Simon Hallsworth

Gang talk and gang talkers: A critique:

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of interest in the phenomenon of the gang both in the UK and across Europe. Such concern has been driven forward by growing reports of gang activity reported in the media, circulated by populist politicians as well as by academic researchers convinced the European gang has been ignored for too long. This anxiety has coalesced in a perception that the gang is a serious and growing problem, that the rise in lethal violence, as seen recently in inner cities such as London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, is connected to the proliferation of the gang, and that the solution to the problem of urban gang violence lies in its suppression. This article takes a critical standpoint against these statements and challenges attempts to interpret urban violence in the UK as a problem of gangs or a burgeoning gang culture. It argues that the problem of street-based violence is not always reducible to the gang and suggests that the solution to preventing urban violence will not be found by sanctioning crackdowns or gang suppression programmes. It concludes by offering an alternate perception of the gang and urban violence and signposts areas that research on urban violence might need to address.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue

This article examines the constitutive role that silence performs in relation to crime; an area of study that remains relatively under theorized in criminological traditions more attuned to examining the noise that those party to the criminal act engage in, rather than the silence they also do. This article seeks to rectify this deficit by considering silence as the absent presence of crime. It outlines a methodological approach for excavating silence and applies it through undertaking a substantive analysis of the silence that perpetrators, control agents, bystanders and victims do.

Understanding the riots: John Lea and Simon Hallsworth put the riots into political and historic perspective

To make sense of last summers riots it is important to put them in historical perspective. A comparison with the 1981 riots in Brixton, Liverpool and elsewhere and with the 2001 riots in Bradford ...

Street crime: Interpretation and legacy in Policing the Crisis

Policing the Crisis (PTC) (Hall et al., 1978) is a book written ostensibly about a crime or, more specifi cally, a crime wave. The crime in question is what the police would come to refer to as ‘street crime’ but which everyone else at the time would come to label ‘mugging’. This is also a book about how and why young black men were singled out for labelling as the archetypical muggers behind this crime wave during the early 1970s, when the research was conducted. The book begins in a traditional criminological vein. The authors review the empirical evidence that had been mobilized to support the contention that there was indeed a street crime pandemic and one in which black males were over-represented. The evidence is examined and the authors are not impressed by what they fi nd. There is, they argue, little evidence to support either conjecture. Street crime, they argue, is not new; it is a perennial feature of urban life in British society. Nor was this the fi rst time a moral panic around it had occurred. As there was, consequently, no prima facie evidence of a crime wave, they see no reason to adopt the path of conventional criminology and study street robbers. Drawing on Stan Cohen’s work in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), they instead ask why, in the face of no compelling evidence, a moral panic over black muggers emerged in British society when it did. From an analysis of the deviant, the text became instead an extended exegesis on the moral panic that surrounded a crime wave the authors did not believe had occurred but out of which the black mugger was produced. From an analysis of the deviant, the text became instead an analysis of the social construction of the black mugger as a folk devil and an analysis of the social function this folk devil would then serve. Well not entirely, because at the very end of PTC, a kind of explanation for street crime and the involvement within it of young black males is in fact attempted. This chapter, entitled ‘The Politics of Mugging’ has the feel of a supplementary narrative and, as such, it sits strangely at odds with the tenor of the text that preceded it. From a narrative that sought to examine a moral panic that had, its authors argued, little basis in material fact, the text returns to ponder black involvement in street robbery. In substance, the explanation advanced involved revising and humanizing an older

Reasons not to be cheerful: New Labour's action plan for targeting violence

Abstract It was always going to be interesting to see which direction the New Labour Administration under Gordon Brown would take on crime, and with the publication of ‘Saving Lives, Reducing Harm and Protecting the Public’, subtitled ‘an action plan for tackling violence 2008–11’, we get to find out (HM Government, 2008). The omens are not propitious, the rightward drift continues and in the direction of a technocratic, administrative criminology wholly devoid of social content and context.

Book Review: Cultural Criminology Unleashed

Cultural criminology is, of course, by no means new. Ferrell and Sanders, after all, wrote Cultural Criminology back in 1995. What is important about Cultural Criminology Unleashed is less its novelty so much as its systematic exploration of this thematic area, its timing and the challenge it poses to the discipline of criminology more generally. To begin with it would be wrong to view cultural criminology as a paradigm in the Kuhnian sense. Rather, it represents a meeting place wherein various members of criminology’s wandering tribes have met profitably together. Conceived in this way, Cultural Criminology Unleashed appears as a space for engagement: a space where criminologists from diverse backgrounds have been drawn together as a social movement in a collective enterprise. Their task has been to review the significance of, to elaborate on, and to demonstrate further, the crucial importance of culture to the criminological imagination. As with any social movement, cultural criminology did not appear out of nowhere and this text provides a useful introduction to the theoretical currents and focal concerns that mobilize its authors. These currents include the microsociology of subcultural theory, phenomenology and post-structuralism. These, in turn, are mixed with, and inspired, by the political engagement and critique of oppression unleashed by critical criminology. What this makes for is a hybridized movement that is theoretically rich while also politically motivated and committed. If we examine how these theoretical and political strains interact, then what we find at the very centre of this enterprise is a movement that aspires to uncover the phenomenology of transgression by taking cognisance of the meanings delinquents bring to their actions and interactions. Conceived in this way cultural criminology aspires to hear those silenced by the truth games of state saviours while attending to that which is intrinsic to the subject matter of criminology itself; what Jock Young aptly describes as ‘its adrenaline, its pleasure and panic, its excitement, its anger, rage and humiliation and its B O O K R E V I E W S

Reconnecting the King with his head: The fall and resurrection of the state in criminological theory

This article examines the relation between criminology and the state in the postwar period. The article begins by looking at the role of the criminologist in the emerging welfare state. Here the state was regarded as benevolent, while the task of the criminologist was to help guide penal policy along benevolent lines. We then chart the development of a more critical approach to the state, now conceived as an authoritarian formation by critical theorists who no longer considered themselves insiders. We then trace a range of forces that worked to marginalise the state now increasingly viewed as irrelevant. These include the triumph of neoliberalism, the reception of Foucault’s work and globalisation theory on mainstream criminological thinking. We conclude by drawing attention to the reality of a post-welfare, neoliberal order, in which the state never went away, and profile recent attempts to theorise its nature. In the context of societies where state power is omnipresent in our lives, we suggest the time has now arrived when we need to reconnect the body of the King with his decapitated head.