ABSTRACT
Accusing someone of criminal wrongdoing occurs through a politics that recognizes distinctive identities: accuser, accused and legitimate overseers of situated accusatorial processes. Unfolding relations between these identities co-produces mutually sustaining accusatorial fields, calling selected subjects to account for actions that accusers somehow seek to define as criminally wrong. Through historically specific rituals, these identities jostle to define the truth of past events, the characters involved and the imputation of action or non-action. Their exchanges enable or deny entry to legal processes. While such relational complexes might change over time, they variously serve as gatekeepers to an immense crime-control industry (Christie, 2013). And as modern states marked in detail the spheres of life designated as ‘criminal’ wrongdoing, so centralized (state) criminal justice systems grew. Many commentators have noted the enormous costs – social, economic, political and cultural – of today’s vast crime-control arrangements (Wacquant, 2010; Simon, 2014), but rather fewer have focused attention on the gatekeeping practices through which criminal accusations open pathways to swollen crime-control arenas (Pavlich, 2006a, 2006b).
