Private Policing in Context

This article considers the development, growth and significance of private policing in a wider context. Section one suggests that the rebirth of private policing is associated with - and, in effect, demands - a change in the conceptual framework with which policing is analysed. While section one addresses the conceptual context of private policing, section two examines its theoretical context by considering various explanations for the post-war growth of commercial security. Moving from specific to general accounts, it is suggested that two explanations - one based upon sociological accounts of the development of modern societies, the other on genealogical accounts of developing mentalities - provide a crucial context for understanding contemporary changes in policing and governance. In the next section, two of these changes - the growing influence of risk-based policing and the increasing significance of diverse patterns of governance - are considered in the context of the fragmented forms of security provision (commercial, municipal, civil and state policing) which are prevalent today. A short concluding section offers some final thoughts on how these arguments impact on the governance of policing. One of the implications contained in this article is that the re-emergence of private policing needs to be considered not only as a problem, but also as an opportunity to identify and address critical questions of contemporary governance.     

Reflections of the Evolving Concept of 'Private Policing'

Once popular state-centred political frameworks, while declining in popularity on many normative agendas, nevertheless continue to guide how we think about and examine policing. Early studies into the private policing phenomenon have thereby focused upon the formal paid private security sector, a set of agencies which do not depart too radically in appearance from traditional public police services. More recent empirical studies have yielded data inconsistent with the established conceptual frameworks. Theorists have been assembling these data into alternate ways of thinking about collective life, which may have profound implications for the ways in which to choose to govern in the future. Further research addressing developments in networked nodal governance may be suggestive of progressive alternatives.     

Reducing and preventing organised crime: An evidence-based critique

Theory and practice in crime prevention and crime reduction have developed and changed significantly, but attention has been focused largely upon conventional forms of crime (especially street crime) and upon situational approaches to their reduction. Drawing on research with a variety of relevant organisations across Europe, this article explores the possibilities of developing more effective crime reduction strategies in respect of organized crime, an area in which (despite important exceptions, particularly in relation to financial regulation), law enforcement rather than prevention has continued to dominate the thinking and the practical responses of the police and other relevant agencies. It illustrates the difficulties of evaluating prevention in the many areas in which data quality on crime levels and their organisation are poor, but also gives examples (mainly financial crime) where private sector data quality are good enough to demonstrate effectiveness. It differentiates impact on crime from impact on the organisation of crime, and between market crimes involving voluntary vice and predatory crimes involving direct harm to victims, concluding that current performance indicators for enforcement agencies may need substantial revision if the focus shifts to organised crime reduction.     

Efficient Contract Remedies And the European Unification

This paper applies theoretical results that are derived from financial-economic principles to the issue of efficient contract remedies in view of the European Unification. Common Law favors the expectation damages remedy, according to which a party who is aggrieved by a breach of contract expects an ex-post damages award, while this paper demonstrates that if the subject of the contract is traded continuously with observable values, an alternative remedy is equally efficient and just. The alternative remedy is rationalized on an ex-ante basis, and thus, courts intervention in the event of a breach of contract may not be essential. The EU aims to establish a uniform commercial code superior to all national law. This goal reflects current cultural differences and lacks of homogeneity, such as expectations and risk preferences across EU Member States. Lacks of homogeneity, can not, however, invalidate the above conclusion, as long as prices are continuously traded and a single price regime prevails. Accordingly, this paper predicts that since price differentials across Member States are likely to disappear faster than other non-homogeneous factors, the Court of Justice will show a tendency to rule, utilizing the rationale underlying the ex-ante regime, and perhaps, to overturn country-specific rulings by National Courts, which favor the expectation damages regime.     

Rape and the Reasonable Man

Standards of reasonability play an important role in some of the most difficult cases of rape. In recent years, the notion of the reasonable person has supplanted the historical concept of the reasonable man as the test of reasonability. Contemporary feminist critics like Catharine MacKinnon and Kim Lane Scheppele have challenged the notion of the reasonable person on the grounds that reasonability standards are gendered to the ground and so, in practice, the reasonable person is just the reasonable man in a gender neutral guise. These critics call for the explicit employment of a reasonable woman standard for application to the actions of female victims of rape. But the arguments for abandoning a gender-neutral standard are double-edged and the employment of gendered standards of reasonability is likely to have implications that are neither foreseen by, nor acceptable to, advocates of such standards. Reasonable agent standards can be dropped, in favor of appeals to the notion of a reasonable demand (or expectation) by the law. However, if reasonable agent standards are to be retained, gendered versions of such standards are not preferable to gender-neutral ones.     

Competitive Distortions in EU Environmental Legislation: Inefficiency versus Inequity

In the European Union a number of emission standards for stationary sources have been harmonised. For many years the legal basis has been article 100 EEC (renumbered as article 94 by the Amsterdam Treaty), which calls for harmonisation to eliminate and prevent distortions of competition in the common market. In the paper, two views of distortion of competition are distinguished: either as an inefficiency in the allocation of resources or as an inequity of starting conditions. At first sight, the inequity interpretation seems to have been the primary motive for harmonising source emission standards. However, a closer investigation reveals that actual harmonisation policies also partly reflect the inefficiency view. Implicitly, the harmonisation policies of the EU may trade off efficiency and equity.     

Is there a Need for a European Criminology?

Readers were invited in Issue 4, 2000 to give their comments on the subject of European criminology. The Editors also invited some scholars on a personal title. The comments, ranging from 1,200 to 2,000 words are presented in alphabetical order. The comments are written by: Rosemary Barberet, Josine Junger-Tas, Martin Killias, H.-J. Schneider, Alenka élih, Henrik Tham, Bas van Stokkom and Lode Walgrave. Together they offer a view on the ideas and different views on European criminology.     

Spectacularizing Crime: Ghostwriting The Law

Beginning with an examination of the process whereby punishment turns its point of application from body to subject, and its scene of application from public to private -- as Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish -- this paper attempts to complicate Foucaults thesis of a shift from corporeal visibility to invisibility as it appears in his account of the withdrawal of punishment from a public, spectacular domain into the no less public yet private sphere of the prison by attending to the transformations of spectacle itself which accompanied this process of disembodiment. The embodied spectacle of punishment -- the states theatre of cruelty -- gave way to a disembodied discursive explosion of images of crime and punishment, and this process can be traced through the texts of Bentham (Panopticon Letters, Fragment on Ontology) and Dickens (Great Expectations). Foucaults dichotomy between the spectacle of public punishment and the disciplinary, non-spectacular prison overlooks the importance of images of crime and punishment which come to pervade public discourse and imagination as part of the installation of the disciplinary régime. Spectacularizing entails a move from the specific, embodied singularity of spectacle to the condition of a generalized, disembodied, and continual insistence: it is this that constitutes and characterizes the shift from spectacular sovereignty to disciplinary surveillance. This spectacularizing is akin to the spectre: some thing that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other (Derrida). The spectre haunting the nineteenth century was the criminal, and that centurys rationalizing of crime and punishment was based upon a fear of the spectral itself.     

The Criminological Enterprise in Europe and the United States: A Contextual Exploration

European criminology obviously means more than simply the collaborative efforts (on drugs, restorative justice, youth gangs) between researchers and scholars from Europe. In this essay, the author compares and contrasts American criminology with criminology in Europe (as it exists in individual countries), without aiming for the essence of European criminology. She points to differences between the US and Europe with regard to the criminological enterprise (such as history, scale, degree of institutionalisation, accessibility, diversity in theory and method, the critical and self-reflexive stance, and focal research questions), and to the differences in doing science, doing justice, and doing crime. American criminology is a powerful influence in Europe, although there may be a tendency to overestimate the importance of American criminology, because of the dominance of English-language publications. American criminology has made many positive contributions to the field of the study of law, crime and social control, and it continues to do so. However, if one defines the essence of American criminology as being policy-oriented, methodologically-driven, and lacking theoretical lustre, diversity, and critical edge, then the fear of Americanisation of European criminology is well-placed. It is not the criminological enterprise of the US per se, but rather the notion of Americanisation which is really at issue here.     

‘Women’ Detectives and Perceptions of ‘Oppressive’ Experiences: Exploring Experiential Essentialism and Phenomenology

The purpose of this paper is toexplore whether female Detectives perceptionsof their own work experiences include oppressive experiences because of their sex. It attempts to evaluate these perceptions ofoppressive work experiences or lack thereofvia a feminist viewpoint that embraces variousaspects of phenomenology with regards towomens experiences. More importantly, itrecognizes that experiential essentialistarguments cannot be ignored. The word womanis in quotes because it has been used,historically and presently, as a category toposition females according to mainstreamsocietys standards. The word oppressive isin quotes because even though the researcherdescribed oppressive instances in specificways, there were times, where some subjects didnot identify those experiences asoppressive. The majority of 60 female CanadianDetectives identified oppressive experiences,and an important task of this paper is toexamine experiences that fit the researchersdefinition but were not considered oppressiveby the subjects.     

The Penalisation of Poverty and the rise of Neo-Liberalism

This article explicates and extends the analyses put forth by the author in his book, Prisons of Poverty, which argues that the generalised increase of carceral populations in advanced societies is due to the growing use of the penal system as an instrument for managing social insecurity and containing the social disorders created at the bottom of the class structure by neo-liberal policies of economic deregulation and social-welfare retrenchment. It retraces the steps whereby this neo-liberal penality was elaborated in the United States and then diffused throughout the world, but contends that European countries are not blindly following the American road to mass imprisonment: Europe's path to the penal state entails the conjoint intensification of both social and penal treatments of poverty and the activation of the policing functions of welfare services leading to a form of social panoptism. Only the building of a Europe-wide social state can check the spread of the penalisation of poverty and its deleterious social consequences.     

Human and fundamental rights: What are they about?

Conclusion Human rights, distrusted by Bentham, through emergence ofGesellshaft, have sometimes been identified with rights of market men and gradually on an ad hoc basis and so have been given a relational or relativist character for that reason. Such a view ignores the test of humanness or the tele of human rights surviving any political association and the need for full development of human personality as an autonomous being inherent in full respect for all as moral persons. This disposes of the view of human rights in terms of rules of a game, or of connection between human rights and human action, or of the standard of the prudent man or, finally, of the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie. Equally, that very test of humanness disposes of criticisms of the human rights theory based on a concern for implementation of rights, on concentric circles based on the specific and concrete, on the impossibility of liking the billions, on the distinction between negative, positive and administrative rights, on the condition of being able to make valid claims and thereby denying human rights to the deprived millions in poor countries, on the social justice model, on the potential for violence and conflict and, finally, on the vagueness or subjectivity of human rights. An eclectic synthesis not between good and evil nor between right and wrong but between the extremes of the views presented in such critical explanations e.g. between the New Right and the New Left and between Hobbes and Rousseau) is what is needed in order to present a workable theory of human rights in the modern-day world.     

Justice in Health Care Decision-Making: Patients’ Appraisals of Health Care Providers and Health Plan Representatives

This study describes the development of two versions of a Health Care Justice Inventory (HCJI). One version focuses on patients interactions with their providers (HCJI-P) and the other focuses on patients interactions with the representatives of their health plans (HCJI-HP). Each version of the HCJI assesses patients appraisals of their interactions (with either their Provider or representatives of their Health Plan) along three common dimensions of procedural justice: Trust, Impartiality, and Participation. Both the Provider and Health Plan scales assess indices that are relatively independent of patients demographic characteristics. In addition, patients appraisals of their interactions with their provider were only moderately related to their appraisals of their interactions with representatives of their health plan, indicating that the Provider and Health Plan scales tap distinct aspects of patients overall experience with the health care system. Overall, procedural justice dimensions were significantly related to patient satisfaction in both the Provider and the Health Plan contexts. As predicted, procedural justice factors were more strongly tied to patient satisfaction in the Provider than in the Health Plan context, and health care decisions based on distributive justice principles of Need (rather than Equity or Equality) were most closely tied to patient satisfaction in both contexts.     

Sex @ the End of the Twentieth Century: Some Re-marks on a Minor Jurisprudence

This article offers a re-reading of Goodrichs essay, Law in the Courts of Love. My contention here is that the idiom of love that Goodrich provides us with in this essay cannot address the complexity of sexuality and sexual politics that inhabit our contemporary technoscientific culture. In so doing, I will juxtapose his essay with Laven Berlant and Michael Warners essay, Public Sex. This article will be divided into three sections. In the first section, I will evaluate and review Goodrichs genealogical approach to law and the image of justice that arises out of his approach. The second section will be a re-reading of Goodrichs Law in the Courts of Love through feminist and technoscientific discourses. Its aim is to problematise and re-think not only the idiom of feminine justice that Goodrich offers, but also to question the presuppositions upon which his work is based, primary presuppositions surrounding issues of privacy, sexuality and sexuated rights. Finally, in the third section I will conclude by suggesting that the re-figuration of justice necessitates a re-figuration of the relationship that law has with time and space.     

Formal Legal Truth and Substantive Truth in Judicial Fact-Finding -- Their Justified Divergence in some Particular Cases

Truth is a fundamental objective of adjudicative processes; ideally, substantive as distinct from formal legal truth. But problems of evidence, for example, may frustrate finding of substantive truth; other values may lead to exclusions of probative evidence, e.g., for the sake of fairness. Jury nullification and jury equity. Limits of time, and definitiveness of decision, require allocation of burden of proof. Degree of truth-formality is variable within a system and across systems.     

Plan and counterplan: Notes on moving beyond the crisis in planning theory

Conclusions In developing a working class perspective of planning theory, I have suggested that neither bourgeois nor Marxist planning theories can incorporate the dissensus tactics that are at the heart of working-class movements. Neither can they deal with the class nature of planning nor the class composition of planners. As the current social, political and economic crisis was forced on capital by the struggles (plans) of the working class, it follows that working-class counter-plans should deepen the crisis so that benefits will accrue to our side. The development of our successful counter-plans will throw their planning theory deeper into crisis. Ultimately, crisis resolution must be on the terms of the (ex-)working class.     

Governmentality and the War on Terror: FBI Project Carnivore and the Diffusion of Disciplinary Power

Social control capabilities have increased significantly over the past several decades, particularly because of an increased utilization of technologically advanced surveillance methods. Following the tragic events of September 11,2001, U.S. Congress and the present Administration have granted law enforcement considerable new powers in the enforcement and prevention of terrorism-related crime. Collectively labeled under the heading of the so-called war on terror , the scope of such laws, policies and directives are challenged by civil rights organizations and numerous legislators for lack of definitional precision, arbitrary application of sanctions, and violation of privacy laws. One of federal law enforcements surveillance tools is Project Carnivore, a Justice Department Internet surveillance program that is administered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to access information flowing to and from a central processing unit on a network connection. While, theoretically relying on Michel Foucaults theory of discipline and governmentality, as well as related insights in the social control literature, this paper examines Project Carnivore relative to the larger context of state rationality and related privacy issues.     

Recovering the Indigenous Legal Traditions of India: Classical Hindu Law in Practice in Late Medieval Kerala

The collection of Malayalam records entitled Vanjeri Grandhavari, taken from the archives of an important Namputiri Brahmin family and the temple under its leadership, provides some long-awaited information regarding a wide range of legal activities in late medieval Kerala. The organization of law and the jurisprudence represented by these records bear an unmistakable similarity to legal ideas found in dharmastra texts. A thorough comparison of the records and relevant dharma texts shows that landholding Namputiri Brahmins, who possessed enormous political and economic power in the region, mediated the implementation of dharmastra into the legal system. From this comparison arise new understandings of law and legal categories such as custom and positive law. Moreover, such comparisons begin to elucidate the problems involved in Western assumptions that it is textual law, not its interpretation and application by humans, which controls behavior. The Vanjeri records demonstrate not only the importance of dharmastra as a historical document but also the manner and extent to which dharmastra provided the foundation for legal systems in Kerala as well as in other regions of India.     

New voices from the ship of fools

Conventional left accounts of Thatcherism have stressed the authoritarian nature of its political rhetoric. This paper suggests that convergences between the new conservatism and more fundamentalist moral positions, meeting on the ground of obscenity and violence in the media, are a relatively recent development, associated with renewed strategic concentration on the question of law and order. Indeed, the libertarian right, in adhering to a utilitarian laissez-faire understanding of private pleasures, has presided over a positive proliferation of erotic and other gratifications. We argue that in the United Kingdom the authentic constituency of the moral right is an increasingly socially marginal one, rendered progressively more so by the rapid development of technologies of communication and entertainment.     

Social control: analytical tool or analytical quagmire?

Conclusion In this paper we have undertaken what we regard as a preliminary critique of the concept of social control and its utility for a critical criminology in Canada. In tracing its emergence and historical development as a key concept in American sociology, we have illustrated that its ascendancy represented a victory for liberal sociology. The recent attempts by critical criminologists and sociologists to rehabilitate the concept of social control by insisting upon the essentially coercive nature of control have not resulted in an advance over traditional theorizing.By examining the women, law and social control literature, in particular the use of the formal/informal dichotomy, we have attempted to illustrate the limited utility of the concept for developing an historically and theoretically informed understanding of the complex and contradictory relationship of women to the state and law. The concept of social control is ahistorical: when coupled with law, moreover, it lends itself to instrumentalism. It is our view that the concept of social control ought to be abandoned by critical scholars in favour of one attentive to the dynamic complexity of history, struggle and change.Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of Sociology and Anthropology, 4–7 June 1986, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Equal authorship.