Sessar Porto Problems criminology has with criminal law

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Western style) acknowledged political instruments. Highly estimated political enterprises
such as the war on crime because of crime’s destructive nature might by themselves be destructive,
as we know from our experience with the war on drugs.
Once again, none of these areas can be controlled by universal moral rules as they may disturb
the autopoiesis of the particular systems. Therefore, it is not without irony that some systems
claim to control themselves, for example by Ethical Commissions in medicine, by Compliance
Departments in larger companies or by Press Codes in the media; it would be worth
studying the degree of their transparency and practice regarding the prevention or the protection
of systems-specific criminal acts.
6. The criminological observation of the political system.
Special attention will be given to the political system. The traditional “war on crime” with its
ever increasing number of criminal laws, harsher punishments and longer sentences and with
elaborate incapacitating regimes (all this much less so on the European mainland) is still dominating
the agenda of legislation and law enforcement agencies and thereby will remain of
interest for criminological observation (research). The well-known key phrases for such analyses
are “culture of control” (Garland 2001) or “governing through crime” (Simon 2007).
One may say that criminal law in close connection with criminal policy is exceeding the area
of case-related crime control and is gradually developing more universal standards of governing
society by, e. g., broadening the area of criminalizable human behaviour and actions.
Parallel to this war on crime a much more radical system of individual and collective control
has emerged. The central ideology is prevention. In many countries, health-care systems, insurance
networks, anti-movements against smoking, alcohol use or drug use, community
crime prevention schemes, laws against truancy, gated communities, an excessive private security
industry and so forth work on the creation, or are the result, of prevention as a selfcontained
pillar of society. The philosophy of this kind of prevention tries to gain the power
of definition over the future by replacing the concrete person by factors of risk which make
the individual increasingly superfluous. “What the new preventive policies primarily address
is no longer individuals but factors, statistical correlations of heterogeneous elements. They
deconstruct the concrete subject of intervention, and reconstruct a combination of factors liable
to produce risk. Their primary aim is not to confront a concrete dangerous situation, but
to anticipate all the possible forms of irruption of danger. … To be suspected, it is no longer
necessary to manifest symptoms of dangerousness or abnormality, it is enough to display
whatever characteristics the specialists responsible for the definition of the preventive policy
have constituted as risk factors” (Castel 1991, 288-289).
Amazing parallels exist between the new forms of crime control. They operate widely without
crime, but with fear. They are less concerned with perpetrators; rather they are concerned with
each and every one of us. The key phrases are “culture of fear” (again Simon 2007) or “politics
of fear”, with fear being “the most powerful enemy of reason” (Gore 2007, 23). Criminology
will discover that our societies are about to undergo an increasing change from a repressive
type of (limited) crime control to a preventive type of (unlimited) social control.
“Crime” may gradually be substituted for “risk”, which would then be the criminological way
from crime society to risk society. “Risk-based control is no longer only one trend among
several others, including retributive and restitutional justice, but has instead become a presence”
(O’Malley 2004, 135), covering almost all segments of our life-world.
One elementary feature of risk is that it is unknown; we don’t know if and when it will materialize
by turning into a real danger or threat and what the consequences will be in such a
case. Because of this ignorance, such an uncertainty will be compensated by control; one may
call it absorption of uncertainty (Luhmann 1998, 89) through an all-encompassing high-tech