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Notes on Contributors
The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

Alison Liebling, Shadd Maruna, and Lesley McAra
p. xxi Notes on Contributors

Alison Liebling, Shadd Maruna and Lesley Mcara
Katherine M. Auty is Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.
Andy Aydın-Aitchison is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Edinburgh School of Law.
Nick Blagden is Professor in Criminological Psychology at the University of Derby, former Head of the
Sexual Offences Crime and Misconduct Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University, and co-founder and
trustee of the Safer Living Foundation.
Mary Bosworth is Professor of Criminology and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford.
Ben Bowling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s
College London.
Ben Bradford is Professor of Global City Policing and Director of the Centre for Global City Policing at the
Department of Security and Crime Science, University College London.
Avi Brisman is a Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, an Adjunct
Professor in the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology (Australia), and an Honorary
Professor at Newcastle School of Law and Justice and a University Fellow at the Centre of Law and Social
Justice at the University of Newcastle (Australia).
Mirza Buljubašić is Postdoctoral Research Associate at Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and
Law Enforcement (NSCR) and Senior Assistant at the Faculty of Criminal Justice, Criminology and Security
Studies, University of Sarajevo.
Michele Burman is Professor of Criminology in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the
University of Glasgow.
Paolo Campana is Associate Professor in Criminology and Complex Networks at the Institute of
Criminology, University of Cambridge.
Victoria Canning is Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Bristol.
Ryan Casey is Interdisciplinary Research Fellow in Digital Society & Economy at the University of Glasgow.
Page 1 of 5
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Neil Chakraborti is Professor in Criminology and Director of the Centre for Hate Studies at the School of
Criminology, University of Leicester. He is also Director of the Institute of Policy at the University of
Leicester.
Amy Clarke is a Research Fellow for the Centre for Hate Studies at the School of Criminology, University of
Leicester.
Ben Collier is Lecturer in Digital Methods at the University of Edinburgh.
p. xxii ↵ Adam Crawford is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Leeds and
Professor of Policing and Social Justice at the University of York. He is also Co-Director of the ESRC
Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre.
Ben Crewe is Deputy Director of the Prisons Research Centre and Professor of Penology & Criminal Justice
at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.
Danica Darley is completing a PhD at the University of Sheffield and conducts research with and about
children in care and the youth justice system.
Bill Davies is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University.
Susan Donkin is Research Fellow in European Urban Security at the University of Leeds.
Ron Dudai is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University.
Rod Earle is Senior Lecturer in the School of Health, Wellbeing and Social Care at The Open University.
Manuel Eisner is Wolfson Professor of Criminology and Director of the Institute of Criminology, University
of Cambridge.
Katja Franko is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oslo.
Alistair Fraser is Professor of Criminology in the Scottish Centre of Crime & Justice Research, University of
Glasgow.
Pete Fussey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex.
David Gadd is Professor of Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester.
David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York
University.
Loraine Gelsthorpe is Professor Emerita of the Institute of Criminology; Deputy Director of the Centre for
Community, Gender & Social Justice; and a Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.
Evi Girling is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Keele University.
Hannah Graham is Senior Lecturer in Criminology and an Associate Director of the Scottish Centre for
Crime and Justice Research at the University of Stirling.
Chris Greer is Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) and Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex.
Page 2 of 5
Adrian Grounds is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.
Keith Hayward is Professor of Criminology at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Paddy Hillyard is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Queen’s University, Belfast.
p. xxiii ↵ Dick Hobbs is Emeritus Professor, University of Essex.
Barbora Holá is Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law
Enforcement (NSCR) and Associate Professor at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
David Honeywell is Lecturer in Criminology at Arden University.
Mike Hough is Emeritus Professor in the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London.
Alice Hutchings is Professor of Emergent Harms at the Department of Computer Science & Technology,
University of Cambridge, Director of the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, and Fellow of King’s College,
Cambridge.
Martin Innes is lead Co-Director of the Security, Crime and Intelligence Innovation Institute <https://
www.cardiff.ac.uk/security-crime-intelligence-innovation-institute> and a Professor in the School of Social
Sciences, Cardiff University.
Yvonne Jewkes is Professor of Criminology at the University of Bath.
Darrick Jolliffe is Professor of Criminology at The School of Law and Criminology, University of Greenwich.
Trevor Jones is Professor of Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University.
Nicola Lacey is Professor of Law, Gender, and Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political
Science.
Cheryl Lawther is Reader in Law at Queen’s University Belfast.
Michael Levi is Professor of Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University.
Alison Liebling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and Director of the Prisons Research
Centre at the University of Cambridge.
Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the
University of Melbourne.
Nicholas Lord is Professor of Criminology at the University of Manchester.
Shadd Maruna is Professor of Criminology at Queen’s University Belfast and President of the American
Society of Criminology.
Ben Matthews is Lecturer in Social Statistics and Demography at the University of Stirling.
Lesley McAra is Professor of Penology in the Law School at the University of Edinburgh and Co-Director of
the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime.
Page 3 of 5
Kieran McEvoy is Professor of Law and Transitional Justice and Theme Leader (Rights and Justice) at the
Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Justice and Security at Queen’s University Belfast.
Eugene McLaughlin is Professor of Criminology in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City,
University of London.
p. xxiv ↵ Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology & Social Work at the University of Glasgow where he
works in Sociology and in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.
Susan McVie is Professor of Quantitative Criminology in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh.
Tim Newburn is Professor of Criminology and Social Policy at the London School of Economics and
Political Science.
Ailbhe O’Loughlin is Senior Lecturer in Law at York Law School, University of York.
Nicola Padfield is Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Penal Justice at the University of Cambridge and a
Life and Honorary Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
Alpa Parmar is Assistant Professor in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the Faculty of Law, and a Fellow
at Clare College, University of Cambridge.
Jill Peay is Emeritus Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Coretta Phillips is Professor of Criminology and Social Policy at the London School of Economics and
Political Science.
Jo Phoenix is Professor of Criminology at the University of Reading.
Gosia Polanska was Postdoctoral Research Associate at Keele University.
Lidia Puigvert is Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona.
Robert Reiner is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at The London School of Economics and Political
Science.
Julian V. Roberts is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford, and Executive Director
of the Sentencing Academy.
Gwen Robinson is Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Sheffield.
Paul Rock is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Meredith Rossner is Professor of Criminology at the Australian National University.
Bethany E. Schmidt is Assistant Professor of Penology at the University of Cambridge.
Ed Schreeche-Powell is a Lecturer in Criminology at The University of Greenwich and Associate Lecturer in

Social and Forensic Psychology at The Open University.
Toby Seddon is Professor of Social Science and Head of the UCL Social Research Institute at University
College London.
Page 4 of 5
Joe Sim is Emeritus Professor of Criminology, Liverpool John Moores University and a Trustee of the
charity INQUEST.
Oliver Smith is Associate Professor (Reader) in Criminology at the University of Plymouth.
Nigel South is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, and Honorary
Visiting Professor in the Institute for Social Justice and Crime at the University of Suffolk.
p. xxv ↵ Richard Sparks is Professor of Criminology in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh.
Alex Stevens is Professor in Criminal Justice at the University of Kent.
Cyrus Tata is Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at the Law School, University of Strathclyde, Scotland.
Steve Tombs is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at The Open University.
Maria Ttofi is Associate Professor in Psychological Criminology at the Institute of Criminology, University
of Cambridge.
Beth Weaver is Professor of Criminal and Social Justice and an Associate Director of the Scottish Centre for
Crime and Justice Research at the University of Strathclyde.
Christine A. Weirich is Research Fellow with the ESRC Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre
and is based at the University of Leeds.
Belinda Winder is Professor of Forensic Psychology and Research Director of the Centre of Crime,
Offending, Prevention and Engagement (COPE) at Nottingham Trent University. She is a co-founder of the
Safer Living Foundation charity.
Lucia Zedner is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College and Professor of Criminal Justice at the
University of Oxford, as well as Conjoint Professor at the University of New South Wales Sydney.
Page 5 of 5
Guide to the Online Resources

p. xxvi Guide to the Online Resources

The online resources that accompany this book provide students and lecturers with ready-to-use teaching
and learning materials. These resources are free of charge and are designed to enhance the learning
experience.
www.oup.com/he/liebling-maruna7e <http://www.oup.com/he/liebling-maruna7e>
Student Resources
Selected Chapters from Previous Editions <http://

www.oup.com/he/liebling-maruna7e/prevedchapters>
In-depth material on topics from previous editions of the text, including the development of criminology
as a discipline, and key issues, such as punishment and control, and crime reduction, are provided in
electronic format for additional reading.
Please note that these chapters are only available directly through the hyperlink above.
Useful Websites <https://learninglink.oup.com/access/

liebling-maruna7e-student-resources#tag_useful-websites>
Links to useful websites for each chapter point you in the direction of important research, statistical data,
and classic texts, keeping you informed of the developments in criminology both past and present as well
as providing a starting point for additional research and reading.
Page 1 of 2
Guide to the Online Resources
Essay Questions <https://learninglink.oup.com/access/

liebling-maruna7e-student-resources#tag_essay-questions>
Written by the contributors, the essay questions that accompany each chapter encourage you to fully
consider the key criminological issues. These essay questions help you to reflect on your reading and
provide an opportunity to assess your understanding of each topic.
Guidance on Answering Essay Questions <https://

iws.oupsupport.com/ebook/access/content/liebling-maruna7e-
student-resources/liebling-maruna7e-guidance-on-answering-
essay-questions?options=showName>
Guidance on approaching essay questions and structuring your answers is available from the Handbook
editors, to help you demonstrate your knowledge and critical understanding of criminology.
p. xxvii Lecturer Resources
Figures from the Text

Figures from the text are available to download in high resolution format, for use in teaching material, or
p. xxviiiassignments and exams. ↵
Page 2 of 2
Introduction: The renewed vision

p. 1 Introduction: The renewed vision

https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0044
Published in print: 21 September 2023
Published online: August 2023
Abstract
This chapter reviews developments in the field of criminology in the context of the fundamental shifts that have occurred over
the past seven years in almost every aspect of society, caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the global economic down-turn,
rising geo-political tensions, and the impact of activist movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. It argues that these
shifts highlight the continued relevance of British criminology as currently practised, with its expanding knowledge-base,
inter-disciplinary insight, and diverse array of methodological tools, all contributing to a better understanding of the
conditions necessary to support just social orders. The chapter pays tribute to the previous editorial team and to those that
criminology has lost since the last edition. The changing of the generations is reflected in this volume: it constitutes a living
archive—a marked step in the life narrative of the field and a celebration of its growing strengths and popularity as a subject.
Keywords: theory, teaching, new generations, legacy, crime, social justice, universities, criminological imagination,
intellectual currents
The three of us are deeply honoured to open this seventh edition of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology, our
second volume since taking over the reins from founding editors Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, and Robert
Reiner in 2015. Their path-breaking and dedicated editorship lasted 18 years, with editions appearing in
1994 (the first), 1997 (the second), 2002 (the third), 2007 (the fourth), and 2012 (the fifth). By the time we
took up editorship, nervously aware of the responsibilities and privilege of inheriting such a successful
franchise, the Handbook was well established as a constitutive and agenda-setting ‘state-of-the art’
collection and an indispensable archive of the evolving state of criminology. Our plan in the last edition
was to maintain the standing of the book, whilst widening its scope and diversifying its authorship. We did
this by slightly shortening, but increasing the number of, contributions and encouraging co-authorship,
Page 1 of 13
especially with younger scholars. We were delighted with the volume’s reception when it was published in
2017 as the sixth edition and enjoyed thinking together about the state of our field as well as working with
a wide range of talented authors doing outstanding work.
For this edition, we continue this trend with further diversification of subject matter and authors. It
remains the case that nearly every invitation we made has been accepted, contributions have all been
produced to time (almost) despite our new conditions, and our deliberations with authors about content
have been productive and professional. Perhaps the hardest aspect of putting together this new edition has
been trying to capture the immense changes in the field and in the wider world that have occurred since
the last edition went to press. As an antidote to the kind of ‘vertigo’ Jock Young once described, we felt the
need to renew and restate our vision of what criminology is and what it could do whilst also trying to come
to terms with the new world we are living in.
From its early immigrant origins our field has always blended empirical science with social and legal
philosophy in order to explore, interrogate, or refine the concepts of crime and justice. Questions of
citizenship, belonging, and borderlands are built into our history. The introduction of criminology in the
UK largely resulted from the pioneering efforts of three post-Second World War émigrés—Hermann
Mannheim, Max Grunhut, and Leon Radzinowicz—around the middle of the twentieth century (see
Garland 2002). It is striking that at times of global upheaval, and movement of people across borders, the
intellectual life sometimes breathes with new energy and determination as a result of its relevance (see
Cumhaill and Wiseman 2022).
p. 2 The New World We Live In
The period since 2015 has felt particularly tumultuous with fundamental shifts across nearly every aspect
of social life in the UK and beyond. Most of these changes have had substantial impacts on the core subject
matter of criminology. This is, as a result, much more than an updated edition.
Most obviously, a global pandemic beginning in spring 2020 brought public life to a virtual standstill,
shutting down criminal justice functions from courts to therapeutic communities, at least temporarily.
Universities closed their doors too, although they swiftly adapted to online delivery before most staff were
prepared for this. Prisons, remarkably, largely avoided closures despite being known as places of severe
contagion risk. Indeed, prisons in England and Wales saw hardly any of the urgent decarceration strategies
seen in other parts of the world, although Scotland and Northern Ireland fared somewhat better in that
regard (see Maruna, McNaull, & O’Neill 2022). Like National Health Service (NHS) staff, those remaining
working in prisons during this fraught time were celebrated as heroes, yet (like in the NHS), their visible
working conditions were exposed as utterly unacceptable.
The pandemic gave unprecedented powers to government control in every walk of life including the
imposition of full community lockdowns, consisting of previously unthinkable restrictions on movement
and contact with families and friends. Questions of compliance, state authority, and the proper limits of
the law were played out on motorways, in neighbourhoods, and in homes across the world. The policing of
parties and gatherings played a key role in bringing down Boris Johnson’s controversial reign as Prime
Page 2 of 13
Minister. Protracted debates about ‘Partygate’ and the ‘Barnard Castle scandal’ undermined the early
spirit of unity brought on by the pandemic and created a sense that there was one set of rules for the
general public and very different rules for the people in charge who created those rules.
Socially, the pandemic seemed to strengthen both localism and globalism. Isolating at home, many of us
re-discovered the importance of strong communities. Community members would look out for vulnerable
or elderly neighbours, offering to do their shopping if needed, and many of us applauded the NHS from
safe social distances on our doorsteps. Yet, confined to our living spaces, we also entered a brave, new
world of video conferencing where suddenly we found ourselves giving lectures or sitting in meetings in
far flung places as if we were in the same room (except when accidentally ‘on mute’). From a
criminological perspective, the lockdown led to significant decreases in many forms of crime, like house
burglary, but created opportunities for others, like cyber crimes (see Collier and Hutchings, this volume),
and recorded incidents of domestic violence visibly increased (see Gadd, this volume, Walklate, Godfrey, &
Richardson 2022). The pandemic and the subsequent lockdown also had a measurable impact on mental
health, well-being, and child development (e.g., increased rates of self-harm, anxiety, depression, PTSD,
especially among young people) in ways that are likely to have longer term criminogenic effects (see
McAra, this volume). Politically, Covid-19 further polarized a population, already divided over issues like
Brexit, into new camps based on concern for public health and the economy. Covid also fuelled a pandemic
of conspiracy theories and anti-science populism, stoking fears of vaccines and undermining medical
advice.
The cost-of-living crisis, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, has intensified already existing social
p. 3 inequalities. At the time of writing, the Conservative Government is ↵ proposing substantial tax cuts
for the UK’s richest taxpayers, yet households are having to choose between heating and eating in ways
that have not been seen in decades. The realities of Brexit have begun to emerge since the publication of
the last volume, and many of the grimmer predictions about the impact on the movement of people and
goods have materialized, threatening peace and stability in Northern Ireland and further exacerbating the
inflation crisis. Continuing austerity measures have devastated the public sector with declining
workforces, deteriorating wages, high attrition rates, and widespread dissatisfaction amongst nurses,
teachers, dockworkers, train drivers, and other professions deemed ‘essential’ during the pandemic.
Prisons, probation, and the police have all faced staggering staff shortages, impacting on the functioning
of the justice system. In universities, wages have stagnated and pensions have been cut dramatically,
leading to years of industrial actions, burnout, and a decrease in the sort of professional good will
necessary to sustain (largely unpaid) systems of peer review and external examination. Almost all of the
critical issues facing higher education discussed in our 6th edition introduction have intensified, including
the threats faced by those working in the humanities and social sciences.
The last seven years have seen the exponential rise of the international movement, known broadly as Black
Lives Matter (BLM), given increased momentum in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police
officers in May 2020 in Minneapolis. With slogans such as, ‘abolish the police’, the movement has sparked
a conversation about the role and purpose of policing in contemporary societies that has reverberated
across the world. In the UK, the Metropolitan Police Service has come under sustained scrutiny since the
last edition, most dramatically in the policing of the vigil following the murder of Sarah Everard by the Met
Page 3 of 13
police officer Wayne Couzens. Under the Conservatives, policing has become increasingly politicized with
ministerial and media hysteria about police officers ‘taking the knee’ in support of BLM or dancing at gay
pride parades as if such gestures undermined crime fighting capacity. In a related development, the
#MeToo movement has led to radical changes in gender politics. A pushback inspired by social media,
#MeToo has drawn attention to the widespread culture of sexual harassment and sexual violence in
workplaces, schools, universities and throughout society and has raised questions about due process for
the accused (see Grounds, Ttofi, and Puigvert, this volume). Debates about climate justice have also
intensified as scientific predictions of climate catastrophes, ranging from wildfires to flooding, have
become daily realities around the globe (see Brisman and South, this volume). Disruptive activism by
environmental groups like Extinction Rebellion has increased in an effort to call attention to state crimes
linked to environmental devastation such as the burning of the Amazon Rainforest (see Canning, Hilliard,
and Tombs, this volume). University campuses have, predictably, become key sites for working through
some of these conflicts, occasionally including the forcible removal of statues or changing the names of
campus buildings. ‘Decolonizing’ the university has become a rallying cry, including a rapidly growing
movement to ‘decolonize criminology’ (Moosavi 2019) and decentre the influence of white, Northern,
male authors from the curriculum.
As such, we are editing this Handbook in a time of profound change and ontological insecurity with the
post-war European ‘project’ largely under threat, or losing its claim to legitimacy. British politics have
seen a dramatic shift to the political right, but unlike a similar period of conservative leadership in the
1980s, the Government has been anything but stable. Since the last edition, the United Kingdom has had
five different prime ministers (all Conservatives), eight different justice secretaries, and ten different
prisons ministers. Little wonder this period has been experienced by so many as chaotic and
p. 4 ↵ fraught. A similar sense of political precarity and turmoil can be found across the globe with the rise
of openly authoritarian regimes in several of the world’s largest countries. Russia’s protracted war in the
Ukraine, and the violent attack on the US Capital on 6 January 2021 all threatened the very foundations of
democracy and the rule of law. In short, if criminology’s main focus, or raison d’etre, is understanding the
relationship between law-breaking, law-making, social order and justice, then there has never been a
greater need of it. Several of the chapters to follow in the Handbook address the scope of criminology.
Loader and colleagues (this volume) for instance, argue that ‘shifting lenses from the sometimes limiting
purview of the fear of crime towards ideas of harm, safety, and security that are at once broader and less
prescriptive, yet more embedded and grounded in the context of everyday experience, is part of what is
involved in developing a contemporary, responsive, and relevant criminological field’. These are precisely
the words we would use to describe our aspirations as editors of this new edition.
British Criminology’s Role in Fraught Times
While the social, economic, and political contexts just described have had profound effects on universities
as places of education and research, they also demonstrate the increasing relevance of social science
research—and especially of criminology. We can see why students continue to be drawn to the field.
Criminology’s expanding subject matter includes questions of citizenship and democratic living; the
nature and consequences of crime control and penal practice; the genesis and outcomes of poverty, trauma
Page 4 of 13
and other social and environmental harms; atrocity crimes, migration and transitional justice.
Criminology, at its best, pays systematic attention to the nature, causes, and trajectories of crime, fear,
and violence. Longitudinal studies, however expensive, remain a state-of-the-art methodology for
achieving the kinds of understanding we need. Criminology also addresses changing responses to crime,
which so often cause harm in their own right. Our vision of the field holds these topic areas in productive
tension, seeking to explain, and where possible, find ways of reducing, new and old forms of harm.
Our discipline’s collective knowledge base, inter-disciplinary insights and our diverse array of
methodological tools, seek to contribute to better understanding of the conditions necessary to support
more just social orders. Sometimes, criminological research even contributes directly to such related
improvements to practice. What other social science could claim the sort of impact evident in Phil
Scraton’s (2013) research on the Hillsborough tragedy, for instance? Or trigger a change in the age of
1
criminal responsibility for children in Scotland? Or a transformation in the design of a prison for women
2
in Ireland, to take some recent examples? This real-world relevance suggests that criminology remains a
p. 5 live, urgent, and engaged field of study, with all the risks and ↵ complexities inherent in doing that sort
of applied work (see, e.g., Jewkes’s 2022 use of the term ‘dirty work’ as she questions whether helping to
design new prisons with no bars on windows counts as a success or contributes to the legitimation of new
prison building). Criminology’s proximity to state power poses both opportunities and risks.
None of this is to assert that criminology is a settled field. The past seven years have seen further
diversification and transformation in some of the basic assumptions and ideas at work within the
discipline. A key example is the major advances made in green criminology—with its interrogation of the
symbiotic harms contributing to the climate crisis and the destruction of planetary health, and
explorations of the contexts and action needed to enable human and non-human species to flourish (see
Brisman and South, this volume). A further example is in the contribution of zemiology to contemporary
knowledge production, including its substantive development of taxonomies of social harms (see Canning
et al., this volume).
The past seven years have also seen a re-emergence of some of the longstanding intellectual battlegrounds
in our discipline. Is it still meaningful to talk about a ‘British Criminology’ (a question we have grappled
with in both the 6th and 7th editions of the handbook), particularly since many of the contemporary
developments to which our discipline is responding (both in the UK and beyond), are transnational or
global in orientation? There have been legitimate challenges to the hegemony of scholarship from the
global north. Criminology has seen impressive growth in southern criminological scholarship, calls to
embrace the epistemic disruption of decoloniality (replacing false universalism with what de Sousa Santis
(2014) has called ‘border’ or ‘intercultural’ thinking’), and greater critical acknowledgment of the role of
empire and coloniality in early and later histories of global north criminology (see also Chakraborti and
Clarke, this volume, Brisman and South, this volume). We welcome the publication of the Palgrave
Handbook of Criminology and the Global South (Carrington et al. 2018) and we look forward to a reshaping
of the field of criminology in the light of these and other developments.
There has been an associated rise in activist scholarship, in particular from early career researchers and
academics, reflecting some of the deep dissatisfactions with power structures both within the discipline, or
academy, and beyond. One key example is the emergence of the Black Criminology Network, founded in
Page 5 of 13
2020 by a doctoral researcher at Birmingham City University and an associate lecturer at the University of
Northampton. The network aims to be a global hub for students and academics of Black heritage, providing
mentoring and support, as well as running a series of skills workshops and seminars. A reinvigorated
activism has also found expression in feminist criminology with the rise of so-called ‘fourth wave
feminism’, premised on the sharing of lived experience, intersectionality and the use of internet tools to
drive a praxis predicated on empowerment and transformational justice. Here there have been fierce
debates around what role (if any) criminal justice and other state sponsored institutions should play in
tackling gender-based violence and inequalities, the extent to which trans and gender diverse experiences
are respected or have voice, and the emergence of queer criminology as a framework for new forms of
knowledge production and action (see Copson and Boukli 2022, Burman and Gelsthorpe, this volume,
Phoenix, this volume). This scholarship differs from the critical criminology of the 1960s and 1970s with
its focus on state and structural injustices, by paying closer attention to matters of gender, identity and
diversity.
It is clear that nurturing the next generation of scholars requires more transparent opportunity structures
p. 6 and more diverse role models within higher education. The ↵ salience of criminolgy as an academic
field—its knowledge-base and innovatory practice in terms of theory and method—constitute powerful
reasons for investment by universities. There has been continued expansion of criminology as both an
undergraduate and taught postgraduate subject, with 814 undergraduate degree programmes on offer
across 132 universities, and 239 masters programmes across 89 universities (WhatUni 2022). This has been
mirrored in increased sales for the Handbook as a core text, especially for postgraduate education. The
demand for professional education is increasing, as seen, for example, in the continuing provision of two
Master of Studies Programmes at Cambridge, albeit with a move towards on-line delivery in some cases.
Criminological practice and teaching is diversifying, whilst senior leadership in most institutions of higher
3
education remains overwhelmingly white and male. The landscape is turbulent, presenting both risks and
opportunities for criminologists and our field as a whole.
Doing criminology in a changing climate

The ways in which we do criminology have had to adapt to these new challenges.
The creativity and resilience of researchers were particularly tested by the impacts of the Covid-19
pandemic, with successive lockdowns necessitating major changes to the conduct of empirical research.
Many sites (for example, prisons and other residential settings) could not be visited in-person. Most
fieldwork was either suspended or moved on-line; ethical issues became correspondingly more complex.
Access to administrative data (for example, on criminal convictions) became more difficult, as staff
shortages and redeployment to tackle the impacts of the pandemic, meant that criminal justice agencies
had limited capacity to deal with researcher requests. The intensification of inequalities that the pandemic
brought and the ways in which it exposed a justice gap (with regard to disproportionate policing, rights
violation in prisons, for example), have become a focus of research in their own right (see McVie 2020,
Maruna et al. 2022). They also highlight ongoing sensitivities in undertaking research with potentially
traumatised populations (both those who come into conflict with the law as well as those within
institutions of criminal justice trying to adapt rapidly to a situation of great uncertainty).
Page 6 of 13
On the other hand, we celebrate the rise of mixed methodological approaches, participatory action
research, and other more inclusive or democratic approaches to knowledge creation (see Liebling et al.,
this volume; Loader et al., this volume). Sometimes this encompasses forms of data collection involving
the arts, or more deliberative approaches to analysis, such as citizens’ assemblies. In particular, there has
been renewed emphasis on ‘lived experience’ not only in terms of those who come into conflict with the
law, but also in terms of practitioners and policy makers (see Earle et al., this volume; Weaver et al., this
volume). Such research methods require slow forms of scholarship—in particular, time to build
relationships and mutual understanding, to gain trust. The curation of the participatory research
p. 7 experience ↵ raises questions for academics around ways of undertaking research which promote
‘generative justice’: a form of praxis aimed at increasing social solidarity in communities with experience
of crime or punishment (see Maruna 2016); and about our responsibilities when projects come to an end. It
also demands particular qualities of researchers in terms of active listening, and operating with a sense of
humility, whilst also striving to build a credible knowledge base. There is a relationship between
criminology’s mission and the methodologies employed. Loader and colleagues talk about ‘the intimate
relation between enquiries into public safety (however conceptualized) and the quality and future
possibilities of a shared democratic life’, arguing that ‘the modes of inquiry that seem most compelling
nowadays need to be more oriented towards dialogue, creativity, and co-production than those that were
applied (including by us) in the past’ (this volume).
Alongside these creative and person-centred efforts in the field, there has been a simultaneous expansion
in big data analytics—both as a mode and a site of criminological enquiry: themes which run through a
number of chapters in the Handbook (see especially Bradford and Fussey, Crawford et al., Jones et al., this
volume). Whilst technological advances both in terms of data capture, linkage and analysis enable
researchers to draw on new forms of data—such as social media scraping—this development raises new
ethical challenges for criminology as well. Researchers need to be mindful of issues related to consent,
privacy, surveillance and data ownership. Big data analysis requires computing infrastructure—which is
both expensive to run and energy intensive. Skills in data handling and coding are a necessary prerequisite,
with implications for researcher training. One concern is that many universities and bodies holding data,
such as the police, are increasingly relying on business developers and data scientists to address
operational questions, or drive research agendas. These researchers have tremendous technical skills, but
they may not be familiar with criminological theory, data collection methodologies, or the realities on the
ground in these justice contexts. Such a technologically driven development risks a future of theory-free
data harvesting and false interpretations based on partial understandings of complex real-world processes
like ‘recidivism’.
Losses and Acknowledgments
Since our last edition, British criminology has lost some of its trailblazers and much-loved characters,
including Jackie Tombs and Roger Matthews, with the latter dying after contracting Covid-19 in April
2020. In books like Realist Criminology and What Is To Be Done about Crime and Punishment?, Matthews came
to represent the hugely influential tradition of ‘left realism’. Through her leadership roles in the Central
Page 7 of 13
Research Unit of the then Scottish Office, and the early days of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice
Research, Tombs played a key role in ensuring that research evidence infused policy debates in Scotland
(long before ‘evidence-based policy’ became a UK mantra) and in building criminological capacity.
Globally, too, criminology has lost some of the most transformative figures in the history of the field, like
David Matza, Nils Christie, Elmar Weitekamp, Joan Petersilia, Nicole Hahn Rafter, Hans Toch, Jim B.
Jacobs, M. Kay Harris, Charles Tittle, Ed Latessa, Bob Bursik, Ray Paternoster, Travis Hirschi, and David
Bayley. Although associated with universities overseas, several of these scholars made an outsize impact
on the development of criminology in the UK. (Indeed, one of our struggles with the concept of
p. 8 ↵ ‘British’ criminology is how to categorize the work of scholars like Christie, Matza, and Rafter with
their evident global influence).
However, no one on that list has shaped British criminology like Donald West (9 June 1924–31 January
2020) or Roger Hood (12 June 1936–17 November 2020). Both West and Hood directed major centres of
Criminology, in Cambridge and Oxford, respectively, with Hood serving for nearly three decades. Both
were highly influential in legal reform, lived to a ripe age (95 and 84 respectively), and were still active in
their research areas as long as they could work and travel. Perhaps there is some relationship between
these facts. In any case, we wish to celebrate and record their contributions here.
Donald West, a psychiatrist, joined the newly established Institute of Criminology in Cambridge in 1960 as
assistant director of research, and spent the rest of his career there, as lecturer, reader, and then professor
of clinical criminology. He was director of the Institute from 1981 to his formal retirement in 1984. He
became a Fellow of Darwin College and was promoted to a personal professorship in Clinical Criminology,
while also providing an outpatient clinic at Addenbrooke’s Hospital as an (unpaid) honorary consultant
psychiatrist. He started the best known of his contributions to criminological research, the Cambridge
longitudinal study in delinquent development, in 1961. He was joined in 1969 by David Farrington, and
their project became one of the major, continuing, prospective longitudinal studies internationally in the
field of developmental criminology (see Chapter 5 in this volume). The study commenced as a prospective
survey of 411 London boys, aged 8, who have since been interviewed at intervals throughout their lives
(including most recently in their late 60s). Their children, and grandchildren, have also been interviewed
in more recent years, enabling a rich range of findings about antecedents and causes of criminality and
desistance. Major books arising from the study include Who becomes Delinquent (1973), The Delinquent Way
of Life (1977), and Delinquency, Its Roots, Careers and Prospects (1982). West also served as a founding
member of the parole board. His work (including his book Homosexuality, published in 1955) contributed to
the decriminalization of homosexuality. He was pioneering, courageous, and left behind many close
friends.
Roger Hood’s career-length research on the death penalty, likewise, was instrumental in the abolitionist
campaign. During his degree in Sociology at LSE, he attended an optional course given by Hermann
Mannheim, the ‘grand old man’ of criminology, who asked for help preparing a paper about the Homicide
Bill, which eliminated the death penalty for so-called crimes of passion. ‘Mannheim was so pleased with it
that he asked me if I would be his research assistant,’ Hood recalled (The Times obituary 2020). In 1967 he
joined the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, with a fellowship at Clare Hall. His work
on the history of criminal law with Sir Leon Radzinowicz, the ‘old fox’ of British criminology (Zapatero,
Page 8 of 13
obituary 2020), is masterful (see A History of the English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750). He
also published Borstal Reassessed and Key Issues in Criminology (1970, with the ‘older’ Richard Sparks)
during this period. In 1973 he became the founding director of the Centre for Criminology at the University
of Oxford with a fellowship at All Souls College, a position he held until 2003. All who knew him remember
with considerable fondness his supportive, exacting, generous, and gentle style. A new Death Penalty
Research Centre, established in his honour, and led by his young colleagues, was launched the day before
his memorial service in 2021. His book, The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective (1989), remains one of
p. 9 the best-known on the subject. He will ↵ be remembered as a ‘champion of justice’ (Garrett 2020) and
as a wise advisor and friend to younger colleagues.
As third generation criminology scholars, we are aware of the privilege of having studied under the
original giants, and of the historically extraordinary nature of a person-and legal-centred discipline. The
people who established our field were intellectual and political activists as well as outstanding scholars.
The humanitarian preoccupations of our field remain central.
So where do we go from here? The new edition of the Handbook illustrates a changing of the guard, an
opening up of the discipline, and an effort to build a bridge between the old and the new. We retain our
commitment to the best scholarship, whilst recognizing that the boundaries of our discipline, and its
locations, are becoming harder to maintain.
What Is New in the New Edition?
The Handbook has a new look, a new structure, and every chapter has been updated and revised for the
contemporary context. In addition, we specifically commissioned a series of new chapters to better capture
the changing zeitgeist in British criminology, including types of crime or approaches to criminology that
have emerged in the past few decades. As part of our refresh, we have invited a number of new authors to
cover a range of traditional topics that have appeared in previous editions of the Handbook. These include
Nicky Padfield and Cyrus Tata on penal decision-making; Manuel Eisner on comparative criminology;
Darrick Jolliffe and Katherine Auty on developmental and life course criminology; and Beth Weaver,
Hannah Graham, and Shadd Maruna on desistance from crime.
We have expanded our coverage of types of crime with four newly commissioned chapters. First, a chapter
on sex offending (by psychologists Neil Blagden and Belinda Winders), which contains important insights
about compassion and trauma-informed therapeutic approaches to dealing with those who come to the
attention of the criminal justice system for sexual assault, and offences against children. Secondly, a
chapter on hate crime (by Neil Chakraborti and Amy Clarke) which explores the processes (social, political,
and economic) which sustain power dynamics between dominant and subordinate groups predicated on
prejudice and hostility, the nature of the harms caused and the ways in which hate crime might be best
responded to. Thirdly, Ben Collier and Alice Hutchins examine the challenges posed by the rapidly
exploding and technically complex field of cybercrime for the first time, describing the ecology and
subcultures of online offending, the harms and methods involved, and the labours of increasing types of
diverse personnel working in enforcement and control. Cybercrime now justifiably constitutes a sub-field
in its own right. Finally we commissioned a new chapter by Andy Aydın-Aitchison, Mirza Buljubašić, and
Page 9 of 13
Barbora Holá on atrocity crimes. This chapter develops and encourages criminology’s engagement with
the forms of mass violence associated with war, armed conflict, and political repression as well as with
efforts to pursue, or describe and define, justice for victims. Importantly, the themes of trauma and the
harms of injustice are also addressed in another newly commissioned chapter on ‘victimology’ in an age of
#MeToo by Adrian Grounds, Maria Ttofi, and Lidia Puigvert. Their account of voice and power shows that
understanding suffering is a concept that ‘merits more attention in criminology’.
p. 10 ↵ Paolo Campana applies network thinking to criminology, including in the analysis of violence and
organized crime. The transmission of risky phenomena across communities with diverse social structures
has been vividly illustrated as we witness infections exploiting webs of social relations to increase their
spread across individuals and places. He argues that relations matter in explaining phenomena of interest
to criminologists and that these can have an effect over and above individual characteristics. Pathogens
have well ‘understood’ the power of relations underpinning human networks. Criminology has much to
learn from the analysis of social structures and connections in understanding the formation and operation
of gangs, patterns of victimization and the broader structure of violence.
The Oxford Handbook has never before had a chapter on penal abolitionism’s role in British criminology,
although, as Sim (this issue) points out in this fascinating chapter, abolitionism has a long tradition in
Britain. Support for abolitionism and sustained decarceration has grown demonstrably in recent years,
spurred on by the parallel push to ‘abolish the police’ inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and the
extreme threats faced by those in prison during the Covid-19 pandemic. For the first time ever, the
Handbook also includes a chapter on the concept of ‘convict criminology’ or criminological research that
centres lived experience and is produced mainly by those with first-hand experience of the justice system.
Convict criminology has been around in US criminology since the late 1990s, but the idea has very much
come to the fore in Britain in the past few years. Rod Earle and colleagues provide one of the most
sophisticated, up-to-date discussions of the now ubiquitous new concept of ‘lived experience’ and its
implications for the study of criminology.
There is also extended coverage of security and place as a thematic. Ian Loader and colleagues, revisit their
work on crime and social change in middle England (Girling et al. 2000), in the context of a more recent
project in the same locale, with a meditation on the relationship between democratic politics and security.
The chapter highlights the importance of co-production in researcher-participant relationships, and the
need for deliberative methods to capture in more granular ways the lived experience of (in)security, and
the conditions necessary for social change. By contrast Ben Bradford and Pete Fussey explore the dynamics
of ‘informational capitalism’ and the digital society and the ways in which they have transformed crime,
security, surveillance and policing, within the context of ‘smart cities’. Here there is emphasis on the ways
in which new technologies can increase vulnerability to crime at the same time as enhancing social
control, with some efforts aimed at enhancing security, paradoxically increasing feelings of insecurity.
The Handbook is a living research project and its various editions function as an archive of some of the best
and most influential scholarship within British Criminology, however loosely defined and problematic that
term now feels. As ‘guardians’ of the Handbook, we are aware that our protégé is now a fully-fledged and
independent adult making its way in a treacherous—contested, uncertain, economically precarious—
Page 10 of 13
world. The unique strengths of criminology as a discipline give us a strong belief in the opportunity for
renewal. We hope this new edition provides some of the energy for a dialogue about what social order and
justice might look like by the time the eighth edition of the Handbook is in preparation.
p. 11 References
Carrington, K., Hogg, R., Scott, J., and Sozzo, M. (2018), The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South,
Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Carrington, K., Hogg, R., and Sozzo, M. (2018), ‘Southern Criminology’, The British Journal of Criminology, 56(5): 1–20.
Copson, L. and Boukli, A. (2022), ‘Queer Utopias and Queer Criminology’, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 20: 5.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895820932210 <https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895820932210>
Cumhaill, C. M. and Wiseman, R. (2022), Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life,
London: Chatto and Windus.
de Sousa Santis, B. (2014), Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide, NY: Routledge.
Garland, D. (2002), The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Garrett, B. (2020). https://wcsj.law.duke.edu/2020/11/remembering-roger-hood-a-champion-of-justice-and-

international-leader-in-criminology/ <https://wcsj.law.duke.edu/2020/11/remembering-roger-hood-a-champion-of-
justice-and-international-leader-in-criminology/>
Girling, E., Loader, I., and Sparks, R. (2000), Crime and Social Change in Middle England: Questions of Order in an English
Town, Adingdon: Routledge.
Hood, R. (1965), Borstal Reassessed, London: Heinemann.
Hood, R. (1990), The Death Penalty, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hood, R. and Sparks, R. (1970), Key Issues in Criminology, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Jewkes, Y. (2024, in press), Beneath the Yellow Wallpaper: A Memoir of Prison and Home London: Scribe.
Maruna, S. (2016), ‘Desistance and Restorative Justice: It’s Now or Never’, Restorative Justice, 4(3): 289–30.
Maruna, S., McNaull, G., and O’Neill, N. (2022). ‘The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Future of the Prison’, Crime & Justice,
51–103.
Matthews, R. (2014), Realist Criminology, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Matthews, R. (2016), What Is to Be Done about Crime and Punishment?, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
McVie, S. (2020), Data Report on the Police Use of Fixed Penalty Notices during the Coronavirus Regulations in Scotland.
https://www.understanding-inequalities.ac.uk/sites/default/files/
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Data%20report%20on%20Police%20Use%20of%20FPN%20190820.pdf <https://www.understanding-
inequalities.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Data%20report%20on%20Police%20Use%20of%20FPN%20190820.pdf>.
Moosavi, L. (2019), ‘Decolonising Criminology: Syed Hussein Alatas on Crimes of the Powerful’, Critical Criminology,
27(2): 229–242.
Radzinowicz, L. and Hood, R. (1991), A History of the English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750., Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Scraton, P. (2013), ‘The Legacy of Hillsborough: Liberating Truth, Challenging Power’, Race & Class’, 55(2): 1–27.
Universities UK and the National Union of Students (2019), ‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Attainment at UK
Universities’ #closingthegap, https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bame-
student-attainment.pdf <https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bame-student-
attainment.pdf>.
Walklate, S., Godfrey, B., and Richardson, J. (2022), ‘Changes and Continuities in Police Responses to Domestic Abuse
in England and Wales During the Covid-19 ‘Lockdown’, Policing and Society, 32(2): 221–233.
West, D. (1955), Homosexuality, London: Penguin.
West, D. (1982), Delinquency, Its Roots, Careers and Prospects, London: Heinemann.
West, D. and Farrington, D. (1973), Who Becomes Delinquent, London: Heinemann.
West, D. and Farrington, D. (1977), The Delinquent Way of Life, London: Heinemann.
WhatUni (2022), https://www.whatuni.com/ <https://www.whatuni.com/>.
Zapatero, L. A. (2020), ‘Obituary’. https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/content/roger-hood-obituary-luis-arroyo-

p. 12 zapatero <https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/content/roger-hood-obituary-luis-arroyo-zapatero>. ↵
Notes
1
Professors Lesley McAra and Susan McVie won the ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize in 2019 for their work on the
Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime (ESYTC) (https://www.law.ed.ac.uk/news-events/news/professors-
mcara-and-mcvie-win-esrc-celebrating-impact-prize <https://www.law.ed.ac.uk/news-events/news/professors-mcara-
and-mcvie-win-esrc-celebrating-impact-prize>).
2
Professor Yvonne Jewkes won the ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize in 2020 for her innovative research on prison
architecture and design (https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/professor-yvonne-jewkes-wins-esrc-celebrating-
impact-prize-2020-for-societal-impact <https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/professor-yvonne-jewkes-wins-esrc-
celebrating-impact-prize-2020-for-societal-impact>).
3
A recent report authored by Universities UK and the National Union of Students (2019), found that only 1 per cent of
university professors were black, with 11 per cent overall from global majority groups. Women currently make up only
28 per cent of the professoriate, despite forming 46 per cent of faculty staff. Efforts to build more inclusive
Page 12 of 13
environments have benefited from staff and student activism (see for example Race-ED and Gender-ED at the
University of Edinburgh), but staff surveys across the UK continue to report cultures of bullying, racial stereotyping,
experiences of micro-aggressions, in addition to inequalities of pay and promotion prospects.
© Oxford University Press 2023
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1. Sociological theories of crime

p. 15 1. Sociological theories of crime

Paul Rock
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0001
Published in print: 21 September 2023
Published online: August 2023
Abstract
This chapter describes how the sociology of crime originally stemmed from professional and political preoccupations with the
problems presented by the practical management of crime and punishment in the emerging British state of the early
nineteenth century but then evolved and expanded in a rather unsystematic fashion over some two centuries into a semi-
detached academic discipline that addresses the various ways in which social order, social control, and social representations
of rule-breaking are said to affect the aetiology of crime. It has never stopped swelling, fragmenting, and proliferating, partly
because of a tendency for new generations of scholars to forget the past (see Plummer 2011), and partly in response to the
emergence of new data, new methodologies (such as randomized control trials), new empirical areas (such as the global
South), and new theoretical possibilities and political preoccupations (such as violence against women and girls) and social
and ecological problems (such as climate change).
Keywords: history of criminology, social order, social control, social representations, the emergence of the state, new
bodies of knowledge, new institutions, universities, professionalization
Introduction: The Development of Criminology in Britain
Criminology emerged so fitfully, discontinuously, and indecisively in Britain that its history does not lend
itself easily to a coherent narrative (Rock 2011). Although it is now more than 50 years old, Hermann
Mannheim’s account of its loosely connected early stages remains as serviceable as any (1965: Vol. 1, 79).
First, he said, there were private individuals working alone, and he cited as examples John Howard and
Jeremy Bentham. One might also add that Howard, Bentham, and others were men working in a newly
established tradition of social, juridical, and political improvement, often lawyers by training and
Nonconformists or utilitarians by inclination, who believed in the possibility of reform through the
Page 1 of 47
application of reason to a welter of confusing and apparently illogical laws, institutions, and practices that
composed an English and Welsh ancien régime. Jeremy Bentham, said John Stuart Mill, ‘found the
philosophy of law a chaos, he left it a science …’ (1838, republished 1950, 75).
It was a group that was tenuously united at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
centuries by a copious correspondence; an independence of thought; an independence of wealth; the
holding of pivotal positions as magistrates, sheriffs, and Members of Parliament; and a common
membership of philanthropic societies and religious organizations (see Whitten 2002). They learned at
first or second hand about conditions in Britain and elsewhere, and they cultivated in their turn the
beginnings of a systematic, comparative, and investigative stance towards problems of crime, policing,
and punishment. John Howard’s The State of the Prisons of 1784, Colquhoun’s A Treatise on the Police of the
Metropolis of 1797, and Samuel Romilly’s Observations on the Criminal Law of England of 1811 are prime
examples of their method. But, being independent individuals, lying outside the universities, they did not
lay much of a foundation for an enduring tradition of research and teaching.
Second and third in Mannheim’s chronology was what he described as the work of public officials acting
first in a private and then in a public capacity, and he cited as examples A.M. Guerry and Cesare Lombroso
(1985). One might add that that second era was marked by the activity of embryonic criminologists who
made use of the copious data and institutions that the newly reformed, expanding, interventionist, and
p. 16 increasingly ↵ wealthy state of the nineteenth century—the state that the Enlightenment reformers
had built—furnished in the service of public administration. The very word ‘statistic’ refers to a fact
bearing on the condition of the state, and it first came into use in the late 1780s, to be joined by the word
‘statistician’ in 1825, and they heralded the arrival of a new kind of blue book knowledge. The first
population census in Britain was conducted in 1801; the new police, judicial, and penal authorities began to
produce their own statistical returns after the 1830s; and a great mass of numerical data began to flood
into the public realm. Chevalier remarked of that period in France that there was ‘a determination to obtain
figures for everything, to measure everything, to know everything, but to know it by numbers, [it was an]
encyclopedic hunger’ (1973: 43). The new statistics were eagerly explored by those who sought to discover
patterns, commonalities, and trends in the social world: Fletcher (1850), Guerry (1864), and Quetelet
(1848), above all, sought to devise a new social physics that could reveal law-like regularities of behaviour
in space and time. One of the three, the Belgian, Quetelet, boldly claimed in 1846, for instance, that ‘we can
count in advance how many individuals will soil their hands with the blood of their fellows, how many will
be swindlers, how many poisoners, almost as we can number in advance the births and deaths that will
take place’ (in Radzinowicz and Hood 1990: 51; and see Merry 2016).
A second concomitant of the emergence of the new penitentiaries, police forces, and asylums (see Scull
1979) was the creation of a new stratum of penal administrators who managed, diagnosed, and ministered
to their inmates, and claimed new mandates and fostered new intellectual disciplines to shore up their
infant and somewhat fragile professional authority. There was W. D. Morrison, a prison chaplain and
pioneering criminologist, the author of Crime and its Causes, published in 1891, and Juvenile Offenders,
published in 1896, and the editor of the criminology series in which Lombroso’s The Criminal Woman first
appeared in English translation in 1895. There was S. A. Strahan, a doctor and lawyer, a physician at the
Northampton County Asylum, and author of writings on ‘instinctive criminality’, criminal insanity,
Page 2 of 47
suicide, and morphine habituation. There was Henry Maudsley, the co-founder of the eponymous hospital,
who wrote about homicidal insanity, insanity, and criminal responsibility, and other matters in the first
stirrings of the new science (1888). These men established new professional associations to promote and
defend their expertise—for instance, the Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the
Insane that was founded in 1841; and the Medico-Legal Association that was founded in 1901. And the new
associations founded new journals and new stocks of knowledge (the first issue of The Asylum Journal of
Mental Science appeared in 1853 and the first issue of the Transactions of the Medico-Legal Society appeared a
year after the Medico-Legal Association itself in 1902).
The very word ‘professional’ appeared for the first time in 1848, to be followed by ‘professionalism’ eight
years later, and these words signify the emergence of a new kind of expert. The new disciplines of criminal
anthropology, criminal psychiatry, criminology, and medico-legal science gave them a capacity to control
and speak about new problems, and it conferred a tenuous legitimacy, but they had few precedents to
follow, and it was to be medicine, the established science of bodily pathology, that became the principal
template for their fledgling science of social pathology. British criminology took much of its form at that
time, remaining for a long while a statistically driven, administratively bent form of knowledge copying
the precedent of applied medicine, practised in the service of the state (see Sim 1990: 9) and adopting the
language of diagnosis, prognosis, epidemiology, treatment, and rehabilitation. And, Garland would argue,
p. 17 it was a project that came to embody ensuing contradictions which have yet fully to be ↵ resolved: the
quest, on the one hand, for a criminology as the science of the causes of crime and, on the other, for a
discipline serving the practical administrative demands of the state (2002).
The penultimate phase was identified by Mannheim as work undertaken by university departments or
individual teachers. By the end of the nineteenth century, enough had been accomplished by the pioneers
to invite people to view a newly born criminology as a discrete discipline that could be detached from its
anchorage in the applied, working practices of state institutions to be pursued as an intellectual object in
its own right. The word ‘criminology’ was devised first in the 1850s and came into more general currency
in the 1890s when it began to be taught in universities in Italy, Austria, Germany, and France. It was to be
associated with a cluster of European thinkers, and particularly, and not always usefully, with Lombroso
and his followers (Lombroso tended to be too fanciful, too extravagant in his mannerisms, to warrant
serious consideration by the largely pragmatic and empirical scholars of the United Kingdom (see Kenny
1910: 220)). British criminology is not and never has been significantly Lombrosian in its affections, and
when criminology did come eventually and tentatively to establish itself in Britain in the early 1920s, it was
not as an offshoot of the new criminal anthropology (see Rock 2007). A university post in the discipline
was created first at Birmingham University in 1921 for Maurice Hamblin Smith, and he was a Freudian-
leaning psychologist (see Garland 1988: 8; Valiér 1995).
What came in time decisively to spur British criminology’s growth was the flight of intellectuals from Nazi
Europe in the 1930s (see Morris 1988: 24–6). Three legally trained emigré criminologists implanted the
discipline in three universities: Leon Radzinowicz at the University of Cambrige in 1941; Max Grünhut, first
at the London School of Economics in 1934, and thence in the University of Oxford in 1940, where he was
appointed to the university’s first lectureship in the field in 1947; and Hermann Mannheim at the London
School of Economics in 1935—and it was in that year of 1935, said Garland, that criminology was instituted
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as a professional academic discipline in Britain (1988: 1). So it was that virtually at a stroke, that the
criminology which had been maturing apart in western Europe, was imported into English universities, but
it did not receive a ready acceptance (see Hood 2004) nor was it inserted into an intellectual framework
that yielded easily.
Mannheim’s course on the Principles of Criminology at the LSE in the 1930s is indicative of what then
passed for criminology. It was eclectic, comprehensive and multi-disciplinary, embracing the study of
criminal statistics; criminal typologies; the physical anthropology of crime; biological theories, including
physical defects; psychological, psychoanalytic and psychiatric theories; social and economic factors; and
much else.
What followed was marked by the same stamp. Thus the editorial of the first issue of the new British Journal
of Delinquency, published in July 1950 with an editorial board consisting of Hermann Mannheim, Emanuel
Miller (a psychiatrist) and Edward Glover (a psychoanalyst), about to become the chief vehicle of the newly
institutionalized discipline, and later to be re-baptized the British Journal of Criminology, proclaimed:
it is perhaps unnecessary to add that the British Journal of Delinquency is not in the customary
sense a clinical journal. Clinical contributions will of course receive special consideration, but it is
hoped to publish articles, both theoretical and practical, from trained workers in the various
departments of criminology; namely, medical psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, organic
medicine, educational psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, psycho-biology and
statistics; also from social workers, probation officers, prison and other institutional personnel,
and from forensic specialists whose work brings them into intimate contact with problems of
delinquency.
p. 18 ↵ That was the vein in which British criminology long remained: catholic, multi-causal, averse to a
reliance on single theories and disciplines; grounded in medicine and medical metaphor; reformist,
applied, and tied to the penal politics of the day. But its very eclecticism brought it about that successive
generations of students were able routinely to receive instruction and conduct research across a very broad
terrain. Sociologists like Terence Morris and Roger Hood could study under Hermann Mannheim or Leon
Radzinowicz, and their students, like Bridget Hutter, David Downes, Stan Cohen, Paul Wiles, and Jock
Young, and their students’ students, like Dick Hobbs, Nigel Fielding, Ken Plummer, and Ian Taylor, could
advance, refine, extend, widen, and revise criminology along a great chain of begats—and there were other
centres and other lineages besides. When the great wave of university expansion was launched in England
and Wales in the 1960s, when the number of universities grew from 30 to 52 in twenty years, the number of
students from 130,000 to 600,000, and the number of academic staff from 19,000 to 46,000, criminology
could come freely into its own, blossoming with the rest of the academy, and colonizing departments of
psychology, law, social policy, and, above all, sociology. The 1970s were especially propitious: a survey
conducted in 1986 revealed that nearly 60 per cent of the criminologists teaching in British universities
had been appointed in that decade, and 30 per cent in the years between 1973 and 1976 alone (Rock 1988).
In that take-off phase, urged on by publishers, made discontinuous with the past by a thrusting generation
of newly appointed young Turks, criminology became striving, expansive, quarrelsome, factious, and
open, its practitioners jostling with one another for a place in the sun (see Taylor, Walton, and Young
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1973). Some established the National Deviancy Symposium in 1968 in open confrontation with what was
conceived to be the old orthodoxies represented by the Institute of Criminology at the University of
Cambridge and the Home Office Research Unit (S. Cohen 1971; Downes 1988). They splintered along the
theoretical and political faultlines of sociology proper, refracting the larger arguments of Marxist and
post-Marxist theory then in vogue through the new phenomenologies of social life, and feminism. And
then, after a while and inevitably—in the 1980s and beyond—most, but not all (see Hillyard et al. 2004;
Sumner 1994, 2004) were to become progressively reconciled to one another as new facts became available
through instruments such as crime surveys, battle fatigue set in, scholars mellowed with age, and the
pragmatics of having to work together continually in departments, committees, and journals began to
supersede the earlier, heady pleasures of intellectual struggle. Yet what the young Turks had succeeded in
constructing was an inchoate, exciting, and ambitious discipline that bore all the marks of its diverse
origins, earlier quarrels, and competing aspirations, a discipline that was never regulated or subject to the
imposition of professional entry requirements, one that could be memorably described by David Downes as
a ‘rendezvous’ subject that was shaped by the confluence of many ideas and schools around an empirical
area rather than a single orthodoxy.
Sociological Criminology
Sociological theories of crime are wide-reaching, extending, for example, from an examination of the
smallest detail of street encounters between adolescents and the police to comparative analyses of large
differences in rates of recorded crime between nations (see Lacey 2008) and over long swathes of time (see
Eisner 2003 and Spierenburg 2008), and it is sometimes difficult to determine where their boundaries
should be drawn. Two of the sociological criminologists most influential in the development of the
p. 19 discipline ↵ once defined it in very broad terms as ‘the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social
phenomenon. It includes within its scope the processes of making laws, of breaking laws, and of reacting
towards the breaking of laws’ (Sutherland and Cressey 1955: 3). There is as a result no one, royal way to lay
it out. In an empirically driven subdiscipline where formally different theories often contend with the same
problems in very much the same way, as useful a procedure as any is to identify and describe a number of
families of theories that share some big idea or ideas in common.
I shall, in particular, attend to the key themes of control, signification, and order. Crime is, after all,
centrally bound up with the state’s attempts to impose its will through law; with the meanings of those
attempts to lawbreaker, law-enforcer, observer, and victim (Condry 2010); and with concomitant patterns
of order and disorder. Criminologists differ about the weights and meanings that should be attached to
those attributes: some, and control theorists in particular, would wish to be what David Matza once called
‘correctionalist’, that is, to use knowledge about crime to suppress or change it. Others would look upon
the exercise of control even more critically. Some are more hostile to interpretive sociology than others
(see Clarke 1980). But they all feed off one another’s ideas even if their practices and politics diverge. The
ideas addressed here map the discipline’s more visible features, and I shall employ them to steer a more or
less straight route through Durkheimian and Mertonian theories of anomie; control theories; rational
choice theory; routine activities theory; the work of the ‘Chicago School’; studies of the relations between
control and space, including Newman’s ‘defensible space’, and more recent ideas of risk and the
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marshalling of dangerous populations; experimental criminology; radical criminology and Left Realism;
functionalist criminology; and ‘labelling theory’ and cultural and subcultural analyses of crime. I shall take
it that such a grand tour should encompass most of the major landmarks which criminologists would now
consider central to the foundations of their field.
What this chapter cannot do, of course, is provide substantial context, history, criticism, and detail. That
would be impossible in a relatively short piece, although the rest of this Handbook may be read as its frame.
Neither is this chapter concerned with theories of penology or governance. Like any scheme of
classification, it is further inevitable that it will face some problems of anomaly and overlap, not only
internally but also with other chapters. If the study of crime cannot be severed from the analysis of control,
the state, or gender, there will always be such problems at the margins. But the chapter should both
furnish the larger contours of an introductory map of contemporary sociological theories of crime and
serve as a complement to those other chapters.
Crime and Control
Anomie and the contradictions of social order

I shall begin by describing anomie theory, one of the earliest, most enduring and, for a while, hard-
researched of all the ideas of criminological theory, and one that still persists, albeit occasionally in
disguised form.
At heart, many theories, lay and scholarly, take it that crime is a consequence of defective social regulation.
People are said to deviate because the controls and authority of society are so weakened that they offer few
restraints or moral direction. The idea is a very old one, antedating the emergence of sociology itself, but
its formal birth into theory is linked indissolubly with anomie and the French sociologist, Émile Durkheim.
p. 20 ↵ Durkheim awarded two rather different meanings to anomie, or normlessness. In The Division of
Labour in Society, published in 1893, and in Suicide, published in 1897, he asserted that a French society
undergoing industrialization was in uneasy transition from one state of solidarity or social integration to
another. A society without an elaborate division of labour rested on what he called (perhaps misleadingly)
the mechanical solidarity of people who not only reacted much alike to problems, but also saw that
everyone about them reacted alike to those problems, thereby lending objectivity, scale, unanimity,
authority and solidity to moral response, and bringing a potential for massive disapproval and repression
to bear down on the deviant. Such a social order was conceived to lie in the simpler past of a less
differentiated pre-industrial society. The future of industrial society would be distinguished by a state of
organic solidarity, the solidarity appropriate to a complex division of labour. People would then be
allocated by merit and effort to very diverse positions, and they would not only recognize the legitimacy of
the manner in which rewards were distributed, but also acknowledge the indispensability of what each did
in his or her work for the other and for the common good. Organic solidarity would thus have co controls
peculiar to itself: ‘Sheerly economic regulation is not enough … there should be moral regulation, moral
rules which specify the rights and obligations of individuals in a given occupation in relation to those in
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other occupations’ (Giddens 1972: 11). People might no longer think wholly in unison, their moral response
might not be substantial and undivided, but they should be able to compose their differences peaceably by
means of a system of restitutive justice that made amends for losses suffered.
Durkheim’s distinction between the two forms of solidarity and their accompanying modes of control was
anthropologically suspect (see Llewellyn and Hoebel 1941), but it was in his analysis of the liminal state
between them that criminologists were most interested. In that transition, where capitalism was thought
to impose a ‘forced division of labour’, people acquiesced neither in the apportionment of rewards nor in
the moral authority of the economy or state. They were obliged to work and act in a society that not only
enjoyed a precarious legitimacy but also exercised an incomplete control over their desires. In such a
setting, it was held, ‘man’s nature [was to be] eternally dissatisfied, constantly to advance, without relief
or rest, towards an indefinite goal’ (Durkheim 1952: 256). Moral regulation was relatively deficient and
people were correspondingly free to deviate, perhaps in a manner defiant towards the existing political and
social order (Sherman 2010). That is the first meaning Durkheim gave to anomie. His second will be visited
below.
Given another, distinctively American, complexion by Robert Merton, anomie became a socially fostered
state of discontent and deregulation that generated crime and deviance as part of the routine functioning
of a society which promised much to everyone but actually denied them equal access to its attainment
(Merton 1938). People might have been motivated to achieve success in the United States, the society on
which Merton focused, but they confronted class, race, and other social barriers that manifestly
contradicted the myth of openness. It was not easy for a poor, inner-city adolescent to receive sponsorship
for jobs, achieve academic awards, or acquire capital. In a society where failure was interpreted as a sign of
personal rather than structural weakness, where failure tended to lead to individual guilt rather than to
political or collective anger (Newman 2006), the pressure to succeed could be so powerful that it impelled
people thus disadvantaged to bypass legitimate careers and take to illegitimate careers instead: ‘the
culture makes incompatible demands … In this setting, a cardinal American virtue—“ambition”—
promotes a cardinal American vice—“deviant behavior”’ (Merton 1957: 145).
p. 21 ↵ Merton’s anomie theory was to be modified progressively for some thirty years. In the work of
Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960), for example, it was elaborated to include illegitimate routes to
success. Their Delinquency and Opportunity (1960) described the consequences of young American men (in
the 1950s and 1960s the criminological gaze was almost wholly on the doings of young American men) not
only being pushed into crime by the difficulties of acquiring money and position in conventional ways, but
also being pulled by the lure of lucrative and unconventional criminal careers. There would be those who
were offered an unorthodox path in professional or organized crime, and they could become thieves,
robbers, or racketeers. There would be those for whom no path was available, and they could become
members of conflict gangs. And there were those who failed to attain admission to either a law-abiding or
a law-violating group, the ‘double failures’, who would, it was conjectured, give up, retreat and become
drug-users and hustlers. Each of those modes of adaptation was, in effect, a way of life, supported by a
system of meanings or a subculture, and Cloward and Ohlin provided one of the bridges between the
structural and the interpretive models of crime which will be discussed towards the end of this chapter.
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And then Irving Spergel went even further to add patterns of community organization to the model,
describing Racketville, Slumtown and Haulburg as the environments in which organized crime, conflict
gangs, and professional crime could flourish (1973).
In the work of Albert Cohen (1957), anomie was in effect to be synthesized with the Freudian idea of
‘reaction formation’ in an attempt to explain the manifestly expressive and ‘non-rational’ nature of much
delinquency. The prospect of failure was depicted as bringing about a major psychological rejection of
what had formerly been sought, so that the once-aspiring working-class adolescent emphatically and
expressively turned his back on the middle-class world that spurned him and adopted a style of behaviour
that was its systematic inversion. The practical and utilitarian in middle-class life was transformed into
non-utilitarian delinquency; respectability became malicious negativism; and the deferment of
gratification became short-run hedonism. Again, in the work of David Downes, conducted in London in the
early 1960s to explore how far beyond America anomie theory might be generalized, the ambitions of
English adolescents were found to be so modulated by the presence of relatively abundant, albeit low-paid,
jobs and what was then a stable and legitimated system of social stratification that working-class youth
did not seem to undergo a taxing guilt, shame, or frustration in their failure to accomplish middle-class
goals. They neither hankered after the middle-class world nor repudiated it. Rather, their response was
‘dissociation’. Where they did experience a strong dissatisfaction, however, was in their thwarted attempts
to enjoy leisure, and their delinquencies were principally hedonistic, focused on drinking, fighting, and
malicious damage to property, rather than instrumentally turned towards the accumulation of wealth. And
that theme—of the part played by the adolescent ‘manufacture of excitement’ and the courting of risk—
was to be echoed repeatedly in the empirical and theoretical work of criminologists thereafter. Making
‘something happen’ in a world without significant cultural or material resources could easily bring about a
drift into delinquency (see Matza 1964; Corrigan 1979; Cusson 1983; Katz 1988; Presdee 2000). Indeed, it
was to be distinctive of much delinquency. Ferrell, Hayward and Young, for example, talked about how
many young people ‘push themselves to ‘the edge’, and engage there in ‘edgework’, in search of an
‘adrenalin rush’, authentic identity, and existential certainty; they lose control to take control’ (2008, p.
72).
An incarnation of anomie theory is thus to be found in muted form in ‘Left Realism’ and its successor,
p. 22 ‘cultural criminology’, where the idea of structural tension is integrated ↵ with that of the social
meanings of the act to produce a conception of delinquency as a motivated, often hedonistic response to
the inequalities of capitalism. ‘The Mertonian notion of contradiction between culture and structure’,
wrote Jock Young, himself the father of ‘left realism’ turned father of ‘cultural criminology’, ‘has run
throughout all my work, from The Drugtakers onwards’ (2004: 553). I shall return to Left Realism below. It
is also found implicitly in an interesting book, written by epidemiologists and only sporadically related to
crime, which suggests that rates of mental illness and violence, including homicide, are tied to levels of
income inequality within societies (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). The more unequal a society, they argue,
the greater is its abundance of social problems, and the tempting conclusion is that the illegitimacy and
blockages inhering in social arrangements conduce to strain (which they call stress) and criminal violence.
Rosenfeld and Messner would add that societies whose key sectors were out of joint with one another can
be distinguished by what they call ‘institutional anomie’, a state of malintegration particularly acute when
the economy ‘dominates the institutional balance of power’ (2013: 61) and ‘non-economic functions and
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roles’ are comparatively eroded and devalued. Market achievements will trump other forms of success;
work can trump the demands of community, family, church and school; and structural restraints and
informal controls will be corroded.
Anomie and social disorganization

The second reading of anomie stemming from Durkheim touched on moral regulation that was not so
much flawed as in a critical or chronic state of near collapse. People, he argued, are not endowed at birth
with fixed appetites and ambitions. On the contrary, their purposes and aspirations are shaped in part by
the generalized opinions and reactions of others, by a collective conscience, that can appear through social
ritual and routine to be externally derived, solid, and objective. When society is disturbed by rapid change
or major disorder, however, that semblance of solidity, authority, and objectivity can itself founder, and
people may no longer find their ambitions subject to effective social discipline. It is hard to live outside the
reassuring structures of social life, and the condition of anomie was experienced as a ‘malady of infinite
aspiration’ that was accompanied by ‘weariness’, ‘disillusionment’, ‘disturbance, agitation and
discontent’. In extreme cases, Lukes observed, ‘this condition would lead a man to commit suicide and
homicide’ (1967: 139).
Durkheim conceived such anomic deregulation to be a matter of crisis, innately unstable and short-lived.
Disorganization could not be tolerated for very long before a society collapsed or order of a sort was
restored. Indeed, sociologists are generally ill-disposed towards the term, believing that it connotes a lack
of understanding and perception on the part of the observer (see Anderson 1976; Katz 1997; and Whyte
1942). It is indeed evident that informal control can survive even in the most adverse circumstances (see
Walklate and Evans 1999) and, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the Congo, Sierra Leone, or Uganda at their
most devastated, people seem able to sustain a measure of organization within disorganization. Yet, on
both the small and the large scale, there are also clear examples of people living in conditions where
informal control and cooperation are only vestigial; where formal control is either absent or erratic; where
others are, or are seen to be, predatory and dangerous; where life is unpredictable; and where, as cause and
consequence, there is little personal safety, much anxiety, and abundant crime. Take William Julius
Wilson’s description of life in the poorest areas of the American city: ‘broken families, antisocial
p. 23 behaviour, social networks that do not extend beyond the ghetto ↵ environment, and a lack of informal
social control over the behaviour and activities of children and adults in the neighbourhood’ (1996: xvi).
On some housing estates in Paris (Wacquant 2008), London (Genn 1988), Nottingham (Davies 1998), and
St Louis (Rainwater 1970), social groupings have been portrayed as so lacking in cohesion that they
enjoyed no shared trust, neighbour preyed on neighbour, and joint defensive action was virtually
impossible.
Rampant anomie has been well documented, especially by Erikson who described in a succession of studies
the radical disorganization and collapse of social order flowing from natural and not so natural disasters
(such as the breaking of a dam and the destruction of a community) (1979, 1991,1994). Consider Davis’s
half-prophetic description of MacArthur Park, one of the poorest areas of Los Angeles, as ‘feral’ and
dangerous, ‘a free-fire zone where crack dealers and street gangs settle their scores with shotguns and
Uzis’ (1992a: 6). Consider, too, Turnbull’s (1973) description of the condition of the Ik of northern Uganda,
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a tribe that had been moved to a mountainous area after their traditional hunting grounds had been
designated a national park. They could no longer live, collaborate, and work as they had done before;
familiar patterns of social organization had become obsolete; and they were portrayed as having become
beset by ‘acrimony, envy and suspicion’ (1973: 239), ‘excessive individualism, coupled with solitude and
boredom’ (ibid.: 238), and the victimization of the weak (ibid.: 252).
A number of criminologists and others have pointed to parts of the world, commonly called ‘failed states’,
whose political structures have been so radically weakened and disordered that it becomes difficult to talk
about legitimate governments operating effectively within secure national boundaries at all (see Bayart,
Ellis, and Hibou 1999). So it was that Kaplan wrote graphically about the road-warrior culture of Somalia,
the anarchic implosion of criminal violence in the Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone, which he depicted at the
time as a lawless state that had lost control over its cities at night, whose national army was a ‘rabble’, and
which was reverting to tribalism. The future for many, he melodramatically predicted, would be a
‘rundown, crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju warriors, influenced by the worst refuse of
Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds, and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerilla
conflicts’ (1994: 62–3). So, too, Martin van Creveld analysed what he called the ubiquitous growth of ‘low-
intensity conflict’ waged by guerrillas and terrorists who threatened the state’s conventional monopoly of
violence: ‘Should present trends continue, then the kind of war that is based on the division between
government, army, and people, seems to be on its way out … A degree of violent activity that even as late as
the 1960s would have been considered outrageous is now accepted as an inevitable hazard of modern
life’ (1991: 192, 194). If Kaplan and van Creveld are even partially gifted with foresight (and much of their
argument is quite stark), the trends they foretell will be of major consequence to criminology. Without a
viable state legislature, laws, and law enforcement, without adequate state control over the exercise of
violence, how can one manage to write intelligently about a discrete realm of crime at all? Crime, after all,
is contingent on a state’s ability clearly to define, ratify, and execute the law. When the police of a state are
massively and routinely corrupt (as they appear to be in Mexico); when, for example, the Colombian
president’s aeroplane was found to be carrying large quantities of cocaine (see the New York Times, 22
September 1996); when ISIS vied with a weak state and weak occupiers to impose control over large
reaches of Syria and Iraq; and when a President of Liberia was accused of cannibalism (The Times, 2
November 1999); it is not difficult to ask with Stan Cohen whether it is possible any longer to distinguish
p. 24 firmly between crime and politics. There has been, he asserted, ↵ a widespread decline of the myth that
the sovereign state can provide security, law, and order; a decline in the legitimacy of the state through
corruption scandals; a growth of international crime and a rise of criminal states such as Chechnya; and, in
Africa particularly, the emergence of barbarism, horror, and atrocity. In some settings, he remarked,
‘lawlessness and crime have so destroyed the social fabric that the state itself has withdrawn’ (1996: 9).
Control theory
A second, large, and linked cluster of theories centres loosely around the contention that almost all people
seek to commit crime because it is possible, profitable, useful, or enjoyable for them to do so, and that they
will almost certainly break the law if they can. Even if that contention, with its covert imagery of feral man
(and woman), is not strictly convincing, control theorists would argue that it directs enquiry in a helpful
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direction. They profess to be interested less in the fidelity of description than in its yield for policy
intervention and prediction in concrete situations. Theirs is a theory of practical rather than of empirical
truths, and the practical is thought to suggest that more will be learned by exploring a few, uncomplicated
factors that seem to prevent people from offending than by investigating all the complicated motives,
meanings, and antecedents that prompt them to transgress. Travis Hirschi put the issue baldly: ‘The
question “Why do they do it?” is simply not the question the theory is designed to answer. The question is,
“Why don’t we do it?”’(1969: 34). Such a doctrine is a recognizably close neighbour of anomie theories in
its focus on the defective regulation of potentially unbridled appetites (Newburn, for instance, asserted
that a number of participants in the 2011 London riots looted because ‘they could’ (2011: 13)); and, indeed,
it is occasionally very difficult to distinguish one set of ideas from the other. Earlier variants of control
theory, compiled in the 1960s and 1970s, proceeded by drafting lists of the constraints which could check
the would-be offender, an offender who, it was assumed for analytic purposes, could be much like you, me,
or anyone. Thus, arguing against subcultural theory, and grounded in a Freudian conception of human
impulses that required taming, Hirschi claimed that ‘delinquent acts result when the individual’s bond to
society is weak or broken’ (1969: 16).
Four chief elements were held by Hirschi to induce people to comply with rules: attachment, commitment,
involvement, and belief. Attachment reflected a person’s sensitivity to the opinions of others;
commitment flowed from an investment of time, energy, and reputation in conformity; involvement
stemmed from engrossment in conventional activity; and belief mirrored a person’s conviction that he or
she should obey legal rules. There is tautology and repetition in that formulation, but he nevertheless
usefully directed the criminological mind towards answering his one big question, ‘Why don’t we do it?’
Later, with Gottfredson, Hirschi elaborated control theory further by turning to self-control and
impulsivity. Crime, they claimed, flows from low self-control: it provides a direct and simple gratification
of desires that is attractive to those who cannot or will not postpone pleasure. In the main, it requires little
skill or planning. It can be intrinsically enjoyable because it involves the exercise of cunning, agility,
deception, or power. It requires a lack of sympathy for the victim. But it does not provide medium- or
long-term benefits equivalent to those that can flow from more orthodox careers. In short, it is, they say,
likely to be committed by those who are ‘impulsive, insensitive, physical … Risk-taking, short-sighted,
and non-verbal’ (1990: 90).
p. 25 ↵ David Matza almost certainly would not have called himself a control theorist, but in Delinquency and
Drift (1964) he effectively straddled theories of control, anomie, and signification, and he portrayed
delinquents and delinquency in a manner that control theorists would find acceptable. Delinquents are not
very different from us, he argued. Most of the time they are conventional enough in belief and conduct, and
it is difficult to predict who will conform and who will not. But there are occasions when the grip of control
loosens, adolescents fatalistically experience themselves (perhaps for opportunistic or rhetorical reasons)
as if they were propelled by social forces stronger than themselves, no longer responsible for their actions,
and they will then find themselves released to drift in and out of delinquency. What eases that process of
disengagement are widely circulating accounts or ‘techniques of neutralization’ (a hugely influential idea
that he had developed earlier with Gresham Sykes (Sykes and Matza 1957)) which enable people
methodically to counter the guilt and offset the censure they might experience when offending. Matza
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claimed that delinquents could be fortified in their resolve by condemning their condemners (by asserting
that police and judges were themselves corrupt and invalid critics, for instance); denying injury (by
asserting that no significant harm was done); denying the victim (by asserting that the victim was of no
consequence or deserved what happened); or by appealing to higher loyalties (a noble motive could be
cited for an ignoble deed).
Perhaps one of the most telling and economical contributions to control theory was supplied by Harriet
Wilson (1980). Examining ‘socially deprived’ families in Birmingham, England, she was to conclude that
what most sharply differentiated families with delinquent children from those with none was simply what
she called the exercise of ‘chaperonage’ (1980). Parents who acted as chaperons effectively prevented their
children from offending: they were so convinced that the neighbourhood in which they lived was
dangerous and contaminating that they sought to protect their children by keeping them indoors or under
close supervision, escorting them to school, and prohibiting them from playing with others defined as
undesirable (and see Reckless 1957).
Control theory has also been applied with effect to the problem of gender differences in offending. Apart
from age, no other demographic feature at present so powerfully discriminates between offenders and
non-offenders. At one time, however, scant criminological attention was paid to female crime because
there was so very little of it (see Innes 2003: 54). As Lemert once said, like Custer’s men, criminologists
rode to the sound of the guns, and there were few female guns to be heard. By contrast, what made male
offending appear so interesting was its sheer seriousness and scale.
Feminist criminologists and others tacitly adopting a control perspective retorted that that was precisely
what made women so important analytically (Heidensohn 1968), and they inverted the problem by asking
Travis Hirschi’s central question (without actually citing Hirschi himself) about why women did not
offend. There was the academically new and intriguing riddle of the conforming woman, and the riddle
was answered, in part, by reference to differentials in control. John Hagan and his colleagues put it that
deviation as a form of fun, exploit and excitement in public space was more commonly open to males than
to females because they are less frequently risk-averse and less frequently subject to intense, continual,
and diffuse family control in and around the private, domestic sphere. That control, by extension, not only
tended to remove girls from the purview of agents of formal social control, the criminal justice system, and
the possibility of public identification as criminal; it also worked more effectively because it rested on the
manipulation of emotional sanctions rather than the imposition of physical or custodial controls. Shaming
strategies and the withdrawal of affection are seemingly more potent than fines, probation, or prison.
p. 26 ↵ It followed that the more firmly structured and hierarchical the family, the sharper the distinction
drawn between male and female roles, the more women were confined to a private space, the greater
would be the disparity between rates of male and female offending (see Hagan et al. 1979, 1985, and 1988).
Pat Carlen gave that analysis another twist by noting that female criminals were most likely to emerge
when domestic family controls were eroded or removed altogether, when what she called the ‘gender deal’
was broken, young women left home or were taken into the care of the state, and were thereby exposed to
controls characteristically experienced by men (1988). The answer to the ‘crime problem’, Frances
Heidensohn once concluded, tongue in cheek, would have to lie in the feminization of control.
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Control theory is now in vogue, particularly in the United States, where it is linked with theories of the
‘life-course’ in the work of authors such as Sampson and Laub (1993), whose seminal Crime in the Making
of 1993 was to be succeeded by Laub and Sampson’s Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives of 2003. Both works
explored the genesis of, and desistance from, delinquency in the lives of men studied over decades: and
they devoted especial attention to the manner in which the social bonds of family, friends, employment,
and military service work as informal controls that filter influences emanating from the wider society.
Marriage, the onset of work, and military service, they argue, may offer critical turning points which
induce discontinuities in a life history; create new sets of social relations, dependencies, and
responsibilities; introduce new disciplines into social life; and invite stock-taking and reflection. Perhaps
they under-estimated the, often hidden, existence of domestic violence within marriage and the crimes
committed by those serving in the armed forces. Perhaps too they neglected the fashion in which
institutions attempt to deal with their own, apart from the public domain (see Henry 1983). But there is
merit in the life course model: involvement with the criminal justice system and imprisonment may well
interrupt or undermine participation in stabilizing social environments; stigmatize the offender and
prevent re-entry into the ‘straight’ world; encourage cynicism about criminal justice through a close
acquaintance with its game-like and seedier features; and introduce the offender to other lawbreakers who
help to amplify deviance through differential association. And, throughout, and following Matza, Katz, and
others, Laub and Sampson (2003) portray the process not as a grim and ineluctable progression into
criminality, but as a sequence of events and actions which is influenced always by the capacity of people to
interpret and choose how they will respond. The part played by human agency and contingency is
repeatedly underscored, leading them to observe how impossible it is to predict future criminality from
present circumstances.
Rational choice theory

An increasingly important, but not indispensable, foundation of control theories is ‘rational choice
theory’, a resuscitation of old utilitarian theories that preceded sociology and were once linked with Adam
Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Cesare Beccaria, and James Mill. Rational choice theory was reintroduced to
criminology through the medium of a revived economics of crime, and it brought with it the convenient
fiction of economic man (see Becker 1968), a fiction which has an immediate affinity with the criminal
man (or woman) of control theory. Economic man, deemed to be continually looking about him for
opportunities, making amoral and asocial choices to maximize his personal utility, may not be a wholly
credible being, but, it is argued, he does help to simplify model-making, strip away what rational choice
theorists conceive to be inessential theoretical and descriptive clutter, and aim directly at practically useful
policy questions (see Clarke and Cornish 1985). Economic man in his (or her) criminal guise does not have
p. 27 a past, ↵ complex motives, a rich social life, or, indeed, a recognizable social identity (a ‘disposition’ is
how Ron Clarke put it (1992)). He or she does not need to have any of those attributes. Indeed, he or she
may not even be perfectly rational, muddling through or ‘satisficing’, as we all do, on the basis of
imperfect information and in the presence of risks and uncertainty. He or she is very much like any one of
us or, better still, like some Everyman who stands abstractly and plainly for all of us. He or she needs no
such complexity, because what weighs in control theory is the piecemeal theoretical analysis of discrete
Page 13 of 47
episodes of disembodied offending behaviour conducted by people making decisions around the issues of
risk, effort, and reward (Clarke and Cornish 2000: 7) in the settings in which they take place (see
introduction to Clarke and Felson 1993).
In Ron Clarke’s particularly influential formulation, the rate of crime was held to vary in response to three
broad configurations of factors. The first revolved around increasing the effort Everyman (and
Everywoman) would have to expend in committing a crime, and that entailed what was called ‘target
hardening’ (by defending objects and people by shields and other devices); ‘access control’ (and that
involved making it difficult for predators to approach targets); deflecting offenders (by encouraging them,
for example, to act in a legitimate rather than an illegitimate manner through the provision of graffiti
boards, litter bins, and spittoons); and ‘controlling facilitators’ (through gun control or checks on the sales
of spray cans, for instance). The second factor revolved around increasing the risks of offending through
the screening of people (by means of border searches, for example); formal surveillance by police, security
guards, and others; surveillance by employees such as bus conductors, train guards, concierges, and
janitors; and ‘natural surveillance’ (aided by lowering or removing obstacles such as hedges and shrubs
around private dwellings (see Bennett and Wright 1984), installing closed circuit television cameras,
lighting the interiors of stores, and enhanced street lighting). The final grouping was ‘reducing the
rewards’ of crime, itself composed of ‘target removal’ (using electronic transactions and bus and ‘oyster’
1
cards to reduce the number of cash payments, and thus the accumulation of money in single places, for
instance); property identification; removal of inducements (by the rapid cleaning of graffiti or repair of
vandalized property); and rule-setting (through income tax returns, customs declarations, and the like)
(taken from Clarke 1992: 13). A pursuit of those common-sense, sometimes indistinguishable, but
nevertheless practical ideas allowed research officers at the Home Office in the 1970s and early 1980s to
undertake a succession of revealing case studies, discovering, for example, that compact, old school
buildings on small urban sites were a third as likely to be burgled as large, sprawling, modern buildings
with their many points of access and weak possibilities of surveillance (see Hope 1982); or that there was
some twenty times as much malicious damage on the upper than on the lower decks of ‘one man’, double-
decker buses whose drivers’ powers of surveillance were confined at the time to one level only (Mayhew et
al. 1976: 26).
None of those variables touched on conventional sociological questions about who offenders might be,
how they reason, and how they act (and for that rational choice theorists have been criticized (see Wright
and Decker 1997; Fukuyama 2004; and Haggerty, who remarked a little astringently that control theorists
are more akin to ‘Wal-Mart security consultants than research criminologists’ (2004: 218)). Control
theorists concentrated instead on the imagined impact of different forms of control on Everyman or
Everywoman abroad in space, and from that it was but a short step to extend control theory to an analysis
of the disciplines that are built into everyday social life, on the one hand, and into the social uses of space,
on the other.
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p. 28 Routine Activities Theory

Ron Clarke, the situational control theorist, and Marcus Felson, the theorist of the links between crime and
routine activities, agreed that they shared ideas in common (see Clarke and Felson 1993) as well as ideas
apart (thus it was claimed that situational control theory is microscopic, routine activities theory largely
macroscopic in its application (Clarke and Cornish undated: 25)). Clarke and his colleagues had asked what
prevented specific criminal incidents from occurring in specific situations. Felson asked how such
incidents originate or are checked in the routine activities of everyday social life (1994). Just as Clarke and
others had emphasized how, for explanatory purposes, it was convenient to assume that offenders were
little different from anyone else, so Felson and his colleagues put it that most criminals are unremarkable,
unskilled, petty, and non-violent people much like many of us. Just as control theorists made use of a tacit
version of original sin, so routine activities theory adopted a series of presuppositions about basic human
frailty, the importance of temptation and provocation, and the part played by idleness (‘We are all born
weak, but … we are taught self-control’, Felson asserted (1994: 20)).
The ‘routine activities’ criminologist would argue that the analysis of predatory crime does not necessarily
require weighty causes. Neither does it demand that the theorist commit the ‘like-causes-like’ fallacy
which tacitly insists that a ‘pathological’ phenomenon such as crime must be explained by a pathological
precondition such as alienation, poverty, family dysfunction, or class or racial oppression. Crime was taken
to be built into the very architecture of everyday life. More precisely, it was to be found in the convergence
in space and time of what were called motivated offenders, suitable targets, and capable guardians (see
Cohen and Felson 1979): being affected by such matters as the weight, value, quantity, and distribution of
stealable goods (the growth in the numbers of light, portable, high-cost goods such as tablets, lap-top
computers and mobile (or ‘cell’) telephones will encourage more theft, for instance); the impact of motor
cars (they aid rapid flight, permit the discreet transportation of objects, and give rise to a geographical
dispersal of the population which dilutes surveillance); habits of leisure (adolescents now have larger
swathes of empty time than did their predecessors, time in which they can get up to mischief); habits of
work (when all members of a household are in employment, there will be no capable guardians to protect a
home); habits of residence (single people are less effective guardians of property than are larger
households); the growth of technology (modern mobile telephones, for instance, amplify the public’s
ability to report and record crime); and so on. It is an uncomplicated theory but again, like its near
neighbour, control theory, it does ask empirically productive questions.
Crime, Control, and Space
The Chicago School

Routine activities theory and control theory both talk about the convergence of victims, offenders,
bystanders and police in space, and space has always been analytically to the fore in criminology. Indeed,
one of the earliest and most productive of its research traditions was the social ecology and urban mapping
practised by the sociology department of the University of Chicago in the 1920s and beyond (see Park 1925;
Thrasher 1927; and Landesco 1968).
Page 15 of 47
As cities grow, it was held, so there would be a progressive, ‘organic’ and largely spontaneous
p. 29 differentiation of space, population, and function that concentrated different ↵ groupings in different
areas. The main organizing structure was the zone, and the Chicago sociologists discerned five principal
concentric zones shaping the city: the central business district around the ‘Loop’ (as it was known in
Chicago) at the very core; the ‘zone in transition’ about that centre; an area of stable working-class
housing; middle-class housing; and outer suburbia.
The zone in transition was marked by the greatest volatility of its residents. It was an area of comparatively
cheap rents, weak social control, internal social differentiation, and rapid physical, demographic and
social change. It was to the zone in transition that new immigrants most frequently came, and it was there
that they settled into what were called ‘natural areas’, small, ‘spontaneously’ generated, communal
enclaves that were said to be relatively homogeneous in composition and culture. Chicago sociologists
plotted the incidence of social problems on to census maps of the city, and it was the zone in transition
that was found repeatedly to house the largest visible proportions of criminals, the poor, the illegitimate,
the illiterate, the mentally ill (see Faris and Dunham 1939), juvenile delinquents (Shaw and McKay 1969),
and prostitutes (Reckless 1933). It was, in effect, virtually coextensive with what was then described as
social pathology. Not only were formal social controls held to be at their weakest there (it was, as it were,
socially dislocated from the formal institutions and main body of American society (see Whyte 1942)) but
informal social controls were eroded by moral and social diversity, rapid population movement, and a lack
of strong and pervasive local institutions: ‘contacts are extended, heterogeneous groups mingle,
neighborhoods disappear, and people, deprived of local and family ties, are forced to live under … loose,
transient and impersonal relations’ (Wirth 1964: 236).
A number of the early Chicago sociologists united social ecology, the study of the patterns formed by
different groups living together in the same space, with the methods of social anthropology to explore the
traditions, customs, and practices of the residents of natural areas. They found that, while there may well
have been a measure of social and moral dislocation between the zone in transition and the wider society,
as well as within the zone itself, those natural areas could also manifest a remarkable inner cohesion and
persistence of culture and behaviour that were reproduced from generation to generation and from
immigrant group to immigrant group within the same terrain over time. Delinquency was, in effect, not
disorganized at all, but a stable attribute of social life, an example of continuity in change: ‘the traditions
of delinquency can be and are transmitted down through successive generations of boys, in much the same
way that language and other social forms are transmitted’ (Shaw and McKay 1969: 174). Cultural
transmission then came to be the focus of the work pursued by a small group of second-generation
Chicago sociologists. Sometimes under the name of ‘differential association’, it was studied as a normal
psychological process of learning motives, skills, and meanings in the company of others who bore
criminal traditions (see Sutherland and Cressey 1955).
That urban research was to prepare a diverse legacy for criminology: the spatial analysis of crime; the
study of subcultures (which I shall touch on below); the epidemiology of crime; crime as an interpretive
practice (which I shall also touch on); and much else. Let me turn first to some examples of spatial
analysis.
Page 16 of 47
Control and space: beyond the Chicago School

The Chicago sociologists’ preoccupation with the cultural and symbolic correlates of spatial congregations
of people was to be steadily elaborated. For instance, Wiles, Bottoms, and their colleagues, then working at
p. 30 the University of Sheffield, added two important ↵ observations. They argued first that, in a then more
tightly administered Britain, social segregation did not emerge, as it were, organically with unplanned city
growth (although Chicago itself was never quite as unplanned as some of the early social ecologists had
alleged (see Suttles 1972)), but with the intended and unintended consequences of policy decisions taken
by local government departments responsible for housing a large proportion of the population in
municipal rented accommodation. Housing allocation was an indirect and sometimes unintended
reflection of moral judgements about tenants that resulted, or were assumed to result, in the spatial
concentration of criminal populations (see Bottoms et al. 1989). Further, and partly in accord with that
argument, the reputations of natural areas themselves became a topic of criminological interest: how was
it, some criminologists asked, that the moral meanings attached to area of residence by insiders and
outsiders affected people’s reputations, choices, and action? One’s very address could become a moral fact
that affected not only how one would be treated by others in and about the criminal justice system (see
Damer 1974), but also how one would come to rate oneself as a potential deviant or conformist (see Gill
1977).
Secondly, it was argued, while the Chicago sociologists may have examined the geographical distribution
of offenders, it was instructive also to scrutinize how offending itself could be plotted, because the two
measures need not correspond (Baldwin and Bottoms 1976 and see Morris 1957). Offending has its maps.
Indeed, it appears to be densely concentrated, clustered around offenders’ homes, areas of work and
recreation, and the pathways in between (Brantingham and Brantingham 1981–2; Wikstrőm 2007). So it
was that, pursuing routine activities theory, Sherman and his colleagues surveyed all calls made to the
police in Minneapolis in one year; and they discovered that a few ‘hot spots’ had exceptional densities of
crime: only 3 per cent of all places produced 50 per cent of the calls; all robberies took place in only 2.2 per
cent of places, all rapes in 1.2 per cent of places, and all car thefts in 2.7 per cent of places (Sherman et al.
1989; see also Roncek and Maier 1991).
Defensible space
If offending has its maps, so does social control; and criminologists and others have become ever more
interested in the fashion in which space, behaviour, and control intersect. One forerunner was Jane Jacobs,
who speculated about the relations between city landscapes and informal controls, arguing, for example,
that dense, busy thoroughfares with their habitués have many more ‘eyes on the street’ and opportunities
for witness reporting and bystander intervention, than sterile pedestrian zones, ‘confused’ mixed space or
streets without stores and other lures (Jacobs 1965).
The idea of ‘defensible space’, in particular, has borrowed from anthropology and architecture, coupled
with the concept of surveillance, and put to work in analysing formal and informal responses to different
kinds of space. ‘Defensible space’ itself leans on the psychological notion of ‘territoriality’, the sense of
attachment and symbolic investment that people can acquire in a place or places. Territoriality is held by
Page 17 of 47
some to be a human universal, an imperative that leads people to wish to guard what is their own. Those
who have a stake in a physical area, it is said, will care for it, police it, and report strangers and others who
have no apparent good purpose to be there.
What is quite critical is how space is marked out and bounded. The prime author of the idea of defensible
space, Oscar Newman (1972), claimed that, other things being equal, what induces territorial sentiments is
a clear demarcation between private and public areas, even if the demarcations are only token. The private
p. 31 will be protected in ↵ ways that the public is not, and the fault of many domestic and institutional
buildings is that separations and segregations are not clearly enough incorporated in design. The
geographer, Alice Coleman, and others took it that improvements to the physical structures of built space
could then achieve a significant impact on crime: above all, she insisted on the importance of restricting
access to sites; reducing the interconnections or ‘walkways’ between buildings; and emphasizing the
distinction between public and private space and minimizing what Oscar Newman called ‘confused space’,
the space that was neither one thing nor the other (Coleman 1985, 1986). She has been roundly faulted,
both methodologically and analytically, for her neglect of dimensions other than the physical (see Hillier
1973, 1986), but she and Newman have succeeded in introducing an analytic focus on the interrelations
between space and informal control that was largely absent before. Only rarely have scholars such as
Campbell (1993), Duneier (2001), Power (1997), and Shapland and Vagg (1988) enquired into the informal
controlling practices of people as they observe, interpret, and respond to ambiguous, deviant, and non-
deviant conduct in the spaces around them.
Shapland and Vagg contended, for instance, that there is often a continuous, active, and informed process
of surveillance exercised by people on the ground; a process which is so discreet that it has escaped much
formal attention, and which meshes only haphazardly with the work of the police and other agencies. And
very similarly, Duneier laid bare the webs of informal control practised by homeless entrepreneurs selling
books and magazines from stalls on New York’s sidewalks. Far from posing a problem of deregulation,
they acted as palpable but subtle agents of order, looking after and protecting one another, and preserving
public stability.
Crime, power, and space

Surveillance has not always been construed as neutral or benign, and there have been debates about what
its newer forms might portend. Even its sponsors in government departments and criminal justice
agencies have spoken informally and privately about their anxiety that people are being encouraged to
become unduly fearful of crime and to retreat into private fastnesses. It began to be argued, especially by
those who followed Michel Foucault, that a ‘punitive city’ was in the making that, in Stan Cohen’s words,
there was ‘a deeper penetration of social control into the social body’ (1979a: 356) (and, Cohen would have
added privately, sociologists do not in the main look on social control with a favourable eye).
Some came to claim not only that there has been a move progressively to differentiate and elaborate the
distribution of controls in space, but also that there has been a proliferating surveillance of dangerous
areas, often conducted obliquely and with an increasingly advanced technology. Michel Foucault’s (1977)
dramatic simile of Jeremy Bentham’s model prison, the Panopticon, was to be put to massive use in
Page 18 of 47
criminology. Just as the Panopticon, or inspection house, was supposed to have permitted the unobserved
observation of many inmates around the bright, illuminated rim of a circular prison by the few guards in
its obscured centre, just as the uncertainty of unobserved observation worked to make the controlled
control themselves (see Semple 1993), so, Foucault and those who followed him wished to argue, modern
society is coming to exemplify the perfection of the automatic exercise of power through generalized
surveillance. The carceral society was a machine in which everyone was supposed to be caught (even, it
seems, the police, who may survey one another as well as the wider population (see The Times, 4 November
p. 32 1999)); relying as it does on diffuse control through ↵ unseen monitoring and the individualization and
‘interiorization’ of control (Gordon 1972)). Public space, it has been said, was becoming exposed to ever
more perfunctory, distant, and technologically driven policing by formal state agencies while control in
private and semi-private space (the space of the shopping malls, university campus, and theme park) was
itself becoming more dense, privatized, and widespread, placed in the hands of security guards and store
detectives, and reliant on electronic monitoring (Davis 1992b: 233; but see Welsh and Farrington 2002
which concluded that the introduction of CCTV appears to affect only the commission of motor thefts. All
other forms of crime were untouched).
A paradigmatic case study of oblique regulation was provided by Shearing and Stenning’s ethnography of
Disney World as a ‘private, quasi-feudal domain of control’ (1985: 347) that was comprehensively,
discreetly, and adeptly controlled by employees, extensive surveillance, the encouragement of self-
discipline, and the very configuration of physical space. The nature of crime and deviance itself can
undergo change in such a transformed environment: they are no longer always and everywhere so
markedly affronts to deep values but are, instead, very often breaches of what appear to be impersonal,
morally neutral, and technical controls (see Lianos and Douglas 2000: 270–1).
What also underlies much of that vision is a companion stress on the sociology of risk, a focus linked
importantly with the work of Ulrich Beck (although he had not himself written about crime (1992)). It has
been argued that people and groups are becoming significantly stratified by their exposure to risk and their
power to neutralize harm (but see O’Malley 2010, who argues that risk has always been with us. It is the
way in which it is regarded that has principally changed). The rich can afford private protection, the poor
cannot, and a new ecology emerges (Simon 1987). Phrased only slightly differently, and merged with the
newly burgeoning ideas about the pervasiveness of surveillance by machine and person (Gordon 1986–7
and Lyon 1994), those theories of risk suggest that controls are being applied by state and private
organizations, not on the basis of some moralistic conception of individual wrongdoing, but on a
foundation of the identification, classification, and management of groups categorized by their perceived
dangerousness (Feeley and Simon 1992; Simon and Feeley 1995; Simon 2007). Groups are becoming ever
more rigidly segregated in space, especially in countries like China and the United States: some being
confined to prison, semi-freedom under surveillance, or parole in the community; others (the more
affluent) retreating into their locked and gated communities, secure zones, private and ‘mass private’
spaces. There are new bifurcations of city space into a relatively uncontrolled ‘badlands’ occupied by the
poor and highly controlled ‘security bubbles’ inhabited by the rich. Geographical and social exclusion
thereby conspires to corral together populations of the unprotected, victimized, and victimizing—the
mentally disordered, the young, and the homeless—reinforcing both their vulnerability, stigmatization
and their propensities to offend (Carlen 1996; Hagan and McCarthy 1998).
Page 19 of 47
Radical Criminology
So far, control has been treated without much direct reference to the power, politics, and inequalities that
are its bedfellows. There was to be a relatively short-lived but active challenge to such quiescence from the
radical, new, or critical criminologies of the late 1960s and 1970s, criminologies that claimed their
p. 33 mandate in Marxism ( ↵ Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973), libertarianism (Douglas 1971), anarchism
(Kittrie 1971; Cohen 1985), or American populism (Quinney 1970), and whose ambitions pointed to the
need for political activism or praxis (Mathiesen 1974).
Crime control was said to be an oppressive and mystifying process that worked largely through legislation,
law-enforcement, and ideological stereotyping to preserve unequal class relations (Chambliss 1976; Box
1983). The radical political economy of crime sought chiefly to expose the hegemonic ideologies that
masked the ‘real’ nature of crime and repression in capitalist society. Most mundane offending, it was
argued, was actually less consequential than other social evils such as alienation, exploitation, pollution,
environmental damage or racism which received far too little attention (Scraton 1987). Much proletarian
crime should actually be redefined as a form of rebellion, redistributive class justice, or the possessive
individualism which resides at the heart of capitalist society. Criminal justice itself was engineered to
create visible crowds of working-class and black scapegoats who could deflect the public gaze away from
the more serious delicts of the rich and the more serious ills of a capitalism that was usually said to be in
terminal crisis. If the working class reacted in hostile fashion to the crime in their midst, then they were, in
effect, little more than the victims of a false consciousness which turned proletarian against proletarian,
black against black, inflated the importance of petty problems, and concealed the true nature of bourgeois
society. So construed, signification, the act of giving meaning, was either manipulative or misconceived, a
matter of giving and receiving incorrect and deformed interpretations of reality. Indeed, it was in the very
nature of subordination in a capitalist society that most people must be politically unenlightened about
power, crime control, and much else, and the task of the radical criminologist was to expose, denounce,
and demystify. It was concluded variously that crime was not a problem which the poor and their allies
should actually address (there were more important matters for Marxists to think about: Hirst 1975); that
the crime which should be analysed was the misconduct of the powerful (the wrong crimes and criminals
were being observed: Chapman 1967; Reiman 1990; Pearce and Tombs 1998); or that crime and its
problems would shrivel into insignificance as a criminogenic capitalism gave way to the tolerant diversity
of socialism (Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973). The crime and criminals that were thought chiefly to
warrant attention were the crimes of the powerful (Slapper and Tombs 1999) or those exceptional
examples of law-breaking that seemed to represent an incipient revolt against the state, and they
demanded cultivation as subjects of study, understanding, and possible politicization. Black prisoners, in
particular, were sometimes depicted, and could depict themselves, as prisoners of class or race wars
(Cleaver 1969). Prisons were the point of greatest state repression, and prison riots a possible spearhead of
revolution (Fitzgerald 1977).
In its early guise, radical criminology withered somewhat under a quadruple assault. In some places, and in
America especially (where it had never been firmly implanted), it ran foul of local and university politics,
and some criminology departments, such as that of the University of California at Berkeley, were closed
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down (see Crime and Social Justice Associates, 2014). More commonly, radical criminology did not lend
itself to the government-funded, policy-driven, ‘soft money’, empiricist research that had begun to
dominate schools of criminology in North America in the 1970s and 1980s (see Marshall 2002: 21)).
Second was the impact of the publication of mass victim surveys in the 1970s and 1980s which disclosed
both the extent of working-class victimization and the manner in which it stemmed from intra-class,
p. 34 rather than inter-class, criminality. It was evident ↵ that crime was a manifest problem for the working
class, adding immeasurably to their burdens, and difficult to dismiss as an ideological distraction (David
Downes 1966 called it a regressive tax on the poor). In the wake of the first British crime survey (Hough
and Mayhew 1983), two prominent radical criminologists came frankly to concede that they had believed
that ‘property offences [had been] directed solely against the bourgeoisie and that violence against the
person [had been] carried out by amateur Robin Hoods in the course of their righteous attempts to
redistribute wealth. All of this [was], alas, untrue’ (Lea and Young 1984: 262).
Third was the critique launched from within the left by a new generation of feminist scholars who asserted
that the victimization of women was no slight affair or ideological diversion, and that rape, sexual assault,
child abuse, and domestic violence should be taken very seriously indeed (Smart 1977). Not only had the
female criminal been neglected, they said, but so had the female victim, and it would not do to wait until
the revolution for matters to be put right. Once more, a number of radical criminologists gave ground.
There had been, Jones, Maclean, and Young observed, ‘a general tendency in radical thought to idealize
their historical subject (in this case the working class) and to play down intra-group conflict, blemishes
and social disorganization. But the power of the feminist case resulted in a sort of cognitive schizophrenia
amongst radicals’ (Jones et al. 1986: 3).
Next, there was a critique launched belatedly from non-feminist criminologists who resisted the
imperious claims of radical criminology to be the lone ‘fully social theory of crime’ (Downes and Rock
1979; Inciardi 1980). Marxist and radical theories of crime, they argued, lacked a comparative emphasis so
that all capitalist societies were treated essentially and misleadingly as if they were the same; and they
neglected crime in ‘non-capitalist’ and ‘pre-capitalist’ societies and crime in ‘socialist’ societies. There
was a naivety about the expectation that crime would wither away as the state itself disappeared after the
revolution. There was a trust in a socialist justice which could actually be very repressive indeed (socialist
legality, Stan Cohen mused, tends to mean a ‘model of social control in which offenders wearing
sandwich-boards listing their crimes before a crowd which shouts “Down with the counter-
revolutionaries!” and are then led away to be publicly shot’ (1979b: 44)). And there was an irresponsibility
about radical arguments, such as those of Thomas Mathiesen (1974), that ‘reformism’ would only
strengthen the grip of the capitalist system.
The radicals again gave ground and ‘Left Realism’ was to be the outcome, represented once again by Jock
Young, one of its revisionist parents, as a novel fusion of analyses of crime in the vein of anomie theory,
radical criminology and symbolic interactionism (Young 1997: 484). It was ‘realist’ because, newly
refusing to accept the so-called ‘left idealists’ dismissal of depictions of crime as an ideological trick, it
acknowledged the practical force of crime in society and its especially heavy impact on the poor, minority
ethnic people, and women. It was ‘left’ because it focused descriptively and politically on the structural
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inequalities of class, race, and gender. Its project was to examine patterns of crime and control as they
emerged out of what Young came to call the ‘square of crime’, a field of forces dominated by the state, the
victim, the offender, and the public.
Left Realism was to follow the earlier radical criminologists’ injunction to act, but action was now as much
in the service of more effective and practical policing and crime reduction strategies as in the cause of
radical social change. Left Realists joined the formerly disparaged ‘administrative criminologists’ working
in and for the (usually local) state to work on situationally based projects to prevent crime and the fear of
p. 35 crime ↵ (see Matthews and Young 1992). They designed new and confusing configurations of streets to
make it more difficult for ‘kerb-crawlers’ to cruise in search of prostitutes. They assisted in the
rehabilitation of dilapidated housing estates. Were it not for their theoretical preambles, it became difficult
to distinguish between their programmes, on the one hand, and those of the Home Office or other
government departments at the time, on the other.
If Left Realism was radical criminology’s praxis, its scholarship continued to develop in different
directions. Radical criminology never disappeared (see, for example, Hodgson 2020) but it diversified as a
number of its exponents began to turn towards studies of current (Cohen 1985; Simon 1993) and historical
forms of social control (see Scull 1979), initially under the influence of E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm
and then under that of Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Ulrich Beck. Others responded to the wider
theories that began to dominate sociology proper in the 1980s and 1990s, incorporating them to write
about crime, postmodernism (or late modernity), risk and globalization, and producing what were, in
effect, examples of the ‘fully social theory’ promised by the new criminologists back in 1973. Above all,
perhaps, that promise was to be realized by books published in 1999 by two of the original troika of new
criminologists: Ian Taylor’s Crime in Context and Jock Young’s The Exclusive Society; and one in 2007 by Jock
Young, The Vertigo of Late Modernity.
Crime in Context catalogues a series of crises flowing from transitions in the political and economic
structures of society, and the manner in which they impinged upon poverty, class, gender, race, and the
family to affect the national and transnational environments of crime and control. The Exclusive Society was
subtitled ‘Social Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity’, and its focus was more narrow,
concentrating upon the social and political consequences of what then seemed to be the inexorable and
vast increases in crime in the West. Crime was held by Young to be no longer dismissed as abnormal, the
property of a pathological few who could be restored therapeutically to the security of a moral community
at one with itself, but normal, the actions of a significant, obdurate minority of Others who were excluded
and demonized in a world newly insecure, fractured, and preoccupied with problems of risk and danger.
More recently, late modernity was portrayed in The Vertigo of Late Modernity as an epoch of flux, mobility
and shifting boundaries; where identities, careers and histories were unstable, marked by hybridization
and a constant traffic of ideas across the frontiers of groups; an epoch where reward appeared arbitrary
and chaotic, community was weakened, class identity and biographical narratives were fractured; and
where the prosperity of a seemingly contented middle class was dependent on the work of a largely
unacknowledged, undervalued, humiliated, and underpaid body of people labouring at home and overseas
to form a new ‘underclass’ which became publicly visible only through a stigmatizing process of ‘othering’
and demonization as deviant, shiftless and dependent. Crime itself was then presented, not so much as the
work of a reasoning criminal, but as an angry, expressive riposte launched by the impoverished,
Page 22 of 47
dishonoured, powerless, and dispossessed, and it worked through a reassertion of control, selfhood, and
violence, an ‘othering’, Jock Young said, of the ‘otherers’ who so devalued the poor. Crime’s new
companion, terrorism, was but a radical extension of such a project of existential affirmation. What
perhaps these accounts did not accommodate with any success, however, and following in the footsteps of
Lynn McDonald (1982) who had noted a similar claim made about an earlier time, was a steady,
concomitant decline in crime rates across the northern world which seemed to undermine what was then
being said (see Zimring 2007).
p. 36 Functionalist Criminology
Another, apparently dissimilar but substantially complementary, theory presented deviance and control as
forces that worked discreetly to maintain social order. Functionalism was a theory of social systems or
wholes, developed at the beginning of the twentieth century within a social anthropology grown tired of
speculative accounts of the origins and evolution of societies which lacked a written history to support
them, and dedicated to what was seen to be the scientific pursuit of intellectual problems. It was argued
that the business of a social science necessitated moving enquiry beyond the reach of common sense or lay
knowledge to an examination of the unintended, objective consequences of action that were visible only to
the trained eye.
There were three clear implications. First, what ordinary people thought they were doing could be very
different from what they actually achieved. The functionalist was preoccupied only with what were
thought to be objective outcomes, and people’s own accounts of action held little interest. Secondly, the
functionalist looked at the impact made by institution upon institution, structure upon structure, in
societies that were remarkable for their capacity to persist over time and beyond the lives of the individuals
who composed them. Thirdly, those consequences, viewed as a totality, constituted a system in which, it
was thought, not only did the parts affect one another and the whole, but also, the whole affected them in
return. To be sure, some institutions were relatively detached, but functionalists would have argued that
the alternative proposition—that social phenomena lack all influence upon one another, that there was no
functional reciprocity between them—was conceptually insupportable. Systemic interrelations were an
analytic a priori, a matter of self-evidence so compelling that Kingsley Davis could argue at one point that
‘we are all functionalists now’ (Davis 1959).
There have been very few dedicated functionalist criminologists (see Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990: 78).
Functionalists tend to deal with the workings of large systems rather than with their lesser attributes such
as crime. But crime and deviance did supply a particularly intriguing laboratory for thought experiments
about social order. It was easy enough to contend that religion or education shaped social cohesion, but
how much harder it would be to show that crime succeeded in doing so. After all, ‘everyone knew’ that
crime undermined social order. It followed that functionalists occasionally found it tempting to try to
confound common sense by showing that, to the contrary, the seemingly recalcitrant case of crime could
be shown scientifically to contribute to the functioning of the social system. From time to time, therefore,
they wrote about crime to demonstrate the potency of their theory. Only one functionalist, its grand
Page 23 of 47
master, Talcott Parsons, ever made the obvious, and therefore intellectually unsatisfying, point that crime
could be what was called ‘dysfunctional’ or injurious to the social system as it was then constituted
(Parsons 1951). Everyone else asserted that crime actually worked mysteriously to support it.
The result was to be a somewhat disparate collection of papers documenting the multiple functions of
deviance: Kingsley Davis showed that prostitution bolstered monogamy by providing an unemotional,
impersonal, and unthreatening release for the sexual energy of the promiscuous married male (Davis 1937)
(Mary McIntosh once wondered what the promiscuous married female was supposed to do about her
sexual energy); Ned Polsky made much the same claim for pornography (Polsky 1967); Daniel Bell showed
that racketeering provided ‘queer ladders of success’ and political and social stability for the workers
p. 37 labouring in the New York docks (1960); Émile Durkheim (1964) and ↵ George Herbert Mead (1918)
contended that the formal rituals of trial and punishment enhanced social solidarity and consolidated
moral boundaries; and, more complexly, Mary Douglas (1966), Kai Erikson (1966), Robert Scott (1972),
and others argued that deviance offered social systems a dialectical or educational tool for the clarification
and management of threats, ambiguities, and anomalies in classification systems. The list could be
extended, but all the arguments tended to one end: what appeared, on the surface, to undermine social
order accomplished the very reverse. A sociological counterpart of the invisible hand transmuted deviance
into a force for the cohesion and permanence of community.
Functionalism was to be discarded by many criminologists in time: it smacked too much of teleology (the
doctrine that effects can work retrospectively to act as the causes of events); it defied rigorous empirical
investigation (see Cotterrell 1999: 75); and, for some, more politically driven criminologists, it represented
a form of Panglossian conservatism that championed the status quo. But its ghost lingers on. Any who
would argue that, contrary to appearances, crime and deviance buttress social order; any who argue for the
study of seamless systems; any who argue that the sociologist should mistrust people’s own accounts of
their actions; any who insist that social science is the study of unintended consequences; must share
something of the functionalist’s standpoint. Anomie theories that represented crime as the system-
stabilizing, unintended consequence of strains in the social order are one quite explicit example (see
Merton 1995): deviance in that guise becomes the patterned adjustments that defuse an otherwise
disruptive conflict and reconcile people to disadvantage (although, as I have argued, the theories can also
envisage conditions in which crime becomes ‘system-threatening’). Anomie theories were, after all, the
direct offspring of functionalism, Merton himself being Parson’s heir. But less explicitly and rather
ironically, some versions of radical criminology provide another example. More than one criminologist has
argued that crime, deviance, and control were necessary for the survival of capitalism (Stinchcombe 1968).
Again, although they did not talk explicitly of ‘function’, the neo-Marxists, Hall et al. (1978), Pearce (1976),
and Reiman (1990), were recognizably functionalist in their treatment of the criminal justice system’s
production of visible and scapegoated roles for the proletarian criminal, roles that attracted public anxiety
and outrage, diverted anger away from the state, emasculated political opposition, and preserved
capitalism (Pearce and Tombs 1998). Consider, for example, Ferrell and Sanders’s observation that ‘the
simplistic criminogenic models at the core of … constructed moral panics … deflect attention from larger
and more complex political problems like economic and ethnic inequality, and the alienation of young
people and creative workers from confining institutions’ (1995: 10). What could be more transparently
functionalist than that?
Page 24 of 47
Signification
Labelling theory
Perhaps the only other outstanding big criminological idea is signification, the interpretive practice that
orders social life. There has been an enduring strain of analysis, linked most particularly to symbolic
interactionism, ethnomethodology and phenomenology, which insists that people do not, and cannot,
respond immediately, uncritically, and passively to the world ‘as it is’. Rather they respond to their ideas of
the world, and the business of sociology is to capture, understand, and reproduce those ideas; examine
p. 38 ↵ their interaction with one another; and analyse the processes and structures that generated them.
Sociology becomes the study of people, relations, and practices as symbolic and symbolizing processes.
Central to that idea is reflexivity, the capacity of consciousness to turn back on and translate itself into its
own object. People are able to think about themselves, define themselves in various ways, toy with
different identities, and project themselves imaginatively into any manner of contrived situation. They can
view themselves vicariously by inferring the reactions of ‘significant others’, and, in so ‘taking the role of
the other’, move symbolically to a distance outside themselves to inspect how they might appear.
Elaborating action through ‘significant gestures’, the symbolic projection of acts and identities into an
imagined future, they can anticipate the likely responses of others, and tailor their own prospective acts to
accommodate them (Mead 1934). In all this, social worlds are compacted symbolically into the phrasing of
action, and the chief medium that makes that possible is language.
Language is held to objectify, stabilize, universalize, and extend meaning. Used in the anticipation of an
act, it permits people to be both their own subject and object, speaker and thing spoken about, ‘I’ and ‘me’,
opening up the mind to reflective action. Conferring names, it enables people to impart moral and social
meanings to their own and others’ motives (Mills 1940; Sykes and Matza 1957; Scott and Lyman 1970),
intentions, and identities. It will matter a great deal if someone is defined as eccentric, erratic, or mad; a
drinker, a drunk, or an alcoholic; a lovelorn admirer or a stalker; a freedom fighter or a terrorist; a ‘bit of a
lad’ or a delinquent. Consequences flow from naming, consequences that affect not only how one regards
oneself and one’s position in the world, but also how one may be treated by others. Naming creates a self.
Transposed to the study of crime and deviance, symbolic interactionism and phenomenology gave
prominence to the processes by which deviant acts and identities are constructed, interpreted, judged, and
controlled (Katz 1988). A core pair of articles was Howard Becker’s ‘Becoming a Marihuana User’ and
‘Marihuana Use and Social Control’, both reprinted in Outsiders (1963), and both describing the patterned
sequence of steps that could shape the experience, moral character, and fate of one who began to smoke
marihuana. Becoming a marihuana user was a tentative process, developing stage by stage, which required
the user satisfactorily to learn, master, and interpret techniques, neutralize negative moral images of use
and users, and succeed in disguising signs of use in the presence of those who might disapprove. It became
paradigmatic.
Page 25 of 47
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
man in den Stand gesetzt wurde, dieselben in kupferne Matrizen
einzutreiben. Kurz: hat auch Schöffer die Schriftgiesserei nicht
erfunden, so bleibt ihm doch das grosse Verdienst, sie in die Bahn
gelenkt zu haben, die sie bis jetzt nicht verlassen hat. Auch die
Verbesserung der Schwärze durch Zusatz von Firnis soll sein Werk
gewesen sein.
Dass die Verdienste Schöffers nicht klein sein konnten, lässt

sich schon daraus schliessen, dass der angesehene und
wohlhabende Fust kein Bedenken trug, dem armen Schreiber seine
Tochter Christine zur Ehefrau zu geben. Diese Tüchtigkeit und
dieses Zutrauen, welches Fust in Schöffer setzte, sollten leider
Gutenberg verderblich werden, denn sie gaben Fust die Zuversicht,
feindlich gegen ihn aufzutreten. Für Schöffers Beteiligung bei diesen
Schritten liegt kein Beweis vor; zweideutig jedoch hat er sich
wenigstens insofern gezeigt, als er später auf Kosten Gutenbergs
sich die Ehre der Erfindung anzueignen versuchte.
Mag nun sein, dass die Auslagen zu gross

Fust klagt gegen
und die Auflagen zu klein, oder, dass Gutenberg Gutenberg.
in der praktischen Geschäftsführung nicht der
rechte Mann gewesen, die neue Kunst hatte trotz aller technischen
Fortschritte keinen finanziellen Erfolg gehabt. Es kam soweit, dass
Fust Klage gegen Gutenberg erhob. Er forderte:
Erstes eingeschossenes Kapital: 800 Goldgulden

Zinsen darauf: 250 "
Zweites Kapital: 800 "
Zinsen darauf: 140 "
Zins vom Zins: 36 "
zusammen 2026 Goldgulden.
Gutenberg machte dagegen geltend, 1) dass Zinsen von den
800 Gulden zwar in dem Dokument festgestellt seien, dass aber
Fust versprochen habe, solche nicht zu erheben; 2) dass die ersten
800 Gulden nicht voll eingezahlt gewesen; 3) dass er in Betreff der
zweiten 800 Gulden zwar die Verantwortung, nicht aber Zinsen zu
tragen habe; 4) dass die zugesagten 300 Gulden jährliches
Betriebskapital nicht entrichtet worden seien. Hiergegen wird Fust
der Eid auferlegt, welchen er leistet, und Gutenberg, der nicht
persönlich erschienen war, wird am 6. Nov. 1455 zur Zahlung
verurteilt. Auf Fusts Verlangen stellte der Kleriker und Notar Ulrich
Helmasperger eine Urkunde über die Verhandlung auf, welche ein
wichtiges Dokument in der Erfindungsgeschichte bildet.
Der Vertrag zwischen Gutenberg und Fust

Trennung Guten-
hatte somit seine Endschaft erreicht; wie sich bergs und Fusts.
jedoch die schliessliche Auseinandersetzung
gestaltet hat, ist nicht bekannt. Aus später erschienenen
Druckwerken geht hervor, dass die Typen der noch nicht vollendeten
42zeiligen Bibel auf Fust übergegangen sind, dass Gutenberg
dagegen die Typen der 36zeiligen behielt. Denn nach dem Tode
Fusts druckte sein Nachfolger Peter Schöffer mit der zuerst
erwähnten Schrift einen Donat, während gegen Ende des Jahres
1456 mit den zuletzt genannten Typen ein Kalender auf das Jahr
1457 fertiggestellt wurde.
Gutenbergs Mut war durch den ihm

Gutenbergs
beigebrachten Schlag nicht erschüttert, und es weitere Wirk-
scheint ihm nicht einmal schwer geworden zu samkeit.
sein, wieder in Besitz von Betriebsmitteln zu
kommen. Zwar wurde auch diesmal eine Verpfändung notwendig,
aber sein Gläubiger Conrad Humery, „der Stadt Mainz Pfaff und
Jurist“, war ein verständiger, Gutenberg wohlgesinnter Mann.
Gutenberg fertigte ganz neue Typen an und druckte mit diesen
zuerst zwei kleine undatierte Schriften: Matthäus de Cracovia,
tractatus racionis et consciencie, 22 Blatt in Quarto, und Thomas de
Aquino, Summa de articulis fidei, 12 Blatt in Quarto. Dann aber
brachte er im Jahre 1460 mit der neuen Schrift ein Riesenwerk
zustande, einen Folianten von 373 zweispaltig und eng gedruckten
Blättern (ohne Signatur, Kustoden und Seitenzahlen). Diese
bedeutende Leistung war die berühmte erste Ausgabe des Joannis
de Janua: Summa quae vocatur Catholicon. Den Anfang bildete eine
lateinische Grammatik in vier Abteilungen (64 Blatt), dann folgt als
fünfter Teil ein lateinisches Lexikon. Am Ende des Buchstaben I
(Blatt 189 rechte Seite) steht gedruckt das Wort sequitur und
darunter geschrieben in alio folio; die Rückseite des Blattes ist weiss
gelassen und somit konnte das Werk in zwei Bände gebunden
werden.
Zum Schluss des Werkes ergreift der

Gutenbergs ein-
Erfinder selbst, jedoch ohne seinen Namen zu zige Ansprache.
nennen, zum ersten, zugleich zum letzten male
das Wort. Die Schlussschrift (Kolophon) ist lateinisch und lautet
übersetzt[4]:
„Unter dem Beistande des Allerhöchsten, auf dessen Wink die Zungen der
Kinder beredt werden und der oft den Kleinen offenbart, was er den Weisen
verbirgt, ist dieses vortreffliche Buch Catholicon im Jahre der Menschwerdung
des Herrn mcccclx in der guten, der ruhmwürdigen deutschen Nation
angehörigen Stadt Mainz, welche die Gnade Gottes mit so hehrem
Geisteslichte und freiem Gnadengeschenke den anderen Völkern der Erde
vorzuziehen und zu verherrlichen gewürdigt hat, gedruckt und zustande
gebracht worden, und zwar nicht mittels des Rohres, des Griffels oder der
Feder, sondern durch das bewundernswerte Zusammenpassen, Verhältnis und
Ebenmass der Patronen und Formen[5].“
So spricht sich der Erfinder selbst über die Erfindung aus. Es ist
kaum anzunehmen, dass er sich nur aus Bescheidenheit oder aus
falschem Stolz nicht genannt haben sollte, oder gar aus Verdruss,
weil seine Leistungen durch die Schöffers überflügelt waren. Wir
müssen leider eher glauben, dass derjenige, der für andere die
Goldminen entdeckt hatte, nicht in der Lage war, seinen Namen
nennen zu dürfen, mögen nun die Gründe in einem noch nicht
geregelten Verhältnis zu Fust oder in seiner neuen Stellung zu
Humery oder sonst wo gelegen haben.
Aus dem Jahre 1461 haben wir noch einen

Gutenberg in
Ablassbrief, mit den Typen des Catholicons Eltville.
gedruckt. Dann kam das für Mainz und die junge
Kunst so verhängnisvolle Jahr 1462. Der Erzbischof von Mainz,
Diether, Graf zu Isenburg, war von Kaiser und Papst abgesetzt. Die
Domherren wählten den Grafen Adolf von Nassau; die Bürger aber
nahmen Partei für Diether. In der Nacht vom 27. zum 28. Oktober
1462 erstürmte Adolf die Stadt. Hunderte von Bürgern fielen, andere
wurden ausgeplündert und vertrieben und ihre Häuser verwüstet.
Dies Schicksal traf auch die Offizin Fust und Schöffers. Mainz war in
wenigen Tagen entvölkert und seiner Privilegien beraubt. Handel und
Gewerbe lagen auf lange darnieder und von einer weiteren
Ausdehnung der Buchdruckereien in Mainz konnte vorläufig keine
Rede sein. Obwohl die Offizin Gutenbergs verschont geblieben war,
da der Besitzer zum Grafen hielt, so musste er doch mit seiner
Druckerei auswandern. Er führte dieselbe nach Eltville, der Residenz
Adolfs, über.
Am 15. Januar 1465 wurde er zum

Gutenberg tritt
Hofdienstmann des Grafen auf Lebenszeit in Hofdienst.
ernannt. Als solcher hatte er jährlich die
Hofkleidung eines Edlen, für sein Haus zwanzig Malter Korn und
zwei Fuder Wein steuerfrei. Wachdienst, Einschätzung u. s. w. ward
ihm auf immer erlassen. Da die Hofdienstmänner für ihre Person
freien Tisch am Hoflager und für ihre Pferde Futter erhielten, so
dürfen wir uns Gutenberg wenigstens nicht als von materiellen
Sorgen zu seinem Lebensende gequält vorstellen. Seine Offizin
hatte er pachtweise seinen Verwandten Heinrich und Nikolaus
Bechtermünze überlassen.
Gutenberg starb in der Zeit zwischen dem

Gutenbergs
24. Nov. 1467 und dem 24. Febr. 1468 und wurde Tod.
aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach in der
Dominikanerkirche[6] zu Mainz begraben. Diese ging in der Nacht
vom 20. zum 21. Juli 1793 bei der Beschiessung von Mainz durch
die Franzosen in Flammen auf und auch die an derselben Stelle
errichtete Fruchthalle brannte (1875) nieder.
Am 24. Febr. 1468 bescheinigt Humery, dass

Fortführung des
der Graf ihm den Vorrat der zu Gutenbergs Geschäfts durch
Nachlass gehörenden Formen, Buchstaben und Bechtermünze.
Werkzeuge verabfolgt habe. Gleichzeitig
verpflichtet sich Humery, den betreffenden Apparat nur in der Stadt
Mainz zu benutzen. Sollte er jedoch denselben verkaufen und ein
Mainzer Bürger soviel dafür geben wollen, wie ein Fremder, dann
gebühre dem Mainzer der Vorzug. Aus dieser Fürsorge Adolfs muss
man schliessen, dass er Gutenberg sehr zugethan und dass dessen
Aufnahme an seinem Hofe eine Belohnung gewesen, entweder für
die Verdienste Gutenbergs im allgemeinen oder um ihn selbst
insbesondere.
Die Offizin ging in den vollständigen Besitz des Nikolaus
Bechtermünze über, dessen Bruder Heinrich bereits 1467
verstorben war. Nikolaus setzte das Geschäft bis 1477 in Verbindung
mit einem anderen Patrizier Wigand Spiess von Ortenberg fort.
Gegen das neu aufgeblühte Geschäft Fust und Schöffers
aufzukommen mag wohl schwer gewesen sein. Die ersten Drucke
der neuen Offizin waren mit den Typen des Catholicons ausgeführt.
Nach dem Tode des Nikolaus überliessen

Weitere Schick-
seine Erben das sämtliche Material der sale der Offizin
Brüderschaft des gemeinsamen Lebens zu Gutenbergs.
Marienthal in der Nähe von Eltville. Von diesen
kam es 1508 an Fr. Hewmann aus Nürnberg, Buchdrucker im
Kirschgarten zu Mainz. Beim genauen Durchgehen eines Buches
aus dessen Offizin soll die älteste Type Gutenbergs aus den
Ablassbriefen von 1454 und 1455 und der 36zeiligen Bibel wieder
erkannt worden sein, während die Nachfolger Gutenbergs bis dahin
von dessen Typen nur die des Catholicons benutzt hatten[7].
Hiermit nehmen wir Abschied von Gutenberg

Gutenbergs
und dessen Offizin. Das erste äussere Andenken Andenken.
an ihn wurde 1504 von Ivo Wittig gestiftet und
bestand in einem Denkstein im Hofe „Zum Gutenberg“. Seitdem
hatte Mainz seinen grossen Bürger ganz vergessen und die
typographischen Schätze von Mainz waren in ausgedehntester
Weise verschleudert. Die Stadt musste die Demütigung erleben,
dass der französische Präfekt Jeanbon-St.-André 1804 den ersten
Vorschlag machte, Gutenberg ein Denkmal zu setzen, zu dem ganz
Europa beitragen sollte, und dass Napoleon im Sept. 1804 in Mainz
dekretierte, dass ein grosser Gutenbergplatz geschaffen werden
sollte. Es blieb allerdings beim Dekret. Erst die mit vielem Pomp,
1821, in Haarlem begangene vierte Säkularfeier der, von den
Holländern für sich in Anspruch genommenen Erfindung der
Buchdruckerkunst war imstande Gutenbergs Vaterstadt aufzurütteln.
Die Kasinogesellschaft liess ihrem neu eingeweihten Hause den
ursprünglichen Namen „Zum Gutenberg“ wiedergeben und eine
goldene Inschrift über das Eingangsthor setzen. Am 24. Oktb. 1824
folgte ein Denkstein im Garten. Im Hofe selbst stiftete der
Kunstverein ein Standbild in Sandstein, den „Ritter“ Gutenberg, eine
Satzform haltend, darstellend.
Im Jahre 1831 erging ein Aufruf „an die

Die Denkmäler
gebildete Welt“ zur Errichtung eines erhabenen Gutenbergs.
Monuments zur Säkular-Feier der
Buchdruckerkunst 1836![8] Es wurde eine Aufforderung an die
Künstler der Plastik erlassen, Entwürfe einzusenden, „um dann das
beste aus jedem zu benutzen“. Thorwaldsen erklärte 1832 die
Ausführung eines, für den Erzguss berechneten Modells ohne
Entgelt übernehmen zu wollen, jedoch ohne Konkurrenz. Der
Vorschlag wurde angenommen und Crozatier in Paris mit dem Guss
betraut. Die feierliche Einweihung fand am 17. Aug. 1837 statt[9].
Seit dem 24. Juni 1840 besitzt auch Strassburg auf dem
Gutenbergsplatz ein Standbild des Erfinders, von David modelliert
und von Soyez & Ingé in Paris gegossen. Ein drittes schönes
Denkmal von Herrn von der Launitz in Frankfurt a. M. zeigt
Gutenberg, Fust und Schöffer in einer Einigkeit, wie sie bei ihren
Lebzeiten so sehr erwünscht gewesen wäre, die jedoch auf dem
Denkmal fast wie eine Satire aussieht.
„Alles zusammengenommen“, so sagt Dr. van der Linde,

„existiert noch kein der Erfindung der Typographie entsprechendes
Monument. Gleichwie das nächste Jahrhundert bei seiner
Säkularfeier den schlüpfrigen Boden der Sage zu verlassen und sich
auf den Felsen der Geschichte zu stellen, das heisst, das erste
halbe Jahrtausend der Typographie
1450-1950
zu feiern hat, so errichte auch das neu entstandene Deutsche

Reich entweder in seiner politischen Hauptstadt Berlin oder in
seiner typographischen Hauptstadt Leipzig ein grossartiges, alle
Kleinkrämerei beschämendes Gutenberg-Monument.“
[1] „Mazarinsche“, weil das erste Exemplar in der Bibliothek des

Kardinal Mazarin entdeckt wurde; „Schellhornsche“, weil der
Superintendent Schellhorn besonders bemüht war, derselben ihr
Recht als ein Werk Gutenbergs zu wahren.
[2] Exemplare besitzen Leipzig, Jena, Stuttgart, Wolfenbüttel.
[3] H. Künzel, Peter Schöffer von Gernsheim, der Miterfinder der
Buchdruckerkunst. Darmstadt o. J.
[4] Nach J. Wetters Uebersetzung. Krit. Gesch. S. 319.
[5] Patrizen. — Matrizen.
[6] Dr. K. G. Bockenheimer, Gutenbergs Grabstätte. Mainz
1876.
[7] Henri Helbig, Une découverte pour l'histoire de l'imprimerie.
Bruxelles 1855.
[8] Diese Jahreszahl war eine Marotte von dem um das Andenken
und die Ehrenrettung Gutenbergs so verdienten A. C. A. Schaab,
die er selbst als solche anerkannte, aber trotzdem aufrecht hielt.
[9] Ausführlicheres über die Denkmal-Angelegenheit, die
Inaugurationsfeier und die vierhundertjährige Feier der Erfindung
1840 ist in Meyers „Journal der Buchdruckerkunst“, Jahrgang
1836 und 1840, enthalten.
III. KAPITEL. [←]
DIE VERBREITUNG DER BUCHDRUCKERKUNST IN

DEUTSCHLAND.
Schnelle Verbreitung der Kunst. Die Nachfolger Gutenbergs in Mainz. Peter

Schöffer und seine Nachkommen. Ulm. Beromünster. Basel. Bamberg,
Albrecht Pfister. Augsburg. Nürnberg. Wien. Der Norden: Köln, Münster,
Magdeburg, Leipzig.
S ist eins der Hauptwunder der

Art der Verbrei-
überhaupt wunderbaren Geschichte tung der Kunst.
der Buchdruckerkunst, dass sie sich in
einer verhältnismässig so kurzen Zeit von 1455-1475
beinahe über das ganze zivilisierte Europa verbreitete. Zwar liegt es
auf der Hand, dass eine so wichtige Erfindung, nachdem sie einmal
in den ersten Erzeugnissen der Presse ans Licht getreten war, auch
von Anderen erfasst werden und, durch kein Gesetz geschützt,
sofort Nachahmung finden würde. Vergleichen wir jedoch ihr
schnelles Vordringen mit dem Gang der grossen Erfindungen der
neueren Zeit, z. B. der Gasbeleuchtung oder der Eisenbahnen, so
wird man finden, dass letztere, obwohl durch viele mitwirkende
Umstände unterstützt, sich nicht so schnell Bahn gebrochen haben
wie die Buchdruckerkunst.
Und wie geschah dieses Wunder?
Zu einer Zeit, wo das Reisen ein so beschwerliches und

gefahrvolles Unternehmen war, wie wir es uns jetzt nicht mehr recht
vorstellen können, bahnten ausdauernde deutsche Arbeiter, die
unermüdlichen Pioniere der Erfindung, sich ihren Weg über die
weiten Gefilde Deutschlands und Frankreichs, ja überschritten die
Alpen und die Pyrenäen, um die Fahne der neuen Kunst in fremden
Ländern aufzupflanzen. Es war, als ob Gutenberg ihnen einen
unwiderstehlichen Talisman vermacht hätte, durch welchen
Deutschland bestimmt wurde, die Wiege der Reformation zu werden
und den Weg für jegliche Art des Fortschrittes im Vaterlande sowohl
wie in fremden Ländern zu ebnen.
War auch die Absicht, den Lebensunterhalt zu verdienen, die

erste Triebfeder der Jünger Gutenbergs gewesen, so ist doch die
Unermüdlichkeit, mit der sie, das Geheimnis der neuen Kunst mit
sich führend, nach den fernsten Teilen Europas drangen, der
höchsten Bewunderung wert. Ein gewisser berechtigter Künstlerstolz
und ein achtungswerter Ehrgeiz erwarben ihnen Zuneigung und
Vertrauen, wo sie erschienen. Mit Energie verfolgten sie ihr Ziel ohne
Rücksicht auf Hindernisse und Gefahren, als furchtlose Apostel und
prädestinierte Verbreiter eines neuen Glaubens, von dem sie
durchdrungen und begeistert waren[1].
Folgen wir nun diesen begeisterten Jüngern auf ihren Wegen in

Deutschland und in den fremden Ländern bis zum Schluss des
Jahrhunderts, nachdem wir erst Kenntnis von dem Fortschreiten der
Druckerei von Fust und Schöffer genommen.
Im Besitz des neuen Gutenbergschen

Materials und der genügenden Geldmittel, mit der Fust und
Schöffers Offizin
technischen Tüchtigkeit verbunden, gelang es
in Mainz.
bald Fust und Schöffer, den Erfinder der Kunst zu
überflügeln und nach der kurzen Zeit von noch nicht zwei Jahren
eine grossartige Leistung der Typographie zu vollenden: das
Psalterium von 1457. Dieses Druckwerk ist das erste, welches mit
der Angabe des Druckers, des Druckortes, der Jahreszahl und des
Datums (14. Aug. 1457) zugleich mit farbigen Initialen versehen ist,
während Seitenzahl, Signatur und Kustoden immer noch fehlen. Man
kennt 6 Exemplare, von denen drei 175, die anderen nur 143 resp.
136 Blätter zählen. Als unvollständig können letztere jedoch nicht
bezeichnet werden, da alle den Schlusssatz enthalten. Die
Auslassungen geschahen wahrscheinlich aus
Sparsamkeitsrücksichten, um nicht zu viel Pergament zu
verbrauchen[2].
Dreihundertundsechs grosse Initialen, in rot

Das Psalterium
und blau gedruckt, schmücken das kostbare, der von 1457.
starken Benutzung wegen nur auf Pergament
gedruckte Buch. Eine Hauptzierde ist das, den Text anfangende
Initial B. Der eigentliche Körper des Buchstabens bildet ein Viereck
von 9 cm Höhe und Breite, rechnet man jedoch die Ausläufer mit zur
Höhe, so beträgt diese 31 cm. Die Ornamentierung trägt einen
maurischen Charakter und ist wahrscheinlich einem spanischen
Manuskripte nachgebildet. Über die Herstellung dieser farbigen
Initialen sind die Kenner nicht einig. Die vollendete Genauigkeit des
Passens schliesst, bei den damaligen technischen Hülfsmitteln, den
Gedanken an einen Doppeldruck aus. Einige halten dafür, dass die
Holzschnitte in einzelne Teile nach den Farben zerlegt, diese einzeln
eingefärbt, und dann, in einander gefügt, mit Einem Druck hergestellt
sind, ganz in der Art des, zu Anfang unseres Jahrhunderts
entstandenen Congrevedruckes. Andere behaupten, die
Holzschnitte seien blind in den Bogen gepresst und nachher
ausgemalt und wollen überhaupt an vielen Stellen des Textes eine
Übermalung weniger gut gedruckter Sätze und Buchstaben entdeckt
haben. Wie dem auch sei, so ist die Ausführung der Doppelfärbung
eine technisch vollendete. Ohne Mängel ist das Werk dennoch nicht,
namentlich ist der Ausschluss ein unregelmässiger und haben die
Zeilen verschiedene Länge; auch Druckfehler, selbst so auffälliger
Natur wie spalmorum statt psalmorum in der ersten Zeile des
Schlusswortes, kommen vor. Merkwürdig ist es überhaupt, dass
gerade die Schlussworte der alten Drucke nicht selten Fehler
aufzuweisen haben; namentlich in Bezug auf Jahreszahlen, was
mitunter zu den sonderbarsten Schlussfolgerungen für die
Geschichte der Buchdruckerkunst Anlass gegeben hat.
Zugegeben, dass die ganze blendende Pracht der Erscheinung

die, an unseren nüchternen Buchdruck gewöhnten Beschauer
befangen gemacht und sie veranlasst hat, die Mängel zu übersehen
und alles für unübertrefflich zu halten, so kann man doch das
Psalterium nur als ein Wunderwerk ansehen, wenn man bedenkt,
dass es nur wenige Jahre nach der Erfindung erschien. Über diesen
so schnellen Aufschwung muss man staunen und bekennen, dass
die vier Jahrhunderte, die seit der Zeit vergangen sind, zwar in der
technischen Tüchtigkeit und Korrektheit des Materials grosse
Fortschritte gemacht haben, in der eigentlichen Kunst jedoch
verhältnismässig wenige; ja wir möchten bezweifeln, dass ein
Meisterwerk von heute nach 400 Jahren ein so jugendliches
Gepräge besitzen wird, wie das Psalterium heute zur Schau trägt.
Fasst man ausserdem ins Auge, dass dies Werk kaum 21 Monate
nach der Trennung Fust und Schöffers von Gutenberg ausgegeben
werden konnte, so liegt der Gedanke nahe, dass die Anfänge schon
aus der Zeit der Verbindung stammen, worauf auch die von der
sonstigen Schöfferschen abweichende Schrift und die
Ausstattungsart hinweisen.
Bereits im Jahre 1459 erschien eine zweite Auflage in etwas

vergrössertem Format, von der man zwölf Exemplare kennt. Eine
dritte folgte 1490; eine vierte 1502; die fünfte, aus dem Jahre 1516,
stammt aus der Offizin des jüngeren Schöffer.
Am 6. Oktober 1459 vollendeten Fust und

Weitere Druck-
Schöffer Durandi, Rationale divinorum officiorum, werke Fusts und
welches mit neuen Typen Schöffers gesetzt Schöffers.
wurde. Am 25. Juni 1460 erschienen:
Constitutiones Clementi V. Im Frühjahr 1462 druckten Fust und
Schöffer die erste politische Flugschrift in Brief- (Plakat-)Form, das
Manifest Diethers von Isenburg gegen Adolf von Nassau, welches
verhängnisvoll für ihre Druckerei werden sollte.
Das vierte der grossen Mainzer

Die 48zeilige
Druckmonumente (vorausgesetzt, dass die Bibel.
36zeilige Bibel das erste gewesen), war die, fünf
Jahre nach dem Psalterium erschienene „Biblia sacra latina“ („Die
48zeilige“ genannt). Dies Werk bildet zwei Foliobände von je 242
und 239 zweispaltigen Blättern zu 48 Zeilen. Die Exemplare sind
teils auf Pergament, teils auf Papier gedruckt; in die ersteren sind die
Initialen hineingemalt, in den letzteren fehlen sie gewöhnlich. Gegen
siebenzig Exemplare dieses Druckwerkes, welches sowohl durch
seine typographische Schönheit, wie auch als erste vollständig
datierte Bibel einen Hauptrang einnimmt, sind erhalten.
So wenig wie Gutenberg früher den Mut verlor, so wenig war es

mit Fust und Schöffer der Fall, als ihre Offizin in der Nacht vom
27.-28. Okt. bei der Eroberung von Mainz durch den Grafen Adolf
1462 verwüstet wurde und in Flammen aufging.
Schon 1465 ward die Herausgabe von

Fust † um 1466.
„Cicero de officiis“ unternommen, worin zum
erstenmale griechische Schriften, jedoch in Holz
geschnitten, verwendet wurden. Im Sommer 1466 war Fust, um den
Verkauf der Verlagswerke zu betreiben, nach Paris gereist. In dem
folgenden Jahre war er nicht mehr am Leben; wahrscheinlich ist er in
Paris, wo damals die Pest hauste, gestorben.
Schöffer setzte nun das Geschäft allein fort. Unter seinen

Druckwerken ist noch die am 24. Mai 1468 erschienene herrliche
Ausgabe von: „Justiniani Institutiones cum glossa“ zu nennen, in
deren Schlussschrift er sich selbst auf Kosten Gutenbergs etwas gar
zu grosssprecherisch hervorhebt.
Ob Schöffer auch das Verdienst gehabt hat,

Schwabacher
die erste rein deutsche Schrift, die Schrift.
„Schwabacher“, zu erfinden, lässt sich nicht
bestimmt ermitteln. Sie kommt zum erstenmale Erhard Rewich.
1486 in Mainz zum Vorschein in dem Werke
Bernhard von Breydenbachs „Heylige reyssen gen Jerusalem“, das
bei Erhard Rewich gedruckt wurde. Da Schöffer im J. 1492 die
Chronik der Sachsen mit dieser Schrift druckte und man von Rewich
aus Utrecht, der als Maler die Reisen Breydenbachs mitmachte und
auf dessen Buche als der Drucker genannt wird, in letzterer
Eigenschaft sonst nichts kennt, so dürfte die Annahme, dass Rewich
nur der Herausgeber und Peter Schöffer der Drucker und Erfinder
der Schrift sei, manches für sich haben. Andernfalls müsste man
annehmen, was ja nicht als einziger Fall dastehen würde, dass
Breydenbach als reicher Mann für dieses Werk eine eigene
Druckerei von Schöffer hätte einrichten lassen. Woher der Name
„Schwabacher“ stammt, ist ebenfalls nicht ermittelt. Die Anwendung
der Schrift als Werkschrift hält sich bis in die Mitte des xvi.
Jahrhunderts und man verwandte sie ebensowohl zu lateinischen
wie zu deutschen Texten. Später unterlag sie mancherlei
Änderungen, die sie der Fraktur näherführten. Als
Auszeichnungsschrift findet die Schwabacher noch bis gegen die
Mitte unseres Jahrhunderts Verwendung. Dann kam sie in
Vergessenheit, um in neuester Zeit wieder als Buchschrift
aufzuleben.
Bald hätte noch ein neuer schwerer Verlust

Schöffer in Paris.
das Schöffersche Geschäft getroffen. Das
Bücherlager, welches Fust nach Paris gebracht
hatte, wurde, nachdem Schöffers dortiger Faktor Hermann von
Stathoen ebenfalls 1475 gestorben war, als herrenloses Gut vom
Fiskus in Besitz genommen. Zur Wiedererlangung seines Eigentums
reiste Schöffer selbst nach Paris, erreichte auch glücklich sein Ziel
und ernannte Conrad Henlif[3] zu seinem Faktor. Schöffer kann
eigentlich als der erste Sortiments-Buchhändler betrachtet werden,
da er nicht allein mit seinen eigenen Druckwerken Handel trieb,
sondern auch die Erzeugnisse anderer Drucker verkaufte.
Von 1493 erlahmt seine Thätigkeit. Das

Schöffers Tod.
letzte Buch mit seinem Namen ist die schon
erwähnte vierte Auflage des Psalterium (21. Dez. 1502). Das erste
Buch mit dem Namen seines Sohnes ist vom 27. März 1503 datiert.
Sonach fällt der Todestag Schöffers, den man nicht genau kennt, in
diese Zwischenzeit. Am 9. Juni 1836 wurde das ihm von seiner
Vaterstadt Gernsheim errichtete Denkmal enthüllt.
Kehren wir auf unserer Wanderung[4] nach Strassburg.

STRASSBURG[5] zurück, so begegnen wir als Joh. Mentelin.
Heinr. Eggesteyn.
den ersten Buchdruckern dort Johann Mentelin
und Heinrich Eggesteyn. Von beiden existieren
Bibeln schon aus dem Jahre 1466; jedoch ohne Nennung des
Druckers und des Datums. Die ersten datierten Drucke aus
Strassburg gehören Eggesteyn an (1471) das: Decretum Gratiani. 2
Bde. fol. und die: Constitutiones Clementi V., ebenfalls in fol., in
welchen der Drucker sagt, er habe schon unzählige Bände gedruckt.
Dass auch Mentelin um diese Zeit eine grössere Thätigkeit
entwickelt hatte, geht schon daraus hervor, dass er 1471 einen —
den ersten überhaupt existierenden — Verlagskatalog auf einem
Oktavblatt von 19 Zeilen herausgab[6] und dass Kaiser Friedrich iii.
ihn schon 1468 auf Grund seiner Verdienste in den Adelstand erhob.
Eggesteyns Wirksamkeit endigt schon 1472; Mentelin starb 1478
und sein Begräbnis fand unter grossen Ehren im Dome statt[7].
Die ersten Strassburger Drucke sind weit unvollkommener als

die Mainzer, und weisen eine ganz abweichende Type auf. Es war
deshalb nicht so unnatürlich, dass man auf eine selbständige und
ältere Erfindung in Strassburg, der „Wiege der Kunst“, — jedoch wie
Schaab richtig bemerkt „eine Wiege ohne Kind“ —, schliessen
wollte.
Das benachbarte Basel, das später einen
bedeutenden Platz in der Geschichte der Die Schweiz.
Typographie behauptet, nahm die Kunst bald auf. Beromünster.
Allgemein wird jedoch nicht Basel, sondern der
Flecken BEROMÜNSTER im Canton Luzern, Basel.
eine Stunde von Sempach, wo am 9. Juli 1386

B. Richel.
Arnold Winkelried durch seine heldenmütige
Aufopferung „der Freiheit eine Gasse brach“, als
erster Druckort der Schweiz betrachtet. In dem dortigen berühmten
Chorherrenstift des Erzengels Michael lebte ein, durch seine
Gelehrsamkeit hervorragender Mann Elias Eliae (Helias Helie)[8] aus
dem berühmten Geschlecht derer von Laufen. Derselbe soll die
Buchdruckerkunst durch Ulr. Gering, der später als erster
Buchdrucker in Paris wirkte, nach der Schweiz gebracht haben und
dort als erstes Buch den Mamotrectus des Joh. Marchesini, ein
beliebtes, für höhere Schulen bestimmtes Wörterbuch der
schwersten Ausdrücke der Bibel, gedruckt haben. Hiergegen wird
jedoch Zweifel erhoben, und der Mamotrectus soll, inklusive der
Jahreszahl 1470, nur ein Nachdruck einer Mainzer Ausgabe aus
diesem Jahre sein und frühestens 1474 gedruckt, dagegen das 1472
erschienene: Roderici, Speculum vitæ humanæ das erste Buch aus
Beromünsters Presse sein. Um diese Zeit kam auch die Kunst nach
BASEL[9] durch Bartholdus de Basilea (eigentlich aus Hanau).
Das erste Buch mit Jahreszahl ist Magister Konrads Repertorium
vocabularum von 1473. Michael Wenssler und Fr. Biel druckten
die Briefe Gasparinis von Bergamo ohne Jahreszahl. Eine
handschriftliche Notiz in einem Exemplar in der Baseler
Stadtbibliothek bezeichnet es als im Jahre 1472 gekauft. Bernhard
Richel druckte bis 1482. Bekannt sind seine vier Ausgaben der
Vulgata. Aus seiner Offizin stammt auch die erste Ausgabe des
„Sachsenspiegels“, des von Eyke von Reppgowe zwischen 1215-
1230 verfassten deutschen Rechtsbuches.
Bekannt ist ebenfalls Johannes Bergmann von Olpe (1494-

1499), namentlich durch die mit 114 merkwürdigen Holzschnitten
geschmückte Ausgabe von Sebastian Brants „Narrenschiff“. Die
erste Auflage dieses oft gedruckten und nachgedruckten Buches
erschien 1494.
Der berühmteste unter den ältern

Joh. Ammerbach.
Buchdruckern Basels war Johannes
Ammerbach aus Reutlingen (geb. 1434). Seine
Liebe zu den Wissenschaften führte ihn nach Paris, wo er sich dem
Rektor Joh. v. Stein anschloss. Dies mag wohl den Anstoss gegeben
haben, dass Ammerbach sich der Buchdruckerei widmete. Als
Magister artium kehrte er nach Deutschland zurück, arbeitete eine
zeitlang als Korrektor bei Anton Koberger. Zwischen 1475 und 1480
eröffnete er seine Offizin in Basel und liess sich namentlich
sorgfältige Ausgaben der hauptsächlichsten Kirchenväter angelegen
sein. Er war der erste Baseler Buchdrucker, der sich der Antiqua
bediente. Unterstützt wurde er in seinen Unternehmungen von
seinen gelehrten Freunden Aug. Dodo, Conr. Pellicanus, Beat.
Rhenanus und Joh. v. Stein, der von Paris nach Basel gezogen war.
Den Grund, weshalb die Druckkunst in Basel so schnell Wurzel

fasste, muss man namentlich in seiner 1460 gegründeten, frisch
aufblühenden Universität suchen. Mitgewirkt hat vielleicht auch der
Umstand, dass die Papierfabrikation dort in grossem Flor stand.
Bereits 1440 besass Hans Halbysen dort eine Papiermühle. Einen
besonderen Aufschwung erhielt die Fabrikation durch die Brüder
Antonius und Michael, die Gallicianen, welche um 1470 aus Spanien
eingewandert waren.
ULM[10] war, nächst Augsburg, in der ersten

Ulm und seine
Hälfte des xv. Jahrhunderts die wichtigste Stadt Kunstschule.
Schwabens und zählte über 50000 Einwohner. Es
war nicht allein durch seinen Handel reich, L. Hohenwang.
sondern zeichnete sich auch durch die Pflege der
Poesie und der bildenden Künste aus. Baukunst, Holzbildnerei,
Malerei, Formenschneiderei blühten dort und die Häupter der
Schwäbischen Schule Martin Schön, Bartholomäus Zeitblom und
Martin Schaffner hatten einen grossen Ruf. Neben Anfertigung von
Heiligenbildern war das Kartenmachen sehr in Schwung und grosse
Massen dieser Erzeugnisse gingen nach Italien. Es war deshalb
natürlich, dass die Buchdruckerei dort schnell Fuss fasste. Nächst
Augsburg hat Ulm die meisten Wiegendrucke aufzuweisen, nämlich
136, unter denen 86 datierte. Ludwig Hohenwang aus Elchingen
war einer der ersten Ausüber der Kunst. Er war selbst Zeichner,
Formenschneider, Schriftsteller und Drucker, der mit Holztafeldruck
anfing. Vier Ausgaben der ars moriendi sollen aus seinen Pressen
hervorgegangen sein. Seine keineswegs vorzügliche Type ähnelt der
römischen und seine Bücher zeichnen sich unvorteilhaft durch die
Masse der Abbreviaturen aus, mitunter über 300 auf einer 32zeiligen
Seite. Wahrscheinlich spielte Schriftmangel dabei eine Rolle, denn
man findet, wie öfters in alten Drucken, kleine Buchstaben für
grosse, oder einander ähnliche Buchstaben als Ersatz für einander
verwendet, z. B. ein K für ein R.
Scheint es demnach nach neueren

Joh. Zainer.
Untersuchungen, als müsse Johannes Zainer
dem Genannten den Ehrenplatz als „erster“
Buchdrucker einräumen, so ist letzterem wenigstens der Ruhm als
Ulms bedeutendsten Druckers und als eines der hervorragendsten in
Deutschland gesichert. Durch einen langen Zeitraum, von dem
Anfange der siebenziger Jahre des xv. bis zur Mitte der zwanziger
Jahre des xvi. Jahrh., lieferte er umfangreiche Druckwerke. Zwar hat
man von ihm kein datiertes Werk älter als 1473 aufzuweisen, da er
jedoch um diese Zeit mit einer Anzahl, zumteil Vorbereitungen aus
langer Hand erfordernder Werke auftritt, so muss er jedenfalls früher
als 1473 zu wirken angefangen haben, und die handschriftliche Notiz
des Käufers eines von ihm gedruckten Buches: „Albertus Magnus,
de adherendo deo“, dass es 1470 gekauft sei, dürfte auf Wahrheit
beruhen. Wahrscheinlich gebührt ihm, nicht Günther Zainer in
Augsburg, der Ruhm, die Antiqua zuerst in Deutschland eingeführt
zu haben. Ob er ein Bruder des Augsburger Zainer gewesen ist,
weiss man zwar nicht, beide stammen jedoch aus Reutlingen.
Überhaupt kennt man von seinem Privatleben wenig mehr, als dass
es eine Kette von Sorgen war.
Leonhard Holl, Ulms dritter Buchdrucker,

Leonh. Holl.
besass eine Spielkartenfabrik. Seine Waren
gingen bis nach Konstantinopel. Er war der erste,
der ein Werk mit in Holz geschnittenen Landkarten, worin zumteil
Typen eingesetzt werden konnten, druckte. Es war dies: Claudii
Ptolomäi Alexandrini Cosmographia mit 32 Karten von Johann
Schnitzer von Armsheim ausgeführt. Pekuniären Erfolg hatte Holl
davon nicht; erst musste er das Werk versetzen, später verkaufen.
Es kam darauf in die Hände eines Venetianers Justus de Albano, der
durch seinen Faktor Johannes Reger eine neue Ausgabe druckte.
AUGSBURGS[11] erster Buchdrucker

Augsburg.
Günther Zainer (1468-1475) ist wahrscheinlich

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The Oxford Handbook of Criminology,

7th edition Liebling

Criminology: The Core 7th Edition, (Ebook PDF)

Criminology: The Core 7th Edition – Ebook PDF Version

The Oxford Handbook of the History Phenomenology

The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global

The Oxford Handbook of Religious Space Jeanne Halgren

The Oxford Handbook of Caste 1st Edition Jodhka

The Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology (Oxford

The Oxford Handbook of Digital Diplomacy 1st Edition

The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

p. xxi Notes on Contributors

Victoria Canning is Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Bristol.

Ben Collier is Lecturer in Digital Methods at the University of Edinburgh.

Bill Davies is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University.

Katja Franko is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oslo.

Pete Fussey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex.

Evi Girling is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Keele University.

Paddy Hillyard is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Queen’s University, Belfast.

p. xxiii ↵ Dick Hobbs is Emeritus Professor, University of Essex.

David Honeywell is Lecturer in Criminology at Arden University.

Yvonne Jewkes is Professor of Criminology at the University of Bath.

Cheryl Lawther is Reader in Law at Queen’s University Belfast.

Nicholas Lord is Professor of Criminology at the University of Manchester.

Jo Phoenix is Professor of Criminology at the University of Reading.

Gosia Polanska was Postdoctoral Research Associate at Keele University.

Lidia Puigvert is Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona.

Gwen Robinson is Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Sheffield.

Meredith Rossner is Professor of Criminology at the Australian National University.

Bethany E. Schmidt is Assistant Professor of Penology at the University of Cambridge.

Ed Schreeche-Powell is a Lecturer in Criminology at The University of Greenwich and Associate Lecturer in

Oliver Smith is Associate Professor (Reader) in Criminology at the University of Plymouth.

Alex Stevens is Professor in Criminal Justice at the University of Kent.

Steve Tombs is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at The Open University.

The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

p. xxvi Guide to the Online Resources

Selected Chapters from Previous Editions <http://

Useful Websites <https://learninglink.oup.com/access/

Essay Questions <https://learninglink.oup.com/access/

Guidance on Answering Essay Questions <https://

p. xxvii Lecturer Resources

Figures from the Text

p. xxviiiassignments and exams. ↵

The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

p. 1 Introduction: The renewed vision

p. 2 The New World We Live In

British Criminology’s Role in Fraught Times

Doing criminology in a changing climate

Losses and Acknowledgments

What Is New in the New Edition?

Garrett, B. (2020). https://wcsj.law.duke.edu/2020/11/remembering-roger-hood-a-champion-of-justice-and-

Hood, R. (1965), Borstal Reassessed, London: Heinemann.

Hood, R. (1990), The Death Penalty, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Matthews, R. (2014), Realist Criminology, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

West, D. (1955), Homosexuality, London: Penguin.

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The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

p. 15 1. Sociological theories of crime

Introduction: The Development of Criminology in Britain