'That Heavy Machine': Reprising the Colonial Apparatus in 21st-Century Social Control
Social Justice › Vol. 32 Nbr. 1, January 2005
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Summary
Traditional sources of authority on matters of punishment and crime control, such as bureaucratic and academic criminologists, have been shifted to the margins so as to allow a strong current popular sentiment to enter the shape debates on punishment policy and responses to crime. The logic and rationale of these new tactics of government, including the changing political relationship between government and offender, are examined.
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'That Heavy Machine': Reprising the Colonial Apparatus in 21st-Century Social Control
SVEN LINDQVIST (2002: 102) WRITES OF THE 19TH CENTURY AS A TIME "WHEN IT was still regarded as more natural to burn down a village than to undress in public."1 The patterns of thought that allowed for such brutality and prudence have returned to find a place in contemporary debates and measures directed at the so-called dangerous offender. This figure, who appears as a kind of atavistic Other against which civil society might usefully seek to measure and reinforce its values, has in the last quarter century become subject to a variety of increasingly punitive sanctions and strategies of exclusion. In the sphere of sentencing, for example, governments have elaborated a doctrine of "public protection," placing it ahead of traditional juridical principles of parsimony and proportionality. This change has occurred against a backdrop of what Bottoms (1995) has termed the rise of a "popular punitiveness." Here traditional sources of authority on matters of punishment and crime control, such as bureaucratic and academic criminologists, have been shifted to the margins so as to allow a strong current of popular sentiment to enter and shape debates on punishment policy and responses to crime. Part of the novelty of these changes seems to lie in their sharp reconfiguration of certain previously solid relationships and expectations. The severing of the relationship between offense severity and sentence length, with its attendant expectation of proportionality, is one such case. Another might b...
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