Foreword

The precrime society is expanding. It relies on a growing range of routine and highly specialist surveillance technologies (see McCulloch & Wilson, 2016) to represent a core characteristic of our ultramodern era (Arrigo, Sellers & Sostakas, 2020). This volume is both a significant and sobering resource on the implications of these developments in a control society (Deleuze, 1992) constituted by an increasingly expanding web of criminal justice agencies, pre-emptive laws and corrective interventions that are enacted through ubiquitous and readily accessible data about people. Underpinning these developments is an equally intricate process of scientific reasoning that has informed various modes of disciplinary and bio-political governance. Technologies have historically classified information (Hacking 1991), and people (see McCahill in this volume), to pursue beneficial and highly problematic social policies. In the ultramodern precrime society, these patterns of classification are magnified by the speed and immediacy of data-driven modes of identifying and preventing crime and recidivism. Formal authorities view people not as individuals, but through their digitised informational personas (Koopman, 2019, pp. 17-19). As dividuals (Deleuze, 1992, p. 5), subjects are composed through “(l)ittle pieces of past patterns” of behaviour or conduct, which are simultaneously used to “train” the algorithms that make formal decisions about their future (Amoore 2020, p. 54). As people often voluntarily contribute information that is used to generate more intricate data doubles (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000), there is a greater desire for governments and private companies to exploit this information to demarcate law abiding people from convicted offenders, and predict who might be criminal at some indeterminate point in future through increasingly nebulous risk and precrime classifications (McCulloch & Wilson, 2016). Bruce A. Arrigo, Brian G. Sellers and each contributor to this volume are to be commended for providing detailed yet accessible explanations about how these processes are currently evolving. The chapters in this volume also offer a range of theoretically informed critiques pointing to the limits of these developments in a range of criminal justice, law enforcement and penal contexts. The Pre-Crime Society: Crime, Culture, and Control in the Ultramodern Age covers an extensive scope of issues from respected researchers and theorists in the fields of criminology, surveillance studies and penology. Despite its breadth and theoretical sophistication, this important text is highly accessible to newcomers to this field and provides grounding for further theoretical and empirical developments examining the problem of precrime in an age of ubiquitous digital surveillance. This foreword offers a few avenues to contemplate in this regard.