Local governance of safety and the criminalization of behaviour

11 h 45 à 13 h 00
Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, local C-2059
Carrefour des arts et des sciences
3150, rue Jean-Brillant

Aucune réservation requise

Stefaan Pleysier is assistant professor at the Faculty of Law at KU Leuven and coordinator, together with Johan Put, of the Research line on Youth Criminology affiliated to the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC). He teaches youth criminology and quantitative research methods in the Bachelor and Master in Criminology. His research interests include juvenile delinquency, youth justice and the criminalization of behaviour. Stefaan Pleysier previously was a MacCormick Fellow at Edinburgh Law School at the University of Edinburgh, and research associate both at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, and the Methodology Institute at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). 

Summary : Although crime, public safety and anti-social behaviour in Belgium to a great extent relate to the powers of the federal government, local communities and authorities have the possibility to deal with these issues in a rather autonomous way. In this seminar I will discuss the local governance of safety by critically analysing the system of administrative sanctions which delegates legislative and executive power to the community level. In doing so, I will pay attention to the precarious position of three specific categories in these systems, i.e. minors and youth, panhandlers and ‘potential’ drug users. This analysis will start off with and draw a parallel to broader social and political trends, which criminologists describe as the shift from a ‘post-crime’ to a ‘pre-crime’ society where pre-emptive logics, mechanisms of exclusion and the criminalization of behaviour tend to prevail.