Students should complain that installing CCTV in their schools makes them feel like they're in jail
Aggrieved students who complain that school feels like a prison are spot on. A secondary school in Surrey is planning to install CCTV in the common areas of its toilets, to monitor bullying. If they'd done that at my school, they would only have found some stray bulimics and the odd lacrosse stick.
It's strange how this incarceration mentality has infiltrated daily life, for all our protestations. Standing on my local tube platform I counted 12 cameras within my sight. As a lifelong science-fiction fan I'd thought that living in this realm of screens and electricity, would be darkly exciting, a cyberpunk melding of woman and machine. Instead, it infuses you with a paranoia of the seediest kind. You think something bad is about to happen and that neither you nor your fellow citizens are trustworthy.
This penetration of prison culture into daily life and particularly into schools has been brilliantly traced by US writer Annette Fuentes in Lockdown High, out this week. It reports on an electrified present dystopia; an isolating system of metal detectors, surveillance and petty rules. It shows that these measures neither deter the bad nor reassure the good. Instead, they breed mutual mistrust between students and authority. As one educator says: "School used to be a refuge. Now it's a lockdown environment. We are bringing the practices of criminal justice into the schools."
This change was pushed by a strong commercial defence and surveillance lobby group looking to exploit new markets after the Columbine shootings. It's strange to think about the Cannes festival jurors, sitting in plush screening rooms, enthralled by Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin. Meanwhile, in middle America, a majority of innocent teens are being watched by a thousand robot eyes.