UK
Artificial Intelligence, Crime and Prisons: Mahmood Revisits the Panopticon
When does the rot start in a politician? For some, it commences the moment election to office is confirmed. Others need to become cabinet ministers before being wholly blighted. UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood may provide a classic case study. Given that security matters fall within her purview, it was probably too much to expect her to be enlightened on the issue of penology. As with previous occupants of the office, compassionate originality is not their strong suit. Preferred operating rationales are perceived toughness, punitive inclination and a closed mind.
Mahmood has, however, outdone her more recent contemporaries. She assumes that the British public, supposedly gorging itself on the populist starch of Nigel Farage from the UK Reform Party, wants more surveillance, more police, more monitoring. Talk about such matters must be tough, uncompromising, even cruel. Her well of inspiration is that much misunderstood genius of legal theory and philosophical provocation, Jeremy Bentham. Karl Marx thought that mighty figure of utilitarian thinking worthy of derision, calling him “that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth century.”
In an interview with former British Prime Minister and overpaid consultancy glutton Sir Tony Blair, the Home Secretary spoke of “my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times”. She thought that there was “a big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.”
The more generously minded might give Mahmood the benefit of the doubt were she using Bentham as a reformer who was, in his own manner and time, a sublime if flawed thinker who genuinely sought changes to Britain’s savage penal system. Reforming the prison population would entail the use of a panopticon design, an all-seeing architecture where guards could witness the activity of all prisoners through the day or night without them necessarily knowing when they were being watched. The aim of this creepy intrusiveness, as he outlined, was ameliorative and rehabilitative: “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instruction diffused – public burdens lightened – Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock – the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied – all by a simple idea in Architecture!”
It is unclear whether the Home Secretary’s use of Bentham was casually pop and pulp or serious substance and grit. The adding of AI to the mix, and its application to the population as a whole, suggested that Bentham was probably merely a useful footstool for arguments about a broader surveillance state that lazy cabinet ministers find utterly enchanting. Even before her interview with Blair, Mahmood was already reflecting the views of a government most keen on massive surveillance in the name of security.
In 2025, Keir Starmer’s government commenced a pilot program with the intention of applying it across the entire criminal justice system to monitor offenders, calibrate risk and apparently pre-empt the commission of crime under the AI Action Plan. According to reporting by the Law Gazette last September, “offenders on license will have to answer to remote check-in surveillance on their mobile devices. Offenders will be required to record short videos of themselves, AI will then be used to confirm their identity.”
The Minister for prisons, Lord James Timpson, showed a child-like delight for the venture. “This new pilot,” he swooned, “keeps the watchful eye of our probation officers on these offenders wherever they are, helping to catapult our analogue justice system into a new digital age. It’s bold ideas like this that are helping us tackle the challenges we face.”
In August 2025, the Starmer government floated plans for using AI to, as a press release from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology stated, “detect, track and predict where devastating knife crime is likely to occur or spot early warning signs of anti-social behaviour before it spirals out of control – giving police the intel they need to step in and keep the public safe.” This was pre-crime methodology at its worst (there is no best), subpar criminology and algorithms.
When the matter of panopticon surveillance came up for discussion in the House of Lords, the Labour Peer, Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, admitted her worry about the “idea that we should all aspire to total surveillance and living in a panopticon”, assuming that the remarks by Mahmood had been “fake news”. “I cannot believe that from a Labour Cabinet Minister, even from a Home Secretary – we know funny things happen to people when they go into the Home Office; I was there myself for a bit.”
Defenders of the Home Secretary, with her adventurously silly and dangerous suggestion, were quickly enlisted. Lord Mike Katz, for one, made it clear that the government had no intentions of introducing “mass surveillance of the population”, making Mahmood either an inspired fool incautious in speech, or a vulgar sneak. Part 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018 was cited as a potential impediment to such grand plans, in so far it “places a range of obligations on law enforcement, including requirements that law enforcement processing of data must be necessary and proportionate, for a specific purpose and not excessive”. Once those darlings in the justice system get going with AI, these injunctions will become the stuff of text rather than reality.
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