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 ARTICLES

Theoretical Criminology
@ 1999 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi.
1362-4806(199902)3:1
Vol. 3(1): 5-28; 006985.

Reclaiming critical criminology:

Social justice and the European
tradition

RENE VAN SWAANINGEN

Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Abstract
This article seeks to examine the relevance of the continental
European tradition in critical criminology for the theoretical
elaboration of criminological theory today. The first step towards an
answer is a rather descriptive one: how did critical criminology
develop historically on the European continent? That is the theme
of the first section. In the second section, the social and cultural
developments which accompanied the heyday of critical
criminology in the 1970s will be analysed, and an expos6 will be
given of the spectrum of the different critical perspectives on the
continent. The same cultural sociological line of thought will be
followed in the explanation of the rather abrupt decline of critical
criminology shortly after in the third section. The need for a
normative counter-weight to present-day, managerial political
discourse which follows from these analyses also forms the prelude
to a reaffirmation of critical criminology in section four. Because
many of its original concepts and presumptions no longer fit very
well to the changed political and socio-cultural reality of the late
1990s, a reconstruction of critical criminology is proposed in
section five.

Key Words
critical criminology * Europe * future prospects * normative
theory * social justice

from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.

6 Theoretical Criminology 3(1)

Introduction

If we are to believe the handbooks, criminology is a discipline of dead

Europeans and living North Americans. Criminology has indeed emerged
in 19th century Europe. It is also true that from the 1940s onwards, the
dominant theories in criminology are 'made in the USA'. Does this mean
that European criminologists currently mainly follow their North American
collegues, or is there still a living European tradition? And, if there are any
specifically European characteristcs, could these be useful for the develop-
ment of the criminological discipline in a general sense? While answering
these questions affirmatively for the continental European critical per-
spective, an investigation is made into the question what this could
contribute to the future of theoretical criminology.
Since its emergence in the second half of last century until World War II,
European criminology was the major source of inspiration for Anglo-
American students of crime and crime control. The Belgian Adolphe
Quetelet, the Italian Enrico Ferri, the Frenchman Gabriel Tarde, the
Dutchman Willem Bonger: which self-respecting criminologist would not
know them? Despite the wide readership of their work, the specific political
and academic context in which these scholars have to be situated has for a
long time remained largely unknown (Beirne, 1993). This context is,
however, important if we are to understand why European criminology
developed in the way it did. On the European continent, there were
criminological schools of thought within the law faculties which always
had a certain influence on cultural and political developments-either as an
intellectual avant-garde or through direct participation of academics in
politics and the legal practice. That is just one reason why European
criminology developed by and large as an auxiliary discipline to criminal
law. This context is also an important factor in the understanding of the
ethical crisis in European criminology, when in the 1930s the dominant
utilitarian focus on social defence and biological theories of crime were
used as a scientific defence of the Nazi law and order campaigns. The moral
discreditation of this kind of academic 'support' of an infamous political
ideology resulted after World War II in the fact that most European
criminologists sought refuge in a tradition set by North American socio-
logical functionalism, which did not suffer so much from such an un-
absorbed past.
The central position of continental European criminologists in the
English-speaking world had paradoxically come to an end at a time when
continental refugees such as Max Griinhut, Hermann Mannheim and Leon
Radzinowicz had popularized criminology in Britain, where the discipline
had, until then, a rather marginal position (Garland, 1997: 34). After
World War II, the dominant stream of influence and inspiration turned
around. From now on the wind would blow from the 'new' to the 'old'
world. New developments on the European continent were no longer
introduced in the English-speaking world. Now English succeeded French
 van Swaaningen-European criminology 7

as the academic lingua franca, Anglo-American studies became much more

widely read in Europe. Which European criminologist would currently not
know Shaw and MacKay, Edwin Sutherland, Howard Becker or indeed
Travis Hirschi? Many North American scholars have left their traces in
continental European criminology and criminal justice policy alike. Yet
again, the specific cultural and political context in which all these theories
emerged was hardly ever taken into consideration when they were im-
ported in Europe. It seems as if it did not matter that the United States'
urban and migration patterns, the 'American Dream'-like social ideals, the
vision of firearms as part of national folklore, or the level of both criminal
and institutional violence, implicitly reflected in so many North American
theories, hardly looked like any European reality. Vice versa, it seems as if
typical European phenomena such as the large differences in language and
culture at small geographical distances, the role of street- and cafe-life as
'social cement', and the social democratic welfare state with its guaranteed
minimal wages, its unemployment and other benefits, its wide net of public
insurances and its extensive system of social housing and rent control do
not shed another light on social control, deprivation or cohesion.
The 'Americanization' of European criminology in the 1960s certainly
had a positive influence on the development of empirical research, but at
the same time, the cultural presuppositions of all those US-made theories
were hardly addressed by its European followers and the traditional
normative framework of continental European criminology, its link with
criminal law theory, got gradually lost. In this article, I argue that there are
in the late 1990s good reasons to retrieve this link. From the 1980s
onwards, criminology has shifted away from epistemological and socio-
political questions and returned to its old empiricist orientation as an
applied science from the days prior to the struggle over positivism. It is
fuelled by the political issues of the day, and geared by the agenda of its
financiers-mainly the Ministry of Justice, local government, the police or
indeed banks or insurance companies. Elaborating 'the European tradition'
could show that by ignoring the specific normative context and epistemo-
logical foundations of criminology we are cutting the roots of the tree we
are sitting in.
Many studies into sub-cultures, attachments, control, exclusion, aggres-
sion, etc. could be done very well by sociologists, psychologists, political
scientists, urban anthropologists or neurologists. The question is why do
we actually need criminologists? An important surplus value of criminol-
ogy over other social sciences lies in its knowledge of the criminal justice
system. The study of crime and crime control needs to include an analysis
of the specific legal conceptualization and amplification of problems if we
are to come to a full understanding of the social reaction side of the
criminological subject matter. At present, many criminologists tend to
ignore this specific expertise and take a positivist stance, in which legal
definitions of crime and the 'just' penal reactions are uncritically adopted,
whereas they are actually part of the problem and thus need to be
8 Theoretical Criminology 3(1)

encountered with a more reflexive attitude. I will focus on the critical

perspective, since this is more in line with the European tradition of the
discipline. European mainstream criminology is more oriented at Anglo-
American perspectives. Whereas many critical criminologists have linked
empirical analyses with social and political theory, the traditional con-
tinental European link with criminal law theory is not yet so obvious.

The development of critical criminology in Europe

Criminology emerged as a response to a prevalent crisis in law enforce-

ment. The classical legal doctrine was no longer felt to be a proper answer
to the seemingly ever rising crime rates. Scientific studies into the causes of
crime and the correction of offenders were welcomed as possible means to
make the system of law enforcement more efficient. From the outset,
criminology's fate is connected to its contribution to criminal justice
politics. Criminological studies have, vice versa, put a strong mark on
(particularly North-Western) European jurisprudence and the penal prac-
tice. Criminology's influence on the legal doctrine has been of a largely
reflexive kind. Considerations from natural law made way for more
pragmatic, goal-oriented objectives. Its influence on the penal practice has,
depending on the political climate in a certain time, once had a mitigating,
humanizing effect (during the belle 6poque) and then again a hardening
effect-in the run-up to World War II. In the 1930s and again in the late
1940s, early 1950s, we also witnessed rather strong counter-movements
against the utilitarian primacy, which gave rise to an ethical, normative
renaissance oriented at the power-critical values of the classical legal
doctrine. These 'critical criminologists' avant la lettre focused on the
question of how a just social and legal order should look. Because this
tradition remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world, it
seems worthwhile to devote some specific attention to these European
precursors of critical criminology.

European precursors of critical criminology

There has always been a tension between those scholars who see criminol-
ogy as an auxiliary and applied science which is to contribute to a more
efficient criminal justice system, and those who rather see it as a critique of
law and order. When Lombroso had laid the foundations for the Scuola
Positiva (Positivist School) in Northern Italy, there were in the 1880s
scholars from the poorer, Southern, parts of the country, such as Colajanni,
Merlino and Turati who criticized Lombroso's class-blindness and his
apparent authoritarianism. Lombroso's 'atavistic men' were in fact the
cheap labour force from Southern Italy who were exploited in the in-
dustries in the rich north of the country. The thesis of their Terza Scuola
(Third School) was that if the level of crime in a certain society is to be
 van Swaaningen-European criminology 9

diminished, people should not have to fear for their daily existence, the
economy should be stable and welfare should be distributed more
equally.
The influential French environmental school, which emerged in reaction
to Lombroso's anthroplogical approach, made some critical elaborations as
well. Even though Lacassagne did not draw too many political conclusions
from his renowned argument of 1885 that every society gets the crime it
deserves, his statement has, later on, been interpreted in a radical way by
various socialist students. In 1893, Manouvrier showed an early reflexive
insight into the fact that the label 'crime' can also be used to morally
censure acts of people in power, when he described the slaughtering of the
communards by the Parisian police as a crime. Manouvrier had a large
influence on the Dutch socialist sociologist Willem Bonger, who is often
mentioned as the founding father of critical criminology. In his classic
Criminality and Economic Conditions of 1905 (in the original version),
Bonger added a socio-economic component to the socio-psychological
theory of the French School. In the run-up to World War II, Bonger became
one of the most fierce critics of an instrumentalist use of criminal law. He
shares this non-utilitarian vision of law and order with Dutch penal
scientist Clara Wichmann, who had until her death in 1922, written about
the necessity of Marxist and feminist reconceptualizations of penality. Her
ideas come close to what we would call today 'abolitionism'.
Even though during the early days of the Weimar Republic, some of its
more critical penal policy proposals have been introduced by Minister of
Justice Gustav Radbruch, the heritage of Franz von Liszt's Modern School
of Integrated Penal Sciences merely fizzled out in authoritarianism in the
1930s. Many of Germany's social critics had to emigrate to the United
States or Britain. If we are to distinguish a critical school in pre-war
German language 'criminology' we are to look at the psycho-analytical
tradition heralded by Otto Gross (Steinert, 1997). In the first decades of the
20th century, Julius Vargha and Theodor Reik developed abolitionist-like
perspectives on punishment, while Alexander and Staub developed an
incisive critique of criminal justice by examining the irrational elements
which constitute the relation between offenders and their judges.
World War II meant an important caesura in the development of
European criminology. The dismay about the misuse of (biological) crimi-
nology in the Nazi law and order politics did, however, not lead to the
emergence of a strong critical perspective in the discipline. There were some
important attempts by the Frenchman Marc Ancel to give the social
defence movement a new, humanistically inspired revival, and a slightly
more radical perspective of the Dutch Utrecht School, which linked a
phenomenological and existentialist inspiration with very concrete penal
policy proposals. These schools certainly contributed to a reductionist
agenda on law enforcement, but the main reaction to the perversion of the
rule of law in the past decades was a return to the Classical School in
jurisprudence. In this perspective, criminal law is not to be subjected to
10 Theoretical Criminology 3(1)

political decision-making but should indeed be a protection for the citizen

against arbitrary state intervention. We should, however, mention two
Dutch criminologists who did not expect too much of a mere reaffirmation
of classical jurisprudence and argued for a more encompassing cultural
revival after World War 1I. The post-war work of Utrecht scholar Ger
Kempe gradually developed in the direction of a social critique which
precedes the theories of criminalization. Leiden criminologist Willem Nagel
increasingly focused on crimes of the powerful, and developed a conflict
approach of criminology (van Swaaningen, 1997: 29-73). They deserve to
be mentioned as two continental precursors of critical criminology in the
1950s.

The heyday of critical criminology

When critical criminology emerged in late 1960s Britain, it seemed as if the

above-mentioned continental precursors never existed and as if all crimi-
nology prior to 1968 embodied a tedious 'administrative' functionalism.
The administrative criminology against which British critics reacted, how-
ever, hardly existed on the Continent by that time. Critical scholars on the
Continent argued around 1970 more against the hegemony of lawyers and
psychiatrists than against any functionalist empiricism. The popularity of
continental critical social and political theory has, however, been of great
influence on the emergence of critical criminology on both sides of the
North Sea. Next to the rather implicit but nonetheless important influence
of the Frankfurt School, critical criminologists have derived a comparable
inspiration from French (post-) structuralists (mainly from Louis Althusser
and Michel Foucault) and the Italian neo-Marxist intellectual tradition
inspired by Antonio Gramsci. Both Britons and continental students com-
bined these social theories with empirical research, demonstrating the
repressive biases of the criminal justice system towards the lower classes,
and pointing out how it disregarded issues like white collar crime, environ-
mental crime, domestic violence or abuse of relations of dependency. Such
critical criminologists thereby shared an idealist and a normative style of
reasoning with previous generations of continental European critical
scholars.
For Stan Cohen, critical criminology has always remained the tougher
successor of the labelling approach. North American scholars such as
Howard Becker, Ed Lemert and Erving Goffman have indeed prepared the
ground for critical criminology in the late 1950s, by turning around the
dominant offender-oriented perspective in criminology and establishing a
research agenda oriented at the penal institutions themselves. European
critics linked these micro- and meso-sociological analyses with macro-
sociological power-questions. The critical imperative of political commit-
ment has also been raised by Becker (1967), who posed the notorious
question: 'Whose side are we on?' Becker's 'liberal' commitment was,
 van Swaaningen-European criminology 11

however, not enough for Marxist students, who felt that labelling processes
needed to be traced back to their ultimate economic power-rationale. They
replaced the image of a deprived underdog by that of an underclass fighting
back and interactionistic analyses of labelling processes by a political
economy of criminalization. On the European continent, interactionist
roots have, however, always remained much more visible than in Britain. In
that sense, Cohen's acknowledgement is more true for the continental
European than for the British case. Particularly in the Netherlands, inter-
actionist perspectives-mainly social constructionism and labelling-have
remained absolutely dominant. Also in Germany, labelling theory's heritage
has always been nourished quite strongly. Here we can find many attempts
to synthesize Marxist and interactionist perspectives-most notably by
Fritz Sack (1972) and Gerlinda Smaus (1986).
Karl Schumann (1985) portrayed abolitionism as the political agenda of
the labelling approach. With its linguistic axiom that dealing differently
with crime starts by talking differently about it, abolitionism can indeed
well be seen as the ultimate conclusion from analyses of labelling theory. If
criminal law mainly stigmatizes people and thus reinforces recidivism, the
logical next step is to draw back its punitive rationale and to replace it by
approaches oriented at redress and at the reintegration of offenders in the
community. Abolitionism is a clear product of a political culture and spirit
of the time in which one believed that things on the penal field could be
changed for the better. The work of abolitionism's founding fathers, the
Norwegian Nils Christie and Dutchmen Herman Bianchi and Louk Huls-
man dates back to the early 1960s, but it is only called 'abolitionist' from
the late 1970s on (van Swaaningen, 1997: 118-34). Its elaboration in an
explicitly critical criminological framework, by Germans such as Stephan
Quensel, Sebastian Scheerer or Heinz Steinert or Dutchmen such as Willem
de Haan, John Blad or myself, is even no older than the mid-1980s.
Abolitionism is rooted in a European normative and 'idealist' style of
thinking. It echoes the idea that things can be changed if 'we' want them to
change. Abolitionism already embodied in the 1970s what Stuart Henry
and Dragan Milovanovic (1996: 205) would, some 20 years later, call a
'language of possibilities' and a 'replacement discourse': a discourse that 'is
not just critical and oppositional, but provides both a critique and an
alternative vision.'
Conflict sociology has been a driving force behind the transition from
analyses of stigmatization to criminalization, and from analyses of the
selectivity of the criminal justice system to a critique of criminal justice as
power-system. A neo-Marxist or Gramscian branch has been particularly
influential in the Italian critical criminological debates of the mid-1970s as
well as in Britain. A strong Marxist tradition is often a resonance of a
culture in which one does not expect a lot from the authorities, and treats
them rather with suspicion than trust. That is why one does not find this
tradition so much in the typical social democratic welfare states in North-
ern Europe. Quite a number of studies in the neo-Marxist tradition were
12 Theoretical Criminology 3(1)

either oriented at criminalization or, generally with a strongly historical

touch, at the prison system. Obviously, Michel Foucault's best-seller
(1975a) Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish) has given a tremendous
impulse for a renewed interest in these 'Rusche and Kirchheimerian'
themes. In Italian criminology, Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini's
(1977) Carcere e Fabbrica (The Prison and the Factory) is probably the
most famous example, while Hubert Treiber and Heinz Steinert's (1980)
Die Fabrikationdes Zuverlissigen Menschen (The Production of Reliable
People) is a good example in German sociology. Thomas Mathiesen's
Law, Society and PoliticalAction (1980) is a Marxist political theoretical
elaboration of his earlier analyses of the Norwegian abolitionist penal
reform movement. Studies in the style of Stuart Hall's sub-cultural conflict
theory are not so common on the European continent, though they have
inspired quite a number of scholars. With later perspectives in British
critical criminology, such as feminism or left realism, it is more or less the
same story: they did get some reception on the Continent, but their role
has been modest or merely implicit. On the Continent, feminist academics
are, for example, more oriented towards general sociology or labour and
family law than at criminology, and women are anyway better represented
in the political and legal practice than at the university. Left realism's
crude utilitarianism and initial police-centredness was largely rejected by
critical scholars on the Continent, whereas mainstream criminologists
embraced the perspective here without taking its social democratic agenda
into account. It is not unlikely, that with the more recent, intellectually
more challenging approach of left realists (e.g. in Walton and Young,
1998) the gap between realism and (continental) critical criminologies will
be closed.
In a more typically continental European strand in critical criminology,
the so-called garantismo penale, conflict sociology is linked to legal philos-
ophy. This tradition emerged in Italian critical criminology as a reaction to
the 'flexible' use of criminal law in the struggle against the brigate rosse
(red brigades) in the 1970s. It has, for example, resulted in Alessandro
Baratta's ideas on 'minimal penal law', in his CriminologiaCritica e Critica
del Diritto Penale (Critical Criminology and the Critique of Criminal Law)
of 1982, and in Luigi Ferrajoli's political theory Diritto e Ragione (Law
and Reason) of 1989. This perspective fell into fertile ground in post-
Franco Spain, where scholars like Perfecto Andr~s Ibafiez (1978) had tried
to develop a critical theory which could inspire the legal transition from the
dictatorship to democracy. A Dutch counterpart can be found in Antonie
Peters' (1993) work on the sociological value of legal guarantees from the
early 1970s. To a certain extent, the German series of books, edited by
Klaus Liderssen and Fritz Sack between 1975 and 1980, called Seminar:
Abweichendes Verhalten (Deviancy Seminar) and Vom Nutzen und Nach-
teil der Sozialwissenschaft fur das Strafrecht (About the Usefulness and
Disadvantage of Social Science for Criminal Law), in which critical crimi-
 van Swaaningen-European criminology 13

nological themes are placed in a legal framework, can also be reckoned to

this tradition. Particularly in those countries which do not have a strong
empirical tradition in criminology, these guaranteeist debates are very
influential on the critical criminological debate. Like abolitionism, guaran-
teeism is also a 'counter-factual' critique (Habermas, 1981), in which
normative presuppositions are placed in a dialectic relation with empirical
reality.
Another European particularity in critical criminology, which does exist
in Britain but much less in the United States, is the orientation towards
penal reform and criminal justice politics, with subsequent action research
in this respect. Particularly in young democracies like Spain or Greece,
penal activism, by prisoners and sympathizing intellectuals, has been the
actual incentive of critical criminology's emergence. In France, we can think
of the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons, in which Michel Foucault
played an active role or Serge Livrozet's successive Comite d'Action des
Prisonniers-thelater CoordinationSyndicale Pinale was more linked with
the syndicat of progressive judges. Prisoners' and other penal reform
movements can be found in virtually all European countries, but the most
famous criminological elaboration of these initiatives is found in the work
of Thomas Mathiesen.
Sometimes there are direct personal links between platforms of critical
criminology and the radical penal lobby. This is, for example, the case in
Britain, where board member Mike Fitzgerald of the National Deviancy
Conference was also active in groups such as Radical Alternatives to
Prison, and in the Netherlands, where, most notably, Louk Hulsman was
also a board member of the Coornhert Liga of penal reform. This was
certainly not the case in Germany and Italy, where a network of critical
criminologists did exist, but where penal reform activities were very
dispersed and had a strongly 'proletarian' perspective of change. The
Spanish case is very particular: in the transition from Franco's dictatorship
to democracy, in the late 1970s, there was a strong prisoners' movement,
COPEL, whose aim was to see to it that prisoners were not forgotten in the
process of democratization. Were we to mention any roots of a Spanish
critical criminology, the involvement of left-wing intellectuals and lawyers
in COPEL, and successors such as the Basque Salhaketa, is an important
one (van Swaaningen, 1997: 135-69).
In Italy, many critical perspectives on deviancy and social control are
rooted in social psychology. In this respect, Gaetano de Leo's work on
normality and deviance should be mentioned (e.g. de Leo and Salvini,
1978). This perspective is strongly influenced by Franco Basaglia's anti- or
democratic psychiatry movement, as well as by Foucault's anti-institution-
alist social theory about madness: Histoirede la Folie (History of Madness)
(1975b). Though there are certainly socio-psychologists involved in critical
criminology in other countries too, it is, as a specific perspective, rather
typical for the Italian case.
14 Theoretical Criminology 3(1)

In this section we have seen that there are both similarities and differ-
ences between continental European and Anglo-Saxon critical criminology.
Two points of distinction are particularly important here. Continental
European criminology includes a more elaborate critique and under-
standing of legal concepts, principles and structures, and takes a more
positive stance towards a politics of rights as a possible perspective of
change. Particularly in the late 1970s, British critical criminologists showed
a deep contempt for 'bourgeois' ideas on legality and the 'ideological' and
'anachronistic' language of rights. European critical perspectives such as,
for example, abolitionism and guaranteeism, do not argue in such dis-
missive terms about law: they are even notably marked by a legal style of
reasoning. Furthermore, most critical scholars on the European continent
have never rejected the interactionist roots of the perspective-while these
were, again particularly in Britain, widely discarded as misplaced liberal-
ism. The development of European critical criminology was more gradual,
breaches with the past were not so drastic, and the perspective did not get
such a dominantly macro-sociological orientation.

Cracks in the critical criminological project

Until the mid-1970s, continental European criminology developed in close

relation with jurisprudence, but from that time on the two disciplines also
took a more independent path, mainly in the Northern countries of the
Continent. Though this development has certainly had major advantages
for the analytical and technical, methodological, elaboration of the dis-
cipline, it has in the 1980s also resulted in an increasing positivism in both
criminology and the legal discipline, and in a mutual loss of reflexivity. The
reflexive influence criminologists had on the penal practice was changed for
a more docile, policy-supportive influence. This coincided with a radical
shift towards a highly punitive politics of law and order (Robert and Van
Outrive, 1993). In this context I situate the often mentioned crisis in critical
criminology. If we are to design a possible future for critical criminology,
we first need to analyse how it got into crisis. Since the British tradition of
critical criminology has been the most powerful, analyses of the crisis have
also been largely oriented towards the British situation.
We can distinguish internal and external causes for the crisis in critical
criminology. As internal causes we could point to the alienation from the
interactionist roots, the increasing dominance of ideological, politically
correct, hobby-horses which are not supported by serious empirical analy-
ses, the ignorance of real social problems in vulnerable urban areas which
ordinary street crime represents, and the gradual loss of restructuring,
utopian perspectives which have led to an intellectual ghetto of negativism
and impossibilism (Young, 1988; de Haan, 1990: 10-15).
 van Swaaningen-European criminology 15

The explanatory value of the notion of 'deviance' also turned out to be

rather limited. According to Colin Sumner (1994), we should even write an
obituary for the sociology of deviance. Too many of its readings would be
misleading or shallow. Deviancy theory would have celebrated law-break-
ers too much as 'rebels without a cause', whereas such latter-day Robin
Hoods are actually driven by egoistic and asocial motives. In this context,
critical criminologists are heavily criticized for neglecting real social prob-
lems in inner-cities-of which even relatively small offences and incivilities
are important examples because of their massive frequency. The critique of
crime control is increasingly portrayed as playing down justified complaints
about the disintegrating effects of such crime on the community. Critical
criminologists would create an atmosphere in which virtually every police
intervention is put under taboo with a conditioned reflex as being repres-
sive, racist or biased towards the lower classes. After having been a symbol
of progressiveness for some years, critical criminology is now merely
depicted as academic dilettantism, witnessing fuzzy morals and flaky
politics (de Haan, 1990: 17-35).
Critical criminology has, in a way, also become the victim of its own
success. Many of the themes raised by critical scholars in the 1960s and
1970s, which were once ignored by the criminal justice system, have in the
1980s and 1990s actually been put on the agenda of law enforcers-take
fraud, corruption, environmental crime, (sexual) abuse in power-relations
or even genocide. At the same time, judges (at least in Holland) seem to
have become less preoccupied with the sexual habits of consenting adults,
with abortion or with people smoking cannabis-with or without inhaling.
The critical criminological pleas for an alternative, non-stigmatizing and
more structural approach to crime have in a way incited such practical
developments as community policing, non-custodial sanctions and crime
prevention politics, even though the way they have been implemented
makes the architects of these ideas want to forget about their parental role.
Thus one could argue that part of the critical criminological project has
become part of the mainstream discourse.
The actual crisis in critical criminology is embedded in a broader,
cultural shift. The belief in progress, social engineering and even civilization
was waning by 1980. Illusions about the possibility of changing society
have been shattered, and the belief in a future just world is now merely seen
as a fundamental delusion. Critical criminology's Marxist image has,
particularly after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, become quite compli-
cated. As a social critique, historical materialism may still make a lot of
sense in most parts of the world, but as a political strategy, or indeed as a
model of society, it is widely regarded as something which once was, but is
never to return. Now the traditional working classes have become so
prosperous that their interests rather lie in reducing taxes than in keeping
up good public services. Even the continental model of the welfare state is
declining. While a 'fortress Europe' is built around the richest countries of
16 Theoretical Criminology 3(1)

the continent, nationalism grows both in and outside the European

Union.

Towards an actuatial approach of justice

After the alleged 'end of ideology', developments in criminal justice are
rather guided by calculations of how risk and nuisance can be limited
efficiently rather than by classical legal principles. In a risk society, that is
a society which is no longer oriented towards positive ideals and solidarity
but towards a negative solidarity of shared fears (Beck, 1986), justice gets
an 'actuarial' character (Feeley and Simon, 1994). It moves away from the
democratic, constitutional principles of the rule of law, that is the idea of
the continental rechtsstaat. A key element of actuarialism is that moral
questions are scrubbed round and translated into technical questions of
implementation. State action is mainly informed by statistical scenarios and
risk assessments. The implicit vision of mankind has changed from the
accountable citizen to the irresponsible object of control. Breaches of law
are no longer judged in terms of culpability but in terms of potential risks
for the social order. 'The new round of "the end of ideology" game has left
its mark in social control systems and ideologies. In the crime control
business, we see an ascendancy of managerial, administrative and techno-
cratic styles' (Cohen, 1994: 72).
In Europe, the debate on actuarial justice started in the mid-1980s as a
critique of an increasingly instrumentalist legal discourse. According to
German criminologist Sebastian Scheerer (1986: 105-6), criminal law is
losing its identity, now it is characterized by punitive 'get tough' symbolism
on a rhetorical level and by mere administrative managerialism on the
practical side. The Italian legal theorist Filippo Sgubbi (1990) argues in a
similar way that a growing proportion of crime in modern society is treated
as a matter of mere transgression, in which attempts to hold an offender
morally accountable are replaced by a sheer administrative rationale.
Scheerer (1996) concludes that prison has become a 'dump' for those who
are too poor to be punished financially and too much an outsider to be
integrated (refugees, East Europeans, asylum-seekers, etc.), but is at the
same time losing its position as the central reaction to the common crimes
of the autochthonous population, for whom a wide net of control mecha-
nisms within society, steered by the rationale of security, has become
increasingly intrusive. Cornelius Prittwitz (1997) explicitly places develop-
ments in German criminal justice politics in Ulrich Beck's theoretical
framework of the risk society. In the Netherlands, actuarial developments
are also clearly visible in criminal justice policy-making, in the inter-
pretation of legal principles, in crime prevention, in the penal system and in
the probation service.' In many European countries, the rapid growth of
the private security industry is interpreted as one of the strongest symbols
of the emergence of actuarial justice.
 van Swaaningen-European criminology 17

Reaffirming critical criminology

From the mid-1980s on, law and order politics are marked by the ingrained
pragmatism of the 'three E's' of the internal Economy, Efficiency and
Effectiveness of the criminal justice system. In response to these develop-
ments, it is high time to revitalize the European counter-factual critique.
Actuarial developments in the justice administration are not accompanied
by any explicit ideological change in jurisprudence. They have become
popular in the context of the popularity of entrepreneurial and managerial
discourse in society at large, and by the new technical possibilities to
'manage' crime more efficiently. If policy-makers hardly deal with questions
of legitimation or external, social, effects of law enforcement, the tradi-
tional critiques of ideology or of a dysfunctioning criminal justice system
make little sense. Because of this changed political rationale, critique has to
be of a different kind than in the 1970s.
To some extent, later developments in critical criminology were a
reaction to the above-mentioned cracks in the critical criminological proj-
ect; that is to issues which have been ignored or indeed overstated in the
1970s. Left realists have reaffirmed the social-aetiological side of critical
criminology under the banner of 'taking (street) crime seriously'; guaran-
teeists have put the normative framework of the social rechtsstaat in the
limelight again; and abolitionists have reassessed the idealist, restructuring,
impetus of a critical criminology which had got lost in negativism. These
issues form the starting point for my reassessment. Basically, I see seven
reasons to reaffirm critical criminology.
1 Ultimately, criminology deals with the big moral questions of mankind: guilt
and penance, good and evil. This implies that criminologists can hardly
adopt a sheer functionalist style of reasoning. In order not to fall back into
a kind of laboratory criminology, they should explicitly deal with the forces
and interests which surround the formation and change of social norms.
With the crisis in critical criminology, this acknowledgement has nearly
passed into oblivion. Whereas moral statements about crime have become
commonplace, criminology seems to have slipped into a normative vacuum
where the social reactions side is concerned. In order to facilitate an actuarial
approach of justice, questions of morality need to be homogenized. The
ideological role of 'get tough' discourse on crime is to feed the hegemonic
idea that there can only be one correct vision of right and wrong and one
correct vision of how 'society' is to react. A normative critique of the bleak
actuarial practice in which crime is reduced to a problem of certain 'risk
categories' which just need to be monitored, profiled and controlled seems
particularly warranted if we are to keep up a decent, democratic legal
system.
2 Though concrete conditions have changed, the old problems of unemploy-
ment, of class-, race- and gender-discrimination or of crimes of the powerful
are still there, and thus we still need a macro-sociological critique which
18 Theoretical Criminology 3(1)

addresses these questions. Though the critical criminological project is in

need of revision, and though its globalizing observations have sometimes
produced little expertise, its theoretical gains should not be forgotten
altogether, for the currently fashionable orientations at business and social
administration jump too easily over the most central questions of criminal
justice. It is in this respect particularly important to analyse the concrete
forces which guide a specific process of criminalization. It is a powerful way
to challenge the still dominant idea that crime differs substantially from
other social problems, and subsequently that criminals are a specific kind of
people-as the current revival of bio-social perspectives suggests.
3 The economic context in which actuarial justice has emerged harks back to
old-fashioned, pre-welfare, ideologies, for which various critical theories can
still serve as analytic tools. Social exclusion remains a basso continuo in the
social causes of crime. It seems quite possible to apply the analytical
framework of 'moral panics', which are traditionally oriented at mods and
rockers and 'muggers', to the construction of drug-users as the most 'suitable
enemies' of society (Christie, 1986) or to the 'strangers' who do not fit in the
consumer era; the people who in public places are increasingly confronted
with the question 'if you have nothing to spend, what are you doing here?'
and are thus treated as a (potentially) 'dangerous class' (Bauman, 1995).
4 Perspectives oriented towards social reactions to crime have been discredited
exactly as police competences were widened, penal systems expanded and
the whole penal rationale of protecting the individual replaced by the
boundless rationale, the 'frameless frame' (Peters, 1993) of social control.
Though the increased attention to studies into (the causes of) crime should
be welcomed, it should not ignore the account of analyses of criminalization
processes or law enforcement. In the light of the sheer, boundless, penal
expansionism of the last 15 years or so, critical studies of this process are
indeed particularly urgent. Especially now law enforcement moves, with its
strong accent on pro-active policing, its development of risk profiles of
certain kinds of offender categories, and the focus of crime prevention
programmes on fighting such a dangerously flexible concept as 'nuisance'
and the equally obscure idea of 'incivilities' beyond its classical bounderies of
legality, it is crucial to follow the current expansion of the criminal justice
system, as well as the simultaneous diversion of control tasks to the private
sector, very critically indeed. It should also be carefully observed that new
legislation and police practices in the field of organized crime will not
penetrate common criminal law, as special measures and decrees in the fight
against terrorism did in the late 1970s, early 1980s-notably in Germany,
Italy or Spain.
5 Over the last decade, we can see that the public debate on crime is
completely dominated by punitive law and order stereotypes. In their desire
to be 'taken seriously' in the policy debate, many criminologists currently
tend to adopt this administrative twaddle, afraid as they are that notions
about crime as deviancy or pleas for non-punitive responses, will exclude
them from the 'serious'-that is hegemonic-debate by stigmas such as
 van Swaaningen-European criminology 19

'idealism' and 'moral relativism'. This is quite understandable in a political

spectrum where media performances have become pivotal, and structures of
financing academic research may eventually make it a mere question of
survival to obey the old adage 'whose bread one eats, whose word one
speaks'. Another reason for reassessing critical criminology thus lies in the
need to counter these 'totalitarian' tendencies, 'which are a consequence of
the ossification of one particular vision, monopolising reality' (Hart, 1993).
There is a democratic need for a visualization of the plurality of values and
of visions of reality. The sensitizing approaches of abolitionism, guarantee-
ism or feminism could be particularly valuable in this respect.
6 Actually, the current legal practice, which is confronted with crises in
policing, in law enforcement, in the judiciary and in the prison system,
would demand a thorough search for radical alternatives. If these various
crises are to be solved really, it would ultimately require a completely
different way of looking at the crime problem as such.
7 The need for a critical perspective is also particularly pressing for the future
of criminology as an autonomous academic discipline, now it has, often
under financial pressure, connected its fate to a rather flat 'policy relevance'.
This development is so general and so dominant, that it has really led to a
mono-culture: there is currently hardly any other criminology than the
criminology in which the agenda of the Justice department forms the alpha
and omega. Because it circles around the traditional criminal justice focus
and is geared by the political issues of the day, criminological studies are
seldom very innovative or even come quite seldom with any surprising
results. Criminologists hop rather frivolously from the one scientific fashion
and political priority to the next, retreat in number-crunching, or do both at
the same time. Consequently, there are too many nimble, unconstituted and
superficial studies and probably very few which will still be worthwhile
reading in 10 years. A more reflexive, more distant, attitude towards the
subject-matter itself may result in more profound, more sound, more in-
novative and more enduring studies.

Reconstructing social justice

All in all, there are good reasons to study criminology again as a critique of
ideology. The good old critical criminological touchstone of social justice
can still fulfil a useful role in this respect, because analyses of the socio-
economic context of crime and crime control have kept their validity-and
maybe have even gained importance if we look at the decline of the welfare
state, the growing split of society and the subsequent exclusion of new
'dangerous' or superfluous classes from our industrialized societies. On
these themes, critical criminology still has sensible things to say. The
challenging question thus is how to adapt the old critique of social justice
to the present-day cultural, political and socio-economic constellation.
20 Theoretical Criminology 3(1)

If the political debate is dominated by technical considerations about

populist, taken-for-granted notions rather than by any normative argu-
mentation, and by compromises based on maintaining good relations with
the business community rather than by what is best for all layers of society,
the old critique of (their) ideology does not seem to be very helpful any
more. Using a 'counter-factual' critique (Habermas, 1981) to open up a
language of alternative possibilities seems more fruitful. By turning around
some central themes from current politics of law and order, as it were, and
placing them in a guiding framework of social justice, the fixed law and
order stereotypes on social problems can be broken. This 'replacement
discourse' could be applied very well to three central themes in present-day
criminal justice politics which still have a rather open agenda: community
safety; the position of the victim; and the role of law in the process of
norm-formation. This investigation can be inspired by a partial integration
of these fields of 'newer' criminologies such as feminism, left realism,
abolitionism and guaranteeism.

Community safety
Community safety and crime prevention politics seems to be an ideal
terrain where a non-stigmatizing, minimally penal, normative and structur-
ally grounded perspective can be developed. It counters the hegemonic idea
that any serious law enforcement would primarily need to consist of
punishing offenders. In the penal practice, crime prevention politics are,
however, mainly guided by pragmatic considerations on the possibility to
limit nuisance by increasing formal social control and technical means. This
thesis can be turned around by arguing for the improvement of living
conditions, particularly of the most vulnerable groups in society, which will
consequently lead to a reinforcement of 'natural' social bonds in neigh-
bourhoods. Hereby, the informal network of social control is strengthened
in an implicit and yet more structural way. The normative touchstone of
social justice is used to criticize criminogenic elements of the decline of the
welfare state. The actuarial context in which community safety politics
emerged, the coinciding privatization of public services and the subsequent
'responsibilization' discourse of the state towards families, neighbourhood
inhabitants and teachers, by which the state mainly legitimizes an off-
loading of its own social functions (Garland, 1996), are not particularly
helpful for the development of a socially just policy on community safety.
This would indeed demand more state care for social welfare and for a
reasonable level of safety particularly in those neighbourhoods where
inhabitants do not have the means to hire private security companies or to
take (technical and other) preventative measures (de Haan, 1997). Thereby,
the social task of the state to prevent the socio-economic split of cities into
ghettos on the one hand and super-protected residential areas on the other,
is remoralized. By placing community safety politics in the framework of
normal social politics, rather than forcing it into a criminal justice frame-
 van Swaaningen-European criminology 21

work, the danger of a new penal stigmatization of the most vulnerable

groups can be prevented (van Swaaningen, 1997: 210-18).

The position of the victim

The idea that the victim would have undergone an emancipation process in
the 1980s (Boutellier, 1993), forms an ideal starting point for an investiga-
tion into the question of which changes in the procedural order could
facilitate this alleged emancipation. First, the currently leading idea that the
interests of the victim would be served best by retributive responses finds
little support in both empirical victimological studies and in normative
legal studies. Great expectations have been raised, but despite the fact that
victims do play a larger role in the penal process now, we can witness most
of all a growing dependency on state institutions like the police and the
public prosecution service. This is, however, of little help, because clearance
rates are very low, only a small percentage of cases can actually be proven,
and real mental and material assistance of victims is still largely lacking.
The fundamentally victim-alien penal rationale is to be confronted with
notions of participatory justice. This allows people to express their anger
and anxiety in their own terms rather than in a pre-fixed penal vocabulary.
In order to realize this, the penal process should be split. A first phase will
need to be guided by the question of what can be done for the victim. This
necessitates a serious search for possibilities for redress and for (therapeutic
and other) means to psychologically get some grip over one's life again.
Because any due process is guided by the principle of equality, the fate of
the accused can, however, not be made dependent on the different demands
and wishes victims will hold. The next question-what should happen to
the offender?-should thus, following the classical penal doctrine, be
judged independently of the victim's wishes. In this two-track system, we
prevent the interests of victims and those of offenders being played off
against each other (van Swaaningen, 1997: 220-6).

The role of law in the formation of social norms

The role of law in the formation of social norms can also be approached
with a replacement discourse. This would not only imply a critique of the
decline of legal safeguards under actuarial justice, but also a reflection upon
the question of how law should ideal-typically look from a perspective of
social justice. According to hegemonic political discourse, litigation got out
of hand in the 1970s. Criminal law would offer the offender so many
safeguards that efficient law enforcement would be hardly possible any-
more. This rather populistic vision can be confronted with the argument
that only in a very small percentage of cases are the rights of the accused
actually mobilized. Just as most crimes are never detected by the police,
most police actions are never questioned on their legitimacy. From a
perspective of social justice the protective value of law is, however, a
fundamental democratic value which indicates the limits of legitimate state
22 Theoretical Criminology 3(1)

intervention. Classical legal principles and social constitutional rights play

a key role in rethinking the social role of criminal law.
In classical Durkheimian visions, criminal law is the forum where the
development of social norms is symbolically reaffirmed. In a critical
perspective on this theme, the necessarily reciprocal character of moral
claims needs to be stressed. I propose to replace the penal idea of imposing
the 'right' norms and values beforehand, by a procedural framework of
norm-formation in which morality is actually established during the proce-
dure. In this way, law will become more a procedurally guaranteed
dissensus, rather than a guardian of a fictitious consensus about morality. If
norms are to be kept alive, they need to be subjected to debate. A legal
forum which offers more space for narrative components also reflects a
more pluralistic vision on the formation of norms, which seems to fit better
to the current social and (multi-) cultural reality than the penal catechism
which axiomatically starts from the presumption that penal norms are
unequivocal and that everybody holds the same criteria of relevance and
interests. In such an ideological framework there is no room for a fight over
apparent social conflicts between rich and poor, black and white, man
and woman, employer, employee and unemployed. This undermines the
validity of criminal law as an adequate institution of norm-formation (van
Swaaningen, 1997: 227-37).

Conclusions

The 'ways forward' for criminology first imply a step back in respect of the
pragmatic, functionalist and utilitarian style of argumentation which cur-
rently dominates the discipline. A historical lesson that can be learned from
continental European criminology is that a subordinated focus on making
law enforcement more 'efficient' will offer very little counter-weight to both
totalitarian and managerial political tendencies. Even when the form has
changed, a warning against instrumentalist politics of law and order is as
relevant today as 60 years ago. Comparing current authoritarian populist
managerialism with the authoritarian politics of the 1930s may seem
exaggerated, but there are dangerous ideological similarities (Quensel,
1989; Christie, 1993). The 'new totalitarianism' lies in a new instrumen-
talist dominance within the criminological discipline. In this respect, there
are some concrete things that can be learned from the European tradition
in criminology.
First, the more critical criminological studies from continental Europe
take normative considerations about the democratic rule of law explicitly
into account. They function as a break on the political urge to always plea
for more and more 'efficient' measures. Particularly because these measures
generally imply an increase of 'penal violence', the moral deficit of the
pragmatic rationale can be demonstrated. The real question is: to what
level can a democratic society increase the use of penal violence? A question
 van Swaaningen-European criminology 23

like 'are capital punishment or chain-gangs compatible with the revered

ideas of a modern democracy, or do these practices actually witness a
disrespect for human dignity which we prefer to reserve for so-called
"primitive" countries?' cannot be answered by empirical arguments alone.
Human rights discourse offers an important normative counter-part to the
empirical critique of instrumentalist visions of law enforcement. Some legal
measures can within an instrumentalist rationale be very efficient, but if
they are 'indecent' or 'immoral' they become untenable and substantially
untrustworthy in the normative postulate of a social rechtsstaat, because
the state thereby lowers its own moral standards.
Second, much theoretical work from continental scholars shows the
value of counter-factual reasoning. The rationale which underlies this non-
functionalist style of argumentation is that the kind of influence a criminol-
ogist can have is probably larger if he or she constructively demonstrates
another possible reality to the general public and politicians alike, rather
than rationally, and mainly negatively, criticizing the penal rationale and
practice which is shaped by the professional, administrative, bureaucratic
vision of the world. These two elements, the non-utilitarian, value-oriented
style of argumentation and the counter-factual critique in which principles
(e.g. of the rule of law) are not rejected or discredited because they are not
realized in practice, seem important enough for the future of theoretical
criminology.
It is also worth acknowledging that the basic pattern of critical criminol-
ogy has kept its validity, or even gained value in the present era. Three of
its central concepts need, however, to be revised if critical studies are to
contribute to the future of theoretical criminology. Though the critique that
the concept of 'deviancy' is morally relativistic is not in all aspects equally
convincing, it does seem to have become less useful. While it demonstrates
the labelling side of crime very well, it does little justice to the experience of
crime as asocial or egoistic behaviour. The term 'crime' may be an
inadequate social construction by which very different problems and
conflicts are heaped together, but as a historical and legal construction it is
very real in its consequences. Thus, from a social reactions perspective,
'crime' remains a central object of study for criminologists, since not all of
its meanings are covered by the notion of deviancy. Other problems arise at
an epistemological level. The concept of deviancy starts from the presump-
tion of a cognizable and clear standard norm, which has come severely
under attack by the postmodern vision of society. Yet at the same time,
postmodern thought on 'otherness' can incite an interesting revival of
deviancy theory.
The term social control, as employed by critical criminologists, has been
too much oriented towards the state. That particular image of social
control offers too little analytical grip for the explanation of current
developments as the privatization of public services and off-loading of state
functions and the subsequent responsibilization of the citizen and of private
enterprise (Garland, 1996). The more or less adapted 'insiders' of the
24 Theoretical Criminology 3(7)

consumer society are currently mainly controlled by a Disney Order

(Shearing and Stenning, 1987), in which social control has the form of
infantilization and soft coercion. Tough, old-fashioned, state control
through punishment will be increasingly reserved for people for whom
incapacitation is seen as 'the only solution'-because they are no longer of
any 'use' to society. In this way, gulags Western style, as Nils Christie
(1993) calls it, will emerge for risk groups as (illegal) immigrants, junkies,
lunatics and the superfluous class of unskilled, 'inadequate consumers'
which are to a large degree created by a vicious circle of penal and social
exclusion. Theories on social control need to be adapted to this phase in the
process of bifurcation between Disney world and the gulag. We should,
however, also take care that the term social control is not surrounded by
mainly negative, repressive connotations, for it is very difficult to imagine a
society which could function without any form of social control. The
question of whether we need more or less social control is less interesting
than the question of what kind of social control we want. Particularly in
the light of debates on community safety, a more communitarian con-
ceptualization of social control will be necessary. This should reflect a new
balance of responsibilities between state and citizens.
A third key concept from critical criminology which has become rather
problematic is the notion of net-widening. Though the argument that
alternatives to prison have indeed mainly led to an increasing reach of the
penal system rather than to an actual replacement of the one mode of social
control by another, less punitive one, is still valid, we also have to
acknowledge that, with hindsight, the net-widening argument has, on a
practical political level, blocked critical criminology's constructive role in
penal reform. On a theoretical level, it has shut out the initial utopian
incentive of critical criminology, which resulted in an uninspiring analytical
despair. The present politics of community safety clearly carries the danger
of net-widening as well. It is to be hoped that today's critical criminologists
are able to deal a bit more creatively with this topic than their precursors
in the 1970s. There is a lot to be said for an affirmative position of
community safety even when this politics could well widen the net of social
control and spread the rationale of criminal justice over wider segments of
society. One could, for example, argue that this politics may also be a
means to bring social provisions to neighbourhoods which notably lack
them. Critique should, in my opinion, be oriented at the actuarial and
managerial context in which community safety has emerged, rather than at
the idea as such.
In respect of penal reform, the focus should also be more on potential
changes and less on impossibilities. An open eye for legal means to achieve
certain things is to be linked with socio-political analyses. The three fields
in which a replacement discourse is developed are still relatively open
political agendas which can be filled in with notions of social justice. This
seems a more fruitful approach of penal reform than the continuous stream
of negative critique of every single measure from the justice administration.
 van Swaaningen-European criminology 25

Successful penal reforms have often been preceded by a sensibilization of

the topic as such, for example by demonstrating the 'pain' of penal
violence. Thus, the criminologist's task of demasking stereotypes and
repeating the obvious also fulfils an important political function.
If the current, strongly result-oriented, professional context continues, it
is unlikely that really innovative theoretical studies will emerge. If scientific
progress is to be made, existing boundaries need to be challenged and new
ways have to be explored. Not all of these new ways will, however,
generate success, and thus the cautious researcher who must produce a
certain output in a limited time will avoid such risks and remain on the safe
side. Without intellectual scepticism, without taking up research whose
outcome is not guaranteed from the outset, and without lifting concrete
empirical studies to a higher level of abstraction, criminology is unable to
make any theoretical progress. It will consequently fall short in creating
explanatory models and innovative frames of reference and will subse-
quently become superfluous. The future of critical criminology lies in its
ability to offer new impulses, and to transgress the professional boundaries
this requires.

Note

1. The most explicit elaborations of the critique of actuarialism to the Dutch

situation can be found in my own work on these themes, respectively in
Recht en kritiek (1995) 21(1): 13-37 and Justitiole Verkenningen (1996)
22(5): 80-97; in John Blad and Paul Mevis (eds) (1997) Het gelijkheidsbe-
ginsel, Deventer: Gouda Quint, pp. 53-68; inJustitile Verkenningen (1995)
21(3): 63-87; in Mick Ryan, Joe Sim and Vincenzo Ruggiero (eds) (1995)
Western European Penal Systems; A Critical Anatomy. London: Sage,
pp. 24-45; and in Proces (1997) 76(11/12): 193-8.

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28 Theoretical Criminology 3(1)

RENE VAN SWAANINGEN is Reader in criminology and penology at the

Erasmus University Rotterdam and Secretary of the Netherlands' Society of
Criminology. His publications generally deal with the relation of social
theory to developments in criminology and criminal justice and cover
themes such as community safety, punishment and restorative justice.
[email: vanswaaningen@str.frg.eur.nl]