The Australian and New Zealand Critical Criminology Conference

Jude McCulloch

Professor, Criminology, School of Political & Social Inquiry, Monash University.

'Precrime: Imagining future crime and a new space for criminology'

This paper sets out to describe the contours of the shift from post to precrime taking shape under contemporary counter terrorism measures and to map the implications of this development in terms of criminal justice and society more broadly. It argues that the move to precrime consolidates a trend towards integrating national security into criminal justice. The emerging hybrid national security and criminal justice framework has led to a number of tensions and contradictions in counter terrorism measures, including a tension between the ideal of impartial criminal justice and the politically charged concept of national security.

The shift from post to precrime and national security under counter terrorism frameworks encompass a temporal and geographic shift, the latter involving a blurring of the borders between the states’ internal and external coercive capacities. The paper traces the antecedents of the shift from post to precrime arguing that the significance of this for criminology and society cannot begin to be understood unless the historical precedents and genealogies are also understood. It argues that the shifts that have advanced under the mantle of counter terrorism can be traced through a number of interlinking historical trajectories including the wars on crime and drugs, criminalization and at a deeper level in colonial strategies of domination, control and repression embodied in counter insurgency practice and theory. The paper identifies a number of challenges and opportunities for criminology in the shift from postcrime criminal justice to precrime national security.
Professor Jude McCulloch is in Criminology in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University. She has researched and published widely on the politics of law and order and state violence including police shootings, prisons, and deaths in custody. Her recent research focuses on neo liberal globalisation and the war on terror. Her most recent books are The Violence of Incarceration (2009 Routledge, with Phil Scraton) and Counter-Terrorism Policing: Community, Cohesion and Security (2008 Springer, Pickering, McCulloch and Wright-Neville).

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