From time to time, I track the number of minutes devoted to security-related topics on the national news. Often it amounts to more than half of the broadcast time available. There was an attempted terrorist attack somewhere, someone has escaped from an asylum, or a suspected dealer in child pornography is being extradited. But this kind of daily research soon gets tangled up in definitions. Should I include accidents – perhaps those caused by carelessness? Or disasters – a guilty party is soon found, or possibly the aid workers arrived too late? Or, take the discussion about norms and values: it is easy to argue that they are related to questions of security. Not to mention food safety or – something totally different – the social security net provided by the government (unemployment benefits, for example).

Security, in other words, deals with anything and everything – and hence nothing, according to current opinion. Yet I dare to doubt that last. The fact that all these subjects can be placed within the framework of security says a great deal about the organization of our society. One way or another, security always seems to be the solution. We address a lot of problems when we use it as an argument – surveillance cameras, child records, number plate recognition, body scans. The security concept has become a semantic dragnet in a liquid society. Words such as ‘crime and punishment’ sound almost old-fashioned – just as the motto ‘law and order’ seemed outdated in the 1970s, and ‘guilt and penance’ smacks of Moscow in the 19th century.

Old-fashioned and yet timeless, crime, punishment, law, order, guilt and penance have obviously not disappeared from the conceptual stage. But these words no longer define thought and action in the area of ‘what is wrong and what you can do about it’. Crime became a risk, and punishment has become one option within a much larger arsenal of instruments of control. The criminal justice paradox forced the system to reach out for other, preventative measures to control behaviour. The discourse about criminality has moved from ‘crime and punishment’ to ‘risk and control’, and sometimes to the even vaguer ‘insecurity and precaution’.