Cultural scripts of risk consciousness: police practices in high-risk offender management programs

Abstract

ABSTRACT Risk discourse pervades criminal justice institutions. One such example is high-risk offender management programmes. Officers who work in these programmes routinely carry out an array of policing practices to manage high-risk individuals. To reduce risks of recidivism and facilitate social reintegration, these practices range from traditional law enforcement tactics of monitoring and surveilling, to collaborating with agencies and organisations outside of the criminal justice system. Here, the authors utilise the concept of risk consciousness to describe and analyze the cultural logics officers mobilise when perceiving, evaluating, and managing high-risk individuals. Using qualitative interviews conducted with police agents working in Canadian high-risk offender management programmes, this study examines how offender management agents justify and inform their actions. We find officers often invoke a reflexive risk consciousness to interpret and respond to subjects’ riskiness and behaviours. Drawing on different cultural scripts, agents frame subjects as both needing help and as dangerous offenders necessitating further monitoring and law enforcement intervention. In doing so, agents simplify offender management strategies by enforcing accountability while simultaneously neglecting subjects’ subjectivity.