ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is on one particular kind of surveillance technology used in crime control, namely visual surveillance technology. As the chapter will show, we can identify several different kinds of visual surveillance, with a range of crime control applications, and with various consequences for our societies and for how we understand the nature of policing, crime control and criminal justice. Over the past few decades, visual surveillance technologies have gradually become an increasingly significant feature of crime control systems. This has been enabled by technological developments, and in particular advances in microelectronics, the shift from analogue to digital electronics, and the emergence of digital imaging, have seen the size and cost of devices plummet at the same time as their optical capabilities have steadily increased. As such, the increased use of visual surveillance technologies parallels the increasing reliance, over a similar time, on other forms of electronic surveillance technologies, such as the electronic monitoring (‘tagging’) of offenders, and surveillance of the Internet (Jones 2014a; Nellis 1991, 2005; Nellis et al. 2013).
