Criminalization, Representation, Regulation

What is a crime and how do we understand it? The answers to these questions are complex and entangled in a web of power relations that require us to think differently about crime. This book draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality as a lens to interrogate and understand how crime and criminal behaviour are created, reproduced, and challenged. It explores the dynamic interplay between practices of representation, processes of criminalization, and the ways that these circulate to both reflect and constitute crime and "justice." Its aim is to challenge common assumptions about crime and criminality. The text is organized into three parts. The first part introduces students to the theoretical, historical, and empirical foundations for the grounded studies that follow. The second part builds the integrative, intersectional character of the text, drawing attention to the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and class feature in the politics of representation and in social processes of criminalization. The final part explores some of the core emerging issues in criminology and socio-legal studies today: the surveillance society, the rise of the national security state, human rights in international contexts, corporate power ungoverned, and the policing of social movements. Each chapter focuses on historical patterns of criminalization, regulation, and representation, with a particular view to understanding the ways in which these dynamics have been constituted over time, and as part of the making of a racially-ordered nation state. Finally, politics of resistance as a form of both reacting to, and shaping the representation and regulation of, crime is considered throughout the text.