ABSTRACT
Emphasizing security produces the perverse effect of multiplying the demand for security. The current invasiveness of the ideology or culture of prevention refers back to the idea of a world that is knowable and controllable and to the utopia of absolute protection and total security. The protagonism assigned to 'victims' and the current centrality of the thematic of victimization signify and reinforce it. First of all, focusing on victims or potential victims tends to shift the attention from past to future, from intervening in the social causes of hardships and street crime to preventing the risk of being victims of these things. It then bases agency and protagonism on the status of being a victim or potential victim. Self-surveillance and exclusion are then two complementary methods of control, as are impersonal surveillance and intervention through individual motivations and moral imperatives, not to mention the 'new prevention' policies on territory and prison.
