Crime and risk

In the 19th century, governments and social reformers across Europe and America were obsessed with the supposed failure of the working classes to adopt the bourgeois habits of industry and thrift. Positivist criminology has a long history of attending to crime as risk-taking. Thus 'short term hedonism' produced by poor socialisation, or 'thrill seeking' produced by the boredom of lower class working life, are explanations for crime that have been deployed by positivist criminologists. Offenders and their offences were coming to be reframed less as the pathological products of societal and psychological breakdowns who needed to be therapeutically reformed, and more as bundles of harmful behaviours and potentialities. In the current era, it is impossible to think about the deployment of discourses and technologies of risk and crime without immediately turning to the problem of governing the 'new terrorism'. Speculative pre-emption relies precisely on high uncertainty for its rationale and this is argued to differentiate it from historical precursors.