Pre-Crime and Post-Criminology

Conventionally, crime is regarded principally as harm or wrong and the dominant ordering practices arise post hoc. In the emerging pre-crime society, crime is conceived essentially as risk or potential loss, ordering practices are pre-emptive and security is a commodity sold for profit. Though this dichotomy oversimplifies a more complex set of changes, it captures an important temporal shift. As the intellectual offspring of the post-crime society, criminology must adapt to meet the challenges of pre-crime and security. This article examines the key features a theory of security needs to encompass. It explores the immanent capacities of criminology for change and suggests exterior intellectual resources upon which it might draw. It concludes that the pre-crime society need not be a post-criminological one. Key Words crime prevention • criminal justice • criminology • fortress continents • risk • security Though criminology constitutes itself with increasing confidence as a disci-pline, it is far from clear that it is yet an independent or settled discipli-nary state (Abbott, 2000: 139–44). Though criminology journals, monograph series, departments and degree programmes proliferate, their practitioners share little more than a common substantive interest in the subject of crime and its control. It follows that significant change in the topography of crime control has profound implications for the discipline. If, as it will be argued, the very subject matter of criminological attention is changing beyond recog-nition, either criminology must also change or risk irrelevance