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4 - Social order, the ‘Hard Strike’ and administrative detention powers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2009

Sarah Biddulph
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
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Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the 1950s different forms of detention evolved in response to practical problems of establishing social control and to the impetus of political campaigns such as the Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries. Whilst law was not entirely absent, it tended to follow behind policies and practices. Since economic reforms were initiated in the late 1970s, the redevelopment of administrative detention powers has again been deeply influenced by their political and social order contexts, though these contexts are quite different from those of the 1950s. The possibilities for different forms of legal treatment of administrative detention are also directly influenced by the political and social order context in which those powers are developed and used. In this chapter, I set out the policy context within which police administrative detention powers have been developed and employed since the 1970s.

The social changes brought about by the economic reform programme disrupted established localised strategies for social control and crime prevention. The Party and police have responded by rejuvenating powers and reworking strategies they remember as successful in the pre-reform era. The remaking of contemporary social order policy in the shadow of its pre-reform analogue illustrates Bourdieu's observation that contemporary debates in social fields are historically and politically structured. Pre-reform strategies for social and political control have provided a vocabulary within which contemporary social order strategies have been developed, though in the process of reusing these powers in a changed social and political environment, they have been significantly altered.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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