ABSTRACT
The previous chapter refers to the co-appearance of accusers, the accused and the common good through rituals of criminal accusation. Working through this idea, the following chapter focuses on fluid political ideas that have, over centuries, shaped changing modes of criminal accusation, and given rise to varied entrances to criminalizing processes. The start of these processes involved calling someone to account – or laying one’s charge formally – through power–knowledge relations centred on changing notions of crime. Such relations recursively positioned accusation as an unseen, though privileged, gateway to criminal justice arenas (Negrier-Dormont, 1994). I propose in this chapter to work with Foucault’s (1980) concept of an apparatus (dispositif) to signal the ideas and relational arrangements that enabled historically what it is to accuse another of a criminal wrong. These apparatuses are meant to signal relations between ‘heterogeneous’ elements consisting of ‘discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid’ (1980: 194). My basic claim is that as gatekeepers to crime-control networks, apparatuses of criminal accusation historically consolidate relations between elements to initiate (potentially at least) criminalization processes (Ericson & Baranek, 1982). There are often several authorized accusatory apparatuses in specific contexts; but their cumulative action regulates the flows of subjects into crime-control systems (Hamilton, 2009; Naffine, 2009; Dayan, 2013), and directly affects the profile of these populations (Brown, 2009; Wacquant, 2009; Simon & Sparks, 2013).
