‘Technologies of responsibility’: social order, disorderly citizens, and the state

In her important monograph, In Search of Criminal Responsibility, Lacey explores changing relations between individual and state and charts the history of growing state ‘confidence in the possibility of shaping the habits and dispositions of citizenhood’ through the criminal law and other legal measures. She concludes, ‘we are seeing not so much a replacement of one paradigm of responsibility by another, but rather an accumulation of conceptions or “technologies” of responsibility.’ This chapter considers these controversial new hybrid legal orders such as the ASBO and its successors with which the state seeks to instil habits of respectable citizenship and to secure civil order. These diverse powers engraft new techniques of ‘responsibilization’ on to existing criminal laws, designed to police ‘irregular’ citizens who occupy precarious places at the margins, such as youth, those engaging in anti-social behaviour, the poor, and the homeless. Arguably these technologies do not signify the growth of state confidence so much as its resort to regulatory fixes to intractable problems of governance. It concludes by considering the implications of these developments for the attribution of responsibility both in and outside the criminal law

Beyond 'Criminology vs. Zemiology': Reconciling crime with social harm

Since its emergence at the start of the twenty-first century, zemiology and the field of harm studies more generally, has borne an ambiguous and, at times, seemingly antipathetic relationship with the better-established field of criminology. Whilst the tension between the perspectives is, at times, overstated, attempts to reconcile the perspectives have also proved problematic, such that, at present, it appears that they risk either becoming polarized into mutually antagonistic projects, or harmonized to the point that zemiology is simply co-opted within criminology. Whilst tempting to view this as nothing more than an academic squabble, it is the central argument put forward in this chapter that the current trend towards either polariziaton or harmonization of the criminological and zemiological projects, risks impoverishing both perspectives, both intellectually and, more fundamentally, in terms of their capacity to effect meaningful social change. To this end, this chapter offers a critical reflection of recent attempts to reconcile the social harm perspective with criminology, focussing in particular on Majid Yar’s attempts to do so using the concept of ‘recognition’ derived from critical theory. It is suggested that such attempts, whilst important in the contribution they make to developing a theory of harm, are necessarily flawed by their reliance on an implicit assumption of a shared conception of harm underpinning both the concept of ‘crime’ and ‘social harm’. By contrast, it is the central argument put forward in this chapter that zemiology and criminology are best understood as divergent normative projects which, whilst sharing many of the same goals with regards to the improvement of the criminal justice system and the tackling of social problems, differ primarily in the means by which they seek to achieve these. Therefore, rather than denying this debate through the collapsing of one perspective into the other, or polarizing them into hostiles camps, it is only by recognising the nature of this debate and fostering dialogue between the perspectives that we can achieve our shared goals and effect meaningful change

Criminology or Zemiology? Yes, please! on the refusal of choice between false alternatives

Buried deep within the zemiological movement and its supportive literature is the implicit assumption that the word zemia, the organising concept around which zemiology is built, simply represents ‘the Greek word for harm’. This interpretation has supported numerous drives to ‘move beyond criminology’ and erect strict borders between the study of crime and harm. However, a deeper, albeit still rather brief, exploration of zemia reveals that it possesses a broader range of meaning than that commonly afforded to it. By beginning to unpick zemia’s semantic genealogy, it appears that the conventional use of the word to support the imposition of false alternatives between criminology and zemiology is untenable. Accordingly, this chapter attempts to foreground a more integrated approach to the study of crime and harm

Preventive justice

- Divulgação dos SUMÁRIOS das obras recentemente incorporadas ao acervo da Biblioteca Ministro Oscar Saraiva do STJ. Em respeito à lei de Direitos Autorais, não disponibilizamos a obra na íntegra.- Localização na estante: 343.85(73) A831