Theoretical Criminology 17(3)

Theoretical Criminology, August 2013: Volume 17, Issue 3

Power to the people: Violent victimization, inequality and democratic politics
Lisa L Miller

Contemporary scholarship on punishment, politics and society generally treats democratic politics and crime policy as a dangerous mix. In this view, when crime comes onto democratic political agendas, it generates perverse political incentives that result in politicians pandering to and/or manipulating mass publics bent on harsh punishment. In this article, I argue that an examination of violent victimization complicates this conventional wisdom. Using violence as a framework, I challenge three fundamental assumptions about the relationship between democracy and crime. From there, I suggest how different democratic institutional arrangements might facilitate broader public participation in crime politics, and how that participation can lead to promoting less, rather than more punishment.

‘This is your face on meth’: The punitive spectacle of ‘white trash’ in the rural war on drugs
Travis Linnemann and Tyler Wall

This article engages the dynamic role of the crime image and more specifically the mug shot, in a contemporary anti-methamphetamine media campaign known as ‘Faces of Meth’. Understood here as a pedagogical policing program, Faces of Meth attempts to deter methamphetamine use through graphic ‘before meth’ and ‘after meth’ images of the faces of white meth users. Our objective is not to evaluate the actual effectiveness of these fear appeals. Rather we discuss how the photographs are largely structured by and embedded within already existing cultural anxieties about the figure of ‘white trash’, reflecting both the dominance and precariousness of white social position.

Policing the ‘progressive’ city: The racialized geography of drug law enforcement
Mona Lynch, Marisa Omori, Aaron Roussell, and Matthew Valasik

This article explores selective drug law enforcement practices in a single municipality, San Francisco, where racial disproportionality in drug arrest rates is among the highest in the United States. We situate this work in the vein of recent case-study examinations done in Seattle, Cleveland, and New York to help build a more nuanced picture of how the local geography of policing drugs produces racialized outcomes. Within this, we examine how historically embedded local politics shape the varied styles and structures of policing that result in racially discriminatory enforcement patterns. Our goal is to begin sketching out a robust framework of ‘place’ as an orientation for examining discretionary local policing practices, especially as they impact marginalized groups and communities of color.

Beware of notarios: Neoliberal governance of immigrants as crime victims
Jamie G Longazel and Benjamin Fleury-Steiner

Drawing on David Garland’s (1996, 2001) observations about the ‘limits of the sovereign state’, we seek in this article to develop a critical understanding of the recent response in the USA to ‘notario fraud’—an unlawful act committed when a non-lawyer poses as an immigration attorney. While efforts to protect immigrants from fraud on their surface represent a counter to recent anti-immigrant policies, our analysis of materials distributed by what we term an anti-notario fraud apparatus suggests that such activity amounts to neoliberal governance. Specifically, we study immigrant advocacy groups’ discourse around the issue and argue that anti-notario efforts are akin to responsibilization. We also study how law enforcement officials discuss the issue and theorize how a one-dimensional framing of notarios as villains supports the neoliberal regime by protecting the state’s sovereignty to manufacture what Nicholas De Genova (2002) has called ‘deportability’.

Asserting criminality and denying migrant belonging: The production of deportability in US judicial court hearings
Clare Newstead and Giovanna Maria Frisso

Recent interest in the securitization of immigration has highlighted a significant shift in immigration enforcement, from border regulation to the control of territorially present populations. Emphasis has focused on the production of migrant illegality and strategies that criminalize undocumented workers. In this article, we shift the focus of analysis to examine how legal residents convicted of non-immigration-related criminal offences are also actively produced as deportable subjects. Drawing on research examining records of appeal cases involving Jamaican nationals in removal proceedings consequent to a criminal conviction, we illustrate how deportability is produced by the deportation process itself, through legal practices that assert migrant criminality and alienage. We suggest ‘criminality’ not only comes to represent migrant subjectivity, at the expense of other forms of subjectivity based on belonging and territorial presences, but acts as affirmation of alienage.

A new risk management for prisoners in France: The emergence of a death-avoidance approach
Gaëtan Cliquennois and Brice Champetier

A new punitive approach in the French prison sector has emerged as a result of the European Court of Human Rights and the French administrative courts exerting pressure on prison governors in response to the complaints made by prisoners’ families, the demands of human rights groups and the requirements of human rights protection bodies. By publicizing cases of suicide and using strategic litigation based on the right to life, human rights groups and barristers have put the prison administration under pressure. The resultant risk management policy and death-avoidance approach are not linked to the decline of the welfare state, as claimed by new penology scholars, but rather to a shared risk management thinking between the prison administration and human rights groups.