Book Review: Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing by Sarah Brayne
| Author | Marianne Quirouette |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221101007 |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
devised over the past 40 years to reduce the numbers of people on the move. As the author
suggests, however, rather than decreasing the number of asylum seekers, deterrent mea-
sures only contribute to exacerbate the dangers travelers face in and around border zones,
while doing little to discourage the movement of those who feel pressured to leave their
homes worrying about the consequences later.
The political death of asylum may sound as the theoretically most engaging of the
three, evinced by the general populace accepting and abetting the politics of exclusions.
It is now accepted that the journey a person shall endure to obtain asylum may entail pre-
carity, exclusion, liminality and legal struggle, over many months of limbo during which
the “normal”is suspended and the body becomes the border. Asylum seekers are quietly
cast aside socially, while a mixture of law, geography and psychology is astutely used to
strategically undermine certain people from landing on sovereign soil where asylum is
customarily assured but tacitly denied. When the general public turns a blind eye;
when we uncritically buy the crisis rhetoric that criminalizes certain arrivals for their
mode of traveling; when we deny violence in the face of evidence; when we, intentionally
or subconsciously, feel that certain lives are more grievable than others, then the institu-
tion of asylum is weakened and its political death assured.
The vast evidence collected in this book certainly supports, and visually maps, the
many advances this monograph makes for scholars and students in the criminology of
mobility, state crime and citizenship studies. Asylum seekers are made precarious by geo-
graphical design and the death of asylum does not occur simply on islands and in remote
borderlands of the enforcement archipelago, but more acutely in the treatment of people
as islands, within law and geopolitical machinations in the interstitial spaces between
states. If a limitation can be noted in this book, it would be its emphasis on the Global
North and the costly and perilous journey asylum seekers undertake to reach North
America, Europe and Australia. More than a weakness, this may indeed sound like a sug-
gestion to expand the enforcement archipelago to include geographies such as in Asia that
may not traditionally appear as prominent and yet are often turned into literal and exist-
ential carceral spaces. Here, life and the personal histories of certain individuals are
grossly devalued, while the asylum process is seldom treated as more than a loophole
in legislation if not a magnet for ill-intended migrants displaced by geographical shifts
in migration enforcement and new configurations of power. Their immobility in these
spaces threatens their identity and morphs territorial borders to cause the death of asylum.
Sarah Brayne, Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press:
New York, 2020; 224 pp.: 9780190684099, $29.95 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Marianne Quirouette, Université de Montréal, Canada
Brayne’sPredict and Surveil opens with a scene illustrating how tools like Palantir can
deliver on the promise to save police precious time and resources, in this case facilitating
the arrest of a suspect involved in the aftermath of a gang-related murder. The manuscript,
however, goes on to complicate this notion and propose that we should be critical of the
Book reviews 519
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