Jonathan Finn

Spotting the Traps

The gradual development and expansion of surveillance programs in North America is one of the most controversial aspects of modern law enforcement. What are the ramifications of having video cameras recording human behaviour in our cities? What impact does the monitoring of our spending habits and consumer preferences have on our daily lives? More importantly, once we acknowledge how we are being watched and to what extent, what room is there for resistance or even discussion on the matter? How do we balance our need for security and our desire for freedom given all the technological devices now available that potentially impact both goals?

Dr. Jonathan Finn is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. He has written an insightful book, Capturing the Criminal Image, which concentrates on the intersection of criminality and visual culture. Beginning with the development of police photography in the nineteenth century, Dr. Finn examines the influence of different identification practices, including the mug shot, fingerprinting, DNA analysis, surveillance programs, and data collection. Running through all his observations is the idea of visibility, and the significance of the different ways that we are watched, represented, categorized, and ultimately identified.

In the following interview, Dr. Finn explains carefully many of the central arguments in his book. He discusses how the introduction of fingerprinting in the 1870s and 1880s, and the refinement of the technique early in the twentieth century, brought the power of the state to new heights. With a view to the introduction of DNA analysis in the 1980s, the professor considers the challenges of regulating that method of identification for use in law enforcement. DNA analysis demands the involvement of many actors and institutions outside the traditional scope of the justice system, including executives, researchers, and laboratory workers at biotechnology companies. “How do you control a technique like that within law enforcement?” Dr. Finn asks. “What you see is a series of competing agents and actors and institutions and individuals, and there is money involved.”

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 mark a critical juncture in terms of public acceptance – and questioning - of intensified surveillance practices. In this regard, Dr. Finn measures the impact of the attacks, specifically the phenomenal social and economic costs of the programs set up in response by government agencies, particularly in the United States. He suggests that contemporary law enforcement practices actually position the human body in society as something that is potentially criminal. In the book, he puts the idea this way: “Law enforcement agencies now collect and store vast amounts of identification data for its potential use. Not only is this data often collected without any clear reason, but these practices also contribute to new conceptions of crime, criminality, and the body.”

The discussion here opens with Jonathan Finn explaining the origins of his interest in this subject matter, which began with courses in art history at McMaster University. It is evident that the work of Michel Foucault was also critical, particularly his monumental book, Discipline and Punish, and his celebrated phrase, ‘visibility is a trap’. Current and prospective university students will be intrigued by what Dr. Finn has to say about the state of security on campuses today, the monitoring of behaviour, and the regimentation of student life.

CI: In Capturing the Criminal Image you trace the ways that law enforcement officials have represented the criminal body, beginning with the development of the mug shot in the mid-nineteenth century. You then make your way through fingerprinting, DNA analysis, and complex surveillance systems, and you note how the human body is increasingly being positioned as something that is potentially criminal. As a starting point, how would you chart the development of your interest in this subject matter?

JF: It actually has a really precise origin. I wasn’t arrested or anything like that! I did an undergraduate degree in art history. In studying art history, obviously photography comes into play there in discussions. I did that at McMaster, and while I was at McMaster, I did an exchange at the University of Leeds in England and took a course there on the history of photography. At McMaster, before I did the exchange, I had introductory courses to art history, and photography was always just one of the media that was discussed but never given any real specific treatment, whereas at Leeds I took a specific course on it. I got to know quite a bit about the medium. One of the things that I had to read for that course was a book by John Tagg called The Burden of Representation. That book is all about the institutional use of photography - photography as used by police, hospitals, schools, and in other documentary capacities. And that was the one that did it! I read that book, and read about police and mug shots, and just became fascinated with it. After that, I came back to finish my undergrad, and even while doing that continued to look more and more into photography.

Then I started an M.A. at York. When I was at York and had to do a major research paper, I went and got in contact with the Toronto Police and asked if I could work in their forensics for a bit, just to shadow them and see how they use cameras and use photographs. They were kind enough to agree to that after we all sat down with our lawyers and signed the appropriate waivers and disclaimers. I worked with them for a month or two months over the summer, and produced evidence with them and saw how they used the camera. The project just sort of snowballed from there. I went to do a PhD. at the University of Rochester, and still always took a variety of courses, looking at different areas of visual culture and art history, but always having this underlying interest in police photography.

CI: Early in the book you discuss the work of Michel Foucault, specifically his great book Discipline and Punish, and his identification of ‘visibility’ as a central feature of how discipline is achieved in society. For people unfamiliar with Foucault, and with a view to the purposes that you introduce in the book, what are the primary ways that reading Foucault helped to open up for you a more comprehensive understanding of modern law enforcement practices?

JF: Well, one of the primary ways that it opens that up, particularly for me, is the emphasis on visibility. He has that famous line, ‘visibility is a trap’. It is the idea of making the unseen seen, and that is really a defining feature of law enforcement – you represent the things that are not represented. You invent methods of identification that bring the fingerprint up to a certain size so that you can read it, or that analyze DNA or whatnot.

I think also that, with Foucault’s work, it really called into question a lot of the basic underlying assumptions that we had about power structures in the world and how the world operated. The emphasis on institutional discourse and institutional life, again, for someone interested in police photography, really made perfect sense and really helped to open that field up. It takes something that is largely under-examined and unquestioned and just pops it open as a social and cultural formation, something that is as constructed as a painting, something that you can analyze as well, something that is open to analysis in the same way as visual art or music. Hospitals, prisons, reformatories – all of a sudden you can analyze those as distinct social and cultural formations, and try to trace their emergence and the various factors at play in how those institutions and organizations come to be.

CI: Famously, early in Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about the Panopticon, the idea that Jeremy Bentham had for this prison where everyone was made visible. You make the distinction, which Foucault does as well, between the Panopticon as an architectural structure and ‘panopticism’, which is a fairly complex idea involving how this ‘making visible’ is happening in wider society. When you are introducing that idea of ‘panopticism’ to students, or to people unfamiliar with it, how do you explain that idea, the widespread nature of ‘visibility’?

JF: It is perfect to teach that in a university environment. The moment that students arrive on campus one of the first things that they have to do is get their photograph taken, and that gets put into an identification card, which has a barcode, and it becomes their lifeblood at the university. It gives them access to all the services and everything else that they have on campus. At the same time, it is a perfect means of recording student behaviour, purchasing habits, and their movement through space. We can see where they eat, what they eat, what kind of books they buy, how often they go to the gym – we could potentially monitor all these things.

The other way that I think it works so nicely with university students is that, when you’re in university, you reach a point in your life when you really become self-reflexive and self-reflecting, and you start to question things. You can bring about a discussion in the classroom to show the way that the university is really just an extension of the progression of regimentation through their lives. You can go about why they dress the way they do, why they get up at certain times of the day, why they eat three meals a day, why they eat when they eat – you can go through all these completely mundane activities, and when you accumulate them and you have dozens and dozens of examples, they start to see that it’s a really tight script that they go through, even though they’re at this moment in their lives when they think that they are incredibly independent and free-spirited.

I should say, as an aside, it is also important not to try to crush anyone’s spirit! That is never my goal, right? But it is a way to exemplify that point, to look at the level of regimentation or the example of panopticism in our lives. Again, with the example of visibility in a university, that really comes to the fore through the identification cards, and also the spatial arrangement of classes – I am the professor and I face all of them and they sit and face me, what they wear, what I wear, all the kinds of architectural ornamentation that goes into a room. We can just sit in the room that we are in and look around and start to have this discussion.

CI: In the book you stress the importance of photography to ‘the documentation, classification, and regulation of the body’ within modern disciplinary societies. One of the crucial distinctions that you make in the book is between the photo as representation and as inscription. There is a moment where you explain the transition of how a photograph becomes an inscription as opposed to just a representation. In simple terms, how would you explain this distinction between representation and inscription?

JF: Representation, when people talk of the photograph – and this is the way most people still refer to photography – it represents something. I take a photograph of something. The way that wording works, that I take a photograph of you or of a cup, presupposes that that thing, the cup or you, exists out there as a knowable, independent entity, independent of the photograph. Whereas with the inscription, the idea there – and that is a concept borrowed from social studies of science – talks about the way in which that act of taking the picture is part of the identity of the thing that is being represented.

In terms of the criminal, if we take the example of the mug shot, the mug shot is primarily used as a representation, at least it initially was – you had somebody that was a criminal, and you knew that they were a criminal because you arrested them because they were caught doing a crime, and you brought them into the police station and took a photograph of them. The point of that photograph was to document their identity as a criminal. But what happens is that, as time unfolds and as police use the camera more and more, the police start to use the camera and photographs in ways to study the criminal. They start to isolate body parts and examine body parts and come up with theories of criminality based on this. In that sense, the image starts to be used as an inscription; it is being used now as a tool in the construction of the subject that the camera supposedly represents.

CI: One of the ideas that occurred to me as I read the book is that, thinking back to Foucault, as the body of the individual is made more visible, there is also a sort of disappearance of the individual because we stop looking at the individual as a person and instead look at people as inscriptions. This is something that I think people have come to feel a little bit: we are all being reduced to just a code. How do you approach that idea with students? As you say, at university, it is a time for students to feel very independent, but at the same time they run into this subject matter, which can make them feel like just one of a very large number.

JF: Well, I think that it is easy enough to give examples of how that is the case. A lot of people who write about surveillance will do this. They will document how many times you are surveyed and in what forms throughout the day. When you perform an exercise like that in the classroom, using the example of the student card or something else, in doing that exercise it is obvious that, in many respects, we are just reduced to numbers. The difficulty is in engaging with that in a productive way because that idea provokes a response of either ‘I don’t care and this guy is an idiot’, or ‘oh my God, we are all numbers and the world is a horrible place’. It opens up this kind of binary, and that is a very difficult thing to negotiate!

The trick, I think, is to be able to discuss that in ways that are productive, and to say, if this is the current state of affairs, let’s recognize it for what it is and see how we might move through the world like this. What are the ramifications? What are the opportunities for us to resist this or make change? Are there ways to do this? Are there ways to make change or resist, and to what end? I find that, at least in teaching courses on it, students are pretty willing to have those discussions, as long as you make sure that you don’t present it as a binary and shake the Foucauldian stick at them and say ‘oh my God, we are all just docile subjects and the world is a terribly, terribly dark place’. And Foucault himself – I don’t think that the books necessarily suggest that. There is plenty of room for resistance, and opportunity in that as well.

CI: With fingerprinting, the photograph remains crucial. The print itself is somewhat useless without the photograph being able to make the fingerprint mobile. As you put it, ‘the individual, physical print holds little value in comparison to its photographic representation, which can traverse physical barriers and can be at work in any number of locations and contexts simultaneously’. Having said that, you argue that fingerprinting permitted new capabilities for the collection, control, and use of personal data, and this brought state power to a new height. From a historical perspective, how did the introduction of fingerprinting make such a difference in terms of bringing state power to a new height?

JF: To me, the introduction of fingerprinting and photography really marks the moment of the shift from representation to inscription. It is not as though there was just a moment in time where a rupture took place with fingerprinting. It was not that dramatic, but what happens over the span of a few decades is that police start to be able to collect fingerprints independent of the body. If you think of prior to this, catching somebody at a crime, you might be reliant on an eyewitness or actually catching the person in the act. Well, now you have the ability to collect information via the fingerprint and make an identification long after the crime has been committed. It is that sense, the notion of latent identification, that I say announced new powers for the state. It gives rise then to the accumulation of unknown fingerprints. Very near after its inception, police will start collecting fingerprints that they don’t have a readily identifiable body for. They are collecting them in the hope that, at some point in the future, they will be able to solve that crime. While it remained primarily abstract in the beginning, or primarily a theoretical capability with fingerprinting, it nonetheless started in a real way and in a significant way with fingerprinting. Gradually through the early decades of the twentieth century it became a common practice to amass vast archives of latent identification information.

CI: And some of that information may have no connection whatsoever to an actual criminal. People who are law-abiding citizens may have their fingerprint archived without any real cause.

JF: Yeah, of course! There is the immediate concern of whether innocent people are being wrongly fingerprinted or convicted or something else. I would never want to dismiss those concerns. Those are legitimate concerns. But to me the larger concern is what is the social ramification of this mass collection of identification data? This is where in the book I say that it reconfigures the body. It presupposes the body, and by that I mean all of us in the world, as inherently dangerous or criminal in nature in that we are always suspect. In the book, you could trace that back to the nineteenth century, but I think now that is a dominant paradigm of life in the twenty-first century.

CI: Fingerprinting depends on external, physical signs of the body, but with the introduction of DNA analysis late in the twentieth century, we come to a form of identification that works at the level of cells. Keeping with the theme that runs throughout the book of how the body is represented by law enforcement officials, you treat DNA analysis as a visual practice, and stress that this is what makes your perspective unique. What are the implications of this approach of treating DNA analysis as a visual practice?

JF: I think one of them is that it allows you to question it in ways that you were unable to before. With something like the fingerprint, we can see it, right? You can look at your fingers and see it, and with a magnifying glass you could sort out the ridges. With a very quick introduction to fingerprinting, you could actually perform a reasonably decent identification of your own print. The same is not the case with DNA at all. It is a highly specialized practice, and we only know it through techniques of visualization. We only know it by the probes and radioactive material that is applied to make cellular material visible to us in ways that we can readily comprehend. In that translation from liquid matter into a concrete, two-dimensional representation, that is a pretty dramatic moment! I think, when you recognize that, you can analyze that transition. How does it get from the body to a two-dimensional representation? And that is what I tried to do in that chapter: let’s see how this technique goes through that transformation, and who are the actors in play in this?

CI: This is the interesting part. We are not just talking about law enforcement officials and the legal system generally. This also involves highly specialized scientists and workers in laboratories, biotech companies, and all sorts of researchers who are influencing the development of this and where it will go. What have been the risks for the justice system as all these other people get brought into the mix?

JF: DNA is such a fascinating example. Unlike other methods of identification, it is something that is driven by a profitable industry, by biotech industries, and it has uses far beyond law enforcement. That is where, in that chapter, I trace its use in law enforcement amidst this larger field. It’s what makes it such a fascinating topic. How do you try and regulate something like that? How do you control a technique like that within law enforcement? What you see is a series of competing agents and actors and institutions and individuals, and there is money involved. And people lie, cheat, and steal when there is money involved!

CI: The fourth chapter of the book is titled ‘Potential Criminality: The Body in the Digital Archive’. It is at this point that we run into the potential and the reality of constant surveillance with the advent of digital technologies. As you note, the scope of data collection is now such that the focus of law enforcement officials is no longer individual offenders but rather entire populations. Near the end of the chapter you note that ‘the enhanced capabilities of law enforcement and state agencies and the unchecked, exponential expansion of the digital archive demand a reinvestigation of the rationale and ethical issues associated with the collection, storage, and use of identification data’. This gets to the point! How would one go about instigating such a reinvestigation, and what would the immediate benefits be of taking on such a complex task?

JF: First, I will say that there are many academics out there that are doing precisely this kind of work. The whole ‘surveillance studies’ movement is a perfect case-in-point. I don’t think that there is any shortage of attempts to bring that debate and discussion into the public arena. The move from the university to the public has to be much more active. There has to be more of it, and it has to be a little bit more thought-out to try to get that discussion into the public forum. The trick is with that – and this is something that you experience when discussing it in classes or at conferences or anywhere else – particularly when talking about criminal identification and surveillance, it quickly dissolves into a binary in which you are either pro-criminal or you are anti-criminal. If you want to do away with, or if you want to critique or question something like DNA analysis, it means that you support serial rapists – and of course that is ludicrous! But that is how the debate often gets whittled down. It makes it difficult and uncomfortable to have those discussions.

The other thing that you run into, at least from my perspective, or something that I would advocate, is that to question or to try to minimize or lessen some of this surveillance that goes on in our lives would mean putting up with other things. It might mean recognizing and dealing with the fact that there are racial and gender inequities in society that are deep-rooted and have very complicated origins and histories, and require equally complicated solutions. No one wants to pay that amount of attention or time. What you want is something that can be fixed in a week or a month or a year. The appeal of these technologies is such that it makes it very difficult to mount a counterargument and say ‘what we need to do instead is to embark on a decades-long path of discussion and education’. Advocates for the surveillance technology will say ‘well, if we do that, in the meantime x number of offenders are going to go uncaught, and such and such number of people are going to be severely beaten or killed’. Those kinds of dramatic examples are what shut the discussion down, when you talk about a child being abducted or somebody being sexually assaulted. When you have those kinds of cases brought into the discussion, it is very difficult to mount a counterpoint to that.

I have got to be really clear here. I am not saying that I want to tolerate criminal activity of any kind, but that we have to recognize that crime, surveillance, and deviance – these things are incredibly complex facets of the world and cannot be solved by the introduction of a new lens or some other new technology. Those technologies carry with them very real and very long ramifications. We need to be extra careful before instituting something like that.

CI: As you say, the discussion gets reduced, in a simplistic way, to a question of whether we want to catch criminals or not. Certainly if there was an armed robbery or a murder that took place in downtown Toronto, and there happened to be one of those video cameras on the corner that helped the police in their investigation and led to the capture of the criminal, we would all be quite content with that. At the same time, there are political and even psychological ramifications to having these cameras all over the place. What do you think having this surveillance system growing in our society excludes? What is possible in our society that having those cameras around excludes?

JF: I don’t know if I can answer what it excludes. I think that I can answer the question by phrasing it slightly differently. What I think it does is that it fundamentally changes our relationship with each other as people, and our relationship with the world. I think it makes us inherently suspicious of one another. I also think that it gives us a false sense – a very, very false sense – of safety and security, so that we defer responsibility to the camera. We may not help one another when we should, or look out for one another when we should.

CI: The possibility then exists that there is a distance being built between citizens, an unwillingness to help because we are reliant on surveillance systems, and that unwillingness may not have existed to the same extent before the introduction of these systems. Is that fair to say?

JF: I think so. I also think that we are developing a kind of fascination with this type of imagery to the extent that we like it. We like watching video and images of other people doing bad things to other people or to property. We like watching videos of people getting hurt. We like seeing videos or images of people committing crimes. Again, there is this kind of deferral or displacement where we are able to separate that from our own world. It’s as if it doesn’t happen in my world, but it’s happening in some imaginary other world out there – but not to us. There is a real lack of self-reflection going on where we are not willing to understand our own role in this.

CI: In the final chapter of the book you examine two contemporary identification programs in the United States: the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) and the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology Program (US-VISIT). You note that one important aspect of the NSEERS is that registration in that system was ‘selectively applied almost exclusively to Arab and Muslim men’. Throughout the book you note various initiatives, even going back to the origins of criminal anthropology and the notion of the ‘born criminal’ in the work of Cesare Lombroso, that seem to identify the criminal ‘type’ in a way that breaks down along racial lines. Have you found this to be fairly constant in the way that the body has been represented, watched, and classified over the years?

JF: I would say that it has been continuous, but the other thing that is important to note about it is that it changes. It is not as though it is the same body, but that it changes depending on the particular cultural formations of the time, and where and when. In the case of September 11th, we have, all of a sudden, a new formulation. Not totally new – it wasn’t as if it didn’t exist prior to September 11th, as the chapter notes, but that it gets fully enhanced. All of a sudden there is this new dangerous body, which is readily identifiable and visible. Basically it is anyone of Arab and Muslim origin. So while race has always been at the forefront of the criminological enterprise and in classifying criminals and categorizing criminals, it changes. Right now we are living in a moment in Canada and the U.S. where there is a particular formulation, a particular link, between crime and race that is being promulgated.

Date of Interview: 01/12/2010
Location: Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON
Link: www.wlu.ca/homepage.php?grp_id=286