“GOVERNMENTALITY AND THE PROBLEM OF CRIME: FOUCAULT, CRIMINOLOGY, SOCIOLOGY”

David Garland (1997)

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RATIONALITIES OF CRIME CONTROL

[…] It seems plausible to suggest that in recent decades the governance of crime has come to be problematized in new ways, partly in reaction to chronically high crime rates and the failure of criminal justice controls (Garland, 1996), and partly under the influence of broader shifts away from welfarist styles of government towards neo-liberal ones.

                It also seems plausible to argue that, in response to this emergent field of problems and political forces, a new rationality for the governance of crime is coming into existence, together with a new rationality for the governance of criminal justice.  Described in very broad terms, this is a governmental style that is organized around economic forms of reasoning, in contrast to the social and legal forms that have predominated for most of the 20th century.

                By an ‘economic’ rationality, I don’t mean simply that value-for-money considerations and fiscal restraint have nowadays become prominent and explicit aspects of crime control discourse and practice – though this is certainly a feature of the contemporary scene.  I mean to point to (i) the ‘increasing reliance upon an analytical language of risks and rewards, rationality, choice, probability, targeting, and the demand and supply of opportunities – a language that translates ‘economic’ forms of reasoning and calculation into the criminological field; (ii) the increasing importance of objectives such as compensation, cost-control, harm-reduction, economy, efficiency and effectiveness; and (iii) the increasing resort to technologies such as audit, fiscal control, market competition and devolved management to control penal decision-making.

                For example, the now recurring image of the ‘rational criminal’ and the concern to govern this figure by manipulating incentives and risks, replicates the standard thought-patterns and economic analysis.  So, too, does the image of the victim as a supplier of criminal opportunities, and the idealized figure of homo prudents (Adams, 1995; O’Malley, 1996) projected by crime prevention literature and insurance contracts.  These new ways of thinking strip away the sociological and psychological layers in which the 20th-century criminology had clothed its conception of the criminal offender, and try to rethink the dynamics of crime and punishment in pseudo-economic terms.

                This kind of thinking developed first in the private sector – in the practices of insurance companies, private security firms and commercial enterprises, concerned to reduce those costs of crime that fall on them.  Commercial and insurance-based thinking about crime control focuses upon reducing or displacing the costs of crime, upon prevention rather than punishment and upon minimizing risks rather than ensuring justice.  Commercially situated attempts to control ‘reactive risk’, ‘morale hazard’ and ‘risk compensation’ (see Adams, 1995; Heimer, 1985; Litton, 1990)  or weigh the costs of crime against the cost – to the enterprise – of its prevention or prosecution, led to the elaboration of this style of reasoning about crime and its control.  Only later, in the 1980s, did it begin to influence state agencies and practices, most of which are in the control of professional groups allied to social and legal ways of conceiving the problem of crime.

                This way of thinking also draws upon other sources.  One such source is the work of Gary Becker (1968) and other economic analysts of crime, whose ideas have recently been imported into the language of criminal policy (Cook, 1986; van Dijk, 1994).  Another is the cluster of criminological theories – rational choice theory, routine activity theory, and the various approaches that view crime as a matter of opportunity – which I have described elsewhere as ‘the new criminologies of everyday life’ (Garland, 1996).  In contrast to the older criminologies, which assumed that the individual offender could be differentiated and corrected, these theoretical frameworks view crime as a normal, mundane event, requiring no special disposition or abnormality on the part of the offender.  Crime is viewed as a routine phenomenon, as something that happens in the course of events, rather than a disruption of normality that has to be specially explained.  The everyday conduct of economic and social life supplies countless opportunities for illegitimate transactions.  Viewed en masse, criminal events are regular, predictable, systematic, in the way that road traffic accidents are.  It follows that action upon crime should cease to be primarily action upon deviant individuals and become instead action designed to govern social and economic routines.

                Since this emergence, these theories have received considerable critical scrutiny, usually from the point of view of rival criminological traditions whose proponents complain that the new theories fail to get to the root causes of crime, or else that they take too superficial a view of human nature and of criminal conduct.

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THE CRIMINOGENIC SITUATION

One of the effects of the new criminologies discussed above has been to bring into view – and therefore into existence for the purposes of knowledge and of government – and entity that one might call the criminogenic situation.  This constitutes a new site of intervention for governmental practices, a new practicable object, quite distinct from the individual delinquents and legal subjects that previously formed the targets for crime control.  Moreover, the criminogenic situation is like ‘the economy’ or ‘the population’ in being a domain with its own internal dynamics and processes.  It is populated by active human subjects whose interests and actions shape these processes, and it has functional ends of its own that are easily disturbed by heavy-handed regulation.

                Criminogenic situations are commonplace in modern society.  They take a variety and come in all shapes and sizes: unsupervised car-parks, town squares late at night, deserted neighbourhoods, poorly-lit streets, shopping malls, football games, bus stops, subway stations, etc.  Their status as more or less ‘criminogenic’ – as hot-spots of crime or low-rate, secure areas – are established by reference to local police statistics, victim surveys and crime pattern analysis.  Their fundamental dynamics can be represented by a few simple parameters - the presence of targets and criminally-inclined individuals, and the absence of effective guardians or situational controls – that emulate the commodity/buyer/price formulae of neo-classical economics.  A new body of research on ‘situational crime prevention’ – offering phenomenological descriptions of situations that ‘invite’ crime, ‘natural histories’ of criminal events and ‘environmental risk indexes’ that calculate vulnerability – has begun to develop a working knowledge of this variable entity.

                The ‘criminogenic situation’ poses difficulties for government because it generally has a commercial or social value of its own which sets limits upon crime control.  Precisely because crime occurs in the course of routine social and economical transactions, and crime-reducing intervention must seek to preserve ‘normal life’ and ‘business as usual’.  The characteristic modes of intervening involve the implantation of non-intrusive controls in the situation itself, or else attempts to modify the interests and the incentives of the actors involved (see Shearing and Stenning, 1985).  The situation can be ‘governed’, but it cannot be completely or coercively controlled.  Practices of situational governance must operate lightly and unobtrusively, working with and through the actors involved.  The aim is to align the actors’ objectives with those of the authorities; to make them active partners in the business of security and crime control.  In this way the situation is allowed to retain its ‘natural’ character, but is made more secure against the occurrence of criminal events.  The parallels with the problems of ‘securing’ economic processes through ‘liberal’ government suggest themselves forcefully.

                […] The attempt to govern criminogenic situations has led to a set of new objectives – the reduction of crime and the fear of crime, the promotion of a culture of security consciousness, the enhancement of public safety, etc. – which are seen to be best achieved by acting through (rather than acting upon) the actors involved.  This gives rise to a ‘responsibilization strategy’ whereby state authorities (typically the police or the Home Office) seek to enlist other agencies and individuals to form a chain of coordinated action that reaches into criminogenic situations, prompting crime-control conduct on the part of ‘responsibilized’ actors (see Garland, 1996).  Central to this strategy is the attempt to ensure that all the agencies and individuals who are in a position to contribute to these crime-reducing ends come to see it as being in their interests to do so.  ‘Government’ is thus extended and enhanced by the creation of ‘governors’ and ‘guardians’ in the space between the state and the offender.

                Whereas older strategies sought to govern crime directly, through the specialist apparatus of criminal justice, this new approach entails a more indirect form of government-at-a-distance, involving ‘inter-agency’ cooperation and the responsibilization of private individuals and organizations.  This practice of enlisting and enrolment, of seeking to build chains of action and to instill crime-conscious attitudes, gives rise, in turn, to the development of new forms of knowledge and expertise – about the problems of coordinated action, about the costs of crime and ways to reduce them, about technologies of situational prevention.  Complex assemblages (composed of specific combinations of agents, knowledges, techniques and practices) are thus pieced together in an attempt to translate the new rationalities and programmes into practical effects.  There has been a real spurt of inventiveness at the level of security technologies […] partly due to government interest in the project, and partly because of  the formulation of a market in security which speeds up the development and the (very unequal) distribution of such devices.

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM AS AN ENTITY TO BE GOVERNED

A striking feature of the present period is the degree to which official attention has become focused not just upon the government of crime, but also upon the problem of governing criminal justice.  Rises in the flow of cases through the criminal justice system, resulting in crowded court calendars and overcrowded prisons, prompted government concerns about new problems such as costs, efficiency and coordination in criminal justice.  This, in turn, led to the development of techniques for representing and controlling these problems.  Over time, there was a transformation in the way the ‘criminal justice’ was understood.  What was previously viewed as a loosely coupled series of independent agencies – police, prosecution, courts, prison, probation, each with its own objectives and working ideologies, each with its own sphere of autonomous action - came to be seen instead as a ‘system’.  This ‘system’ is an entity which can be known and governed.  It has become a practicable object of government, with the Home Office increasingly constituting itself as a centre of calculation and management, oriented to that governmental task.

                The system’s processes and internal dynamics have been theorized, using concepts and tools borrowed from ‘systems management’.  Models have been constructed to simulate the workings of the system.  Monitoring devices, auditing requirements and decision-making guidelines have been implanted at key points so that the flow of cases can be predicted and controlled from a central point in a way that was quite impossible before.  Similarly, the day-to-day practice of practitioners working in the various agencies has been standardized and subjected to greater managerial control by the use of ‘government-at-a-distance’ techniques (budgetary limits, national standards, ‘gatekeeping’ guidelines) by which the central authorities exert broad control over decision-making while still leaving a space for the exercise of localized judgement on the part of the individual professionals.

                As many commentators have pointed out – see Peters (1986), Heydebrand and Seron (1990), Tuck (1991), Feeley and Simon (1992), Walker (1993) – the rendering of criminal justice into a ‘system’ that can be known and centrally governed presupposes a new way of thinking about the processes involved.  The focus of attention is shifted from individuals to aggregates, from specific cases to population flows, and from individualized justice to the management of resources.  The discretionary powers or professionals are curtailed, and their jurisdictions are narrowed.  The system is rendered more homogenous, more knowable and more governable.  There is a centralization of powers and a shift from a patchwork of particular expertise to a more homogenized field of risk- and resource-management.  Precisely because of these curtailments and centralized controls, this development has provoked resistance from some of the professional groups involved.  The judiciary is especially forceful in its opposition to this attempt to ‘systematize’ and govern its conduct, and the need ‘to treat the merits of the individual case’ is used as a counter-claim by judges and social workers alike.

ACTIVE SUBJECTS

Crime control practices embody a conception of the subjects they seek to govern.  For most of the 20th century, the subjects of crime control have been the ‘individual delinquent’ and the ‘legal subject’.  The new economic rationality attempts to make up new kinds of individuals, or rather, to create and impart new forms of subjectivity, which individuals and organizations will adopt for themselves.

                One form of ‘subjectification’ is the responsibilized, security-conscious crime preventing subject – homo prudens – analyzed by O’Malley (1992) and Adams (1995).  A related, though opposed, figure is what has been called ‘situational man’ (see Clarke and Cornish, 1986).  Situational man is criminology’s version of the economic subject of interest.  He (or less often, she) is a moderately rational, self-interested individual, unfettered by any moral compass or super-ego controls; a consumer who is alert to criminal opportunities and responsive to situational inducements.

                The questions to be asked of subjects of this kind are not ‘how did their attitudes and personalities come to be abnormal?’ or ‘how can they be corrected?’ but rather ‘ how do such persons reason and act in criminogenic situations?’, ‘how do they choose?’ and ‘how can their actions be channeled away from crime by modifying situational controls?’

                Unlike the ‘crime-preventing subject’, situational man is not a preferred form of subjectivity that is promoted and projected by the authorities.  It is an assumption about the real subjectivity of already-formed individuals.  But in assuming the reality of situational man, the authorities begin to give substance to it, projecting it on to live men and women, and ‘making people up’ in this form.  Thus research is conducted into the reasoning processes of burglars or robbers, offenders are officially identified as career criminals, sentencers shape their sentences on the basis of these perceptions, and convicted offenders are treated as entrepreneurial actors rather than as subjects of need or candidates for rehabilitative treatment.

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