Risk Prevention and Management as a Vicious Cycle - Essay Example

Introduction A risk society is a society defined by its efforts to manage risk (O'Malley, 2000). Managing risk is away of "ordering reality, of rendering it into a calculable form" (Dean, 1999, p. 131). As a concept, and as a unifying political philosophy, the search for order is the driving spirit behind all risk management strategies. It also means realizing efforts to seek out and identify those perceived to pose the greatest risk to dominant cultural norms and values are a perennial activity. Emergence of the risk society is a relatively recent phenomenon beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. Two approaches to studying the government of risk are particularly salient: (a) the view that risk is an important manifestation of modern technological innovations and responses to them and (b) the heterogeneous composition of technologies of surveillance, data collection, medicalization, and the like, by which risk is managed. The government of risk points to the ways in which the various agencies of the state intersect to promote greater stability and predictability in human behavior. The question that will be answered in this paper is whether justice is still present in a risk society. This is a response to the concepts that Barbara Hudson forwards in her composition 'Justice in the Risk Society'. The question that will be answered is whether the notion of basing justice on risks and employing preemptive measure constitutes the true notion of justice. The Negative Connotation of Risk Analysis of risk provides a context for more thoroughly understanding why criminal justice institutions and actors behave the way they do. Most important, criminal justice institutions exist principally to manage risk. During the past few centuries prior to modernity, the meaning of the concept Risk was neutral, possessing neither a positive nor negative connotation (Fox, 1999; O'Malley, 2000). To engage in a risky act meant that one could either attain significant gain or experience a painful loss. With the transition to modernity, however, the concept risk assumed an almost exclusively negative connotation. The term risk is now synonymous with hazard or danger (Douglas, 1990; Fox, 1999). To be labeled a risk typically invokes institutional mandates to monitor, control, and in some way remove the risky act and actor from dominant culture. Similar to Garland (2001), Fox (1999) contended that being labeled "a risk" implied a moral judgment. That means that the receiver of the label must in some way correct the risky behavior or expects cultural sanctions, sometimes in the form of punishment. Douglas (1990) explained that risk is the perfect forensic category for a new global society. She claimed that a "culture needs a common forensic vocabulary with which to hold persons accountable" (p. 1). Given the ubiquitous nature of the concept, it can be applied to virtually any behavior in any global context. Decisions made to prohibit immigration, or to use excessive force against protesters in Seattle, Washington, each rely on the forensic vocabulary of risk. Criminal justice agencies now make use of actuarial models to stimulate greater social control over perceived risk. In his review of the risk literature, Rigakos (1999) identified five characteristics that appear to run through each scholarly and political account. Briefly they are: a) noninvasive, routinized forms of discipline and surveillance, b) an acceleration in the assembly of knowledge in order to manage populations, c) adoption of "insurance-based" management regimen, d) social control strategies are considered moral because they reflect dominant cultural values and e) risk becomes symbolic. Although each characteristic deserves attention, I direct my emphasis to the first, third, and fourth points. Abuse of Power in the Search for Risks To efficiently manage a diverse culture, mechanisms of social control and surveillance must be noninvasive. Hegemonic control (Gramsci, 1971), therefore, must manifest in seemingly benign patterns of behavioral regulation. These will be expressed as actions necessary to preserve the peace and will carry the weight of moral authority characteristic of utilitarian motivations to preserve the "greater good." Here, Foucault's (1979) articulation of docile bodies, serial space, and panopticism is illustrative. Similar to Garland (2001), Foucault (1979) associated the proliferation of docility in direct proportion to the state's interest in enhancing discipline and social control. Or more succinctly, "A macro- and a micro-physics of power made possible, not the invention of history . . . but the integration of a temporal, unitary, continuous, cumulative dimension in the exercise of controls and the practice of dominations" (Foucault, 1979, p. 160). For our purposes, the physics of power referred to by Foucault appears in the designation of multiple and individualized risk behaviors consistently cited in professional journals, magazines, and television programs. Regardless of the risk factor considered, it soon becomes apparent that "no detail is unimportant, but not so much for the meaning that it conceals within it as for the hold it provides for the power that wishes to seize it" (Foucault, 1979, p. 140). To appropriately manage populations (Rigakos, 1999) engaging in risky behavior, the state relies on panopticism and marginalization through bifurcation of opposites (Derrida, 1976; Foucault, 1979). Rigakos's (1999) articulation of the rise of actuarial sciences and the emphasis placed on disciplinary control draws on Foucault's (1979, 1994) early attempts to explain modes of social control based on routinization and compliance. Dominant cultural interests in producing docile bodies, combined with contemporary manifestations of panoptic regulatory control, signal a mode of moral and behavioral socialization necessary to promote maintenance of hegemonic power (Foucault, 1979). Clearly, each of Rigakos's first three characteristics of risk finds their origins in Foucault's lucid accounts of the creation of docility through a microphysics of power directed at detailed documentation of every aspect of daily life. Risk Prevention and Management as a Vicious Cycle One of the more important insights regarding a risk-based justice system is attributed to Rigakos (1999) who suggested that actuarial risk-prevention strategies proliferate over time; that is, with each response to a risk factor, a new risk is created by the technology, practice, or policy meant to inhibit the risk in the first place. Beck (1992) produced the most salient analysis of this as it applies to risks to the living organisms brought about by industrialization. Each time a new technological solution to an environmental concern has been created and introduced; this new technology emits its own latent risk factor. The cycle of risk, then, is endless. Knowledge based on Fear The perpetual nature of risk strategies is aided by the articulation of risk discourse (Altheide & Michalowski, 1999). Most important as it applies to the position taken in this article, risk discourse operates to produce knowledge based on fear. This manifests in the media and in political rhetoric. More specifically, "Risk discourse cultivates insecurities, focuses them on scapegoats, and forces people to accept expert knowledge of risk- a knowledge that creates new insecurities-as the only viable solution" (Ericson & Haggerty, 1997, p. 86). This kind of marginalization is characteristic of dominant cultural efforts to construct and perpetuate a master narrative, one that claims the mantle of "truth" for itself, and that marginalizes powerless people and their cultural capital (Arrigo & Schehr, 1999). Having established who the primary scapegoats are, the discourse of fear generates technological and actuarial proposals to enhance social control. New technological and behavioral strategies are then promoted as providing greater public security. What the vocabulary of risk assures is constant attention to cultural pressure points. Parents, teachers, librarians, clergy, policy makers, law enforcement, and media personnel are each put on guard for indications of danger. The discourse of risk complements our dehumanizing and individualizing consumer culture in that it stimulates mistrust and suspicion. This is important for students of criminal justice because the invocation of a risk vocabulary leads to divisions among people based on certain ascribed characteristics of difference. The poor, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, and youth each find themselves marginalized by a discourse of fear. Much similar to the efforts at marginalization and social control that manifested at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, a similar actuarial strategy is used by those with a vested interest in maintaining dominant cultural norms and values with respect to the administration of justice. Although many who invoke the language of risk do so with the best of intentions, the hegemonic force that characterizes contemporary renderings cannot help but promote greater mistrust and misguided judicial policy. What is needed is honest discourse that speaks truth to power. Policymakers need to be better educated about the confluence of political, economic, cultural, physiological, and environmental variables that affect non-normative behavior. The Evidence: Response to Terrorism Pre-emptive war in the name of national security has become a 'mega-project' aimed at mobilizing billions of dollars on highly speculative outcomes - defeating terrorism, democratizing Iraq, achieving Middle East peace, and eliminating WMDs. The WMD controversy in the mega project of the Iraq war is instructive about the centrality of risk as the justification of going to war. The question of WMD was the issue through which the US and the UK attempt to get UN Security Council backing for the invasion but failed - that war against Iraq could be justified as an act of self-defense. The present UK inquiry into the death of David Kelly, the biological weapons scientist, reveals the centrality of heightened risk matched by diminished accountability, especially the use of secret intelligence sources to justify decisions to go to war, in war as a mega project. The PM Tony Blair's claim that "Saddam has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes" is under intense scrutiny and it has been revealed that at least one of his advisors, Jonathan Powell, war warned against exaggeration "We will need to make it clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that [Saddam] is an imminent threat." (Norton-Taylor, 2003). This is not so much a new imperialist age in which the US is unilateralist in its national security policy but one of 'Empire Lite' - Norton-Taylor's term for the insufficient exercise of power to realize the goals of human rights and democratization through intervention. If we understand war as a mega project then effectively what the US has achieved is a huge demand on other nations to internationalize the 'stabilization', democratization and rebuilding of Iraq. The success in the war has created an outcome in which the risks will rapidly being shared - recruitment of peacekeeping troops, financial backing, UN collaboration. The struggle at the moment between the US and UN is the extent it will be on US terms. In other words war as a mega project has been used to dramatically re-shape international relations and the terms of global security by displacing national security risk onto others. Pre-emptive war as counter-terrorism has changed the international security system not merely by undermining international law and the regulatory role of the UN Security Council. It has made the national security of first world states the main issue of international security. And within these states the issue of individual security has become the primary referent of national security. In the 1990s the main threat of political violence was the threat to populations in the third world from the impact of failed states. Then the demand was to protect human rights and human life through humanitarian intervention. Now with the spread of the threat of terrorism to the first world the security focus has shifted to become how to protect individuals. As security and human rights concerns have shifted from the third world to the first world with the advent of 'globalize terrorism' so humanitarian intervention has been transformed into pre-emptive war. A pre-emptive war which is seen to be justified can be subject to manipulation by those actively seeking it. In other words, justice in risk society is subjective and is therefore not justice at all. A well ordered society then is not a risk society. References: Altheide, D., & Michalowski, R. S. (1999). Fear in the news: A discourse of control. Sociological Quarterly, 40(3), 475-504. Arrigo, B.,&Schehr, R. (1999). Restoring justice for juveniles: Toward a critical analysis of victim offender mediation. Justice Quarterly, 15(4), 629-666. Dean, M. (1999). Risk, calculable and incalculable. In D. Lupton (Ed.), Risk and Sociocultural theory (pp. 131-159). New York: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fox, N. (1999). Postmodern reflections on "risk," "hazards," and life choices. In D. Lupton (Ed.), Risk and socio-cultural theory (pp. 12-33). New York: Cambridge University Press. Douglas, M. (1990). 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