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Prisons The surveillance of ‘prolific’ offenders: beyond ‘docile bodies’. Michael McCahill and Rachel L. Finn, Punishment & Society, Volume 15 no. 1, 2012, pp. 23-42.

01 March 2013

Based on a series of interviews with a group of mainly white, working class residents of deprived council estates in northern England on a variety of different probation regimes, the article draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to try and “provide a corrective to much of the existing literature which continues to portray the surveilled as ‘docile bodies’, rather than social actors who can contest power relations in situations that are very much skewed against them.” The authors examine the different methods of monitoring and surveillance (electronic tagging, surveillance, databases, observation, police and probation service interviews, home visits) to which people on probation are subjected, and examines the different ways in which they seek to resist these methods of control.