Tim Newburn

The future of policing

The changing social context of British policing recent developments in policing the role of the police questions Posed dilemmas stated options for change next steps.

Atlantic crossings ‘Policy transfer’ and crime control in the USA and Britain

It is increasingly recognized that factors beyond the nation state are influencing and shaping domestic crime control policies. Much discussion takes place under the general rubric of ‘globalization’. This article looks at the more specific issue of ‘policy transfer’: the way in which ideas, ideologies, practices and policies are transported from one jurisdiction to another. More particularly, the focus here is upon the recent influence of the United States on areas of crime control policy and rhetoric in the United Kingdom. The article explores some of the apparent areas of influence and outlines a framework within which a substantive account of policy transfer in the crime control arena might be developed.

“Tough on Crime”: Penal Policy in England and Wales

Over the past quarter century crime and penal policy have come to occupy a central place in political and public debate. Declining faith in rehabilitative interventions has been accompanied by an increasingly harsh form of penal populism that emphasizes the general deterrent and incapacitation effects of imprisonment and has disparaged welfare‐oriented approaches as being “soft on crime.” One consequence is a significant increase in the use of imprisonment—making England and Wales the highest incarcerator in western Europe. Although the last decade has seen substantial drops in overall levels of crime, this is not reflected in public opinion, which continues to believe that crime and disorderliness are rising. The shift toward a more punitive and populist penal politics has been visible since the early to mid‐1990s. From around 1993/94 both main political parties became joined in a contest to present themselves as tougher on law and order. This occurred just as crime was peaking and beginning its downward path. The consequence has been a proliferation of crime‐oriented legislation, the broadening of the agenda to “antisocial behavior,” and a rapid and sustained rise in the number of people incarcerated.

Symbolizing crime control Reflections on Zero Tolerance

The term Zero Tolerance has become a familiar feature of the crime control landscape. In recent times it has been deployed regularly by politicians, police managers, policy-makers and the media. Though it has been used in connection with a number of different policy initiatives, Zero Tolerance is most closely associated with policing and, in particular, with a set of policing strategies adopted by the New York Police Department in the 1990s. This article explores the origins of this most potent of crime control symbols, and examines how it has subsequently been developed, deployed and disseminated. It concludes with an examination of how and why policy actors deploy symbolically powerful terms in the context of contemporary crime politics in the USA and UK.

Learning from Uncle Sam? Exploring U.S. Influences on British Crime Control Policy

This paper examines the idea of “policy transfer” in the arena of crime control. More specifically, it examines the influence of the United States on recent criminal justice and penal policy developments in Britain. Three policy areas are discussed: privatized corrections, “zero-tolerance” policing, and “three-strikes” sentencing. Changes in these areas are widely perceived as being strongly influenced by developments in the U.S., although there has yet to be a systematic empirical study of how and why these policy developments occurred. Drawing on a review of literature, this paper examines the plausibility of the idea of policy transfer and highlights distinct routes through which policy transfer may occur between jurisdictions. It uses Bennetts (1991) model of “policy convergence” as a framework for exploring how “emulation,”“elite-networking,”“harmonization,” and “penetration” might have been relevant to policy changes in these areas. Finally, the paper considers how the concept of policy transfer in criminal justice and penal policy might be further examined empirically.

Symbolic politics and penal populism: The long shadow of Willie Horton

There is increasing evidence that, in general terms, much transnational lesson-drawing in criminal justice has been at the symbolic rather than the substantive level. Much of what has been ‘transferred’ has been terminology or rhetoric rather than the technologies and techniques of crime control. That is not to imply that these transfers have been inconsequential, for ‘political rhetoric and official representations of crime and criminals have a symbolic significance and a practical efficacy that have real social consequences. Sometimes “talk” is “action”’ (Garland, 2001: 22). In this article we outline a particular case of lesson-drawing that has had, we argue, a dramatic impact on British penal policy. This case, the defeat of Michael Dukakis in the 1988 US Presidential election, has had a long-lasting impact on electoral politics in the USA but also, we suggest, in the more specific arena of the mediated politics of crime control in the UK.

How big is the private security sector

A particularly striking feature of research into the private security sector in the UK is the lack of reliable data about the actual size and shape of the industry. This has been noted by a number of authors with a close interest in the private security sector. South (1988: 23) stated that ‘the only consistent and reliable statement that is continually made about the size and the scope of the private security industry today is that it is hard to obtain consistent and reliable information about it’. George (1984: 41) wrote that ‘the Home Office that so often pontificates on the industry cannot even produce a reliable estimate of numbers employed’. This paper gathers together some of the available estimates of the private security sector, and compares them with new information available from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and British Telecoms Business Database.

Urban Change and Policing: Mass Private Property Re-considered

This article examines a key explanation for the growth of private policing in North America and Western Europe - the influential ‘mass private property’ thesis (Shearing and Stenning 1981). The discussion of private policing in Western Europe still tends to be heavily influenced by theories developed in the North American context, theories which may be problematic in the contrasting legal, social and economic contexts of Western European nations. The development of more ‘Eurocentric’ theories has to date been inhibited by the relative paucity of empirical data on the rise of private policing in European countries. Recent research in Britain (Jones and Newburn 1998b) has begun to address this problem, and to map out some important contrasts with the North American experience. By considering these contrasts, it is possible to identify some key areas for future research on private policing in European countries and thus provide a more contextually-grounded series of explanations for what is happening to policing.

Young People, Mentoring and Social Inclusion

Mentoring is the latest in a long line of interventions with disaffected young people that is believed to hold considerable promise. However, the expansion of mentoring schemes in recent years has been based more on faith in what are perceived to be the merits of the approach rather than on robust empirical evidence that mentoring actually brings about the benefits expected of it. This paper reports the results of the largest British study of mentoring to date. Built around a longitudinal survey and depth interviews with programme workers and participants, the research sought to measure the impact of a particular group of mentoring programmes. The evidence from the study suggests that the programmes were particularly successful in increasing young people’s involvement in education, training and work, but less successful in reducing offending. This is unsurprising, we argue, given that much of the core content of the programmes centred on education, training and work and contained relatively little activity focused on the avowed aim of reducing offending. Moreover the programmes were generally under-theorised, failing to provide an explicit model of how and why change was to be brought about. The danger for these and similar programmes is that they will be perceived to fail to deliver and, despite their promise, will become the latest ‘silver bullet’ to be talked up and then cast aside.

Diffusion, differentiation and resistance in comparative penality:

The contributions to this issue respond to various aspects of two of Loïc Wacquant’s recent volumes in his prodigious output. My focus, rather than taking the broad sweep of Wacquant’s work, is concerned with one relatively small sub-theme that appears most clearly in Prisons of Poverty (2009): namely, his analysis of the flow and spread of neoliberal penality through and across the modern advanced economies. The most significant scholarly activity has a number of consequences, perhaps the most important of which is that it provokes new work – either through emulation, replication, and expansion and/or through critique and revision. Thus, within the general field of contemporary criminology, the power and influence of David Garland’s (2001) The Culture of Control can be seen in the strength of its arguments and the subtlety of its analysis, and through its influence over a generation of scholars who have drawn on it as a means of illuminating and framing their own work. Its impact is also illustrated by the fact that it has stimulated a great deal of new criminological activity, primarily by prompting an increasing number of researchers to examine the penal trajectories of their own and other nations, and to engage anew with comparative research (see, for examples, the essays in Tonry, 2008). Few scholars can expect to have such an impact. Though too early to assess its influence, it seems likely that Nicola Lacey’s (2008) The Prisoners’ Dilemma will fall into a similar category, setting out, as it does, a programme of theoretical and empirical inquiry for a new generation of comparative researchers. Loïc Wacquant’s Prisons of Poverty (and his related scholarship) also seems set to have a considerable future influence in a number of areas, not least in exploring the complex interface between systems of welfare and punishment. Indeed, although it has a publication date (in English) of 2009, it can already be said to have had an appreciable impact in the field of study of convergences and divergences in penal practices under advanced liberalism. Wacquant’s observations on this subject were initially set out in reasonably extended form in ‘How penal sense comes to Europeans’, published in the journal European Societies (Wacquant, 1999), and now appearing in revised form as the