David Downes

From Prohibition to Regulation: Bookmaking, Anti-Gambling and the Law

Anti-gambling in late Victorian and Edwardian society the NAGLs campaign against racecourse bookmaking the prohibition of street betting gambling and the NAGL 1906-1919 an alternative to prohibition policing illegal gambling Churchills betting duty from anti-gambling to compulsive gambling from prohibition to regulation.

Toughing it out: From labour opposition to labour government

Abstract Labours criminal justice policy has remained strikingly consistent in the move from Opposition to Government. That policy was fashioned in the break with key aspects of past Labour policy after Tony Blairs Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime’ statement of 1993. The tensions implicit in this approach flow from the relatively short‐term demands of the first part of the phrase and the longer term requirements of the second part. In the context of punitive populism, being tough on crime came to mean being as tough as (if not tougher than) the Tories on crime. And the need to head off a repetition of the Conservative ‘tax bombshell’ in the 1992 defeat for Labour seems to have meant (despite the Comprehensive Spending Review) an excessive caution on public expenditure. These tensions now threaten to undermine the most positive aspects of Labours programme, not only in criminal justice, but more broadly in relation to social exclusion and the labour market. They have generated perverse incen...

The British General Election 2001 The centre right consensus

The politics of law and order played only a modest role in the British General Election of 2001. But that role was shaped by a near consensus between New Labour and Conservative agendas for more punitive policies towards persistent offenders and the rediscovery of the criminal rather than the crime as the rationale for sentencing policy. The article explores the background and character of this climax to a decade of realignment.

What the Next Government Should do About Crime

Criminology is well enough stocked with theory and evidence to offer governments important leads on how to address problems of crime and criminal careers more effectively. Three basic assumptions can be made: that informal social controls are more influential in regulating conduct than formal measures; that social, economic and cultural sources of crime are more potent than either genetic or criminal justice variables; and that, following Beccaria, certainty of punishment is more effective than severity. These assumptions, combined with five basic data on the prevalence of crime, are the context for recommending eight sets of priorities for governmental action.

Social reaction to deviance and its effects on crime and criminal careers.

IThe emergence of the social control perspective in the study of crime and criminal careers has accelerated the movement from a conception of criminology as almost exclusively preoccupied with pathogenetic explanations of crime and delinquency to a sociology of deviance which seeks to locate the study of crime and delinquency in a much broader and more complex perspective concerned with the processes whereby different forms of deviance are defined, imputed, acted out and subjected to social control. The propositions most germane to the emergence of this perspective are that (a) deviance is a property conferred upon, rather than inherent in, behaviour, and (b) that we are at present likely to learn much more about crime and delinquency by studying processual characteristics that these phenomena share with forms of deviance which fall outside the scope of the criminal law. The result has been a momentous enlargement and enrichment of the scope of criminology. The issues of defining and enforcing the criminal law are now regarded as in themselves problematic, and not

Review Symposium on Nicola Lacey, The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary Democracies: Against penal inflation Comment on Nicola Lacey’s The Prisoners’ Dilemma

Lacey N (2008) The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Political economy and punishment in contemporary democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelken D (2006a) Patterns of punitiveness. Modern law review 69(2): 262–277. Nelken D (2006b) Italian juvenile justice: Tolerance, leniency or indulgence? Youth Justice 6(2): 107–128. Nelken D (2007) Comparing criminal justice. In: Maguire M, Morgan R and Reiner R (eds) Oxford handbook of criminology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 139–157. Nelken, David (2009) ‘Comparative Criminal Justice: Beyond Ethnocentricism and Relativism’. European Journal of Criminology 6(4): 291–311. Nelken, David (2010) Comparative criminal justice: Making sense of difference, London, Sage. Walmsley R (1999) World prison populations. Home Office Research Development and Statistics Directorate, Research Findings No. 88. Walmsley R (2003) World prison population list, home office research findings, 234. London: London Home Office. Whitman J (2003) Harsh justice: Criminal punishment and the widening divide between America and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zedner L (2002) Dangers of dystopias in penal theory. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 22(2): 341–366.

Crime and deviance

White criminology is confined to violations of the criminal law, the sociology of deviance has a much wider focus, examining any behaviour perceived as breaking the rules of a social group. Sociologists are not only interested in explaining why deviance occurs, but also why and how some actions are defined as deviant and why and how sanctions are applied to offenders. in this undertaking they draw on a wide range of theoretical perspectives including some of those examined in Chapter 3, such as functionalism, interactionism and Marxism. This chapter aims to explain and illustrate the development of the major sociological approaches to crime and delinquency. It should help you understand: The distinction between the sociology of deviance and criminology The development of strain theories from the work of Durkheim to the study of delinquent sub-cultures Interactionist theory and the focus on social definitions of deviance ’social’ and’ situational’ control theories and their implications for crime prevention Radical deviance theory

Book Review: City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience

In early February, a new IKEA superstore—an ultra-rational cathedral of consumption—opened at midnight in Edmonton, North London, offering widely advertised heavy discounts on sofas and assorted furniture. The event attracted several thousand people, who burst past security guards to scrimmage for bargains. The store was forced to close after 30 minutes, some people were reportedly hospitalized and IKEA pronounced itself dismayed by the consumer frenzy it had generated. This erudite and ambitious book explores why contemporary criminology cannot cope with the task of explaining and understanding such phenomena. The first chapters revisit the history of cities over the past two centuries as the crucible of modernity. Their extraordinary growth trapped millions in poverty and slum housing while around them a new individualism was taking shape via the arcades and department stores that heralded the era of mass consumption. Social and artistic observers from Mayhew and Dickens to the Chicago School and Georg Simmel sought to capture what this swirl of change was doing to human consciousness. The complex emotions that they conveyed were, however, increasingly ignored by planners and architects who sought to impose rational order on diverse and often conflicting populations. The mass housing estates of the inter-war and immediate post-war years paid some regard to Garden City ideals but still left millions poorly housed. The combination of high-rise and low-income developments in the second wave of mass housing polarized the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ into zones of social inclusion and exclusion. Le Corbusier and often corrupt system building were not the answer. This leads into the central theme of the book, that

Contrasts in Tolerance, Post-War Penal Policy in the Netherlands and England and Wales

The criminal justice systems of The Netherlands and England post-war penal trends in The Netherlands and England theories of decarceration consequences of sentencing trends in The Netherlands drugs - the limits of tolerance? the depth of imprisonment - an exploratory study of The Netherlands and England contrasts in tolerance - criminal justice policies in The Netherlands and England. References. Index.

Delinquency and Drift

The first C. Wright Mills Award-winning book, Delinquency and Drift has become a recognized classic in the fields of criminology and social problems. In it, Matza argues persuasively that delinquent thought and delinquent action are distorted reflections of the ideas and practices that pervade contemporary juvenile law and its administration. His ideas are as persuasive today as when they were first published twenty-five years ago. By example and illustration, Matza argues that the delinquent subculture is based on many of the same standards as the conventional social order, and that the delinquents negation of the law is the result of his relations with an inconsistent and vulnerable legal code. Once the juvenile breaks his or her ties to the legal order, the drift to delinquency becomes relatively easy to justify. The author also maintains that being liberated from legal constraint does not necessarily lead to delinquency; that event depends on the will to commit crime. Because delinquency remains one of our most serious social problems, it is important to consider Matzas thesis that the drift toward delinquency is frequently aided by the unwitting support of society and the guardians of social order.