Caring states? Bureaucratic care, moral ideals and emotional dilemmas in British asylum and policing

Abstract

This article explores everyday discourses of care among public protection police officers and asylum-screening officers in Britain. Contemporary policy rhetoric of vulnerability and care commits these bureaucracies to relieve human suffering. Through ethnographic observations and interviews, this article reveals the conflicting and profoundly moral meanings that these officials attach to care, which they claim as a central inspiration and ideal of their labour. Officers invoke ideals of empathy, personalization and moral responsibility to navigate their roles – an attempt to redress what they characterize as a failing system and articulate their own aspirations about the state. Yet the gatekeeping and exclusion characteristic of bureaucracy undermines such ideals, bringing officials to confront the impossibility of their aspirations. Examining the moral tensions that ensue enables a reappraisal of dominant analyses of state power. Casting care as neither a unitary governmental logic nor a vehicle to legitimize punishment, this article redresses criminology's neglect of the ‘benevolent’ side of the state and illustrates the state's fragmented character.