Volume 2 issue 2 December 2014

The Surveillance of ‘Risky Subjects’: Adiaphorisation through Criminal Records, and Contested Narratives of Stigma

Jamie Grace
The article examines the way that the construction, retention and sharing of ‘criminality information’ in a multi-agency, public protection ‘routine’ places the ‘risky’ in society under surveillance, but also examines the way that evolving human rights doctrines have started to enhance the procedural rights of ‘subjects’ to take part in this narrative of public protection, through their own enhanced procedural rights in contesting the validity and necessity of this stigmatising disclosure to myriad criminal justice, health and social care agencies, as well as (potentially) to members of the public deemed ‘at risk’. These enhanced procedural rights can be and should be seen as a kind of ‘inverse surveillance’ conducted by the ‘risky’.