De laglydiga. Om skolans brottsförebyggande fostran

Abstract in English

Politicians and scholars often frame schooling as one of society’s most important crime preventive measures. The object of the study is to examine and problematize the hopes and ambitions that have evolved around what the study conceptualizes as the crime preventive educational task of public schooling and its historical trajectory as articulated in government publications. Drawing on governmentality theory, the study focuses on the liberal conception of the autonomous and self-regulating subject, and how the liberal mode of government works through the governing of freedom. The study identifies three discourses on crime preventive education: The emancipatory (1970s onwards), the deterrence (late 1980s onwards) and the safety/security discourse (21st century). The discursive shifts identified are further analysed in respect to how i) the explanation of crime, and the relationship between the deviant and the law-abiding subject, ii) control and iii) freedom and responsibility, are conceptualized over time. The conceptualization of criminal behaviour goes from being caused by social deprivation, becoming instead a calculated rational act. Subsequently, the deviant is altered from a person in need of reintegration to a deterrent example and a risk. The problematization of control has a trajectory from being a matter of social control and integration, ending instead as a matter of risk control and prudentialism. The conceptualization of the kind of freedom and responsibility the crime preventive education should foster is also reframed, from a strategy to counter a lack of democracy and influence, to a way of making prudent citizens. In this, the notion of a collective responsibility has been superseded by a belief in individual responsibility. The key problematization vindicating the process has gone from how to integrate youths into a society in constant flux, to how to restore control if lost and how to protect a pre-given social order.