THE LIMITS OF THE SOVEREIGN STATE: Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society

Abstract

The article offers a descriptive analysis of strategies of crime control in contemporary Britain and elsewhere. It argues that the normality of high crime rates and the limitations of criminal justice agencies have created a new predicament for governments. The response to this predicament has been a recurring ambivalence that helps explain the volatile and contradictory character of recent crime control policy. The article identifies adaptive strategies (responsibilization, defining deviance down, and redefining organizational success) and strategies of denial (the punitive sovereign response), as well as the different criminologies that accompany them.

CCTV: Beyond Penal Modernism?

“…In this respect, 'new modes of government' are not simply about the central state off-loading the responsibility for crime control. Instead, the composition of such networks can in some contexts extend the central state's capacity for action and influence (Garland 1996). In his book, The Surveillance Web, for example, McCahill showed how the privately owned CCTV control room of a local shopping mall was used by the police as an 'intelligence base' to target suspected drug dealers.…”

“…This article draws upon research conducted for the European Union-funded URBANEYE project 1 to ask how the rapid growth in the use of CCTV in the UK fits in with contemporary debates on the emergence of a 'post modern' penality (Garland 1996(Garland 2001Hallsworth 2002; Lucken 1999;O'Malley, 1999;Simon 1994 …”

Enlisting the Public in the Policing of Immigration

“…According to him (Garland, 1996(Garland, , 2001, contemporary crime control policies and politics should be read in light of two fundamental social facts which characterize late modern societies: sustained high crime rates and the incapacity of state's institutions to prevent and suppress crime. These two social facts, in his view, had contributed to erode the myth that the state is capable of delivering 'law and order'.…”

Immigration detention

“…What seems clear is that, government pronouncements aside, detention is unlikely to prevent desperate people from attempting to enter countries with greater employment opportunities and standards of living. Therefore, as with the neo-liberal state's inability to solve the crime problem which seems to have led in England and Wales and the US to mass imprisonment, the criminalisation of foreigners points to significant 'limits of the sovereign state' (Garland, 1996). The question we are left with then is whether talking and acting tough on noncitizens will create a new kind of popular punitivism -this one with a nationalistic edge?…”