Theoretical Criminology 15(4)

Theoretical Criminology, November 2011: Volume 15, Issue 4

Crime prevention goes abroad: Policy transfer and policing in post-apartheid South Africa

Jonny Steinberg

Loader and Walker have warned that ideas about order ‘always travel with culturally specific baggage’, ‘never adapt easily to [their] new environment’ and thus ‘always risk hubristic failure’. My aim is to offer an exemplar of this hubristic failure. I chart the infusion of Anglo-American ideas of crime prevention into the policing institutions of South Africa’s young democracy. These ideas bore a bloated conception of urban security which inadvertently stimulated, and thus helped to keep alive, a similarly bloated conception of security that lay at the heart of apartheid thinking. Dressed in the garb of crime prevention, a modified version of the paramilitary policing practices that flourished under apartheid returned to the streets of democratic South Africa.

Prepression: The actuarial archive and new technologies of security
Willem Schinkel

This article argues, on the basis of a discussion of current Dutch databases, that we are witnessing what can be called prepression. This combination of prevention and repression entails the archiving of risky individuals and their selection for ‘early intervention’. Such databases can be seen in light of their work of social imagination: they visualize the constitutive outside of ‘society’, and in so doing function as part of a governing imaginary. Crucial in contemporary prepression is the archive, which is interpreted not as a recording but also as a recoding of the past, that is, as an ordering principle in the fields of law and order, social work and health. The cases on the basis of which this article develops a preliminary sketch of a theory of prepression are drawn from recent developments concerning actuarial archiving systems in the Netherlands.

Crime behind the glass: Exploring the sublime in crime at the Vienna Kriminalmuseum
Laura Huey

Scholars have noted an ever-increasing growth in the number of crime-themed leisure and tourism venues. Within this article I examine one such site: the Vienna Kriminalmuseum. An analysis of this site provides an opportunity to explore how the ‘sublime in crime’ is presented to the Museum’s visitors in ways that intentionally merge the macabre with the educational. This presentation says much, I suggest, not only about the Museum’s goals, but about its intended audience, an audience seeking to be exposed to elements of the darkest side of humanity, now sanitized for wider public consumption through the union of educational and entertainment strategies.

Penal tourism in Argentina: Bridging Foucauldian and neo-Durkheimian perspectives
Michael Welch and Melissa Macuare

In theoretical criminology, scholars continue to debate the significance of power-based perspectives in the face of semiotics and vice versa. Among the problems created by ‘taking sides’ is the missed opportunity that would allow for the synthesis of instrumentalist and culturalist work. Recognizing the merits of both perspectives, this project explores penal tourism in Argentina in ways that reveal key forms of state power alongside important cultural signs, symbols, and messages. In particular, our case study of the Argentine Penitentiary Museum in Buenos Aires delivers a thick description of its collection so as to bridge Foucault’s insights on systematic penal regimes with Durkheim’s socio-religious concepts: pollution; the sacred; the mythological; and the cult of the individual.

Punishment and the body in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ South Africa: A story of punitivist humanism
Gail Super

This paper analyses official discourse about punishment in South Africa, from 1976 to 2004. It frames punishment as a form of governance which is both connected to, and separate from, the Anglo/American/European examples that are generally referred to in the literature. The shift from corporal and capital punishment to the use of long-term imprisonment is discussed within a framework that emphasizes how both the apartheid and post-apartheid state explained and attempted to justify punishment policies during times of great upheaval and change. Penality under apartheid was a complex entity, and the punishment regime under the Nationalist Party government was starting to reform during the period analyzed. This liberalization was accompanied by a lengthening of terms of imprisonment, a trend that has continued in the ‘new’ South Africa. The prison in post-apartheid South Africa speaks to both humanism and punitivism. This duality has contributed to its enduring nature and endless capacity to reform.

Neutralizing sexual victimization: A typology of victims’ non-reporting accounts
Karen G. Weiss

Drawing its examples from National Crime Victimization Survey narratives, this article proposes a theoretical framework for elucidating victims’ non-reporting accounts, the rationales that victims use to justify why they do not report sexual victimization to police. The framework delineates four account types—denying criminal intent, denying serious injury, denying victim innocence, and rejecting a victim identity—that each problematize one or more critical elements of real and reportable crime. By delineating victims’ accounts of unwanted sexual incidents, along with each account’s distinct neutralization strategies, non-reporting rationales, and cognitive benefits, this article contributes theoretically to discourses on unreported and unacknowledged rape, as well as to a broader literature on non-reported crime.