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Dawn K Cecil, Prison life in popular culture: From the Big House to Orange is the New Black

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 June 2016
Published date01 June 2016
DOI10.1177/0004865815616535
Subject MatterBook Reviews
SG-ANJ-49-02-TOC 1..2 Book Reviews
303
Pre-crime paints a vivid picture, but – like the best scholarship – it left me with
unanswered questions and a desire for more detail. For example, ‘justice’ is an important
concept for McCulloch and Wilson, appearing in three dif‌ferent chapter titles. Pre-crime
appears problematic because it is incommensurable with justice, but ‘justice’ is only
loosely def‌ined: a society in which people are ‘trusted rather than treated as presumptive
enemies’ (p. 142). Without a clearer framework for justice, however, it is dif‌f‌icult to
identify which aspect of pre-crime is problematic. Is it the transformation of populist
prejudices and the catastrophic imagination into actionable intelligence? The emergence
of questionable technologies and the concomitant mystif‌ication of prediction science?
The reif‌ication of social inequalities? The violation of civil liberties and human rights?
All of these contribute to pre-crime, and it would be useful to parse them in more detail
to understand how, exactly, they trench upon justice.
Similarly, the authors do a f‌ine job of extending an analysis rooted in terrorism to the
criminal justice context (e.g. control orders for organised crime and ‘bikies’), but it
would be fascinating to apply a pre-crime framework to other criminal justice/security
phenomena. Preventive detention regimes, crimmigration (Stumpf, 2006), the opaque
workings of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and the spread of
sexually violent predator (SVP) legislation would all benef‌it enormously from pre-crime
analysis. So, too, might substance abuse: after all, civilly committing sex of‌fenders with
mental disorders who present a risk of future of‌fending is logically indistinguishable
from civilly detaining drug addicts who are likely to continue abusing illegal drugs
(Krongard, 2002).
Pre-crime is an urgent and important piece of socio-legal scholarship. McCulloch and
Wilson’s book breaks new ground in the criminological literature on...

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