POLICING THE CRISIS 30 YEARS ON

Aftermath: Living with the crisis: From PTC to

Governing Through Crime
MICHELLE BROWN, Ohio University, USA

In these disparate voices we can hear the closure occurring the interlocking
mechanisms closing, the doors clanging shut. The society is battening itself down
for the long haul through a crisis. There is light at the end of the tunnel but not
much; and it is far off. Meanwhile, the state has won the right, and indeed inherited
the duty, to move swiftly, to stamp fast and hard, to listen in, discreetly survey,
saturate and swamp, charge or hold without charge, act on suspicion, hustle and
shoulder, to keep society on the straight and narrow. Liberalism, that last back-stop
against arbitrary power, is in retreat. It is suspended. The times are exceptional. The
crisis is real. We are inside the law-and-order state. (Hall et al., 1978: 323)

Welcome to the desert of the real.1

Criminologists today find themselves in times and places where the questions they
ask take on contexts with little analytical or material precedence: cultures of control
(Garland, 2001a), fear (Furedi, 1992; Glassner, 1993), surveillance and suspicion
(Staples, 1997; Lyon, 2001) and their correlates, wars against terror (Butler, 2004;
Ignatieff, 2004), mass incarceration (Garland, 2001b; Mauer, 2006), and states of
exception (Agamben, 2005). In these debates and in the aftermath of Policing the
Crisis (PTC), crime can never, or at least should never, again be understood outside
of what produced it and what its consequences were, that whole complex action
and reaction (Hall et al., 1978: 18). And yet reaction now has such massive scope and
scale, so much so as to be a criminogenic force in and of itself. To understand crime
at all now necessitates an understanding of the massive social control apparatus that
has emerged in the west, precipitated by the United States, currently on the verge of
incarcerating two and a quarter million people with disastrous direct and collateral
consequences. Simultaneously, the US is engaging in new and unusual global, post-
9/11 penal projects like those at Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib. The manner in which
Stuart Hall and his collaborators anticipated and laid a foundational structure and
account for our understanding of the emergent political role of social control is
embodied in their analysis of the slow construction of a soft law-and-order society

CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 2008 SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore
www.sagepublications.com, ISSN 1741-6590, Vol 4(1): 131136 [DOI: 10.1177/1741659007087279]

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132 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 4(1)

(Hall et al., 1978: 306). The problem now, of course, is that law and order has culmin-
ated in a penal state in which crisis serves as the chronic condition of modern social
and political life. Policing of the self and others is a normalized feature of everyday life,
with responsibilization and exclusion embedded in institutions and social practices well
beyond criminal justice. In this retrospective, consequently, I wish to engage briefly a
sad paradox: how living with the crisis came to be simply living and the deep impact
upon social life of such a configuration.
At the time of PTCs writing, crime was an emergent way in which to govern and
organize social and political life. The contours and depth of crisis were to be found
in a historical shift, in the accumulation of contradictions and breaks that mark hege-
monic processes, from a consensual to coercive state structure (Hall et al., 1978: 219).
The birth of a law-and-order society was the ultimate legitimation of this coercive mode
of governance with social discipline at its heart. In PTC, consensus was shown to be
gradually abandoned as a structure for state rule, bringing about what Hall et al. referred
to, presciently, as the exceptional state a coercive mode of governance directed at
social control, a new reliance upon and foregrounding of criminal justice agencies in
maintaining social order, and the condensation of all social issues around crime through
a manipulation of the potentiality of violence. Law-and-order governance, then, was
defined through its overwhelming single consequence of legitimating the recourse to
the law, to the constraint and statutory power, as the main, indeed the only, effective
means left of defending hegemony in conditions of severe crisis (Hall et al., 1978:
278). In short, law-and-order societies became contexts in which law serves as the
first resort and crime, foreshadowing governmentality, actuarialism, and the new pen-
ology, the most effective mechanism through which to regulate individuals and groups
within the social order. Hall et al. (1978) emphasized the slow, processual aspects of
this phenomenon, where the state slides toward exception as coercive management
gradually achieves popular consent and legitimacy through the appropriation of a
broad, diffuse sense of social anxiety. This anxiety at the time of PTCs writing was
loosely directed at an enemy who was perceived to be lurking everywhere but subtly
diffused into the control of a few, defined by race and class. In such contexts, new
thresholds emerged for governance, thresholds built upon potentiality alone and a
prolonged, anxious existence at the edge, where the questions given the most salience
were those framed by security: who is safe in this world of violence? (p. 282). In this
new experience of crime, the real and perceptual fragmented into a felt sense of crisis
(p. 301). The authors map the power of this reduction: the ways in which real, concrete
suffering and death were dissolved in the abstractness with which they are raised to
the level of sheer violence, out of which emerges a terrible unity based upon yet
another abstraction the utter innocence of the victims, all at the price of historical,
political, and social context (p. 301). PTC thus marks how race, crime, youth con-
densed into the image of mugging became the articulator of a crisis with political,
economic, and ideological dimensions, thereby changing British civil and political life,
ushering in a new mode of political subjectivity. And, in the aftermath, they warned
us of an exceptional state with a structural proclivity toward permanent installation
(p. 306). So what happens when the warning becomes reality when crime becomes

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 BROWN AFTERMATH: LIVING WITH THE CRISIS 133

the lens through which all other social problems are defined and acted upon, when
crisis becomes chronic, and exception becomes the rule?

The aim of this investigation in the urgency of exception in which we live was
to bring to light the fiction that governs this Arcanum imperii [secret of power] par
excellence of our time. What the ark of power contains at its center is the state of
exception but this is essentially an empty space, in which a human action with no
relation to law stands before a norm with no relation to life. (Agamben, 2005: 86)

In contemporary work, state reconstruction is argued to center foundationally upon

a set of fictions that are rendered increasingly visible, empty spaces where the rela-
tionships and responsibilities shared between law, human action and life are daily
severed. This mode of governance relies heavily upon the political symbolism of crime,
violence, and fear as a common sense discourse capable of facilitating a variety of
other aims, including the rise of executive power, the primacy and manipulation of
the victim, and the emergence of a state of exception. Now, social control and the
violence of the state are revealed openly and with little irony as the very basis of
sovereignty. This structural shift that PTC meticulously mapped in its historical and
ideological emergence, Jonathan Simons latest volume, Governing Through Crime
(2007), addresses in terms of its long-term, unanticipated impacts, a new social and
civic order built fundamentally around violent crime. In this context, political and insti-
tutional legitimacy of all sorts is increasingly and centrally built around crime and
responsibilization strategies attached to its prevention. This means that the manner in
which crime is deployed is quite often based upon non-crime related concerns. Thus,
as Simon puts it, the technologies, discourse, and metaphors of crime and criminal
justice have become more visible features of all kinds of institutions, where they can
easily gravitate into new opportunities for governance of the self, family, work, edu-
cation and so on (pp. 45). This mode of governance, of course, as Simon insists,
does not make us more safe but rather exacerbates the contradictions of democracy,
limiting us in its engagement and development, polarizing us around race (and its
longtime code: street crime), and exhausting vital social capital. In the transformation
from the welfare to the penal state, Simon maps how everyday choices decisions
about where to live, work, send children to school are increasingly based upon per-
ceptions of risk and fear of crime. This new political subjectivity reflects a popular
consensus surrounding law-and-order politics and marks the American citizen, finally,
as first and foremost a potential victim:

For more than three decades, the making of crime laws has offered itself rather
explicitly as the most important subject for expressing the common interest of the
American people. We are crime victims. We are the loved ones of crime victims.
Above all, we are those who live in fear that we or those we care for will be
victimized by crime. Although few of us recognize this as a primary identity, our
social practices and the way our lawmakers make laws for us testify to that. By
writing laws that implicitly and increasingly explicitly say that we are victims and
potential victims, lawmakers have defined the crime victim as an idealized political

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134 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 4(1)

subject, the model subject, whose circumstances and experiences have come to
stand for the general good. (p. 110)

As Simon maps it, these shifts are evident in the rise of a prosecutorial complex, made
up of the expansion of prosecutorial and gubernatorial powers at the local level and
attorneys general and presidential powers at the federal level. Simultaneously, the
courts, historically protected through their autonomous deliberation as checks upon
executive power, have become withdrawn and deferent to the executive, increasingly
conscious of an emotive, volatile victim consciousness. The criminal justice outcome
of such practices, of course, is mass incarceration and the development of the waste
management prison, a security logic framed entirely in physicality the sorting of
people by risk or potential danger. These technologies of exile detention, expulsion,
dismissal; strategies of shutting out and shutting in expand into other institutions
and ways of life: schools, workplaces, and homes. Here, crime and the potentiality of
violence serve as proxies for managing all kinds of conflicts and disputes ranging from
domestic disputes and child custody battles to problematic students and irresponsible
parents to workplace dismissals and interpersonal conflicts. Governing through crime
ultimately then functions as a mechanism for achieving legitimacy as schools add drug
sweeps and zero tolerance policies (in schools with no previous drug problems) and a
growing prison population is rendered a positive project of state legitimacy in its own
right, quite apart from any impact on crime rates, the outcome of what happens when
traditional checks and balances are reconfigured or eliminated by governance through
crime (Simon, 2007: 158).
As Simons work makes clear, among American scholars, PTC has substantive heirs
most of whom, sadly, are mapping what happens when policing the crisis simply
becomes how we do things and victimizes who we are. This genealogy remains slightly
incomprehensible as the scale and scope of social control, particularly in the American
context, far exceed perhaps the authors worst imaginings at the time of PTCs
writing. Although Hall et al. (1978) were thoroughly criticized for their universalism
and essentialism in the construction of common sense, it is exactly law-and-order
common sense understandings of crime that have moved violence and exception
to the center of American governance. And it is still the question of change and its
mobilization which haunts this legacy. Consequently, PTC presents us with the birth of
law-and-order subjectivities but leaves us caught in the contradictions as to how we
both break free of and reproduce such positions. Possibility, although dim and far off,
lies somewhere in the promise of an agent-citizen who engages civil society as a site
of contest separate from the state and beyond the law. These kinds of complex pro-
cesses of interpretation and politicization leave open small pockets of resistance and
strategy in the mobilization of counter-discourses. Katherine Beckett, in her widely
read Making Crime Pay (1997) a volume marked by the influence of PTC provides
evidence of crucial cleavages beneath the coercion and consensus of law and order
when she writes,

When methodologies that allow people to develop and express the complexity of
their beliefs are used, a different picture emerges. Research using these alternative

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 BROWN AFTERMATH: LIVING WITH THE CRISIS 135

techniques suggests that the popular desire for punishment coexists somewhat
uneasily with support for prevention and rehabilitation and the belief that social
conditions (such as poverty, unemployment, and a disrupted family life) are crim-
inogenic . . . The more exposure people have to nonsensationalistic accounts of
real criminal incidents (from court documents rather than media accounts), the less
punitive they become. (p. 108)

Becketts work implies, like Hall et al.s, that the wars over crimes meaning depend upon
processes of signification. PTC pursued similar aims with a meticulous methodological
attention to the ideological and discursive processes of law and order through critical
assessments of what it means to talk about crime rates, public opinion, political texts,
and their ideological components scientifically with a marked, thorough, and new
reliance upon media as a conduit for understanding shifts in popular discourse. In PTC,
the media emerge as a key site where consent is won or lost through processes
built upon signification spirals, amplification, and tolerance thresholds which legit-
imate new forms of state violence with their chronic crossing (Hall et al., 1978: 220).
But how do we begin to change the way we think, act, represent, and govern? What
processes of signification will it take to mark a successful political and social shift away
from such a state?
In Governing Through Crime, Simon (2007) concludes with a discussion of how a
war against cancer might imply a different mode of governance with another kind
of emergent political subjectivity. In this context, still troubled by war metaphors,
prevention is key but in a manner where victims are empowered and institutions
committed through knowledge, science, research, and treatment, where professional
training is extensive, where networks and information are crucial and proliferating,
built, most importantly, around individuals who have the disease and the families and
friends who support them all of which has radically shifted the cancer patient, Simon
argues, into a rights-bearing subject over the last four decades. This subject, however,
implies a vastly different sociality, where stigma is surpassed and the public good built
not just upon the health, vitality, and protection of its subjects but on how we as a
society choose to deal with some of our largest social problems and the needs of our
most vulnerable citizens: the elderly, the sick, and the dying. Such a turn would mark
a profound site from which to re-envision otherness as amongst us, part of us and the
ones we love. Models and sites for a different social order then do exist but remain
secondary to other modes of subjectivity built around crime. As Simon argues,

These conditions will mean little in the absence of social movements and political
leaders ready to break the hold of crime on American governance . . . That convic-
tion will not spread from the major political institutions of the United States, which
have been largely made over by the war on crime. If it grows, it will spread from
person to person and institution to institution as a discussion breaks out on how
crime risks rule our lives. This book was written with the sole aspiration of starting
just such discussions. If its interpretation of American institutions, communities, and
lives resonates with your experiences, please start a discussion among your friends
and colleagues about governing through crime and its consequences. (p. 282)

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136 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 4(1)

PTC began this discussion some time ago with far-reaching theoretical and meth-
odological insights into the ideological and discursive processes by which a moral panic
surrounding the phenomenon of mugging occurred. That account is now far better
situated as evidence as to how crime itself was historically and politically situated to
mark a shift in governance that is now, unfortunately, the history of the present. The
future of that history and this present will be marked by how we as criminologists
and citizens choose to define ourselves in relationship to the needs of distant and not-
so-distant others in exceptional times.

Note
1 Quoted in The Matrix (1999). Also see Slavoj Zizek (2002).

References
Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Beckett, K. (1997) Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.
Furedi, F. (1992) Culture of Fear: Risk-taking and the Morality of Low Expectation. Washington,
DC: Cassell.
Garland, D. (2001a) The Culture of Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Garland, D. (2001b) Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences. Los Angeles, CA:
SAGE.
Glassner, B. (1993) The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.
New York: Basic Books.
Hall, S., C. Critcher, T. Jefferson and B. Roberts. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State,
and Law and Order. London: Macmillan.
Ignatieff, M. (2004) The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Lyon, D. (2001) Surveillance Society. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.
Mauer, M. (2006) The Race to Incarcerate. New York: New Press.
Simon, J. (2007) Governing Through Crime. New York: Oxford University Press.
Staples, W. (1997) The Culture of Surveillance. New York: St Martins Press.
Zizek, S. (2002) Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related
Dates. New York: Verso.

MICHELLE BROWN, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology,

Ohio University, USA. Email: brownm3@ohio.edu

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