Oliver Brüchert

Advertizing the Penal State

For more than a decade football in Germany has been a preferred field for implementing new technologies of control, privatizing security, and cutting down civil rights. The demonization of a relatively small number of potentially violent (gewaltbereiten) fans did not only allow for a huge expansion of the security web but also inspired countless media stories about these new folk devils. Thus, the public has been persuaded to agree for more policing, more surveillance, and harsher punishment. Thus the hosting of the World Cup in 2006 allowed for a new climax in expanding the security state as well as preaching it to the public. The criminalization of football fans can be analyzed as an outstanding example of how the neoliberal penal state is made plausible to the subjects of control. This criminalization process can be can be contrasted with another dimension of public dramatization in preparation for the World Cup: the fear of terror. Even when law enforcement violates human rights openly,

Fighting and punishing terrorists who are depicted as hostile to our whole society, to our democratic culture, and to our way of life can be legitimized relatively easily. A new culture of control, covering all aspects of public life, often penetrating the private sphere, does not base on the fear and exclusion of the others alone. The penal state is advertised as something intrinsically good even for the penalized. We are told that RFID-chips and CCTV, police in schools and in the sports stadia, even electronic monitoring, and new partly privatized prisons serve no other purpose than to make our life more comfortable, respectively to help us back into a normal work life in case we lost our track. The penal state truly claims heritage to the welfare state by thoroughly organizing everybodys lives.

Oliver Brüchert is sociologist and works as lecturer at the University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Most recent publications: Autoritäres Programm in aufklärerischer Absicht. Wie Journalisten Kriminalität sehen. Westfälisches Dampfboot, Münster 2005; Es gibt keine Kriminalstatistik nur eine Anzeigenstatistik ...und das ist auch gut so!. In: Hanak/Pilgram (eds.): Phänomen Strafanzeige. Jahrbuch für Rechts- und Kriminalsoziologie 2003, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden, 2003, pp. 87-106.

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