Kevin Stenson

Sovereignty, biopolitics and the local government of crime in Britain

Fears about macro-level crime join those about local volume crime, inter-communal conflicts and governance emerging to manage them, presenting challenges for analysing commonalities and differences at various spatial levels. Governance theories crystallize in debates about security. Realist governmentality theory transcends discourse analysis of mentalities of government, and a focus on security, arguing that security practices manifest the struggle by local state institutions for sovereign control over populations and territories (biopolitics). Illustrated by rural and urban examples of biopolitical struggles, this highlights interaction between official and informal biopolitics, the latter involving communal groups attempting to govern from below. This creates tensions between universalistic/liberal, and particularistic, nationalist agendas, and also the recognition of multi-cultural, communal identities and interests.

Community policing as a governmental technology

Community policing and practices are rooted in British policing traditions and must be understood as attempts to deal with the internally generated dilemmas of liberal mentalities.By contrast with pre-liberal dystopian images of the totally policed society, Peels new police signified as a historical settlement between the governmental concerns with sovereignty, disciplinary control and the knowledge and regulation of populations. This created enduring but misleading public representations of policing as law enforcement and crime control, removed from the political sphere.Although, as elsewhere, public policing agencies were involved in the whole range of governmental tasks.The politicized rhetorics of community policing signal a rejection of narrow, reactive law enforcement and depoliticized images of policing.In turn these signal a restructing of the linkages between governing agencies in both ‘public’ and ‘community’ spheres, during a period of neo-liberal reform.The elements of community policing are ...

Security, Sovereignty, and Non-State Governance "From Below"

Governmentality scholars document the new, pluralistic, post-Keynesian modes of public governance linking State and non State agencies. This emphasis on “governance from above” needs to be complemented by a focus on “governance from below” by non State actors, especially in urban areas. “Governance from below” may involve actors ranging from commercial organisations and citizens’ initiatives, to organised crime and paramilitary networks operating as sites beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign law and public authorities within and between countries. In both rich and poor countries these may be antagonistic to but may also become enrolled in forms of public governance. This paper challenges the view that governance from below fills the vacuum left by the retreat of the central nation State. Rather, these developments signify complex forms of re-articulation of relations of governance from above and below, which may at times strengthen the legal authority of the central State.

Advancing governmentality studies Lessons from social constructionism

Criminology has been significantly influenced by governmentality studies and the social constructionist perspective on social problems. Despite emerging in distinctive academic networks, this article elaborates how both programmes similarly focus on the simultaneous governance and constitution of problematized—often moralized or criminalized—conduct; imagine plurality, temporality and continuous failure of their subject matters; and presume language is constitutive. These similarities are discussed in order to show how the governmentality project in relation to criminology can learn from the social constructionist perspective on social problems. Using empirical illustrations, it is shown how governmentality studies can benefit from adopting constructionism’s concept of claims-making activities; attention to context; and earlier acceptance of the futility of cutting the cord with ‘the real’.

Social work discourses and the social work interview

This paper argues that we should beyond views of social work which highlight its role as either the provider of benevolent, professional care, or as the medium for the operation of negative, repressive forms of social control. Rather, it is best viewed as an element of productive governmental practices which create and operate within regimes of truth. These regimes identify and limit the objects, concerns and subject positions of key participants within practice. At root, social work mediates between the mass of established citizens and the excluded stigmatized minorities, both monitoring and judging the lives of clients and attempting to equip clients with the knowledge and skills for a self-regulating citizenship. Through an analysis of interview transcripts, the paper identifies the complex, indirect techniques involved in interview practice and some of the barriers to social work aims in the exchanges between textually based, professional discourses and residually oral based client discourses.

Crime control and local governance: The struggle for sovereignty in advanced liberal polities

The institutions and practices of pluralistically managed, local crime control or community safety were a product of the period of modernization of public service provision in the UK in the eighties and nineties. They were assembled using a hybrid mix of governmental technologies ranging from attempts to impose sovereign domination over the recalcitrant, to situational measures to harden targets, to social crime prevention, or community security measures to regenerate areas representing high risk. Some of the key advances were made in the margins by local authorities under Conservative governments. Ironically, under New Labour, the drive for centralized control via the performance culture of audit and target setting has reduced the discretionary scope at local level and heightened the emphasis on achieving targets of crime reduction and the restoration of sovereign control, perhaps at the expense of more holistic conceptions of community safety, and also generating a series of other local tensions in managing the contradictions of sovereign government by administrations of the centre-left.

Surveillance and sovereignty

An industry of description and interpretation has developed around the growth of surveillance, accelerated by: the development of the internet; volatile international relations since the collapse of communism; demographic mobility, segregation by class and ethnicity in the rich and poor worlds, sharpening inequalities, and post 9/11 fears of terrorism. Influential narratives have emphasised the diminishing power of sovereign nation-states in a marketised and globalised world. This chapter challenges the notion that coercive, sovereign modes of rule are a monarchical survival in decline. Rather, sovereign technologies of rule, in which surveillance is central involves strategies of governance from below as well as from above. They combine coercive with rhetorical, metaphorical communication and other ‘soft’ modes of rule. These make thinkable the nation-state as a discrete, defensible entity. Political communication translates between the complex technical expertise of evolving surveillance and security technologies and language intelligible to the public. Though surveillance technologies and information can be produced by commercial and other non-state sites of governance, metaphorically, much surveillance can be viewed as the extension of the eye of the sovereign. Although we are all targets of surveillance, those seen as threatening to the majority help to constitute and reproduce the social collectivity.

Race, crime and criminal justice: international perspectives, edited by Anita Kalunta-Crumpton

This book should be included on every reading list for the topic and Kalunta-Crumpton is to be congratulated for putting together this collection of short, readable chapters examining the links between race, ethnicity, crime, victimisation and criminal justice in 13 countries. The countries range from South Africa and Brazil to the United Kingdom, the United States, Portugal, Australia and New Zealand, and dealing adequately with the wealth of topics raised would require an essay rather than a review. The contributions are inevitably uneven, not so much because of the limitations of contributors as because of the awesome complexity and variety of the issues involved, and the patchy and variable quality of police and criminal justice data available to the analysts. Ruggiero, for example, confronted by limited statistical data for Italy makes creative use of theory rooted in USand UK-based research. One of the virtues of a number of the contributions, notably of Georges–Abeyie’s chapter examining the United States, is that they critique and try to go beyond the official crude reliance on race categories, denoting visible physical differences, to recognise the importance of the more subtle culturally defined aspects of ethnic identities and categories in all the major racial categories – and often buried within aggregated racially based statistics on crime and victimisation. This overemphasis on racial categories, uncontrolled for other key variables (especially social class, age, gender, populations at risk and neighbourhood factors), remains a particular weakness of the annually aggregated, statistics on race, crime and justice in the United Kingdom. Simple, misleading race (mainly white, black and Asian) comparisons are made in relation to police stops, arrests, sentencing and so on that do not compare like with like. The most appropriate comparisons are between culturally distinct groups who are matched for these key variables; these data are difficult to tease out and academic research that does this is rare. As Colin Webster has argued elsewhere, a politically dangerous consequence is that our knowledge of and policy responses to crime, justice and victimisation patterns within white ethnicities are very limited. This refers especially to marginalised and socially or geographically segregated, less-educated white young men (from lower class English, to Irish, to Poles and Albanians). However, gaining access to differentiated data that would facilitate – especially internationally comparative – analysis is extremely difficult. Categories and data are constructed, collated and analysed by state personnel usually in line with national, political, not academic, agendas. Therefore, for example, Canada, Portugal, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Germany do not routinely collect ethnicor race-based crime and criminal justice statistics because this is seen as undermining key constitutional and other principles of nationhood. Therefore, to explore these issues, analysts have to artfully decode existing statistics that, for example, code offenders under national categories and they also have to rely on particular research data (inevitably partial and limited) generated for the purpose.

Review Symposium: Richard V. Ericson Crime in an Insecure World Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. viii + 256 pp. £14.99/

Richard Ericson’s tragic recent death robbed not just Canadian but global criminology of one its most creative scholars. Like Rose, Valverde, Garland, Shearing, O’Malley, Simon and others, he was inspired by Foucault’s later work on Governmentality: the changing modes of reflecting on and rationalizing what it is to govern people and things in liberal social orders. In our field this includes the increasing centrality of governing through an emphasis on crime and insecurity. The leading scholars who have defined Governmentality for criminology and other disciplines have tended to be theorists and historians of ideas whose site of research is the library and whose data mainly consist of discourses of governing, manifest in policy and other texts. As I have argued, they operate at a remove from researchers engaging with human subjects, collecting and analysing contemporary data. They tend, therefore, to underestimate the important distinction and interplay between oral and textual forms of discourse and action and the contexts that produce them. Ericson was rare in this field, combining high levels of scholarship with empirical research and thereby developing a grounded form of theorizing. His studies of insurance practice and (with Kevin Haggerty) policing in the risk society are already modern classics, mainstays of degree programmes globally. The passion and originality of this book and its beautifully clear guidance to the complex debates about crime, law, risk and uncertainty warrant a similar inclusion to the pantheon. Grounded theorizing and data analyses, with all the cautious caveats they entail, can be at odds with the pressure on intellectuals to assume the modernized mantle of griot, shaman, biblical prophet or seer. To earn our keep we are expected to identify the allegedly deeper logic and tendencies in governing practices in an interdependent, shrinking world, and hence provide master narratives, digestible storylines for governors and the populace, to make sense of scary realities. Here Ericson cuts loose and joins Garland and others in providing such a narrative. In doing so, he provides the familiar caveats that his story glosses over differences between jurisdictions and local contexts and hopes that others will be moved to modify his analysis with comparative research (p. 208). Theoretical Criminology

19.95 (pbk). ISBN 0—7456—3829—5:

The recasting of the knowledge base of social democracy has involved the use of the term ‘realism’ in a number of policy areas. In criminology, a social democratic, or ‘left’ realism has been developed by a group of intellectuals, in sympathy with the parties of the social democratic left, who seek to challenge the hegemony in left discourses of Marxist and neo-Marxist analyses of crime and the justice system. In their view, the left’s misuse of notions of moral panic (Hall et al., 1978), suggesting that the police, courts and mass media have exaggerated the incidence of crimes like mugging, has led to a serious underestimation of the scale of the problem of intra-class street crime for working-class people and the non-working poor. Street assaults and robberies, burglaries, sexual attacks and so on, in decayed inner-city neighbourhoods and poor housing estates are demoralising and are a key element in the social disorganisation of working-class ‘communities’, already suffering from a multiplicity of economic and social deprivations, including a marked vulnerability to the effects of white-collar crime (Lea and Young, 1984).