Pre-Crime: Preempting Suspects at the Temporal Border

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

This session considers the concept of pre-crime, which is the subject of a small but growing literature in criminology and related fields. The term is also increasingly used in the media to describe shifts in the law, prosecutions, policing and surveillance that seek to anticipate and coercively intervene to preempt future crimes. The pre-crime concept is drawn from science fiction and based on a fantasy that the ability to foresee the future has advanced to the point where crimes can be accurately predicted and prevented by incapacitating 'would be criminals'. Pre-crime criminal justice frameworks are justified as necessary in a time of unprecedented, unpredictable and even catastrophic risk.The papers in this session consider the realities created when punishment precedes crime and suspicion becomes the basis for a wider and deeper range of coercive interventions. Drawing on research and examples from the US, UK and Australia the session considers the ways that pre-crime creates new risks and spreads insecurity, extending and embedding the marginalization and criminalisation of groups already low on the social hierarchy.

Sub Unit

• Area III. Correlates of Crime and Oppression / 29. Race, Ethnicity and Nationality

Individual Presentations

• Pre-Crime: War on the Future - Jude McCulloch, Monash University

• Pre-Crime and Non-Citizens - Sharon Pickering, Monash University

• ‘If you see something, say something’. Pre-crime and the Suspected Other - Sandra Walklate, University of Liverpool; Gabe Mythen, University Liverpool

• The Rise of the United States as a “Surveillance Superpower”: Pre-crime, New Assemblages of Power, and State Corporate Crime - Colin Burke, Northern Arizona University; Nancy Wonders, Northern Arizona University