Showing papers in "Theoretical Criminology in 2005"

Police reform and the problem of trust

Abstract: Police reform is widely undertaken in developing and post-authoritarian countries. The starting point for analysis of this phenomenon, it is suggested, is the absence of public trust in police that characterizes police-community relations in these countries. Without public trust in police, ‘policing by consent’ is difficult or impossible and public safety suffers. The nature of trust is examined in general terms and related to the problem of trust in governance. Then, the problematic nature of trust of the police is considered; structural features as well as performance aspects are invoked to explain distrust of police. In the penultimate section, the question of how to build trustworthy police forces is examined in the light of what has been learnt about the difficulties of maintaining or establishing trust in police. Process as well as substantive improvements each play a role here. In addition to building trust, ways of institutionalizing distrust are needed. The article concludes by pointing to some i...

The myth of punitiveness

Abstract: There is a widespread claim in the criminological literature that the current period is characterized by a surge in punitiveness and that this ‘punitive turn’ is fuelled by a new populism. However, the key notions of ‘punitiveness’ and ‘populism’ remain largely undefined, with the result that much of the associated analysis is vague, while developments are often asserted rather than explained. Consequently, there is a tendency towards empiricism, on the one hand, and speculative idealism, on the other. It is not that one cannot find examples of punitiveness but since the deployment of punitive sanctions has historically been an endemic feature of the criminal justice system we are faced with question of ‘what is new?’ In this article it is argued that there has been a one-sided, exaggerated focus on punitiveness in recent times, which has detracted from the development of a progressive realist account of contemporary crime control.

The globalization of crime control—the case of youth and juvenile justice: Neo-liberalism, policy convergence and international conventions

Abstract: The concept of globalization has gradually permeated criminology, but more so as applied to transnational organized crime, international terrorism and policing than in addressing processes of criminal justice reform. Based on a wide range of bibliographic and web resources, this article assesses the extent to which a combination of neo-liberal assaults on the social logics of the welfare state and public provision, widespread experimentation with restorative justice and the prospect of rehabilitation through mediation and widely ratified international directives, epitomized by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, have now made it possible to talk of a global juvenile/youth justice. Conversely it also reflects on how persistent national and local divergences, together with the contradictions of contemporary reform, may preclude any aspiration for the delivery of a universal and consensual product

Sovereignty, biopolitics and the local government of crime in Britain

Abstract: Draws on commissioned research in the Thames Valley. In special issue on community safety in Europe, written by the ESC's European Governance of Public Safety Research Network. Widely cited and reprinted in German in S. Krassman (ed), (2007) Michel Foucault's `History of Governmentality` as a Paradigm in the Social Sciences.

Contesting criminality Illegal immigration and the spatialization of legality

Abstract: As a field, criminology has paid insufficient attention to societal processes that obscure the distinction between legality and illegality, decriminalize formerly objectionable behavior or redefine law-breakers as deserving members of society. An analysis of undocumented immigrants’ efforts to redefine themselves as legal residents highlights ways that the category of the criminal is rendered unstable, suggests that logics of social control create opportunities to challenge exclusion and shows how law and illegality are entangled. For instance, individuals who are deemed socially dangerous can argue that they are low risk, or can redefine risk, highlighting the social costs of situating offenders exclusively in a domain of illegitimacy. Through such arguments, the licit can seep into and reconstitute the illegal, and vice versa

Public safety and the management of fear

Abstract: In the international criminological literature the Netherlands is generally characterized as a tolerant, liberal country: permissive towards many vices, foreigner-friendly and blessed with a mild penal climate. Today this image is about as worn out as the odd postcard image of the Netherlands as the country of clogs, windmills and tulips. With this alleged tolerant past portrayed as a mistake, the Netherlands has over the last few years turned into a rather confused, intolerant and punitive country. In this article, the development of inclusive ideas about a local prevention of crime into a merely exclusive politics of public safety is analysed. By doing so, an attempt is made at answering the question: ‘How could the traditional sober-minded, research-led and Enlightened Dutch approach of crime control change so quickly?’

Comparing the governance of safety in Europe A geo-historical approach

Abstract: The concept of governance alerts us to the exercise of political authority beyond the nation state. In criminological thought governance has been associated with the preventive turn in crime control strategies in Europe that acknowledge the limits of criminal justice, invoke the direct participation of other statutory as well as commercial and voluntary sector actors and, in so doing, generate new objects and places of control signified by notions of ‘safety’ and ‘security’. The corollary of this preventive turn is a geohistorical approach to comparative criminology that is capable of recognizing the diverse contexts that constitute new governable places and objects.

Dimensions of women’s power in the illicit drug economy

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to elaborate on the gendered social and economic organization of the illicit drug world by articulating several dimensions of women’s power. The main thesis is that w...

Crime, shame and reintegration in Russia:

Abstract: We address individual-level hypotheses from Braithwaite’s shaming theory using Russian survey data. The results are mixed. Disintegrative shaming is associated with future misconduct, but being rei...

Private security and crime control

Abstract: This article argues that the persistence of coercive tactics is not just limited to the excluded, the anti-citizens. It explores the routine use of coercion in contemporary practices for the government of conduct. Rather than simply seen as repressive or negative, such strategies are best regarded as productive, seeking to shape individual agency in particular ways. I point to the range of punitive measures operated by private security and highlight the multiple objectifications of the governed that these specify.

The murderous Dutch fiddler: Criminology, history and the problem of phrenology

Abstract: To form a clear view of the origins of criminology and present-day practices in criminal justice, criminologists need to recognize phrenology as one of their progenitors Although phrenology is dismissed as a ‘pseudo-science’ and mocked as ‘bumpology’, it in fact constituted an important early science of the mind, and the theories that phrenologists generated in the fields today called criminology, criminal jurisprudence and penology influenced those fields long after the phrenological map of the brain had been forgotten Coming to terms with phrenology requires rejecting simple distinctions between ‘science’ and ‘pseudo-science’ It leads to a better understanding of the scientific project of criminology and, more broadly, to a better understanding of the nature of social-scientific knowledge

'Con me if you can': Exploring crime in the American cinematic imagination

Abstract: This article deals with current re-dramatizations of crime and popular criminologies. It analyses key elements of the popular criminological imaginaries underpinning a recent and highly successful film—Catch Me If You Can—in order to tease out the discursive, mythical and fabulist techniques by which it communicates particular imaginations of crime. Additionally, the article offers some conceptual and analytical anchors for interpreting filmwork so that other popular representations might be more easily situated within criminological analysis. We argue that popular media portrayals of crime are highly effective in sustaining particular conceptions of the interaction between crime and wider social conditions, and we explore four layers of discursive work through which this film communicates the causes and consequences of criminal behaviour

A reciprocal approach to peacemaking criminology: Between adversarialism and mutualism

Abstract: In the process of characterizing the dialectics of adversarialism and mutualism, a case is made for a reciprocal approach to peacemaking criminology. As part of the rationale for a reciprocity of m...

Re-theorizing the penal reform functions of the prison film Revelation, humanization, empathy and benchmarking

Abstract: Previous literature on ‘the prison film’ has generally been sceptical as to the value of portrayals of prisons and prisoners in popular film. The prison film is said to contain little real informat...

Towards Cittá sicure? Political action and institutional conflict in contemporary preventive and safety policies in Italy

Abstract: The article deals with the issue of the local safety policies in the Italian context and outlines how the origin and development of this approach to crime control is the result of some cnvergent processes and socio-political dynamics. Starting from the general and widespread move towards crime prevention and social reassurance, the article tries to show how these processes are influenced by local peculiarities and how the specific local contexts re-shape definitions, concepts, conflict and programmes. In the Italian case, the most influential factors are related to the conflict and negotiations between the national and local levels of state and governance and to the specific relationship established in the Italian context between the state and the civil society which continues to influence the kind of community involvement in crime control strategies.

The governance of safety in France Is there anybody in charge

Abstract: France has been affected by various changes concerning safety policies during the last two decades, especially at the local level. Several features can be noticed: territorialization, the link between prevention and repression; and contractualization. In such a context, the traditional monopoly of the central state ? besides being increasingly fragmented between various agencies ? on security has ended. Such a move must be related to the growing importance of local authorities in the elaboration and implementation of policies against insecurity, but equally to the role played by various other agencies. The present article seeks to understand interagency co-ordination and point up the existence of a complex array of networks governing safety. It also seeks to examine critically the claim made by some scholars of the turn to repressive policies that would affect local policies.

Book Review: After September 11

Abstract: While this sort of criticism has re-surfaced in criminology from time to time over the years (e.g. Ross, 1988; Smith, 1999), it has taken on new urgency since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Black (2002), for one, argues that the identification of ‘terrorism structures’ in society (cultural and organizational factors) is nearly impossible because criminologists rarely study them. Taking the criticism a step further, Kennedy and Lum contend that criminologists ‘have generally remained silent about the issue of terrorism’ (2003: 1–2). The study of terrorism, they write, ‘remains unrefined in criminology . . . with little specification of the subject matter to be explored, the knowledge base, or the methodologies that can be used’. LaFree (2002) goes so far as to describe the data supporting criminological studies of terrorism as the equivalent of ‘junk food’. In perhaps the most stirring complaint published in criminology since 9/11, Rosenfeld asks: ‘Why haven’t we embraced the study of terrorism? . . . It is our fault,’ he confesses, ‘our poverty of intellectual imagination, that prevents us from studying terrorism right alongside other forms of predatory or justice-oriented violence’ (2002: 1–3). The post-9/11 verdict on criminology’s contribution to terrorism research is, therefore, quite dreadful. Because they have either failed to

Sir Leon’s shadow:

Abstract: Sir Leon Radzinowicz was one of the last great exemplars of modern criminology. Yet he remains, 32 years since his retirement from the Wolfson chair of Criminology at Cambridge, an almost unrecogni...

Book Review: Reading terrorism and terrorists:

Abstract: Books on terrorism and terrorists are not new but, like so many aspects of our society, they have undergone tremendous changes since the tragic events of 11 September 2001. Not only have many new terrorism-related books been published over the past two years, but other works on this topic that were released before 9/11 have been republished in updated editions. Criminologists remain somewhat marginalized within this field. Thus, of the works reviewed here, only one is written by a criminologist even though all three can be relevant for the development of a criminology of terrorism and counter-terrorism. Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction by Charles Townshend provides a succinct overview of some of the key issues in the study of terrorism. Rather than attempting to offer easy or straightforward answers, this book raises a number of fundamental questions about the definition and goals of

Book Review: Prisons and their Moral Performance

Abstract: Since her seminal study, Suicides in Prison (Liebling, 1992), Alison Liebling has conducted an impressive series of studies into prison life and its impact on prisoners, and has written, in particular, about the different ways in which the ‘truth’ about prison life can best be assessed. In this her latest book, on the ‘moral performance’ of prisons, she attempts to discover a more meaningful way of assessing the quality of life in prisons than she thinks has hitherto been achieved by the much-criticized official measures of performance-measurement, some Inspectorate Reports and certain sociological studies which appear to have given prison officers rather a bad press. Thus, the logic behind the quite complex investigative methods which Liebling develops appears to be rooted in the empiricist assumption that the fuller the picture (of a phenomenon), the greater the ‘truth’. At the core of Prisons and their Moral Performance is the report of an empirical study conducted in five prisons in England and Wales which aimed, first, to find out what, in terms of values, really matter to prisoners and staff; and then, second, to use the values derived from the first part of the study to assess how five different prisons were performing in terms of imbuing their everyday practices with those values. The ‘values’ were derived by asking prisoners and staff about what, in their opinion, were the best or better aspects of prison life; and the assessment of prisons’ moral performance was based on answers to a questionnaire containing 102 statements with which prisoners were asked to give their degrees of agreement or disagreement. Refining the situational meanings given to key value-terms such as ‘humanity’, ‘justice’ and ‘respect’ continued throughout the research period, and, indeed, some of the discussion of the difficulties of defining these terms and then operationalizing them in investigative research is one of the book’s key strengths. Other strengths are the detailed expositions of the recent history of penal politics in England and Wales, the ingenious methods devised for comparing the ‘moral B O O K R E V I E W S

Book Review: Handbook of Policing

Abstract: William F. Whyte once presented a paper at the American Sociological Association noting the features of conference papers. He concluded that they were not understandable without considerable (unspoken) background knowledge; often truncated for lack of time; presented as hastily prepared extemporaneous exercises and so narrow in scope that few in the audience had deep interest in them. He concluded, well within his allotted time, that such sessions are ritual performances in which presenters, co-presenters, audience and program committees honor the idea of scholarship. My task in this review is to honor scholarship and there is much to be honored here. This Handbook (HB), like all ‘handbooks’, is too heavy and cumbersome to be held comfortably in a single hand. It might be called the handbook of British policing. It contains 28 chapters, runs to 757 pages with a glossary, list of abbreviations and an index, and contains well-written and thoughtful entries by a wide range of (mostly) young and active scholars. Virtually all have done fieldwork of consequence, are reflective and objective in their assessments of a rapidly changing field and with one or two exceptions are located in major British universities. One finds many familiar names as well as new names, both of which are charting new areas and raising new questions—Newburn, Bowling, Chan, T. Jones and Crawford, among others. While there is some overlap in topics with the magnificent Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Maguire et al., 2002), those considered in the three major divisions of the HB—‘Context’ (transnational policing and policing beyond the police), ‘Doing Policing’ (crime prevention, crime analysis, terrorism and cyber policing ) and ‘Themes and Debates in Policing’ (gender, ethics, new technologies, restorative justice)— explore new areas of research. While it is not possible to comment on or critique all of the 28 chapters and it would be of no use to potential readers in any case, I found several of the chapters penetrating and stimulating for their concise and useful summaries. I include here Mike Maguire’s very detailed laying out of the new forms of data B O O K R E V I E W S

Book Review: Selling Security: The Private Policing of Public Space:

Abstract: foreigners, ‘prone to violence, vengeance, and conspiracy’. With the threat firmly established as essentially alien, a powerful business elite could employ criminal methodologies to establish fortunes and monopolize a very distinct notion of progress. ‘Force and Fraud’ forged powerful monopolies in all of the major industries and attempts to organize labour were met with variations on the alien conspiracy theory and brute force. Woodiwiss proceeds to map out the post-Prohibition era shift in the perception of organized crime as a distinct association of gangsters, which is the dominant populist image of the phenomenon, culminating in the Cold War era’s stress upon hierarchical models of essentially foreign syndication that threatened the USA from within and marked for the author a ‘dumbing down of discourse’. In the latter stages of the book Woodiwiss critiques the ‘drug abuse industrial complex’ that has emerged as a result of attempting to control the illegal drug trade, and in the final chapter the author examines the promotion of organized criminal activity in the interest of foreign policy objectives. While not the first author to highlight hypocrisies inherent in the USA’s particular construction of organized crime, the breadth of his analysis alone distinguishes Woodiwiss’s book. Inevitably there are some criticisms, for instance the political use of frontier violence and the co-option of criminal individuals and groups as a means of incorporation on behalf of capital is well documented elsewhere but strangely missing from this book. However, the author’s thesis is clear and concise. While crime and capitalism go hand in hand, the state, particularly when in a state of flux, will find suitable enemies among poor, vulnerable populations seeking refuge and respite from war, poverty and economic chaos. Their transgressions will be subject to exaggeration and elaboration, and their difference magnified. With western Europe gazing anxiously eastward, this very important book deserves a wide readership.

Book Review: The New Punitiveness: Trends, Theories, Perspectives:

Abstract: J.M. Coetzee’s motif of prison building as the blooming ‘black flower of civilization’ certainly resonates with many of the ideas elaborated within this book. Its concern is to trace the contours of a ‘new punitiveness’, typified by, inter alia, a more rapid resort to imprisonment, longer prison sentences, a curtailment of privileges afforded to those convicted and a greater recourse to emotionally charged punishments. This new punitiveness is contrasted with an old punitiveness that restrained and rationalized itself to produce docile and useful bodies, what Foucault called a process of normalization. In sketching such a hypothesis, several issues come to the fore. How accurately does the concept of a new punitiveness describe contemporary developments? What are the conditions of its existence? Does it signal a fundamental rupture with what has gone before? How does one best measure it? And how extensively has it spread, or alternatively, what are the conditions of resistance to punitiveness? This collection offers sustenance for each of these issues and displays a fair degree of dissension on each of them. The question of novelty cannot be detached from the issue of how best to measure punitiveness. The most common way is to look at numbers incarcerated, either on an absolute or per capita basis. This is Loı̈c Wacquant’s strategy as he details the ‘great American carceral boom’ of a fivefold increase in numbers incarcerated from 1975–2000 and a doubling of African-Americans in prison admissions numbers. This allows him to make his by now familiar claim that the US penal system has partly supplanted and partly supplemented the ghetto as a mechanism of racial control. The penal system reveals itself as the ‘whip hand’ of the market, containing those who are unable to maintain themselves in an increasingly economically libertarian society. While plausible, there may be too much aggregation at two levels. Why should the risks thrown up by market society be dealt with largely by exclusionary measures within the penal system, particularly when these sanctions rack up such a high human and B O O K R E V I E W S

Book Review: Workable Sisterhood and the Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS

Abstract: attracted dignitaries was not unrelated to the regular contact maintained between the security manager and the local police commander (of superintendent rank). Equally, effective intelligence sharing at the Quayside Centre was, to a significant degree, a product of the close relations that two police officers had maintained with security staff over time. Overall, Wakefield argues that all three sites exhibited a degree of ‘active partnership’ (the sixth stage of Stenning’s (1989) model of public police reactions to private security) but the degree of partnership depended on how much time the police were prepared to invest. Thus, the relationship between police and security personnel in the ‘City Mall’, unlike in the other two locations, was one-way: Mall staff receiving little information from the police but providing extensive CCTV support to the police. This book is well researched, well written and thoroughly enjoyable to read. It raises important questions about how we consider security and space under conditions of plural policing; and its appearance is particularly timely, given continuing debates about police reform and the police extended family. As well as providing a wealth of empirical data and much valuable conceptual analysis, it identifies a number of key issues for the future: not least the question of how plural security networks can be rendered accountable.

Book Review: Investigating Murder: Detective Work and the Police Response to Criminal Homicide:

Abstract: implications for prison policy, evaluation studies and investigative methodology; the rest is an over-referenced and eclectic commentary on that study and it is a commentary, moreover, which mainly concentrates on management concerns about how values should be prioritized, and without any explanation of which values must be prioritized if prisoners are to be kept in prison. My main criticism, however, is that throughout her commentary, Liebling implies that Prisons and their Moral Performance tells a ‘truer’ story about prisons than did books such as the classic Cohen and Taylor (1972) study of long-term imprisonment or even the very detailed and very critical Inspectorate reports of recent times. The story that Liebling tells is an important story, and it is one that the Home Office, prison staff and, indeed, all persons concerned with prisons, will like to hear. But it is only one story, and, by and large, it is one that most people who know anything about prisons will easily recognize. The more critical research stories, which focus on other dimensions of, and ask different and more fundamental questions about, prison life, construct different truths. After reading this in many ways frustrating book, I couldn’t help wondering if the moral performances of prisons might be better if both the Home Office and Prison Service were to take more seriously the ‘truths’ which they do not like to hear, and which, year after year, Home Office-funded researchers fail to name.

Book Review: After Crime and Punishment: Pathways to Offender Reintegration:

Abstract: Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society. London: Sage Publications. Defert, D. (1991) ‘Popular Life and Insurance Technology’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp. 211–34. London: Harvester Press. Doran, N. (1994) ‘Risky Business: Codifying Embodied Experience in the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows’, Journal of Historical Sociology 7: 131–54. Ericson, R. and A. Doyle (2003) Insurance as Governance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ericson, R. and A. Doyle (2004) ‘Catastrophe Risk, Insurance and Terrorism’, Economy and Society 33: 135–73. Ewald, F. (1991) ‘Insurance and Risk’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp. 197–210. London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. Knights, D. and T. Verdubakis (1993) ‘Calculations of Risk: Toward an Understanding of Insurance as a Moral and Political Technology’, Accounting, Organizations and Society 18: 729–64. O’Malley, P. (2004) Risk, Uncertainty and Government. London: Glasshouse Press. Zelizer, V. (1979) Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press.

Book Review: Policing and the Condition of England: Memory, Politics and Culture:

Abstract: Danner, M. (2004a) ‘Torture and Truth’, New York Review of Books, 51/10, 12 May, pp. 13–16. Danner, M. (2004b) ‘The Logic of Torture’, New York Review of Books, 51/11, 24 June, pp. 16–19. Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Loader, I. and A. Mulcahy (2003) Policing and the Condition of England: Memory, Politics and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maguire, M., R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds) (2002) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (3rd edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shearing, C. and L. Johnston (2003) Governing Security: Explorations in Policing and Justice. London: Routledge. Singer, P. (2003) Corporate Warriors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.