‘The Usual Suspects’: Knife Crime Prevention Orders and the ‘Difficult’ Regulatory Subject

Abstract

Knife Crime Prevention Orders (KCPOs) were introduced by the Offensive Weapons Act 2019 with the stated aim of providing additional tools for police to use in combatting increasing rates of knife crime in England and Wales. This article situates KCPOs within a continuous policy trend of procedural hybridization, and highlights the worrying manner in which such criminalization, underpinned by a preventive logic and facilitated by this hybrid procedure, enables new forms of ‘othering’. Drawing a threefold distinction within the concept of the regulatory subject—the responsible, the rational/virtuous and the difficult/other—it argues that preventive hybrids generate a self-fulfilling category of ‘difficult’ subjects, while simultaneously denying them the procedural protections normally afforded to the responsible subject of classical criminal law.

Alcohol Regulation, Historical Change and the Contemporaneity of the Non-Contemporaneous: A Non-Linear Story in Four Parts

“…Young people were no longer seen as a valuable resource that must be protected, but as a threat which the rest of society needs to be protected from (Yeomans, 2014). A similar punitive ethos continues to be apparent in the twenty-first century and is evident in how, as already mentioned, governmental efforts to suppress anti-social behaviour or protect quality of life have been largely constituted by regulatory actions that discipline and punish young people (Crawford, 2009;Jamieson, 2012;Hendry, 2019).…”

“…Equally, while they can constrain the actions of people of all ages, the enforcement of DPPOs and PSPOs has not been necessarily impartial. Indeed, the whole suite of civil orders created by New Labour and subsequent Conservative governments have, in practice, been principally employed in efforts to discipline or control young people (see Crawford, 2009;Jamieson, 2012;Hendry, 2019). Importantly, these new legislative provisions and the disciplinary practices they propagate did not modify or replace the age threshold of 18 and other existing legal controls on youth drinking but, instead, were added to them.…”