Anti-social behaviour and its surveillant inter-assemblage

Abstract

This paper describes a recent initiative in NSW, Australia in the state government’s “fight against anti-social behaviour”. The Anti-Social Behaviour Pilot Project has developed a surveillance regime that exempts justice and human service public authorities from existing privacy laws so that these agencies can share risk intelligence about targeted young people for a more integrated and multi-agency intensive management of risk. A detailed account of the ensemble of statements that have shaped and made this highly politicised risk governance possible is outlined. The initiative seeks to establish a more flexible mode of surveillance capable of intervening into cases of persistent risks linked to the possibility of criminal offending and the risks of persistent offending that have both become linked to public safety. Two analytical frames are used to make sense of the project. Firstly, its nodal technique for integrating case management risk across governmental assemblages (police, health etc) is analysed as an exemplar of a post-panoptical surveillant inter-assemblage designed for the networked control of young people. Secondly, Agamben’s (1988, 2005) account of the state of exception is used to demonstrate how the project’s extra-legal administrative procedures for managing risks linked to “the public interest” establish a spatial arrangement for the control of young people based on decisions of exclusion that are paradoxically located inside and outside the law.