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Policing 2007 1(1):46-56; doi:10.1093/police/pam001
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Copyright © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press.

The Engineering of Social Control: Policing and Technology

Gary T. Marx*

* Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, USA. E-mail: gmarx{at}mit.edu

Increased reliance on science and technology is central to contemporary developments in policing. The engineering of social control is not new. What is new is the scale, greater precision, continual invention and experimentation, and global connections. Technical means of social control saturate modern society, colonizing and documenting ever more areas of life. This article considers six ways of controlling the environment: target removal, target devaluation, target insulation, offender weakening or incapacitation, exclusion and offense/offender/target identification. Social and ethical implications involving goal conflicts, unintended consequences, displacement, neutralization, and escalation are considered.

This article draws from and builds upon Marx (1995; 2001). These and related articles are at garymarx.net. A slightly different version will appear in Byrne, J. (ed.). The New Technology of Crime, Law and Social Control, forthcoming.


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