Jock Young

What is to be done about law and order

The authors of this seminal work challenge many of the Lefts traditional attitudes toward crime and policing, proposing instead a rigorous, new Left realism for the issues raised.

Cultural Criminology:: Some Notes on the Script

Let us start with a question: what is this phenomenon called ‘cultural criminology’? Above all else, it is the placing of crime and its control in the context of culture; that is, viewing both crime and the agencies of control as cultural products—as creative constructs. As such, they must be read in terms of the meanings they carry. Furthermore, cultural criminology seeks to highlight the interaction between these two elements: the relationship and the interaction between constructions upwards and constructions downwards. Its focus is always upon the continuous generation of meaning around interaction; rules created, rules broken, a constant interplay of moral entrepreneurship, moral innovation and transgression.

Issues in realist criminology

Crime, incivilities and urban change, Roger Matthews criminal women and criminal justice, Pat Carlen rethinking corporate crime, Frank Pearce and Steve Tombs appreciating the victim, Sandra, Walklate reason and unreason: the fear of crime, Richard Sparks law and order politics, Dave Brown and Russell Hogg.

To these Wet and Windy Shores Recent Immigration Policy in the UK

This article examines recent British immigration policy particularly with regards to the panic responses to the 2001 riots in Northern English cities. It places policy in the context of the social inclusionary project of New Labour, which it argues makes the fundamental mistake of assuming that the problem is because of lack of assimilation. In fact the problem is not because of lack of citizenship but of citizenship thwarted. Crime and social disturbance occurs in the second generation of immigrants who expect economic and legal equality but experience unfairness. This is exacerbated by social segregation that sets one group of marginalized people up against another. A policy of economic inclusion together with a critical multiculturalism is advocated.

Cannibalism and Bulimia: Patterns of Social Control in Late Modernity

The transition from the modern world of the postwar period into late modernity involves a movement from an inclusive to an exclusive society. This is concomitant with a change in tolerance from a society which abhors difference and attempts to reform difficulty to one which celebrates difference and attempts to exclude the difficult. Two motifs of exclusion coexist uneasily in late modernity, the actuarial and the demonizing: one calculative and cool, the other essentializing and judgemental. Social exclusion is concerned not only with the social control of deviance but with its genesis. The two deficit models, cultural and economic exclusion, are criticized. Instead, the Mertonian notion of inclusion followed by exclusion as the source of discontent is developed into the notion of a late-modern bulimia. Using the black underclass as an example, the manner in which a series of inclusions and exclusions generate disaffection is traced and the fashion in which social exclusion is facilitated and self-fulfilled by essentialist depictions both of the self and the other is analysed.

Moral panics and the transgressive other

The concept of moral panic arose out of a particular conjuncture of political, social and theoretical circumstances; specifically the events of 1968, the social transformations of the late 1960s and the synthesis and energizing of New Deviancy and subcultural theory in British criminology centering on the NDC (National Deviancy Conference) and the CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies). This work evoked Mills’s Sociological Imagination: the placing of individual problems as public issues, the relation of the individual to his or her particular time and social structure, and the effect of social dynamics on the psychological and psychodynamics on the social. The sociological imagination is not a constant but is greatly enhanced at times of change: it is this imagination which engenders transformative politics. Such an analysis clearly demands placing both human actors and reactors, in this instance, ‘deviants’ and moral panickers, in structure and historical time and to examine both the immediate and deep roots of their behaviour. There is a tendency in these neo-liberal times to view moral panics as simple mistakes in rationality generated perhaps by the mass media or rumour. In this process any link between the individual and the social structure, between historical period and social conflict, is lost. In particular the peculiar ‘rational irrationality’ of moral panics is obfuscated, the link between social structure and individual belief diminished, and attempts to utilize moral panics to stymie social change and transformative politics obscured.

Breaking Windows: Situating the New Criminology

At the end of the day, the book should be judged not so much as an academic discourse but as a political brick that was hurled through the windows of various establishments that had it coming to them (Sumner, The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary, 1994, p. 284).

The decline in crime and the rise of anti-social behaviour:

This article examines a phenomenon of our times: the decline in crime and the rise in concern with anti-social behaviour. We will examine both the evidence for and the causes of this shift, focusing on England and Wales and the USA.

In praise of dangerous thoughts

David Downes once famously remarked that criminology is a ‘rendezvous discipline’ – it is a subject where other disciplines meet and its very liveliness and, at its best, intellectual interest is because of this position on the busy crossroads of sociology, psychology, law and philosophy. Criminology cannot exist separately from social theory, it is inevitably concerned with the central problems of social order and disorder. One glance at the classic texts: Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Merton, the Chicago School and the symbolic interactionists shows the shared canon with sociology. What is distinctive about criminology is not its knowledge base but its formal focus: on the origins of crime, on criminal law and on the interaction between the offender and the law – and latterly the victim. Suffice it to say that all the main social theorists engage with at least some part of this problematic – the major exemplar is, of course, Durkheim – and that not only does criminology need social theory but social theory has been manifestly and frequently concerned with crime, disorder and regulation. Yet there is the ever-present tendency in contemporary work, particularly in the burgeoning administrative criminology, to cast adrift from grand theory to write as if a theory of the social order, the State and political economy were no concern to the jobbing criminologist. This text sets out to help place theory back into its key role particularly with regards to contemporary theory and in relationship to the wide changes engendered by late modernity. David Garland and Richard Sparks in a far-reaching and thoughtful introductory essay set out to analyse the impact of late modernity on criminology, their central thesis being that the world today is no longer the same as that which faced the modernist criminology which developed during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. According to their analysis modern criminology was a discourse which emerged around the penal–welfare complex. It was hegemonic in its influence, individualistic in its focus and relatively autonomous from wider currents of social thought. Its aim was the social engineering of the maladjusted individual into the ranks of the law-abiding majority – it was a discourse of inclusion. It presented a progressive narrative of modern times, as reform followed reform and the rehabilitative ideal of the criminologist influenced politicians

Mike Presdee (1944-2009) - cultural criminologist and champion of a life less ordinary

Mike Presdee was a sociologist of international acclaim and considerable personal magnetism. His work focused on the sociology of youth and cultural criminology. He was fascinated by the way in which young people are criminalized and controlled; of youth being seen as the problem rather than young people being the locus of the problems of the system. Later in life he emerged as a key fi gure in the burgeoning fi eld of cultural criminology, convinced of the impossibility of understanding crime (or any other form of human behavior for that matter) in terms of survey data and quantitative analysis. He argued that ‘numerical life’ had little if any relationship with ‘actual life’, that there was a chronic split between academic knowledge, the gaze from above, and everyday experience and the view from below revealed by ethnography and biography. He maintained that orthodox criminology was driven by the administrative concerns of the powerful which present problems as obvious and uncontested and set the research agenda of the social scientist. Why he asks is it ‘obvious to all…that we need research into the “evilness” of young people rather than the oppression of young people; the evils of drink and drugs rather than why we take substances that might even include enjoyment and the excitement of transgression’? (Presdee, 2004a). Such a power driven knowledge presents itself as part of a rational research agenda where the very presence of power is occluded. He then turns to the researchers themselves, noticing their poverty of experience, their exclusion from the lived worlds of the people they research, thus neatly reversing the conventional nostrum: it is the social scientist who is marginalized from the social world rather than those deemed marginalized and objects of study.