Governmentality’ and the Problem of Crime
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Description
Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1977) made a huge impression on criminology, providing it with a theoretical language with which to analyse the practices of punishment, as well as with a heightened sense of criminology's own status as a power/knowledge apparatus linked into these very practices. Now, a dozen years after his death, Foucault has begun to exert a theoretical influence of a quite different kind. From 1978 until his death in 1984, his work developed around a new theme, ‘the government of others and the government of one's self’, which focused particularly on the relations between two poles of governance—the forms of rule by which various authorities govern populations and the technologies of the self through which individuals work on themselves to shape their own subjectivity. These analyses of Foucault - broadly described as studies of ‘governmentality’—have inaugurated a vigorous research programme and an impressive scholarly literature, anatomizing practices of government across a range of social and economic fields. Analyses of this kind have recently begun to consider the field of crime control and criminal justice, suggesting that a second, and rather different, ‘Foucault effect’ might be about to be felt within theoretical criminology. At a time when criminologists are trying to come to terms with a reconfigured criminological field, the governmentality literature offers a powerful framework for analyzing how crime is problematized and controlled. It is focused on the present—particularly on the shift from ‘welfarist’ to ‘neo-liberal’ politics—and avoids reductionist or totalizing analyses, encouraging instead an openended, positive account of practices of governance in specific fields. It aims to anatomize contemporary practices, revealing the ways in which their modes of exercising power depend on specific ways of thinking (rationalities) and specific ways of acting (technologies), as well as on specific ways of ‘subjectifying’ individuals and governing populations. It also problematizes these practices by subjecting them to a ‘genealogical’ analysis—a tracing of their historical lineages that aims to undermine their ‘naturalness’ and open up a space for alternative possibilities. In the first part of this chapter, I discuss the usefulness of this governmentality approach in opening up new ways of understanding the discourses, problems and practices of contemporary crime control. I then turn to consider some of the limitations and problems of this framework and argue, against some of its proponents, that an engagement with (certain forms of) sociological analysis would allow governmentality studies to overcome some of these limitations.
Source Publication
Governable Places: Readings on Governmentality and Crime Control
Source Editors/Authors
Russell Smandych
Publication Date
1999
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Governmentality’ and the Problem of Crime" (1999). Faculty Chapters. 689.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/689
