Jude McCullough and Sharon Pickering, eds., Borders and Crime: Pre-Crime, Mobility and Serious Harm in an Age of Globalization.

Abstract

Jude McCulloch and Sharon Pickering, eds, Borders and Crime: Pre-Crime, Mobility and Serious Harm in an Age of Globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2012, 202 pp. $ 85.00 hardcover (978-0-230-30029-3) This edited volume contributes to critical scholarship on transnational crime control, mobility, citizenship, and border governance. The chapters marshal primary research to reveal dynamics that operate to foster or disallow transnational human mobility. Each chapter provides an account of how international border is configured as a zone of negotiation and contact where issues of citizenship and identity, race, gender, and mobility are at stake. Borders and Crime will be of interest to sociologists, critical criminologists, and critical security scholars who study migration and its control, flows of capital and commodities, globalization of criminal justice initiatives, biosecurity, geographies of global war on terror, and international crime and its construction. Borders and Crime begins with an introduction by volume editors, Jude McCulloch and Sharon Pickering, who describe contradiction at heart of border: it is at once foremost site where forces of criminalization and crime control operate on a transnational scale as well as a threshold crisscrossed by state actors, entrepreneurs, corporations and other powerful stakeholders that cause widespread harm. This contradiction is positioned as an incongruity between what authors describe as hyperactivity and hypoactivity at border. McCulloch and Pickering situate border as a site of contact and negotiation where coercive power is concentrated and where demands of effective control and regulation inevitably exceed capacity of border to deal with them. The volume is organized in two parts that in turn address production and construction of crime and organized responses to it, as well as notable failures in addressing transnational criminal activity. The bipartite organization of volume mirrors another contradiction identified by border studies literature: namely, that borders are significant for forms of policing undertaken at them as well precrime measures that operate across them. The first part of volume addresses hyperactivity at border, and offers a series of detailed accounts of role of border in defining and addressing crime, threat, and unease. This focus implicitly acknowledges that powerful actors coalesce at border to come to terms with mobility of goods and people by making determinations concerning their licit or illicit status; but it also recognizes that border itself is mobile. For example, second chapter of volume--by Leanne Weber--is a rich empirical account of how policing in New South Wales transcends border as a geographically fixed and singular entity by intercepting unlawfuls at multiple and mobile points within state. Weber shows how a great number of Australia's so called unlawfuls are identified not by Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) agents at border, but through other forms of contact with agencies within country--and often as victims of crime. Weber's contribution contrasts with critical security literature that notes how algorithmic risk assessments and international data-mining constitute a pushing out of border. DIAC interdiction of unlawful non-citizens is often achieved at infranational (rather than transnational) scales, and in a manner that constitutes an inward movement wherein detection and expulsion result when the world, in effect, comes to police (p. 35) rather than other way around. In a preceding chapter, Dario Melossi analyses EU imprisonment rates to locate exclusionary practices of border in EU prisons, where (im)migrants are disproportionally present. Through their analysis of internal Foreign and Commonwealth and Home Office documents, Marinella Marmo and Evan Smith view present immigration control through a historical lens by juxtaposing present-day trafficked to woman subjected to virginity testing at British borders from late 1960s to late 1970s. …