ABSTRACT
The increasingly significant role of technology within the crime and criminal justice field has been only incompletely discussed. Where it has, it has almost always been digital technologies which have served as the primary focus of analysis. Even the most preliminary scoping of the field supports this conclusion, for example, enter ‘technology crime’ into a search engine and the only results produced will be those relating to cybercrime. This ‘digital myopia’ has tended to obscure many other varieties of technology equally worthy of criminological and socio-legal research. In particular, it has caused us to downplay the role of tools which utilise biological or chemical processes – tools which represent both some of technology’s most deadly risks and its most coercive potentials. At a time when technology is transforming almost every aspect of the crime and justice process the limited attention paid to the very wide range of technologies which can be implicated in crime and control and the failure to grasp the continuities and discontinuities here in any kind of joined up way is surprising. Technologies rarely work in isolation, but as a composite set of artefacts, processes and practices which must be understood holistically if they are to be understood at all.
