The long history of prevention: Social Defence, security and anticipating future crimes in the era of ‘penal welfarism’
| Author | Charlotte Heath-Kelly,Šádí Shanaáh |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211056313 |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The long history of prevention:
Social Defence, security and
anticipating future crimes in
the era of ‘penal welfarism’
Charlotte Heath-Kelly
University of Warwick, UK
Šádí Shanaáh
University of Warwick, UK
Abstract
Using a combination of documentary and archival research methods, this article
explores the development of Social Defence criminology across the 19th and 20th cen-
turies—highlighting the influence the ‘new’Social Defence movement had upon the
United Nations’and Council of Europe’s international crime policy programmes. By
exploring the integration of Social Defence within these international programmes,
the article is able to challenge several longstanding arguments in Criminology which
associate pre-crime and the securitization of criminal justice with the neoliberal era.
Social Defence scholars influenced International Organizations to research and dissem-
inate anticipatory mechanisms to identify and reform potential deviants decades earlier
than prominent theses suggest. These measures were steeped in the language of security
and were oriented towards the prevention of future juvenile crime. The article argues
for a reweighing of the influence of Social Defence criminology and against accounts
which draw significant divisions between ‘penal welfarism’and ‘neoliberal penality’.
Keywords
crime prevention, international criminal justice, neoliberalism, risk, security, Social Defence
Received June 23, 2021; revised October 5, 2021; accepted October 7, 2021
Corresponding author:
Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: c.heath-kelly@warwick.ac.uk
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2022, Vol. 26(3) 357–376
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/13624806211056313
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Agenda-setting texts in Criminology associate pre-crime interventions with the era of
neoliberalism. Crime prevention programmes, we are told, are the result of leftist and cen-
trist parties adapting to the neoliberal environment, which has limited their policy options
(Crawford, 2001; Hughes, 2002; McLaughlin, 2002; Pitts, 2001). Others go further and
posit that pre-emptive and actuarial governance (in both criminal justice and national
security) are the direct result of neoliberal economic and social policy—particularly
the entrance of the insurance industry into questions of policing risk (O’Malley, 2010;
O’Malley and Hutchinson, 2007) and the effect of 9/11 on legitimating the turn
towards catastrophic imaginaries of future disaster (Zedner, 2007).
Centrally, these studies of ‘neoliberal penality’and ‘pre-crime’rest upon a contrast
with a previous era of ‘penal welfarism’(Garland, 1985b, 2002). Depictions of ‘penal
welfarism’focus on the categorization and rehabilitation of offenders through criminal
justice systems—framing this as a consequence of the expansion of the state in the
early–mid-20th century. Few scholars include Social Defence philosophy in their
accounts of this shift towards rehabilitation. Instead, Social Defence is treated as a histor-
ical phenomenon more associated with the rise of positivism in the late 19th century. Yet
this article focuses on a ‘missing history’of pre-crime; articulating how Social Defence
philosophy influenced crime policy forums in the United Nations and Council of Europe
to develop pre-criminal agendas in the era of penal welfarism—decades before the rise of
neoliberalism.
The history of Social Defence (especially ‘new’Social Defence) has remained
underexplored, due to its development in Francophone and Italian criminological
circles and the noted Anglophone tendency within Criminology—at least in terms of
the countries studied in agenda-setting texts (Ashworth and Zedner, 2014; Garland,
2002; Harcourt, 2011; Wacquant, 2009; Zedner, 2009). Furthermore, the embedding
of the ‘new’Social Defence within some International Organizations has largely
escaped the attention of Criminology—which tends to study criminal justice at the
national and sub-national levels. Of course, there are notable exceptions which have
explored the impact of Social Defence criminology on the rendering of the ‘dangerous
offender’in criminal justice, the mutation of preventive detention across history
and—less commonly—the role of Social Defence in the United Nations’Crime
Prevention activities (Danet, 2008; Lopez-Rey, 1957; Pifferi, 2016; Tulkens and
Digneffe, 1981; Vervaele, 2015; Walters, 2001; Wyvekens, 2011), to which this
article will contribute.
This article highlights how the Social Defence movement upturned classical under-
standings of punishment as a retributive act and reframed juridical apparatuses to serve
an explicit preventive security mandate. This re-orientation of criminal justice towards
social Defence and public security involved a temporal shift towards anticipatory
logics of crime prevention. While criminological studies have detailed the early
decades of the Social Defence movement (Ancel, 1965 [1954]; Pifferi, 2016), this
article tracks the development of anticipatory criminal policy through the post-war
attempt to ‘liberalize’Social Defence from its association with authoritarian regimes.
This centrally relied upon the United Nations’establishment of a Social Defence
section, which centralized Marc Ancel’s‘new’Social Defence, to establish an anticipa-
tory juvenile crime prevention agenda at the international level.
358 Theoretical Criminology 26(3)
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