PART I: POSITIVELY UNDERTAKEN

service of the “best” people who have received the “best” education.
In the immortal words of Robert McNamara:

Management is in the end the most creative of all the arts for
its medium is human talent itself. The real threat to democracy
comes . . . from undermanagement . . . To undermanage reality is
not to keep it free. It is simply to let some force other than reason
shape reality.
(from The Essence of Security [1968],
quoted in Chomsky [2005 (1970)]: 51)

(Readers are encouraged to look up what Chomsky says about

McNamara’s position immediately following this quote.) Required,
then, are such data on the population as are suitable for its effective
management.
Gathering data on the state of said population – its size, age
and gender composition, geographical distribution, state of health,
involvement in work and so on – is simply required for effective
administration, as the debate over the removal and reinstatement of
the long-form census in Canada between 2010 and 2015 amply dem-
onstrated. Crime and its measurement have always been a significant
part of such public administration, given the state’s necessary and
inevitable interest in law and order. Locating and managing problem
populations that, whether through disease, poverty, “immorality” or
criminality, are potentially disruptive of the orderly transaction of
public affairs, is a given activity of states. Such is made evident in the
typical categories into which the offences making up a state’s crimi-
nal code are divided; namely, offences against public order, offences
against property and offences against the person. We take up Marxist
criminology’s theoretical critique of the role of the state’s power to
criminalize as a vehicle of class control in Chapter 7.
As that data in the form of official national statistics on such things
as crime and suicide became available in the nineteenth century,
sociology itself came into (pre-)professional being in close proximity
to social administration (or social work), as evident in the many UK
university departments that combined the two disciplines. For at least
the last 150 years, correctional criminology has continued to stand
alongside the correctional agencies of the state, from government
ministries to municipal mayors and police chiefs, in “fighting crime”

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