Pre-crime and post-criminology?
LUCIA ZEDNER
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
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 postcriminological
one.
Key Words
crime prevention • criminal justice • criminology • fortress
continents • risk • security
Though criminology constitutes itself with increasing confidence as a discipline,
it is far from clear that it is yet an independent or settled disciplinary
state (Abbott, 2000: 139–44). Though criminology journals, monograph
series, departments and degree programmes proliferate, their practitioners
share little more than a common substantive interest in the subject of crime
and its control. It follows that significant change in the topography of crime
control has profound implications for the discipline. If, as it will be argued,
the very subject matter of criminological attention is changing beyond recognition,
either criminology must also change or risk irrelevance.
Theoretical Criminology
© 2007 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore
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Vol. 11(2): 261–281; 1362–4806
DOI: 10.1177/1362480607075851
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In important respects we are on the cusp of a shift from a post- to a precrime
society,1
a society in which the possibility of forestalling risks
competes with and even takes precedence over responding to wrongs done.
In consequence, the post-crime orientation of criminal justice is increasingly
overshadowed by the pre-crime logic of security. This shift poses important
questions about the role of criminology and its future. If a pre-crime society
is not to be a post-criminological one, the first task is to map the coordinates
of this shifting terrain and to identify the core concepts and
characteristics that a general theory of security would need to elucidate. A
second is to establish the adaptive potential of criminology both in respect
of its immanent capacity for change and the exterior disciplinary resources
upon which it might draw in securing its future. This article explores the
substantive shifts and intellectual challenges posed by pre-crime and the
pursuit of security. It goes on to ask if a pre-crime society need necessarily
be a post-criminological one or whether criminology can transform itself to
meet the challenges it now faces.
Pre-crime and the security society
Criminology is the intellectual offspring of a post-crime society in which crime
is conceived principally as harm or wrongdoing and the dominant ordering
practices arise post hoc. In a post-crime society there are crimes, offenders and
victims, crime control, policing, investigation, trial and punishment, all of
which are staples of present criminological enquiry. Pre-crime, by contrast,
shifts the temporal perspective to anticipate and forestall that which has not yet
occurred and may never do so. In a pre-crime society, there is calculation, risk
and uncertainty, surveillance, precaution, prudentialism, moral hazard, prevention
and, arching over all these, there is the pursuit of security (Ericson and
Haggerty, 1997; Loader and Sparks, 2002; Johnston and Shearing, 2003;
O’Malley, 2004). Already the criminological lexicon has expanded: though
they were scarcely in use just two decades ago, these terms are now commonplace
in criminological enquiry.2
A coincidental facet of the temporal shift to
pre-crime is that responsibility for security against risk falls not only to the State
but extends to a larger panoply of individual, communal and private agents.
The shift is therefore not only temporal but also sectoral; spreading out from
the State to embrace pre-emptive endeavours only remotely related to crime.
Private security is a burgeoning industry, community safety, and personal
crime prevention are major platforms of public policy, and the technological
paraphernalia of security scatter the social world (Crawford, 1998; Jones and
Newburn, 1998; Lyon, 2001). According to the British Security Industry
Association (BSIA) there are now over 600,000 people working in the UK private
security industry; over 4.25 million CCTV cameras in operation; and the
estimated turnover of the UK security industry in 2004 was over £5 billion.
Private security industry turnover in respect of CCTV has risen from £84 million
in 1993 to £509 million in 2005, while turnover in respect of manned
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security guarding has risen from £530 to £1575 million over the same period
(http://www.bsia.co.uk/). Figures for North America are even more striking.
These developments have sparked a lively debate. Where some see total rupture,
others observe more continuity with the past, less radical or more contradictory
patterns of change (Bayley and Shearing, 1996; Jones and Newburn,
2002). But no one is any longer pretending that criminology can remain complacent
if it is to meet the challenge of these new social ordering practices
(Braithwaite, 2000a; Shearing, 2001; Reiner, 2006).
The growth of non-state actors in the production of security is such that
(if it ever could) it no longer makes sense to focus on the workings of the
criminal justice state to the exclusion of private, commercial, communal,
voluntary and individual actors. Even within the public sector profiling,
offender registers, surveillance, CCTV, situational crime prevention and
community safety initiatives all signal a shift in temporal perspective.
Equally important is the changing relationship between the public and private
spheres (Shapland and van Outrive, 1999). Mechanisms of delegation,
of contract (Crawford, 2003) and strategies of responsibilization (Garland,
2001: 124–7) invite enquiry into the new means by which states govern at
a distance. Relations between different ventures in security are so complex
that the very distinction between public and private is increasingly blurred
(Jones and Newburn, 1998: ch. 8; Marx, 2001). Mapping these relations
exposes deep ligatures between public and private. The demarcation is
transgressed by the contracting out of public services to private providers;
by state regulation via the licensing, inspection and auditing of the private
security industry (Zedner, 2006c); and also by private sponsorship of state
policing, for example through the provision of hardware or even vehicles.
In some US states the police are, quite literally, ‘brought to you by Toyota’.
Concern with the antagonistic, competitive or simply antithetical aspects of
the public/private relationship has tended to obscure the degree to which
professional interaction, reciprocity, even mutual dependency now characterize
working relations between the two (Feeley, 2002; Vindevogel, 2005).
The tendency to see private security as competitor to public policing has
cemented the view that they are functionally analogous, masking important
temporal differences and distinctions of role and orientation. The traditional
post-crime functions of the state police in enforcing the criminal law,
pursuing criminal investigations, prosecuting criminal offences and serving
the criminal process apply much less to those working in the private security
sector (Loader, 1997). To the extent that there are common areas of
functional overlap these arise pre-crime: in respect of patrol, surveillance,
order maintenance and property protection. Once an offence has occurred,
private security agents, constrained by the limits of their legal powers, their
mandate and the interests of their employers, are quick to dispatch suspects
to the public police. Post-crime, agents of the security industry are interested
less in punishing the wrong done or even in making good other than
in the narrow economic sense of recovering losses (Williams, 2005). Their
principal interest is rather to identify the source of the opportunity taken,
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to harden targets and so minimize future losses. The distinct functions of
public police and private security are worthy of closer attention, not least
because they attest to a larger change. The growth of private security signals
not merely a transfer of authority for crime control. It presages a more
radical shift from the largely post hoc logic of criminal justice to the forward
trajectory of pre-emption and protection (Shearing and Johnston,
2005: 32). The key transition is, therefore, less a contested shift between
public and private, though this is important, than the temporal move from
post- to pre-crime.
Of course it is important not to exaggerate these temporal and sectoral
shifts. Policing, particularly in its formative years, had a decidedly preventative
turn (McMullen, 1998; Zedner, 2006a). Garland describes this early preventative
orientation as the ‘path not taken’ (2001: 30–2). And yet, although
it was later overshadowed by largely reactive practices, prevention was never
absent from police beat and patrolling functions. Even in the heyday of the
modern criminal justice state, crime control was not exclusively a state function:
preventing crime and maintaining social order were tasks shared also by
private citizens, communities and private security agents. It is important
therefore not to overstate ‘the novelty and the “epochal” nature of current
trends’ and thereby overlook continuities (Jones and Newburn, 2002: 130).
This said, the impact of 9/11, of the London bombings and the continuing
threat of catastrophic risk has significantly increased the pressure on
governments to think and act pre-emptively. The trajectory towards anticipatory
endeavour, risk assessment and intelligence gathering is accelerating.
It follows that as security comes to contest crime control as a key object of
criminological enquiry, larger changes in arrangements for national security
and in respect of terrorism acquire a new relevance for criminology (Stuntz,
2002). Reorientation around security exposes domestic crime control policies
to the impact of global terrorism to a degree not seen even at the height
of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and the IRA bombing campaign in
mainland Britain. Government has not been slow to enact a raft of powers
instituting draconian security policies.3
The temporal shift denoted by the
war on terror poses a powerful challenge to the historic precincts of criminological
scholarship. Where once terrorism and counter-terrorism stood
outside the normal boundaries of criminological knowledge, they now
demand criminological attention (Deflem, 2004). Together these temporal
and sectoral shifts pose a powerful challenge to criminology’s raison d’être.
Theorizing security
The developments so far described are disparate and not easily amenable to
coherent explanation. Superficially there appears to be little in common
between the burglar alarm and the satellite tracking system or the work of
the bouncer and the security systems analyst. But is there an underlying
logic common to them all—the logic of security perhaps? At a minimum, a
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‘general theory’ of the security society would need to be able to account for
and explain the following conceptual contours and topographical features
of the emergent terrain.
First, as has already been observed, seeking security implies a temporal
shift pre-crime. Security is less about reacting to, controlling or prosecuting
crime than addressing the conditions precedent to it. The logic of security
dictates earlier and earlier interventions to reduce opportunity, to target
harden and to increase surveillance even before the commission of crime is
a distant prospect (Clarke, 1995; von Hirsch et al., 2000).
Second, risk frames and provides the rationale for many features of the
security society (O’Malley, 1992; Ericson and Haggerty, 1997). Although
concern about the risks of crime is a major force behind the market for security,
it is driven by a larger array of anxieties that do not derive necessarily or
solely from crime (Bauman, 1998: 116; Crawford, 2002). Prudentialism or
the logic of actuarialism, which underpin measures designed to locate, sort
and manage diverse risks, become at least as important as reactive penal
measures (Feeley and Simon, 1994; O’Malley, 2001; Harcourt, 2003; Feeley,
2004). Preoccupation with individual offenders is overlaid by concern with
identifying and classifying suspect populations in order to manage the risks
they collectively pose. In this context the prison is less an instrument of punishment,
still less reform, than a carceral warehouse for detaining those categorized
as posing the highest risks (Simon, 2000).
Third, rather than focus on crime as wrongdoing, the dominant raison
d’être of security is to pre-empt, minimize and displace loss (Williams, 2005).
Much of the pressure to mitigate loss derives from the insurance industry, an
industry devoted to the management and pooling of risk (Ericson et al.,
2003). Security provision is also concerned with providing the appearance
and assurance of protection (Crawford and Lister, 2004; Innes, 2004). The
millions spent annually on security derive from the demands of private and
corporate consumers to cocoon themselves and, in the case of commercial
enterprises, their customers in an apparently safe environment as much as any
direct determination to reduce crime rates.
A key issue therefore is that protection provided as a public good to which
all have access is endangered by its commercial sale as a commodity or club
good, access to which is limited by the capacity to buy (Hope, 2000;
Crawford, 2006). In the distinction between public good and private commodity
the source of provision is arguably less important than the question
of access (Coase, 1974). To the extent that the private industry is becoming
a major provider of security, market-driven discrimination in the distribution
of risks is a vital concern. Securing an exclusive commercial environment such
as an inner-city business district may be conducive to maximizing turnover
but have displacement effects that bear heavily on neighbouring ‘unsecured’
environs (Rigakos, 2002; for a different view see Vindevogel, 2005).
Central to the selling of security is the pursuit of profit (Wakefield,
2003), both political and financial, which derives from the industrial production
of security.4
Pursuit of the profit motive may coincide with the
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demands of crime reduction, but may equally lead in quite other directions.
The desire to hide company losses suffered through fraud, for example,
militates against the public revelation that prosecution would require. It follows
that changing patterns of governance are indivisible from the normative
question of how the security society is itself regulated (Ericson and
Stehr, 2000; Johnston and Shearing, 2003). Where security is a saleable
commodity, accountability to the democratic polity is liable to be usurped
by the more powerful demands of narrower constituencies, be they bounded
political communities, consumer groups or shareholders. The rise of contractual
governance and the onset of the post-regulatory state pose serious
difficulties for the regulation of powers once, theoretically at least, reserved
to the State (Scott, 2004). Inseparable from the question of how to govern
security is the question of how far society is now governed through security
in the sense that diverse policies are pursued from the standpoint of security
(Valverde, 2001: 89).
From this brief mapping of the conceptual contours of the security
society, several questions arise. If the logic of security is only connected to
crime at one remove, what becomes of criminology? In what ways does prudentialism
distort or pre-empt the traditional criminal justice functions of
pursuing, prosecuting and punishing crime that have historically engaged
criminological attention? Do criminologists need a new vocabulary and
new disciplinary resources with which to describe and to tackle the problems
posed by the pursuit of security? To what extent do the values and
principles of the criminal law, process and trial, and the aims and justification
of punishment speak to the concerns it throws up? If not, do we need
to develop a new normative framework or to articulate a fresh ‘ethics of
security’ with which to govern its provision?
Security is inherently a normative concept: it describes a good. Though we
can haggle over its meaning (Freedman, 1992; Rothschild, 1995; Zedner,
2003a), we cannot escape the need to establish what sort of good it is, for
whom it is sought and by what means. Ensuring that the means of security
are consistent with its ends; that its measures are inclusive, consistent with
equality and fairness; that they do not unduly erode trust; nor impinge without
warrant upon civil liberties and that they are proportionate to the risks
faced are just some of the challenges to be met. It follows that if criminology
is to respond to the challenge of security, it too cannot escape the implicit
duty to engage in normative theorizing (Braithwaite, 2000b: 87; Loader and
Walker, 2007).
What might this normative project look like? An essential first step is to
excavate the entrenched, often hidden assumptions that drive the security
agenda by means of immanent critique. Revealing the political and economic
interests underlying the present pursuit of security as well as the
intellectual assumptions upon which security policies are based are essential
first steps. Second, in the spirit of intellectual pilfering that has long characterized
criminology, we can profitably draw upon the insights of adjacent
disciplines. Historically, criminology has looked principally to sociology,
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psychology and, in more recent years, to legal scholarship for sources of
intellectual renewal. The following sections first examine the adaptive
potential of criminology before going on to argue that there are other apposite
disciplinary seams that might now be mined for insight and inspiration
in meeting the new challenges faced by criminology.
The adaptive potential of criminology
Criminology’s ability to respond to the seismic shifts in its substantive terrain
presaged here depends largely upon its capacity to adapt and evolve,
so an essential first question is, ‘does criminology have the capacity to
change?’.
Criminology is the child of a set of assumptions about crime and the selfdesignated
observer of strategies that follow logically from these assumptions.
Crudely put, it has been assumed that crime is an aberration from the
norm; that those who commit criminal acts can and should be held responsible
for their wrongdoing; and that the wrongs in question offend not only
against their immediate victims but also the public interest. These assumptions
about crime have dictated the main trajectories of criminological
enquiry and, to the extent that they also inform crime control responses by
the State, have furnished the basic framework, principles and values of
criminal justice. These core assumptions are now under threat.5
Where
crimes are regarded as continuous with normal behaviour; where future
crimes are anticipated by actuarial calculation and forestalled by preemptive
endeavour; where past crimes are conceived less as wrongs than
losses; and where responsibility for limiting loss lies as much with the individual
or the company as the State, then criminology must also adapt or
risk being rendered marginal, even obsolete.
The shift has already begun. A small revolution has occurred in the conceptual
and theoretical tools deployed by criminology, a revolution that is
suggestive of its reflexive capacity for adaptation. The conceptualization of
crime as ‘a routine activity’ or ‘opportunity’ (Clarke, 1995: 91), a ‘fact of
everyday life’ (Felson, 2002: ch. 11) or ‘normal social commonplace aspect
of modern society’ (Garland, 2001: 128) are all important first steps. New
criminologies deriving from rational choice theory, opportunity theory,
environmental analysis, routine activity theory and crime pattern theory
have been developed to make sense of change within domestic crime policy
(Felson and Clarke, 1998: 4; Zedner, 2006b). Yet ‘ironically’ to conceptualize
crime as a routine, rational activity may be a self-denying ordinance.
It risks depriving criminology of the very subject matter that has, historically,
been its defining object. Testimony to this danger is the emergent
sub-discipline of crime science: ‘a new approach intended to get upstream of
crime and to proactively prevent it rather than merely respond to it’.6
Advocates of crime science regard theirs primarily as a technical enterprise
focused on opportunity reduction and closely allied to the security industry.
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Alarmingly, they also view the discipline of criminology as redundant and
see crime science as the future.
If crime science is not to reduce criminology to a technicist adjunct to the
security industry, then criminology needs to meet and defeat the challenge
posed. Assessing the adaptive potential of criminology requires a better
sense of its inherent traits and latent capacities. The following sections
focus on the cultural, structural, substantive and normative capacities of
criminology for change.
Culturally, criminology is an interstitial discipline (Abbott, 2000: 6). It
inhabits the spaces between other more established social sciences, thieving
their intellectual styles, concepts and explanatory tools. Criminology distinguishes
itself from its social scientific neighbours less by any defined
heuristic, methodological or normative distinction than by its substantive
concern with a particular topic—crime.
It is an open question how much coherence of intellectual approach any
social scientific discipline can claim since enquiry in this field is inherently
interdisciplinary. Intellectual borrowing arises from the fact that social scientists
observe the same phenomena from different angles. Arguably, this is a
necessary feature of disciplinary development without which stasis might
creep in. Criminology is born out of the common interest of sociologists, historians,
lawyers, economists and psychologists in the phenomenon of crime.
But, as yet, it lacks any established, distinctive explanatory or methodological
framework.7
Rather its history can be tracked against the waxing and
waning of different disciplinary influences: from the phrenological measurement
of skull types through psychological analysis of individual development
to the sociology of deviance. Awareness of the limits of these approaches
stimulated and made possible each subsequent transition to new modes and
goals of enquiry. Thus the sociology of deviance grew out of impatience with
positivism, and radical criminology rebelled against mainstream criminological
endeavour (Downes and Rock, 2003: ch. 10). More recently, the influence
of law and political science shifted the focus again, away from crime itself to
legal, political and institutional responses to crime. Much that now goes
under the heading of criminology is in fact the study of crime control and
criminal justice. For all that, this continuing adaptation to external influences
betokens a lack of solidity; it also suggests an innate elasticity and capacity
for change essential to its flourishing.
Structurally, criminology is only now establishing its institutional foundations
through the formation of faculties, degree programmes and bespoke
monograph series that consolidate earlier forays in the form of seminar
series, journals, conferences and colloquia. Probably, the majority of criminologists
still reside in the parent faculties of law, sociology or other social
sciences and were themselves trained in these older disciplines. If one
applies the simple but defensible test that a discipline is only really established
once it mainly hires PhDs in its own field, then criminology is yet to
attain discipline-hood (Abbott, 2000: 139). Given its relative structural
immaturity, its interstitial nature and lack of well-defined intellectual
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approach, criminology is especially vulnerable to external change. Read
negatively, the cultural porosity and structural frailty of criminology are
weaknesses that render it a camp follower of shifting intellectual fashions
and raise doubts about its claim to independent status. The criminological
project is not yet (and may never be) a settled disciplinary state. Read positively,
however, it might be that in its precarious existence as raider tribe
lays its potential strength. It can adapt to the changing topography of what
is new, salient and in need of explanation. It can draw upon its many disciplinary
influences to develop analytical tools appropriate to the changing
nature of its self-appointed task. And free of the fetters of disciplinary institutionalization,
it is capable of radical self-redefinition of its assumptions,
values and methods.
Substantively, the cutting edge of criminological enquiry already extends
well beyond, or rather before, the criminal justice system to the temporally
prior logics of actuarial justice and risk management, surveillance, social and
situational crime prevention, and new urban forms, not least mass private
property and gated communities. This said there are important areas of larger
change that still await a fully developed criminology. The emergence of socalled
reassurance policing, the role of private security; the increasing
transnational character of policing, security and intelligence services; and, not
least, the war on terror all invite further enquiry (Walker, 2004; Zedner,
2005). There are excellent new studies on the technology of surveillance
exemplified by CCTV (Norris and Armstrong, 1999; Goold, 2004) and the
work of private security agents, guards and bouncers (Jones and Newburn,
1998; Hobbs et al., 2003). There is also an important emergent literature on
the role of the insurance industry and its intersection with state policing and
risk management (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997; Ericson et al., 2003). Less
attention has yet been given by criminologists to the fields of financial regulation,
commercial licensing, audit, profiling and data mining, to transport
security, Internet and computer security, and forensic systems analysis—all of
which are now central to the workings of the public and private security
industries (Sheptycki, 2002: 330; Williams, 2005). Documenting these burgeoning
arenas of activity is only the first substantive step towards elaborating
analytical tools apposite to the security society. And even these are but
preparatory to the yet more challenging task of evolving legal frameworks
and regulatory mechanisms by which the security society might be governed
(Lister et al., 2001; Zedner, 2006c).
Normatively, criminology has only begun to meet the challenge posed by
the pursuit of security to engage in prescriptive theorizing (Hudson, 2003;
Johnston and Shearing, 2003; Loader and Walker, 2007). Criminologists
are by nature ‘pessimists and cynics’ (Braithwaite, 1998: 49) who conventionally
display a healthy ambivalence towards enlightenment projects and
the claims of progress. Criminology has a strong record of critical engagement,
alert to the ways in which crime is constructed. It is politically sophisticated
in its appreciation of the oppressive and illegitimate features of
crime control. Yet this predilection for negativity has tended to result in a
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collective unwillingness to develop constructive theories of change (Ericson,
2003).8
Furthermore, the dispassionate, apolitical bent of post-modernism
has resulted in wry, often penetrating observation but rarely in positive
critical engagement. Deconstruction done well is potentially illuminating,
but its position of absolute relativism is arguably an avoidance tactic, an
evasion of moral responsibility. Whether disassociated critique suffices as
the academic purpose of criminological enquiry is debatable. Whether it is
adequate to the explicitly normative challenges posed by security is more
questionable still. As Hudson laments,
[w]hat criminology and penology have lost touch with, however, is work
aimed at normative reconstruction of law and penality. Penology seems content
to be descriptive or instrumental: it does not appear to see its endeavour
as an aspiration to justice.
(2003: xvi)
Debate about the proper role of intellectual endeavour has a distinguished
history and is a matter of insightful controversy in the neighbouring discipline
of sociology (Braithwaite, 2005; Burawoy, 2005; see also Chancer and
McLaughlin, this issue). Gramsci famously distinguished between ‘traditional
intellectuals’ who consider themselves free thinkers above the partisan divisions
of society (but who, according to Gramsci, nevertheless help buttress the
prevailing hegemony) and ‘organic intellectuals’ who self-consciously play a
political role as critics of the dominant discourses and constructors of alternative
modes of thought (1971: 5–23, 323–77). Leaving on one side
Gramsci’s particular political purpose (to advance proletarian emancipation
and foment revolution), there is much to be said for the organic intellectual
as a critical thinker willing to engage in programmes of thought designed to
abet change. At one level, this entails systematic criticism of existing practices
and the detailed specification of the wrongs, burdens and costs of particular
courses of action. At quite another level, it requires utopian thinking, unconstrained
by the strictures of realism. Although this second approach is liable
to be condemned as hopelessly idealistic, such thinking may furnish what
Williams called ‘resources of hope’ (Williams and Gable, 1989). To promote
utopian goals unrealizable today nevertheless pushes the boundaries of what
it is possible to conceive and, in so doing, renders movement towards these
goals more likely (Young, 1992; Loader, 1998).
In between the critical and the utopian projects lies an intermediate path,
the development of normative theory according to whose values and precepts
present practice can be appraised and prescriptions for change developed.
The normative project is less ambitious than the utopian one in that it begins
with the status quo rather than a hypothetical blank sheet and it works within
the realms of the possible rather than the ideal. As Lacey observes: ‘the temptations
of elaborate and elegant theory-construction, of the development of
beautiful utopian visions, provide a substantial incentive to ignore inconvenient
obstacles thrown up by the recalcitrant empirical world’ (forthcoming).
This does not require that we accept the status quo as inevitable, but it does
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ground normative theory within empirical enquiry. Thus informed, normative
theorizing has a greater chance of developing prescriptions that are, if not
immediately, then prospectively, realizable. By this means criminology might
seek to elaborate and defend a conception of justice apposite to the problems
and potential of the security society (Hudson, 2003; Zedner, 2003b; Loader
and Walker, 2007).
‘Resources of hope’
Earlier it was suggested that criminology remains less a settled disciplinary
state than a raider tribe. Looting other disciplines for intellectual resources
is something criminologists do rather well, not least because many have
been trained first in other schools. Several disciplines suggest themselves as
resources that supply conceptual and analytical techniques in which criminologists
might productively become more literate and suggest an alternative
lens through which to view the problems of the security society.
Interdisciplinarity need not be a one-way traffic. One productive outcome
of ‘tooling-up’ in adjacent disciplines may be to enhance criminology’s
future capacity to feed back into the development of those disciplines from
which it now steals. What follows is a sketch of just some resources, drawn
respectively from economics, international relations, moral philosophy and
political theory that, for quite different reasons, appear germane to the
present challenge.
First, economic analysis lies behind so many of the most salient changes so
far described that criminologists need to engage with it far more rigorously
and systematically than has hitherto been the case. The impact of economic
reasoning, the assumptions of rational choice theory and the conceptual
toolkit of game theory together underpin policy makers’ conceptions of
crime and the pursuit of security in and outside the public sphere. To the
extent that criminology is a policy field, criminologists need better to appreciate
the foundations of present policy in rational choice theory (Ericson,
2003; Zedner, 2006b). The founding assumption that crime is less a moral
wrong than the product of opportunity (Becker, 1968) creates the expectation
that crime is a ‘normal’ and probably ineradicable fact of everyday life, a calculable
cost that can be estimated, insured against and otherwise minimized.
It is thus in large measure from economic analysis that prudential orientations
of present policy arise (O’Malley, 2001). According to its logic, reducing
opportunities for crime is likely to be more effective than tackling root causes
or engaging in moral re-education (Felson and Clarke, 1998): target hardening,
monitoring and surveillance are all obvious consequences. Accepting
that economic analysis provides the rationale behind much that goes under
the banner of security is not the same as claiming that it can also furnish a
guide to the moral and ethical dilemmas thrown up by the pursuit of security.
And yet to the extent that it underpins the logic of pre-crime, criminologists
need to engage much more closely with economic reasoning. What follows
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are just a few examples of how economic analysis might inform criminological
understanding.
Achieving adequate, fair, equal and universal levels of protection requires
reflection upon how security is provided and distributed. Protecting security
as a public good, available equally to all, raises particular difficulties
where the nature of its provision limits access, for example in business districts,
gated housing complexes and university campuses. These ‘clubs’ are
by definition exclusive, creating negative externalities for those outside
(Hope, 2000: 86; Crawford, 2006). Economic analysis suggests that one
means of limiting these burdens is to force suppliers to internalize the externalities
they impose and so absorb some of the costs otherwise born by
those outside the club.
Given that the market is an increasingly important mechanism for the
supply of security, economics provides expert insight into its operation and
the components essential for it to thrive. A flourishing market requires that
there be competition, that contracts are enforceable and that consumer
choice is well informed. Problems such as competitive breakdown, information
deficits and incomplete markets are common in the provision of
security, but are difficulties with which economics is well acquainted and
for which sophisticated solutions have been developed. Relying upon the
market for the provision of security is clearly problematic. Yet given it is
impossible to envisage that this market will wane, developing the means to
manage it is an essential first step to contending with the realities of the
security society (Zedner, 2006c).
International relations, with its substantive interest in national security and
its conceptual toolkit for thinking about the nature, the costs and benefits of
security strategies, also has a new salience for criminological endeavour. Of
particular interest are ‘critical security studies’—an amalgam of disparate
approaches distinguished by their commitment to think ‘critically’ about
security; to eschew statism; to widen the security agenda; and to anchor the
pursuit and study of security in a broader concern with ‘human emancipation’
(Krause and Williams, 1997; Wyn-Jones, 1999). Emancipation here is
the idea of freeing peoples ‘from those physical and human constraints which
stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do … Security and
Emancipation are two sides of the same coin. Emancipation, not power or
order, produces true security’ (Booth, 1991: 319). The idea of emancipation
is so loosely articulated it arguably raises as many questions as it answers.
None the less it is a provocative idea, not least because it invites consideration
of the means by which people may seek their own security rather than
having order foist upon them (Shearing and Wood, 2003).
Significantly, just as criminology is taking increasing note of international
affairs by studying crimes of the State, transnational and
international crime and policing, and terrorism (Cohen, 2001; Walker,
2003; Deflem, 2004), so international relations has developed a closer
interest in domestic social issues. Security is seen to reside not only in political
and military endeavour by nation states but also in social, economic
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and environmental policies to secure people in their homes, jobs and communities.
As policing relies increasingly on international co-operation or is
carried out by supranational bodies, the earlier domestic societal focus of
criminology is replaced by concerns held more closely in common with
international relations.
Of particular interest is ‘human security’, a concept that displaces national
security by fusing ideas from international relations and development studies
to foster a new focus on people rather than states.9
In so doing it brings international
relations even closer to a sociological understanding germane to
criminological interests. The goods to be protected are not only political and
territorial but also personal, communal and environmental. In place of the
negative logic of defence, human security promotes concern for the basic
necessities of human flourishing and the upholding of human rights. It is
predicated upon the belief that the chief threats to security arise out of deprivation
and frustration which together breed disorder and, at the extreme, terrorism.
Human security has become important conceptually and practically,
motivating efforts to supplement state provision with programmes aimed at
empowering people to secure their own interests. The State retains a vital role
in developing and sustaining norms, policies and institutions essential to protection,
but human security requires that this be supplemented by the expansion
of human rights and the fostering of the basic goods of health, education
and employment at the micro level. In order to encompass these larger concerns,
security is reconceived not as a technical, military or policing issue but
as a political concept within which state security is less an end in itself than
the means of securing individual liberty.
Whether it is possible thus to expand the meaning of security without
risking the problems of ‘securitization’—not least distorting priorities to fit
the security agenda—is a matter of live debate within international relations.
Viewing problems that are arguably only tangentially related through
the lens of security risks other important issues being subsumed by the security
agenda and may dictate policies inimical to their proper solution (WynJones,
1999: 107). There is much to be learned from international relations
therefore as criminology, too, faces the challenge of rapid securitization
(Loader, 2002).
Finally, in pursuit of the larger normative project, criminology could
profit from the insights and intellectual resources of moral philosophy and
political theory to address the difficult question of how to achieve justice in
a security society (Hudson, 2003). Outside the limited domain of justifying
punishment, criminology has engaged little with philosophy and political
theory despite their obvious relevance to tackling issues such as the just distribution
of security and the role of the State in the increasingly mixed market
of security provision, to say nothing of the moral and metaphysical
dilemmas of pre-emptive intervention. For example, some argue that where
there is as strong a reason to believe someone is about to commit an offence
as is sufficient to merit post-punishment then that person is ‘pre-deserving’
of punishment (New, 1992). Yet even if it appears almost certain that the
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person will commit an offence, respect for the individual as a moral agent
must acknowledge a categorical ‘window of moral opportunity’ or chance to
remain innocent (Smilansky, 1994: 52). To close this window pre-emptively
fails to respect the moral autonomy of the individual to choose to do right.
Moral philosophy might also inform consideration of what kind of good
security is and how it relates to other goods. One persuasive line of philosophical
argument is that the pursuit of security is justified only in so far as
it serves ulterior goods such as liberty, justice, equality, trust and social
inclusion (Dinwiddy, 1978: 21). It does not make sense therefore to posit
the relationship between security and these goods as in tension, still less as
a zero-sum game but rather as properly interdependent (Kelly, 1990: 89).
Whereas security is generally seen as standing in competition with the protection
of individual liberty, a better view might be that the pursuit of security
is justified precisely because it is a precondition of liberty. Upholding
individual liberties looks less like the defence of liberty against security than
an integral facet of its pursuit. Understanding security this way would lead
us to abandon balance and other computational metaphors in favour of a
more cohesive conception of security and other goods as interdependent.
The pursuit of security also poses difficult distributive questions whose
resolution might lie in the sophisticated work of political theorists on questions
of distributive justice (Rawls, 1973; Nozick, 1974: ch. 7). Who should
provide protection, to whom and in what measure are all questions at the
heart of political theory but with which there has yet been only limited
criminological engagement. The role of the State in providing protection is
accepted by even those, like Nozick, who propose a minimal ‘night watchman
state’. Yet it is arguable that the privatization of security eats into even
this core state function. As we have already seen, private provision of security
results in unequal provision and in circuits of inclusion and exclusion.
And even state provision may not meet the expectation that security is for
all. Security presumes a threat, those who threaten and, necessarily therefore,
those within and without protection. Again, resort to political theory
provides the basis for arguing that security of the self can be guaranteed
only by providing equal security for all (Loader and Walker, 2005). The
challenge is to ensure a realm of security in which each is able to exercise
the widest possible freedom compatible with the same realm of security for
others. Theories of distributive justice are particularly apposite therefore to
the task of allocating benefits and burdens of security that this requires.
Finally, recognizing that security should be sought only by means consistent
with its ulterior purpose of serving other goods renders it impossible to
specify its end in a way that leaves the means open. Since security is the
indefinite pursuit of the unattainable, it cannot in any case make sense to
draw a sharp distinction between ends and means. New forms of moral reasoning
are needed to capture this dual aspect of security, which recognize
that means and ends are logically, not merely contingently, related (Duff,
1986: 7). So, for example, although it might be practically efficacious to
prevent crime by imposing a blanket curfew on all teenage boys, the means
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here would be patently inappropriate to the goal of providing security for
all and, therefore, unjust. What renders a security measure just is that it
employs means that can be rationally defended as intrinsically appropriate
to the end sought. To put it another way, the justice of the means is integral
to the very attainment of a just security society.
This preliminary foray focuses on intellectual resources that have, for
the most part, yet to capture criminologists’ imagination. It suggests just
some of many insights to be derived from raiding neighbouring disciplines.
Engaging with ideas that have such powerful potential application
to the dilemmas of the coming security society is a vital step towards
securing criminology’s own future. At a time when other disciplines, not
least the bio-sciences, statistics, psychiatry, genetics and, in quite a different
way, war studies, scramble to colonize security as a terrain over which
they can claim sovereignty, criminology has both an existing expertise in
the area and a structural capacity for adaptation that renders it particularly
well placed to lead the field. Reducing ‘security threats’ to matters
of crime prevention; insisting that even the gravest prospective harms be
tackled with proper regard to due process; recognizing that security
measures, like penal ones, require special justification; and maintaining
the central role of the State in providing security as a public good are just
a few of the steps criminologists might take to tame security, capture the
field and reassert the Enlightenment values that lie behind much criminological
endeavour.
Conclusion—the triumph of criminology?
Pre-crime—or the study of risk, uncertainty, precaution and security—lies
at the cutting edge of criminological endeavour posing a considerable
challenge to existing modes of scholarship and stretching existing conceptual
and methodological resources to the full. Happily, criminology is
well adapted to change, voracious in its capacity to absorb new ideas, and
unashamed in its plundering of neighbouring social science disciplines in a
continuing bid to adapt, advance and meet new challenges. The particular
challenge of security requires new resources, especially in the exacting task
of establishing the values, principles and human rights that are to be
defended in its pursuit.
There is an exciting array of analytical and conceptual tools being developed
by criminology’s social scientific neighbours. These furnish ‘resources
of hope’ with the aid of which the daunting hurdle of securing justice in the
security society may successfully be surmounted. And although pre-crime
shifts the temporal perspective it does not radically undermine criminology’s
expert knowledge about the causes, meanings and means of managing
crime. Providing criminology maintains its historical facility to adapt to
social change and succeeds in reinventing itself with a prospective orientation,
the pre-crime security society need not be a post-criminological one.
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Exactly what sort of criminology will persist is perhaps harder to anticipate.
In significant degree, this claim for the continued flourishing of criminology
relies upon its intimate interrelation and expertise in related social scientific
disciplines. A larger question therefore is what will occur as criminology
becomes a popular undergraduate degree course turning out skilled practitioners
who may, however, have little exposure to other modes of thought or
access to other disciplinary tools. Such gains as the development of criminology
degrees undoubtedly bring in generating large cadres of well-educated,
self-identifying professional criminologists may just come at the cost of a
growing insularity and a loss of intellectual vitality. Those drawn to criminology
by the appeal of its intellectual rendezvous status and the challenge of
applying different disciplinary proficiencies to a particularly intractable social
problem may come to be regarded as ill-educated dinosaurs by the new criminologically
trained entrants to the field. So to end on a note of caution: the
claim that criminology can surmount the challenges of the pre-crime, security
society is a claim about the discipline as it is presently constituted. Whether the
professional consolidation and structural establishment of criminology within
the academy will compromise its flexibility and capacity for adaptation is a
matter to which some thought might profitably be given as criminologists collectively
set about entrenching the subject’s disciplinary boundaries.
Notes
With thanks to John Braithwaite, Adam Crawford, Ben Goold, Nicole
Hahn Rafter, Bernard Harcourt, Ian Loader, Eugene McLaughlin and participants
at the Oxford Centre for Criminology Research Workshop for
their comments. An earlier version of this article was presented as the opening
Plenary Lecture at the 2005 British Criminology Conference, University
of Leeds. I am very grateful to the British Academy for the award of a
Research Readership during which this article was written.
1. Both terms derive from the prescient science fiction short story by Philip
K. Dick first published in 1956 about a future society where murders are
prevented before they happen (Dick, 2002: 2–3).
2. Though they have earlier historical antecedents in the work of 19th-century
social statisticians and in Lombrosian Positivism.
3. Most notably the Terrorism Act 2000, the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security
Act 2001, the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 and the Terrorism Act 2006.
4. In ways not dissimilar to the development of the penal industrial complex
described by Christie (1994).
5. It has been suggested that they are also under threat from a certain disciplinary
fragmentation witnessed by the rise of distinct ‘policing studies’, ‘probation
studies’ and ‘community safety studies’.
6. As advocated by the practitioners of this new approach like Gloria Laycock,
Ron Clarke, Nick Tilley and Ken Pease at the Jill Dando Institute of Crime
Science, University College London. http://www.jdi.ucl.ac.uk/
Theoretical Criminology 11(2)276
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7. As Vick rightly insists ‘disciplines are not just distinct bodies of knowledge
or branches of learning’ (2004: 166).
8. Restorative Justice is an obvious exception.
9. The United Nations’ Commission on Human Security promoted human
security as a necessary complement to state security by addressing fundamental
problems of poverty, ill health, illiteracy and other maladies to secure
freedom from fear and freedom from want (UN Commission on Human
Security, 2003).
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Politics of Crime Control: Essays in Honour of David Downes, pp. 147–72.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zedner, L. (2006c) ‘Liquid Security: Managing the Market for Crime Control’,
Criminology and Criminal Justice 6(2): 267–88.
LUCIA ZEDNER is Professor of Criminal Justice in the Law Faculty and Centre
for Criminology and Senior Law Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University
of Oxford. Much of her recent work has been on contemporary changes in
policing, security and anti-terrorism policy.
Zedner—Pre-crime and post-criminology 281
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