“Secrets of the Self: Punishment and the Right to Privacy.”

Source: (2006) .” In, Erik Claes, Antony Duff, and Serge Gutwirth. , eds., Privacy and the Criminal Law. Antwerpen-Oxford: Intersentia. PP. 137-161.

“There are many questions that could — and certainly should — be raised in a discussion of punishment and a right to privacy, in relation to both imprisonment and to community punishment. Following on from my acceptance at the start of this paper of punishment as necessarily being a suspension of rights rather than an assault on bodily integrity (with the corollary that any rights suspension should be conscious and rule-governed), the paper is concerned with one particular form of rights-curtailment, a form that, in my view at least, seems to be unconscious, unexamined, and receiving far too little attention from penal professionals. I want to reflect on the upsurge of consequentialist, future-oriented, community-focused penal modes in relation to a culture of rights. While many of the new penal practices impinge on family relationships, privacy of correspondence etc., and these are of course important issues, here I want to concentrate in particular on privacy in the sense of being able to keep one’s beliefs, attitudes and motivations to oneself. I think that this kind of privacy is very much undermined by some of the latest penal trends and innovations, which require offenders to reveal secrets of the self.” (excerpt)