Lucia Zedner

Pre-crime and post-criminology?

Conventionally, crime is regarded principally as harm or wrong and the dominant ordering practices arise post hoc. In the emerging pre-crime society, crime is conceived essentially as risk or potential loss, ordering practices are pre-emptive and security is a commodity sold for profit. Though this dichotomy oversimplifies a more complex set of changes, it captures an important temporal shift. As the intellectual offspring of the post-crime society, criminology must adapt to meet the challenges of pre-crime and security. This article examines the key features a theory of security needs to encompass. It explores the immanent capacities of criminology for change and suggests exterior intellectual resources upon which it might draw. It concludes that the pre-crime society need not be a post-criminological one.

Liquid security Managing the market for crime control

Liquid security captures the shift from the solid-state technology of the criminal justice state to the more fluid, transient and dispersed operations of the private security industry. Despite its promise to sell security, the industry is often better known for the dangers it poses to the safety of people and property. Marked by high levels of corruption, violence, rapid staff turnover and high customer churn the private security industry cannot maintain consumer confidence or public respect. This article examines various attempts to manage the market for crime control and seeks to disclose their underlying rationale. Attempts to govern through industry self-regulation, market competition and the design and architecture of provision have failed to secure standards. Yet formal state regulation appears directed less at compliance with articulated ethical standards, a clear conception of what security is for and whom it should serve, than ensuring the health of the market. The state presents itself as facilitator, but appears as pimp, to the security industry. Regulation is sold as a ‘business opportunity’ and compliance as the means to ensuring profitability. In the telling words of the Security Industry Authority, ‘Good security is good for the whole business environment’.

Prevention and the Limits of the Criminal Law

Introduction 1. The Ubiquity of Prevention 2. Preventionism and Criminalization of Nonconsummate Offences 3. Preventive Justice: The Quest for Principle 4. Responsibility to Protect and Preventive Justice 5. Preventive Justice and the Rule-of-Law Project 6. Pre-Trial Detention and the Presumption of Innocence 7. Controlling Risk 8. Restraining Orders, Liberty, and Due Process 9. Preventive Detention as Punishment? Some Possible Obstacles 10. Proportionality as a Limit on Preventive Justice: Promises and Pitfalls 13. Democratic Limits to Preventive Criminal Law 14. On Preventive Justice 15. Punitive Preventive Justice: A Critique 16. The Politics of Mass Preventive Justice

In Pursuit of the Vernacular: Comparing Law and Order Discourse in Britain and Germany:

RIME HAS BEEN increasingly politicized in Britain, held up as a ~ metaphor for social disorder and a manifestation of political rupture.’ Law and order has become the currency of heated cross-party debate and, since 1979, a staple of general election manifestos. As a corollary, social problems (from education and employment to housing and the environment) are increasingly described in terms of crime. Recast as truancy, unemployment, homelessness and urban degeneration, these wider social issues attract attention only insofar as they are deemed to threaten social order. As crime figures supplant unemployment statistics or mortality rates as indicators of the health of the nation, the question arises whether debates about growing inner-city violence or spiralling prison populations are really just about crime or rather express some deeper unease. The anxieties articulated by discourses of law and order extend beyond experiences of victimization or the rational anticipation of harm. This lack of fit between the ’realities’ of the crime problem and the space it occupies in the national psyche is not readily explained (Muller-Dietz, 1993: 57-9). In seeking to ’

Penal subversions: When is a punishment not punishment, who decides and on what grounds?

Current criminological interest in the boundaries of penality has done much to shed light on the definition and meaning of punishment. Even the central case of punishment, its aims and purposes are contested, so it should not surprise that the boundaries are also disputed. As states seek to evade the criminal process and its protections by resort to civil and administrative measures, the line between formal and informal criminal penalties blurs. In Europe, the courts have sought to reassert the protections of the criminal process by looking behind the labels to insist on substance over form in deciding what is a punishment. In so doing, they have re-affirmed the boundaries of penality as a vital means of providing protection against arbitrary government. Examining these turf wars reveals a constitutional struggle over the very authority of the state to punish.

Researching child victims -- some methodological difficulties

Research into child victims has been overshadowed by concern about the physical and sexual abuse of children. Children who are victims of other crimes have difficulty in attaining ‘victim status’ and have been overlooked by academics and policy makers. ‘Indirect child victims’, affected by witnessing or living with the impact of crimes against others, are more hidden still even though their experience may be no less serious. This article addresses conceptual, ethical, and methodological difficulties encountered in identifying child victims for the purposes of research in carrying out interviews with children and their families and, finally, in assessing the impact of crime upon them.

Citizenship Deprivation, Security and Human Rights.

In response to the rise of IS and the growing problem of foreign fighters, deprivation of citizenship of persons deemed to threaten the interests of the state has been revived as a key tool for security and counterterrorism. Yet, citizenship deprivation raises profound issues for human rights. In the UK, the Immigration Act 2014 includes a power to deprive naturalized British citizens of their citizenship on security grounds, even if doing so would render individuals stateless. The UK government has argued that deprivation would satisfy the requirements of necessity and proportionality under Article 8(2) ECHR, provided it could be shown to be necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the UK. Yet the risks are not only to private and family life. Citizenship deprivation may also involve other rights (not least Articles 2 and 3) where the consequence of deprivation is that individuals suffer loss of life, torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. This article explores the genesis of citizenship deprivation resulting in statelessness and offers a strong critique on grounds of legality and rights. It also raises serious questions about its efficacy as a security strategy.