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Governing on the margins: exploring the contributions of governmentality studies to critical criminology in Canada.

Article Excerpt
Introduction

Despite its early promise, critical criminology has waned in influence in recent years, its star dimmed by the rising currency of administrative criminology and the migration of critically minded scholars from the criminological tent to more distant theoretical traditions and domains of substantive inquiry. This gradual decline has spurred a renewed effort by those who continue to identify with the mantra of critical criminology to diagnose this apparent malaise and to seek pathways to renewal. This article is informed by such a spirit. It draws on the belief that a core limitation of critical criminology lies in its continued emphasis on the apparatus of the state as a fulcrum of power, oppression, and domination and its related endorsement of an ontology that privileges crime as an archetypal expression of social disorder. This focus on the state, and on state-centred conceptions of criminality, tends to neglect how injustice and domination are reproduced through non-state institutions and forms of expertise that are (1) dispersed through social space and (2) forged on the boundaries of formal legal frameworks through quasi-criminal categories and identities. Here individuals are governed indirectly, at a distance, in the interstitial regions of the social order, through governmental rationalities that transcend the traditional confines of the state and the formal operations of its institutional avatars: police, courts, and corrections. Drawing upon this wider frame of reference, we seek to explore some of the limitations of critical criminology and to suggest that this tradition may well benefit from a closer dialogue with governmentality studies, a body of work rooted in the analysis of governance beyond the state. In encouraging a dialogue between these traditions, we explore various points of cross-fertilization based on two substantive contexts: the governance of immigration and the private policing of financial disorder. (1) It is our belief that this type of dialogical exchange will help to rejuvenate critical criminology by drawing its critical eye to forms of governance on the margins and loosening its reliance on a state-centred ontology of crime.

The limits of critical criminology and the contributions of governmentality studies

With the publication in 1985 of the New Criminologies in Canada, an edited collection adopting its name from the 1973 seminal British work The New Criminology, critical criminology emerged as a legitimate scholarly pursuit in Canada. From its inception, critical criminology was viewed more as a form of critical inquiry grounded in a certain esprit de corps than as a coherent and theoretically consistent corpus or body of work (Carlen 2002). Consequently, while crafted from a variety of theoretical and conceptual traditions, including postmodernism, peacemaking, feminism, and Left realism, at its core critical criminology has been enlivened by a critical sensibility that has sought to interrogate the conditions under which inequality and social injustice are reproduced and legitimated through state responses to crime. This involves a dedicated pursuit of social justice as a distinctly normative enterprise, one juxtaposed to the more traditional and conservative pursuits of administrative criminology--the intellectual handmaiden of the criminal-justice apparatus. Thus, critical criminology has emerged as a "splendid oxymoron" (Ratner 1989) dedicated to the task of transforming "criminology from a science of crime control into a struggle for social justice" (MacLean and Milovanovic 1991: 113).

Yet, despite a flurry of activity in the 1970s and 1980s and its direct influence on criminological thought in Canada, the development of critical criminology has stagnated in recent years. (2) A number of reasons may be proffered for this gradual decline. First, the field of criminology as a whole has fallen under the gravitational pull of an administrative tradition largely devoted to crafting expedient policy responses to crime. Second, as a reaction to these developments, more critically minded scholars have sought out alternate conceptual terrains. One particular theoretical vein that has attracted considerable attention in recent years is rooted in the later work of Michel Foucault (Foucault 1991). Gradually extended and refined by several followers (e.g., Rose 1999; Dean 1999), the governmentality tradition, as it has come to be known, is characterized by its sensitivity to transformations in the nature of government and by its recognition that power is exercised through a diverse patchwork of sites, logics, and strategies rather than through a centralized administrative apparatus (i.e., the state). Moreover, this body of work is informed by a constitutive understanding of power as populations and subjects are constituted, and thus made governable, based on particular logics of problematization and related technologies of calculability and intervention. Through an eschewal of conventional approaches to government as a state project and an emphasis on governance as a problematizing activity, governmentality scholars have provided invaluable insights into the workings of power on the margins of formal state bureaucracies and legal frameworks. Here control is exercised at a distance through seemingly innocuous forms of expertise and knowledge.

Interestingly, the wider frame of reference provided by governmentality studies throws into relief a number of key limitations of critical criminology. Reflecting the latter's roots in the politics of the Left and its close affinity with the political-economy tradition, foremost among these is not only a preoccupation with the state as a primary site and practical embodiment of power and injustice (see, e.g., Ratner...