Crime Prevention as Totalitarian Biopolitics

Abstract

The article examines a number of prescriptions from The Danish Crime Prevention Council and argues that in the name of prevention, ever‐new social and materiel technologies are invented to regulate the life of ordinary citizens. The article contends that this may be interpreted as a comprehensive attempt to exercise power, that is, to structure the possible field of actions of others. But what is more, the rationality of crime prevention amounts to an almost totalitarian biopolitical strategy, as it focuses on virtually all dimensions of life: our health, the way we live, our identities, how we play, the way we move, our relations to neighbours, etc. This biopolitical rationality of crime prevention is closely associated with a more general focus on risk and responsibility.

Keywords:

• Community
• Foucault
• Governmentality
• Health
• Power
• Risk
• Urban design

Notes

This article draws and elaborates on the analysis of crime prevention in Borch (2005). I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments.

There has been an intense debate on whether the diagnosis of the advanced liberal rationality does in fact capture the main developments in current crime control. Pat O'Malley, for example, has argued that the governmentality literature tends to ignore the neo‐conservative rationality which embodies the present calls for, say, punishment and remoralization (O'Malley 2001). This is clearly an important point. Despite a few remarks in the final section of this article, I do not intent to continue this discussion, however, as my the ambition is not to offer an analysis of general trends in crime control, but rather to present an investigation of a limited domain, crime prevention.

In a recent article, Stenson (2005) has made a similar criminological effort to combine the focus on government and biopolitics.

This emphasis on the possible significance of communities on crime prevention is part of a general trend in Western societies. Cf., for example, Pease's analysis of ‘the re‐emergence of community’ in crime prevention (1997: 980 ff.).