An Expanding Culture of Control? The Municipal Administrative Sanctions Act in Belgium

Abstract

This article provides an in-depth study of the Act on Municipal Administrative Sanctions 1999 (MAS), which is the first major piece of legislation regulating antisocial behaviour in Belgium. MAS provides municipalities with an instrument to sanction antisocial behaviour and conduct perceived to disturb public order. The article uses Garland's (2001) thesis on the culture of control to analyse whether MAS has led to increased government control and the exclusion of significant groups of the population. The research is based on a multiple case study in which the application of MAS was analysed over a 25-year period of security policies in Belgium (1985Belgium ( -2010. The Act's implementation was studied in the two Belgian cities of Antwerp and Liège in order to consider the influence of the Flemish government and the Walloon government, respectively, in this policy area. The article uses insights from this comparison to revisit the culture of control thesis and its limitations in understanding the political competition that exists over the formulation of policies on antisocial behaviour.

Constructing migrants as crime and public order problems. Comparing local press representations in two Italian cities

“…Research has highlighted that there are differences in the local enforcement of these public order regulations (Di Ronco, 2014, 2016 and that these differences are also related to the specific political parties entrusted with the local governance (Devroe et al, 2016). The use of onerous administrative or civil measures, which substantially restrict individual's autonomy and de facto criminalise an individual's behaviour and exclude unwanted and already marginalised groups from public spaces (which has occurred not only in Italy but also in other European countries, see Peršak, 2017a), has been viewed as an example of popular punitiveness and protection of the public from feeling negative emotions (Peršak, 2017b).…”

“…The use of onerous administrative or civil measures, which substantially restrict individual's autonomy and de facto criminalise an individual's behaviour and exclude unwanted and already marginalised groups from public spaces (which has occurred not only in Italy but also in other European countries, see Peršak, 2017a), has been viewed as an example of popular punitiveness and protection of the public from feeling negative emotions (Peršak, 2017b). This misuse of measures has also been interpreted as a feature of the pre-crime society (Pleysier, 2015(Pleysier, , 2017 and of Garland's (2001) 'culture of control' (Devroe, 2012;Devroe et al, 2016).…”