This paper produces a critical reading of discourses of criminality, family and racialization circulating in an interrelated set of feature articles published in late 2006 in a major New Zealand newspaper. Through images, diagrams and written text, local crime is mapped as a familial aberration that threatens a whole city and region. Rather than demonstrating a novel approach to reporting crime, this paper argues that the representation of crime in these texts puts the body politic of the state, and good governance, at risk in ways that resonate with the new modes of subjectivity and responsibility that Nikolas Rose (2007) traces from contemporary biomedicine into populist discourses.
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2.
Martin, Y. (2006) `Crime Families', The Weekend Press. Christchurch, NZ, Dec 2-3, (D. pp. 1 and 4).
3.
Martin, Y. (2006) `Police Target Worst Families', The Weekend Press. Christchurch, NZ, Dec 2-3, 2006 (A. p. 1).
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Miller, P. and N. Rose (2008) Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Town of Publisher: Polity.
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Nisbet, A. (2006) `Cartoon', The Weekend Press . Christchurch, NZ, Dec 2-3, 2006 (D. p. 4).
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Rose, N. (1996) `Governing "Advanced" Liberal Democracies', in A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (eds) Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government, pp. 37-64. London: UCL Press .
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Rose, N. (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8.
Rose, N. (2000) `The Biology of Culpability: Pathological Identity and Crime Control in a Biological Culture', Theoretical Criminology4(1): 5-34.
9.
Rose, N. (2007) The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
