The Return of the Slave Master

Popular ideas of crime victimhood have been bound up with imagery of Black criminality. Against this backdrop, the application of Britain’s “modern slavery” policies and law to young people’s involvement in the street-level economy of heroin and cocaine—dubbed county lines—appears as a departure from entrenched forms of punitivism in British criminal justice policy: now, working-class and minoritized boys and young men are discovered as victims, indeed as slaves, worthy of redemption by the state. Yet my multisited ethnography reveals a more complicated picture. At precisely the moment when the British state has included some of its most criminalized constituencies within the ambit of legal victimhood, it has also imbued a range of actors—police officers, judges, and jurors—with the power to decide where the line between victims and perpetrators, or slaves and masters, is to be drawn. I argue that the government’s discovery of slavery on home ground marks the deepening of an authoritarian populism reminiscent of British colonial logics, one which is premised upon not only the figure of the constitutive “other” as a threat to the body politic but also a certain kind of popular subject, capable of dispensing both care and coercion.