The New (Biological) Culture of Control: Neoliberal Communitarianism and the Singularity of the Contemporary Homo Criminalis

At stake in this article is an understanding of the new biological culture of control (cf. Garland 2001). It discusses the emergence of the New Homo Criminalis: the new biological subject in the government of crime (Rose 2000; cf. Rose & Abi-Rached 2013). This paper  investigates the power/knowledge relations between contemporary penal government and criminological theory. Three leading questions are: 1) what conditions facilitated the re-emergence of bio-criminology, 2) how to understand bio-criminology,  and, 3) what are the possible effects on the government of self, others and the state? Answering these questions the paper argues, firstly, that the last thirty years witnessed the emergence of a regime of government that can be called neoliberal communitarianism. It explicates how criminological theories can be placed in the discursive space of neoliberal communitarianism. This also implied a fundamental rupture in the assumptions of government. One of the effects of this paradigm-shift is that it made possible the re-emergence of bio-criminological approaches. The  latter will be understood, secondly, in its ‘singularity’ (Foucault 2000). It will be argued that it is not simply the re-emergence of Lombroso and Homo Criminalis because the question that should be asked is precisely how the new biocriminological approaches problematize crime, criminality and contemporary crime control in radical new ways. This singularity of the bio-criminological program will be analyzed, thirdly, by a study of the strategic case of ‘neurocriminology’ (Raine 2013). This paper explores its claims, assumptions and how this involves a change in the government of self, others and the state.