Social Issues of Law and Order

In this paper the author extends his account of‘postmodernity and its discontents’ to address questions of crime and penal policy in the contemporary period. It is argued that there is a tendency to maintain order by resort to a‘paradigm of exclusion’ and this pattern is exemplified by a discussion of the significance of the Pelican Bay‘super-max’ prison in California and the more widespread reliance upon mass incarceration that has emerged in recent years. It is argued that the Pelican Bay project is not, as it appears at first sight, a super high-tech version of the Panopticon. On the contrary, the project is shown to lack the key qualities of work-related discipline and re-subjectification that characterized the latter. Instead it operates as a factory of exclusion for people habituated to their status as‘the excluded’. It is a technique of immobilization, one of several measures of‘space-confinement’ that have arisen in response to the postmodern social field and the wasteful, rejecting logic of globalization. The role of prisons in the post-correctional age is shown to be linked to the new forms of anxiety that characterize the populations of postmodern societies, and to the political strategies that express and reinforce these widespread sentiments. Whereas modern liberal societies were organized around a compromise wherein a measure of individual liberty was exchanged for collective economic security, today’s tendency is the opposite of this: a trade off of collective security in exchange for the maximization of individual choice, which in turn, focused by the political process upon the problem of crime and its control gives rise to a logic of exclusion and fortification. This feature of postmodernity is, in effect, symptomatic of a failure to face up to the challenge of existential insecurity generated by our social and economic arrangements.