Katja Franko Aas

‘Crimmigrant’ bodies and bona fide travelers: Surveillance, citizenship and global governance

The article explores the nature of surveillance and crime control as they enter the sphere of global governance. Taking the European Union (EU) as a point of departure, it examines the relationship between surveillance and sovereignty, and looks more broadly at the role that transnational surveillance and crime control play in constructing a particular type of globally divided polity. Transnational surveillance practices are increasingly addressing a public which is no longer defined exclusively as the citizenry of the nation state, nor are all European citizens entitled to the privileges of such citizenship. Through the notions of bona fide global citizens and ‘crimmigrant’ others the article details how the seeming universality of citizenship is punctuated by novel categories of globally included and excluded populations, thus revealing the inadequacy of the traditional liberal language of citizenship as the springboard for articulating a critical discourse of rights.

The borders of punishment : migration, citizenship, and social exclusion

The Criminology of Mobility Introduction. Humanizing Migration Control and Detention PART I: CRIMINALIZATION The Ordered and the Bordered Society: Migration Control, Citizenship, and the Northern Penal State Is the Criminal Law only for Citizens? A Problem at the Borders of Punishment The Process is the Punishment in Crimmigration Law The Troublesome Intersections of Refugee Law and Criminal Law PART II: POLICING Policing Transversal Borders The Criminalization of Human Mobility: A Case Study of Law Enforcement in South Africa Human Trafficking and Border Control in the Global South PART III: IMPRISONMENT Can Immigration Detention Centres be Legitimate? Understanding Confinement in a Global World Hubs and Spokes: The Transformation of the British Prison Seeing like a Welfare State: Immigration Control, Statecraft, and a Prison with Double Vision PART IV: DEPORTATION The Social Bulimia of Forced Repatriation: A Case Study of Dominican Deportees Deportation, Crime, and the Changing Character of Membership in the United Kingdom Democracy & Deportation: Why Membership Matters Most PART V: SOCIAL EXCLUSION Governing the Funnel of Expulsion: Agamben, the Dynamics of Force, and Minimalist Biopolitics People on the Move: From the Countryside to the Factory / Prison Epilogue. The Borders of Punishment: Towards a Criminology of Mobility

‘The body does not lie’: Identity, risk and trust in technoculture

The article suggests that surveillance of the body is gradually becoming a major source of identification, as well as a vital element of late-modern mechanisms of social exclusion. The increasing demand for technological verification of identity is a result of intricate connections between our notions of the self, order, efficiency and security. Behind the growing acceptance of these new technologies, such as biometric passports, biometric ID cards, drug testing, and DNA databases, are fears connected to those who may have a ‘stolen identity’, are unidentified, or ‘identity-less’, such as potentially fraudulent welfare recipients, ‘identity thieves’, terrorists, immigrants and asylum seekers. However, unlike Foucaults disciplinary power, the latest technologies no longer see the body as something that needs to be trained and disciplined, but rather as a source of unprecedented accuracy and precision. Bodies become ‘coded’ and function as ‘passwords’. This form of identification is particularly relevant since its mode of operation enables identification and denial of access at-a-distance, thus fitting perfectly into the contemporary modes of disembedded global governance.

From narrative to database Technological change and penal culture

Information technology is a cultural environment that requires its users to communicate within certain parameters. This article explores how contemporary penal knowledge has changed in order to be accepted as knowledge in the information society. Computers enable penal governance that is based on formatted communication, and relies on databases rather than on the expertise of individual decision-makers. The rules governing the database thus become central for the nature of knowledge and identity constitution. The database, as a cultural form, differs from the narrative. It is a collection of items without an internal development. The database classifies its objects and in the process gives them additional social identities. The vertical and horizontal fields that constitute the database tend to construct individual identities in highly caricatured yet immediately available form (Poster, 1990). The database identity is dispersed, highly abstract and de-contextualized. As such it is opposed to narrative identity as well as Foucault’s ‘descending individualization’. It will be suggested that the database can be seen as an example of power without narrative (Simon, 1995) and government-at-a-distance.

‘The Earth is one but the world is not’: Criminological theory and its geopolitical divisions

The article addresses the prevailing assumptions about geo-political context in criminological theory. It draws on a well-developed and prolonged critique within sociology, gender and postcolonial studies, of the seemingly context-free nature of western social theory and its assumptions about the universality of its knowledge production. The article’s particular concern is criminology’s engagement with the global. By examining the ‘situated identity’ of criminological theory, and its claims to universality, the article raises questions about who produces theory, who has access to the universal, and what are the potential consequences for our understanding of the global.

Bordered penality: Precarious membership and abnormal justice

The article brings to attention, and explores, the transformations of criminal justice related to the control of unwanted mobility, looking in particular at recent Norwegian developments. It maps a gradual emergence of a differentiated, two-tier approach to criminal justice and a more exclusionary penal culture directed at non-citizens. The article suggests that the absence of formal membership is the essential factor contributing towards shifting the nature of penal intervention from reintegration into the society towards deportation and territorial exclusion, and towards the development of a particular form of penality, termed hereby bordered penality. The lack of formal citizenship status also crucially affects the procedural and substantive standards of justice afforded to non-members. While these developments are not confined to Norway alone, they cast doubt on the non-punitive image that is widely attributed to Scandinavian countries, and present a set of conceptual, epistemological and normative challenges for criminal justice in a rapidly globalizing world.

(In)security-at-a-distance: rescaling justice, risk and warfare in a transnational age

The article examines the progressive de-bounding of social risks and the blurring boundaries between internal and external notions of security. Contemporary forms of cross-border connectivity bring to our attention the renewed importance of analysing distance (physical, social and other) in criminology. Globalising processes significantly expand the scale and scope of social interaction, including violent conflict and crime control and security strategies, by offering social agents a possibility of acting from the point of ‘strategic globality’. The article outlines an emerging landscape of ‘security at a distance’, where previously local and national phenomena are transformed by new forms of transnational connectivity, risk and movement. It suggests that, through the emerging forms of globalism, criminal justice is plugging into trans-border circuits of circulation of people, forms of knowledge and social and political action, where, ultimately, crime control can become an export and war can be, metaphorically, seen as an import.

Sentencing Transparency in the Information Age

How unrestricted or restricted should judges be when deciding a sentence? To what extent should sentences be predetermined, or to what extent should judges be left with the right to decide a sentence in each individual case? Some legal systems, most notably in the United States, have chosen sentencing guidelines to control judicial discretion. However, another approach has been to use computer technology in the form of so‐called sentencing information systems (SIS). This article examines these developments and what possible influence they have had and could have in the Scandinavian, particularly in the Norwegian, context. Penal institutions today are adjusting to the demands of the information society. Does and could the fact that we are living in an increasingly technologically mediated world influence judicial decision‐making? The article argues that the use of technology is not simply a question of technological change, but is first and foremost a social and political phenomenon, related to the relatio...How unrestricted or restricted should judges be when deciding a sentence? To what extent should sentences be predetermined, or to what extent should judges be left with the right to decide a sentence in each individual case? Some legal systems, most notably in the United States, have chosen sentencing guidelines to control judicial discretion. However, another approach has been to use computer technology in the form of so‐called sentencing information systems (SIS). This article examines these developments and what possible influence they have had and could have in the Scandinavian, particularly in the Norwegian, context. Penal institutions today are adjusting to the demands of the information society. Does and could the fact that we are living in an increasingly technologically mediated world influence judicial decision‐making? The article argues that the use of technology is not simply a question of technological change, but is first and foremost a social and political phenomenon, related to the relations of trust in a society.