Prisons and the pandemic: the panopticon plays out

Fearing the spread of the COVID 19 infection in prisons, governments have released seemingly large numbers of prisoners in many countries. However, in terms of overall percentages, the releases have been less significant. In India, prisons are overcrowded with nearly 70% under trials. With very poor sanitation and healthcare facilities, there are numerous deaths in custody due to various illnesses, including heart, lung, liver and kidney-related ailments as well as HIV, tuberculosis and cancer. It is in this context that the need to take urgent steps to contain the spread of the contagion inside prisons became apparent to the prison authorities around the time the national lockdown was announced by the Government of India. Some of the measures taken by prison departments include creation of temporary prisons to admit new prisoners and keep them in quarantine for 14 days before transferring them to the regular prisons, transfer of prisoners from congested prisons to less crowded prisons, making prisoners aware of the virus, setting up Corona care centres inside or outside prisons, etc. While prison authorities claim that they were taking necessary preventive steps within existing limitations, there has been some criticism of the inadequacy of these measures and the conditions inside prisons. The Supreme Court of India took suo moto cognizance of the issue and asked state governments to constitute a High Powered Committees to identify categories of prisoners who could be released. The article highlights that the criteria for release was based on the purported seriousness of the offence rather than vulnerability to getting infected. Also, the absence of gender disaggregated data on release of prisoners indicates the lack of importance given to the needs of women prisoners. It can be said that the policies and measures taken towards preventing the spread of COVID 19 pandemic in prisons has reinforced existing biases against prisoners. The major concern of the prison and judicial authorities was to somehow manage the situation without disturbing the 'dangerousness' and risk to 'law and order' narrative about prisoners. The article concludes by drawing attention to the fact that the Foucauldian principles of segregation, segmentation and surveillance were maintained in the decision making processes relating to treatment of prisoners during the pandemic.

COVID-19-Extending Surveillance and the Panopticon

Surveillance is a core function of all public health systems. Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have deployed traditional public health surveillance responses, such as contact tracing and quarantine, and extended these responses with the use of varied technologies, such as the use of smartphone location data, data networks, ankle bracelets, drones, and big data analysis. Applying Foucault's (1979) notion of the panopticon, with its twin focus on surveillance and self-regulation, as the preeminent form of social control in modern societies, we examine the increasing levels of surveillance enacted during this pandemic and how people have participated in, and extended, this surveillance, self-regulation, and social control through the use of digital media. Consideration is given to how such surveillance may serve public health needs and/or political interests and whether the rapid deployment of these extensive surveillance mechanisms risks normalizing these measures so that they become more acceptable and then entrenched post-COVID-19.

Obese people's perceptions of the thin ideal

The media play a key role in promoting the thin ideal. A qualitative study, in which we used in depth interviews and thematic analysis, was undertaken to explore the attitudes of 142 obese individuals toward media portrayals of the thin ideal. Participants discussed the thin ideal as a social norm that is also supported through the exclusion of positive media portrayals of obese people. They perceived the thin ideal as an 'unhealthy' mode of social control, reflecting on their personal experiences and their concerns for others. Participants' perceptions highlighted the intersections between the thin ideal and gender, grooming and consumerism. Participants' personal responses to the thin ideal were nuanced--some were in support of the thin ideal and some were able to critically reflect and reject the thin ideal. We consider how the thin ideal may act as a form of synoptical social control, working in tandem with wider public health panoptical surveillance of body weight.

Between surveillance and subjectification: professionals and the governance of quality and patient safety in English hospitals

Two understandings of the dynamics of power developed by Foucault have been extensively used in analyses of contemporary healthcare: disciplinary power and governmentality. They are sometimes considered alternative or even contradictory conceptual frameworks. Here, we seek to deploy them as complementary ways of making sense of the complexities of healthcare organisation today. We focus on efforts to improve quality and safety in three UK hospitals. We find a prominent role for disciplinary power, including a panoptic gaze that is to some extent internalised by professionals. We suggest, however, that the role of disciplinary power relies for its impact on complementary strategies that are more akin to governmentality. These strategies foster organisational contexts that are receptive to disciplinary work. More fundamentally, we find that both disciplinary power and governmentality work on subjectivities in rather a different manner from that suggested by conventional accounts. We offer an alternative, less individualised and more socialised, understanding of the way in which power acts upon subjectivity and behaviour in professional contexts.