Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture
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Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture

Claire Grant

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Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture

Claire Grant

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About This Book

Today, questions about how and why societies punish are deeply emotive and hotly contested. In Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture, ClaireGrant argues that criminal justice is a key site for the negotiation of new collective identities and modes of belonging. Exploring both popular cultural forms and changes in crime policies and criminal law, Grant elaborates onnew forms of critical engagement with the politics of crime and punishment. In doing so, the book discusses:

  • teletechnologies, punishment and new collectivities
  • the cultural politics of victims rights
  • discourses on foreigners, crime and diaspora
  • terror, the death penalty and the spectacle of violence.

Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture makes a timely and important contribution to debate on the possibilities of justice in the media age. This book is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers interested in the area of crime and punishment.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781134973842
Subtopic
Criminology
Edition
1

1 Murder will out

There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays)
Once upon a time, a storyteller named Geoffrey Chaucer had one of his pilgrims proclaim, 'Murder will out, certain, it will not fail.'1 In this tale of his, the Prioress asserts that God will not suffer a crime to remain forever concealed. Later in the story divine intervention, a miracle of the Virgin, produces the discovery of the corpse and provides a narrative of its violent death. Chaucer's tale locates the oft-repeated maxim, murder will out, within a medieval and ecclesiastical view of justice and morality. In modern and secular times, this 'certain' moral maxim began to turn into an intriguing and dramatic plot device, central to a new specialist genre of detective fiction. 'Undiscovered crimes', the problem of impunity and criminal detection practices were an important feature of the modern mediated spectacle of punishment, and they remain so to this day. Nevertheless, their significance has been overlooked by scholars of penality. The first chapter of this book argues that the history of criminal detection technologies, with which there has always been great popular fascination, does not accord with the established account of penal modernity. The conventional account has scant interest in matters of mediated spectacle. In it, modern penality is depicted as centred on correctional technologies, on a disciplinary form of punishment working through surveillance practices and normative judgement. The picture of disciplinary penal modernity is based in a reading of the work of Michel Foucault. This chapter looks at the story told by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, and shows that another story is equally persuasive, that of spectacle, retributive penality, and juridical forms of power.
Discipline and Punish stands among the most striking and beautiful of academic texts. Its power does not emanate from the promise of a fully comprehensive and authoritative account of historical reality. On the contrary, the effect of this book comes about through its construction as a dissident fiction.2 It achieved a superb political intervention, published at a moment when Foucault distributed a manifesto warning, 'police control is tightening on our everyday lifte ... we live in a state of custody' (Eribon 1992: 224). The impact of the text lay in its eloquent depiction of the condition of modernity as, 'a prison house of technical knowledge' (Beck 1998: 11). Relatedly, it has been remarked that Foucault privileged metaphors of imprisonment in outlining the process of subjectivization, depicting the soul as 'an imprisoning effect' (Butler 1997: 85). His claim that modern society had a carceral texture was complemented by this textual strategy. On several occasions, Foucault stated that capitalist societies were confinement societies, in the sense of the dispersion throughout the social body from the nineteenth century of networks of surveillance and punishment. He named the closing chapter of Discipline and Punish 'The carceral', and in it presented the picture of a carceral continuum, 'a subtle graduated carceral net, with compact institutions, but also separate and diffused methods' (Foucault 1975/1991: 297). Overall, he contended that society itself could be seen as carceral, writing that 'the carceral texture of society assures both the real capture of the body and its perpetual observation' (ibid.: 304). Foucault claimed that the person conscious of being watched would come to exercise control over themselves, writing that 'he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it. . . becomes the principle of his own subjection' (ibid.: 202-3; my emphasis). He famously alluded to the dissident literature of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn when he used the phrase, 'the carceral archipelago'. In interview, Foucault (1980a: 168) explained that he had alluded to the Soviet writer's novel to express 'the way in which a punitive system is physically dispersed yet at the same time covers the entirety of a society'. Solzhenitsyn had written his novel, which was repressed by the authorities, in prison, and in the early 1970s defected to the USA. The Gulag Archipelago opened with a depiction of how in Russia the network of penal institutions and police machinery was all around, yet invisible. Systematically, and out of sight, it eliminated and purged society of all that might be considered subversive. Arrests were sudden and could occur anywhere, and people disappeared for years or forever, leading Solzhenitsyn (1974: 614) to reflect, 'the cell was constricted, but wasn't freedom even more constricted'. Foucault's allusion to this carceral archipelago protested against the constitution of western societies as societies of surveillance, through a regime which embedded the power to punish more deeply within the social body than ever before. The political strategy by which he sought to transgress the carceral logic of modernity required a shift from traditional history to an 'effective history'. In this mode of critique, the scholar sets aside teleological narratives of progress, tolerance and humanity, and works to produce an 'insurrection of subjugated knowledges' (Foucault 1980a: 81). Discipline and Punish was a brilliant and timely strategic intervention published at a specific socio-historical conjuncture. It was crafted to induce specific political effects through a practice of 'fictioning' history. The book's power arises through a re-telling of the past as a certain kind of story, by exploiting the constitutive link between history and story in the term l'histoire.
An integral part of this dissident textual strategy was Foucault's construction of several schematic discontinuities, and his painting of a number of associated memorable scenes. He used these to characterize the movement from the ancien regime to penal modernity and the modern order of subjectivity and subjection. Most strikingly, Discipline and Punish emphasized a decisive break, with a shift from spectacle to surveillance. Foucault associated this break with the replacement of retributive 'armed power' by an insidiously 'gentle', correctional disciplinary power. He illustrated the distance between the two punitive styles by drawing contrasting images of the dramatic public execution of a regicide and the banal institutional timetable of a penitentiary. Accompanying the narrative of this story of penal change and new modes of rule was an elevation of the power of the norm over the power of law. Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture tells the story differently, moving away from the Foucauldian strategy of schematic discontinuities.3 In several of the chapters of the present book, the transformation of spectacle with the reconfiguration of retributive penality and armed power in mediated forms is discussed.

Criminal detection and the war on crime

Detective work contributed to a profusion of images of criminality, policing and punishment that were circulated throughout western societies from the nineteenth century. These images produced a mediated relation with punishment, a relation that is not directly experienced but arises from imaginative engagement. While the spectacular regime of the public display of execution declined, this decline was accompanied by a massive proliferation of narratives and images of crime and punishment in both popular and official texts (Hutchings 2001). Foucault spoke boldly of a shift from the juridical to the normalizing. However, in the process of diffusion, in which law's spectacle was transformed from the public performance of the scaffold towards an imaginative practice, law did not lose the visceral and potent, yet also lacunary, power of its force. The force of law, in its hold upon the imagination, does not simply operate as an abstract set of principles, but rather through specific textual practices. As will be shown in this chapter, the juridical represents and reconstructs events in certain ways, disseminating persuasive yet ambiguous narratives of injury and victimization.
Criminal detection technologies have played a substantial part in the emotionality of policing and penal practices. They are not a feature of the compassionate correctionalism drawn by some scholars as the core of modern penality.4 In Police!, Clarkson and Richardson (1889: vii) wrote, 'civil power is constantly at war with crime'. Criminal detection practices were described in both official and popular discourses as part of an aggressive war on crime centred on deterrence and retribution. The rationale, design and efficacy of criminal detection and its technologies has repeatedly been linked to control through the fearful example of certain punishment. For instance, in War With Crime, Baker (1889: 46) wrote, 'to be deterrent the punishment must be certain'. The notion of'war' against crime figured criminals as formidable adversaries, as enemies within, constantly upping the ante by the use of new tactics and tools: 'In the constant state of warfare between the lawmaker and the lawbreaker. . . every new invention or practical application of scientific discovery has supplied each side with new weapons frequently of much greater precision' (Mitchell 1911: 1). The importance of criminal detection in the war on crime was highly publicized in the USA during the period of the rise of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under Hoover. At this time, the Bureau undertook elaborate public relations and publicity campaigns. Hoover made regular announcements vilifying gangsters as public enemies, deadly wanton killers and mercenaries, whom he readily described as depraved and ruthless evil monsters that must be 'eliminated'. A similarly hostile, combative and repressive discourse is found in other official reports and announcements concerning criminal detection.
As I outline below, Foucault drew an image of modern penality and disciplinary power as discreet, preventative and automatic. The term detection (derived from the Latin, tego, -tect, cover), means, literally rendered, 'to uncover'. Its temporal orientation is retrospective, and at the close of the twentieth century, the use of scientific methods in criminal investigation remained primarily reactive rather than proactive (Tilley and Ford 1996). Criminal detection methods try to take us back to crimes which have already been committed, in this gesture recalling unacceptable events about which very little may be known. Through both systematic and scientific methods, as well as chance discoveries, the crime event must be 'painstakingly' reconstructed in detail, producing an image of a suspect and a proposed narrative of their actions. With their retroactive impetus, criminal detection practices seek to reconstruct an authoritative narrative of what really happened, to produce a singular truth of the crime event. However, over the years considerable anxiety has been evident about the general efficacy of criminal detection practices, as well as their implication in miscarriages of justice. To this day, new scientific technologies are described by professional and government bodies as part of a 'techno-police revolution'.5 This rhetoric echoes the disciplinary history of the forensic sciences, replete as it is with celebratory acclamations. For instance, 'since 1837, the Microscope, strengthening notably anatomy as well as toxicology, has repeatedly released the innocent from the jailor's clutch and delivered the culprit the hangman' (Chaille 1876: 403). However, with the expansion of the mass media and the proliferation of popular cultural representations, the failures of vision and the contested character of reconstruction were widely publicized. High public expectations, and plenty of stern criticism, have accompanied the use of modern criminal detection practices. Despite their objectivist rhetoric and the regular claims to 'absolute certainty' made by the practitioners of scientific methods, criminal detection practices differ markedly from those of surveillance. Circumstantial evidence, to which scientific criminal detection methods contribute in court, is precisely 'the evidence of things unseen'. The visualizing practices of criminal detection hence do not have the structure of watching over involved in this term 'surveillance'. Instead of the inspection theorized within the notion of panopticism, they reconstruct and re-write things in certain ways, and the images and narratives that they produce must be read (Pugliese 1999). Traces must be looked for after the crime event, which may be indistinct, incomplete, and are very likely to be challenged in court.
The place of interpretation and opinion in criminal detection was already hotly disputed by the mid-nineteenth century. One instance of this contestation was the Road murder of 1860. The case, which was extensively publicized, began when an infant boy was found murdered in a middle-class residence in Wiltshire. The magistrates soon called for a Scotland Yard detective, who focused his investigation on members of the family, and especially on the boy's step-sister, Constance.6 A year passed by and the crime remained unsolved, despite the detective charging Constance with murder, and bringing committal proceedings against her. Great public clamour ensued when he gave evidence that Constance was a violently jealous child who had previously ran away disguised as a boy, and that her father had affairs with the family servants. At this point, an incensed surgeon who had assisted at the post-mortem examination published a monograph, aiming to dissipate popular suspicions and to refute press inaccuracies and distortions. In his text, Stapleton (1861) rejected the proposition that the killer was a family member as 'revolting and unnatural', deploring the damage done to the reputation of the pater familias, the privacy of his home invaded, his daughter suspected. He told his readers that he would examine the 'silent witnesses' collected by the police, observing that much of the material evidence pertaining to various bloodied items had been disregarded or misused by the police (Stapleton 1861: 105). Stapleton firmly believed that clarity could be brought by the adoption of a scientific perspective, and depicted the press as progressively obscuring the truth. For him, scientific methods were a means of access to new facts able to point out the culprit and exonerate the innocent. However, he admitted that conflicting explanations could be made of the same facts, undermining somewhat his claim that 'murder will out' as scientific methods end all speculation and dispute. His narrative produced fearful images of injury, for instance, 'these cuts upon the left finger proclaim the consciousness of the child to the first sharp pang which waked him from his happy dreams, to look one moment at the treacherous murderer, and then to die' (ibid.: 63). The monograph portrayed a multitude of possible suspects, including the violent inhabitants of the nearby cottages, vengeful ex-servants, escaped lunatics, and ferocious homicidal children. Commenting on the continuing mystery of the Road murder. The Times (11 December 1860) stated, 'if great crimes remain undetected, they are neither undiscussed nor forgotten', and aspects of the murder and its detection featured in both Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) and Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Discourses about undiscovered crimes and criminal detection technologies have been significant to the engagement of fascinated and fearful audiences in the mediated spectacle of crime and punishment. Criminal detection produced images of the city as dark and labyrinthine, of shadowy, inscrutable suspects and predatorial elusive criminals. A rising demand for sensational crime reporting and fictional literature has been related to urban fears about anonymous strangers (Goldberg 1998). The urban itself came to suggest the inscrutable in Poe's The Man Of The Crowd (1840/1984). The tale follows an image of the satisfactions of surveillant observation with the story of a frustrating pursuit of an elusive and ultimately unknowable criminal. The narrator of the story sits at the window of a London coffee-house, looking out from this vantage-point onto a busy thoroughfare. The street becomes more crowded as evening sets in, and the narrator passes the time in picking out the traits of the passers-by in relation to their kind of occupation. Observing the passers-by, he feels that he can tell their history from a brief glance at them. At this moment of confident mastery, the face of an old man strikes him, its curious expression attracting his whole interest, bringing to mind 'ideas of vast mental power... of excessive terror, of intense- of extreme despair' (Poe 1840/1984: 243). The narrator follows this man with difficulty through the dense crowd, shadowing him in a determination to find out more. Through the fog and darkness, the old man crosses and recrosses the street, doubles back upon himself, and repeats the same route several times. Poe closes his tale by informing the reader that the darkest of hearts cannot be read. This intriguing tale epitomizes the potency with which the mediated spectacle of criminal detection engages audiences, but as fearful and fascinated consumers and not as masterful surveillant viewers.

Defects of power and knowledge

In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault asserted that the choice of imprisonment as the pr...

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