Ian Loader On How Culture of ‘Excess’ Impacts Penal Politics

In ‘Ice Cream and Incarceration’, Ian Loader attempts to explain a possible connection between the prevailing consumerist culture of ‘excess’ and how the same impacts the penal politics that support harsher punishments and hyperactive legislative interventions.

A connection is established between mundane consumer pleasures — quick gratification of cravings, self-fulfilment over the well being of others — and the social responses to crime control — indeterminate sentences, zero-tolerance, ‘crackdown’ on offenders:

Loader explains the idea of excess:

‘… the idea that the world is — or should be — organized so that one’s immediate desires can be instantly satisfied in ways which often permit one to disregard, perhaps even trample over, the interests, feelings and well-being of others. It is a world that pays homage to self-regarding self- fulfilment; where speedy access to what one craves is paramount; where the great enemies are obstacle and delay.’

What constitutes this idea of ‘excess’, Loader argues, can be connected to crime control in multiple ways. First, they can amplify the damage that is caused by experiencing crime or being under a standing security threat which — represents a disruption of the promise that the world can and should deliver the immediate gratification of self-defined desire.

Second, these elements of excess align with and appear to support the contemporary social responses to crime — speedy adjudication, urgency, decisiveness, gratification, etc.

While referring to Bauman’s framework of ‘Securitarian Obsession’ — an obsession with security and fear that conditions the social relations and political life of many western societies today — Loader endeavours to create an understanding of demands for security and punishment as an ‘appetite’, and how this appetite both engages and get influenced by the operations of identity, state, and market. Reference is also made to Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence — how immediate arousal of ‘myopic choices’ deviates individual choice from delayed rewards that come with self-control:

‘contemporary forms of penal excess may today be bound up with the very ascendancy of myopic choice and the attendant waning of commitment devices that Offer diagnoses as the pathology of our times… decline and failure of various commitment devices — notably government, which today functions less as a source of restraint and more typically acts as an agent of arousal.’

Loader argues for the heuristic value of studying the cultural and psychic underpinnings of illiberal penal practices and how they are able to resonate or align with the securitarian preoccupations of the citizens — how these illiberal attitudes towards punishment are able to secure if not the active consent, then at least the acquiescence or indifference of citizens:

‘But I do believe that we can shed new light on contemporary demands for order by deploying the notion of appetite as a metaphor; by thinking about sensibilities towards security, and demands for punishment, as if they were like (other) mundane consumer pleasures and cravings.’

Loader then goes on to investigate as to how the ‘security arousal’ of the citizens is responded to and amplified by the functioning of identity clashes, government and the market. How these factors compromise the ‘security prudence’ of the population.

Using Garland’s notion of ‘criminological other’, Loader argues that the public discourse on the relationship of a fixed and non-negotiable idea of identity with crime affects the ‘crime consciousness’ of the citizens, and creates binaries of us versus them — security prudence, then, is compromised the social representation of what and who is ‘dangerous’ and who is at ‘risk’:

The effect, across all such cases, is the reproduction of a non-dialogical relation to those who are deemed to lack one’s values and/or threaten one’s existence, and a tendency to privilege penal interventions which are impatient, myopic and directed exclusively at ‘them’

Further, Loader argues, the process of ‘responsibilisation’ — where citizens are encouraged to take precautions concerning their own security — as promoted by liberal democratic governments, enables the market to step in and help the citizens in satisfying their self-defined security demands. He says:

‘The market for security enables its consumers to define and seek to satisfy their own security interests (either alone or by clubbing together with like-minded others — Crawford, 2006), irrespective of the relationship of their security choices to risk, or the wider social impact of their behaviour. If consumers evince a preference for ‘stockpiling’ protection, for creating fortified enclaves, or for using security measures to signal their social status, then so be it. Ours, the security industry says, is not to reason why.’

Loader uses Richard Layard’s ‘hedonistic treadmill’ to argue that in the system of excess, fear proves and renews itself and a person finds it imperative to keep consuming the security goods just to maintain her perceived sense of security intact. As the market perpetuates this culture of excess, Loader argues, that the more this security ecosystem is opened up for the markets, the more it will perpetuate this selfish and other-disregarding over consumption.

From the market, attention is now shifted to the government. The critique here is focused at government’s punitive, hyperactive and consumer-appeasing political posture. Instead of paying attention to the complexities of crime, Loader argues that the government chooses to pay attention to crowd-pleasing rhetoric on crime:

‘… typically glosses over the complexities of lay sensibilities towards crime in favour of simplistic, risk-averse and electorally satisfy- ing readings of ‘public opinion’. Government acts, in other words, as a consumer watchdog and champion, eliciting and giving effect to the demands for punishment and security of its always potentially disloyal customers… Government, in other words, becomes a myopic actor, content to run with and put into effect the forms of security arousal that press most forcefully upon it.

The government’s process of security arousal, Loader argues, is further accompanied by a reluctance to highlight the value of institutions that support human rights, judicial review, parliamentary oversight, and the established jurisprudence of criminal law. He says:

‘… tardiness in ensuring that new counter-terrorism institutions, networks and powers are accompanied by appropriate mechanisms of transparency, oversight and accountability, coupled with a failure to apprehend such things as rights, complaints procedures, parliamentary oversight and the like, not as impeding our ability to guarantee security (‘tying one arm behind the police’s back’, ‘giving succour to our enemies’), but as preconditions for sustaining a form of security that is consistent with, not corrosive of, liberal democracy.’

Therefore, instead of reasoning with public opinion, or to put a counter view, the government simply panders to the public demand for hyperactive security interventions and punishment:

‘The result, too easily and too often, is the production and reproduction within social relations and public life of an impatient illiberalism, and a ratcheting up of levels of material and symbolic investment in penal solutions to crime problems. By injudiciously arousing appetites for security that ought properly to be subject to regulation by the institutions of liberal constraint (Hollifield, 1992: 94; Boswell, 2007), political actors feed the mouth that bites them.’

To suggest an antidote to this culture of excess being reflected in the politics of crime control, Loader argues, is a utopian task. One way of going about it, he argues, is for the government to rationalise the context in which public arguments are made, be a choice architect, instead of blindly translating public appetite for punishment into penal policy. As Loader puts it, instead of riding the public tiger of security, political leaders should try to tame it:

‘It may then start issuing ‘health warnings’ about the dangers of (excessive) consumption; it may begin negotiations with security producers (including, in this case, its own actors and agencies) about the promises they make when promoting their products; and it may insist on the importance of constant, inclusive and thoughtful public reflection about what it is ‘we’ are doing when we punish or seek to secure ourselves. It may, in short, begin to fashion and articulate in public an ethic of penal responsibility and moderation.’

Complement this with Pat Carlen on Imaginary Penalties, and Simon Hallsworth on Rethinking The Punitive Turn.