New directions in prevention: ignored insecurities and social harm

Question 1

What was exemplified in Mike Davis’ 1998 depiction of late 20th century Los Angeles as an ‘ecology of fear’?

Answer 1

• preoccupation of security studies over the past two decades with surveillance containment and exclusion

Question 2

What is positive security?

Answer 2

• less ‘defensive’ strategies which focus on inclusion rather than exclusion
• a means to improve urban safety and security by strategies based on attributes of living together such as ‘care’, ‘protection’ and ‘belonging’

Question 3

What is an example of positive security?

Answer 3

The De-esculate project, Eindhoven
- pursues the securitisation of public space through behavioural manipulation and inclusion
- using light, smell and sound in soft ways to manage mood and behaviour
- contrasts defensive forms of security architecture which seek to ‘design out’ unwanted behaviour without providing cues for alternative behaviour

Question 4

What is pastoral power?

Answer 4

• an individualising and totalising form of power
• pastoral power in its typology, organisation and mode of functioning, implies a practice that targets ‘a multiplicity in movement’ in order to insert and maintain people on the right path and to steer their change and development in the appropriate direction

Question 5

Ignored insecurities and social justice (Palidda, 2016)

Answer 5

security governance:
- a neo-liberal concept
- privileges a concern with the ‘usual suspects’ of: street crime, drug use, migrants and terrorist incidents

an exercise in ‘mass distraction’ from……..

ignored insecurities
…… everyday insecurities that are objectively more prevalent and harmful, such as:
- exploitative shadow economies
- deregulated but toxic industrial production
- degraded environments
- corrupt public administration

• they are ignored by a conspiracy of business, organised labour and officialdom and accepted as the cost of economic growth in global markets

Question 6

Ignored insecurities: case studies

Answer 6

• urban renewal in Campania post 1980 Irpinia earthquake, ‘Disposable bodies’ (Petrillo)
• Child cancer rates and Taranto steelworks, ‘Better sick than unemployed’ (Sagitta, 2016)

Question 7

Zemiology: decriminalising criminology?

Answer 7

• recoding crime as social harm: a conception of crime without a conception of power is meaningless
• recoding criminal justice as social justice: the redefining of crime as harm opens up the possibility of dealing with the consequences of the offences

Question 8

The zemiological critique of criminology (Canning, Hillyard and Tombs, 2023)

Answer 8

• Crime has no ontological reality
• Criminology perpetuates the myth of crime
• Crime consists of many petty events
• Crime excludes many serious harms
• Constructing crimes
• Criminalization and punishment
• Crime control is ineffective
• The category of crime, and therefore criminology which is largely organized around
  it, gives legitimacy to the expansion of ‘crime control’
• The category of crime serves to maintain power relations

Question 9

Zemiology: replacing criminology?

Answer 9

criminology:
- criminology deploys an individualistic notion of harm
- the focus on crime points us towards a focus on the inter-personal
- individualised concepts of offending and victimisation imply individualised forms of justice and risk management

zemiology:
- Conversely, a social harm or zemiological approach implies a concern with social structures of power and inequality
- Zemiology consequently focuses on the social conditions producing harms such as: excess winter deaths, worker deaths, environmental pollution, abuses of state power
- What needs to be prevented, therefore, is not ‘crime’ but ‘social harms’ and their enabling social conditions, through forms of social justice