Foucaultian intuitions about a new securitarian penality. Punitive Actuarialism and epidemiological approach to crime

Abstract

Penalty and the punitive question, as technologies of discipline and/or the government of populations, occupy a fundamental place in Foucault's preoccupations throughout his life, beyond disciplinary analyses. These securitarian and penal questions are present in Foucault's analyses even when they do not appear to be central to them. In this article, we propose an interpretation of epidemiological risk technologies, which takes into account the concern for the emergence of a new securitarian criminality, as a precedent or primitive intuition of actuarial criminal technologies. The alignment of these actuarial technologies with insurance techniques has left the epidemiological strategy of risk management, which promotes a new distribution of populations for the sake of securitarian optimization. The purpose of this article is not only to show the importance of this epidemiological risk in the critical systematisation of actuarial technologies, but also to account for the relevance of Foucauldian contributions to this issue.