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IN PRAISE OF DANGEROUS THOUGHTS: A REVIEW

ESSAY

CRIMINOLOGY AND SOCIAL THEORY

(eds.) D Garland and R Sparks

Oxford: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 0-19-829942-7

David Downes once famously remarked that criminology is a

'rendezvous discipline' - it is a subject where other disciplines
meet and its very liveliness and, at its best, intellectual
interest is because of this position on the busy crossroads of
sociology, psychology, law, and philosophy. Criminology
cannot exist separately from social theory, it is inevitably
concerned with the central problems of social order and
disorder. Once glance at the classic texts: Marx, Weber,
Durkheim, Merton, The Chicago School and the symbolic
interactionists shows the shared canon with sociology. What
is distinctive about criminology is not its knowledge base but
its formal focus: on the origins of crime, on criminal law and
on the interaction between the offender and the law - and
latterly the victim. Suffice it to say that all the main social
theorists engage with at least some part of this problematic -
the major exemplar is, of course, Durkheim - and that not only
does criminology need social theory but social theory has
been manifestly and frequently concerned with crime,
disorder and regulation. Yet there is the ever-present
tendency in contemporary work, particularly in the burgeoning
administrative criminology, to cast adrift from grand theory to
write as if a theory of the social order, the State and political
economy were no concern to the jobbing criminologist. This
text sets out to help place theory back into its key role
particularly with regards to contemporary theory and in
relationship to the wide changes engendered by late
modernity.

David Garland and Richard Sparks in a far reaching and

thoughtful introductory essay set out to analyse the impact of
late modernity on criminology, their central thesis being that
the world today is no longer the same as that which faced the

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modernist criminology which developed during the first two

thirds of the twentieth century. According to their analysis
modern criminology was a discourse which emerged around
the penal - welfare complex. It was hegemonic in its
influence, individualistic in its focus, and relatively
autonomous from wider currents of social thought. Its aim
was the social engineering of the maladjusted individual into
the ranks of the law abiding majority - it was a discourse of
inclusion. It presented a progressive narrative of modern
times, as reform followed reform and the rehabilitative ideal of
the criminologist influenced politicians and public policy. All of
this came awry in the last third of the twentieth century where
a series of factors: the normalisation of crime, the emergence
of a risk society, the decline of social democratic politics, the
identification of the criminal justice system as only one part of
the crime control system, and the revival of private policing
and commercialised security, all served to tip the criminology
of modernism from its privileged place. The first sign of this
shift was the emergence in the 1970s of a critical criminology
which turned for inspiration to - another modernity - the
classic sociology of modernism - Durkheim, Marx, Mead and
Simmel - and which for a "moment" connected crime with
politics and the wider social world. But, "the moment did not
last long" (p.14) and whilst modern criminology became
decoupled from power, at the same time the new theoretical
criminology continued only as a subordinate and muted voice.
The new situation presenting criminology today is to be
merely one voice amongst the many talking about crime and
the realisation that its own rationality and the public rationales
for policing, punishment and control are irrevocably rendered
asunder.

I have great difficulty with this account. It is absolutely true

that an applied criminology, pragmatic, empiricist and
parochial developed in Britain in the period up to the 1970s. it
is also correct that such an a-theoretical criminology was
deeply intertwined in the criminal justice system and the
politics of the time and to this extent had influence. But it is
important to stress how such a criminology was cut off from
developments in the rest of the world (particularly the U.S.)
had an extraordinary level of amnesia about the past and,
most importantly, was severely intellectually inadequate. The
developments in the last third of the twentieth century were
not momentary, rather they transformed the criminological
canon, they involved no sense of decline but rather the
reconnection of British criminology into the main corpus of
modernist thinking on crime and regulation. This reconnection
with sociology had dramatic implications for criminological
thought. The first was the realisation that the criminal justice
system was not the central agency of social control. Work, the
family, the mass media, psychiatry, medicine, etc. - all of the
institutions of society contributed to social order. The criminal
justice system was only one part of the process, itself
dependent on civil society and was, in fact, frequently

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counterproductive in its contribution. The second was a move

away from the analytical individualism of positivism and
classicism and an awareness of the interplay between
structure and agency. Individual actors were constructed
socially, society was constructed by individuals: neo-classicist
criminology with its rational actors and positivistic atoms was
superseded - not only was the role of the criminal justice
system decentred but the ideas surrounding it exposed as
being intellectually flawed. The text which heralded British
criminology's coming of age was Herman Mannheim's
remarkable two volume Comparative Criminology published
in 1965, in which he draws heavily from the flourishing
American sociology of crime and deviance and begins the
reconnection with classical sociology. It is here that he notes:
"that it should be clear that nothing fundamental can be
achieved without the investigation of the deep-seated causes
[of crime]" and critiques current thinking about crime: "It is …
in line with this self-abdicating policy that so much modern
criminological writing in this country has, on the whole, kept
meticulously aloof from 'dangerous thoughts'." (1965, p.428).
These dangerous thoughts went beyond the immediate and
the pragmatic and linked crime and penality to the deep
structure of society evoking readily the whole panoply of
modernist social theory from Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Simmel
and Mead to the burgeoning new subcultural and labelling
theories of the United States. The textbooks changed from
The New Criminology onwards and feeding back to the US in,
for example, the later editions of Vold and Sutherland.
Therein a modernist narrative of progress became de rigeur,
starting at classicism, then going on to the positivist revolution
and proceeding to the "new" sociologies of crime became,
and remains, the standard canon of the criminological text. To
this extent the authors' depiction of the post-1970s as
somehow a loss or a disarray seems singularly inappropriate.
Indeed criminology in the third part of the twentieth century
developed remarkably. What is distinctively late modern,
however, is the plurality of narrative - for all of the paradigms
from dyed in the wool biological positivism to gushing post-
modernism now co-exist - there is no agreed sequence called
progress. Furthermore, and here Garland and Sparks are
correct, there is a blurring of boundaries, criminology exists
outside of the talk of criminologists. But this, of course, is all
for the good - for criminology, whatever it is, is a focus on the
nature of crime, regulation and their interaction it is not and
can never be a substantive subject in its own right.

Let us turn to their next claim - the loss of power. This

revolves around Radzinowicz's thesis (1999) that the gulf
between theory and practice, between criminology and policy,
was once close and is now widening. This is obviously wrong:
for example, on the right, Wilson and Kelling, Charles Murray,
John Dilulio, have obvious and direct influences on policy.
Indeed much of New Labour's law and order agenda is
constituted by James Q Wilson (some quotes from Blair look

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like transcripts of Thinking About Crime) whilst Charles

Murray's singular interpretation of the underclass debate has
clearly influenced their key concept of "social
exclusion" (Young, forthcoming). As far as more liberal
criminology is concerned, notions of repeat victimisation,
restorative justice and situational crime prevention have large
and worldwide political followings. It would be difficult to think
of a period where criminology had a greater influence. All that
can be said is that a particular political agenda of
rehabilitation, sentence reform and the reduction of
imprisonment has been in decline but this, as the authors
acknowledge, is merely the result of changes in the wider
political sphere.

I have dwelt at some length on the introductory essay,

because of its significance. Let us turn now to the
contributions. A key thread running through many of these
articles is the Foucauldian concept of governmentality (1991)
and its implications for contemporary systems of regulation.
Closely linked to this is the new problematic of criminology in
the last decade. Namely the answer to three closely related
questions: 1. Why the vast increase in the correctional
population - the punitive turn? 2. Why the proliferation of
agencies dealing with crime and incivilities? 3. Why the
contradictory nature of these responses? The punitiveness,
proliferation and contradictions of the control system, that is
aspects of the rise in punishment, have become the focus for
contemporary criminological analysis just as the rise in crime
was the focus of criminology from the sixties to the eighties.

One of the first essays in the collection is by John Braithwaite,

a distinguished example of an influential criminologist. His
work on shaming and restorative justice alone has extremely
wide currency. The lamp posts of my home borough of
Hackney in London are regaled with posters attempting to
shame street robbers - campaigns which were designed by
Council officers schooled in criminology, and acutely aware of
his work. Braithwaite traces a line of development of the State
from the nightwatchman State of nineteenth century liberalism
to the Keynsian State of the post-war period to what he calls
The New Regulatory State (NRS). The characteristics of the
NRS and its incipient development are shared by a wide
range of contemporary writers on neo-liberalism and
governmentality. The NRS involves the decentring of the State
- its 'hollowing out' - rule at a distance, the empowerment of
the community and the responsibilisation of the citizen.
Whereas the nightwatchman State left the steering and the
rowing to civil society, the Keynsian State attempted to row
yet was weak on steering, the NRS - as the name suggests,
leaves the rowing to civil society and concentrates on the
steering. Within the criminal justice system indicative
developments include the rapid rise and ascendancy of
private policing and security, the burgeoning of private
prisons, the privatisation of ancillary work and the

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development of restorative justice which in Braithwaite's

estimation is the epitome of the NRS.

Braithwaite's advocacy of the NRS rests, firstly, on the work

of Clifford Shearing and behind that what he calls "the
Hayekian Vision". Hayek's insight was that as economics
became more and more complex the central State could no
longer acquire the local knowledge to intervene effectively.
Hence he emphasised the superiority of the market as a
provider of both knowledge of demand and effective service
delivery. Shearing applies this concept of the superiority of
local knowledge from the market place to the criminal justice
system arguing for the empowerment of local communities.
He rejects, however, a market solution to security because of
the palpable economic inequalities in society. Rather his
imaginative solution is the provision of policing budgets rather
than a central state police budget and a disputing budget
rather than a court budget. Thus centralised control becomes
devolved to community tendering for crime control budgets
and community based restorative justice schemes replace the
retributive policies of the State.

Whatever truth there is in the free market's ability to solve the

problems of complex societies and there are, of course,
numerous arguments against, the transposition of such ideas
to the criminal justice system has several grave problems.
The first is the limits of local knowledge in terms of both
pinpointing problems and providing effective service delivery.
Local consultation, surveys and debate are an essential
exercise and undoubtedly a democratic gain. But the simple
reflection of public opinion would be unwise both in terms of
pinpointing problems and advocating solutions. To take an
extreme but all too real example: the inhabitants of a council
estate may loudly announce that their prime problem is a
solitary paedophile who threatens their community. Further, in
diverse communities, there will be intense conflict over what
are the problems, indeed some parts of the community may
problematise other parts. As far as service delivery is
concerned it may well be that the local community are more
punitive than the State officials (see Stenson and Edwards,
2001) whilst intense levels of internecine conflict over the
prescribed solution may occur (Crawford, 1998). Furthermore,
localisation does not necessitate either efficiency or efficacy.
Locally, democratically elected authorities with considerably
devolved budgets can well be startlingly inefficient. Their
ideas of effective intervention can be based on false notions
of the nature of crime and other problems and even where
effective can merely result in the displacement of a problem
to an adjacent locality. Finally, it can be argued that we do not
want, whether it is in South Africa or Northern Ireland (two of
the areas where policing budgets were under consideration)
to reinforce community divides but to dissolve such binaries
and differences (see Stenson, 1998). All of these objectives
suggest the need for a State which does not project upon but

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debates with the local yet an authority where the universalistic

values of liberty, equality and tolerance in the last analysis
predominate over particularism and parochialism.

But let us turn now from the normative to the descriptive. Has
the shift to the NRS occurred in the area of criminal justice?
Strangely Braithwaite, having heralded the advent of the new
paradigm, candidly admits that however this is true say of
telecommunications or the provision of services for the
mentally ill, this is not true in the area of the criminal justice
system. In this instance, the punitive State has, of course,
remarkably expanded both in number of coercive State
personnel and in public expenditure. What we have seen is
expansion of the centralised criminal justice system coupled
with an expansion of decentred, distanced institutions of
social control which in turn are subject to intricate -
sometimes Byzantine - regulatory mechanisms. One should
note at this point that the concept of the exceptionalism of the
criminal justice system when compared to the other
centralised State institutions is a fallacy. It is not true of
defence, as he admits: the war against crime, drugs and now
terrorism blurs the distinctions between the police and the
military just as it bloats their budgets. But as Paul Hirst
indicates in an article later on in the book, government
expenditure on traditional welfare institutions whether in the
US or Europe has not shrunk, indeed it has increased -
witness the present British government debate on health and
education. Hardly a hollowing out of the State. What has
occurred in the majority of these Keynsian institutions is a
consolidation and sometimes expansion of the centre coupled
with a parallel expansion of government at a distance
frequently in the form of locally based partnerships. With
regards to these partnerships, government at a distance may
be their intention but this is not in most cases a devolution of
power - central government keeps the local on a tight, if
sometimes long, leash and the regulatory State involves
intricate, intensive and expensive bureaucracies which impact
onerously on all our lives. For, as Paul Hirst argues in this
volume: "Government ceases to be limited it is everywhere,
despite all the talk of the 'retreat of the state'." (p.132). There
has been, as Kevin Stenson (1998) has pointed out, a curious
neglect in governmentality studies of this regulation and the
parasitic 'new class' which thrives upon it.

Overall Braithwaite would advocate a NRS which lost much of

its punitive centre but he has some significant caveats. A
strong central Keynsian State needs to remain in place, he
argues, in order to provide an economy capable of
underwriting the welfare services necessary for successful
restorative justice programmes, in order to help eliminate
unemployment (an echo of Braithwaite's early work), to fund
disputing budgets and to continue a reduced criminal justice
system to deal with the need for coercive power. Such a
programme begins to look like a radicalised version of Third

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Way politics and it is a pity and a surprise that in this opening

out of criminology to outside literature that the lengthy debate
in this area is not referred to or acknowledged.

Paul Hirst's piece on 'Statism, Pluralism and social Control'

starts from the same premise as Braithwaite, namely the rise
of the regulatory State, in order to tackle the difficulties of
social control in more and more complex and heterogeneous
societies, but comes to strikingly different conclusions. On the
one side there has arisen in Western societies a greater level
of heterogeneity and individualisation, on the other a new
class of regulators who by audit and surveillance, and the
power of discretionary funding, attempt to impose
standardised norms. The result is a new regulatory State in
which government rather than retracting becomes ubiquitous
and because of the increased complexity and contradictions
of the regulatory norms ultimately discretionary and arbitrary
in its powers. Hirst's suggestions to overcome this 'crisis in
the relationship between state and society' is radical: an
'associative democracy', a system where the presently non-
accountable areas of governance from the corporations
through to public agencies are made accountable directly to
the citizens whose interests they affect, and by the setting of
decentralised and democratic norms which reflect the various
'communities of choice' which exist in a modern
heterogeneous society. Thus his solution is local, like
Braithwaite, and he likewise would keep the core institutions
of the State whose function it is to set minimum values, inhibit
serious conflict between the communities and maintain
welfare funds. But he would combat the overextended
regulatory State. His stress on community is reminiscent of
Etzioni's (1997) communitarianism, but he differs in that he
will only acknowledge or advocate a 'thin' common morality
and does not seek to remoralise society by encouraging the
development of a 'thick' common moral framework.

The fundamental flaw in Hirst's formulation is his notion of the

'communities of choice' which he sees as characteristic of late
modern society. Thus he views the city as being inhabited by
communities of distinctly different values (eg Born Again
Christians and gays) the members of which would seldom
agree with each other and who, therefore, would best exist as
plural groups each with their own rules. In some cases this
will involve separate zones, in others extra-territoriality:
shared space but within the parallel existence of self-
governing communities, inhabiting the same space but
applying their own rules. His advocacy of separate
communities is quite strident, for example, that of Christian
fundamentalists, gay villages, and the anarchist enclave of
Christiana in Copenhagen. "Imagine", he asks us: "cities
clearly divided into permissive and restrictive zones with
regards to drug use. Imagine if the rich can live in gated
communities with security guards, that the metaphorical
'ghettos' of the USA became like real ones, with their own

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boundaries and their own local policing. Tell that to the LAPD?
But the cost of their rule is immense, including the cost of
riots, and its results ineffective." (p.143)

My feeling is that this formulation is sociologically incorrect

and politically dangerous. The great achievement of the late
modern city, however unintended, is the combination of a
diverse population living in close propinquity. That is multi-
cultural societies living admixed in the same area where
people encounter as a daily presence the differences which
make urban life so enjoyable, exciting and intriguing. The
great danger, however, is that of intemperate behaviour
toward others: prejudice, bigotry and group hatred (see I.
Young, 1990). What is essential is common, universalistic
regulatory norms which proscribe intolerance and which
prescribe equal treatment despite difference. Indeed, as Todd
Gitlin (1995) has pointed out, this is exactly embodied in the
ideals of the Enlightenment and is undermined by the notion
of a multiculturalism of separate standards and values. Yet
Hirst's concept of co-territoriality with differing regulatory
standards advocates precisely this, whilst his notion of
separate policing and regulatory communities would create
even greater difficulties. Social segregation, as Loic Wacquant
(1996) has pointed out, is not characteristic of the great cities
of Europe but where it occurs be it in Belfast, Derry, Oldham
or Bradford it generates intense conflict. Correspondingly in
the United States the racial segregation of Atlanta,
Philadelphia or Chicago or the wilful class segregation so well
documented by Mike Davis in The City of Quartz (1990) are a
blight on the social landscape. Housing segregation, single
faith schools, communities which set themselves up as
territories distinct from each other - all of which Hirst
advocates - will not on the evidence increase social harmony
but the reverse.

Social differentiation in late modernity is shaped by two

somewhat contradictory forces: cultural globalisation which
narrows differences and individualisation, which as Hirst
correctly surmises, increases differentiation. The resulting
impact, by and large, is a narrowing of major differences whilst
a heightening of minor ones. There is greater shared values
and interconnectedness yet a myriad of minor cultural
variation. As critics of Hirst's concept of pluralism in the area
of welfare choice and provision have pointed out, whatever
the heterogeneity of modern liberal societies there is a broad
consensus with regards to the vast majority of basic needs
(Stears, 1999). There is one proviso to this which, rather than
shoring up Hirst's argument, further undermines it. That is the
impact of cultural globalisation can, particularly where
combined with economic deprivation, result in widespread
ontological crises. Such threats to identity are often combated
by groups essentialising themselves, that is of 'discovering'
hidden essences or traditions which separate them out from
those who despise or denigrate them. Fundamentalism,

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nationalism, the construction of 'hard core' identity around

ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender, can lead to a
separation which magnifies differences. These cultural
projects are, of course, prime candidates for the communities
of 'choice' which Hirst extols. Yet such fundamentalism not
only sets out to create a world of major differences but sets
itself up both as a source and a target of inter-group hatred
and anxiety. To view human choice unfettered by big
government as leading to social harmony is the illusion of the
libertarian, once again Hirst, like Braithwaite, privileges the
local and has a virtuous concept of human agency,
untrammelled by state intervention.

When we turn to the article by Nikolas Rose we have once

more an emphasis on the shift in late modernity (or 'advanced
liberalism' as he calls it), from the national to the local as the
locus of social control. But whereas for Braithwaite and Hirst
such a shift offers great advantages, for Rose it further
ratchets up the iron cage of social control. He argues against
the rigid division between the State and civil society where
power lies within the State and civil society is the subject of
control. Rather power permeates throughout society, social
control is not centralised but is decentralised and rhizomatic.
He rejects the notion of a maximum security or panoptical
State - and stresses the role of the array of institutions in
society "where the criminal justice system itself plays a minor
role in control practices" (p.187). Let me say at this juncture
that Rose at times seems to suffer what Sorokin once termed
the 'discovery complex' - he discovers and claims as
Foucauldian insights things which are of no surprise to any
sociologist. His location of dispersed circuits of power in civil
society verges on the obvious, indeed it is difficult to think
what orthodoxy he is debunking (see Garland, 1997). It is
certainly not Marxism - or maybe it is the aberrant Marxism of
Mao - for Marx himself had no doubt that the core institutions
of control existed within civil society. The only traditions which
place the criminal justice system in such a central and
privileged position are anarchism (critically) and
(enthusiastically) the neo-classicist criminology of the
immediate post-war years depicted by Garland and Sparks in
their introduction. This being said, his depiction of a dispersed
system of power manifestly ignores the fact that State powers
have considerably increased and that certain forms of
contemporary politics would seek to actively regulate and
orchestrate wider and wider sections of civil society. The
Foucauldians in their rush to bid farewell to the Keynsian
State with its patronising attitude to its citizens (see, for
example, O'Malley and Palmer, 1996) forget that political
interventions such as that of New Labour have manifestly set
up a wider network of regulatory bodies and regularly see fit
to issue guidelines to all and sundry, such as advice to
parents on bedtimes for their children, the appropriate age to
have children, the amount of nightly homework etc.

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As I outlined at the beginning of this essay, the three

questions which the recent transformation of the criminal
justice system poses are that of punitiveness, proliferation
and contradiction. The task which Nikolas Rose sets himself
is to explain the latter: why zero-tolerance policing goes hand
in hand with neighbourhood policing, why prison
incapacitation occurs at the same time as rehabilitation, why
'three strikes and you're out' is paralleled by restorative justice
schemes. First let us note that the very existence of such
contradictions is seen as a problem. I am not suggesting here
that we should not explain the source of such contradictions
but rather I am puzzled by the idea that one should expect a
high degree of consistency or coherence within society. Many
theorists, of course, from Marx to Merton to Habermas have
pointed to contradictions within the social system as being
characteristic of advanced capitalism. Rose could quite easily
source these contradictions in his depiction of social control
as a myriad of decentred circuits. But he chooses not to do
so. Indeed, he rather surprisingly claims that despite "their
apparent complexity and heterogeneity, contemporary control
strategies do show a certain strategic coherence" (p.187). Out
of such a decentred mass of control decisions emerges
common strategies and purpose. The task then is to display
the coherence of these strategies, that is of the non-
contradictory nature of the apparent contradiction and he
does so by dividing them into two 'families': those that seek to
regulate conduct by enmeshing individuals within circuits of
inclusion and those that seek to control by managing circuits
of exclusion. The co-existence of both inclusive and exclusive
moments in society dependent on the institutions involved
and the individuals being controlled has, of course, a long
lineage. Witness for example, the work of David Cooper
(1967), Stan Cohen (1985) and Zygmunt Bauman (1995), but
none of this is referred to in the text. His division between
those who are the subjects of inclusion or exclusion revolves
around the usual one of the normal citizen and the deviant.
His explanation of such strategies of control seems to rely, as
so often in these accounts, on a foreground of intricate
description backed by an implicitly functionalist background.
As with all functionalist explanations it assumes a social
system with too great a coherence and that pointing out a
supposed function implies a satisfactory and sufficient
explanation. 'Advanced Liberalism' becomes a category
which describes the ethos of all advanced capitalist societies
which follows with some imminent logic from the social order
which preceded it and which hangs together in an almost
intentionalist fashion (see Pearce and Dupont, 2001). Further,
the actual differences between the policies of different
governments is ignored; compare for example the overtly
exclusionist policies of Thatcher's Conservatism with the
centrality of inclusionist policies for New Labour (see Garland,
2001). In this terrain there are no actors creating meaning
and praxis in the material circumstances in which they find
themselves, rather there are functional discourses which

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mould human subjectivity.

I am aware of the various interpretations and tendencies

within Foucault's work, but Rose would seem to drive off from
the most bleak vision. What Marshall Berman trenchantly
referred to as

"an endless, excruciating series of variations on the

Weberian themes of the iron cage and the human
nullities whose souls are shaped to fit the bars. Foucault
is obsessed with prisons, hospitals, asylums, with what
Erving Goffman has called 'total institutions'. Unlike
Goffman, however, Foucault denies the possibility of
any sort of freedom outside these institutions or within
their interstices. Foucault's totalities swallow up every
facet of modern life. he develops these themes with
obsessive relentlessness and, indeed, with sadistic
flourishes, clamping his ideas down on his readers like
iron bars twisting each dialectic into our flesh like a new
turn of the screw." (1983, p.34).

What has happened to Mannheim's 'dangerous thoughts': the

connecting up of crime and penality to the deep structural
inequalities of wealth and power? Strangely, crime itself is
rarely considered in this volume - there is an interesting
article by Maureen Cain which warns us of Occidentalist
errors in comparative research but the only discussion of
crime is a brief mention in John Braithwaite's article echoing
his earlier work on inequality and crime. This is perhaps to be
expected given the shift in the attention of contemporary
criminologists from crime to the reaction to crime, but I feel
this is something of a loss. Firstly, it disregards the important
radical tradition (central for example to Merton and
subcultural theory) which links crime to the deep
contradictions of structure and culture. Secondly, because it
is an inadequate criminology which ignores crime itself - as
this is obviously a key part of the explanatory equation. It is,
as David Garland pointed out at a recent conference, like
trying to describe a room without mentioning the large
elephant that is sitting there! It goes without saying that the
decentring of the criminal justice system both in theory and in
practice, the rise of theories concerned with the social control
aspects of civil society and the stress on multi-agency, the
family and the citizen in late modern crime control policies,
are all intimately connected with the massive rise in crime
experienced in so many industrial societies in the post-war
period. This is not, for a moment, to say that they are
reducible to a reflex of the level of crime, but as was indicated
a while back the realisation that the reality of crime control
had always resided within civil society and the attempt to
organise these influences were considerably shaped by the,
until recently, seemingly inexorable rise in crime and disorder,
which severely tested both criminological theory and the
resources of the criminal justice system. (see Young, 1992).

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The lack of focus on crime abnegates any contest with

establishment criminology which puts considerable effort into
constantly attempting to explain crime in terms of a failure of
individuals, families or community as if these were entities
autonomous of political economy - anything but the
extraordinary divisions of wealth, power and recognition which
occur within society (see Wacquant, 1999). This is as true of,
for example, the social exclusion discourse surrounding New
Labour's policies on crime and disorder as it was when
Herman Mannheim railed against the fundamental
presuppositions of the White Paper, Penal Practice in a
Changing Society (1959) and its avoidance of 'dangerous
thoughts'. A critical criminology which does not deal with crime
loses both its explanatory powers and a great deal of its
critical edge. This being said, the articles in this collection do
attempt to relate penality to structure although in perhaps a
little too functionalist a fashion for my taste. The exception is
Dario Melossi's brilliant essay which explores his development
of the themes of Kai Erikson and George Rusche which has
been so much part of his recent intellectual work.

What of the widening out of influence, the reconnecting with

social theory? Here the collection comes into its own with a
great variety of influences from Hayek to Said, brought to bear
on criminological theory. Of great interest here is Zygmunt
Bauman's powerful piece where the arch-bricoleur draws
inspiration from Gregory Bateson and Milan Kundera but most
significantly - and ironically unlike the criminologists in this
volume (with the exception of Melossi) - from his debate with
criminology. Namely with the Scandinavian criminologies of
Mathieson and Christie and the American prison theory of
Clemmer, McCorkle, Korn and Sellin.

It is vital that, in a desire to connect criminology up to a wider

social theory, we do not have an amnesia with regards to the
rich past of the discipline. Further the act of reconnection with
the modernist discourse within sociology which occurred, as
Garland and Sparks outlined, in the seventies must be
widened out and developed. The major texts of modernity
carry with them what I would call a harbinger quality. That is
they sense in the pace of change of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, a prescience of what was to happen in
the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. This is most
marked in Marx's Communist Manifesto, much of which rings
so true in this age of economic and cultural globalisation, as it
does in the closing chapter of Durkheim's Division of Labour, it
is quite clearly present in Georg Simmel's depiction of
urbanism and depressingly relevant in the Weberian notion of
the iron cage of rules and regulations. These texts, together
with the exciting contemporary developments in radical
philosophy, politics and cultural studies, must inform us. If I
have been critical in this essay, it is because I have found this
collection so thought provoking and challenging. This is a
book which deserves a wide audience: its wealth of debate

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demonstrates, far from the death of criminology, its manifest

flourishing.

JOCK YOUNG

December, 2001

Revised Version

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