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CRIME PREVENTION AND
SECURITY MANAGEMENT
Law, Insecurity
and Risk Control
Neo-Liberal Governance
and the Populist Revolt
John Pratt
Crime Prevention and Security Management
Series Editor
Martin Gill
Perpetuity Research
Tunbridge Wells, UK
It is widely recognized that we live in an increasingly unsafe society, but
the study of security and crime prevention has lagged behind in its impor-
tance on the political agenda and has not matched the level of public
concern. This exciting new series aims to address these issues looking at
topics such as crime control, policing, security, theft, workplace violence
and crime, fear of crime, civil disorder, white collar crime and anti-social
behaviour. International in perspective, providing critically and
theoretically-informed work, and edited by a leading scholar in the field,
this series will advance new understandings of crime prevention and
security management.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14928
John Pratt
Law, Insecurity
and Risk Control
Neo-Liberal Governance
and the Populist Revolt
John Pratt
Institute of Criminology
Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington, New Zealand
Crime Prevention and Security Management

ISBN 978-3-030-48871-0 ISBN 978-3-030-48872-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48872-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
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Cover illustration: Artur Debat
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden.
—T. S. Eliot (1968, 13)
For Isabella
Series Editor’s Preface
This book not only provides a critique of the role of security, it does so by
examining the key ways in which social and political contexts shape penal
responses, what is referred to as the security sanction. Essentially John
Pratt’s book focuses on the impact of populist policies and the disparities
created by neo-liberalism. Specifically, it examines the damning conse-
quences for the losers with a specific focus on penal policy.
In addition to covering a wide geographical territory that takes in the
US, the UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, this book also engages
with a range of intellectual domains. Just for example, and core to his
analysis, you will read about different elements of the “dark” side of risk
management that in different ways lead to the undermining of human
rights (where respect for human dignity is viewed as being “trampled”);
how both Covid-19 and the UK referendum in Europe generated hostili-
ties towards minorities; and how the influence of experts was undermined
to facilitate a new way of populist thinking.
The book is set in historical perspective, starting in the 1930s, and
examines the key points at which neo-liberalism began, interestingly with
the support of both the political right and left. Never disguising his views
and disdain, Pratt describes this era of individualism, and hatred of
ix
x Series Editor’s Preface
collectivism, as leading to a state in which “the irresponsible and the

unworthy would have to wallow in their own misfortunes.” He docu-
ments the many forms this takes; you will read about the impact on
relationships and marriage, and fashion for example.
For Pratt the emphasis on being enterprising and wealth creating broke
social bonds and undermined the principles of a good society. It also led
to the “inevitability” of economic disasters when individuals were
expected to cope for themselves—with minimal state support—penalis-
ing the disadvantaged who, for example, lived in more crowded houses
and had less secure jobs. And it led in a different way to the reorientation
of criminal law and punishment by “using retrospective legislation, shift-
ing burdens of proof, changing rules of evidence, abandoning due process
and so on to put these measures into law.” The role of politicians in find-
ing a rationale and legitimacy for their position is discussed.
If you are looking for a well-researched and well-written book that
articulates how the social and political context, formed over time, leads
to a certain type of security, and of the relationship between human rights
and security, then you will find these pages a must read. Clearly not
everyone will agree with the conclusions, but the message is clear; when
policies reinforce the division between the haves and the have-nots then
there are serious implications for the type of security you get and the type
of society people live in.
April 2020 Martin Gill

Acknowledgements
The first seeds of the research programme on which this book is based
were sewn by Andrew Ashworth who gave a seminar at the Institute of
Criminology, Victoria University of Wellington, in 2013 (I think), about
the growth of preventive criminal law in the UK. It was based on what
was to become his 2014 book with Lucia Zedner, Preventive Justice. What
was it, though, that was suddenly making possible the transformations in
criminal law that had previously been thought beyond the bounds of pos-
sibility in that country? In 2014, my thinking was pushed further along
when I was invited by Anna Eriksson (my collaborator on a previous
project) to attend a symposium in Prato, Italy. This was on the work of
Zygmunt Bauman, as it related to practices of exclusion, punishment and
criminalisation. My own contribution was a paper based on new laws in
New Zealand that allowed for post-prison confinement of certain high-
risk sex offenders: in effect, in an era when mobility had become so
important, they had become immobilised, as was also occurring in simi-
lar fashion in Australia and the US—the shift towards preventive crimi-
nal law was not just occurring in the UK. At the same time, I was able to
develop the concept of “immobilisation” as an organising theme that
addressed the role of these innovative preventive measures in place, to
varying degrees, across the main English-speaking common law jurisdic-
tions of Western society. And, of course, immobilisation as the main
xi
xii Acknowledgements
strategy in the fight against the Covid-19 virus has since come to have
national implications, as explained in Chap. 9 of this book. My paper was
published as “Immobilisation in an Age of Mobility: Sex Offenders,
Security and the Regulation of Risk” in Anna’s (2016) edited collection,
Punishing the Other. And the purpose of these interventions was further
explored in a paper I wrote with Jordan Anderson, then my Summer
Research Assistant: “The ‘Beast of Blenheim,’ Risk and the Rise of the
Security Sanction,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology
(2016) 49 (4): 528–545.
In 2016, I was fortunate enough to receive a research award from the
Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund that made this project—
how and why preventive criminal law had embedded itself in these societ-
ies in the post-1970s era—conceivable. The project was titled at that time
“Intolerable Risks. The Search for Security in an Age of Anxiety.” Jordan
was recruited as my PhD student. With the receipt of the award, the
project was able to gain momentum and the ideas underlying it began to
be regularly marshalled and revised in a series of seminar and conference
presentations: in Argentina (courtesy of Maximo Sozzo), and in Hong
Kong, Beijing, Prague, Brisbane and Adelaide. Further seminars were
given in 2017 at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University
of California (Berkeley), and the School of Social Ecology, University of
California (Irvine), with thanks to Jonathan Simon and Elliot Currie. A
seminar was also given at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal
Studies, University of Toronto, with thanks to Marianna Valverde; and at
the Department of Criminology, Ryukoku University, Kyoto (courtesy of
Koichi Hamai). My 2017 publication in the British Journal of Criminology
57 (6): 1322–1339, “Risk Control, Rights and Legitimacy in the Limited
Liability State” was an important milestone in this journey.
In 2016, in what proved to be my great pleasure, I began to work with
Michelle Miao on what became the “populist dimension” to the analysis
being developed. It was because of her cajoling—at that time (remarkable
though it might now seem), I did not think I had anything further to say
on this subject, following my 2007 book Penal Populism, and a few pub-
lications thereafter—that I began to see populism both as a response and
as a successor to the neo-liberal era of governance. This work in turn led
to another series of seminar and symposium invitations: in Taiwan
Acknowledgements xiii
(courtesy of Doris Chu), in Berlin and at the Max Planck Institute in

Halle-an-der-Saale; at the Institute of Criminology, University of Sydney;
at the Department of Criminology, Jagiellonian University of Krakow
and the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw (courtesy of Magdalena
Grzyb and Witold Klaus); and at Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv (courtesy
of Hadar Dancig Rosenberg). There have been the following publications
on populism with Michelle that have been influential in the development
of the later themes of this book: “Populismo Penal: El Fin de Razon
[Penal Populism: The End of Reason],” Nova Criminis (2017) 9 (13):
33–105; “From Protecting Individual Rights to Protecting the Public,” in
Gregor Fitzi et al. (eds) (2018), Populism and the Crisis of Democracy,
Volume 2, 47–63, Oxford: Routledge; “Risk, Populism and Criminal
Law,” New Criminal Law Review (2019) 22 (4): 391–433; and “The End
of Penal Populism; the Rise of Populist Politics,” Archiwum Kryminologii
(2019) 2: 15–40.
Part of the project involved what might loosely be termed “fieldwork.”
That is, I was exploring the way in which urban regeneration and its
built-in security measures had further social and spatial divisions in these
societies. Here, I am particularly grateful for the guidance provided by
Paul O’Hare in Manchester; Francis Pakes and David Pritchard in
Portsmouth; Joe Sim in Liverpool; Wayne Morrison in London; Carlos
Bustamente in San Francisco and Oakland; Katherine Beckett and Steve
Herbert in Seattle; and Murray Lee in Sydney. I have had numerous
research assistants, in addition to Jordan Anderson initially, all of whom
have done invaluable work for me. These are Ruby King, Sean Becker,
Daniel Botha, Emma Simons and Naomi Scott.
Insa Koch, Liam Martin and Sarah Monod de Froidville read initial
chapters and made helpful suggestions. Paul Morris persevered with early
drafts of the whole manuscript and his encouragement and subtle criti-
cisms have been invaluable. Jordan Anderson was outstanding in organis-
ing the symposium we held here in December 2018 titled “Criminal
Justice, Risk and the Revolt Against Uncertainty.” A book from the pro-
ceedings with this title and edited by myself and Jordan was published by
Palgrave Macmillan in March 2020. I am grateful to Josie Taylor and
Liam Inscoe-Jones at this publishing house and also the very helpful ref-
erees’ comments on my book proposal.
xiv Acknowledgements
Finally, I would especially like to thank Anne Holland for the wonder-
ful work she has done for me for getting on for twenty years now—hunt-
ing down internet references, sometimes remarkably obscure; formatting;
referencing; constructing bibliographies, graphs, tables—I could go on
and on. To my knowledge, this is the fifth of my books to which she has
acted as “midwife,” in addition to articles, book chapters and so on along
the way. This one posed its own particular challenges for her but she
remained undaunted and helped me enormously in delivering the
manuscript.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Professor of Criminology John Pratt

Institute of Criminology
Victoria University of Wellington
April 2020
Praise for Law, Insecurity and Risk Control
“Many will already know and admire John Pratt’s contributions to studies of risk
and criminal justice. Law, Insecurity and Risk Control is the culmination of those
efforts. In charting the rise of ‘the security sanction’, Pratt here also tells an
engrossing story about the transformations that have engulfed Anglophone
countries in recent decades. In Pratt’s view the populist revolt is no longer merely
the shadow or counterpart of neo-liberal government; it is the token of its failure
to develop a viable habitat in which humans can flourish. This is not just a book
about the present and future of criminal justice, but about the future of democ-
racy as a way of life.”
—Professor Richard Sparks, School of Law,
Edinburgh University, UK
“In Law, Insecurity and Risk Control, John Pratt provides a compelling caution-
ary tale of hubris and unlearned lessons. Placing risk at the core of a socio-his-
torical analysis of Anglo-American societies in the last 75 years that carries the
insightful rigour and sophistication that are the hallmarks of his work, Pratt
traces the rise of the security sanction from before its neoliberal framing up to its
appropriation by the populist revolt and the contemporary challenges posed by
the Covid-19 pandemic. This book is essential reading to anyone wishing to
reflect on the role of criminal law and punishment in politics and society today.”
—Dr Henrique Carvalho, School of Law, University of Warwick, UK
“John Pratt’s new book Law, Insecurity and Risk Control. Neo-liberal governance
and the populist revolt’ is broadly about the consequences of unleashing risk.
From the inter and post-war attempts to manage and tame population risks, to
a neo-liberal freedom where market risk and ontologically insecurities fuel fear
and facilitate the emergence of punitivity and populism, the book traces the
broad contours of risk in late modernity. Pratt shows that risk not only re-writes
criminal law in the form of the ‘security sanction’, but also recasts our human
rights. In the new paradigm the key human right becomes that which protects
the many from the few – even if the few are yet to commit and offence. The
book is stunning in scope yet manages to ground its analysis of broad concepts
through a discussion of a range of historical and contemporary issues. The book
will be of great value to the fields of sociology, criminology, political science and
policy.”
—Professor Murray Lee, Institute of Criminology,
University of Sydney, Australia
“In Law, Insecurity and Risk Control, John Pratt provides a typically systemic,
sociologically-informed analysis of the way in which the politics of risk (and its
inherent duality) has been turbo-charged by populist politics and underlying
social and economic discontent. In so doing, Pratt poses fundamental questions
about the future of the (neo-)liberal state and the role of criminal law within it.”
—Dr Harry Annison, Southampton Law School,
University of Southampton, UK
“Caught between its core commitment to shifting economic risk to ordinary

citizens and workers, and the growing backlash of populism, John Pratt shows
how the neoliberal state increasingly turns to novel sanctions that are placing the
rule of law in crisis. A global analysis of astounding breadth. Theoretical crimi-
nology at its best.”
—Professor Jonathan Simon, Centre for the Study of law and Society,
UC Berkeley, US
“This is a timely, thought-provoking and authoritative book. John Pratt has pro-
vided us with a critical, engaging and highly prescient account of the impacts of
neo-liberal governance on the criminal justice system and the broader manage-
ment of ‘security’ in an age of pervasive risk and uncertainty. Masterful writing,
by one of Criminology’s finest scholars.”
—Professor Gabe Mythen, Department of Sociology, Social Policy
and Criminology, University of Liverpool, UK
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 “Never Again” 21
3 Set Risk Free 53
4 The Celebration of Risk 93
5 Fear and Anxiety in the Risk Society133
6 The Rise of the Security Sanction179
7 Issues of Legitimacy: Legal and Political223
8 The Revolt Against Uncertainty261
9 The End307
References329
Index381
xvii
List of Tables
Table 4.1 References to “Lifestyle” in leading national newspapers:

1960–2019112
Table 5.1 Number of personal bankruptcies: 1980 and 2010 136
Table 5.2 References to “Quality of Life” in leading national
newspapers: 1960–2019 142
Table 5.3 References to “Sexual Predators” in leading national
newspapers: 1960–2019 154
Table 5.4 References to “Paedophile” in leading national newspapers:
1960–2019156
Table 5.5 References to “Terrorist” in leading national newspapers:
1960–2019158
xix
1
Introduction
Dramatic changes to criminal law have been occurring since the 1980s.
These reflect the way in which it has taken on a risk-prevention role, in
addition to what had previously been its carefully limited capacity to
react to crime that has been committed. In contrast, this new capability
takes the form of a range of controls that are intended to prevent crime
occurring, a change that had hitherto been largely prohibited or greatly
restricted in the common law jurisdictions on which this book is based—
the US, the UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Penal policy has
also been harnessed to this process, to the point where risk considerations
have become the most important determinant of prison design, bail and
parole decision-making and much of the sentencing in between.
© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. Pratt, Law, Insecurity and Risk Control, Crime Prevention and Security Management,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48872-7_1
2 J. Pratt
isk and the New Paradigm of Criminal Law

R
and Punishment
Feeley and Simon (1992) had first identified a growing preoccupation
with risk in the management of prison populations. Clearly, though, this
was a mere overture to the much more extensive way in which risk has
since inveigled itself into contemporary criminal justice systems. We can
thus find, variously across these Anglophone societies, by-laws that pre-
scribe alcohol-free zones in public places; anti-congregation laws against
gang members; anti-loitering and anti-begging laws; serious crime pre-
vention orders; anti-social behaviour laws; laws restricting the movement
of particular groups of offenders in public space; laws that allow catego-
ries of sex and violent offenders to be held in “civil detention” at the end
of a finite prison sentence; anti-terrorism laws that impose curfews,
restrictions on places of residence and use of the internet, reinforced by
electronic monitoring and other forms of surveillance; and greater use of
indeterminate sentencing. What all these measures have in common is
their intention to control and prevent the risk of crime. None were in
existence before 1980, with the exception of indeterminate sentences
which, having largely died out by then, have since been resurrected.
What does this assortment of restrictions and prohibitions before a
crime has been committed represent? They reflect the emergence and rise
of what can be termed the security sanction (Pratt and Anderson 2016).
This is intended to protect the public from those who put their security
at risk, even if this is at the expense of the rights of individuals to be pro-
tected from arbitrary or excessive use of criminal law and penal sanctions.
This used to be one of the main jurisprudential and ethical arguments
against such preventive interventions. On this matter, the distinguished
legal scholar Andrew Ashworth (2004, 265) has written that “there comes
a point when the [preventive] legislative devices being used or proposed
are so disrespectful of fundamental principles that questions have to be
asked about their legitimacy in a country committed to the protection of
human rights.” This is correct, according to the way in which human
rights have previously been defined and understood. But it is not correct
according to the way in which the rise of the security sanction shows how
1 Introduction 3
human rights are being redefined within a different paradigm of law and
punishment from that in which they had previously been encased. This
new paradigm includes the capacity to control risk, while giving priority
to public protection.
This then means that, when being used for these preventive purposes,
the criminal justice process is no longer framed around questions of
guilt or innocence; nor how much punishment a particular crime mer-
its; nor is it bound by all the previous restraints on punishment borne
out of concerns about the over-prediction of dangerousness. On the
contrary, “the morality of [a] risk society is thus thoroughly utilitarian.
Efficiency in loss reduction is the moral imperative” (Ericson and
Haggerty 1997, 124). Hence the shift in the understanding of human
rights to fit within law and punishment’s new paradigm. Rather than
ensuring that the rights of all individuals are protected in the criminal
justice process, it has the utilitarian intention of ensuring that the
majority have the right to be protected from the few, even if no crime
has yet been committed by them.
Similarly, controlling risk through criminal law and punishment has
different operational logics from those thought to underlie “the new
punitiveness,” “the culture of control” and so on. Within those analytical
frameworks, “those who refuse to become responsible, to govern them-
selves ethically, have also refused the offer to become members of our
moral community. Hence, for them, harsh measures are entirely appro-
priate. Three strikes and you are out: citizenship becomes conditional
upon [past] conduct” (Rose 1999, 267). Such scholarship, though, con-
flates risk control measures with this more punitive, moralistic trajectory
of punishment that has been seen as the hallmark of the neo-liberal
agenda since the 1980s (Garland 2001). Risk control initiatives, although
introduced by the same governments over the same period, sometimes as
part of the same penal package, are driven by a different economy of law
and punishment. Controlling risk is the response to issues of uncertainty
and insecurity (Ericson 2006), rather than immorality. Here, citizenship
is conditional on assessment of future conduct.
Thus, while the new punitiveness and related characterisations of this
era speak of the need for new penal excesses in response to crime that has
been committed, this risk-based paradigm of law and punishment is
4 J. Pratt
concerned with identifying and then controlling those whom it is thought

are likely to commit particular types of crime, rather than waiting for
them to do so.
The Duality of Risk

The growing influence of risk on the design of criminal justice is one
aspect of the more general preoccupation with risk that has occurred over
the same period, as reflected in all the “risk talk” in the leading newspa-
pers of these societies. While “risk” was mentioned in the Times (London,
UK) in 8074 articles in the 1960s, it was mentioned on 51,620 occasions
in the 2010s. Similarly the New York Times: 12,238 articles in the 1960s
and an increase to 41,549 in the 2010s. In the Globe and Mail (Canada),
an increase from 6936 articles in the 1960s to 31,827 in the 2010s. From
the time when the Sydney Morning Herald and the Dominion Post (New
Zealand) became available online—(1990 and 1996 respectively)—the
preoccupation with risk had already begun. In the former newspaper, we
thus find 19,241 references to risk in the 1990s, and 30,147 in the 2010s.
In the latter, 4795 between 1996 and 1999, and 18,041 in the 2010s.
Yet amongst all this talk, there is a duality in the way in which risk is
understood. On the one hand, risk-taking is actively sought out. Holidays
projecting risk and excitement have become a major feature of tourism
and leisure industries:
Adventure tourism has been booming in recent years as world-weary trav-

ellers look for exciting new destinations and activities—and the chance to
post daring pictures to their social media feeds. The size of the global mar-
ket has more than doubled over the past five years and is now worth £450
billion a year. Almost one in every 20 holidays taken by Britons is now
adventure or activity based. … For a long time Iraqi Kurdistan was a popu-
lar destination. … Until a few years ago, adventurous travellers could visit
Syria or Libya. (Ellson 2019)
But while the search for excitement and risk has become an increasingly
important feature in the merchandising of these industries, the other side
1 Introduction 5
of risk-thinking has come to have very different associations in these set-

tings. Here, it takes the form of warnings about the level of terrorist
threat at holiday destinations; what we must then do if there is an attack
(the Daily Mail reported that “Holiday reps … are being trained to deal
with potential terrorist attacks at hotels across Europe … this includes
what to do if your hotel is attacked by masked people with guns. Holiday
makers will be told to escape to their rooms if they can get there safely …
and to barricade themselves in”, Newman 2019); and what procedures
we must follow to successfully navigate risk-prevention procedures at air-
ports. Simultaneously, then, risk is also something to be feared and to be
avoided.
By the same token, risk-taking is encouraged and applauded: this is
how champions on the sports field might win their medals; this is how
fortunes are made; restaurants can advertise their risky, daring, exciting
menus as a way of distinguishing themselves from their competitors;
extreme sports involving, for example, ice climbing and sky diving, have
come to have large audiences; children are encouraged to participate in
“risky play”; a city that is “vibrant” with a flourishing night-time econ-
omy, and the sense of risk and excitement that comes with this, is an
attraction for investment and for a wealthy, mobile population to make it
their home and so on.
Yet risk warnings simultaneously circumscribe these and virtually all
other aspects of everyday life: taking undue risks might mean defeat on
the sports field; fortunes that can be made by stock exchange trading, for
example, can just as easily be lost; however attractively or excitingly a
restaurant presents its food, there are familiar warnings about the need
for careful diet and the avoidance of risk; children’s journey’s to and from
schools have become carefully guarded (“don’t talk to strangers”); and
while urban regeneration brings attraction and excitement, in the UK
every public and private place is now assessed from a safety perspective.
There, ominous warnings about risks on public transport began to appear
in the early 1990s: “no-one is vetted, everyone is acceptable as a passen-
ger”—hence the need for travellers to be alert to risk. The presence of
“security officers” is advertised on UK trains. When we check in at a
hotel, we may see signs telling us that their risk assessment plan is
6 J. Pratt
available for inspection. Meanwhile, notices in bus stations in Australia

advise us “what to do in case of an evacuation.”
Accordingly, while risks are eagerly pursued to make life more exciting,
we protect ourselves as much as we can from the unwelcome dimensions
of risk. And then the security sanction, in the various forms that it takes
across these societies, represents another layer of protection from risk,
over and above the precautions that individuals take to protect them-
selves. But again, as Baker and Simon (2002, 2) note, “if risk is some-
thing to be celebrated, it cannot only be about harm or danger.”
What is it, then, that has brought about this duality of risk: a prolifera-
tion of risk-seeking, of risk interest, of risk awareness, of risk warnings,
and of risk controls in the form of the security sanction? To a large extent,
this has been the product of governments pursuing neo-liberal agendas
since the 1980s. Their intention has been to set risk free from the eco-
nomic restraints that had been placed on it during the post-war commit-
ment to more extensive welfare state provision, intended to bring certainty
and security to everyday life. In contrast, in this neo-liberal mode of gov-
ernance, uncertainty and insecurity have been seen as necessary accoutre-
ments if risk-taking enterprise is to flourish. By removing state guarantees
intended to prevent business failure, or to secure a “soft landing” in its
event, it was envisaged that this would then allow a new kind of hero to
emerge: the business entrepreneur, more ruthless, sharper and indepen-
dent minded now, engaged in wealth creation, primarily for themselves—
rather than the selfless bureaucrat of the welfare era dispensing public
service for the good of the community as a whole. From the 1980s, how-
ever, rather than allowing the state to determine the course of their lives,
individuals have been urged take charge of this themselves, for good or bad.
Governing Through Risk

In the course of this restructuring, new possibilities of human existence,
shaped around consumerism and technology rather than manufacturing
and unrelenting physical labour, have come into existence. However, the
possibilities of advancement that these bring exist alongside new dangers
that have emerged over the same period, dangers that are the product of
1 Introduction 7
that same journey in the company of risk. Zygmunt Bauman (2002, 62)
wrote that in this new era, “individuals who are untied to place, who can
travel light and move fast, win all the competitions that matter and
count.” To move at that speed, however, necessitates the jettisoning of
former ties, loyalties, duties and encumbrances (in relation to family,
community and work) that would otherwise hold them back. Those who
set out on this path then find that they are taking lonely journeys, with-
out familiar signs and symbols of support and guidance on which they
could have once depended. Meanwhile, those not setting out on it—
individuals or sometimes entire communities—have found that they
have been left behind, isolated and marooned. But now they can expect
no rescue by the state, no helping hand to start them off. Furthermore, if
they are unable to take the risks that have become the necessary recipe for
success, this still does not provide them with some kind of protective
cocoon from the dangers that the risk journey brings. They, too, are beset
by the anxieties and uncertainties that risk has brought to the conduct of
everyday life, as well as what their place in this new social order is to be,
given that all that was once familiar in life in modern society seems to be
vanishing in the course of this restructuring (Bauman 2000). Indeed,
they may be more vulnerable to these risks, not having the means or the
capacity to protect themselves from them.
Where, then, does the security sanction fit in this governmental for-
mula? It has been argued that the range and extent of its preventive mea-
sures reflects the “normalisation” of risk control (Ramsay 2012), and is
indicative of “a ‘guided society’, in which citizens have nothing to fear …
as long as they do not pose an increased risk” (Peeters 2015, 178).
Similarly, these risk control measures are seen as reflecting the emergence
of “the security state” (Ramsay 2012) and “the preventive state” (Ashworth
and Zedner 2014), implying an inexorable growth of state power—in
ironic contrast to the political emphasis given to individuals “taking care
of themselves.” However, this book argues that the shift towards risk con-
trol measures in criminal law allows the general public to continue to
maximise the opportunities for advancement and improvement that
unleashing risk has made available to them. It does this by offering a form
of limited protection by the state from risks that individuals cannot insure
themselves against and which would otherwise cause irreparable harm:
8 J. Pratt
limited promises of security, but dramatic and spectacular all the same in
the form they take and their ensuing ability to solidify communities
against those they target. Hence the focus of most of these initiatives—
against sex offenders, terrorists, gang members and forms of anti-social
behaviour that constitute an assault on quality of life. Risk control mea-
sures are thus not ad hoc or arbitrary; nor are they universal in applica-
tion.1 Instead, they have come to be targeted only at specific types of risk.
By the same token, although controlling risk can certainly lead to more
imprisonment, it is not the purpose of these measures to impose a much
more rigid, authoritarian conservative morality on society at large (cf.
Hall 1988). Questions of morality in this era have become much more
matters of personal choice rather than government direction.
Furthermore, in this formula of governance, individuals are still
expected to take their own precautions against risk, in keeping with the
emergence of what might be termed “the limited liability state,” the prod-
uct of post-1980s economic and social restructuring and the new obliga-
tions and reciprocities between state and citizen this has brought about.
That is, where the gravest risks are seen as beyond the power of individu-
als to offset through their own precautions, the state remains committed
to managing these risks in limited and specific ways in the form of inno-
vative penal measures. Governments are then able to claim that they are
still performing their duty in democratic society to look after their citi-
zens, and protect them from those risks that are understood as posing the
greatest danger to their well-being, notwithstanding all the exhortations
bearing the hallmark of neo-liberal governance regarding the self-
management of risk.
As such, the security sanction has come to have an important role to
play in maintaining the nexus between the productive consequences of
setting risk free and the fears and anxieties that are then simultaneously
unleashed. It has become a means of upholding a sufficient level of social
cohesion as the neo-liberal mode of governance generates winners and
losers in the casino style economies it creates (Reiner et al. 2001). All
have been encouraged to enter this casino and take risks they thought
appropriate, captivated as they were by the enticing prizes on offer, seem-
ingly within their reach. Not all can be winners, of course, but most of
the losers have wanted only to play again, to take more risks, rather than
1 Introduction 9
demand that the casinos be closed. Indeed, it is as if, as Bauman (2007,

146) has written, “to those who have forgotten or have never tasted life in
that other world, it seems indeed that there is no alternative to the pres-
ent one … or rather, any alternative has become all but unimaginable.”
Meanwhile, and irrespective of what happens in the casino economy and
the winners and losers it generates, the security sanction is needed to keep
what are represented as, what have come to be understood as, the most
direct, most immediate, most obvious, most featured risks in public and
political discourse under control, soothing erstwhile fears and anxieties
that individuals had been left on their own in a world redolent with such
terrors: a governmental formula that became self-sustaining for several
decades from the 1980s.
The Populist Revolt

So it was that we deluded ourselves, over the course of this time, into
thinking that it was possible to continue living indefinitely amidst this
finely balanced equilibrium: balanced between the pleasures risk pro-
vided and the dangers it unleashed; balanced between managing our own
risks and relying on manifestations of the security sanction to protect us
from those beyond our control, all the while ignoring the mounting casu-
alties that setting risk free had meanwhile caused. But now we find that
our delusions that this equilibrium could permanently remain so deli-
cately poised have been shattered. The security sanction itself is no longer
able to prop up and maintain a sufficient level of social cohesion to allow
the existing neo-liberal mode of governance to flourish; no longer suffi-
cient to maintain the belief that the existing social order, despite its
imperfections, works well enough for most of us. Instead, cohesion, belief
and (to varying degrees) trust in the authority of the central state itself
have fragmented to such an extent that the entire foundations—once
seemingly impermeable—on which democratic society itself had been
based now seem at risk. And if these fall apart, then all the protections
and expectations that had come to be associated with life in the democra-
cies fall apart as well. Hitherto, familiar institutions of government,
norms, protocols and conventions had remained intact and performed as
10 J. Pratt
they had always done: often not to everyone’s liking, often not very effi-
ciently, but there all the same as recognisable, inviolable fortifications
around the democratic social order. It was these, especially, that provided
the strongest point of difference between the democratic world and non-
democratic social formations.
But now democracy itself is in danger as many of these fortifications
have been subverted, smashed down or simply pushed aside—showing,
in reality, how flimsy they had been all along. As we watch them collapse,
one by one, we find ourselves immersed in what has become a living
nightmare. What will happen if and when—most likely when—the last
of the fortifications falls? What will happen then? No-one can tell us.
No-one can tell us what the eventual price for the delusions we had about
setting risk free will be, but we are gripped by the deepest foreboding at
what it will amount to.
What is it, though, that has brought about this sense that we are slid-
ing inexorably towards the cliff edge of the democratic world where, even
though we cling to its familiar emblems for protection, we succeed only
in dragging these along with us towards this precipice? The cause is popu-
list anger and outrage. This had been building for some time in response
to the growing disparities between neo-liberalism’s winners and losers,
but it had been primarily channelled into the penal arena. There, it was
directed against the criminal justice establishment and the scientific
expertise that influenced policy. A range of extra-parliamentary law and
order lobbyists claiming to speak on behalf of the general public against
such elitist dilettantism insisted that too much attention had been given
to the rights and rehabilitation of law breakers who put the well-being of
the public at risk, while doing virtually nothing for their victims.
Governments variously aligned themselves with these forces and the
security sanction has become one of the responses to these anxieties and
demands, simultaneously enabling social cohesion, despite growing social
disparities, to be maintained.
Thereafter, however, populism has burst out of this confine and now
swarms venomously around “the Establishment” as a whole, denouncing
all institutions of democratic government, denouncing forms of expert
knowledge that it sees as perpetuating the power of the Establishment,
denouncing forms of difference (religious, ethnic or sexual orientation)
1 Introduction 11
that the Establishment seems to condone, all the while yearning for the
rule of a kind of “strong man” authoritarianism. Such a ruler would
respect the common-sense wisdom of ordinary people rather than the
complexities of experts, as well as their despised “political correctness”
derivatives. The Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald
Trump as US president, both within a five-month period in 2016, have
brought these virulent dreams to the centre of political debate.
There has since been an abundance of warnings about the dangers that
will come from unleashing this populist politics. “Are we sliding back to
the chaos of the 1930s?,” Tim Lister, writing for CNN asked in 2018;
Jonathan Freedland (2018) wrote in the Guardian of the way in which
“the sulphuric acid of Brexit is corroding our democratic institutions”;
the Washington Post Editorial Board (2016) wrote that “Democracy [is]
in retreat. Liberal values such as transparency, rule of law, accountability
and respect for human dignity are being widely trampled. Autocrats and
even some Western politicians openly traffic in fear, xenophobia and
paranoia. The enemies of democracy are growing bolder by the day”;
French President Macron has warned in a speech to the European
Parliament that “Leaders worldwide are falling for a deadly illusion of
strong power, nationalism, [and] the abandonment of freedoms”
(Washington Post Editorial Board 2018). Indeed, the warning voices have
become a cacophony, ever more shrill and portentous: the New York
Times: “How Democracy Became the Enemy” (Cohen 2018); the
Guardian: “Take Fright on Brexit: Even the Civil Service Is Telling Us to
Panic” (Toynbee 2018); “Fake News a Democratic Crisis” (BBC News
2018); the Washington Post: “open societies are headed toward a cata-
strophic failure of the marketplace of ideas with no-one believing any-
thing or everyone believing lies” (Gardels 2018); the New York Times: “If
America’s worst enemies had spent years designing a plan to erode our
greatest strengths, they could not have done better than what some of our
fellow citizens are doing to the country every day for short-term financial
or political gain” (Friedman 2019). Nonetheless, this most existential risk
and danger that populism constitutes—to the existence of democratic
society itself—marches menacingly onwards.
Meanwhile, if this marks the end of the road for neo-liberal gover-
nance, it does not mark the end of the road for the security sanction.
12 J. Pratt
While it helped to sustain social cohesion in the former era, it is now

co-opted into performing more extensive duties and responsibilities of
this nature as the populist revolt gathers momentum. Indeed, the more
populism disrupts social cohesion, the more the security sanction is likely
to broaden and become more expansive, in desperate bids to hold this
together.
The purpose of this book is to examine and explain how the security
sanction, which did not have any legitimate place in these societies before
the 1980s, has come into existence and has since performed its vital roles
and functions, while at the same time rewriting our understandings of
both human rights and the limits of criminal law and punishment in
democratic society. This also means examining the social and political
context from which our preoccupation with risk emerged, and it means
examining what lies behind the revolt against risk embodied in the con-
temporary resurgence of populist politics. It is thus not a book that is
intended as an institutional history of preventive law criminal (see
Ashworth and Zedner 2014 for this). Nor is it a history of the emergence
of the security sanction in one particular jurisdiction (see Ramsay 2012).
Instead, the book draws together material from these five jurisdictions to
show how the phenomenon of the security sanction emerged out of the
consequences of neo-liberal restructuring as a possibility to control new
anxieties and insecurities this simultaneously generated. While there has
been no uniformity to this process, it represents a history, nonetheless, of
the way in which it has been possible to think in this way and to put the
various forms the security sanction has taken into place—from compara-
tively light touches (as in Canada) to a much more fundamental refash-
ioning of criminal law and punishment altogether (as in the UK).
What Follows
At what point, then, do we begin this exploration? To misquote T. S. Eliot
(1943, 23), its beginning is to be found in what had appeared to be its
end. The starting point in this analysis of the rise of the security sanction
begins in the post-1945 era. Here, indeed, was another world, notwith-
standing a tendency to romanticise it when compared to the cliff edge we
1 Introduction 13
are now approaching, but a time, all the same, when indeterminate sen-
tencing (the main feature of the security sanction then in existence) had
largely been abolished or had fallen into disuse, to the point of extinction
by the 1970s (Bottoms 1977). Risk of offending could not be accurately
assessed, it was thought, and such measures anyway had no place in dem-
ocratic society, given the way in which they seemed to jeopardise human
rights—as this concept was then understood—and the importance given
to their protection in the post-war era. This was the culmination of a time
when the control of risk was seen as one of the main duties of the central
state—but in the form of controls on market forces in conjunction with
extensive welfare and social assistance programmes that then reinforced a
strong cultural homogeneity, rather than through the criminal justice sys-
tem. Keeping risk under control was seen as the way to bring a longed-for
stability and cohesion to these post-war societies. There could be no
return to the pre-war era when risk, free from economic restraints, had
been allowed to run through these societies, like some sort of demented
clown, creating chaos and disorder in its wake. The cry of “never again”
echoed around the democratic world after 1945.
Yet this post-war, risk free form of governance became unsustainable.
This was both because of its own internal shortcomings and limitations
and because of the prolonged and ultimately successful attack on it from
neo-liberal critics. In the work of Friedrich Hayek especially, welfare gov-
ernance was understood as not only ineffective and inefficient but, in
addition, as constituting a new form of bureaucratic tyranny, suppressing
individual freedom and responsibilities. Market forces, rather than gov-
ernments and their officials, he and his followers argued, should be
allowed to determine who the winners and losers were going to be in a
particular society. Individuals would flourish if they were allowed to be
masters of their own fate rather than passively treading water in a world
that offered them protection from risk at all times. As these criticisms
gathered momentum and eventually seized the mainstream of the politi-
cal agenda, governments from the 1980s were determined that risk
should be set free from its previous economic controls and restraints.
This, it was thought, would make life in the fast lane, or some version of
this, a dream so enticing that all would try to live it and strive for a share
of the rewards it placed on offer. And in contrast to the supposed
14 J. Pratt
“bureaucratic tyranny” of welfarism, this minimalist state would be com-

mitted to “the rule of law”: law that was fixed, certain and limited to
ensure that individuals knew the rules of this game. Those who disrupted
it would be made to take responsibility for doing so and face the conse-
quences of their actions.
Hence the appeal of new, risk-taking ventures from the 1980s. For
example, stock market investment (no longer seen as the exclusive privi-
lege of the already wealthy) and foreign currency trading—opportunities
to become wealthy by pressing a few buttons on a computer rather than
perform backbreaking physical labour over the course of a lifetime.
Deregulated economies now driven by mass consumption and service
industries made prizes available that celebrated extravagance and pleasure
rather than austerity and thrift—expensive cars, furnishings and fashion
items, second homes, holiday homes, holidays abroad and so on. While
such lifestyle possibilities had scarcely existed before, now, as Winlow and
Hall (2017, 93) write, “perhaps more importantly, consumerism has
infiltrated our dreams. … It shapes our desires, our fantasies and our
aspirations. As it has overpowered all alternative sources of meaning and
value, it has furnished us with the symbols we use to gauge our own value
and social significance.”
To live all such dreams, uncertainty was to be welcomed, since this
would allow the strongest to thrive from the opportunities for wealth
creation this would throw up, while the weakest—and, by implication,
the most unworthy now (rather than “the helpless,” as they may have
been designated in the welfare era)—would go to the wall. In this way,
risk itself was projected as something to be celebrated rather than feared.
The prizes that seemed to be on offer in the course of unchaining risk
became so dazzling that those who were left behind in the headlong rush
for these rewards were quickly forgotten. Indeed, the prizes that seemed
to be on offer became the key to neo-liberal political success: prizes and
rewards were offered that would be within the grasp of all competitors;
prizes and rewards, luxuries and extravagances that would no longer be
the exclusive privilege of the rich and powerful.
But, of course, there was the other side to setting risk free: a much
greater awareness of dangers that this brought to everyday life, and a
much greater sense of insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty about the
1 Introduction 15
journey through it. Post 1970s, restructuring removed most previous

signs and symbols that had previously provided guidance and support
along the way. Now, however, there were only rivals and competitors for
the prizes, politicians who made promises about the wonders of risk and
the virtues of self-help, alongside a state that was prepared to offer only
unsatisfactory levels of protection from dangers. Transformations in
urban design from this time began to reflect the deep social and spatial
divisions that had opened up in the course of the restructuring, based
around the need for individuals to protect themselves from unwanted,
threatening, dangerous risks now to be found in public space.
It was this nexus between boundless possibilities of pleasures and
excitement that risk-taking might now bring on the one hand, and all the
anxieties and uncertainties that came from setting risk free on the other,
that brought the security sanction into existence. It represented a kind of
political compromise between the ideological purity of neo-liberalism
and its insistence on individual responsibility and the duty of the state in
the democratic world to protect the well-being of its citizens. As such, the
security sanction came to offer protection from those risks that were seen
as uninsurable against and which would lead to irreparable harm if they
eventuated—while individuals still had to take responsibility for their
own risk management. In this new understanding of risk control, this no
longer meant the state providing protection from poor health, unem-
ployment, poverty in old age and the like. Instead, matters such as these
have indeed been largely assigned to individuals to look after for them-
selves, as risk protection moved into the area of criminal law and punish-
ment. It did this to meet the kinds of grotesque risks that a newly
deregulated media—available on a 24/7 basis for the first time—consis-
tently reminded and warned us of.
Within the framework of knowledge and understanding that this cre-
ated, it was risks from sex monsters, from terrorists, from “neighbours
from hell” who made everyday life a misery and the like that become
predominant. But there was a reality to these fears—they were not some
sort of media fabrication. They spoke to and addressed fears of danger to
what had become particularly precious commodities during this era: the
human body, as a site for pleasure and fulfilment as consumerism became
increasingly central to economic development; and quality of life,
16 J. Pratt
representing a safe haven “for sailors lost in a turbulent sea of constant,

unpredictable and confusing change” (Bauman 2000, 171), but under
threat from the breakdown of local interdependencies and obligations
caused by neo-liberalism.
The form the security sanction has taken to bring risk control to these
areas has then been particularly apposite to this era. It does not speak of
rehabilitating, or exacting remorse or penance; it does not offer retribu-
tion, it is not even interested in deterring or denouncing. It does not
simply incapacitate some, with new forms of indefinite detention, but
goes far beyond the way in which this term was previously understood.
Instead, in an era when mobility is essential if the race to win the prizes
now on offer is to be joined, it immobilises, through controls on move-
ment in public space or through extended use of imprisonment. By so
doing, it then becomes possible to control, regulate and prevent risks of
crime. Nevertheless, legislating for these controls has been no straightfor-
ward matter. A range of conventions, protocols, norms and the like limit
the extent of criminal law preventive strategies that are allowed in demo-
cratic society. The authorities have thus had to win legal legitimacy for
the security sanction by overcoming these obstacles (Beetham 1991).
While some of its elements have been regularly contested in the courts
(sometimes successfully), its proponents have been at pains to argue (usu-
ally successfully) for their legitimacy in ways that provide them with the
hallmark of governance in democratic society. Worried, for example,
about double jeopardy implications for those who continue to be detained
at the end of their prison sentence? We are merely assisting them, not
punishing them again with our civil detention laws. Worried about the
human rights of those subjected to penal control without committing an
offence? We are merely rebalancing the way in which “rights” are under-
stood, so that the public’s right to protection outweighs the rights of ter-
rorists and similar dangerous people to due process. And anyway, the
security sanction is directed at relatively few. Why worry about them
when we can safeguard the many?
Once put in place, the security sanction then played an important role
in maintaining legitimacy for the neo-liberal mode of governance that in
reality had made its presence a necessity. Through its deployment, gov-
ernments could then give the appearance that they were still steering the
1 Introduction 17
ship of state to safe shores. With the assistance of the security sanction,
this mode of governance was able to sail on, full steam ahead. If this
meant governments aligning themselves with a body of populist voices
clamouring for these measures along the way, while ignoring the reserva-
tions of the criminal justice establishment about the legitimacy of them,
so be it.
Except that this ship has since floundered, coming to grief on the twin
rocks of the 2008 global fiscal crisis and mass immigration. The eco-
nomic consequences of the former’s aftermath have meant that large sec-
tions of these societies have been left with no place in the lifeboats—and
with no hope of rescue. They, too, have become immobilised: not through
the range of controls that the security sanction makes available but by the
very mode of neo-liberal governance that they were exhorted to put their
trust in. Meanwhile, mass immigration is claimed by populist politicians
to be corroding the values, norms, security and identity of the nation-
state itself (Pratt and Miao 2019). It has been out of these ashes of neo-
liberal governance that populist politics has flourished. Rather than
sustaining the neo-liberal version of “risk society,” as populism in the
penal arena had done (Pratt 2007), this form of populist politics promises
an end to its uncertainties and anxieties, amidst incantations of bringing
about a return to a glorious but largely mythical past. The result? Out of
uncertainty, into chaos.
Ultimately, it was the decision to set risk free that led us to the rise of
anti-risk populism. With its inherent disrespect for the rule of law—as if
this is some sort of anachronism that only despised liberal elites recog-
nise—and its own need to identify enemies to feed its grievances, popu-
lism is likely to further extend the growth and reach of the security
sanction. There is to be no return, then, to a more benign past for crimi-
nal law and punishment. New para-penal measures beyond the adminis-
tration of criminal justice altogether, immobilising new clusters of those
populism identifies as its enemies, complement existing risk control mea-
sures. That these are in the name of “public protection” then gives them
their stamp of approval.
“Are you still sure there’s no need to worry?,” Anne Applebaum (2018)
has asked, in relation to the Trump administration’s attacks on demo-
cratic governance. Are you still sure? Are you? Are you still sure, as we
18 J. Pratt
head towards democracy’s precipice? The bill we have to pay for allowing
ourselves to be seduced by risk and all it promised us has only just begun
to be added up.
Note
1. The exceptions to this, which have the potential to take prevention into
broader areas of law breaking, are serious crime prevention orders, avail-
able in England and Wales from 2015 and New South Wales from 2016.
While the former targets slavery, prostitution and child sex crime, these
orders can also be used to prevent, inter alia, money laundering, fraud,
blackmail and organised crime. In the latter, the target seems to be drug
trafficking.
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2
“Never Again”
Let us first return to that “alternative world” that Bauman mentioned:

the alternative to this one of imminent dangers, of threatening risks, of
the real possibility of the collapse of the democratic social order itself. At
the end of the Second World War, the task of government had been to
provide that very alternative: cohesion, stability, certainty and security, all
the features of contemporary social arrangements that now seem missing.
What elements that there were of the security sanction increasingly
seemed redundant to this task. But this alternative world had not fallen
into place by accident. Rather, it had been very deliberately constructed
to try to ensure that risk and all its attendant anxieties and insecurities
would be tamed and never again be allowed to rain down its fearful con-
sequences in unpredictable storms.
“Never again” had been the phrase that dominated political discourse
in the Anglo-American societies in the aftermath of their victory. Never
again a war such as this had been, with its misery, destruction, mass mur-
der and genocide. Never again, senseless slaughter, starvation, the bomb-
ing of cities, the show trials of dissenters that made a mockery of justice,
the horrors that were to be found in concentration camps and all the
wasted lives that were caught up in this morass. But never again, as well,
© The Author(s) 2020 21

J. Pratt, Law, Insecurity and Risk Control, Crime Prevention and Security Management,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48872-7_2
22 J. Pratt
a return to the ravages of the depression years of the 1930s and the way
this had led to the rise of anti-democratic “strong men”—and ensuing
catastrophe. For the British double agent Donald Maclean, the 1930s
had been “blackly depressing. … It was not merely that there were mil-
lions of unemployed whose festering boredom and misery were all
around … [even worse,] the foundations of ordered society in Europe,
the ordinary decencies of peaceful civilisation seemed to be breaking up”
(quoted in Philips 2018, 27). Never again should risks from market forces
be allowed to roam these societies untrammelled, wreaking havoc on
national economies. Memories of that pre-1939 time, when risk was on
the loose, remained a perpetual nightmare:
It was every man for himself, whether he wanted to find a job or whether
he wanted to invest money in the work of reconstruction … nobody could
bother to plan the supply of labour for this work. Nobody could bother to
plan the work itself on a national scale, and it was left to speculators who
care for quick profits and nothing for the future … afterwards, when the
frenzy of speculation had exhausted itself, came the crash. (Balogh 1941, 10)
By 1945, the results of allowing risk to run free were all too evident.
Much of the modern world stood in ruins. True, in the 1930s, some had
been able to make fortunes scavenging amongst the detritus of the Great
Depression—but countless more had lost everything. As Eric Hobsbawm
(1994, 271) explained:
The inter-war experience, and especially the Great Slump, had been so
catastrophic that nobody could possibly dream … of returning as soon as
possible to the time before the air-raid sirens had begun to sound. All the
men who sketched out what they hoped would be the post-war principles
of the world economy and the future of the global economic order had
lived through the Great Slump.
To ensure that there could be no such return, a range of measures were

put in place after the war—welfare programmes and economic policies—
to keep those pre-war risks under control. For a time—up to the late
1970s in some of these societies, but one which came to an end rather
earlier in others—these measures seemed to have had significant success.

Living standards for most improved considerably; a much greater sense of
cohesion, stability and security was implanted than had existed before the
war. As a consequence, what traces there were of the security sanction
largely disappeared from these societies in this era. It was not needed.
Risk should be alleviated by social welfare rather than criminal justice, it
was thought. For many, the future in this time held few fears, only a
bright certainty and sense of security.
The Reduction of Risk

Initiatives to protect citizens from free market risks had begun to be put
in place in the 1930s. The New Zealand Labour government in 1938 had
introduced one of the most comprehensive welfare systems then in exis-
tence, promising “cradle to the grave” security. Furthermore, its highly
protected economy aimed to promote and preserve full employment. In
the US, President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” promised greater government
management of the economy, poor relief and increased public expendi-
ture (before 1933, federal aid had been limited to Red Cross distribu-
tions). During his presidential statement upon signing his 1935 social
security legislation, Roosevelt (1938, 324) explained that “we can never
insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred per-
cent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a
law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and
to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.”
In other words, he was prepared to take on risk and vanquish it, as far as
possible, from the lives of US citizens. His “Four Freedoms” speech of
1941 then promised freedom from fear and want (along with the consti-
tutionally guaranteed freedom of speech and worship). This was to be
delivered through “economic understandings which will secure to every
nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants” (Roosevelt 1941b,
672). He justified these guarantees on the grounds that, as it was “increas-
ingly difficult for individuals to build their own security single-handed,
Government must now step in and help them lay the foundation
stones. … We must face the fact that in this country we have a rich man’s
24 J. Pratt
security and a poor man’s security and that Government owes equal obli-
gations to both” (Roosevelt 1941a, 479–480).
During the war, a commitment to creating risk-free societies under an
umbrella of state protection began to be seen as an obligation that gov-
ernments owed to their citizens for their wartime efforts. They were not
fighting Nazism to the death just to bring about a return to the hopeless-
ness of the 1930s. Early on in the conflict, George Orwell (1940, 1982,
73) had recognised that “what this war has demonstrated is that private
capitalism—that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines
and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit—does not
work.” In effect, the fight for freedom that the war represented was a war
where freedom itself was in the process of being redefined. As the Times
editorial on July 1, 1940, explained, “if we speak of freedom, we do not
mean a rugged individualism that excludes social organisation and eco-
nomic planning. If we speak of equality, we do not mean a political
equality nullified by social or economic privilege. If we speak of eco-
nomic reconstruction, we think less of maximising production than of
equitable distribution.”
This redefined understanding of freedom no longer meant pre-war lib-
ertarianism where only the strong survived but, instead, a set of guaran-
teed opportunities for all, with those earlier risks to them brought under
government control. For Karl Mannheim (1940, 376–377) at the London
School of Economics:
The new conception of freedom creates the desire to control the effects of
the social surroundings as far as possible. This is no mere daydream, it is
based on the fact that enormous advances in social technique allow us to
influence the conduct of social affairs from the key positions, according to
a definite plan … [to do so] we must be willing to forgo our former liber-
ties. … From now on men will find a higher form of freedom in allowing
many aspects of their individual lives to be determined by the social order
laid down by the group.
New expectations of government thus emerged during the war: “it was
increasingly regarded as a proper function or even obligation of
Government to ward off distress and strain not only among the poor but
almost all classes of society” (Titmuss 1950, 506). In the UK, “certain
groups—expectant and nursing mothers and young children—were sin-
gled out to receive extra allowances and special aids, not because they
were rich or poor … but because common-sense, supported by science
and pushed along by common humanity, said it was a good thing to do”
(ibid., 507). Indeed, wartime success in the delivery of such services was
itself evidence of the way in which state provided assistance could improve
both citizen well-being and the health of the nation itself. Hence the
growing responsibilities placed on governments, in planning for the end
of the war, to provide security against risk in the form of comprehensive
state welfare programmes. Most famously, the UK’s Beveridge Report
(1942, 120) promised to control risk by eradicating “five giant evils:
Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, Idleness … [by] securing an income
to take the place of earnings when they are interrupted … and to provide
for retirement through age, to provide against loss of support by the death
of another person, and to meet exceptional expenditures, such as those
connected with birth, death and marriage.”
The Employment Policy (Home Office 1944, 3) white paper that fol-
lowed it proclaimed that “the Government accept as one of their primary
aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of
employment after the war”—so imperative a matter would no longer be
left to the quixotic play of market forces to determine. Equally, the Report
on Social Security for Canada (Marsh 1943, 6, 15) indicated that:
Organised provisions will be made in the post-war world for the risks and
contingencies of family life that are beyond the capacity of most of them to
finance adequately from their own resources … social security has become
accepted as one of the things for which the peoples of the world are fight-
ing for. It is one of the concrete expressions of “a better world.”
The subsequent White Paper on Employment and Income (1945, 548)

acknowledged that “when unemployment threatened, government would
incur deficits and increases in the national debt resulting from its employ-
ment and income policy, whether that policy in the circumstances is best
applied through increased expenditures or reduced taxation.” Government,
rather than market forces, would be the determinant of the well-being of
26 J. Pratt
individual citizens. The state objectives in the white paper Full Employment
in Australia (1945) was “work for all.” This was to be secured by the
maintenance of total expenditure at a level equal to the maximum pro-
duction that would be achieved “if our human resources are to be
employed to the full” (Walker 1947, 381).
Furthermore, the way to implement these dreams of a new kind of
freedom would be through extensive and elaborate government plan-
ning, preventing any return to the “Age of Chaos” (Barlow 1940), as the
pre-war era was depicted by influential post-war opinion formers. Chaos
was the stuff of nightmares; what was needed was certainty and security.
It was anticipated that, through the state’s carefully planned economy,
this would bring permanent employment, ensuring that lives that could
then be lived quietly in the tranquillity of peace. Even before 1939, it had
been recognised that, without planning, “democracy cannot be pre-
served” (Allin 1937, 511). Accordingly, in the US in 1939, the National
Resources Planning Board was founded, with its primary emphasis on
protecting employment and the development of public aid. Thereafter,
Balogh (1941, 12) recognised that, in the UK:
The most important thing is to realise that the end of the war will not be
the time to return to what used to be called “normal”—that is complete
freedom for the speculator to make high profits out of the world’s recon-
struction … on the contrary, it must be planned, exactly as wartime recon-
struction ought to be planned. Just as Government controls are needed at
present to enable the nation to throw its whole strength into the war effort,
so a system of Government controls—reformed both in character and per-
sonnel—is needed to enable us to throw our whole strength into the
peace effort.
In 1943, Beveridge anticipated that when peace came, “the very first
thing to win is the Battle of Planning. We shall need to have planning on
a national scale, boldly overstepping the traditional boundaries of urban
council, rural council, County Council. Boldly overstepping the interests
described so often as vested” (quoted in Kynaston 2007, 31). The Marsh
Report (1943, 7) explained that “the pre-war background has not been
forgotten by many … and it must not be forgotten in the post-war period
[that] in planning in advance what measures should be taken … to give

reality to the aspirations and hopes which the peoples of the world are
more and more clearly voicing.”
Such shifts towards centralised planning for the future, at the expense
of the power of market forces, had not always been welcomed. The
renowned British jurist A. V. Dicey (1914) had warned of what he saw as
the growing influence of the “collectivist movement” in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth century and the implications of the growth of
state administrative power for individual liberties:
Contrast now with the dominant legislative opinion of 1859 the dominant
legislative opinion of 1900. … The current of opinion had for between
thirty and forty years been gradually running with more and more force in
the direction of collectivism, with the natural consequence that by 1900
the doctrine of laissez faire, in spite of the large element of truth it contains,
had more or less lost its hold upon the English people. (Ibid., xxx–xxxi)
In the midst of the war, however, most such concerns were discarded.
Mannheim (1940, 377) argued that “freedom can only exist when it is
secured by planning. It cannot consist in restricting the powers of the
planner, but in a conception of planning which guarantees the existence
of essential forms of freedom through the plan itself.” Indeed, Barbara
Wootton (1945, 48) took the view that planning would be freedom’s
guarantor, even though this necessitated “people putting old individual
liberties in trust for the common good.” This was the prevailing opinion
at the time: “it is no overstatement to say that the simple choice between
planning and non-planning, between order and disorder, is a test-choice
for English democracy … plan we must, to save and fulfill democracy
itself ” (Sharp 1942, 118); “the man in the street begins to think that we
should be able to plan our work and our environment after the war is
over and to feel that we shall need planning in those immediate postwar
years as we have never needed it before” (Stephenson and Pool 1944, 9);
“planning is the process by which the physical background necessary for
a full and healthy life for all our citizens may be provided” (Abercrombie
1945, 105); “planning aims at providing better and healthier conditions
28 J. Pratt
of life for men, women and children … it involves the best possible deci-
sions by the ablest personnel available” (McAllister 1945, 13).
By the end of the war, planning had become a central feature of a new
political orthodoxy. In what led to its landmark election victory in 1945,
the British Labour Party manifesto Let Us Face the Future (1945, 2) main-
tained that planning and controls were necessary to prevent “the profi-
teering interests and the privileged rich having an entirely free hand to
plunder from the rest of the nation as shamelessly as they did in the
nineteen-twenties.” The US statesman Averill Harriman acknowledged in
1946 that the free market needed regulation: “people in this country are
no longer scared of such words as ‘planning’ … people have accepted the
fact that the government has got to plan as well as individuals” (quoted
in Maier 1987, 129). J. K. Galbraith (1967, 25) later reflected that “dur-
ing the war, the need for post-war planning acquired the status of a mod-
est industry … nothing else would so reassure those who were fighting
that they had eventual utility as civilians.”
A new infrastructure of government, with vast expansions of the pub-
lic sector was one of the consequences of this investment in state plan-
ning. In the UK, this increased from eight per cent of the workforce in
1950 to seventeen per cent, or twenty-seven per cent if the employees of
nationalised industries were included by 1971. Civil servants increased in
number from 340,000 to 720,000 between 1931 and 1955. Furthermore,
working for the state was understood to be good, important work; work
that would help to rebuild and remodel society—what more important
task was there? In 1957, Which Magazine reported that “nearly every
occupation nowadays, whether the army, the police, the stock exchange
or even advertising, likes to portray itself as a ‘social service’: they publi-
cise and promote themselves to their customers or potential recruits as
being just as public-spirited as anyone else” (quoted in Sampson 1971,
656–657). At the same time, this new public sector workforce with its
assurances of almost wholly new conditions of employment—job secu-
rity, incremental pay rises, promotion opportunities and (eventually)
even a guaranteed pension on retirement based on one’s earnings during
work—was itself a safe haven against pre-war risks of poverty and
unemployment.
Another random document with
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Besides our own people, and the followers of Boo-Khaloom, we
had a number of liberated slaves who were returning to their homes.
The bashaw had given freedom to twenty-four from the castle,
sixteen of whom were females. Our friend, Mohammed D’Ghies, had
also liberated three young women, all under twenty, natives of
Begharmi, the evening previous to our leaving Tripoli, telling them, in
my presence, that his friends the English wishing to visit their
country, was the cause of their being set at liberty. There are
circumstances attached to this act of D’Ghies beyond the mere
liberation of three healthy negresses, so creditable to the feelings of
this excellent old man, that they must not be omitted. Two of these
girls only had fallen into his hands, and on his intimating to them his
intention of giving them their liberty, they told him that another sister
had been brought to Tripoli with them, and sold, like themselves, to
slavery; but they knew not what was become of her. Mohammed
D’Ghies, after much inquiry, succeeded in finding out who had been
the purchaser, paid the price demanded for her liberation, and
provided the means for enabling all the sisters to return together to
their own country with Boo-Khaloom.
On the 20th October, in a date grove a short distance from the
town of Temenhint, we found a kafila from Mourzuk, and some of the
Mamelukes who had come from Darfoor and Waday. I visited them
with Boo-Khaloom: their tents scarcely held together, and they gave
a deplorable account of their sufferings: two of them had been beys,
and one, Mohammed Bey, was still in the prime of life, and
conversed with spirit; the other, Ali Bey, appeared weighed down by
his misfortunes, and was between fifty and sixty years of age: they
had left Cairo fifteen years, and had passed the greater part of their
exile in and near Dongala. On the approach of the army of
Mohammed Ali, three hundred and fifty of them mustered at
Dongala, and determined on passing to Kordofan, and from thence
to Darfoor. At Darfoor they refused to receive them, and they then
moved on to Wara, the capital of Waday, where also they were
refused permission to remain. For four months they had been in
great distress, the Waday people refusing to sell them any thing for
themselves, or forage for their horses, all of which they were
consequently obliged to part with: taking slaves for them, which they
again exchanged for ostrich feathers, and any thing they could get.
At Waday, all but twenty-six determined on proceeding to the south;
they, however, afterwards altered their minds, and took the direction
of the army of Mohammed Ali, meaning to claim protection there.
The twenty-six left Waday just before the Rhamadan (May), and
followed the tracks of camels until they came to a kafila of
Fezzaneers proceeding to Mourzuk: this kafila they joined; but in
passing through the Tibboo Borgoo country, one of their camels
strayed and tore a branch from a date tree, for which the Borgoo
people beat and wounded one of the Mameluke slaves: this was
resented by the Mamelukes, and a quarrel ensued, which the
Fezzaneers in vain attempted to arrange. They also became
sufferers: the Borgoo people attacked and followed the kafila for five
days, during which time twenty of the Mamelukes were killed, and
thirteen of the Fezzaneers; the six remaining Mamelukes were now
on their way to Tripoli, in the hope of obtaining from the bashaw
permission to pass the remainder of their lives in his regency: they
had lost forty thousand dollars since leaving Egypt.
Mohammed Bey describes the people of Borgoo and Waday as
savages of the worst description, abhorring even the sight of a white
man. I told him it was my intention to proceed in the direction of
Darfoor, if possible: he replied, placing my hand in Boo-Khaloom’s,
“Do not leave this good man, Sidi-Rais, if you hope to return.”—But
rarely a kafila passes from Dongala to Darfoor; to Bornou, never.
The army of Egypt had been repulsed with considerable loss at
Darfoor; the people of which country, Mohammed Bey said, could
muster one hundred thousand men, armed, in the field, equipped
with artillery and mortars. The beys of Egypt had sent the King of
Darfoor, many years ago, eight pieces of ordnance; they had made
others, and worked them, as well as the people of Egypt themselves.
The army had gone south, and meant to over-run all the Kordofan,
when it was thought, if they had no reinforcement, that they would
return to Egypt: with their present strength, they could do nothing
with Darfoor, but the people of Darfoor wished for peace with
Mohammed Ali, and feared him; on this account it was that they
would not receive the Mamelukes. Affecting my own plans so
materially as this information appeared to do, it was listened to by
me with the deepest interest.
On Thursday, the 24th of October, we halted at Sebha, and
remained there until Saturday the 26th, gathering our escort and
collecting our supplies.
On Wednesday, the 30th October, we made our entrée into
Mourzuk with all the parade and show that we could muster. By Boo-
Khaloom’s presents to the bashaw, but chiefly on account of his
having undertaken to conduct us to Bornou, he had not only gained
the bashaw’s favour, but had left Tripoli with strong proofs of his
master’s consideration. Boo-Khaloom, naturally liberal, had, by
successful trade, been enabled early in life to gratify his charitable
and benevolent inclinations. This made him so popular in Mourzuk,
that nearly half the inhabitants came out to meet him, at a short
distance from the town, although not any of the authorities, and we
entered the gates amidst the shouts of the people, preceded by
singing and dancing women; and the Arabs who formed our escort
made such repeated charges upon their jaded and tired animals, that
I really expected some of them would “fall to rise no more.” No living
creatures can be treated worse than an Arab’s wife and his horse,
and if plurality could be transferred from the marriage bed to the
stable, both wives and horses would be much benefited by the
change.
I could not quite resist a sensation of disappointment that no
friends came out to meet me: but as the sun was insufferably
powerful, and as I had received a message by Boo-Khaloom’s
brother, from Doctor Oudney, that he was unwell, and that
Clapperton had the ague, I did not much expect it; I was, however,
by no means prepared to see either of them so much reduced as
they were. Both my companions and Hillman I found had been
confined to their beds with hemma (fever and ague), had been
delirious, and the Doctor and Hillman only a little recovered.
Clapperton was still on his bed, which for fifteen days he had not
quitted. Doctor Oudney was suffering also from a severe complaint
in his chest, arising from a cold caught during his excursion to
Ghraat, and nothing could be more disheartening than their
appearance. The opinion of every body, Arabs, Tripolines, and our
predecessors, were unanimous as to the insalubrity of its air. To
account physically for the sickliness of the place, was beyond the
powers of wiser medical heads than mine, but facts are stubborn
things. Mr. Ritchie had fatally felt the baneful influence of the climate
of Mourzuk, and Captain Lyon had suffered extremely during his stay
there: every one of us, some in a greater or less degree, had been
seriously disordered; and amongst the inhabitants themselves, any
thing like a healthy looking person was a rarity.
Notwithstanding Boo-Khaloom made every exertion in his power
to get away from Mourzuk as early as possible, yet, from the
numerous arrangements which it was necessary for him to make, for
the provisioning so many persons during a journey through a country
possessing no resources, it was the 29th November before those
arrangements were complete. Doctor Oudney and Mr. Clapperton,
from a most praiseworthy impatience to proceed on their journey,
and at the same time, thinking their health might be benefited by the
change of air, preceded him to Gatrone by ten days. I had remained
behind to urge Boo-Khaloom and expedite his departure, and we
thought by these means to obviate any wish which he might have to
delay on account of his private affairs, even for a day. Our caution
was, however, needless; no man could be more anxious to obey the
orders he had received, and forward our views, than himself: indeed
so peremptory had been the commands of the bashaw, in
consequence of the representations of our consul general, when
complaining of former procrastination, that Boo-Khaloom’s personal
safety depended on his expedition, and of this he was well aware.
It may not be unacceptable to the reader, if I here give some
account of the strength of our party.
I had succeeded in engaging, on my return to Tripoli, as an
attendant to accompany me to Bornou, a native of the island of St.
Vincent, whose real name was Adolphus Sympkins; but who, in
consequence of his having run away from home, and in a merchant
vessel traversed half the world over, had acquired the name of
Columbus; he had been several years in the service of the bashaw,
spoke three European languages, and perfect Arabic. This person
was of the greatest service to the mission, and so faithful an
attendant, that His Majesty’s government have since employed him
to accompany my former companion and colleague, Captain
Clapperton, on the arduous service he is now engaged in: we had
besides three free negroes, whom we had hired in Tripoli as our
private servants; Jacob, a Gibraltar Jew, who was a sort of store-
keeper; four men to look after our camels; and these, with Mr.
Hillman and ourselves, made up the number of our household to
thirteen persons. We were also accompanied by several merchants
from Mesurata, Tripoli, Sockna, and Mourzuk, who gladly embraced
the protection of our escort to proceed to the interior with their
merchandize.
The Arabs in the service of the bashaw of Tripoli, by whom we
were to be escorted to Bornou, and on whose good conduct our
success almost wholly depended, were now nearly all assembled,
and had been chosen from the most obedient tribes; they gained
considerably in our good opinion, each day we became better
acquainted with them: they were not only a great and most
necessary protection to us, breaking the ground as we were for any
Europeans who might follow our steps, but enlivened us greatly on
our dreary desert way by their infinite wit and sagacity, as well as by
their poetry, extempore and traditional. We had several amongst our
party who shone as orators in verse, to use the idiom of their own
expressive language, particularly one of the tribe of Boo Saiff
Marabooteens, or gifted persons, who would sing for an hour
together, faithfully describing the whole of our journey for the
preceding fortnight, relating the most trifling occurrence that had
happened, even to the name of the well, and the colour and taste of
the water, with astonishing rapidity and humour, and in very tolerable
poetry; while some of his traditionary ballads were beautiful. The
names of the chiefs who were to accompany us were as follows:—
Of the tribe of M’Garha, Sheikh Abdi Smud ben Erhoma, from the
Syrtis, with seventy men. He often said that his father’s name was
renowned in song, for having killed one hundred men with his own
hand in battle, and please God! he should exceed him, for he was
but thirty-five, and had brought forty to the ground already.
The M’Garhas are at this time in great favour with the bashaw,
and entirely exempt from tribute of any sort, from having assisted
him very materially in annihilating the Waled Suleyman: I must,
therefore, give some account of them.
They principally inhabit the Syrtis, where a considerable body
always remain; tribes of them, with their flocks, pitch their tents for
the months of pasture wherever they can find forage, and in times of
peace even to within a few leagues of Tripoli. When the present
bashaw determined on putting a finishing stroke to the Waled
Suleyman, by the extermination of the tribe, he, like a wily politician,
sent offers of peace and protection to the M’Garha, the ancient and
inveterate enemies of the Seffenusser[7]. In their occasional
skirmishes, no quarter was given; and a Waled Suleyman literally
sucked the blood of a M’Garha, after giving him the finishing blow:
children were even called upon to follow the parent’s example, so
that they might imbibe all the hatred felt by their ancestors, and vice
versa. The tribe of M’Garha readily accepted the bashaw’s offers;
and with their assistance, about six years back, the Waled Suleyman
struggled with the power of the bashaw for the last time. It was near
the borders of Fezzan, in one of those extensive upland plains called
Hormut Mahulla, that the grandsons of Seffenusser, the last of the
house, returned from Egypt, and headed the remaining followers of
their ancestors. The Orfilly, and several other tribes, flocked to the
standard: the M’Garha marched from the eastward to assist the
bashaw, who came from the side of Tripoli; the rebels were
surrounded, and the Orfilly capitulated, promising an enormous
tribute. No terms were, however, granted to the Waled Suleyman;
they were followed with fire and sword to their very huts—
Seffenusser’s children fell into the hands of their enemies; they were,
however, spared, and two of them sent to Mourzuk. Since that time,
the name of Waled Suleyman is scarcely breathed; indeed the tribe
has ceased to exist, with the exception of some few who escaped to
Egypt. A solitary being, who thinks himself unobserved, is
sometimes pointed out to you as having been one; but his misery
protects him. So complete an overthrow of the most numerous tribe
that inhabited the regency of Tripoli, and one whose riches and
influence were so well known, has had the effect of humbling the
turbulent spirit of the Arabs to a wonderful degree: the bashaw rules
them literally with a rod of iron, and for the slightest cause he has the
heads of their sheikhs over the gates of his palace in a few hours.
He makes it his policy to keep up their feuds and ancient enmities,
by which means he prevents that unanimity which might make them
dangerous. The name of Seffenusser is, however, still the tocsin of
revolt; it is in itself a thousand strong; and the bravery displayed by
Abdi Zeleel, the eldest survivor of the name, during the late
campaign in the negro country, has not a little contributed to
strengthen the feeling.
Abdallah Bougeel, a chief and a warrior, from the Shiati, whose
father and grandfather died because they would not fly; who never
attended to flocks, but were chief in fight—twenty men.
Sheikh Sultan ben Kaid, from the Shiati, a great warrior, who had
a terrible wound in his face, which had nearly demolished his nose,
from the sword of a Tuarick—ten men.
Hamed el Geide, Shiati—ten men.
Hamed Bendou el Hothmani, Shiati—ten men.
Sheikh Boo Bucker Saakhi, Shiati—ten men.
Salem Asheneen Hashnuowy, Shiati—thirty men.
The Maraboot Sid Hassan ben Eran—ten men.
Il R’baiah—ten men.
Boo Ahgoom, Osfilly—twenty men.
Futhaem—ten men.
Arabs are generally thin meagre figures, though possessing
expressive and sometimes handsome features, great violence of
gesture and muscular action. Irritable and fiery, they are unlike the
dwellers in towns and cities: noisy and loud, their common
conversational intercourse appears to be a continual strife and
quarrel; they are, however, brave, eloquent, and deeply sensible of
shame. I have known an Arab of the lower class refuse his food for
days together, because in a skirmish his gun had missed fire: to use
his own words, “Gulbi wahr,” “My heart aches;” “Bindikti kedip
hashimtni gedam el naz;” “My gun lied, and shamed me before the
people.” Much has been said of their want of cleanliness; I should,
however, without hesitation, pronounce them to be much more
cleanly than the lower order of people in any European country.
Circumcision, and the shaving the hair from the head, and every
other part of the body; the frequent ablutions which their religion
compels them to perform; all tend to enforce practices of cleanliness.
Vermin, from the climate of their country, they, as well as every other
person, must be annoyed with; and although the lower ranks have
not the means of frequently changing their covering (for it scarcely
can be called apparel), yet they endeavour to free themselves as
much as possible from the persecuting vermin. Their mode of dress
has undergone no change for centuries back; and the words of
Fenelon will at this day apply with equal truth to their present
appearance[8].
The fondness of an Arab for traditional history of the most
distinguished actions of their remote ancestors is proverbial:
professed story-tellers are ever the appendages to a man of rank:
his friends will assemble before his tent, or on the platforms with
which the houses of the Moorish Arabs are roofed, and there listen,
night after night, to a continued history for sixty, or sometimes one
hundred nights together. It is a great exercise of genius, and a
peculiar gift, held in high estimation amongst them. They have a
quickness and clearness of delivery, with a perfect command of
words, surprising to a European ear: they never hesitate, are never
at a loss; their descriptions are highly poetical, and their relations
exemplified by figure and metaphor, the most striking and
appropriate: their extempore songs are also full of fire, and possess
many beautiful and happy similes. Certain tribes are celebrated for
this gift of extempore speaking and singing; the chiefs cultivate the
propensity in their children; and it is often possessed, to an
astonishing degree, by men who are unable either to read or write.
Arabic songs go to the heart, and excite greatly the passions: I
have seen a circle of Arabs straining their eyes with a fixed attention
at one moment, and bursting with loud laughter; at the next, melting
into tears, and clasping their hands in all the ecstacy of grief and
sympathy.
Their attachment to pastoral life is ever favourable to love. Many
of these children of the desert possess intelligence and feeling,
which belong not to the savage; accompanied by an heroic courage,
and a thorough contempt of every mode of gaining their livelihood,
except by the sword and gun. An Arab values himself chiefly on his
expertness in arms and horsemanship, and on hospitality.
Hospitality was ever habitual to them. At this day, the greatest
reproach to an Arab tribe is, “that none of their men have the heart to
give, nor their women to deny.” Nor does this feeling of liberality
alone extend to the chiefs, or Arabs of high birth: I have known the
poor and wandering Bedouin to practise a degree of charity and
hospitality far beyond his means, from a sense of duty alone.
Notwithstanding all the savageness of an Arab, there are
sometimes noble thoughts which seem to cross over his powerful
mind; and then again to leave him choked up with weeds of too
strong a growth to be rooted out.
The M’Garha sheikhs were, after the defeat of Waled Suleyman,
all taken into the bashaw’s service; and are now amongst his most
faithful and favoured followers. Abdi Zeleel ben Seffenusser, upon
his submission, had been assigned some portion of his grandsire’s
extensive lands at Sebha in Fezzan; and on his being ordered to
repair with a certain number of camels to Mourzuk, and to
accompany the Sultan of Fezzan into the negro country, he was
reported to have delayed obeying the order: his enemies attributed
his reluctance to disaffection and want of courage. The bashaw’s
judgment was summary; and Hamet Ghreneim, the brother of my
chaoush, was despatched with a letter to Abdi Zeleel, and orders to
stab him while he read it, and return with his head. The M’Garha had
five hundred miles to ride, previous to executing his bloody
commission; and, by his account to me, it was the sixteenth of the
same kind that he had been intrusted with: he seldom failed either in
the execution or in receiving the reward, which always follows: “they
were his master’s orders—with Bis milla! (in God’s name) he struck,
and struck home!” His victim, in this case, was of more consequence
than any of his former ones, and his reward would have been greater
in proportion: Hamet was withal the descendant of the old enemy of
his clan; but there was still some magic in the name of the
Seffenusser. They were a race of heroes—cowardice could not be a
crime for any of the blood to be guilty of; and the chance of being
strangled on his return appeared to him preferable to assassinating
Abdi Zeleel, and he determined on hesitating before he executed the
bashaw’s orders. On arriving at the hut of the Arab chief,
notwithstanding his fallen state, friends enough remained to warn
him of his approaching fate: he met Hamet at the door, kissed the
signet of the bashaw, and desired him to perform his office; adding,
“You are a M’Garha, and an enemy to our house.” “I am,” replied the
other, “and therefore not capable of assassinating a Seffenusser: if
you are guilty, fly—mine be the risk.”
Cowardice is ever visited in an Arab by the most disgraceful
punishments; he is often bound, and led through the huts of the
whole tribe, with the bowels and offal of a bullock, or some other
animal, tied round his head; and amongst a people who only desire
to be rich in order to increase the number of their wives, probably the
greatest punishment of all is, that could even any woman be found
who would receive him as a husband, which would be an
extraordinary circumstance, no Arab would allow him to enter into his
family with such a stain on his character as cowardice.
The amor patriæ discoverable in even the wildest inhabitant of the
most barren rock is not felt by the wandering Arab, or the Moor. He
wanders from pasture to pasture, from district to district, without any
local attachment; and his sole delight is a roving, irregular, but
martial life. I have met with several, mostly Moors of Mesurata and
Sockna, who have made three times the pilgrimage to Mecca; visited
severally all the ports in the Red Sea; had been in Syria, from St.
Jean d’Acre to Antioch; had traded to Smyrna and Constantinople,
visiting Cyprus, Rhodes, and most of the islands in the Archipelago;
had penetrated to the west of Nyffe, in Soudan, and every other part
of the black country; had been two or three times stripped and
robbed of every thing in the Negro country, escaping only with life,
after receiving several wounds. Some of them had not seen their
families for fifteen or twenty years, yet were still planning new
expeditions, with as much glee as if they were just beginning life,
instead of tottering on the brink of death.
Arabs have always been commended by the ancients for the
fidelity of their attachments, and they are still scrupulously exact to
their words, and respectful to their kindred; they have been
universally celebrated for their quickness of apprehension and
penetration, and the vivacity of their wit. Their language is certainly
one of the most ancient in the world; but it has many dialects. The
Arabs, however, have their vices and their defects; they are naturally
addicted to war, bloodshed, and cruelty; and so malicious as
scarcely ever to forget an injury.
Their frequent robberies committed on traders and travellers,
have rendered the name of an Arab almost infamous in Europe.
Amongst themselves, however, they are most honest, and true to the
rites of hospitality; and towards those whom they receive as friends
into their camp, every thing is open, and nothing ever known to be
stolen: enter but once into the tent of an Arab, and by the pressure of
his hand he ensures you protection, at the hazard of his life. An Arab
is ever true to his bread and salt; once eat with him, and a knot of
friendship is tied which cannot easily be loosened.
Arabs have been truly described as a distinct class of mankind. In
the bashaw’s dominions, they have never been entirely subdued:
violent attempts at subjugation have often deprived them of tracts of
their vast territories; whole tribes have been annihilated; but, as a
people, they have ever remained independent and free.
The few fertile spots of scanty verdure, called “oases,” which now
and then refresh the languid senses of the weary traveller, and which
are desolate, beyond the wildest wastes of European land, are the
tracts inhabited by the eastern Arabs. Masses of conglomerated
sand obstruct the path which leads to these oases or wadeys;
nothing relieves the eye, as it stretches over the wide expanse,
except where the desert scene is broken by a chain of bleak and
barren mountains: no cooling breezes freshen the air: the sun
descends in overpowering force: the winds scorch as they pass; and
bring with them billows of sand, rolling along in masses frightfully
suffocating, which sometimes swallow up whole caravans and
armies, burying them in their pathless depths!
“Their hapless fate unknown!”
FOOTNOTES:
[1]Benioleed, a rich valley, bounded on all sides by whitish

brown hills, capped in many places with green stone and
amygdaloid, or vesicular lava, rugged villages, and ruinous
castles, on every point, some overtopping the columnar green
stone, and scarcely distinguishable from it.
The hills possess a very interesting structure. The height does
not exceed 400 feet, and limestone is the prevailing rock. On the
north side the whole of the range, till within a mile of the western
extremity, is limestone: at that point above the limestone is a thick
bed of columnar greenstone, with thick layers of vesicular lava.
On the southern side, most of the hills have their tops covered
with lava and columnar green stone, and have a structure similar
to that of the one I have delineated. A little difference is here and
there observable, but not so much as to be worthy of notice. The
tops of the hills on this side form an extensive, black, dreary-
looking plain, strewed over with loose stones, extending
eastwardly as far as the eye can discern. The upper, or, as I
would call it, the lavaceous crust, appears as if a layer left by a
flowing fluid, and therefore of more recent formation than the rock
on which it rests. This is seldom more than a few feet in
thickness, and spread over the subjacent rock.
The rocks dip in various directions, but generally at an angle of
18°.
The Jibel Gulat is one of the highest hills we have yet come to.
It is about six hundred feet high: its top is tabular, and its sides
exceedingly rugged, from an amazing number of detached
pieces. The lowest exposed stratum is a calcareous tufa,
containing, or indeed almost formed of sea-shells; the most
abundant are a species of oyster and limpet, in a very entire
state. Above, beds of soft carbonate of lime, like whiting, and
falling into dust on the slightest touch, and in which is imbedded a
large quantity of lamellar calcareous spar. Above, and apparently
extending to the summit, tolerably fine marble. The quantity of
debris, and the size and appearance of the masses, might make
one believe that an earthquake had been the cause of that rent
state; but it appears to me more probable that the undermining,
by the mouldering of the soft stratum underneath, accounts well
for the state and appearance of the side of the hill. The hill is
about three miles long, and runs from east to west. It is inhabited
by a solitary family; a man, his wife, and several children. We
were told that he had resided in this dreary and barren place for
eleven years, and it is said lives chiefly by plunder.
Near Niffud, the hills are of lime, and in structure and form not
unlike those of the Tarhona range.
In the vicinity of the long range there are a number of small
conical hills, of a soft whiting-like substance, appearing as if
recently thrown up, although, from every thing around, that is not
at all probable. The range runs parallel to that near the coast; but
we had no opportunity of determining how far it extends to the
eastward and westward. There are several passes, into one of
which we entered. It is rugged, from the number of masses that
have fallen from the sides of the hills. Several tumuli of stones are
observable, marking the burial-places of unfortunate travellers,
who have been murdered here, it was said, by large rocks rolled
from the overhanging heights. When I was examining the rocks,
in the dry bed of a river, these monuments were pointed out, to
make me aware my presence there was not free from danger.
This led to a valley, with some thick groves of acacias, and a plant
like a mespilus, with pleasant small astringent berries: it is called
by the natives butomo. From this we passed over a low hill, into
the valley Niffud. This valley has been the seat of much fighting,
as our conductors informed us, among the Arabs of different
tribes.
We left the valley, by a pass to the southward, and entered an
extensive plain, named Ambulum: in this we travelled the whole
day. The surface, in some places, a firm sand, with here and there
rocky eminences, and patches of gravel: the latter was fine, and
mixed with fragments of shells. Often, for a considerable extent,
not the least vestige of vegetation; and in no place was the
ground completely covered, except in a few small oases, where
there was a species of grass, of the genus festuca. The feniculum
duter, and a beautiful genista, which extends all the way from the
coast, were common. The butum occurred in abundance, and its
shade was a defence to us at times. We found some beautiful
fragments of striped jasper, and some small pieces of cornelian.
Bonjem.—We had no opportunity of examining any of these;
but from the strewed masses they appear to be limestone. The
wadey of Bonjem has characters different from any of the other
valleys we have passed through. This valley is strewed over with
gypsum in different states, with numerous shells, of the genus
pecten, and several terebrellæ. There are here and there sand,
and many incrustations of the carbonate, mixed with crystals of
the sulphate, of lime, that gives to the surface a shining white
appearance, which, in place of being pleasing, is disagreeable, by
the power of the reflected light. There are small ranges of low
hills, composed of soft white chalk (whiting), covered with a crust
of gypsum. In this structure we found one large pit, about forty
feet deep, and nearly as much in diameter. These low hills are
bounded by much higher, and of a dark brown colour: the low hills
are numerous, some are separate, but in general they are in short
ridges, and have, at a distance, very much the appearance of
fortifications. A small senecio, a geranium, and a statice, were the
principal beings of the vegetable creation. Barometer 30.020.
temperature 72.
Near the wells, the arundo phragmites grows in abundance; it
has long creeping roots, the first true roots of that kind I have
seen in North Africa. Plants of this kind would soon make
considerable encroachments on the desert, and render habitable
where it is difficult even to travel over. This quarter is poor in the
grasses, for I think I have not seen above eight different kinds.
Our course was among sand-hills, and over a gravelly road,
strewed with masses of common opal, with small portions of
botroidal iron ore, and thick layers of gypsum, with their edges
appearing above ground. The low hills presented the same
features as those near which we remained in the wadey: one,
detached on the road, had a curious appearance, and was called,
by the natives, “The Bowl of Bazeen.” It is about forty feet high,
and formed above of a calcareous crust, with sulphate of lime,
and below of soft chalk.
The higher ridge was observable on each side of us, running
south-south-east on the east side, and south-south-west on the
west: some of those to the westward have detached hills, and one
has the name of the “Salt Hill.” W. O.
[2]Captain Lyon’s travelling name.
[3]This is only called jaafa when a bride is conveyed in it—at
other times a caramood.
[4]Gibel Assoud and the hills on this side have the same name.
The valley is bounded on both sides by hills, from 400 to 600 feet
high—tops in general tabular; but a few are irregular, and two or
three end in conical peaks; the sides of all are covered with much
debris. The colour of the hills gives a very peculiar character to
the valley; the tops of a shining black, as if covered over with
black lead, that often extends some way down the sides, which
are of a light brown, mixed with a dirty yellow: this is often
observable in patches in the black, which gives to the whole a
very striking appearance. The lower strata are limestone, of a
yellowish colour, almost entirely formed of marine remains: this,
although hard, is easily acted on by the air, and the exposed
surface mouldering away leaves cavities in the rock, which,
undermining the superincumbent ones, gives rise to the quantity
of detached fragments. There are several thin strata of earthy
gypsum: above that, limestone, with a fine fibrous-looking
external surface, something like wood: this has the jingling sound
of burnt lime; above is the shining basalt, of a fine texture, mixed
with amygdaloid.
About six miles from where we halted, are a range of low white
hills, running about west by north, of the same name as the
plains. The top is a fine shining white, from thick beds of a milk-
white marble, the base of porphyritic limestone. W. O.
[5]The hills of Zeghren opened: a low range, running nearly
east and west; their appearance different from any we had yet
seen, long, oval, and truncated at the top—colour black, with
white streaks.
About the same time a detached rock came in view: it was
about a hundred feet high, and 200 from the land from which we
descended.
This is the geological structure of the neighbouring land, which
has at no very distant period been joined to this. W. O.
[6]The mother of peace.
[7]The name of their sheikh or chief; also often used when
speaking of the tribe.
[8]Leurs habits sont aisés à faire, car en ce doux climat on ne
porte qu’une piece d’étoffe fine et lègère, qui n’est point taillée et
que chacun met à longs plis autour de son corps pour la
modestie; lui donnant la forme qu’il veut.
EXCURSION TO WESTWARD OF MOURZUK,
IN JUNE, JULY, AND AUGUST, 1822,
BY WALTER OUDNEY, M.D.
Saturday, June 8, 1822.—At a little after sunrise departed from

Mourzuk. Lieutenant Clapperton, Mr. William Hillman and I were
accompanied by Hadje Ali, brother of Ben Bucher, Ben Khullum,
Mahommed Neapolitan Mamelouk, and Mahomet, son of our
neighbour Hadje Mahmud. It was our intention to have proceeded
direct to Ghraat, and laboured hard to accomplish our object.
Obstacle after obstacle was thrown in our way, by some individuals
in Mourzuk. Several came begging us not to go, as the road was
dangerous, and the people not at all under the bashaw’s control. We
at length hired camels from a Targee, Hadje Said; but only to
accompany us as far as the Wadey Ghrurby.
Our course was over sands skirted with date trees; ground
strewed with fragments of calcareous crust, with a vitreous surface,
from exposure to the weather. About mid-day, after an exhausting
journey from oppressive heat, we arrived at El Hummum, a
straggling village, the houses of which are mostly constructed of
palm leaves. We remained till the sun was well down, and then
proceeded on our course. The country had the same character. At
eight we arrived at Tessouwa.
The greater number of inhabitants are Tuaricks. They have a
warlike appearance, a physiognomy and costume different from the
Fezzaneers. More than a dozen muzzled up faces were seated near
our tent, with every one’s spear stuck in the ground before him. This
struck us forcibly, from being very different from what we had been
accustomed to see. The Arab is always armed, in his journey, with
his long gun and pistols; but there is something more imposing in the
spear, dagger, and broad straight sword.
About eight, we departed: several wadeys in our course, with
numerous small acacias, a few gravelly and sandy plains, and two or
three low white alluvial hills. About three, halted at a well of good
water.
Our course lay over an extensive high plain, with a long range of
hills, running nearly east and west. Distance, about fourteen miles.
We entered them by a pass which runs north and south, in which are
numerous recesses, evidently leading to more extensive wadeys.
Before reaching the hills, we found some people digging a well. It
was about a hundred feet deep.
The hills are at about a hundred yards’ distance. Their form is that
of a table top, with a peak here and there. The structure sandstone,
finely stratified with beds of blue and white pipeclay, and alum slate.
The pass led to another, the finest we have seen, and the only
part approaching to the sublime we have beheld in Fezzan. It is
rugged and narrow; its sides high, and overhanging in some places.
The whole exposed rock is a slaty sandstone, with thin strata of alum
slate. The path has several trunks of petrified trees, with branches
going out from them; the stem very similar to the acacia. They
appear as if precipitated from the top. Near the end of the pass, the
Wadey Ghrurby opens, with groves of date palms, and high sand
hills. The change is sudden and striking; and instead of taking away,
added to the effect of the pass we were descending. The hills from
the wadey have rugged, irregular, peaked tops, as if produced by
some powerful cause; although it appeared, on examination, that all
was produced by the mouldering away of the lower strata.
The hills are composed of thick beds of blue clay, alternating with
sandstone, beds of alum slate, and thick strata of porphyritic clay
stone, and all the tops of finely stratified sandstone.
Wednesday, June 12. Moved up the valley for about four miles,
and halted at a small town, Kharaik, having passed two in our
course. Valley, fine groves of palm trees, with cultivated patches;
water good, depth of the wells as about Mourzuk; hills bound the
valley on the south side, and sand hills on the north. The number of
date trees in the eastern and western division of the valley is said to
be 340,000. The first division, or Wadey Shirgi, extends from near
Seba to within a few miles of Thirtiba; the other, from the termination
of Shirgi to Aubari.
In the evening saw some of the preparatory steps for a marriage.
The woman belonged to this, and the man to the next town. A band
of musicians, accompanied by all the women of the village, dancing
and singing, with every now and then a volley of musketry. One
woman carried a basket on her head, for the purpose of collecting
gomah, to form a feast and pay the musicians. They came from the
village of the bridegroom, which was about a mile distant. The
marriage was not to take place till the feast after Rhamadan.
There are very few plants here. A species of asclepias, with milky
juice; the agoul, apparently a species of ulex, has a fine red
papilionaceous flower; species, with small obovate leaves, pod small
and obtuse at the apex. A species of sweet-smelling rue, and two
other plants in fruit, one like a veronica, and the other I have not
seen a similar one before.
Friday, June 14. Rain sometimes falls in the valley, sufficient to
overflow the surface, and form mountain torrents. But it has no
regular periods; five, eight, and nine years frequently intervening
between each time. Thus no trust can be placed in the occurrence of
rain, and no application made in agricultural concerns. The sheikh of
this town is Ali, a good natured Tiboo, exceedingly poor, but very
attentive, and always in good humour. The place is so poor, that we
had sometimes to wait half a day before we could get a couple of
fowls, or a feed of dates or barley for our horses. We are in hourly
expectation of camels from friends of Hateeta, for the purpose of
conveying us to Ghraat.
There are a number of ants, of a species different from any I have
seen in North Africa. Colour, a light shining brown, speckled with a
silvery white, a strong pair of nippers, like the large claws of a crab.
They run with great swiftness.
Saturday, June 15. No camels have arrived, and we are obliged to
remain; much against our inclination. Hateeta was conversing
yesterday on the difficulty we experienced in getting away from
Mourzuk, from obstacles thrown in our way by the people. He said
that the dread they had of the Tuaricks was unfounded, and we
would soon be convinced of it. He further added, that he could, by
his influence alone, conduct us in perfect safety to Timbuctoo, and
would answer with his head. He was indignant at the feelings the
people of Mourzuk had against the Tuaricks, who, he said, pride
themselves in having but one word, and performing what they
promise.
Sunday, June 16. Our camels have not yet arrived; but we were
able to hire two from one Mahomet El Buin, and with these we
proceeded on to Germa. Our course lay along the wadey, which
grew finer and finer as we advanced, the number of gummah and
gussub fields and date groves increasing. The hills formed some
small recesses; the tops of most were level, and all of the same
height. Passed several villages built all in the same manner.
Notwithstanding the nearness and fitness of the stone, the salt
mould is preferred; perhaps from the want of lime, and the ease with
which the house is erected. Another thing: so very little rain falls, that
there is no danger of the fabric falling. Near Break passed some
imperfect inscriptions, apparently Arabic.
About eleven arrived at Germa, a larger town than any in the
wadey, but both walls and houses have the marks of time. We waited
in the house of the kaid till our camels came up. The sheikh,
Mustapha ben Ussuf, soon visited us. He is an old man, a
Fezzaneer, dark complexion, arch of nose small, tip depressed, and
alæ expanded, lips a little thick, but mouth not large, hair black, and
from the appearance of the beard, woolly. His ancestors are natives
of this place; and his features may be considered as characteristic of
the natives of Fezzan.
Monday, June 17. We had many accounts of inscriptions being
here, which the people could not read. We were conducted to-day by
Sheikh Mustapha to examine a building, different, as he stated, from

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Law, Insecurity And Risk Control:

Neo-Liberal Governance And The

More information about this series at

Crime Prevention and Security Management

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

Cover illustration: Artur Debat

collectivism, as leading to a state in which “the irresponsible and the

April 2020 Martin Gill

(courtesy of Doris Chu), in Berlin and at the Max Planck Institute in

Professor of Criminology John Pratt

“Caught between its core commitment to shifting economic risk to ordinary

3 Set Risk Free 53

4 The Celebration of Risk 93

5 Fear and Anxiety in the Risk Society133

6 The Rise of the Security Sanction179

7 Issues of Legitimacy: Legal and Political223

8 The Revolt Against Uncertainty261

Table 4.1 References to “Lifestyle” in leading national newspapers:

© The Author(s) 2020 1

 isk and the New Paradigm of Criminal Law

concerned with identifying and then controlling those whom it is thought

The Duality of Risk

Adventure tourism has been booming in recent years as world-weary trav-

of risk-thinking has come to have very different associations in these set-

available for inspection. Meanwhile, notices in bus stations in Australia

Governing Through Risk

demand that the casinos be closed. Indeed, it is as if, as Bauman (2007,

The Populist Revolt

While it helped to sustain social cohesion in the former era, it is now

“bureaucratic tyranny” of welfarism, this minimalist state would be com-

journey through it. Post 1970s, restructuring removed most previous

representing a safe haven “for sailors lost in a turbulent sea of constant,

Let us first return to that “alternative world” that Bauman mentioned:

© The Author(s) 2020 21

To ensure that there could be no such return, a range of measures were

earlier in others—these measures seemed to have had significant success.

The Reduction of Risk

The subsequent White Paper on Employment and Income (1945, 548)

[that] in planning in advance what measures should be taken … to give

“Their hapless fate unknown!”

[1]Benioleed, a rich valley, bounded on all sides by whitish

BY WALTER OUDNEY, M.D.

Saturday, June 8, 1822.—At a little after sunrise departed from

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3 Set Risk Free 53

4 The Celebration of Risk 93

5 Fear and Anxiety in the Risk Society133

6 The Rise of the Security Sanction179

7 Issues of Legitimacy: Legal and Political223

8 The Revolt Against Uncertainty261

Table 4.1 References to “Lifestyle” in leading national newspapers:

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The Reduction of Risk