Watchful: police stand guard throughout French president Emmanuel Macron’s go to specializing in safety and the struggle towards drug trafficking, Marseilles, 19 March 2024
Nicolas Tucat · AFP · Getty
In the early 1860s, Karl Marx wrote that simply as a thinker produces concepts and a poet verse, a prison produces crime – and far else apart from. At a time when narco-trafficking appears to have grow to be certainly one of French society’s principal scourges, his phrases advantage renewed consideration.
Going towards the criminological pondering of his day, which tended to view crime as a sort of social or psychological illness, Marx steered that it was in actual fact an integral a part of collective life. The sociologist Émile Durkheim explored this concept extra systematically a number of years later, displaying that grouping sure acts and behaviours underneath the label ‘crime’ serves to demarcate a society’s ethical boundaries, separating a majority of ‘sincere males’ from a minority of ‘criminals’.
But Marx had an extra perception when he thought of the ‘secondary advantages’ of crime: there are numerous actions (legislation, publishing, the press, science, expertise) and professions (law enforcement officials, attorneys, insurers, locksmiths and many others) that thrive as a result of it exists. His checklist was not exhaustive: many of the political elite now advantage a spot on it, as they’ve made safety certainly one of their problems with alternative.
The ascendancy of ‘legislation and order’, which started within the US within the early Seventies, unfold some 30 years later to Europe and Latin America. It provoked a race to move legal guidelines and make pronouncements condemning political opponents’ naivety and laxity, and calling for harder crackdowns, even in political events historically extra beneficial to crime prevention and defending liberties.
Separating safety points
By separating safety from social points with which it was as soon as intently linked, this pattern has profoundly reshaped the framework and working ideas not solely of justice and policing, but additionally of schooling and social companies. As a outcome, French prisons are full to overflowing (85,000 prisoners as of 1 July 2025, for 62,509 locations). with none observable discount in crime and (…)
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