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January 22, 2011
We live in a culture that is now saturated with images of crime, fears of crime, surveillance of our bodies, private policing and the techniques of repression. Behind these images a neo-liberal mode of governance operates in the economy and society. Though a neo-liberal shaping of public policy is most obvious in the economy-- market competition, privatisation, austerity politics, decentred regulation etc --- it also shapes the welfare and penal systems of late capitalist society. Crime is a central concern of a neo-liberal mode of governance. Criminology is booming.
In his Government and Control essay in The British Journal of Criminology (Vol 40, Issue 2, 2000) Nikolas Rose says that the logics of control under neo-liberal mode of governance is concerned with both the shift from reformation to incapacitation and punishment of criminals in the prison regime and the ethical reconstruction of the excluded individual in the welfare regime.
The latter is seen in workfare programmes that seek to micro-manage the behaviour of welfare recipients in order to remoralize them. They stress the need to reform habits as a condition of receipt of benefits, and ultimately, to seek to get get all those physically able to work off benefits entirely. The aim is responsibilization: to reconstruct self-reliance in those who are excluded. This implies that the problems of the excluded person are reformulated as moral or ethical problems; as problems in the ways in which excluded individuals understand and conduct themselves and their existence.
The language of empowerment codes the exclusion as a lack of self-esteem, self-worth and the skills of self-management to steer oneself as an active individual in the world of choice. Subjects are to do the work on themselves, not in the name of conformity, but to make them free. Doing the work means moral reformation through ethical reconstruction of the will and self control, of the habits of independence, life-planning and self improvement so that the individual adheres to the core values of honesty, self-reliance and concern for others and can be reinserted into family, work, and consumption.
Those who cannot be so reconstructed to become responsible, to govern themselves ethically, will be imprisoned. For them--the predator, the pedophile, the psychopath---harsh measures are entirely appropriate as they present a threat to the public.
Whilst welfare budges are cut the penal budgets expand, and the zones or spaces of exclusion---petty theft, drinking alcohol in public, loitering, drugs, etc--- are being effectively criminalized and being managed with an overlay of increased punitiveness.
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