***** Surveillance and Criminal Statistics: Historical Foundations of Governmentality
Mathieu Deflem Purdue University DeflemM at soc.purdue.edu
Pp. 149-184 in Studies in Law, Politics and Society, Vol. 17, eds Austin Sarat and Susan Silbey. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1997.
...Criminal Statistics and Risk
The science and practice of criminal statistics in several respects betrays similarities with the rationality of risk. Above all, criminal statistics was a descriptive enterprise which sought to collect, classify, and assess the probabilities of crimes for classes of people and social and physical environments. Criminal statistics was essentially description with a purpose: as risk assessment it collected information, and as risk management it predicted the crimes to be expected and prevented. Thus, the transformation of crime from danger to risk was a crucial component of criminal statistics. Dangers have causes that need to be tackled and ultimately removed. But risks do not call for elimination; they need to be, and can be, managed....
The Governmental Rationality of Criminal Statistics
As Foucault suggested with respect to governmental power, criminal statistics led to conceive and develop totalizing and at once individualizing strategies of surveillance. It was endeavored by criminal statistics to count each and all, _not as individuals, but as members belonging to classes_.... Such technologies reveal not only the definite attempts but also the realizations, however modest, to transform the legally regulated and policed nation-state into a statistically administered society....
Criminal Statistics and Law
Conceived in terms of regularities and probabilities, the rationality of risk and governmentality manifested in criminal statistics implies a different concept of society and individual than the one adopted by a concept of law based on rights. Particularly relevant, in my view, are the following four characteristics of the relationship between risk-based criminal statistics and rights-based law.
First, through criminal statistics it was attempted to substitute the individuality of juridical responsibility with the collectivity of risk (Ewald 1991a:201-205; Feeley and Simon 1992:452). With criminal statistics each and all were counted because entire classes of the population as a whole were conceived to be threatened by a generalized risk of crime. The distinct motives of individual violators of law were dispensed in favor of average probabilities of segments of the population. The individualizing totality of crime control based on criminal statistics also led to a shift of responsibility away from the individual criminal, not only to an entire class of probable criminals, but also to aggregates of potential victims. The anticipated actions of the potential victim could become a basis for risk control because criminal statistics revealed the probability and regularity of crime.
Second, criminal statistics aspired to supplant the justice of law with an economic efficiency of risk. Particularly since the early 20th century, criminal statisticians, as experts of the risks of crime, tried to take over from the judges of right, an endeavor in which they were at least in part successful. And while surveillance strategies based on criminal statistics could not exclude or abolish crime, they could economically distribute the negative effects of crime over the population as a whole.
Third, through criminal statistics it was endeavored to replace the morality of law with the calculability of risk. Criminal statistics had established regularities of crime, on the basis of which the probability of future crimes could be calculated. This calculation did not take into account the moral will of legal actors, neither judge nor suspect, but the objective, social and/or natural, correlations of crime.
Fourth, as indicated by the rather limited applicability of criminal statistics, there remained an important breach between statistical dreams and political-legal realities. In Germany, criminal statisticians more readily found an ally in the political-legal system, relying as they could on a long tradition of broad police powers and autocratic rule. Indicative, most tragically, is the ease with which the Nazi regime incorporated existing statistical structures, procedures and organizations in its ruthless program (Hughes 1955)....That realization, of course, was never fully attained and criminal statistics would continue to remain confronted with political and legal realities. Even the most totalizing of plans for control and surveillance face resistance; or, in the words of Foucault (1975a:27), power is omnipresent but not omnipotent. The development of criminal statistics did not entail a transformation towards a totally administered society but towards a society where total administration is deemed a possibility and a necessity....
(emphasis mine, bibliography omitted; the full article is available at <http://www.sla.purdue.edu/people/soc/mdeflem/ZCRIST.htm>) *****
"Statistics, as it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, referred to the science of the state, that is, the descriptive study of the 'curiosities of the state' (Staatsmerckwürdigkeiten). The German scholar Gottfried Achenwall invented the term 'Statistik' in a 1749 publication on the European empires" (Deflem at <http://www.sla.purdue.edu/people/soc/mdeflem/ZCRIST.htm>). The calculation of risks according to the "curiosities of the state" -- statistics -- has been regularly conducted in such a way as to define not just distributions of crimes, diseases, etc. but "classes of persons" who are "at risk" (potential criminals, potential victims, & the "innocent general public"). The boundary between "homosexual" and "heterosexual" (with a furtive & ambivalent glance occasionally cast in the direction of "bisexuals") is drawn & redrawn through the curiosities of the state & resistance against it.
At 7:53 AM +0000 1/24/01, James Heartfield wrote:
>the threatened heterosexual aids epidemic never happened.
That is because there is no such thing as "homosexual AIDS" or "heterosexual AIDS."
Yoshie