Online workshop, 26 September 2024 at 5pm UK time / 6pm CET
Malte Laub is a University Teacher in Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. His research focuses on the political economy of policing and criminal justice policy as well as welfare policy in the context of neoliberalisation. He is interested in how policing has changed in recent decades and how these changes relate to wider socio-economic transformations.
Discussant
Emma Bell, Professor of British Civilization and Director of the Laboratory of Languages, Literatures, Societies, Cross-Border and International Studies, Université Savoie Mont Blanc
Read the article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380261231202649
Abstract
This article argues that as a consequence of austerity, police in England and Wales have taken over important roles in welfare and social policy institutions. This renders those institutions more coercive, punitive and exclusionary, and normalises a police worldview in those institutions. This process of what I call austerity-driven policification can be observed specifically well in the increasing numbers of police officers integrated into schools most affected by austerity. Such ‘transinstitutional policing’ in Britain is triggered by contradictory post-global financial crisis austerity measures, but reliant upon a long, racialised history of authoritarian neoliberalisation. Cuts to public spending in the 2010s reduced state institutions’ capacities to provide for vulnerable people, who were further criminalised and whose rights to support and solidarity were further delegitimised by a radicalisation of the framing of welfare recipients as undeserving, social housing estates as drug-infested gang territories, and schools in deprived areas, and Black pupils in particular, as dangerous. Police, while subjected to austerity measures also, functioned as an institution of last resort, supplementing and replacing incapacitated state institutions, while also being presented as an appropriate institution to address problems increasingly understood to be of a criminal rather than educational nature. This article suggests that austerity-driven policification is an intensification of longer-term trends toward a larger role for police in the neoliberal era. It shows the racial and authoritarian nature of neoliberalisation, and its messy realisation.
Critical Political Economy Research Network (RN06) 