The Rise and Restraint of the Preventive State

Abstract

Security has always been a core function of the modern state. Yet the rise of the Preventive State captures an intensification of that role as threats to security and demands for public protection increase, prompting states to prioritize new practices of preventive criminalization, policing, and punishment. The rise of the Preventive State may promise greater security, but the costs of ever more coercive preventive laws and measures are burdensome and pose a threat to civil liberties. This review considers the drivers, multiple manifestations, and direct and collateral consequences of preventive endeavors that assess and manage risk, target hazards, and restrain or detain those deemed dangerous. It also explores their ramifications for criminology and criminal justice. It concludes by considering the potential of criminology to join cross-disciplinary efforts to articulate a new jurisprudence of security and to elaborate principles of preventive justice with which to restrain the excesses of the Preventive State. 429

Rethinking prevention as a reactive force to contain dangerous classes

“…Scholars from around the world have paid considerable attention to the expansion of preventive measures (Carvalho, 2017; Crawford, 2009; Janus, 2006; Mayson, 2015; Sajó, 2006) and the production of security laws, policies and interrelated practices that, taken together, ‘are motivated by the same impetus to minimise risks and forestall harms’ (Zedner and Ashworth, 2019: 430). This phenomenon shows the intricate relationship between the installation of the security imperative and the maintenance of a capitalist order, favoured by the emergence of a risk factors market.…”

Authoritarian exclusion and laissez‐faire inclusion: Comparing the punishment of men convicted of sex offenses in England & Wales and Norway*

“…The contemporary penological literature consistently describes the increasingly exclusionary aims and practices of state punishment reflected in the extreme growth of the size of the prison population and of the population subjected to community punishment, as well as in the density of regulations applied to people subjected to the latter (McNeill, 2019). Common across these accounts is a description of the growth of the Preventive State (Steiker, 1998; Zedner & Ashworth, 2019)—that is, a state preoccupied with the management of risk and the provision of security for the majority, and that does so by weakening individual rights and extending its own power at the bottom end (Wacquant called this “a centaur state , liberal at the top and paternalistic at the bottom”; 2009, p. 312, emphases in original; see also Feeley & Simon, 1992; Garland, 2001). People convicted of sex offenses are often described as the archetypical target population of these preventive and exclusionary strategies, and many scholars have described how their citizenship rights are systematically stripped after their convictions.…”

“…Smith and Ugelvik (2017) built on these insights, supplementing the two ideal types they see in Pratt's work—the punitive Anglophone and the mild Nordic—with a third, the “Big Mother penal welfare state model” (Smith & Ugelvik, 2017, p. 513), which represents a culture of benign but intrusive intervention. Like the Preventive State (Zedner & Ashworth, 2019), the Big Mother State is highly active, and it overlooks individual rights to serve its own purposes; unlike the Preventive State, its desire is to help rather than to manage. In the words of Smith and Ugelvik, the embrace of this State “is simultaneously loving and forceful, and she both wants and knows what is best for you” (2017, p. 513; see also Pratt & Eriksson, 2013, p. 190).…”

Prevention of Radicalization as an Emergent Field of Plural Policing in Norway: The Accelerating Role of Militant Islamists

“…diverse manifestations of this preemptive turn, particularly since the 9/11 attacks (Zedner & Ashworth, 2018). The preemptive turn has involved a shift from reactive responses to crimes that have been committed to prioritizing proactive efforts to forestall, for example, radicalization.…”