This course explores the limits and contradictions of crime prevention technologies. It focuses on the tension between the promises of such technologies and their consequences. Limits are explored via critical analyses of DNA typing, fingerprint comparison, forecasting or prediction, security technologies, and environmental controls, such as “target hardening,” “guardianship,” and “environmental design.”
Crime control efforts are overwhelmingly driven by faith in technology. That is, it is commonly accepted that technological innovation can stop crime. The history of crime control is witness to this faith. Technologies such as fingerprint matching, lie detection, DNA profiling, actuarial predictions of dangerousness and future offending, hi- and low-tech surveillance and, amongst others, environmental modifications litter the past and present (and foreseeable future) of crime control. Some technologies predate criminology as a modern discipline; many are coterminous with it. In some shape or form, all such technologies promise crime’s resolution.
This course will explore the paradoxes and ironies of technological fetishism and its promise to provide social security by eradicating crime. Many paradoxes and unanticipated consequences can be discerned: technological strategies often produce new forms of criminalised behaviour, undermine important legal frameworks and concepts that safeguard individual and group liberties, presuppose the very criminality that they seek to control, assume a “legal-illegal” distinction that ensures the classification of behaviour as either legal or illegal. In these respects, the faith deposited in technology is brought into the spotlight and subject to critical interrogation. Throughout, the course will also consider what alternatives, if any, exist to a technology fetishism that requires the criminality it supposedly controls.