The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society
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Description
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. One insight that Friedrich Nietzsche shares with Emile Durkheim—perhaps the only insight shared by these very different thinkers—is that strong political regimes have no need to rely upon intensely punitive sanctions. Punitiveness may pose as a symbol of strength, but it should be interpreted as a symptom of weak authority and inadequate controls. The most visible and striking phenomenon of recent penal policy in Britain and the USA is the punitiveness which has come to characterize prominent aspects of government policy and political rhetoric. In what follows, I will seek to identify the weaknesses and limitations that motivate this display of punitiveness and to point to some of the problems of power and authority that lie behind it. I also want to describe some quite different strategies of crime control that have been prompted by these same weaknesses, and that are emerging—rather less visibly—alongside the recurring recourse to punitive display. This second set of strategies is quite different in character from the punitive current and bears a complex relation to it. I will characterize these strategies as adaptations to the current predicament of crime control, whereas the punitive strategy will be described as a symbolic denial of that predicament. I will go on to suggest that this dualistic, ambivalent, and often contradictory pattern of crime control is underpinned by a similarly dualistic and ambivalent pattern of criminological thinking, involving a split between what I term a ‘criminology of the self’ and a ‘criminology of the other’. My argument will be that this is a contradictory dualism expressing a conflict at the heart of contemporary policy, rather than a rationally differentiated response to different kinds of crime. I take as my point of departure the predicament of crime control in late modern society and the reactions to this predicament on the part of state agencies. I want to focus on the problem of crime control as it is perceived and managed by the agencies and authorities involved, and to trace how these perceptions and administrative strategies have changed over time. That broader social and cultural forces play a part in shaping the 'problem' and its ‘perception’ is taken for granted—and largely unexplored—in the present paper. My analysis will be based upon trends which are discernible in Great Britain, although there is evidence to suggest that similar trends are also present in the USA, Australia and elsewhere.
Source Publication
Perspectives on Crime Reduction
Source Editors/Authors
Tim Hope
Publication Date
2000
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society" (2000). Faculty Chapters. 687.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/687
