Pre-Crime: War on the Future

• In Event: Pre-Crime: Preempting Suspects at the Temporal Border

Abstract

Pre-crime stands at the temporal front line of the criminal justice system’s increasingly preoccupation with preempting future crime. Pre-crime interventions assign guilt for crimes that have never happened. Pre-crime reverses the temporal order of crime and punishment or coercive (pre)action. Its anticipatory logic is the antithesis of the temporally linear post-crime criminal justice process that commences from the presumption of innocence and progresses through a number of discrete stages. Pre-crime, which is aimed at anticipating threats before they emerge, is justified as necessary in a time of unprecedented, unpredictable and sometimes catastrophic risk. The term pre-crime, which is subject to a small but expanding scholarly literature, is taken from Phillip K. Dick’s 1950s science fiction short story The Minority Report. The paper draws out the defining characteristics of pre-crime. Drawing on examples from the US, UK and Australia it demonstrates the ways that pre-crime produces crime and insecurity and supports and extends hierarchical power relations. The paper illuminates the ways that pre-emption under pre-crime frames produces new fictions related to crime, risk and security as well as the new realties that such interventions produce, with a particular focus on its implications for social justice.

Author

• Jude McCulloch, Monash University