`Governmentality' and the Problem of Crime:

Abstract

The article traces the main themes of the `governmentality' literature, as developed by Michel Foucault and subsequent writers, and outlines a series of related ideas about `the social' as a realm of government; statistics and bio-power; actuarial forms of reasoning; and government-at-a-distance. It goes on to illustrate the criminological value of these ideas by means of an analysis of some of the governmental rationalities and technologies that are currently emerging in the field of crime control. These include `economic' forms of reasoning about crime and its control, the emergence of `the criminogenic situation' as a practicable object of government and the use of `technologies of the self' in penal settings. The final part of the article identifies some of the limitations and problems of the `governmentality' literature. It argues that studies of governmentality beg certain sociological questions; that the governmentality analytic is quite compatible with certain forms of sociological analysis; and that the project of writing a history of the present is best pursued — in the field of crime control at least — by combining these forms of enquiry.

CrimeTelescope: crime hotspot prediction based on urban and social media data fusion

“…As an inevitable and important social problem of our societies, criminal activities have been traditionally studied in different fields, such as sociology [15], psychology [13], and economics [23]. The recent movements of open data have made large repositories of crime activity data become publicly accessible, which provides an unprecedented opportunity to start studying crime in a more systematic manner.…”

“…Furthermore, by conducting factor analysis on the SUS statements, Lewis et al [20] further define two finer-grained dimensions, i.e., learnability and usability, where the learnability dimension contains the statements 4 and 10, and the usability dimension contains the statements 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. We conducted our survey of CrimeTelescope platform using Google Forms 15 . The participants are recruited by emails, websites and social networks.…”

False Starts, Wrong Turns and Dead Ends: Reflections on Recent Developments in Criminology

“…There has been some stimulating and thoughtful work taking place in relation to the issues of desistance and rehabilitation (Maruna 2000;Ward and Maruna 2007). There has been some provocative discussion around Foucauldian themes (Rose 1999;Garland 1997) as well as an informative examination of the application of risk analysis within the criminal justice system (O'Malley 2004;Hannah-Moffat 2001). However, probably the most significant theoretical development in the recent period has been linked to the development of Southern Theory, the import of which has been to fundamentally challenge any claims to universality by the traditional theoretical approaches associated with the global North.…”

Multi-centred governance and circuits of power in liberal modes of security

“…55 For these reasons the goals of critical social science, to arbitrate between rival truth-claims and provide a more emancipatory understanding of the problems and governing arrangements in question, must be rejected in favour of diagnostic descriptions of government. In response, critics of this strong historicism argue it prevents commentators from posing questions about why governing programmes prevail or fail, 56 how they can be reformed and what lessons can be drawn about this from comparative analysis. 57 Advocates argue the rejection of critique and explanation, 'the burdens of sociological realism', 58 liberates historicist accounts to be forward-looking in inventing alternative governing arrangements and thinking, 'how not to be governed thus'.…”