NCJ Number
183286
Journal
British Journal of Criminology Volume: 40 Issue: 2 Dated: Spring 2000 Pages: 321-339
Date Published
2000
Length
19 pages
Annotation
Advanced liberal democracies are currently witnessing a bewildering variety of developments in regimes of control.
Abstract
These range from demands for execution or preventive detention of implacably dangerous or risky individuals to the development of dispersed, designed in-control regimes for the continual, silent, and largely invisible work of the assessment, management, communication, and control of risk. Concerns about illegality and crime have been articulated as much, if not more, by institutions and practices that are not part of the criminal justice system than by those that are conventionally considered to be part of such a "system." Despite claims that we live in a post-disciplinary society (Simon); that dangerousness has given way to risk (Castel); that control is now continuous, immanent, and cybernetic rather than discontinuous, localized and individualizing (Deleuze), there appears to be little strategic coherence about these developments at the level of their rationalities and much diversity and contingency at the level of their technologies. The pervasive image of the perpetrator of crime is of the individual who has failed to accept his/her responsibility as a subject of moral community. Under such a perspective, governmental practices of behavioral control are constructed, not in the name of universal principles of justice and the rule of law, but in the name of the capacities and obligations of citizens who are expected to act ethically in a free society. 59 references