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Resilience and Criminal Justice: Unsafe at Low Altitude

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Abstract

Resilience is increasingly featuring in crime and justice policy discussions. It appears in the fusion of military, security and criminal justice. It offers an alignment by which individual actors are to be adaptive to the uncertain conditions of high risk societies. This article unpacks the application of resilience to criminal justice to reveal at least one negative implication: by placing the focus on self-directed change resilient subjects have limited transformative power. The concept of resilience involves discounting a longer view that challenges the dominant social institutions and orders of neoliberalism. In contrast, we propose the dignified subject and the re-assertion of the discounted institutional context at a level above the individual and community. This analysis supports renewing the transformative agenda of a critical criminology.

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Notes

  1. We are extrapolating this because the salience remains to classic and then to advanced liberalism, with welfare liberalism the missing variant (see O’Malley 2010: 495).

  2. Historical examples of the use of militarism in corrections include the practice of chain gangs and the para-military command structures within prisons (Lutze 2006, p. 393).

  3. Edwards proposes “green world” options over those that close off transformations.

  4. In this regard, and following Adorno’s “figuration” (1995), Bourdieu’s (1977) “habitus”, and Deleuze’s “dividual” (1992), individuals are made meaningful, constructed and reconstructed, to align with built structures, field relations, or “societies of control”.

  5. As we have noted there has been a movement from risk to uncertainty, and this transition is fluid with the emergence of the resilience, which thrives in conditions of uncertainty. However, this neoliberal (some prefer advanced liberal) interpellation (Althusser 1971) is ironic if not mystifying because military organisations in fact do not want warriors deciding the exemption or making battlefront decisions of any true significance to the direction of the war.

  6. This is because ‘individuals living under conditions of poverty, violence, chronic unemployment, oppressive or meaningless labour, overcrowding, poor sanitation, poor health care, poor education, and constant anxiety about the future rarely have either the capacity or opportunity to exercise choices, to develop and utilize themselves, or to take advantage of the civil liberties that may in principle be available to them’ (Kelman 1977, p. 533).

  7. The plaintiffs were awarded a permanent injunction by Judge Forrest of the Southern District of New York, to which the Obama administration filed a request for an emergency stay, which was granted by the Second Circuit court.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the editor, two anonymous reviewers, Professor Pat O’Malley, Dr. Maria Giannacopoulos and Adam Pocrnic for their helpful suggestions to improve this paper.

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    Willem de Lint & Nerida Chazal

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de Lint, W., Chazal, N. Resilience and Criminal Justice: Unsafe at Low Altitude. Crit Crim 21, 157–176 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-013-9179-2

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