Preface and Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Prologue: The Bus 1. Introduction 2. The California Political Economy 3. The Prison Fix 4. Crime, Croplands, and Capitalism 5. Mothers Reclaiming Our Children 6. What Is to Be Done? Epilogue: Another Bus Notes

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

It is often useful within the social sciences to rely on personal experiences, or at least take this as our point of departure. So, given the challenge to lecture on the topic “Society and the victim,” I started out with some reflections on my own past history. Had I ever been a victim, and if so, when and how? And I will ask you in this audience to engage in the same exercise. Have you ever been victims? When was that? Where was it? What characterized the situation? How did you react? How did your surroundings react? Maybe I could ask you to scribble down just a few words from your own personal histories as a victim, not for my use, but for your own. Such personal memories might prove valuable during my presentation, and particularly during our later discussions.

The Ideal Victim

For informal justice to be restorative justice, it has to be about restoring victims, restoring offenders, and restoring communities as a result of participation of a plurality of stakeholders. This means that victim-offender mediation, healing circles, family group conferences, restorative probation, reparation boards on the Vermont model, whole school antibullying programs, Chinese Bang Jiao programs, and exit conferences following Western business regulatory inspections can at times all be restorative justice. Sets of both optimistic propositions and pessimistic claims can be made about restorative justice by contemplating the global diversity of its practice. Examination of both the optimistic and the pessimistic propositions sheds light on prospects for restorative justice. Regulatory theory (a responsive regulatory pyramid) may be more useful for preventing crime in a normatively acceptable way than existing criminal law jurisprudence and explanatory theory. Evidence-based reform must move toward a ...

Restorative Justice: Assessing Optimistic and Pessimistic Accounts

Conventionally, crime is regarded principally as harm or wrong and the dominant ordering practices arise post hoc. In the emerging pre-crime society, crime is conceived essentially as risk or potential loss, ordering practices are pre-emptive and security is a commodity sold for profit. Though this dichotomy oversimplifies a more complex set of changes, it captures an important temporal shift. As the intellectual offspring of the post-crime society, criminology must adapt to meet the challenges of pre-crime and security. This article examines the key features a theory of security needs to encompass. It explores the immanent capacities of criminology for change and suggests exterior intellectual resources upon which it might draw. It concludes that the pre-crime society need not be a post-criminological one.

Pre-crime and post-criminology?:

This is the fi rst of a two-part paper on penal exceptionalism in Scandinavia — that is, low rates of imprisonment and humane prison conditions. Part I examines the roots of this exceptionalism in Finland, Norway and Sweden, arguing that it emerges from the cultures of equality that existed in these countries which were then embedded in their social fabrics through the universalism of the Scandinavian welfare state.

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SCANDINAVIAN EXCEPTIONALISM IN AN ERA OF PENAL EXCESS Part I : The Nature and Roots of Scandinavian Exceptionalism

CONFLICTS are seen as important elements in society. Highly industrialised societies do not have too much internal conflict, they have too little. We have to organise social systems so that conflicts are both nurtured and made visible and also see to it that professionals do not monopolise the handling of them. Victims of crime have in particular lost their rights to participate. A court procedure that restores the participants' rights to their own conflicts is outlined.

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Conflicts as property

Crime Control As Industry, translated into many languages, is a modern classic of criminology and sociology. Nils Christie, one of the leading criminologists of his era, argues that crime control, rather than crime itself is the real danger for our future. Prison populations, especially in Russia and America, have grown at an increasingly rapid rate and show no signs of slowing. Christie argues that this vast and growing population is the equivalent of a modern gulag, run by a rapacious industry, both public and private, with vested interests in incarceration. Pain and confinement are products, like any other, with a potentially limitless supply of resources.

Widely hailed as a classic account of crime and restorative justice Crime Control As Industry's prophetic insights and proposed solutions are essential reading for anyone interested in crime and the global penal system. 

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by David Garland.

Nils Christie

Papers

Conflicts as property

The Ideal Victim

Crime control as industry: Towards gulags, Western style?

Crime control as industry

Limits to Pain