
Dr Michael McGuire
About
Biography
Dr Michael McGuire joined the Department as Senior Lecturer in Criminology in September 2012. Dr McGuire read Philosophy & Scientific method at the London School of Economics where he acquired a first class BSc Econ and he completed his PhD, at Kings College London. He has subsequently developed an international profile in the study of technology and the justice system and has published widely in these areas. His first book Hypercrime: The New Geometry of Harm (Glasshouse, 2008), involved a critique of the notion of cybercrime as a way of modelling computer enabled offending and was awarded the 2008 British Society of Criminology runners up Book Prize. His most recent publication Technology, Crime & Justice: The Question Concerning Technomia (Routledge, 2012) is the first book in the field of Criminology and Criminal Justice to attempt an overview of the implication of technology for the justice system and complements a range of applied studies in this area, including a comprehensive evidence review of cybercrime for the Home Office. Dr McGuires research interests also encompass questions relating to the impacts of the instincts and irrationality upon crime and justice and his paper “Abnormal Law” was recently included as a chapter in the three-volume series on Criminalisation (OUP) edited by Professor Anthony Duff of Stirling. He is currently completing a new monograph in this area to be titled The Criminology of Pleasure (for Taylor & Francis, 2014).
News
Publications
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York. All rights reserved.Chapter Overview: Threat assessments of cyberterrorism have so far tended to focus upon on two kinds of question. First, the extent to which such a construct really 'exists'- or at least exists in any way substantively different from other forms of terrorism. Second, its destructive potentials and the kinds of targets this might involve. This chapter considers a more basic set of questions about the cyberterrorist threat. These centre upon the very thing considered to make it a distinctive form of offending: (information) technology and its relationships with the intentions of potential terrorists. Central to this analysis is an attempt to clarify some recurring confusions about the criminogenic potentials of technology in general-in particular the extent to which it can be causally agentic or 'enables' offending. I argue that it is only by developing a more coherent understanding of contemporary socio-technic relations that a robust evaluation of the risks posed by cyberterrorism can be made.
© 2007 Michael McGuire. All rights reserved.Hypercrime develops a new theoretical approach toward current reformulations in criminal behaviours, in particular the phenomenon of cybercrime. Emphasizing a spatialized conception of deviance, one that clarifies the continuities between crime in the traditional, physical context and developing spaces of interaction such as a 'cyberspace', this book analyzes criminal behaviours in terms of the destructions, degradations or incursions to a hierarchy of regions that define our social world. Each chapter outlines violations to the boundaries of each of these spaces - from those defined by our bodies or our property, to the more subtle borders of the local and global spaces we inhabit. By treating cybercrime as but one instance of various possible criminal virtualities, the book develops a general theoretical framework, as equally applicable to the, as yet unrealized, technologies of criminal behaviour of the next century, as it is to those which relate to contemporary computer networks. Cybercrime is thereby conceptualized as one of a variety of geometries of harm, merely the latest of many that have extended opportunities for illicit gain in the physical world. Hypercrime offers a radical critique of the narrow conceptions of cybercrime offered by current justice systems and challenges the governing presumptions about the nature of the threat posed by it.
FRENCH L'apparition du profilage ADN comme outil au service de la justice penale constitue une etape nouvelle dans l'usage du corps au titre de ressource a des fins de regulation sociale. Le rôle traditionnel du corps penal – objet visible de dispensation de souffrances – a progressivement ete dilue dans des projets de regulation plus subtils et invisibles, centres sur sa structure biochimique. La transformation a ete si subtile que l'on peut avancer qu'un nouveau type de sujet de justice est ne : le citoyen biochimique. Dans cet article, je suggère que la citoyennete biologique doit etre consideree comme le resultat d'un deplacement regulatoire plus complexe, dans lequel les technologies biochimiques ne constituent qu'un element d'une matrice plus etendue de la regulation technologique. Dans ce nouvel ordre technologique (que je nomme technomie ), les fonctions de la justice penale traditionnelle et les institutions qui la portent se doivent detre rearticulees selon des modalites dont nous commencons seulement a nous rendre compte.
Emphasizing a spatialized conception of deviance, one that clarifies the continuities between crime in the traditional, physical context and developing spaces of interaction such as a 'cyberspace', this book analyzes criminal behaviours in ...
Technology has become increasingly important to both the function and our understanding of the justice process. Many forms of criminal behaviour are highly dependent upon technology, and crime control has become a predominantly technologically driven process - one where ‘traditional’ technological aids such as fingerprinting or blood sample analysis are supplemented by a dizzying array of tools and techniques including surveillance devices and DNA profiling. This book offers the first comprehensive and holistic overview of global research on technology, crime and justice. It is divided into five parts, each corresponding with the key stages of the offending and justice process:
This paper argues that the significance of technology for contemporary crime and control needs urgent retheorisation. In a context where communications and information technology are having such profound effects upon social interaction, important questions arise about the changing relations between spatial experience, crime and control. The paper suggests that one standard approach here – the claim that communications technology crimes are best explained by reference to them as ‘cybercrimes’ which occur in‘cyberspace’– represents one variant of the failure to properly locate technology within the social. Adopting a Simmelian perspective, the paper advocates considering technology in terms of a geometry of offending behaviours and responses to them – one defined by social interaction rather than the other way around. It is argued that an extended form of social space –a hyperspace – is now evolving, with important implications, not just for our experience and perception of crime, but the kinds of options available for managing it.
This book responds to the claim that criminology is becoming socially and politically irrelevant despite its exponential expansion as an academic sub-discipline. It does so by addressing the question 'what is to be done' in relation to a number of major issues associated with crime and punishment. The original contributions to this volume are provided by leading international experts in a wide range of issues. They address imprisonment, drugs, gangs, cybercrime, prostitution, domestic violence, crime control, as well as white collar and corporate crime. Written in an accessible style, this collection aims to contribute to the development of a more public criminology and encourages students and researchers at all levels to engage in a form of criminology that is more socially relevant and more useful.