systems. The post modernist Michel
Foucault wrote his book Discipline and Punish (1977) in which he looks
at the development of the prison system from 18th century to modern
time. He found that two hundred years back, when a person was found
guilty of a criminal act, the sovereign or ruler at the time decided
their fate. In That time there was no such thing as bureaucracy, there
were no files or records on a person in which to retrieve or further
document, a decision was made and the outcome was in the form of a
public display of punishment by flogging, the stocks or torture and
sometimes death. Then gave way to the birth of the prison system in
which public displays of punishment converted to other methods of
control and the decisions made on how a person be punished was
governed by agencies rather than a single person in sovereignty. The
goals where no longer to inflict pain and humiliation but to offer a
different kind of control, a control of the mind and body and it
became a method in which to covert a person rather than a means to an
end. Prison became a consequence of a criminal act and whilst
incarcerated different forms of control where implemented from
rationing of food to control over daily activities such as
sleep as well as enforcement of uniform wearing in which to strip the
inmate his/her feeling of self or individuality.
The Panopticon, a 19th century prison designed by Jeremy Bentham was a
circular like building in which inmates were housed in cells around
the...