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: Governing Through Crime

In the Safe Zone: At the heart of governing through crime is an impossible dream of the perfectly safe space

By Jonathan Simor

One of the most distinctive features of America's late 20th century engagement with crime as a problem of governance is the relentless recourse to spatial constructions of crime and the possibility of security from it that have at their core the creation of a pure space of safety in which dangerous people have been excluded. This is a distinctive vision of order and security. The great cities of 19th and 20th century America were built to encourage maximum freedom of access to stoke commerce and probably class mobility (of course this was an idea betrayed in a thousand ways). They relied on police and the criminal justice system to deter crime before the fact or correct it afterwards. Since the 1960s Americans have increasingly rejected this model of security and in favor of a very different and extreme model, one that placed crime prevention right at the heart of the polis...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on February 18, 2008 (boomark / email).