‘The Usual Suspects’: Knife Crime Prevention Orders and the ‘Difficult’ Regulatory Subject

Abstract Knife Crime Prevention Orders (KCPOs) were introduced by the Offensive Weapons Act 2019 with the stated aim of providing additional tools for police to use in combatting increasing rates of knife crime in England and Wales. This article situates KCPOs within a continuous policy trend of pro...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inBritish journal of criminology Vol. 62; no. 2; pp. 378 - 395
Main Author Hendry, Jennifer
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published UK Oxford University Press 01.03.2022
Subjects
hybrid procedures
security
preventive hybrids
knife crime prevention orders
regulation
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ISSN0007-0955
1464-3529
DOI10.1093/bjc/azab063

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Summary:Abstract Knife Crime Prevention Orders (KCPOs) were introduced by the Offensive Weapons Act 2019 with the stated aim of providing additional tools for police to use in combatting increasing rates of knife crime in England and Wales. This article situates KCPOs within a continuous policy trend of procedural hybridization, and highlights the worrying manner in which such criminalization, underpinned by a preventive logic and facilitated by this hybrid procedure, enables new forms of ‘othering’. Drawing a threefold distinction within the concept of the regulatory subject—the responsible, the rational/virtuous and the difficult/other—it argues that preventive hybrids generate a self-fulfilling category of ‘difficult’ subjects, while simultaneously denying them the procedural protections normally afforded to the responsible subject of classical criminal law.
ISSN:0007-0955
1464-3529
DOI:10.1093/bjc/azab063