Introduction

It is or contention that this book, The Pre-Crime Society: Crime, Culture and Control in the Ultramodern Age, furthers a project that was initiated and subsequently developed within two of our previous volumes (Arrigo & Milovanovic, 2009; Arrigo, Bersot & Sellers, 2011). Among the themes shared by these volumes was a sustained focus on the philosophical currents and cultural intensities that produce de-vitalizing and finalizing laws of shared human captivity (Arrigo & Sellers, 2018). These laws originate in the captivity of forms (Plato, 2008), including the forms of human abstraction and their sequelae (Arrigo & Polizzi, 2018).

In the first of these volumes, Bruce Arrigo and Dragan Milovanovic (2009) argued for a ‘revolution in penology’ (pp. 3–8). As the authors explained, this revolution begins with a radical critique of subjectivity (i.e. human capital abstracted) and the constitutive forces into and out of which this subjectivity both shapes and is shaped by a ‘society of captives’ (pp. 170–95). This is the captivity of the kept and their keepers, the watched and their watchers in which risk-as-currency prevails as trade. The authors further asserted that when the excesses of this captivity are maintained in consciousness, through dialogical encounters, and in material expressions of the same, then they (these excesses) nurture the captivity of society. This is the captivity of ontology (i.e. of being human), and of epistemology (i.e. of human relating). The maintenance of these conditions forestalls a ‘people yet to come’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 108), and forecloses what Hardt and Negri (2004) have described as the ‘multitude’ (pp. 97–157).

The ubiquity of the prison form is revealing of captivity, both as meditation on and metaphor about risk, the risk of being human and of evolving in humanness (Nietzsche, 1966), amidst the culture of crime control that the management of human risk inevitably spawns (e.g. Ericson & Haggerty, 1997; O’Malley, 2004). By prison form we mean its symbols and discourses (Sloop, 1996; Brown, 2009), its architecture and environmental designs (Johnston, 2006; Day, 2013; Reiter and Koenig, 2015), its industries and mechanisms (Alexander, 2011; Geunther, 2013). In this regard, we might think of the prison form as what Foucault (1980) described as a dispositif: an apparatus of discipline and of disciplining whose systems of thought reproduce a network of discursively structured power/knowledge relations (pp. 194–228).

What happens to culture when the experience of privacy, as we have lived it, disappears? What happens to (co)existence when the commercialism of surveillance capitalism fetishizes ‘life mining’ (van Dijck, 2014, p. 198) expressed through the recursive logics of new social media? What happens to human subjectivity when all of reality is reduced to the predictive analytics of dataism (i.e. the algorithmic scrutiny of metadata and the cyber-construction of networked profiles) (e.g. Powell, Stratton & Cameron, 2018)? These are the information technology conditions of the current era. These conditions reflect a collective, undulating consciousness. Within the ‘hardwiring’ or circuitry of this consciousness lurk the passions of law and the emotions of crime reassembled as ‘dividual’ justice (Deleuze, 1992, p. 6). This volume both probes and dissects the criminological landscape of this consciousness that we, and others, have termed the ultramodern (Arrigo, 2012; Arrigo, Sellers & Sostakas, 2020; Shantz, 2014).

Introduction: the complexity of drug addiction

According to most experts, successful drug addiction intervention and substance abuse recovery necessarily requires the use of external constraints and, in some cases, even exogenous forms of coercion (Morgan and Lizke, 2007; Barlow, 2010; Walker, 2010). What this means, then, is that any subsequent manifestation of disorder (ie decompensation, relapse or dependency-seeking) will necessitate further system control from outside the disorganised and disruptive self. This is a self whose patterns of behaviour are deemed too unpredictable, too chaotic, to warrant the freedom to be (Williams and Arrigo, 2002, 2007, forthcoming). But, what if the above-stated theoretical claims and the science that has been used to test and measure them were flawed? What if the mobilisation and activation of human social capital (eg from a complexity perspective, the addict's possible self-organisation) required perturbations of disorder, disequilibrium and instability to make this natural recovery more fully realisable? Moreover, what normative framework regarding ontology (ie the ‘laws’ of being) might exist to support this alternative approach to drug addiction and natural recovery? How, and in what ways, might this framework and approach suggest an emergent and radicalised jurisprudence: one that advances a collectivist agenda in overcoming system control and regulation by way of externalities or formal intervention (eg mandated in-patient medication treatment, structured out-patient rehabilitation programming)?

This chapter critically probes the under-examined relationship between substance abuse and spontaneous self-healing. To situate the critique, two streams of philosophical analysis will be presented and integrated. In particular, selected insights from the science of complexity studies (non-linear dynamical systems theory) and the diagnostics of psychological jurisprudence (PJ) will be described. The relevancies of these insights will be fitted to the necessity of exogenous system-based policy reform. These reforms will emphasise changes in substance abuse, mental health and criminal justice theory and science for and about human social capital.

The human project: the science of complexity, adaptability and self-organisation

The evolving science of dynamical systems theory has, from its inception, been inspired by the ‘inherent creativity’, ‘spontaneous appearance of novel structures’ and ‘autonomous adaptation to a changing environment’ (Heylighen, 2001, p 253) that characterises and unifies the diverse phenomena it studies.