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THE SAGE DICTIONARYOF CRIMINOLOGY

THE SAGE DICTIONARYOF CRIMINOLOGY

Compiled and edited by

Eugene McLaughlin and John Muncie

SAGE PublicationsLondon · Thousand Oaks · New Delhi

Ø The editors and contributors 2001

First published 2001

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CONTENTS

List of Contributors vii

Preface ix

Editors' Introduction xi

The Sage Dictionary of Criminology 1

Subject Index 324

Name Index 331

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

EDITORS

Eugene McLaughlin, The Open University,UK

John Muncie, The Open University, UK

ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT

Pauline Hetherington, The Open University,UK

Sue Lacey, The Open University, UK

INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD

Pat Carlen, University of Bath, UKStuart Henry, Wayne State University, Michi-

gan, USATony Jefferson, University of Keele, UKVictor Jupp, University of Northumbria, UKPat O'Malley, La Trobe University, Mel-

bourne, AustraliaJoe Sim, Liverpool John Moores University,

UKElizabeth Stanko, Royal Holloway, University

of London, UKReneÂ van Swaaningen, Erasmus University

Rotterdam, The Netherlands

AUTHORS

Robert Agnew, Emory University, Atlanta,USA

Bruce Arrigo, School of Professional Psychol-ogy, Fresno, California, USA

Gregg Barak, Eastern Michigan University,USA

Piers Beirne, University of Southern Maine,USA

Ben Bowling, University of London, UKTrevor Bradley, Victoria University, Well-

ington, New ZealandEamonn Carrabine, Essex University, UK

Geertrui Cazaux, University of SouthernMaine, USA

Kathryn Chadwick, Edge Hill UniversityCollege, Ormskirk, UK

John Clarke, The Open University, UKRoy Coleman, Liverpool John Moores Uni-

versity, UKIain Crow, University of Shef®eld, UKKathleen Daly, Grif®th University, Brisbane,

AustraliaJulia Davidson, Westminster University, UKAnna Duncan, Victoria University, Welling-

ton, New ZealandPaul Ekblom, Home Of®ce, UKClive Emsley, The Open University, UKJeff Ferrell, Northern Arizona University,

USALoraine Gelsthorpe, University of Cambridge,

UKPeter Gill, Liverpool John Moores University,

UKDavid Greenberg, New York University, USANic Groombridge, St Mary's College, London,

UKWillem de Haan, University of Groningen,

The NetherlandsKeith Hayward, University of East London,

UKFrances Heidensohn, Goldsmiths College,

University of London, UKStuart Henry, Wayne State University, Michi-

gan, USAPaddy Hillyard, University of Ulster at

Jordanstown, Northern IrelandClive Hollin, University of Leicester, UKBarbara Hudson, University of Central Lanca-

shire, UKGordon Hughes, The Open University, UKRuth Jamieson, Keele University, UKTony Jefferson, Keele University, UKVictor Jupp, University of Northumbria, UKRoger Kern, Eastern Michigan University,

USAMaggy Lee, Essex University, UKEugene McLaughlin, The Open University,

UKDragan Milovanovic, Northeastern Illinois

University, USA

Wayne Morrison, Queen Mary and West®eldCollege, University of London, UK

John Muncie, The Open University, UKKarim Murji, The Open University, UKPat O'Malley, La Trobe University, Mel-

bourne, AustraliaKen Pease, University of Hudders®eld, UKHal Pepinsky, Indiana University, USAMike Presdee, University of Sunderland, UKJill Radford, University of Teesside, UKJoseph Rankin, Eastern Michigan University,

USARoger Sapsford, University of Teesside, UKEsther Saraga, The Open University, UKPhil Scraton, Edge Hill University College,

Ormskirk, UKJames Sheptycki, University of Durham, UKJoe Sim, Liverpool John Moores University,

UKRichard Sparks, Keele University, UKElizabeth Stanko, Royal Holloway, University

of London, UKColin Sumner, University of East London, UKMaggie Sumner, Westminster University,

London, UK

ReneÂ van Swaaningen, Erasmus UniversityRotterdam, The Netherlands

Mark Thornton, Victoria University, Well-ington, New Zealand

Steve Tombs, Liverpool John Moores Univer-sity, UK

Tonia Tzannetakis, University of Athens,Greece

Claire Valier, Lancaster University, UKSandra Walklate, Manchester Metropolitan

University, UKReece Walters, Victoria University, Welling-

ton, New ZealandLouise Westmarland, Scarman Centre, Uni-

versity of Leicester, UKNicole Westmarland, University of Stirling,

UKDick Whit®eld, Probation Of®ce, Kent, UKDave Whyte, Liverpool John Moores Univer-

sity, UKDavid Wilson, University of Central England,

Birmingham, UKAnne Worrall, Keele University, UKJock Young, Middlesex University, UK

viii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

PREFACE

The compilation of the dictionary has been atruly collective endeavour and could not havebeen developed without the generous help,support and suggestions of many differentpeople. From the outset the editors have beensupported by an international advisory boardwith representatives from the USA, Australiaand the Netherlands as well as the UK. Theyprovided invaluable advice in drawing up aninitial list of key terms which had internationaland universal signi®cance and furnished theeditors with the names of specialist academicsworld-wide. As a result the dictionary has beenimmeasurably enhanced by contributions fromcriminological researchers and authors, ofwhom many are the leading scholars in their®eld. With more than 250 entries written by69 academics and practitioners from Europe,

USA, Australia and New Zealand, never beforehas the work of so many criminologists ± oftenwith widely differing perspectives ± beenbrought together in a single endeavour. We areindebted to them all.

A work of this nature has also been anecessarily lengthy and complex exercise incollaboration, collation, formatting, timeta-bling and processing. Without the formidableadministrative and secretarial skills of SueLacey and Pauline Hetherington of the SocialPolicy Department at the Open University itwould not have been possible at all. Last butnot least we express sincere thanks to GillianStern and Miranda Nunhofer and the team atSage for their invaluable support, assistanceand care for this project.

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION

The Sage Dictionary of Criminology explores thecategories of thought, methods and practicesthat are central to contemporary criminologi-cal study. Unlike many other dictionaries orencyclopaedias in this area, its starting point isnot to elucidate particular legal powers orcriminal justice procedures but to unravelissues of theoretical and conceptual complex-ity.

The dictionary was constructed on theprinciple that criminology is a contested inter-disciplinary discourse marked by constantincursion, interactions, translations and trans-gressions. Competing theoretical perspectivesmeet and sometimes they are able to speak to,listen to and understand each other, at othersthey appear not to share any common dis-course. There is, therefore, no one de®nition ofcriminology to be found in this dictionary buta multitude of noisy argumentative crimin-ological perspectives which in themselvesoften depend and draw upon knowledgesand concerns generated from elsewhere. As aresult, the dictionary deliberately includespieces that depart from traditional agendas,transgress conventional boundaries and sug-gest new points of formation and avenues forcross-discipline development. Many of theentries will be of vital importance in under-standing criminology in terms of what it isdiscursively struggling to become. A canonicalclosure or discursive uni®cation of crimino-logy is no more possible at the beginning ofthe twenty-®rst century than it was at thebeginning of the twentieth century. Newmodes of information exchange and theunprecedented mobility of ideas rule outdisciplinary parochialism and assertion ofauthoritative positions. This is what will givecriminology its intellectual strength andensure that the ®eld of criminological studiesremains dynamic and relevant for futuregenerations of students.

The rationale of the dictionary can best beexplained by way of a detailing of its scopeand structure. In compiling this dictionaryevery effort has been made to ensure that it isbroadly representative and inclusive in tone,

re¯ecting the ®eld of criminology in its diverseand expansive dimensions. Though theyappear in alphabetical order, the choice ofentries has been guided by four organizingprinciples. Each entry concerns one of thefollowing:

· a major theoretical position;

· a key theoretical concept;

· a central criminological method; or

· a core criminal justice philosophy orpractice.

Each entry is central to the ®eld, standingeither as an intellectual benchmark, or as anemergent thematic in the shifting and expand-ing ®eld of criminological studies. As a result,the dictionary provides a comprehensiveintroduction to criminological theory, itsdiverse frames of reference and its expansivemodes of analysis.

Throughout, the dictionary aims to be fullyinternational and deliberately avoids legalterms and cases which are speci®c to par-ticular criminal justice jurisdictions. For thesame reason it also deliberately avoids legallyde®ned acts of crime ± such as theft, burglary,murder and so on ± but does include those`crimes' which are either emergent ± such ascybercrime and animal abuse ± or those with awider theoretical resonance ± such as corpo-rate crime, serial killing, hate crime and so on.

In selecting these entries we have beenparticularly concerned to help students tothink through and utilize key concepts,methods and practices and to complement aswell as supplement the teaching materialsalready used in university and college-basedcriminology and related courses. It is designedas an accessible learning resource for under-graduate students in the ®elds of criminology,criminal justice studies, the sociology of crimeand deviance, socio-legal studies, socialpolicy, criminal law and social work.

To ensure maximum accessibility each entryis headed by a short statement or de®nitionwhich sets out the basic parameters of theconcept itself. From here any comparability

with an orthodox dictionary ends. The follow-ing section ± distinctive features ± is moreencyclopaedic in style and allows for somedetailed comment on the concept's origins,development and general signi®cance.Throughout, we have encouraged authors tore¯ect critically and freely on criminology'shistorical knowledge base and on potentialfuture developments. We have ensured that a®nal section ± evaluation ± has been includedfor all major theoretical positions. This allowsfor some initial considered and critical assess-ment of how they have been or can bedebated, challenged and reworked. Evaluationsections also appear in many of the otherentries, but at the discretion of the individualauthors. As a guide, we have encouragedentries of up to 1500 words each for majortheoretical positions and up to 1000 wordseach for theoretical concepts, methods andcriminal justice concepts. Each entry is alsocross-referenced to those other associatedconcepts included in the dictionary to facilitatea broader and in-depth study. Finally, eachentry concludes with a list of up to six keyreadings to reinforce the aim of the dictionaryas a learning resource to be built upon by thereader. We are also aware that for manystudents an initial entry into criminologicalstudy is as much through the names ofparticular authors as it is through a particularkey concept. To this end, the dictionary con-cludes with both a subject index and a nameindex to further enhance its accessibility. Allthese features are designed to facilitate the

dictionary's use as a study guide for intro-ductory courses in the ®eld, as a source ofreference for advanced study, as a supplementto established textbooks and as a referenceguide to the specialized language of theore-tical and conceptual criminology. Patientreading will uncover the full range of connec-tions to be made across the entries and theirassociated concepts.

There is one ®nal point we wish to make.This dictionary originated in a series of con-versations between ourselves and GillianStern in London and Milton Keynes in 1997and 1998. We ®nally committed ourselves tothe dictionary when we realized that it ®ttedin with the criminological project we hadembarked upon at the Open University. Wecontinue to view this dictionary as part of ourongoing dialogue with/in criminology and weintend to produce a second edition which willenable us to re¯ect on the framework we haveconstructed and expand upon the range oftheoretical perspectives, concepts, methodolo-gies and emergent issues. We will persist withour efforts to be as inclusive and internation-alist as possible and to emphasize theimportance of a theory-led criminology. Tothis end we would welcome feedback as wellas any possible future contributions.

Eugene McLaughlinJohn Muncie

Milton Keynes, UKDecember 2000

xii EDITORS' INTRODUCTION

A

ABOLITION

De®nition

In criminology and criminal justice, the termàbolition' currently refers to the attempt to doaway with punitive responses to criminalizedproblems. It is the ®rst step in the abolitioniststrategy, followed by a plea for dispute settle-ment, redress and social justice. In moregeneral terms it refers to the abolition ofstate (supported) institutions which are nolonger felt to be legitimate. Historically, theterm abolition has been used in the ®ghtagainst slavery, torture, prostitution, capitalpunishment and prison.

Distinctive Features

Though the literal meaning of the verb `toabolish' suggests differently, penal abolitionshould not be interpreted in absolute terms.Abolitionists do not argue that the police orcourts should be abolished. The point is thatcrime is not to be set apart from other, non-criminalized, social problems and that the socialexclusion of `culprits' seldom solves problems.Instead, crime problems should be treated in thespeci®c context in which they emerge andreactions should be oriented around reintegra-tion, rather than exclusion. Neither do aboli-tionists argue against social control in generalterms. It is indeed hard to imagine social co-existence without any form of social control. Theproblem is the top-down, repressive, punitiveand in¯exible character of formal social controlsystems. It is these speci®c characteristics ofpenal control which are to be abolished (Bianchiand van Swaaningen, 1986).

Abolitionists question the ethical calibre of astate that intentionally and systematically

in¯icts pain upon other people. They pointout that, because generally accepted goals ofgeneral and special prevention cannot besupported with empirical data, the credibilityof the whole penal rationale is at stake.Depenalization (pushing back the punitivecharacter of social reactions) and decriminali-zation (against the labelling of social problemsas crimes) are the central strategies of aboli-tion. Stan Cohen (1988) has identi®ed ®veother `destructuring moves' which are part ofthe politics of abolition: decarceration (awayfrom prison), diversion (away from the insti-tution), decategorization (away from offendertypologies), delegalization (away from thestate) and deprofessionalization (away fromthe expert). In a next, positive or reconstruc-tive phase, a distinction is made betweenabolitionism as a way of thinking (an alter-native way of understanding the problem ofcrime and punishment), and as a way of acting(a radical approach to penal reform).

In their attempts at depenalization, aboli-tionists ®rst pointed their arrows at the prisonsystem. This struggle has its roots in prisoners'movements or a religiously inspired penallobby (Mathiesen, 1974; van Swaaningen,1997). During the early 1980s, the attentionshifted to the pros and cons of non-custodialmeasures as alternatives to prison. Warningsagainst the net-widening effects were con-trasted with their potential value in the attri-tion of the penal system. The recognition thatsanctioning-modalities at the end of the penalchain do not change its punitive, excludingcharacter, focused attention on the diversionof cases in preliminary phases, with the aim ofpreventing the stigmatizing effects of bothtrial and punishment. This phase was fol-lowed by the advocacy of a whole alternativeprocedural rationale, in which non-punitiveresponses to social problems were promoted,including forms of social crime prevention

designed to address the structural contexts ofcrime (de Haan, 1990).

Notably, Nils Christie's and Louk Huls-man's abolitionist perspectives contain manyimplicit references to Habermas's idea of the`colonization of the lifeworld'. The `decoloni-zation' of criminal justice's `system rationality'is another object of abolition. Though thetension Habermas observes between systemsand lifeworlds does not lead him directly to arejection of the criminal justice system, he doesargue against the degeneration of criminaljustice into a state-instrument of crime controlin which the critical dimension of power isignored. Thus, penal instrumentalism isanother object of abolition which can bederived from Habermas.

A further aim of abolition is related to theconstitution of moral discourse. In Western,neo-liberal societies values like care andempathy are delegated to the private sphereand are thereby excluded from public, orpolitical, ethics. These latter ethics are domi-nated by abstract, so-called `masculine'notions such as rights, duties and respect,which outrule more subjective, contextuallydetermined `feminine' notions such as careand empathy. The dominance of abstractapproaches of rights results in a moralityoriented at a generalized other, whereas afeminist approach is oriented at a concreteother. Thus, abolitionism also implies theabolition of the `masculine', individualistic,neo-liberal values upon which our penalsystems are built (van Swaaningen, 1989).

ReneÂ van Swaaningen

Associated Concepts: abolitionism, communityjustice, critical criminology, deconstruction,redress, the state

Key readingsBianchi, H. and van Swaaningen, R. (eds) (1986)

Abolitionism: Towards a Non-Repressive Approach toCrime. Amsterdam, Free University Press.

Cohen, S. (1988) Against Criminology. New Bruns-wick, NJ, Transaction.

de Haan, W. (1990) The Politics of Redress: Crime,Punishment and Penal Abolition. London, UnwinHyman.

Mathiesen, T. (1974) The Politics of Abolition. London,Martin Robertson.

Van Swaaningen, R. (1989) `Feminism and abolition-ism as critiques of criminology', InternationalJournal for the Sociology of Law, 17 (3), pp. 287±306.

Van Swaaningen, R. (1997) Critical Criminology ±Visions From Europe. London, Sage.

ABOLITIONISM

De®nition

A sociological and political perspective thatanalyses criminal justice and penal systems associal problems that intensify rather thandiminish crime and its impact. On this basisprisons (the initial focus of study) reinforcedominant ideological constructions of crime,reproduce social divisions and distract atten-tion from crimes committed by the powerful.Abolitionists advocate the radical transforma-tion of the prison and punishment system andtheir replacement with a re¯exive and inte-grative strategy for dealing with these com-plex social phenomena.


Liberal approaches to the study of the prisonare built on a number of often competing andcontradictory goals: rehabilitation, generalprevention, incapacitation, punishment andindividual and collective deterrence. Aboli-tionism, which emerged out of the socialmovements of the late 1960s challenges theseliberal perspectives by arguing that thecriminal justice system and prisons in practicecontribute little to the protection of theindividual and the control of crime. In thewords of the Dutch abolitionist Willem deHaan, the prison ìs counter productive,dif®cult to control and [is] itself a majorsocial problem'. Crime is understood as acomplex, socially constructed phenomenonwhich `serves to maintain political powerrelations and lends legitimacy to the crimecontrol apparatus and the intensi®cation ofsurveillance and control' (de Haan, 1991, pp.206±7). At the same time abolitionists arecritical of the unquestioning acceptance byliberals of prison reform. For abolitionists likeThomas Mathiesen liberal reform can neverhave a positive effect because it reinforces andbolsters the system, thus perpetuating pro-cesses of brutalization for the con®ned.Alternatively, `negative reforms' are sup-ported for their potential to challenge andundermine the system leading eventually tothe demise of prisons. Abolitionists advocate asystem that deals with crime as a sociallyconstructed phenomenon. Crime should beresponded to not by the negativity of a systembuilt on punitive exclusion but on a re¯exiveand participatory system of inclusion built onredress, social policy, mutuality and solidar-

2 THE SAGE DICTIONARY OF CRIMINOLOGY

ity. `The aim is compensation rather thanretaliation; reconciliation rather than blameallocation. To this end, the criminal justicesystem needs to be decentralized and neigh-bourhood courts established as a complementor substitute' (de Haan, 1991, pp. 211±12).Abolitionism therefore ìmplies a negativecritique of the fundamental shortcomings ofthe criminal law to realize social justice' whilesimultaneously offering both an alternativeway of thinking about crime and a `radicalapproach to penal reform' (van Swaaningen,1997, p. 117).

It is also important to note that abolitionismis not a homogeneous theoretical and politicalmovement but varies across cultures. Not onlyhas it been principally a European phenom-enon (Davies, 1998), but within Europe therehave been different strands to the movementwith some pointing to the distinct differencesbetween European and British movements. InEurope early abolitionists such as Mathiesen,Christie, Bianchi and Hulsman advocated analternative vision for criminal justice politics.Second generation abolitionists, neo-abolition-ists, accept many of the abolitionist principles,including the rejection of both the concept ofcrime and `penality as the ultimate metaphorof justice' (van Swaaningen, 1997, pp. 116 and202). However, British neo-abolitionists suchas Box-Grainger, Ryan, Ward, Hudson andSim also advocated engaging in more inter-ventionist work to develop a `criminologyfrom below', which

In utilizing a complex set of competing, contra-dictory and oppositional discourses, and provid-ing support on the ground for the con®ned andtheir families, has challenged the hegemonyaround prison that has united state servants,traditional reform groups and many academicson the same pragmatic and ideological terrain. Ina number of areas . . . such as deaths in custody,prison conditions, medical power, visiting, cen-sorship and sentencing these groups haveconceded key points to the abolitionist argumentand have moved onto a more radical terrainwhere they too have contested the construction ofstate-de®ned truth around penal policy. (Sim,1994, pp. 275±6)

Evaluation

In the light of the huge increase in prisonpopulations around the globe and the con-tinuing rise in both reported crimes andcrimes audited in victimization and self-report studies, abolitionism offers an impor-

tant series of insights into the role of theprison and its failures at the beginning of thetwenty-®rst century. The perspective con-tinues to pose the key question: is prison theanswer to the problem of crime even allowingfor an expanded de®nition to include crimescommitted by the powerful?

There have been a number of issues raisedand criticisms made of the abolitionist posi-tion. Most have come from those who, likeabolitionists, would see themselves as part of atheoretical and political tradition that was onthe critical wing of politics and social science.Left realists would criticize abolitionists fortheir idealism and for their ànarcho commu-nist position' which is `preoccupied withabolishing or minimizing state interventionrather than attempting to make it moreeffective, responsive and accountable' (Mat-thews, cited in Sim, 1994, p. 265).

Abolitionists would reject the charge ofidealism and as noted above would point tothe in¯uence that they have had on a numberof political debates and social policies in termsof making the state more accountable. Forexample, the issue of deaths in custody whichbecame a major political debate in the UK inthe 1980s and 1990s involved not onlyindividuals who were part of the abolitionistmovement but had a signi®cant hegemonicimpact on liberal reform groups by pullingthem onto a more radical and critical terrain interms of demanding political action to dealwith the devastating impact of these deaths onthe family and friends of the deceased (Sim,1994). Abolitionists would also say that theproblem with criminology is that it suffersfrom too little utopian and idealistic thoughtrather than too much.

Feminist writers have also drawn attentionto the problem of violent men and whatshould be done to protect women from thepredations of, for example, men who rape.This raises the broader question of dangerous-ness and the nature of the response that isneeded to deal with dangerous individuals.What, for example, do we do with those whoengage in serial killing and who are over-whelmingly men? Abolitionists would agreethat violence against women is a major issueacross societies which should be taken andresponded to seriously but would maintainthat simply con®ning violent men inside canoften only mean detaining them in institutionswhere the pervasive culture of masculinity islikely to reinforce misogynist views aroundmale power and women (Sim, 1994). Thereforethey would say that the nature of theinstitutions and the broader culture which

3ABOLITIONISM

objecti®es women and equates heterosexualitywith domination and power needs to beaddressed.

They would argue further that dangerous-ness is a social construction in that there are arange of behaviours that can have immenseimplications for individual and group safetybut which are rarely, if ever, labelled danger-ous. The non-implementation of health andsafety laws would be an example of this point.Finally, abolitionists would argue that thedistinction between normal and abnormal,which lies at the heart of positivist thought,and which dominates debates about violenceand dangerousness, is also problematic. Theywould point to the killings carried out by, andthe non-prosecution of, the `normal' men whomurdered hundreds of innocent men, womenand children in Vietnam in 1968 as an exampleof the social construction of dangerousness.This crime took place 15 months before theinfamous Manson murders in the USA. Thislatter case has become deeply embedded inpopular and political consciousness while theformer case has largely been forgotten.

At another level, Angela Davies (1998, pp.102±3) has argued that while the Europeanabolitionist tradition has offered many impor-tant insights into the nature of the prison`there is no sustained analysis of the part anti-racism might play in the theory and practice ofabolitionism'. This is particularly importantwhen it is recognized that prison populationsaround the world contain a disproportionatenumber of people drawn from ethnic minoritybackgrounds.

For the future, abolitionists have increas-ingly connected with the emerging discoursesand debates around human rights and socialjustice which they see as mechanisms fordeveloping negative reforms, thereby promot-ing a response to social harm that is verydifferent from the destructive prison andpunishment systems that currently exist.

Joe Sim

Associated Concepts: abolition, critical crimino-logy, hegemony, left idealism, redress, socialconstructionism, social justice, the state

Key ReadingsBianchi, H. and van Swaaningen, R. (eds) (1986)

Abolitionism: Towards a Non-Repressive Approach toCrime. Amsterdam, Free University Press.

Davies, A. (1998) `Racialized punishment and prisonabolition', in J. James (ed.), The Angela Y. DaviesReader. Oxford, Blackwell.

De Haan, W. (1991) Àbolitionism and crime control:a contradiction in terms', in K. Stenson andD. Cowell (eds), The Politics of Crime Control.London, Sage.

Mathiesen, T. (1990) Prison on Trial. London, Sage.Sim, J. (1994) `The abolitionist approach: a British

perspective', in A. Duff, S. Marshall, R.E. Dobashand R.P. Dobash (eds), Penal Theory and Practice:Tradition and Innovation in Criminal Justice.Manchester, Manchester University Press.

Van Swaaningen, R. (1997) Critical Criminology:Visions From Europe. London, Sage.

ACTION RESEARCH

De®nition

Action research is a form of research, oftenevaluative in nature, which has the intentionof in¯uencing the future direction of practiceand policy.


The origins of action research are generallytraced to the work of Kurt Lewin (1943), whoenvisaged that social research should seekto address certain goals. In many forms ofenquiry the researcher seeks to distance him-self or herself from the topic being researched,and from the parties to social action. Theaction researcher, in contrast, enters into adialogue with the parties to social action,transmitting results at certain points duringthe investigation so that the parties involvedcan make changes to the ways in which theyare proceeding, and sometimes to the aimsthey are seeking to achieve. The consequencesof these changes are then studied in turn, andfurther feedback and change may take place inan iterative process. Such a process can alsohave consequences for the research design andmethods originally adopted by the research-er(s), which may have to change in order toaccommodate new developments in socialaction. Action research is therefore a dynamicmodel of research, which requires time forre¯ection and review.

Action research has been used in commu-nity-based initiatives, such as communitydevelopment projects and crime preventionprogrammes, in order to inform the futureprogress of social intervention. An example ofaction research in practice can be found in anevaluation of a domestic violence project


where `regular feedback was given to theproject in order that this could inform sub-sequent developments'. Here the dif®culties ofachieving `longer term re¯ections and change'when beset by shorter term òperational'issues were noted (Kelly, 1999).

Evaluation

Action research has also been employed whereparticipants and researchers share a commit-ment to achieving a particular end, such as anti-racist action, feminist approaches to working,and the pursuit of human rights (see, forexample, Mies, 1993). Action research raisesquestions about the extent to which theresearcher can remain aloof and detachedfrom social action; the researcher may beregarded more as an actor with a particularset of skills and experience. Action research canalso have the aim of empowering participantsin social action. This may be achieved byenabling participants to have more control overtheir lives and communities, or by increasingthe research skills of participants so that theyhave a greater ability to monitor, evaluate andre¯ect on their activities themselves, or both ofthe foregoing. One such development has beenthe attempt to empower user interests in publicservice evaluations. Ùser' research has a `com-mitment to changing the balance of powerbetween those who provide and those whoreceive services', the interests of service usersbeing enhanced through the research process(Barnes, 1993).

Iain Crow

Associated Concepts: evaluation research,praxis, re¯exivity

Key ReadingsBarnes, M. (1993) Ìntroducing new stakeholders:

user and researcher interests in evaluative research± a discussion of methods used to evaluate theBirmingham Community Care Special ActionProject', Policy and Politics, 21 (1), pp. 47±58.

Everitt, A. and Hardiker, P. (1996) Evaluating forGood Practice. Basingstoke, Macmillan.

Greenwood, D.J. and Levin, M. (1998) Introduction toAction Research: Social Research for Social Change.London, Sage.

Kelly, L. (1999) Domestic Violence Matters: AnEvaluation of a Development Project. Home Of®ceResearch Study No. 193, Research, Developmentand Statistics Directorate, London, HMSO.

Lewin, K. (1943) `Forces behind food habits and

methods of change', Bulletin of the NationalResearch Council, 108, pp. 35±65.

Mies, M. (1993) `Towards a methodology forfeminist research', in M. Hammersley (ed.),Social Research: Philosophy, Politics and Practice.London, Sage.

ACTUARIALISM

De®nition

Actuarialism refers to the suite of risk calcu-lation techniques that underpin correctionalpolicies.


Actuarialism is most closely associated withthe `new penology' writings of Malcolm M.Feeley and Jonathan Simon. The term the `newpenology' had been ¯oating around Americancriminal justice circles for several years beforeFeeley and Simon ®nally pulled the variouscomponents together. They argue that inresponse to the need for more accountabilityand rationality a radical shift took place incorrectional policy in the USA during the1980s. The old transformative rationales forthe correctional system were replaced by theactuarial language of probabilistic calculationsand statistical distributions applicable topopulations. Rather than concentrating onindividuals, the system shifted to targetingand managing speci®c categories and sub-populations. Management was to be realizedthrough the application of increasingly sophis-ticated risk assessment technologies andpractices. This shift also enabled the systemto construct its own measures of success andfailure and to predict its own needs. In manyrespects Feeley and Simon viewed actuarial-ism as both the logical consequence of theoriginal utilitarian penal reform project and aradical departure in that the system hadmoved beyond any interest in reform orrehabilitation. The correctional system underactuarialism becomes a hyper-rational proces-sing system that ful®ls the mandate that it hasbeen given. For them actuarialism logicallyconnected with neo-liberal socio-economicpolicies that produced surplus populationsthat had to be contained and controlled. In theUK actuarialism is most closely associatedwith the work of the probation service, whoseprofessional task is risk assessment of the

5ACTUARIALISM

likelihood of re-offending and the threat posedto the community.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: managerialism, predictionstudies, rational choice theory, risk, situationalcrime prevention

Key ReadingsDiLulio, J. (1987) Governing Prisons: A Comparative

Study of Correctional Management. New York, TheFree Press.

Feeley, M. and Simon, J. (1992) `The new penology:notes on the emerging strategy of corrections andits implications', Criminology, 30 (4), pp. 452±74.

Simon, J. (1988) `The ideological effect of actuarialpractices', Law and Society Review, 22, pp. 771±800.

Simon, J. and Feeley, M. (1995) `True crime: the newpenology and public discourse on crime', in T.Blomberg and S. Cohen (eds), Punishment andSocial Control. New York, Aldine de Gruyter.

ADMINISTRATIVE CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

A term coined by Jock Young in the 1980s torefer to the reconstitution of establishmentcriminology in the UK and USA in the after-math of the demise of positivist inspiredcorrectionalist theory and practice and theemergence of radical criminology. Adminis-trative criminology concentrates on the natureof the criminal event and the setting in whichit occurs and assumes that offenders arerational actors who attempt to weigh up thepotential costs and bene®ts of their actions.The goal of administrative criminology is tomake crime less attractive to offenders.


The term àdministrative criminology' encom-passes a large number of writers from a varietyof academic backgrounds involved in a widerange of research sites. They are united by:acceptance of dominant de®nitions of whatconstitutes the problem of crime; a lack ofinterest in the social causes of crime; acceptanceof the need for their research to be applied toaid policy development and decision-making;support for rational choice or òpportunity'approaches to speci®c offenders and speci®c

offences; advocacy of `what we know' and`what works' criminal justice policies; propos-ing modesty and realism in making claimsabout what can be achieved; and being eitheremployed within the criminal justice system oracting as paid advisers to criminal justiceof®cials.

For Jock Young, the work of James Q.Wilson (in the USA) and Ronald V. Clarke (inthe UK) has been vital to the emergence of afully ¯edged administrative criminology.Administrative criminology's starting point isthat despite the massive investment in welfarein the 1960s and a sustained period of pros-perity, crime rates escalated to unprecedentedlevels in many Western societies. James Q.Wilson took this startling fact as proof thatsocial democratic theorizing on the causes ofand solutions to crime was seriously ¯awed.He argued that it was time to go back to basicson criminal justice policy. Criminologistsshould concentrate their efforts on producingpolicies that addressed what the public wasafraid of, that is `predatory' street crimes suchas muggings, assaults, robberies, burglariesand so on, carried out by strangers. Crimereduction rather than social engineeringshould be the focus of criminal justice policies.The importance of engaging in focusedresearch and evaluated pilot studies was toproduce rigorous knowledge and avoid costlymistakes. Scepticism about the role of thecriminal justice system in crime control alsomeant that policy-makers needed to thinkabout how to integrate practical crime controlinto other aspects of public policy.

In the UK, Ronald V. Clarke, a seniorresearcher at the Home Of®ce, reached similarconclusions to Wilson and began to formulatean approach to `commonplace crime' that wasnot hindered by what he viewed as thelimitations of mainstream criminological the-orizing, particularly its failure to developrealistic and practical policy recommenda-tions. From Clarke's perspective, criminaljustice policy-makers cannot do much aboutthe desire of some young men to becomeinvolved in delinquency and criminal activity.However, most offenders are involved in arational choice structuring process that con-sists of evaluating the perceived risks in thecommission of a particular offence, therewards that are likely to be realized and theskills and resources required to execute acriminal act successfully. As a consequence,criminal justice policy-makers should concen-trate their efforts on reducing the physicalopportunities for offending and increasing thechances of offenders being caught and


punished. The focus on how a criminal'sdecision-making in a given situation is in¯u-enced by her/his perception of risk, effort andreward led to the development of a suite ofopportunity reduction techniques to: increasethe effort associated with committing a crime;multiply the risks of crime; reduce therewards of crime; and remove the excusesfor crime. The techniques and strategieschosen must be appropriate to the speci®csof the crime committed and their setting.

Evaluation

Such situational crime prevention policyinitiatives lend themselves to evaluation foreffectiveness and this enabled administrativecriminologists to develop evidence-based,problem-solving approaches to crime reduc-tion. Administrative criminology's other con-cern is to re-organize the state's crime controlefforts to make them as ef®cient, effective andfocused as possible. It has no particular senti-mental attachment to the criminal justicesystem and is willing to advocate managerial-ization, actuarialization and privatization.

By the end of the 1990s administrativecriminologists had become increasinglysophisticated in formulating and defendingtheir perspective, going so far as to presentòpportunity' as a `root cause' of crime. To datethere has been no adequate response fromeither critical criminology or left realism.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: actuarialism, managerial-ism, rational choice theory, routine activitytheory, situational crime prevention

Key ReadingsClarke, R.V. (ed.) (1997) Situational Crime Prevention:

Successful Case Studies, 2nd edn. New York,Harrow and Heston.

Cornish, D. and Clarke, R.V. (eds) (1996) TheReasoning Criminal: Rational Choice Perspectives onOffending. New York, Springer-Verlag.

Felson, M. and Clarke, R.V. (1998) Opportunity Makesthe Thief: Practical Theory for Crime Prevention.London, Home Of®ce, Police Research GroupPaper 98.

Newman, G., Clarke, R.V. and Shoham, S. (eds)(1997) Rational Choice and Situational CrimePrevention. Aldershot, Ashgate.

Sherman, L., Gottfredson, D., MacKenzie, D., Eck, J.,Reuter, P. and Bushway, S. (1997) PreventingCrime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promis-

ing: A Report to The United States Congress, http://www.ncjrs.org/works/index.htm.

Wilson, J.Q. (1983) Thinking about Crime. New York,Basic Books.

AETIOLOGY

See Causation

ANARCHIST CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

Anarchism is one of the most dif®cult politicalideologies to conceptualize and de®ne, pri-marily because there is no one anarchistideology and because of the degree ofmisrepresentation by its political opponents.It is a meeting place for a bewildering numberof philosophies, belief systems and practicesand originated as a reaction to the emergenceof the nation state and capitalism in thenineteenth century. Anarchists are united, ®rstand foremost, by the belief that the state iscoercive, punitive, exploitative, corruptingand destructive. Alternative forms of mutualaid and voluntary organization that are non-authoritarian, non-coercive, non-hierarchical,functionally speci®c and decentralized areadvocated.


A number of speci®cally anarchist principleshave been developed from the work of MaxStirner (1806±56), Pierre Joseph Proudhon(1809±65), Mikhail Bakunin (1814±76) PeterKropotkin (1842±1921) and Emma Goldman(1869±1940). In general, these principles donot conceive of a disorderly or chaotic societybut rather a more expansive form of socialorder without the state. This social order willmaximize individual freedoms and encouragevoluntary association and self-regulation. Abroad spectrum of anarchist thought alsowishes to replace monopoly forms of capital-ism and private property with collectivistforms of ownership. According to sympatheticcriminologists such as Jeff Ferrell, there cannotbe fully ¯edged anarchist criminology becauseit would be a contradiction in terms. However,Peter Kropotkin's writings on law and state

7ANARCHIST CRIMINOLOGY

authority still stand as a key reference pointfor any emergent anarchist criminology.Kropotkin argues that law is useless andharmful, sustaining mass criminality andgenerating social pathologies. Laws protectingprivate property and the interests of the stateare responsible for generating between two-thirds and three-quarters of all crime. Thebody of criminal law that is geared towardsthe punishment and prevention of `crime'does not prevent crime and degrades societybecause it fosters the worst human instinctsand obedience to the status quo and bolstersstate domination.

Kropotkin insists that the majority of crimewill disappear the day private property ceasesto exist and human need and cooperationrather than pro®ts and competition becomethe organizing principle of social life. Alter-native forms of social solidarity and inclusivenotions of social justice, rather than state-runsystems of criminal justice and the ®ctional`rule of law', can contain anti-social behaviour.Here, there are obvious links to the core prin-ciples underpinning abolitionism, left idealismand peacemaking criminologies.

Anarchists deny that their vision relies ondisorder, violence and lawlessness. However,the belief that anarchism originates in every-day struggle rather than abstract theorizingleads to the advocacy of direct or creativeaction and `propaganda by deed'. The resul-tant protest and resistance tactics and set-piececonfrontations which are vital to the renewalof theory and practice bring anarchist groupsinto confrontation with the forces of law andorder and they thus risk potential criminaliza-tion. It is in this moment that the stereotypicalrepresentation of the nihilistic anarchist isconjured up in the news media.

Evaluation

Anarchist theory provides criminologists with:

· an uncompromising critique of law,power and the state;

· the promise of un-coercive social relation-ships;

· the possibility of alternative forms ofdispute settlement and harm reduction;

· a form of political intervention that maybe appropriate to an increasingly complexand fragmented world where conven-tional forms of politics are increasinglyredundant;

· the basis to develop both libertarian andcommunitarian criminologies.

Jeff Ferrell (1995, p. 106) sums up thepossibilities of anarchist criminology: Àt itsbest, anarchism and the process of justice that¯ows from it constitute a sort of dance that wemake up as we go along, an emerging swirl ofambiguity, uncertainty, and pleasure. Onceyou dive into the dance, there are no guar-antees ± only the complex rhythms of humaninteraction and the steps that you and othersinvent in response. So, if you want certainty orauthority, you might want to sit this one out.As for the rest of us: start the music.'

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: abolitionism, left idealism,peacemaking criminology, the state

Key ReadingsFerrell, J. (1995) Ànarchy against the discipline',

Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 3 (4),pp. 86±106.

Ferrell, J. (1999) Ànarchist criminology and socialjustice', in B.A. Arrigo (ed.), Social Justice/CriminalJustice. Belmont, CA, Wadsworth.

Kropotkin, P. (1996) `Law and authority', in J.Muncie, E. McLaughlin and M. Langan (eds),Criminological Perspectives: A Reader. London,Sage.

Tifft, L.L. (1979) `The coming re-de®nitions of crime:an anarchist perspective', Social Problems, 26, pp.392±402.

ANIMAL ABUSE

De®nition

Animal abuse is any act that contributes to thepain, suffering or unnatural death of ananimal or that otherwise threatens its welfare.Animal abuse may be physical, psychologicalor emotional, may involve active maltreatmentor passive neglect or omission, and may bedirect or indirect, intentional or unintentional.


Species-speci®c indicators indicate the impacton the psychological and physical welfare ofanimals. Speci®c health, physiological, etholo-gical and production indicators (when theanimals are incorporated in productionprocesses, e.g. animal husbandry) can bedetermined, from which a violation of


animals' welfare can be assessed. Reduced lifeexpectancy, impaired growth, impaired rep-roduction, body damage, disease, immuno-suppression, adrenal activity, behaviouranomalies and self-narcotization are indicatorsof poor welfare. Welfare thus depends notsolely on an animal's subjective experiences.Although poor welfare and suffering oftenoccur together, suffering is no prerequisite forpoor welfare. When an act or omission entailsnegative effects on an animal's welfare ± to beassessed using these species-speci®c indica-tors ± it can be classi®ed as animal abuse. Butscienti®c uncertainty about many aspects ofanimals' mental state or emotional liferequires the use of a precautionary principle:an act should be regarded as animal abuse ifwe are unsure if it has a detrimental effect onthe welfare of an animal. Following thedescriptions of the `battered child syndrome'and the `battered woman syndrome', attemptsshould also be made to identify the clinicalsigns and pathology of physical abuse ofcompanion animals, as speci®ed in the`battered pet syndrome'.

Evaluation

The apparent importance of animal abuse hasrecently been highlighted through its complexrelationship with child abuse and domesticviolence (Lockwood and Ascione, 1998). Oneline of research has examined the supposedlinks between animal abuse and other expres-sions of family violence, for example, childabuse and woman abuse. It has been foundthat several forms of violence often co-existwith different categories of victim. Thepresence of animal abuse might indicate thatother family members are also potentialvictims; acknowledging this connection canhelp in the prevention of human interpersonalviolence. Other research has examined thecorrelation between animal abuse committedby children and the development of aggressiveor violent behaviour at later stages in life. Here,it has been found that children abusinganimals are more likely subsequently to exhibitaggressive and violent tendencies towardshumans. Animal abuse in childhood is thusseen to signify the need for intervention by avariety of social and human service agencies.

The importance of detecting and preventinganimal abuse has tended to become a justi®ableand legitimate ®eld of research, action andintervention, precisely because of its connectionwith expressions of human interpersonalviolence. However, this is an anthropocentric

or speciesist approach to animal abuse. Severalphilosophers have established the moral signi®-cance of animals in their own right. Becauseanimals are sentient living beings, with interestsand desires, and are `subjects-of-a-life', animalsare taken into the circle of moral consideration(Regan and Singer, 1989). Speciesism thusstands for a prejudice or biased attitudefavouring the interests of the members of one'sown species against those of members of otherspecies. As with other systems of discriminationlike racism and sexism, speciesism rests on thedomination and subordination of others, heresolely based on the fact that animals are nothuman (Adams and Donovan, 1995). A non-speciesist and more sensitive de®nition ofanimal abuse focuses on the interests of animalsand the consequences of animal abuse for theirwelfare (Beirne, 1995; Cazaux, 1999). It rests noton an exhaustive enumeration of possiblyabusive acts or omissions (e.g., burning,poisoning, assault, neglect, etc.) but on theeffects of practices on animals' physical andpsychological welfare.

Henceforth, this de®nition of animal abuseinvalidates the distinction between animalcruelty and animal abuse. The effects of abuseon animals' welfare are independent ofoffenders' sadistic, malicious or benign pro-pensities. Nor should the de®nition of animalabuse include the anthropocentric phraseol-ogy ùnnecessary suffering' ± often inscribedin animal welfare laws ± since it lendslegitimacy to animal suffering deemed neces-sary for economic, political or scienti®creasons. For example, from a non-speciesistviewpoint, bestiality is not an offence ofdecadence or of sexual indecency but, becauseof its similarity to the sexual assault of womenand children, it should be named interspeciessexual assault (Beirne, 1997).

Animal abuse refers not only to individualcases of socially unacceptable practices, suchas the abuse of companion animals, but also toseveral institutionalized systems founded onthe exploitation and subordination of animalswhich are by many viewed as sociallyacceptable. These include the abuse of animalsin agriculture, hunting, ®shing, trapping,entertainment and sports and in experimentalresearch.

What is classi®ed as animal abuse is thusindependent of human intention or ignorance,socially sanctioned or socially rejected norms,and labels of necessary or unnecessary suffer-ing. It is also independent of whether theanimal victim is categorized as a companionanimal, a wild animal, as livestock or as anexperimental animal, and covers both single

9ANIMAL ABUSE

and repeated or institutionalized incidents ofanimal abuse.

Geertrui Cazaux and Piers Beirne

Associated Concepts: family crime, hiddencrime, violence

Key ReadingsAdams, C.J. and Donovan, J. (eds) (1995) Animals

and Women. London, Duke University Press.Beirne, P. (1995) `The use and abuse of animals in

criminology: a brief history and current review',Social Justice, 22 (1), pp. 5±31.

Beirne, P. (1997) `Rethinking bestiality: towards aconcept of interspecies sexual assault', TheoreticalCriminology, 1 (3), pp. 317±40.

Cazaux, G. (1999) `Beauty and the Beast: animalabuse from a non-speciesist criminological per-spective', Crime, Law & Social Change, 31 (2), pp.105±25.

Lockwood, R. and Ascione, F.R. (eds) (1998) Crueltyto Animals and Interpersonal Violence. Indiana,Purdue University Press.

Regan, T. and Singer, P. (eds) (1989) Animal Rightsand Human Obligations. London, Prentice±Hall.

ANOMIE

De®nition

A state of ethical normlessness or deregula-tion, pertaining either to an individual or asociety. This lack of normative regulationleaves individuals without adequate ethicalguidance as to their conduct and undercutssocial integration.


Anomie is one of the foundational concepts ofmodern criminological thought. Its promi-nence in American theorizing (where it formsthe basis of `strain' theory) is largely due to theinterpretation given to anomie in the work ofRobert Merton. His 1938 article `Social Struc-ture and Anomie' is one of the most in¯uentialarticles in the history of sociology. WhilstMerton's theory is now seen as reductionistand somewhat mechanistic in the view itoffers of human agency, fertile ground is stillseen in Durkheim's original late nineteenth-century formulation of anomie. This is largelydue to the scope of Durkheim's questioning.Along with fellow Europeans Marx, Nietzsche

and Weber, Durkheim was concerned withgrappling with the new problems of modern-ity and sought to identify the key featuresunderlying social change. With modernityhuman desires and passions seemed freer,the pace of change was dramatic: how thenwas `social solidarity' or social cohesionpossible? Durkheim did not pose the questionso much in terms of `what are the forcesdriving us apart?', but rather asked `what is itthat keeps us together?' How is society itselfpossible? What are the roles and `functions' ofhumans and social institutions? And how arewe to learn about it in order that we mayadapt to change?

Durkheim located the driving force ofmodernity in the twin factors of the divisionof labour and the freeing of desire. Society is tobe conceived as a `moral milieu' which posi-tions and constitutes the individual. Indivi-duals experience social reality through theirdifferential positioning in the social division oflabour. Humans are motivated by the pursuitof pleasure and the satisfaction of desire andthey attain happiness when their possibilitiesfor satisfying desire are not at odds with thesocial realities of the division of labour. Butwhat happens when the cultural regulation ofdesire breaks down and desire is released as amobile, in®nite capacity transcending thelimitations on satisfaction inherent in anydivision of labour?

In his doctoral thesis, ®rst published in 1893,Durkheim argued that the consequences ofanomie, or the failure of moral regulation,were clear in

the continually recurring con¯icts and disordersof every kind, of which the economic world offersso sorry a spectacle. For, since nothing restrainsthe forces present from reacting together, orprescribes limits to them that they are obliged torespect, they tend to grow beyond all bounds,each clashing with the other, each warding offand weakening the other . . . Men's passions arestayed only by a moral presence they respect. Ifall authority of this kind is lacking, it is the law ofthe strongest that rules, and a state of warfare,either latent or acute, is necessarily endemic.(Durkheim, 1984, pp. xxxii±xxxiii)

Durkheim thus explicitly reversed Hobbes'spicture of `the war of all against all' inherentin the state of nature. Whereas for Hobbes thisis the purely natural or pre-social state, whichhumans overcome by creating a powerfulsovereign to lay down de®nitions of meaning(laws) and enforce obedience, Durkheimplaces this state of social war and crime as a


product of society, a result of the breakdownof moral regulation. Modernity is character-ized by increasing individualism, by auton-omy of thought and action, but this autonomyis dependent upon greater interdependency inthe division of labour and increased complex-ity within the collective consciousness: `libertyitself is the product of regulation'. The task foràdvanced societies' was to achieve a balancebetween the functions of the division oflabour, law and culture, `the conditions thatdominate social evolution'. With the oldcertainties disappearing, the individual ®ndshim/herself without secure footing uponreality; anomie threatens. In times of economiccrisis, either dramatic increases in prosperityor disasters, anomie may become the normalstate of being: `greed is aroused withoutknowing where to ®nd its ultimate foothold.Nothing can calm it, since its goal is farbeyond all it can attain. Reality seems value-less by comparison with the dreams of feveredimaginations; reality is therefore abandoned,but so too is possibility when it in turnbecomes reality: A thirst for novelties, unfa-miliar pleasures, nameless sensations, all ofwhich lose their savour once known' (Dur-kheim, 1984, p. 254).

What was the solution to the state ofanomie? While Durkheim personally arguedthat the solution to the normative deregulationcausing anomie could not be the imposition ofnormative restructuring through violence andthe manipulation of cultural symbols ± thesolution that both Fascism and state Stalinismwere later to offer ± he bequeathed few theor-etical tools for integrating studies of culture,class and perceptions of social `reality'. Theunderstanding of anomie which was to bedeveloped within criminology was con-strained by its centrality to the middle rangetheorizing of Robert Merton (1938).

Writing shortly after the social democraticcompromise of the `new deal', Merton identi-®ed the key cultural message of modernistAmerican culture as the `success' goal, in par-ticular `money-success'. A `strain to anomie'resulted from a disjuncture between culturalgoals and legitimate means of achievement.Speci®cally, the new technologies of advertis-ing put forward a cultural goal of economicaf¯uence and social ascent, but individuals,differentially positioned in the social structure,understood that the institutionally availablemeans may or may not enable personalsuccess. Whilst the majority of Americansmay `conform', others may ìnnovate', accept-ing the cultural goal but rejecting the insti-tutionally available means. Particularly for

those `located in the lower reaches of the socialstructure' crime could, therefore, be a reachingfor the American dream, albeit sought throughillegitimate channels. Merton's theory wasfurther developed with the `differential oppor-tunity' theorizing of Cloward and Ohlin (1960)and anomie has proved a fertile, if somewhatelusive concept to build upon, recentlyinforming Agnew's (1992) `positive' straintheory.

Evaluation

Merton's theory struck a deep chord withmany. It seemed to offer a way of constrainingcrime by improving the legitimate life chancesof those who otherwise may make the choiceto innovate deviantly. However, the positivisttendencies of American sociology meant thatany concept dif®cult to operationalize intosurvey questions or mathematically inscrib-able data remained elusive rather thanaccepted, and always open to the charge ofweak sociology.

Anomie is thus a highly suggestive concept,but dif®cult to operationalize. What are we tomake of this? Perhaps the intellectual historyof anomie re¯ects the impossibility of achiev-ing a `transparent' sociology, capturing thetrue èxperience' of the subject. Durkheimiansociology had a normative element; it was formodern society to arrive at a state of scienti®cself-consciousness. This would aid the crea-tion of moral individualism in that mankindwould attain an objective knowledge of howthings stood, of the functional interdepen-dency of all upon all. But this dream of happi-ness as attunement to our shared knowledgeof the state of reality has been undercut by therelentless division of labour, by `reality' in`late-modern' `Western' societies being char-acterized by oscillation, plurality and perspec-tivism, rather than stability. The technologicalintensi®cation of cultural reproduction ± viathe advent of generalized communication, themass media, the Internet ± gives us a sea ofinformation, rendering òur' experience com-municable to a trans-local set of `fellow-feelers' while appearing inconsistent andsuper®cial to our òthers'. Few would see thefunction of modern àrt' as to offer representa-tions of the àbsolute' or gateways into theeternal truths of the human condition; rather itis designed to `shock' or draw the observerinto the experience of ambiguity and ambiva-lence. Within criminology, understandinganomie offered the hope that criminologicaltheorists could demonstrate particular policy

11ANOMIE

recommendations, namely that crime could beaverted by reconciling the means available toagents through the goals offered by culture. Ifagents could be assured that they couldachieve the cultural goals through legitimateor `normal' means (education, employmentetc.), then the strain to deviance would lessen.But in the globalized capitalism of the late-modern condition, at least within Westernsocieties, multiple goals and fractured andoverlapping identities appear the norm. Thevery concept of deviance loses its grip.Moreover, the range of candidates availableas cultural goals, not just consumerism but theenhancement of power or the creation ofpersonal identity as a life choice, render thetechnological ®x of adjusting `means to ends' amirage. The concept of anomie may take onthe role of an existential prop, never quite®tting within any criminological theory, butalways hinting at something of fundamentalimportance in the human condition.

Wayne Morrison

Associated Concepts: differential association,functionalism, relative deprivation, socialcontrol theory, strain theory, subculture

Key ReadingsAgnew, R. (1992) `Foundation for a general strain

theory of crime and delinquency', Criminology,30 (1), pp. 47±87.

Cloward, R. and Ohlin, L. (1960) Delinquency andOpportunity. New York, The Free Press.

Downes, D. and Rock, P. (1998) Ànomie', inUnderstanding Deviance: A Guide to the Sociologyof Crime and Rule Breaking, 3rd edn. Oxford,Oxford University Press.

Durkheim, E. (1970) Suicide (trans. S.A. Solovay andJ.H. Mueller, ed. G.E.G. Catlin), New York, TheFree Press.

Durkheim, E. (1984) The Division of Labour in Society(trans. W.D. Halls). Basingstoke, Macmillan.

Merton, R.K. (1938) `Social structure and anomie',American Sociological Review, 3, pp. 672±82.

APPRECIATIVE CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

An approach that seeks to understand andappreciate the social world from the pointof view of the individual, or category of

individual, with particular reference to crimeand deviance.


The designation àppreciative criminology'owes much to use of the term àppreciativestudies' by Matza (1969) to refer to speci®cstudies of deviant subcultures such as those ofthe hobo, the juvenile gang, the drug-taker.Such studies are characterized by observing,sometimes by participation, the social world ofdeviants with a view to producing anappreciative account of the deviant's ownstory in his or her own terms. Theoretically,appreciative criminology is in¯uenced by theinteractionist perspective which developed insocial psychology and sociology in the 1930sand which received further impetus in the1960s and 1970s, for example in connectionwith new deviancy theory. Interactionismoffers an alternative to positivist ways ofthinking about crime and criminality.Amongst other things, positivism startedfrom assumptions such as: there are categoriesof individuals who are criminal and who havecharacteristics which clearly distinguish themfrom non-criminals; the explanations forcriminality lie in individual pathologies; suchpathologies are the causes and determinantsof criminality. Instead, interactionism offers aframework which emphasizes human choiceand free will rather than determinism; a viewof crime and deviance as something which isgenerated in interactions rather than as acharacteristic of individual backgrounds; andan assumption that social action and the socialworld are ¯exible, changing and dynamicrather than ®xed, objective and external.Above all, appreciative studies took frominteractionism the notion that there can bevariability of meanings in social contexts andin society in general, rather than consensus.The aim of appreciative studies was, and is, todescribe, understand and appreciate the socialmeanings and interpretations which cate-gories of individuals attribute to events,contexts and others' actions. Such studies areepitomized in the title of Howard Parker's(1974) book View from the Boys, a study of malejuvenile gangs in Liverpool based on theperspectives of the gang members themselves.

Methodologically, appreciative studies havebeen in¯uenced by the ethnographic traditionin social research. Ethnography, which liber-ally means description (`graphy') of cultures(èthno'), has its roots in social anthropologyand the study of pre-industrial societies.


Subsequently it has been adapted to theexamination of subcultures in complexsociety. Ethnography has a number of meth-odological commitments which make it espe-cially appropriate to appreciative studies ofdeviant subcultures using an interactionistframework. First, there is a commitment tostudying the social world from the point ofview of the individuals being studied. Sec-ondly, it is assumed that there can be a multi-plicity of perspectives rather than just one,and also that each is equally valid for thepeople who hold them. Thirdly, social per-spectives (and the social meanings, de®ni-tions, labels and stereotypes which comprisethem) cannot be separated from social inter-actions. Therefore, particular attention shouldbe paid to the ways in which people interact inspeci®c social contexts. Fourthly, there is abelief that such observation should be natur-alistic, that is individuals should be studiedbehaving as they would normally and natur-ally do so. It is for this reason that ethno-graphers often rely on participant observationalthough that is not the only form of datacollection used.

The Chicago School of Sociology of the1920s and 1930s was a source of classicappreciative studies. Researchers adaptedsome of the techniques of social anthropolo-gists to study the subcultures of crime withintheir city (in addition to statistical analysis ofcrime rates to map zones of the city). Theyproduced books with titles such as The JackRoller (Shaw, 1930), The Hobo (Anderson,1923), and The Gang (Thrasher, 1927). Therewas particular emphasis on the transitionalzone of the city with indicators of socialdisorganization such as high turnover ofpopulation, poor housing and high incidenceof crime.

Appreciative studies captured the culture ofcrime in this zone and also the mechanisms bywhich this culture was transmitted. In doingso, the Chicago sociologists emphasized thedistinctiveness of the deviant subcultures andtheir separation from mainstream society. Inthe 1960s and 1970s there was a resurgence ofethnographic studies, linked to an interac-tionist framework, but with a particular slanttowards the process of labelling. For example,Howard Becker's (1963) study of marijuanasmokers was in¯uential in generating agreater concern with the ways deviant andnon-deviant worlds meet and interact ratherthan with their separation. This was part of theemergence of labelling theory as a radicalresponse to the predominance of positivistconventional criminology. Becker was not

interested in asking questions about thecauses of smoking marijuana; instead hefocused on the question of how and whymarijuana users come to be de®ned andlabelled as deviant. This involved looking atinteractions between the would-be deviantand the agencies of social control.

Evaluation

The critiques that can be levelled at apprecia-tive criminology are those which, in terms oftheory, can be levelled at interactionism andwhich, in terms of methodology, can bedirected at ethnography. For example, expla-nations of crime and deviance that aregrounded in interactions in small-scale con-texts run the risk of neglecting wider socialstructural dimensions of power, inequalityand oppression (although for some a synthesisbased on theorizing at different levels isfeasible). Methodologically, ethnographic stu-dies endure the criticisms that they lackgeneralizability to wider contexts and ±being reliant on the deviants themselves fordata ± are not scienti®c or objective. There isalso the possibility that taking an appreciativestance is synonymous with glorifying thecriminal. This does not ®nd sympathy withthose who emphasize the need to face up tothe reality of crime and the consequences of itfor victims.

Such criticisms apart, appreciative studieshave provided a rich vein within criminologyand have described and explained criminaland deviant subcultures which would nototherwise have been made visible by othertheoretical and methodological approaches.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: Chicago School of Sociol-ogy, cultural criminology, ethnography, inter-actionism, labelling, new deviancy theory,participant observation, subculture

Key ReadingsAnderson, N. (1923) The Hobo: The Sociology of the

Homeless Man. Chicago, University of ChicagoPress.

Becker, H. (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology ofDeviance. New York, The Free Press.

Matza, D. (1969) Becoming Deviant. EnglewoodCliffs, NJ, Prentice±Hall.

Parker, H. (1974) View from the Boys. Newton Abbot,David and Charles.

Shaw, C.R. (1930) The Jack Roller. Chicago, Universityof Chicago Press.

13APPRECIATIVE CRIMINOLOGY

Thrasher, F.M. (1927) The Gang. Chicago, Universityof Chicago Press.

AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM

De®nition

Conceptualized as an essential aspect of howsocial democratic states and their institutionsrespond to crises within advanced capitalistpolitical economies, authoritarian populismexplains how increasingly repressive punitivelaws and sanctions gain popular legitimacy.This mobilization of state power aims tomanage consent, organize regulation andsecure hegemony through an increasinglyauthoritarian political agenda derived frompolitical disaffection and discontent. It reaf-®rms reactive and reactionary discoursesestablished around the `collapse' of democ-racy, the `breakdown' in law and order, the`militancy' of the unions, the `decline' in moralvalues and so on. These discourses areexploited through political and media `cam-paigns', thus generating `moral panics' withinpopular discourse and social reaction.


Basing his analysis on the proposition that`state-monopolized physical violence perma-nently underlies the techniques of power andmechanisms of consent' within Westerncapitalist democracies, Poulantzas (1978,p.81) claimed that during the 1970s a newform of state had emerged: àuthoritarianstatism . . . intensi®ed state control overevery sphere of socio-economic life combinedwith radical decline of the institutions ofpolitical democracy and with draconian andmultiform curtailment of so-called `̀ formal''liberties' (1978, pp. 203±4). Repressive mea-sures depended on the actual exercise of state-sanctioned violence and, signi®cantly, on itsinternationalization through ideologicalacceptance or, for those who opposed therise of authoritarianism, through mechanisms offear.

For Stuart Hall, Poulantzas had made ade®ning contribution to the critical analysis ofthe èxceptional shifts' towards authoritarian-ism within Western social democracies. Yet hefelt that Poulantzas had misread the strategyof anti-statism prevalent within the radicalright ± a strategy representing itself as anti-

statist to win popular support while disguis-ing the reality of honing state centralism. Moreimportantly, Poulantzas had neglected thepurposeful and orchestrated construction andmanipulation of popular consent. Herein laythe essence of Hall's claim for authoritarianpopulism: `harness[ing] . . . support [of ] somepopular discontents, neutraliz[ing] opposingforces, disaggregat[ing] the opposition andincorporat[ing] some strategic elements ofpopular opinion into its own hegemonicproject' (Hall, 1985, p. 118).

Hall's response to, and development of,Poulantzas's thesis emerged from his workwith colleagues at the Centre for Contempor-ary Cultural Studies, Birmingham, UK duringthe 1970s. In their exhaustive analysis of the`crisis' in the UK political economy, Hall et al.(1978, p. 303) identi®ed `deep structural shifts'which had resulted in `the extension of the lawand the courts at the level of politicalmanagement of con¯ict and the class struggle'.As the state had become more directly inter-ventionist within the economy, establishingthe foundation for capitalist reconstructionthrough the libertarianism of the `free-market',it became both necessary and `legitimate' for`public opinion to be actively recruited in anopen and explicit fashion in favour of the`̀ strong state'' . . . [characterized as] the ebband ¯ow of authoritarian populism in defenceof social discipline' (1978, pp. 304±5).

For Hall et al. (pp. 317±20) the `crisis' thatwas `policed' through the gradual develop-ment of legitimate coercion comprised fourdistinct elements: a crisis of and for Britishcapitalism; a crisis of the `relations of socialforces' derived in the economic crisis; a crisisof the state in mobilizing popular consent forpotentially unpopular socio-economic strate-gies; a crisis in political legitimacy, in socialauthority, in hegemony; the imposition of`social authority' and societal discipline. Theauthors identi®ed the collapse of postwarsocial-democratic consensus and the consoli-dation of New Right ideology as a funda-mental shift in the balance of social forces ±from consent to coercion ± inherent withinsocial democracies; a shift they characterizedas the emergence of an exceptional form of thecapitalist state.

Further expanding the thesis, Hall (1979, p.19) proposed that the `language of law andorder is sustained by moralisms . . . where thegreat syntax of `̀ good'' versus `̀ evil'', of civil-ized and uncivilized standards, of the choicebetween anarchy and order constantly dividesthe world up and classi®es it into itsappointed stations'. By appealing to ìnherent'


social values and evoking an overarchingmoral imperative, law and order rhetoricappealed to a collective common sense;`welding people to that `̀ need for authority''. . . so signi®cant for the Right in the con-struction of consent to its authoritarianprogramme'. Populism, however, was notsimply a `rhetorical device', it operated on`genuine contradictions' and re¯ected a`rational and material core' (1979, p. 20).

Hall (1980, p. 3) considered the `drive'towards a `more disciplinary, authoritariankind of society' to be `no short-term affair'. Itembodied a `regression to a stone-age mor-ality' promoted by politicians, together with,in popular discourse, à blind spasm of con-trol: the feeling that the only remedy for asociety which is declared to be `̀ ungovern-able'' is the imposition of order, through adisciplinary use of law by the state'. Thus, the`shift ``from above'' [was] pioneered by,harnessed to and, to some extent, legitimatedby a popular groundswell below'; a populismexempli®ed by à sequence of `̀ moral panic'''(Hall, 1985, p. 116).

Evaluation

The most strident critique of authoritarianpopulism came from Jessop et al. (1988).Concentrating on its application to the riseand consolidation of Thatcherism in the UKthey argued it over-emphasized the signi®-cance of ideology and downplayed structuralrelations of political economy. It was too con-cerned with the `relative autonomy' oflanguage and discourse, neglected the politicaleconomy of the New Right (preferring insteadto focus on its `hegemonic project') and`generate[d] an excessive concern with themass media and ideological production at theexpense of political and economic organiza-tion . . .' (1988, p. 73). They rejected the ideathat Thatcherism had secured hegemony andachieved a new expression of collective`common-sense'; the New Right had neitherbroad consensus nor political legitimacy for itsobjectives. Further, Hall was criticized foridealizing the gains of postwar social democ-racy and for failing to address the politicaleconomic determinants of global economicrestructuring.

The ensuing debate was severe. Hall deniedthat authoritarian populism had been con-ceived as a comprehensive analysis of Thatcher-ism. It was `preposterous' to claim that he hadsuggested that Thatcherism had securedhegemony. Rather, it constituted a politics,

shared by Western capitalist states, hegemonicin `conception and project', whose `domi-nance' had become `self-evident' by the mid-1980s (Hall, 1985, p. 119). Returning toGramsci, he concluded it was ìmpossible toconceptualize or achieve' hegemony withoutaccepting the economy as the `decisivenucleus' around which civil society consoli-dated (1985, p. 120).

As academic hostilities cooled it becameclear that the signi®cance of authoritarianpopulism conceptually lay in its contributionto theorizing the political and ideologicaldimensions of the authoritarian shift and itspopulist appeal for stronger laws, imposedorder and tightening discipline. Whatremained unexplored was the foundation ofpopular authoritarianism within the widersociety, given ± as Hall and others recognized± that people are not mere `dupes'. Historically,an authoritarian streak can be detected withinthe collective psyche which appears to trans-cend cultural and regional differences. Further,authoritarian responses to orchestrated moralpanics, not derived in economic crises or whichoccur during periods of relative economicexpansionism, require consideration.

Yet Hall's analysis ± combining Gramsci,Laclau and Poulantzas ± demonstrated thatadvanced capitalism is served, serviced, butrarely confronted, by state institutions whosedecision-makers share its ends, if not alwaysits means, in a coincidence of interestsexpressed in a common and dominantideology. In functioning, the state ± exempli-®ed by the rule of law, its derivation andadministration ± tutors and guides the broadmembership of society. State institutions aresites for the regeneration and reconstruction ofideas as well as policies. This process, sensi-tive to and informing of popular discourses,serves to defend the structural contradictionsand inequalities of advanced capitalismwhether in recession (crisis) or in growth(reconstruction). In this climate, authoritarianpopulism serves as a poignant reminder that ifconsensus cannot be forged, it will be forced.

Phil Scraton and Kathryn Chadwick

Associated Concepts: criminalization, criticalcriminology, hegemony, moral panic, the state

Key ReadingsHall, S. (1979) `The Great Moving Right Show',

Marxism Today, January, pp. 14±20.Hall, S. (1980) Drifting into a Law and Order Society.

London, The Cobden Trust.

15AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM

Hall, S. (1985) Àuthoritarian populism: a reply toJessop et al.', New Left Review, 151, pp. 115±24.

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. andRoberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, theState and Law and Order. London, Macmillan.

Jessop, B., Bennett, K., Bromley, S. and Ling, T.(1988) Thatcherism. Cambridge, Polity Press.

Poulantzas, N. (1978) State, Power, Socialism. London,Verso.


B

BEHAVIOUR MODIFICATION

De®nition

Early theories of learning gave rise to a rangeof strategies, termed behaviour modi®cation,aimed at changing behaviour. These practicaltechniques were widely used with a range ofgroups, including offenders. As theories oflearning became more sophisticated and theirresearch base grew, so their application, in theassociated methods of behaviour change,developed accordingly.


The early learning theorists maintained thatbehaviour is functionally related both to itssetting (i.e., the antecedent conditions), and toits consequences (via reinforcement and pun-ishment). It follows from this position that agiven behaviour can be changed by modifyingboth the setting events and the outcomes forthe behaviour.

The strategy of bringing about behaviouralchange through modi®cation of the environ-ment is called stimulus control and is astandard technique in behaviour modi®cation(Martin and Pear, 1992). This strategy is evi-dent in situational crime prevention where theaim is to reduce offending by, say, reducingopportunity or increasing the chances ofdetection. Similarly, behaviour change can beattempted by modifying the consequences thatfollow a given behaviour. There is a range ofestablished methods that focus on control ofreinforcement and punishment contingenciesto bring about behavioural change. Tokeneconomy programmes are one such method,in which optimal behaviours are strengthenedby the reward of tokens or points which can

later be exchanged for tangible rewards.Token economies were used in the Americanprison system for a period of time but werediscontinued for ethical reasons.

As well as bringing about behaviouralchange through modi®cation of antecedentsand consequences, the focus can be on thebehaviour itself. The rationale underpinningthis particular strategy is that changingbehaviour will elicit different outcomes fromthe environment. In turn, these new outcomeswill then reinforce and strengthen the newbehaviour, thereby bringing about beha-vioural change. Strategies that focus explicitlyon overt behaviour are often termed behaviourtherapy, although the basic theory is the sameas that informing behaviour modi®cation. Inthe 1970s the notion of skills training in healthservices was developed and quickly becamewidespread in the form of assertion, life andsocial skills training. Skills training withoffenders became popular and was usedwith a range of types of offender, includingsex offenders and violent offenders (Hollin,1990a).

As behavioural theory developed to pro-duce social learning theory, behaviour mod-i®cation and behaviour therapy evolved intocognitive-behavioural therapy. A number ofparticular techniques have become associatedwith cognitive-behavioural practice: thesetechniques include self-instructional training,thought stopping, emotional control training,and problem-solving training (Sheldon, 1995).The method of change underpinning thisapproach is that by bringing about change ofinternal (psychological and/or physiological)states and process, this covert change will, inturn, mediate change at an overt behaviourallevel. Changes in overt behaviour will thenelicit new patterns of reinforcement from theenvironment and so maintain behaviourchange. Cognitive-behavioural methods have

been widely used with offender groups, parti-cularly with young offenders (Hollin, 1990b).

In practice, behaviour change techniques areseldom used in isolation: it is more common tosee amalgams of techniques in the form ofmultimodal programmes. Such multimodal pro-grammes might include elements such asproblem-solving skills training, social skillstraining and emotional control training. Giventhe complexity of many of the problems forwhich cognitive-behavioural therapy has beenused, including offending, it is appropriatethat change is sought by attending to a rangeof aspects of an individual's functioning. If thecognitive-behavioural model has several inter-related constituents, then attempts at changewill be well served by attending to a range ofthose aspects rather than one in isolation.There are several multimodal programmesdesigned for offender groups, includingReasoning and Rehabilitation (Ross et al.,1988) and Aggression Replacement Training(Goldstein et al., 1998).

One of the main concerns lies in the abuse ofbehavioural methods. First, when thesepowerful methods are used inappropriatelyby untrained personnel; second, when theyare used with people, such as prisoners, whoare not in a position to give free consent.

Clive Hollin

Associated Concepts: conditioning, differentialreinforcement, situational crime prevention,social learning theory,

Key ReadingsGoldstein, A.P., Glick, B. and Gibbs, J.C. (1998)

Aggression Replacement Training: A ComprehensiveIntervention for Aggressive Youth, 2nd edn. Cham-paign, IL, Research Press.

Hollin, C.R. (1990a) `Social skills training withdelinquents: a look at the evidence and somerecommendations for practice', British Journal ofSocial Work, 20, pp. 483±93.

Hollin, C.R. (1990b) Cognitive-Behavioural Interven-tions with Young Offenders. Elmsford, NY, Perga-mon Press.

Martin, G. and Pear, J. (1992) Behaviour Modi®cation:What It Is and How To Do It, 4th edn. EnglewoodCliffs, NJ, Prentice±Hall.

Ross, R.R., Fabiano, E.A. and Ewles, C.D. (1988)`Reasoning and rehabilitation', International Jour-nal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Crimino-logy, 32, pp. 29±35.

Sheldon, B. (1995) Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy:Research, Practice and Philosophy. London, Rout-ledge.

BEHAVIOURISM

See Conditioning

BIFURCATION

De®nition

Bifurcation is a concept ± built on the `justdeserts' premise ± which seeks to reserveincarceration solely for those offenders whopose a risk to the community, whilst ®ndingcommunity-based penalties for less seriousoffenders.


Bifurcation is a reaction to at least twodifferent forces within transnational criminalsystems. First it is a reaction to the expansionof the penal estates of several Westerndemocracies, which has seen the prisonpopulations of, for example, the USA quad-ruple since the early 1980s, with a correspond-ing growth in expenditure on maintaining thepenal estate. This expansion is in turn partly areaction to the neo-conservativism of Repub-licans in the USA and the Conservatives inEngland and Wales, the latter coming topower in 1979 and the former with the electionof Ronald Reagan in 1980.

With increasing numbers of people beingincarcerated, politicians came under increas-ing pressure to reduce the amount of moneybeing spent on maintaining the infrastructureof the penal estate. One way of doing thiswas to reserve imprisonment only for thosepeople who posed a risk to the public, and to®nd alternative punishments for largely non-violent offenders. By adopting this policy agovernment could appear to be `tough andsoft simultaneously' (Pitts, 1988, p. 29) Thishas been described as `penal pragmatism'(Cavadino and Dignan, 1992), and furtherinterpreted as a reaction to the `penal crisis'.

In England and Wales bifurcation is mostcommonly associated with the CriminalJustice Act of 1991. In the words of theWhite Paper which preceded the Act ± Crime,Justice and Protecting the Public ± for mostoffenders, imprisonment has to be justi®ed interms of public protection, denunciation andretribution. Otherwise it can be an expensiveway of making bad people worse. The


prospects of reforming offenders are usuallymuch better if they stay in the community,provided the public is properly protected(Home Of®ce, 1990).

The passage of the 1991 Act did reduce theprison population signi®cantly; it fell from45,835 in October 1992 to 41,561 in January1993. This downward trend continued untilexpansionist policies re-appeared in the wakeof the murder of 2-year-old James Bulger bytwo 10-year-olds in 1993, and the `prisonworks' speech of the then Home Secretary,Michael Howard, in the same year (Wilsonand Ashton, 1998).

The second force at the heart of bifurcationis the theoretical concept of just deserts. Putsimply this is a return to elements of classicalcriminology which suggests that `the punish-ment should ®t the crime'. As such, prisonsshould not be ®lled with minor propertyoffenders ± who in fact ®ll most prisons inWestern democracies ± but with offenderswho pose a risk to the public, and who wouldbe dangerous if not incarcerated. Just desertsis therefore also a recognition that prisons donot rehabilitate offenders, but often stigmatizethem, making it more dif®cult for them to re-integrate into society.

Evaluation

Bifurcation showed limited success in Englandand Wales in that the passage of the 1991Criminal Justice Act did reduce the prisonpopulation signi®cantly. However, it is ofrelevance that it was a concept that was unableto withstand popular, `common sense' cla-mour to increase prison numbers, largely as areaction to a tragic but atypical murder, andwhen political expediency determined adifferent course of action. In short, when itwas in the government of Britain's interests toappear `tough' on criminals as well as crime,bifurcation became politically irrelevant.

David Wilson

Associated Concepts: classicism, just deserts,neo-conservative criminology

Key ReadingsBottomley, A.K. (1980) `The `̀ Justice Model'' in

America and Britain: development and analysis,'in A. Bottoms and R. Preston (eds), The ComingPenal Crisis: A Criminological and TheologicalExploration. Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press,pp. 25±52.

Cavadino, M. and Dignan, J. (1992) The Penal System:An Introduction. London, Sage.

Home Of®ce (1990) Crime, Justice and Protecting thePublic. London, HMSO, cm 965.

Pitts, J. (1988) The Politics of Juvenile Crime. London,Sage.

Wilson, D. and Ashton, J. (1998) What Everyone inBritain Should Know About Crime and Punishment.London, Blackstone's.

BIOLOGICAL CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

The basic premise of biological criminology isthat certain people are born to be criminalthrough the inheritance of a genetic or physio-logical predisposition to crime. Environmentalconditions are not ignored but viewed aspotential triggers of the biological force. Asbehaviour is viewed as re¯ecting a prewritten,often inherited, code, criminality lies beyondindividual control. Accordingly biologicalcriminology is overwhelmingly positivist innature.


Early positivists such as Lombroso, Ferri andGarafalo identi®ed the criminal in terms ofphysical stigmata. Physical anomalies withhereditary origins (such as large cheekbones,¯at nose and thick eyebrows) were thought tomark out a criminal propensity. The notion ofthe criminal as defective reworks Darwin'stheory of evolution. As humans develop theylearn how to adapt to their environment.Those who do not are viewed as an atavisticthrowback to an earlier stage of evolution aspre-social and more criminally inclined. In hislater work Lombroso placed less emphasis onthe atavistic nature of all criminality. By 1897he claimed that the `born criminal' applied toonly a third of all criminals. To this he addedthe categories of the epileptic, the insane andthe òccasional criminal'. The latter exhibitedno inbred anomalies, but turned to crime as aresult of a variety of environmental condi-tions. His later work also attempted tomeasure the effect of climate, rainfall, priceof grain, banking practices, poor educationand the structure of government, Church andreligion on occasional criminality. However,he never totally abandoned the notion thatcriminals were abnormal. He never allowed

19BIOLOGICAL CRIMINOLOGY

for the possibility that criminality could be`normal'.

Several attempts have subsequently beenmade to test biological and genetic theories. Astudy of 3,000 prisoners in London in the1910s discovered high correlation between thecriminality of spouses, between parents andtheir children and between brothers. Poverty,education and broken homes were poorcorrelates. It was argued that criminality waspassed down through inherited genes.Accordingly, in order to reduce crime, it wasincreasingly recommended that people withsuch inherited characteristics should not beallowed to reproduce. This logic was fertileground for the growth of eugenics, a doctrineconcerned with ìmproving' the genetic selec-tion of the human race. Evidence from theCambridge Study in Delinquent Developmentestablished in the 1960s also continues tosuggest that crime does indeed run in families.From a base of 397 families, half of all con-victions were concentrated in just 23. Convic-tions of one family member were stronglyrelated to convictions of each other familymember. Three-quarters of convicted mothersand convicted fathers had a convicted child.

Further, more sophisticated research direc-ted at isolating à genetic factor' has beencarried out with twins and adoptees. Thesehave attempted to test two key propositions:

1 That identical (monozygotic or MZ) twinshave more similar behaviour patterns thanfraternal (dizygotic or DZ) twins.

2 That children's behaviour is more similarto that of their biological parents than tothat of their adoptive parents.

In a review of research carried out between1929 and 1961, Mednick and Volavka (1980)noted that, overall, 60 per cent of MZ twinsshared criminal behaviour patterns comparedto 30 per cent of DZ twins. More recent workhas found a lower, but still signi®cant, level ofassociation. Christiansen's (1977) study of3,586 twin pairs in Denmark found a 52 percent concordance for MZ groups and a 22 percent concordance for the DZ groups. Theevidence for the genetic transmission of somebehaviour patterns thus appears quite strong.However, telling criticisms have also beenmade of this line of research. For example, atendency to treat identical twins more alikethan fraternal twins may account for thegreater concordance. Thus the connectionbetween criminality and genetics may bemade through environmental conditions,derived from the behaviour of parents or

from twins' in¯uence on each other's beha-viour.

As a result, Mednick, Gabrielli and Hutch-ings (1987) proposed that the study ofadoptions would be a better test of a relativegenetic effect, particularly if it could be shownthat the criminality of biological parent andchild was similar even when the child hadgrown up in a completely different environ-ment. Using data from over 14,000 cases ofadoption in Denmark from 1924 to 1947,Mednick et al. concluded that some factor istransmitted by convicted parents to increasethe likelihood that their children ± even afteradoption ± will be convicted for criminaloffences. As a result, this type of researchcontinues to attract research funding andpublicity. In 1994 the Centre for Social, Geneticand Development Psychiatry was establishedat the Maudsley Hospital in South London toexamine what role genetic structures play indetermining patterns of behaviour (includingcrime). In 1995 a major international con-ference was held behind closed doors todiscuss the possibility of isolating a criminalgene ± the basis of which rested on the studyof twins and adoptees (Ciba Foundation,1996). In one of the best selling social sciencebooks of the decade, The Bell Curve (New York,Basic Books, 1994), Herrnstein and Murrayclaimed that American blacks and Latinos aredisproportionately poor not because of dis-crimination, but because they are less intelli-gent. Further, they suggested that IQ is mainlydetermined by inherited genes and thatpeople with low IQ are more likely tocommit crime because they lack foresightand are unable to distinguish right fromwrong. Such theory indeed remains politicallyand popularly attractive because it seems toprovide scienti®c evidence, which clearlydifferentiates ùs' from `them'. If certainpeople are inherently `bad' then society isabsolved of all responsibility. Such reasoningis, of course, most characteristic of totalitarianregimes whether in Nazi Germany or theformer USSR or in programmes of forcedtherapy practised in the USA.

Further research has examined the effect ofa wide range of biochemical factors Thesehave included: hormone imbalances; testoster-one, vitamin, adrenalin and blood sugarlevels; allergies; slow brain-wave activity;lead pollution; epilepsy; and the operation ofautonomic nervous system. None of theresearch has, as yet, been able to establishany direct causal relationships. While someinteresting associations have been discovered± for example between male testosterone


levels and verbal aggression, between vitaminB de®ciency and hyperactivity, and betweenstimulation of the central portion of the brain(the limbic) and impulsive violence ± itremains disputed that such biological condi-tions will automatically generate anti-socialactivities, which in turn will be translated intocriminality.

Evaluation

Most critical commentaries on this work ±notwithstanding the question of its ethicalposition ± have argued that each fails torecognize the potential effect of a wide range ofenvironmental factors. The high correlation inthe criminality of family members could beexplained by reference to poor schooling,inadequate diet, unemployment, commonresidence or cultural transmission of criminalvalues. In other words, criminality may notnecessarily be an inherited trait, but be learnedor generated by a plethora of environmentalfactors. The usual comparative controls ofcriminal and non-criminal are doubly mislead-ing. Offenders in custody are not representa-tive of criminals in general, but constitute ahighly selected sub-set of those apprehended,charged and convicted. Control groups of thenon-criminal are almost certain to includesome individuals who have committed crimesbut whose actions have remained undetected.Indeed most current research in this traditionwould not claim that biological make-up alonecan be used as a suf®cient explanation of crime.The question of exactly what is inheritedremains unanswered. Rather, some biologicalfactors may generate criminality, but onlywhen they interact with certain other psycho-logical or social factors. Whilst correlationalanalysis may suggest that criminality istransmitted in certain families, it is nowacknowledged that it does not allow us todistinguish the relative importance of geneticand environmental factors. Characteristics thatare linked to offending (e.g. intelligence,impulsivity, aggressiveness) could be geneti-cally transmitted, but not criminality per se.

It is now more common to ®nd biologyconsidered as but one element within multiplefactor explanations. For example, Wilson andHerrnstein (1985) argue that individuals havethe free will to choose criminal actions whenthey believe that the rewards will outweighany negative consequences. Such a decision(freely made) is, however, in¯uenced byinherited constitutional factors. Low IQ,abnormal body type and an impulsive

personality, it is argued, will predispose aperson to make criminal decisions, butcriminality is not a matter of nature versusnurture, but of nature and nurture. Thisapproach is a de®ning characteristic of socio-biology, developed in the 1970s and heraldedby its advocates as a way forward in unifyingthe social and natural sciences. Generally, it isargued that some people carry with them thepotential to be violent or anti-social and thatenvironmental conditions can sometimes trig-ger anti-social responses. Socio-biologists viewbiology, environment and learning asmutually interdependent factors. Sociopathymay not be inherited, but a biochemicalpreparedness for such behaviours is presentin the brain, which, if given a certain type ofenvironment, will produce anti-social beha-viour (Jeffery, 1978).

Nevertheless, the search for biological,physiological or genetic correlates of crimin-ality is continually hampered because it ispractically impossible to control for environ-mental and social in¯uences and thus to beable to measure precisely the exact in¯uenceof a genetic effect.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: determinism, dispositionaltheories, genetics, individual positivism,somatotyping

Key ReadingsChristiansen, K.O. (1977) À review of studies of

criminality among twins', in S. Mednick and K.O.Christiansen (eds), Biosocial Bases of CriminalBehaviour. New York, Gardner.

Ciba Foundation Symposium 194 (1996) Genetics ofCriminal and Antisocial Behaviour. Chichester,Wiley.

Jeffery, C.R. (1978) `Criminology as an interdisci-plinary behavioural science', Criminology, 16 (2),pp. 149±69.

Mednick, S. and Volavka, J. (1980) `Biology andcrime', in N. Morris and M. Tonry (eds), Crime andJustice, vol. 2. Chicago, University of ChicagoPress.

Mednick, S.A., Gabrielli, W. and Hutchings, B.(1987) `Genetic factors in the etiology of criminalbehaviour', in S. Mednick, T. Mof®t and S. Stack(eds), The Causes of Crime: New BiologicalApproaches. Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress.

Wilson, J.Q. and Herrnstein, R.J. (1985) Crime andHuman Nature. New York, Simon and Schuster.

21BIOLOGICAL CRIMINOLOGY

`BROKEN WINDOWS'

De®nition

`Broken Windows' is arguably one of the mostin¯uential and widely cited articles in NorthAmerican criminology. It was publishedoriginally by James Q. Wilson and GeorgeKelling in 1982 and updated by Kelling andColes (1996). Using a mixture of research®ndings on policing and self-proclaimed`common sense', Wilson and Kelling produceda working theory about the role of the policein promoting neighbourhood safety throughreducing the fear of crime.


The image of `broken windows' is used toexplain how neighbourhoods descend intoincivility, disorder and criminality if attentionis not paid to their maintenance. An un-repaired broken window signals to law-abiding and criminals alike that no one cares.Gradually other windows in the building willbe smashed and this will reinforce the sensethat the local community and the authoritieshave relinquished ownership and that disorderis tolerated. For them, petty disorderly acts,which are not necessarily breaches of thecriminal law, trigger a chain reaction thatundermines community safety and paves theway for serious criminality. If a neighbourhoodor a street is perceived to be increasinglydisorderly and unsafe people modify theirbehaviour accordingly. People, fearful of beingharassed, will avoid or withdraw from theseareas or move through them as quickly aspossible and respectable residents, aware thatthings will deteriorate, will move out or fortifytheir homes. Because only the weak and vul-nerable are left behind this leaves the neigh-bourhood open to colonization by drugdealers, pimps and prostitutes and other`street criminals'. It is they who then layclaim to ownership of the streets and who setthe appropriate norms of behaviour. Thehuman equivalents of the `broken windows'are down and outs, rowdy teenagers andimportuning beggars: `The unchecked pan-handler is, in effect, the ®rst broken window.'Thus, policy-makers should pay attention tothe policing of these disorderly and disrepu-table individuals because they create theconditions within which more serious formsof criminality can ¯ourish.

According to Wilson and Kelling, shifts inpolicing styles also leave certain neighbour-hoods and streets exposed to such a chainreaction. The authors step back to ask why thepublic is so supportive of foot patrols eventhough this particular policing style has beendiscredited as a method of effective crimecontrol. For them it is because foot patrollingheightens the sense of public safety and theimpression of social order. Experienced footpatrol of®cers with a sense of duty and anaura of authority, intuitively recognize thattheir primary role is òrder maintenance' and`community safety' rather than crime ®ghtingor law enforcement. This form of police workenables of®cers to become intimatelyacquainted with the law-abiding and respect-able as well as criminals and the disreputable.They also notice indicators of routine normal-ity and the out of the ordinary. Their task is toorder social relations and activities on thestreets and use their discretionary powers toregulate disorderly tendencies through rein-forcement of communal norms and informalsocial controls. As a consequence, the policeenjoy the con®dence and support of thecommunity because they are effective inresponding to and dealing with the `qualityof life' matters that exasperate people on adaily basis. In a neighbourhood where poli-cing is de®ned as a collaborative effortbetween patrol of®cers and the community,there is considerably less likelihood of dis-order and incivilities going unchecked andfewer opportunities to break windows withimpunity.

However, from the 1970s onwards thenature of police±community relations chan-ged as a result of: the police claiming that the®ght against high pro®le, serious crime wastheir priority; deploying of®cers in patrol cars;concentrating resources in high-crime areas;the bureaucratization and professionalizationof police work; the emergence of a stridentcivil rights culture; and the decriminalizationof victimless crimes. As a result police of®cersbecame more distant from local communitiesand less able and willing to intervene in petty`non-police' matters. In neighbourhoods atrisk of tipping over into disorder, `de-policing'had a disastrous effect because it meant thatrespectable residents had no support from theauthorities.

Wilson and Kelling (1982, p. 36) thus arguefor a return to old-fashioned, community-oriented òrder maintenance' police work andto employ such methods in neighbourhoodswhere they will make a qualitative difference.The primary police task should be to protect


areas and support communities where `thepublic order is deteriorating but not unrec-laimable, where the streets are used frequentlybut by apprehensive people, where a windowis likely to be broken at any time, and mustquickly be ®xed if all are not to be shattered'.It is a waste of police resources to concentrateon crime-ravaged neighbourhoods that arebeyond redemption.

Evaluation

The compelling analysis underpinning`Broken Windows' fed into policy discussionsabout the need for new approaches to urbanpolicing. What is signi®cant is that it lendsitself to both benign and authoritarian policyresponses and mission statements. It couldbe argued that `problem oriented policing'strategies are premised on a similar type ofunderstanding of the role of the police instabilizing urban communities and how policelegitimacy can be secured through respondingto `quality of life issues' and prioritizing crimeprevention. However, its core argument hasalso been adapted to justify aggressive streetpolicing tactics such as those practised in NewYork in the 1990s. NYPD's `zero tolerance'crime ®ghting strategy returned of®cers tostreet patrolling and mandated them to targetthe broad spectrum of low level misconductand widespread anti-social behaviours whichmade the city feel unsafe and disorderly.

There is considerable disagreement over howmuch of the remarkable improvement in theNew York crime rate could be attributed to the`broken windows' strategy. However, what isbeyond dispute is that Wilson and Kelling re-opened a debate on what the core role of thepolice should be and how policing should beorganized.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: defensible space, problemoriented policing, zero tolerance

Key ReadingsBratton, W.J. (1997) `Crime is down in New York:

blame the police', in N. Dennis (ed.), Zero-Tolerance Policing: Policing a Free Society. London,Institute of Economic Affairs.

Goldstein, H. (1990) Problem-Oriented Policing. NewYork, McGraw±Hill.

Kelling, G.L. and Coles, C.M. (1996) Fixing BrokenWindows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime inOur Communities. New York, Touchstone Books.

Skogan, W. (1990) Disorder and Decline: Crime and theSpiral of Urban Decline in American Neighborhoods.New York, The Free Press.

Wilson, J.Q. and Kelling, G. (1982) `Broken win-dows', Atlantic Monthly, 249 (3), pp. 29±38.

Young, J. (1997) `Zero tolerance: back to the future',in A. Marlow and J. Pitts (eds), Planning SaferCommunities. London, Russell House Publishing.

23`BROKEN WINDOWS'

C

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

De®nition

Capital punishment is punishment by execu-tion ± either by hanging, electrocution, ®ringsquad, gas chamber, lethal injection, orbeheading. Capital punishment can beimposed for a range of offences, but inWestern countries, except in exceptionalcircumstances, is usually reserved for murder.


Capital punishment by hanging was used inEngland and Wales between 1016 and 1964,and between 1900 and 1949 751 people werehanged, of whom 87 were women. Thepurpose of capital punishment seems to havebeen both retributive and deterrent. Until 1868hangings were public affairs. The last publicexecution was of the Irish nationalist MichaelBarrett in May 1868, with some 2,000 peopleattending (Potter, 1993, p. 94). These publicevents were usually drunken affairs, withspectators often using the occasion as anopportunity to commit further crimes, thusturning what was intended as a solemn stateritual ± which was supposed to re¯ect thepower of the law ± into a shambles (Ignatieff,1978, pp. 21±4). After May 1868 executionstook place behind the prison's walls withincreasing standardization in the process ofdeath, so that a uniform scaffold apparatuswas adopted, a standard length and thicknessof rope, and tables of `drops' were publishedso that executioners ± a profession itself whichbecame increasingly specialized ± could judgethe execution in relation to the condemned'sheight and weight. Although executions wereprivate, selected members of the public were

allowed to attend. For example, in August1868 at the hanging of Thomas Wells inMaidstone Gaol ± the ®rst person to beexecuted in prison ± 16 reporters were presentso as to be able to describe the ®nal momentsof the death of the condemned man for themorning papers (Potter, 1993, p. 95). The 1965Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Actended capital punishment except in excep-tional circumstances ± such as treason, arsonin HM Dockyards, and piracy ± for a trialperiod of ®ve years. Actual abolition occurredin England and Wales in December 1969.

This trend towards the abolition of publicexecutions, and thereafter capital punishmentitself, has been a process most obviouslyobserved in Western Europe. There has been atendency to treat capital punishment as asomewhat closed policy issue, especially asthose former Warsaw Pact countries whichhave applied to join the Council of Europehave signalled their intention to move toabolition. Indeed Russia has also reduced thenumber of offences for which the deathpenalty can be imposed. However, the aboli-tionist cause has not had much impact onseveral regions of the world. So, for example,as Hood (1996) advises, most of the MiddleEast and North African states have expressedstrong support for the continued use of capitalpunishment, which re¯ects their Islamicbeliefs and law; China continues to use capitalpunishment enthusiastically; and only oneCaribbean country has abolished the deathpenalty since 1965.

By far the most vocal and visible retentionistadvocate of capital punishment is the UnitedStates of America. In 1999, for example, therewere some 3,000 people on `death row'awaiting execution in the 37 states that haveretained the death penalty. Of note, concernhas been expressed that blatant racial dis-crimination operates in the application of

capital punishment in the USA. So, forexample, the killers of white people wereeleven times more likely to be condemned todeath than the murderers of African Amer-icans. However, discrimination in the applica-tion of the death penalty can be seen mostobviously by focusing on the race of the victimof the murder. In Georgia, for example,prosecutors sought the death penalty in 70per cent of the cases where the murderer wasAfrican American and the victim was white,but when there was a white murderer and thevictim was African American the sameprosecutors sought the death penalty in only15 per cent of cases (Donziger, 1996). Othershave drawn attention to how politicians usethe issue of capital punishment symbolicallyfor electoral advantage. So, for example, it hasbeen suggested that Bill Clinton scheduled theexecution in Arkansas of a brain-damagedblack man ± Rickey Ray Rector ± during hisPresidential campaign bid in 1992 so as todemonstrate his toughness on crime andpunishment. On the eve of his execution MrRector is reported to have been barking like adog, laughing inappropriately, and on beingoffered his last meal, asked to save his dessertùntil later'.

The most consistently debated questionabout capital punishment is whether it has adeterrent effect, and this remains the mostcommon justi®cation for the death penalty byretentionist countries. However, comparativestudies of neighbouring abolitionist andretentionist states in the USA have suggestedthat abolition is not associated with highermurder rates in general, or with highermurder rates of police or prison of®cers inparticular (Hood, 1996, p. 166). Even where adeterrent effect has been detected criticswould still debate whether the decision tomurder is a matter of rational choice, andwhether data on executions and murder arereliable. In his comprehensive study, under-taken on behalf of the United Nations Com-mittee on Crime Prevention and Control,Hood (1996, p. 167) concludes that `researchhas failed to provide scienti®c proof thatexecutions have a greater deterrent effect thanlife imprisonment. Such proof is unlikely to beforthcoming. The evidence as a whole stillgives no positive support to the deterrenthypothesis.'

David Wilson

Associated Concepts: deterrence, retribution

Key ReadingsBedau, A.H. (1998) The Death Penalty in America:

Current Controversies. New York, Oxford Univer-sity Press.

Donziger, S. (ed.) (1996) The Real War on Crime: TheReport of the National Criminal Justice Commission.New York, Harper Collins.

Gatrell, U.A.C. (1994) The Hanging Tree: Executionand the English People 1770±1868. Oxford, Clar-endon Press.

Hood, R. (1996) The Death Penalty: A World-WidePerspective. Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Ignatieff, M. (1978) A Just Measure of Pain: ThePenitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750±1850.Harmondsworth, Penguin Books.

Potter, H. (1993) Hanging in Judgement: Religion andthe Death Penalty in England. London, SCM Press.

Sarat, A. (ed.) (1998) The Killing State. New York,Oxford University Press.

CARCERAL SOCIETY

De®nition

The concept of the emergence and existence ofa carceral society was ®rst suggested byMichel Foucault (1977) in his book Disciplineand Punish: The Birth of the Modern Prison. Inthis book not only does Foucault attack theidea that prisons have somehow become moreenlightened and humanitarian ± that theyhave progressed ± but he also tries to unmaskthe disciplinary nature of modern society, ofwhich prison is but one manifestation.


Discipline and Punish opens with a descriptionof the gruesome torture of the regicideDamiens in 1757, and is almost immediatelycounterbalanced in the text by the detailedplans for a young offender institution some 70years later. However, the reader is not meantto infer from these descriptions that somehowpunishment has become more humane orenlightened ± the book stands as a full-frontalattack on modernism ± but rather how prisonspunish in other ways, which might be lesspublic and individualized, but which areequally gruesome. Moreover, punishment isno longer intended to alter individual beha-viour, but rather becomes the basis on whichphysical and social structures are createdwithin society ± not just within prisons ±and which thus alters the behaviour of

25CARCERAL SOCIETY

everyone. For Foucault the key words areinspection, surveillance and power, which inrelation to prison were symbolized byBentham's Panopticon.

What is of interest is that Foucault saw these`carceral impulses' swarming outside of thePanopticon and other penal institutions: `theirmechanisms have a certain tendency tobecome de-institutionalized, to emerge fromthe closed fortresses in which they oncefunctioned and to circulate in a `̀ free'' state'and thus ìnfecting' schools, hospitals andfactories. Their purpose was to observe,inspect and ultimately control the generalpopulation, a disciplinary impulse that he sawat work in a variety of locations, and within avariety of organizations ± from religious andcharity groups, to the development of acentralized police force in France.

Evaluation

The concept can be applied within a variety ofWestern societies that have sought to controlthe behaviour of their inhabitants, not on thebasis of controlling the behaviour of indivi-dual members of that society but rather of thepopulation as a whole. So many more areas ofsocial life are being subjected to categoriza-tion, surveillance, prevention, organizedforms of control and `compliance systems' ofboth a formal and informal nature. Inevitablythis has also meant that the number of peoplewho come to be managed by the criminaljustice system has increased, and the massivegrowth of, for example, the prison populationsof the USA and England and Wales istestimony to this expansion. Hand in glovewe have also seen, for example, the increaseduse of CCTV, airport security checks, andrandom urine checks at work. At another levelthere is greater awareness of `lifestyle controls'in the form of no smoking zones, or evidencethat some businesses may not hire people whoare overweight.

Foucault's work is ®lled with rich historicalinsight, and has re-emerged as a powerful toolwith which to analyse more contemporaryconcepts such as risk management, actuarial-ism and population control which are oftenincorrectly presented as `theory neutral'.

David Wilson

Associated Concepts: actuarialism, governmen-tality, net widening, panopticism, penality,situational crime prevention, social control,target hardening

Key ReadingsBogard, W. (1996) The Simulation of Surveillance:

Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies. Cambridge,Cambridge University Press.

Driver, F. (1984) `Power, space and the body: acritical reassessment of Foucault's Disipline andPunish', Society and Space, 3, pp. 425±46.

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Modern Prison. London, Allen Lane.

Gandy, O. (1993) The Panoptic Sort. Boulder, West-view Press.

CARNIVAL (OF CRIME)

De®nition

A description and analysis of popular festivebehaviour as a necessary act of irrationalexcess and excitement in opposition to thedominant accepted values of the restraint,sobriety and rationality of modern industriallife. Transgression and crime are understoodas an integral part of the performance ofcarnival no longer restricted to festivals but asan enjoyable part of popular everyday life andas a site of resistance to rationality.


The most important analysis of the nature ofcarnival is that of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin(1984), who stressed that the structure andimagery of carnival seeks to legitimate itsparticipants' behaviour making it a period oflicensed misrule. A characteristic of carnival-esque transgression is the open de®ance ofdominant authority structures and values,thereby putting the transgressor in a positionof power as their behaviour turns the socialworld ùpside down'. Such social behaviour isfull of irrational, senseless, offensive actsperformed in a time of disorder, transgressionand doing wrong in an otherwise orderedworld where such acts would be consideredcriminal.

Contemporary theorists of popular culture(Docker, 1996) have analysed the place ofcarnival in popular pleasure including mediaentertainment, whilst cultural criminologistshave looked at the pleasure of doing wrong(Katz, 1988; Presdee, 2000). The latter high-light the notion that carnival functions as aplayful and pleasurable resistance to authoritywhere those normally excluded from thediscourse of power celebrate their anger at


their exclusion. Cultural criminologists main-tain that, through the dual processes of thescienti®c rationality and containment of con-temporary everyday life, carnival has shat-tered and its fragments and debris are now tobe found not in the pleasure and excitement oforganized carnival but in acts of transgressionand crime (Presdee, 2000). Without a partlylicensed and organized carnival `form', thecarnivalesque emerges more unrehearsed andunannounced and often in a more violent andcriminal way. Lyng (1990) has described suchperformance as èdgework' ± intense andoften ritualised moments of pleasure andexcitement which accompany the risk,danger and skill of transgression and whichcome to play a key part in the construction ofshared subcultural meaning.

Many pleasurable activities such as raveculture, drug taking, body modi®cation, theuse of the internet, joy riding and SMactivities, contain both elements of the carni-valesque and of crime whilst the politicaldemonstration `the Carnival against Capital-ism' that erupted at the 30 November 1999meeting of the World Trade Organization inSeattle, USA, evidenced a global carnival ofcrime and pleasure, partially organizedthrough the Internet, that showed that prac-tical politics (such as the demonstrations by`Reclaim the Streets' and `Tree Dwellers' in theUK) can cause widespread disruption; can becriminal yet immensely pleasurable to theparticipants.

The carnival as analysed by Bakhtinresulted in a return to law and order and ledto reintegration into the existing structures ofsocial life. Now, as carnival explodes intoeveryday life there is no longer an inevitablereturn to law and order. The expectation hasgrown that crime as carnival will be con-tinually performed without shame and with-out social reintegration.

Mike Presdee

Associated Concepts: anarchist criminology,cultural criminology, cybercrime, hedonism

Key readingsBakhtin, M. (1984) Rabelais and His World. Bloo-

mington, Indiana University Press.Docker, J. (1996) Postmodernism and Popular Culture:

A Cultural History. Cambridge, Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Ferrell, J. and Sanders, C.R. (1995) Cultural Crimino-logy. Boston, MA, Northeastern University Press.

Katz, J. (1988) Seductions of Crime: Moral and SensualAttractions in Doing Evil. New York, Basic Books.

Lyng, S. (1990) Èdgework: a social psychologicalanalysis of voluntary risk taking', AmericanJournal of Sociology, 95, pp. 851±86.

Presdee, M. (2000) Cultural Criminology and theCarnival of Crime. London, Routledge.

CAUSATION

De®nition

The key proposition of causal analysis is thatcertain antecedent individual and socialfactors will invariably and unconditionallyhave a certain effect.


To establish that one factor is the cause ofanother, we have at least to show that thesupposed cause precedes the supposed effectin time and, ideally, that the effect occursalways and only when the cause occurs.(Social causation is generally complex, how-ever, and it may take a combination of causesto produce an effect. We may also ®nd that acause does not determine an effect absolutely,but only probabilistically: the cause may makethe effect more likely but not always andinevitably produce it.) We should note thatassociation between the supposed cause andthe effect is a necessary condition for causationbut not a suf®cient one. To demonstratecausation beyond argument it is necessary toestablish the mechanism by which the causebrings about the effect.

In social and criminological research weseldom speak absolutely of `causes', but ratherof àntecedents' or ìn¯uences' or `predispos-ing factors'. Rarely is it possible, even intheory, to argue that an antecedent factorleads deterministically to its effect; we aremore likely to want to say that it renders abehaviour more likely or in¯uences the way inwhich events and actions are interpreted. Theexception is when treatments or ways ofhandling offenders or crimes are beingevaluated. Here we shall want to show thatthe treatment or form of handling does havethe desired effect and is the only reasonableexplanation for the effect's occurrence.

The essence of casual analysis, in crimin-ological as in all other research, is control ofalternative explanations. In an experiment this

27CAUSATION

control is delivered as part of the design of thestudy: a treatment or manipulation is shownto lead to the effect, and the study is sodesigned that all other explanations for theeffect can be ruled out. Where experiments arenot possible or ethical ± i.e. in most crimino-logical research ± then statistical control isused to rule out alternative explanations.

Roger Sapsford

Associated Concepts: correlational analysis,determinism, experiments, multivariate ana-lysis, positivism, prediction studies

Key ReadingsBelson, W.A. (1975) Juvenile Theft: The Causal Factors.

London, Harper and Row.Glueck, S. and Glueck, E. (1950) Unravelling Juvenile

Delinquency. Cambridge, MA, Harvard UniversityPress.

Sapsford, R. and Jupp, V. (eds) (1996) Data Collectionand Analysis. London, Sage.

CHAOS THEORY

De®nition

Chaos theory, sometimes referred to as com-plexity theory, and one of the emerging per-spectives in postmodern criminology, is thestudy of orderly disorder. Chaos theory isthe study of dynamic systems that exhibit both`determinism' and `free will'. Modernistthought has constructed determinism and freewill as dualities; chaos theory argues both canbe at work in complex, dynamic systems.


Chaos theory had already been anticipated byNietzsche (cited in Babich, 1996, p. 109): `thetotal character of the world . . . is in all eternitychaos'. Order appears only as an imposition oras àesthetic anthropomorphisms', as `semiotic®ctions' according to Nietzsche. In the early1990s a number of theorists in America (BruceArrigo, Dragan Milovanovic, Hal Pepinsky,Robert Schehr, T.R. Young) began applyingchaos theory to criminology, law and sociol-ogy (Milovanovic, 1997). Chaos theoryincludes several key conceptualizations:

Attractors Four types of attractors have beenidenti®ed: point, cyclic/periodic/limit, torus,

and strange. Each lives in `phase space', a mapportraying dynamic systems in movement intheir various phases. Attractors are regions inphase space toward which dynamic systemsmove. The point attractor re¯ects movementtoward a point in phase space. A swingingpendulum (the dynamic systems) eventuallycomes to rest at a point. This `point' attractstrajectories to it. The periodic, cyclic or limitattractor is seen as a circle with each point onthe circle depicting at least two dimensionssimultaneously. A swinging pendulum, withno frictional forces, will move back and forthtraversing space and changing momentum.This could be depicted in phase space as acircle with the two axes marked position andmomentum. Hence, any point on this circlerepresents simultaneously its location andmomentum. For both the point and periodicattractor, modernist thought would have noproblem in the determinacy involved.

The next two attractors become increasingly`fuzzy'; one sees both order and disorderexisting. Modernist thought is hard pressed toexplain them. A torus attractor looks verymuch like an in¯ated inner tube. If ourpendulum was connected with a worn hingeit would wobble as it moved in its trajectory.Hence this introduces the third degree offreedom. To depict this we would includemovement in the form of a line winding itselfaround the outside of the torus. In otherwords, the torus depicts two coupled cyclicattractors. Where the two coupled systemsrepeat frequencies in a ratio way we have aperiodic torus; where they don't, we have aquasiperiodic torus. The shape of the torusitself does indicate there is overall order in thesystem (read `determinism' or stability); how-ever, within the torus, or at any moment,accurate prediction escapes us (thus a degreeof instability, or if you will `free will'). Thestrange attractor combines order and disorder(orderly disorder), and is the most indetermi-nate of the four attractors. The most celebratedstrange attractor is the butter¯y attractor,which looks very much like a pair of butter¯ywings. Each wing represents an òutcomebasin', or a region toward which trajectoriesmove. These attractors both exhibit a form(i.e., the shape of a butter¯y wing), or order,stability, or can even be interpreted as havinga degree of determinism, and also disorder(i.e., within the wings, indeterminacy pre-vails). Thus within each wing are trajectoriesportraying the dynamic system in movementin its various phases, but no accurate predic-tion can exist, hence we have instability,disorder, indeterminacy, or `free will'.


Bifurcation diagram (logistic mapping) Thisphase map was developed in early studies ofgypsy moth populations. It was found thatrather than linear development, non-linearmovement appears in the form of `perioddoubling'. Here, with increasing input of somemajor variable, results do not follow neatpredictable outcomes. Rather, initially peri-odic attractors develop as solutions to thequestion of what size population, but withadditional proportional input, bifurcations orsplitting exists, where ®rst two solutions(periodic attractors) then 4, then 8, 16, 32 andso on emerge. In other words, proportionalinputs did not produce proportional results,and various attractors appear: ®rst, point, thenperiodic, then torus, and then strange attrac-tors. After that, deep chaos is experiencedwhere prediction escapes us. However, withinthese latter regions, called far-from-equili-brium conditions, order spontaneously arisesout of disorder. These pockets of order arecalled `dissipative structures'.

Far-from-equilibrium conditions Modernistthought privileges order, stability, homeosta-sis, equilibrium, structural functionalism.Chaos theory argues for inherent instabilities.Thus disorder, instability and far-from-equili-brium conditions are privileged. Within theseregions both order and disorder live side byside, not as dualisms. Within these regions`structures' are extremely sensitive to pertur-bations. Even very small inputs can producedisproportionate effects. Thus contrary to theprivileging of bureaucratic structures as isassumed in homeostatic systems, `dissipativestructures' appear which are only temporarystructures of stability.

Dissipative structures These `structures' arecharacterized as always in process; they areboth `structures' and also dissipating ± are inconstant recon®guring modes of being. Theyoffer only temporary stability points. They existin far-from-equilibrium conditions. Unger's(1987) blueprint for a `superliberal' societyentails the emergence of these dissipativestructures (without him naming them as such).

Iteration This is a process by which onebegins with a simple algorithm, plugs in aninitial value, solves, takes the result, plugs itback into the algorithm, solves, plugs in thesolution into the initial algorithm and so on. Itis feedback. What one ®nds is that even a veryslight variance can, with a number of subse-quent iterations, produce large, dispropor-tional effects. In empirical criminology

rounding and dismissing `minor' variables incalculating `variance explained' may overlookimportant factors once iterated. One of theclassic forms produced by a simple algorithmand iteration is the Mandelbrot set.

Sensitivity to initial conditions Chaos theoryshows that especially in far-from-equilibriumconditions, even with small perturbations, orwith even some small change in initial startingvalues in iterations, large, unintended, anddisproportional results occur: à butter¯y¯apping its wings in Southeast Asia producesa hurricane in Florida'. A school crossingguard taking interest in a child in the ghettomay, upon iteration, produce a persontranscending his/her adverse environment.

Non-linearity Modernist thought privilegeslinear developments. Perhaps best expressedin syllogistic reasoning and deductive logic inlegal reasoning. Chaos theory indicates thatcomplex systems often exhibit `jumps', singu-larities, and unintended consequences. Evenbeginning with a deterministic mathematicalformula can produce unexpected, non-linearchanges.

Fractals and fractal geometry Modernistthought privileges Euclidean geometry withits whole integer dimensions (0,1,2,3, etc.).Chaos theory indicates that within theseinteger dimensions an in®nite number ofothers exist. The classic question of how longis the coast of England is answered by: it'sin®nite; it depends on the measuring device;use a yardstick and one gets one result, use afootstick, one gets another result, use an ìnchstick' and yet another result. With each meas-urement the distances increase. Fractals areuseful in getting away from Boolean logic, asin yes±no answers privileged in legal logic.Truth is always somewhere in between.Fractal geometry opens up `space' in whichalternative visions may appear.

Evaluation

Chaos theory has been applied in criminology(see generally, Milovanovic, 1997) to explainrural crime, banditry, property crime, genderand racial violence, organized crime, corpo-rate crime, white collar crime; in modellingRichard Quinney's critical theory in crimino-logy; in developing a `chaos of violence'; andin juvenile delinquency research. In law,several applications have developed: it hasbeen integrated with semiotic analysis; it has

29CHAOS THEORY

been applied to explain the role of theAmerican legal system; it has been shownrelevant in forensic psychology to explain theinsane defendant; it has been shown how lawimposes coordinates on the body and lan-guage by which reality gets constructed inrestricted ways; it has been shown that lawoperates much like an àutopoeitic' system(e.g., dissipative structure); and it has beenapplied in decision-making in law. In socialjustice it has been used to explain models of amore just society (Henry and Milovanovic,1996); to explain the spontaneous develop-ment of new forms of organization in singleroom occupancy areas; used in the develop-ment of new models of society that are moresensitive to being human; applied to a critiqueof existing mediation programs (Schehr andMilovanovic, 1999); and used as the basis of anew approach in social movement theory.

The methodological thrust of doing chaostheory involves:

1 locating the attractors hidden in complexdata sets.

2 determining how many attractors exist inthat data set.

3 ®nding the change point(s) at which newattractors are produced (for purposes ofsocial control).

4 identifying the key parameters which drivethe system into ever more uncertainty (forpurposes of developing humanistic socialpolicy).

5 determining which setting of those keyparameters is acceptable to the wholesociety.

Chaos theory is one of the perspectiveswithin postmodern criminology. It continuesto ®nd wide application areas in criminologyand law. Several theorists have integratedchaos theory with other perspectives withinpostmodern analysis in developing a modelthat draws from the innovative conceptualtools offered. Perhaps the greatest in¯uencehas been on those who are eager to developnovel ways of approaching old problems.

Dragan Milovanovic

Associated Concepts: constitutive criminology,postmodernism, post-structuralism

Key ReadingsBabich, B. (1996) `The order of the real: Nietzsche

and Lacan', in D. Pettigrew and F. Raffaoul (eds),

Disseminating Lacan. Albany, NY: State Universityof New York Press.

Henry, S, and Milovanovic, D. (1996) ConstitutiveCriminology. London, Sage.

Milovanovic, D. (1996) `Postmodern criminology',Justice Quarterly, 13 (4), pp. 567±609.

Milovanovic, D. (ed.) (1997) Chaos, Criminology, andSocial Justice: The New Orderly (Dis)Order. West-port, CT, Praeger.

Schehr, R. and Milovanovic, D. (1999) `Con¯ictmediation and the postmodern: chaos, catas-trophe, and psychoanalytic semiotics', SocialJustice, 26 (1), pp. 208±32.

Unger, R. (1987) False Necessity. New York, Cam-bridge University Press.

CHICAGO SCHOOL OF SOCIOLOGY

De®nition

A school of sociological enquiry renowned forestablishing links between environmentalfactors and crime.


To understand the Chicago School it helps toknow something of Chicago itself. In a littleover a century ± largely as a result of its sig-ni®cant geographical location ± Chicago grewfrom an obscure frontier trading-post tobecome one of the world's greatest citieswith a population that, by 1930, had exceeded3 million. One of the striking features of thisphenomenal expansion was the extent towhich Chicago became home to a panoply ofethnic groups: not only was the city a point ofgravitation for migrating African Americanskeen to escape the poverty and repression ofthe rural South, but it was also a destinationpoint for large numbers of European immi-grants. Consequently, by 1900 Chicago was anamalgam of disparate social worlds andcon¯icting identities. Against this sociallyturbulent background, a new school of socio-logical enquiry emerged.

The starting point for the Chicago Schoolwas Robert Park's `theory of human ecology'.Derived from the observations of early plantecologists, Park postulated that human com-munities were closely akin to any naturalenvironment in that their spatial organizationand expansion was not the product of chance,but instead was patterned and could beunderstood in terms analogous to the basic


natural processes that occur within any bioticorganism. Thus, Park maintained that the citycould be thought of as a super-organism; anamalgamation of a series of subpopulationsdifferentiated either by race, ethnicity, incomegroup or spatial factors. Accordingly, each ofthese groups acted `naturally' in that theywere underpinned by a collective or organicunity. Furthermore, not only did each of these`natural areas' have an integral role to play inthe city as a whole, but each community orbusiness area was interrelated in a series of`symbiotic relationships'. Close observation ofthese relationships enabled Park to concludethat just as is in any natural ecology, thesequence of ìnvasion±dominance±succession'was also in operation within the modern city.

Park's thoughts on the social ecology of thecity were developed by his colleague, ErnestBurgess (Park et al., 1925), whose concentriczone theory contended that modern citiesexpanded radially from their inner-city corein a series of concentric circles. Burgess identi-®ed ®ve main zones within Chicago, each twomiles wide. At the centre was the businessdistrict, an area of low population and highproperty values. This in turn was encircled bythe `zone in transition'; a place characterizedby run-down housing, high-speed immigra-tion, and high rates of poverty and disease.Surrounding that zone, in turn, were zones ofworking-class and middle-class housing, andultimately the af¯uent suburbs. Of greatestimportance to the Chicagoans, however, wasthe zone in transition. This was the oldestresidential section of the city and wascomprised primarily of dilapidated, ghettohousing that was unlikely to be renovatedbecause of its proximity to the busy commer-cial core. The affordability of accommodationin these neighbourhoods ensured that thezone served as a temporary home for thou-sands of immigrants too poor to affordlodgings elsewhere in Chicago. A patternquickly emerged whereby immigrant familiesonly remained in the zone for as long as it tookthem to become suf®ciently economicallyestablished to move out and ìnvade' an areafurther from the business district. Conse-quently, this was an area of great ¯ux andrestlessness ± a place in which communal tieswere lost, traditional shared folkways wereundermined, and impersonal relations pre-vailed. Such neighbourhoods were sometimesdescribed as `socially disorganized', and itwas within these un-integrated urban spacesthat the members of the Chicago Schoolsought to unearth the substantive causes ofcrime and deviance.

The Chicagoans set about assiduouslyresearching the city's many social problems.Taking their lead from Park, they proceededfrom the premise that the best way to identifythe causes of social problems such as crimewas by close observation of the social pro-cesses intrinsic to urban existence. To facilitatethis task the School developed innovative newresearch methods such as participant observa-tion and the focused interview. Such techniquesenabled the Chicagoans to ènter the world ofthe deviant' and compile ethnographic data onhobos and taxi-dancers, racketeers and street-gang members. The result was a series ofstunning qualitative and appreciative studies(e.g. Anderson, 1923; Shaw, 1930) that not onlyprovided great insight into many diverseurban subcultures, but also went a long wayto establishing a theorized methodology forstudying social action.

Arguably, it is the ®ndings that emergedfrom the School's empirical work that remainits most enduring legacy. Clifford Shaw andHenry McKay (1942) set about statisticallytesting the assumption that crime was greaterin disorganized areas than elsewhere in thecity by plotting juvenile delinquency courtstatistics onto Burgess's concentric circlemodel. Their ®ndings had immense implica-tions for criminology. Simply stated, theyfound that delinquency rates were at theirhighest in run-down inner-city zones andprogressively declined the further one movedout into the more prosperous suburbs. Ofcritical importance, they also identi®ed thatthis spatial patterning of juvenile crimeremained remarkably stable (often over verylong periods of time) irrespective of theneighbourhood's racial or national demo-graphic composition. These ®ndings allowedShaw and McKay to conclude that delin-quency was a product of sociological factorswithin the zone of transition rather thanindividual pathology or any inherent ethniccharacteristics. This was a momentous break-through that did much to dispel earliercriminological theories, that located the rootcause of crime within the individual. Havingestablished this important position, Shaw andMcKay went on to claim that socially dis-organized neighbourhoods perpetuate a situa-tion in which delinquent behaviour patternsare culturally transmitted. In contrast to orderlyneighbourhoods where community integra-tion is strong and `conventional values' aredeeply ingrained, in disorganized environ-ments ± because of the paucity of supervisionand the collapse of community provisions ±the prevailing value-system is likely to be both

31CHICAGO SCHOOL OF SOCIOLOGY

conducive to, and supportive of delinquentbehaviour. In other words, criminal conven-tions and delinquent traditions are `trans-mitted down through successive generationsof boys, in much the same way that languageand other social forms are transmitted' (1942,p. 166). This observation, along with EdwinSutherland's (1939) related theory of differen-tial association, was an important strand insubsequent criminological theories thatattempted to account for crime by referenceto deviant subcultures.

Evaluation

The work of the Chicago School has had aconsiderable in¯uence on the development ofcriminological theory. In particular, it helpedcrystallize thinking and give structure to thenascent and very disparate movements withinthe then ¯edgling discipline of sociology.

By developing innovative research meth-odologies, the School laid the foundations fora new type of àppreciative', re¯exive, quali-tative analysis. More importantly, by identify-ing the important relationship betweenenvironmental factors and crime, the Schoolgreatly compromised the (then still popular)belief that criminality was a product of innatebiological or pathological factors. Vitally, itestablished the importance of detailed appre-ciation of the social lifeworlds of individualsfor understanding the meaningfulness of theirbehaviour. Despite its many achievementshowever, the School has not been without itscritics.

A common criticism, challenging the useful-ness of the ecological model, is that the theoryof human ecology contained certain fallaciousassumptions ± not least that the work of theChicagoans (in particular that of Shaw andMcKay) implied that individual action can beexplained solely by the larger environment inwhich that individual resided. This laterfamously became known as the ècologicalfallacy'. Similarly, the key concept of `socialdisorganization' has been questioned on thegrounds that it was held by the Chicagoans tobe both the cause of delinquency and the proofthat it existed. This tautological `like-causes-like' fallacy today is recognized as fundamen-tally ¯awed.

Major reservations have also been expressedabout the wisdom of basing empirical researchinto juvenile delinquency upon of®cial statis-tics. Aside from the obvious criticism thatShaw and McKay consistently failed toacknowledge that crime rates are always the

product of social construction, the `delinquencyareas' scrutinized in their research were oftenlocations in which delinquents resided andthus not necessarily the same neighbourhoodsin which they committed their crimes.

A further criticism concerns the failure ofthe Chicagoans to place the everyday world ofcrime and deviance into the wider economicor political context. So concerned were Parkand his followers with the day-to-day pro-cesses of urban life and the ways in whichthese concerns impinged upon and contrib-uted to crime in the city, that they neglected toconsider fully the underlying forces ofcapitalist development that also played amajor role in shaping social life and determin-ing patterns of urban segregation in Chicago.

Keith Hayward

Associated Concepts: appreciative criminology,community crime prevention, geographies ofcrime, participant observation, social ecology

Key ReadingsAnderson, N. (1923) The Hobo: The Sociology of the

Homeless Man. Chicago, University of ChicagoPress.

Faris, R.E.L. (1967) Chicago Sociology, 1920±1932.Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Park, R.E., Burgess, E.W. and McKenzie, R.D. (eds)(1925) The City. Chicago, University of ChicagoPress.

Shaw, C.R. (1930) The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy'sOwn Story. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Shaw, C.R. and McKay, H.D. (1942) JuvenileDelinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago, Universityof Chicago Press.

Sutherland, E. (1939) Principles of Criminology, 3rdedn, Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott.

CHILD ABUSE

See Family crime; Violence

CLASSICISM

De®nition

An approach to the study of crime andcriminality which is underpinned by thenotion of rational action and free will. It wasdeveloped in the late eighteenth and early


nineteenth centuries by reformers who aimedto create a clear and legitimate criminal justicesystem based upon equality. At its core is theidea that punishment should be proportionateto the criminal act and should be viewed as adeterrent. Further assumptions include thenotion of individual choice within a consen-sual society based upon a social contract andthe common interest.


One of the central features of the classicalperspective within criminology is the empha-sis upon voluntarism and hedonism. Indivi-dualism and self-interest are placed at theforefront of explanations about why somepeople commit crime and how they should bepunished. One of the ®rst proponents of thisapproach was the Italian philosopher CesareBeccaria, with his work on the right to punishand methods to prevent crime, ®rst publishedin 1764. He argued that society should createlaws that may infringe upon the personalliberty of a few, but result in the greaterhappiness of the majority. His approach to theprevention of crime was that the pain ofpunishment should be greater than thepotential pleasure resulting from the act.Hence, the punishment should be proportion-ate to the harm it causes society.

Another early advocate of this utilitarianapproach was the philosopher and penalreformer Jeremy Bentham, who argued thatpunishment should be calculated to in¯ictpain in proportion to the damage to the publicinterest. As this philosophy was developedinto criminological and legal de®nitions ofcrime, formal equality before the law and thesimilarity of criminals and non-criminals wasemphasized in penal policy. In contrast topositivist approaches, which were developedin the late nineteenth century by Lombrosoand Ferrero (1895) and Ferri (1901), forexample, classicists maintained that the rea-soning individual had simply made an errorof judgement in committing a criminal act ± aviolation of the social contract. To prevent thisrecurring the individual must be sure of swift,sharp and certain punishment, so that,according to Beccaria, crime and punishmentare associated in the human mind.

Evaluation

As an alternative to the apparently cruel,harsh system based on terror, absolute control

and paternal benevolence which had precededBeccaria and Bentham's ideas, leading toreforms to the legal system, classicism appearsto offer a reasonably fair and more transparentphilosophy of punishment. It provides abenchmark by which other theories can becompared and an important philosophicalunderpinning for anti-positivistic paradigmsthat emphasize free will. What it fails to takeinto account, however, are the reasons orcauses of societal inequality or conditionswithin which individuals are said to bepropelled to commit certain acts that mayviolate legal codes. Classical criminologiesassume that there is an agreed collective set ofvalues or goals, ignoring the possibility ofcon¯icting groups or aims. Although Beccariaconceded that there are pre-rational indivi-duals (children) and sub-rational people (thementally insane), he failed to acknowledgethat social conditions may affect `rational'judgement. Furthermore, unlike later neo-classicists, Beccaria did not view crime as arational response to certain social conditionssuch as poverty, although he did concede thatthe poor may have to be deterred moreforcefully than other members of society.

Critiques offered by positivist criminolo-gists also suggest that social and individualforces, such as biology, physiology andenvironment create situations which maylead individuals to commit certain acts. Earlytheorists, mentioned above, proposed thatsome particular bodily difference, such asskull size, could identify and predict propen-sity to crime (see for example Lombroso andFerrero, 1895). Later, psychologists workingwithin positivist frameworks argued that therecould be an individual explanation in terms ofpersonality characteristics which might pre-dispose some people to commit crime. Incontrast, classicism maintains that althoughhedonistic, pleasure-seeking principles maylead some people to make errors of judge-ment, they are essentially similar to those whodo not commit such acts. Furthermore, interms of gender this perspective fails to takeinto account the disparity between rates ofoffending between men and women. One ofthe questions this type of critique raises is theinability to explain these differences in termsof offending as an irrational act or individualerror.

Another dif®culty with the classical schoolis that it assumes a rational, legal and `just'system ignoring functionalist argumentsregarding the necessary and bene®cial aspectsof crime. It seems unable to account for whitecollar and corporate crime or the `dark' ®gure

33CLASSICISM

of crime because, if self-report studies are tobe believed, `crime' is a regular and commonoccurrence. This questions the extent to whichthe majority of individuals in society can beargued to be acting in an ìrrational' manner, ifthis is the case.

Louise Westmarland

Associated Concepts: free will, functionalism,neo-conservative criminology, positivism,rational choice theory

Key ReadingsBeccaria, C. (1764) On Crimes and Punishments

(reprinted 1963). New York, Bobbs±Merrill.Beirne, P. (1993) Inventing Criminology: Essays on the

Rise of Homo Criminalis. Albany, SUNY Press.Bentham, J. (1791) Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham

(reprinted 1843). London, J. Bowring.Ferri, E. (1901) `Causes of criminal behavior',

reprinted 1968 in S.E. Grupp (ed.), The PositiveSchool of Criminology: Three Lectures by Enrico Ferri.Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press.

Lombroso, C. and Ferrero, W. (1895) The FemaleOffender. London, Fisher Unwin.

Roshier, B. (1989) Controlling Crime: The ClassicalPerspective in Criminology. Milton Keynes, OpenUniversity Press.

COGNITIVE-BEHAVIOURAL THERAPY

See Behaviour modi®cation; Social learningtheory

COHORT STUDIES

De®nition

Cohort studies involve the collection of datafrom the same group of respondents over aperiod of time. Research employing the cohortapproach can be either qualitative or quanti-tative. Researchers adopting a qualitativeapproach might seek to conduct in-depthinterviews with a group of respondents on alongitudinal basis, whilst researchers employ-ing a more quantitative approach mightsurvey the same sample of respondents overa period of time. Cohort studies are a form oflongitudinal study.


Cohort studies are employed where there is adesire to explore patterns of behaviour overtime or, where there is an interest in followinglife events and increasingly they are used inevaluation research, where there is a desire toobserve the impact of rehabilitative pro-grammes upon recipients. The aims ofcohort-based research are to identify whatmotivates groups of people to behave as theydo, to describe life events and sometimes toexplore the impact of programmes or policies.

The form that cohort research takes will bedependent upon the methodological techni-ques employed within a particular study.Typically a sample of respondents is selectedat the outset of a study on the basis of somede®ning characteristic. The respondents may,for example, share the same birthday or thesame interest or may have been convicted of aparticular offence at a given time. This groupof respondents or participants are asked toparticipate in the research over a speci®edtime period and are contacted at regularintervals, in order to participate in interviewsor to complete questionnaires.

Some cohort studies are based upon theanalysis of secondary data. In the case ofcriminological research such data may havebeen collected by criminal justice agencies inthe conduct of their work. As the data alreadyexist the researcher may select a cohort ofindividuals and attempt to trace their criminalhistories. One such study was conducted byPeter Marshall (1998), in which he aimed toestimate the number of men in England andWales who had received convictions for avariety of sexual offences. The work wasbased upon data from the Home Of®ceOffender Index, a database which storesinformation on all convictions from 1963 tothe present. Marshall calculated estimates onthe basis of ®ve cohort samples of men bornbetween 1953 and 1973. The men's criminalhistories were compiled by `sampling one inthirteen records from each year ± based uponall birthdays in four weeks of each year' (1998,p. 2). Marshall was able to estimate thenumber of men convicted of sexual offencesin England and Wales, and found that at least260,000 men aged 20 or over had beenconvicted of a sexual offence in the 1993population, 110,000 of whom had committed asexual offence against a child. Of his cohort ofmen born in 1953, approximately one in 60had a conviction by age 40 for some type ofsexual offence (this does include less seriousforms of sexual offending).


Evaluation

The value of quantitative cohort research liesin its ability to provide a great deal of dataregarding respondents' lives and motivations,over a long period of time. As the work is notconducted in a retrospective fashion, problemsassociated with respondent recall of pastevents are also diminished. The advantagesare similar in qualitative work, except that inaddition rich, detailed data may be collectedon an ongoing basis, providing a fuller pictureof respondents' lives rather than simply asnapshot.

Relatively few cohort studies have beenconducted by social researchers given theresources associated with the design andmanagement of such projects. Another keyproblem arises in attempting to retain theoriginal sample over time. Some respondentsmay be inaccessible as the study progresses ormay wish to withdraw from the research. Agreat deal of effort is involved in retaining thecooperation of respondents. A further pro-blem arises in that the production of ®ndingsis slow, given the long-term nature of cohortresearch.

Julia Davidson

Associated Concepts: longitudinal study, socialsurvey, time series design

Key ReadingsMarshall, P. (1998) The Prevalence of Convictions for

Sexual Offending. Home Of®ce Research FindingsBrie®ng, No. 55, London, HMSO.

Sapsford, R. and Jupp, V.R. (eds) (1996) DataCollection and Analysis. London, Sage.

COMMUNITARIANISM

De®nition

The broad philosophical and sociologicaltradition in which there is an emphasis onthe centrality of informal, communal bondsand networks for the maintenance of socialorder. It is critical of individualistic, liberaltheories of social behaviour and `society',invoking notions of `social beings' and `com-munity' rather than àtomized individuals'. Ithas both conservative and radical variants.


The intellectual pedigree of this body ofideas/perspective is one of a decidedlymixed `parentage'. Apart from the importantconnections back to Aristotelian notions ofcivic republicanism and Judaeo-Christianideas of communion, the expression of com-munitarian aspirations is also associated withsocialist and anarchist thinking. Furthermore,communitarian philosophy may also be linkedto a conservative sociological tradition inwhich a critique of Enlightenment's projectmay be discerned. As a result of this hetero-dox pedigree, communitarianism may be saidto `break' with traditional ideas of right andleft. Thus, for example, within much commu-nitarian thought, both the market and the(welfare) state are viewed as dangers to thevibrant, organic community.

Liberalism's emphasis on individual rightsand freedoms and abstract notions of ènligh-tened self-interest' is subject to a critique forits neglect of the inherently social nature ofhumans. In contrast, communitarians point tothe collective character of human existence inwhich obligation and mutual dependency areto the fore. Questions about solidarity andbelonging are central to communitarianism inall its versions. Social compliance in turnderives primarily from informal culturalcontrols built into everyday relations. Muchof its appeal then is to real people in speci®c,morally bounded communities rather thanthrough abstract notions of liberty and indi-vidual rights. Herein lies its strong conserva-tive appeal.

The sociologist and populist `guru' AmitaiEtzioni (1994) is the most prominent con-temporary proponent of the conservativecommunitarian project to undertake a `re-moralization' of society. In Etzioni's words,`Communitarians call to restore civic virtues,for people to live up to their responsibilitiesand not to merely focus on their entitlements,and to shore up the moral foundations ofsociety.' At times Etzioni is quite explicit inharking back to a vision of a more stable,orderly and lawful past based on an idealizedimage of small-town America. Accepting thatthere was discrimination against women andethnic minorities in the past, Etzioni never-theless expresses concern that the assumed,previous bedrock of moral consensus has notbeen replaced by anything of substance otherthan à strong sense of entitlement and a weaksense of obligation'. The contemporary weak-ness of community is identi®ed as both thecause of most of our ills (including crime and

35COMMUNITARIANISM

disorder) but also its potential saviour, when`re-moralized'.

Quite speci®c suggestions are put forwardby conservative communitarians on law andorder which further reinforce the dominantmotifs of obligation and the shoring up of ourmoral foundations. Apart from support forvigilant `self-policing' in the community, thiscommunitarian agenda appears to lend sup-port to a draconian and public version of`shaming' offenders. The bottom line forauthors like Etzioni, however, in their diag-nosis of the problem and solution of crime anddisorder, always appears to be the existence ofa tight and homogeneous community.

There is also a radical variant of commu-nitarianism in which the principles of sponta-neous solidarity, rules of reciprocity andsmall-scale communities with participatorydemocracy are to the fore. Bill Jordan capturesthe working de®nition of `community'adopted in this body of work as follows: it is`the voluntary exchanges within systems ofmutual obligation that include membersthrough reciprocity, sharing and redistribu-tion' (Jordan, 1996, p. 186). In contrast to moralauthoritarian communitarianism, radical com-munitarians are keen to emphasize that indi-vidual moral autonomy needs to be assuredand realized through speci®c projects andcommitments. The good society is de®antlypluralistic and mutual tolerance is a crucialfeature of it.

According to radical communitarians,recent years in neo-liberal societies havewitnessed a deterioration in social relationsdue to the denial of access for the poor tomajority goods and thus their experience ofmajority power as unjust. As a consequence,both the autonomy of poor people as citizensand the quality of life in the community havebeen jeopardized. Such processes of socialexclusion and polarization do not necessarilydestroy communities in any simple sense butradical communitarian commentators recog-nize that new forms of particularistic commu-nities do emerge in the absence of any notionof a shared, common good. It is argued thatmarginalization, inequality and exclusion lieat the root of much crime and anti-social acti-vities. As a consequence, the radical com-munitarian agenda on crime prevention givesethical priority to decisions over redistributionand reintegration which in turn allows allmembers to participate both in the decisionsthemselves and, crucially, in the shared life oftheir communities. Unless such developmentstake place, it is suggested, the decay in consentand in allegiance to democracy and civil order

will continue and with it the growth of morecoercive and authoritarian methods of govern-ment and social control. The politics ofenforcement will gather greater force.

A major contribution to the radical commu-nitarian debate on crime, disorder and thedecline of communities in the USA is found inthe work of Elliot Currie (1997). Currie con-tends that the most serious problem facingcontemporary USA is that its most disadvan-taged communities are sinking into a perma-nent state of terror and disintegration. Radicalcommunitarian commentators like Currieargue that behind the growth of crime is acultural as well as a structural transformationof poor communities. In this regard, there aresome common themes to both the conserva-tive and radical communitarians. The con-necting points are around the concern withcultural deprivation and morality. However,there are also important breaks between thetwo variants of communitarianism, as exem-pli®ed in the radical version's concern withstructural inequalities, promotion of diversityand the key and positive role of the state inaddressing social `wounds'.

Evaluation

Moral authoritarian or conservative commu-nitarianism has been widely criticized for thefollowing reasons:

· a normative emphasis on one moral com-munity at the expense of a sociologicalrecognition of the plurality and diversityof actually existing communities;

· a desire to return to a traditional andnostalgic past;

· a neglect of power structures in humansocieties or at least a naturalization ofhierarchical relations;

· a critique of personal rights and a call forduties but a failure to critique propertyrights;

· a glori®cation of past solidaristic commu-nities together with a failure to concep-tualize the crucial importance of strugglesversus oppression in the creation ofcollectivist communities;

· ®nally, a naive and exclusivist call for areturn to the `traditional' family as themeans to prevent social ills, includingcrime.

Within the popular conservative variant ofcommunitarianism, there is a vision of aunitary, homogeneous community sustained


by strongly held moral certainties, celebratingin turn mono-culturalism and setting; and,albeit at times implicitly, a morally prescrip-tive agenda for the social exclusion of margin-alized and `deviant' categories of people.

The extent to which the aspirations for aradical communitarian agenda are realizablein the face of both the authoritarian penalpopulism and the fragmentation of com-munities in neo-liberal societies remainsopen to further debate. There remains a lackof empirical substantiation for its participatorydemocratic visions of civil society and vibrant,expansive and tolerant communities. Further-more, the key question remains as to whatmight create the more redistributive economicstrategies upon which these radical commu-nitarian visions of crime prevention and socialreconstruction are dependent.

Community remains a deeply problematicword which is often derided by socialscientists and yet it is hard to live without. Itmay be a necessary ®ction, evoking as it doesthe fundamentally collective, shared andinterdependent quality of our existence andthe pull of the local on most of our lives (andespecially those of the poor and disadvan-taged).

Gordon Hughes

Associated Concepts: abolitionism, communitycrime prevention, community safety, leftrealism, restorative justice, shaming

Key ReadingsCurrie, E. (1997) `Market, crime and community',

Theoretical Criminology, 1 (2), pp. 147±72.Etzioni, A. (1994) The Spirit of Community: The

Reinvention of American Society. New York,Touchstone.

Hughes, G. (2000) `Communitarianism and law andorder', in T. Hope (ed.), Perspectives on CrimeReduction. Dartmouth, Ashgate.

Jordan, B. (1996) A Theory of Poverty and SocialExclusion. Cambridge, Polity Press.

COMMUNITY CORRECTIONS

De®nition

A catch-all term for the range of correctionalstrategies and programmes for dealing withthe punishment, treatment or supervision ofoffenders without recourse to penal custody.


Community corrections are generally viewedas being synonymous with àlternatives tocustody' and may range from the use ofsupervisory probation orders, communityservice orders, rehabilitation programmes,half-way houses, electronic tagging andhome curfews to even more draconian,shaming corrections in the community. Thereis a marked diversity of programmatic acti-vities which have a `community-based' label.Across the world, such strategies and pro-grammes still generally exist on the `border-lands' of criminal justice and social welfare, inwhich a mix of the principles of punishment,care and treatment is evident. They areparticularly associated with the work of theprobation or correction services in mostWestern jurisdictions (Hamai et al., 1995).Community corrections have been popularlyperceived as `soft options' when comparedwith custodial sentences and widespreaddebate continues to rage over their èffective-ness', however de®ned. They have also beenpopularly viewed as marginal to the `realwork' of criminal justice, namely custody,despite the use of community penalties out-numbering those sentenced to custody in mostcountries. In the USA, for example, there were1.5 million adults sentenced to penal custodyas against 3 million on parole in 1994.

The changing nature of community correc-tions and sentences has been driven by aheady mix of populist political motives, prag-matic managerial and economic concerns aswell as philosophical and moral principles. AsTim May (1994, p. 860) notes, àttempts there-fore to improve an evolutionary theoreticalscheme on the spread of community-basedsentences must be treated with caution'.

A recent shift in the wake of dominant NewRight thinking across many neo-liberal socie-ties has seen the move from `welfare' to`punishment' models of community correc-tions and the populist punitive political callfor such community sentences to be `tough'.Indeed, in the USA the use of the term `correc-tions' rather than `treatment' itself is indicativeof the sullied reputation of treatment modelsof rehabilitation (National Advisory Commis-sion on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals,in Carter and Wilkins, 1976). More generally,since the 1980s the `professional-therapeutic'rationale has been replaced by a `punishment-administrative' rationale of community sen-tences (May, 1994). Apart from the shift tomake community sanctions `tougher', theother key, related shift is that of concentrating

37COMMUNITY CORRECTIONS

on the administrative and managerial techni-calities of such corrections, with particularemphasis placed on cost and effectiveness.

Evaluation

The contemporary picture of communitypenalties and treatment programmes acrossmany societies is confusing and messy. Manyof these programmes are currently overlaidwith contradictory objectives and concerns,including the issues of managerialist effective-ness, value for money, public protection,victim satisfaction, responsibility of the offen-der, as well as the vestiges of rehabilitation andrestoration. And this situation is not helped by`community' being such a slippery and pro-miscuous word. According to critics of theappeal to community in criminal justice prac-tices, the rise of community-based, non-incarcerative sanctions is particularly danger-ous due to their potential for widening the netof social control from inside the prison and outinto the community (Cohen, 1985). However,such sweeping, if seductive, generalizationsare open to question from existing trends(Bottoms, 1983). There is also the danger thatcriticisms of community-based programmesmay serve to vacate the political space to thoseforces who want to increase the pro®le of retri-butive and incarcerative penalties yet further.

Like probation, community corrections arealways practised in `the shadow of prison'. Weseem incapable of conceptualizing otherpenalties except in terms of their relationshipto imprisonment. This is perhaps why non-incarcerative sanctions and programmesattract such popular suspicion. Across theworld, it would seem that non-incarcerativemeasures are increasingly concerned with the`punitive' restriction of liberty, surveillanceand monitoring rather than treatment andwelfare. An alternative vision is put forwardby Ann Worrall to this depressing scenario inher argument that such measures should beviewed as constituting a sphere of social con-trol which is quite separate from that of theprison, based on self-government and normal-izing instruction. This would result in awidening of the net of inclusion (Worrall,1997, p. 151).

Gordon Hughes

Associated Concepts: bifurcation, managerial-ism, neo-conservative criminology, net widen-ing, probation, rehabilitation, social control

Key ReadingsBottoms, A. (1983) `Neglected features of contem-

porary penal systems', in D. Garland and P.Young (eds), The Power to Punish. London,Heinemann.

Carter, R. and Wilkins, L. (1976) Probation, Parole andCommunity Corrections. New York, John Wiley.

Cohen, S. (1985) Visions of Social Control. Cambridge,Polity Press.

Hamai, F., Ville, R., Harris, R., Hough, M. andZvedic, U. (eds) (1995) Probation Around the World.London, Routledge.

May, T. (1994) `Probation and community sanctions'in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds),Oxford Handbook of Criminology. Oxford, TheClarendon Press.

Worrall, A. (1997) Punishment in the Community.London, Longman.

COMMUNITY CRIME PREVENTION

De®nition

The strategy which prioritizes the participa-tion of members of the community in theactive prevention of crime and related incivi-lities. It is also associated with explanationswhich look for the causes of crime anddisorder in the fabric of the community andthe wider social environment.


The strategy was most famously pioneered bythe Chicago School of Sociology in the earlytwentieth century, which focused on the com-munal `pathology' behind high rates of crimeand delinquency in urban environments. Itsenduring legacy is the rationale of communitydevelopment. Key individuals of the ChicagoSchool, such as Shaw and McKay (1969), wereat pains to develop practical ways of modify-ing those aspects of socially disorganizedcommunity life which fostered delinquencyand criminal careers among its members. Thestrategy which emerged, and is now oftentermed `community crime prevention', wasone which targeted speci®c problem neigh-bourhoods and sought to compensate poorcommunities for their lack of `normal' institu-tional infrastructure by initiating programmesof community development. The success ofthe Chicago School's own programmes hasbeen widely questioned but it has nevertheless


in¯uenced subsequent community interven-tions across the globe (Hope, 1995).

Appeals to community in crime preventioninitiatives remain popular among both practi-tioners and politicians. This is in no small partdue to the seductive rhetoric of `community'in a world where traditional, tightly knit andcohesive communities appear to be the excep-tion rather than the rule. It is also linked to theperceived growing problem of policing themost deprived and marginalized urban com-munities and the recognition that the solutionto problems may require the participation ofthe involved communities themselves. Inpractice, many researchers have noted thatthe active role of the community is oftenlimited to rhetoric rather than practice. Con-temporary strategies of community crimeprevention ± increasingly termed `communitysafety' ± are generally multi-agency in char-acter and involve both situational techniques(such as CCTV) and some limited socialinitiatives, such as the `self-help policing' ofNeighbourhood Watch schemes. Overall, suchstrategies are generally `top-down' in char-acter with limited `bottom-up' participation.

Evaluation

Despite the lack of tangible, measurablesuccesses, by the 1990s multi-agency commu-nity crime prevention appeared to be aphenomenon whose `time had come' on theglobal stage. However, for some critics, theappeal to community sits more comfortably atthe level of rhetoric than practice. Accordingto other critical commentators, the idea thatthe solution to neighbourhood crime problemscan be achieved primarily through the self-help efforts of residents is fundamentally¯awed. Tim Hope (1995, p. 78), for example,argues that instead of communitarian self-help, disintegrating urban communities mayneed signi®cant investment in their institu-tional infrastructure to offset the powerfultendencies of destabilization of poor commu-nities within the urban free-market economy.

There are some important conceptual andpolitical questions with regard to the popularappeal to `community' in crime control dis-courses. For example, the nature of the com-munity to which such appeals in dominantpolitical discourses on law and order are madeis itself often a highly selective rhetoricaldevice. Crawford (1997) has noted that it isassumed (wrongly) in the dominant discoursethat the lack of community necessarily leads todecline and thus crime, whereas `more'

community equals less crime. Furthermore,community is assumed to be a defence againstòutsiders' and that community will be char-acterized by homogeneity rather than diver-sity. In accord with a long tradition ofsociological scepticism on the use of thisslippery word, Crawford alerts us to theexclusionary and bounded `majoritarian'mode of legitimation which is likely to resultfrom the particular effects of the dominantdiscourse on multi-agency `community' crimeprevention and community safety; not leastleading to the demonization of the labelledòther' and òutsider'.

Most contemporary sociologists and crim-inologists are deeply sceptical about the use ofappeals to community in crime control `talk'and practice. According to Garland (1996),appeals to, and use of, community as a newmeans of `governing' crime may again be bestunderstood as part of the wider adaptation tothe realization of high crime rates as a normal`social fact' in late modernity. More than this,they are part of a `responsibilization strategy'by means of which the state devolves respon-sibilities for crime prevention onto agencies,organizations, groups and individuals outsideof the state and persuades them to act appro-priately. According to this logic, the sources ofcrime and also the means of its control andprevention are viewed as lying in thebehaviour and attitudes of individual citizensand their local communities.

However, this grand theoretical critique maybe guilty of neglecting countervailing forces atwork on the wider social fabric and of under-playing the possibility of ùnsettlements' of thestate's dominant agenda on crime control. Wemay, for example, ask what of mobilizationaround community as symbolic of newresistances and solidarities in opposition tothe central state's programme of popularpenalism and `privatized prudentialism'?

Despite the criticisms noted above, the ideathat communities do have a key role to play incrime prevention remains in¯uential in crim-inological circles. The argument that commu-nity `breakdown' is a key contributing factorin patterns of rising crime and delinquencyand claims that some communities are beingexcluded from `mainstream' social life in aperiod of increased social polarization andgreater social inequality remains a powerfulone. Again, it is wise to be wary about thenovelty of such ideas. The Chicago School inthe USA in the 1920s and 1930s claimed tohave identi®ed a crucial link between thedisorganized and disadvantaged communityand the growth and sustenance of criminality.

39COMMUNITY CRIME PREVENTION

Thus similar claims and arguments aboutcommunity tend to re-occur in different his-torical contexts, highlighting the continuingpotency of community ideas.

Gordon Hughes

Associated Concepts: Chicago School of Sociol-ogy, communitarianism, community justice,community safety, crime prevention, leftrealism, self-policing, social exclusion

Key ReadingsCrawford, A. (1997) The Local Governance of Crime.

Oxford, The Clarendon Press.Garland, D. (1996) `The limits of the sovereign state:

strategies of crime control in contemporarysociety', British Journal of Criminology, 33 (4), pp.445±71.

Hope, T. (1995) `Community crime prevention' in M.Tonry and D. Farrington (eds), Building a SaferSociety: Strategic Approaches to Crime. Chicago,University of Chicago Press.

Shaw, C. and McKay, H. (1969) Juvenile Delinquencyand Urban Areas. Chicago, University of ChicagoPress.

COMMUNITY JUSTICE

De®nition

The term is deployed generally to describe arange of con¯ict resolution strategies, usuallyassociated with informal, popular or restora-tive forms of justice.


The term `community justice' has begun toenter the vocabulary of those who work withoffenders and victims, although few are surewhat it means (Nellis, 2000). That noted, theword has a long tradition in criminologicalthought, having been deployed in analysesof popular and informal justice. It is alsoparticularly associated with abolitionist andcommunitarian perspectives/traditions incriminology (see Christie, 1977). The current,growing popularity of the term among prac-titioners and policy-makers is in part linked tothe recognition that state-administered sys-tems of justice are expensive, unduly bureau-cratic and slow, individualized in theirresponse to offenders and neglectful of theneeds of victims and the wider community.

Abolitionists have long shared these misgiv-ings but the main impulse of the abolitionistcritique of traditional formal criminal justice isbased on the criminalizing consequences ofdisintegrative shaming and retributive pun-ishment and the failures of contemporarycriminal justice policy owing to its over-bearing reliance on imprisonment. Commu-nitarians of different varieties share theabolitionist bias towards informal, reintegra-tive and educational solutions. However, theyalso openly accept that punishment is theinevitable concomitant of law enforcementwith censure as a mostly legitimate responseto wrong-doing; and with denunciation in thename of the victim and the common good asmorally appropriate (Nellis, 2000).

The claims of community justice are alsoevident in populist law and order interpreta-tions of the limitations of the formal andlegalistic system of criminal justice. Vigilant-ism and public shaming are common expres-sions of this variant of the movement forcommunity justice.

However, the contemporary appeal to com-munity justice in criminal justice systems andfor policy-makers and practitioners is based onless extreme criticisms of, and organizationaldepartures from, formal, adversarial justicethan that associated with either abolitionism orpopulist punitiveness. In effect, the practice ofcommunity justice is for the most part aimed atorganizational reform of parts of the justicesystem which are viewed as failing due to highcosts, poor coordination and lack of participa-tion and involvement of lay actors in theprocess. There are clear parallels with theemergence of the strategy of multi-agencycommunity safety and crime reduction. Theactual claims for returning justice to thecommunity (however de®ned) appear to havemore to do with rhetoric and legitimation thanactual practice. Instead, community justice asrealized in speci®c criminal justice and socialwelfare systems tends to be a not so new orradical strategy based on multi-agency workwith relatively low tariff offenders in which theactive involvement of the victim, offender andother relevant members of the community isencouraged. Among the most in¯uentialexamples of such institutional practices incontemporary societies are the `reintegrativeshaming' initiatives such as Family GroupConferences and sentencing circles and thewidely used penalties such as communityservice orders for `shallow end' offenders. Is itthen mostly a `rebranding' of the status quo?According to proponents of community justice,it offers to open up further possibilities, in


ways that other terms and ideas do not. Inparticular, there is the hope that over time newpractices might develop which will tilt thecentre of gravity away from imprisonment andmass social exclusion and towards the creationof inclusive communities which would also befreer from crime (Nellis, 2000). Prime amongthese new possibilities are initiatives in restora-tive justice, such as reparation and compensa-tion schemes and victim±offender mediationinitiatives.

Evaluation

There are some important reservations to bemade about the contemporary appeal tocommunity and communal participation incriminal justice. Community justice initiativeshave tended to de®ne community loosely if atall and critics have noted the wide variety offorms that these initiatives often take. Inparticular, the dangers of populist appeals to a`participatory' politics of enforcement in crimecontrol are evident. The òff-loading' bycentral government of crime control practicesonto communities, however `represented',does have its dangers for the central state,not least in the creation of volatile new spacessuch as vigilantism. The rise of vigilantism isevident in the examples of `communities'taking the law into their own hands against`paedophiles' and `persistent' offenders. Weneed to be wary of opening up criminal justiceissues to democratic participation at preciselythe moment when relations of trust betweengroups of citizens and between citizens andgovernment have been at their weakest. Inorder to counteract the dangers of a reac-tionary and exclusivist moral majoritarianbacklash against the criminalized, Jordan andArnold (1995, p. 180) argue that `balanceddemocratic governance may require the publicpower to repair social con¯icts throughactions in other spheres before attempting toopen up criminal justice policy for publicparticipation'. In other words, there may be akey role to be played by the state in healingthe wounds in the social fabric by measures ofsocial justice before `the community' can beallowed to participate in an inclusive politicsof crime control and social justice.

Gordon Hughes

Associated Concepts: abolitionism, communitar-ianism, community crime prevention, com-munity safety, governmentality, redress,restorative justice, shaming

Key ReadingsChristie, N. (1977) `Con¯icts as property', British

Journal of Criminology, 17 (1), pp. 1±19.Galaway, B. and Hudson, J. (1996) Restorative Justice:

International Perspectives. Monsey, NY, CriminalJustice Press.

Jordan, B. and Arnold, J. (1995) `Democracy andcriminal justice', Critical Social Policy, 44/45, pp.171±80.

Nellis, M. (2000) `Creating community justice', in K.Pease, S. Ballintyne and V. McLaren (eds), KeyIssues in Crime Prevention, Crime Reduction andCommunity Safety. London, IPPR.

COMMUNITY POLICING

De®nition

A policing philosophy that promotes commu-nity-based problem-solving strategies toaddress the underlying causes of crime anddisorder and the fear of crime. The statedintention of community policing is to enhancethe quality of life of local communities.


Community policing is one of the mostpopular contemporary approaches to policework and has emerged in response to evi-dence that indicated that the police could not®ght crime by themselves and increasinglycon¯ictual relationships with minority ethniccommunities. There is no general consensus asto what community policing actually entailsand it can take various forms, for example`team policing', `foot patrol', `problemoriented policing', `neighbourhood policing',`service-based policing', `policing by consent'.It recognizes that effective police work is acollaborative effort between the police and thecommunity and involves identifying theproblems of crime and disorder that concernthe community and attempts to include allsections of the community in the search forsolutions to these problems. At the centre ofcommunity policing initiatives are localizedpolicing, community partnerships and pro-blem oriented approaches.

· Localized policing requires a process oforganizational decentralization. Of®cersneed to be assigned to the same beat andsame shifts so that they can establish thetrust and con®dence of local people and

41COMMUNITY POLICING

secure an intimate day-to-day knowledgeof local conditions. Of®cers also need to begiven more operational freedom anduncommitted patrol time to tailor theirwork to local demands and optimize con-tact with the community.

· Forging meaningful partnerships with thecommunity necessitates a degree of de-professionalization on the part of thepolice. Active community involvement indeliberations about police prioritiesobliges the police to be open about issuessuch as strategies and resourcing.

· Problem oriented policing identi®es theunderlying causes of crime and disorderthat the community feels most stronglyabout and constructs tailor-made strate-gies that have the support of the commu-nity. It also enables police of®cers andcommunities to alter the conditions andcircumstances that encourage criminaland disorderly behaviour.

Community policing holds out the promiseof reduced levels of crime and disorder,improved quality of life for the community,enhanced relationships between the policeand the community, a supportive environ-ment for police operations and greater jobsatisfaction for police of®cers. The long-termaim is to produce strong self-suf®cient com-munities that have the ability to protectthemselves from crime and disorder. There isno single recipe for successful communitypolicing but for it to work it requires the entirepolice force to shift to a broader conceptuali-zation of police work and the transformationof the mindset of police of®cers of all ranks.The production of genuine community poli-cing is not possible unless it is constructedwithin a framework of democratic account-ability that necessitates service to communitiesrather than the state or the police bureaucracy.The radical implications of such a move meanthat many police forces will continue to opt fora `spray on', token version of communitypolicing that leaves the hegemonic position ofthe police bureaucracy intact.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: `broken windows', gov-ernmentality, problem oriented policing

Key ReadingsGreene, J.R. and Mastrofski, S.D. (1991) Community

Policing: Rhetoric or Reality? New York, PraegerPress.

Lyons, W. (1997) `Re¯ections on power relations incommunity policing', in A. Sarat and S. Silbey(eds), Studies in Law, Politics and Society, Vol. 16,pp. 103±38. London, JAI.

McLaughlin, E. (1994) Community, Policing andAccountability. Aldershot, Gower.

Skogan, W.G. and Hartnet, S.M. (1997) CommunityPolicing: Chicago Style. Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress.

Trojanowiz, R.C. (1998) Community Policing: AContemporary Perspective. New York, AndersonPublishing Co.

Watson, E.M., Stone, A. and Deluca, S.M. (1997)Strategies for Community Policing. New York,Prentice±Hall.

COMMUNITY SAFETY

De®nition

The strategy which seeks to move beyond apolice-driven crime prevention agenda, toinvolve other agencies and generate greaterparticipation from all sections of the `commu-nity'. It has been particularly associated withlocal `partnership' strategies of crime anddisorder reduction from local authorities.However, it is a capacious phrase which mayalso refer to strategies aimed at improvingcommunity safety from harms from allsources, not just those acts classi®able as`crimes'.


By the 1990s community safety could beviewed as the `rising' star of crime prevention.The use of this referrent, rather than crimeprevention, may re¯ect a diminished con-®dence in formal criminal justice agencieswhich, compared to the networks of civilsociety, have limited impact on patterns ofcrime. It also involves an expanded role to beplayed by an array of voluntary and commer-cial organizations and responsible (`responsi-bilized') individuals in `partnership' withstatutory agencies, all of which now representa key feature of the politics of social defence inincreasingly fearful and divided societies. Thesubtext of community safety then is that of aholistic, managerialist approach allied to thepromotion of community activism and of alogic of responsibilization ± with the conse-quence that blame is placed on fellow citizens


rather than the wider social arrangements thatgenerate harms. Multi-agency strategies ofcommunity safety are most pronounced in theUK, where they have become a statutoryfeature of local crime and disorder reductionpolicies. As legislated in the UK, it is merely astyle of crime reduction/prevention ± àsynonym of crime prevention with ¯uffyovertones added' (Pease and Wiles, 2000).

More generally across the world, commu-nity safety also often appears to be a means bywhich many powerful sectional interestswithin civil society are able to `lock', `light'and `zone' themselves out of harm's way,whilst areas blighted by de-industrializationand acute levels of victimization are leastlikely to have the material resources, politicalconnections and the civic associations thatmeaningful community safety presupposes(Hope, 1995).

Viewed more broadly, community safetyrefers to the absence of likely or serious harms,whether caused by human agency or other-wise (Pease and Wiles, 2000). This pan-hazardparadigm offers a challenge to dominant,compartmentalized thinking about harms inwhich each agency seeks to reduce the harmstraditionally central to its compartmentalfunction. It is concerned with dangers fromwhatever source, not just crime but also, forexample, traf®c and transport, housing andworking conditions. This approach to harmreduction and the promotion of public safetyis not as yet common, necessarily involvingwhat is often termed `joined-up thinking'. Italso necessitates sustained, multi-agency coor-dinated attention to access to, and delivery of,welfare and health services, educational andemployment opportunities, as well as con-fronting institutionalized discrimination andvested power interests. But there are potentialadvantages of rethinking community safety asstrategies aimed at the minimization of thenumber and seriousness of harms rather thanfocusing on crime prevention alone: not leastso that serious harms caused by non-humanagency may take their rightful place amongreasons to be fearful (Pease and Wiles, 2000).

Evaluation

The debate on whether community safety andcrime prevention amount to the same thing orwhether they carry different connotativebaggage is still nascent and un®nished. AsPease and Wiles note, community safety is aphrase to be preferred (over crime preventionand crime and disorder reduction) only if

safety refers to the likely absence of harms(particularly serious harms) from all sources,and not just from human acts classi®able ascrimes. In particular this requires a shift offocus from that of the harming person to thatof the harming circumstance. If used narrowlywe are likely to see the emergence of doublestandards ± whereby some of us are protectedfrom attack by others while others of us chokeon polluted air or are victimized as a result ofinadequate protective building design.

Many academic commentators have soughtto debunk the idea of community, on variouscounts (for being nebulous, nostalgic, intrinsi-cally oppressive and so forth). According tomany academic commentators, `communitysafety' is at best a `feel good' word marked byan extreme vagueness. It is generally seen toexist more happily at the level of rhetoricrather than practice where it is limited bysome serious structural constraints (Gilling,1997). Critics of community safety have alsoalerted us to the dangers of appeals to com-munity in the politics of criminal justice andcrime prevention, not least for the tendency toproduce intolerance towards those viewed asòutsiders'. But the idea of community also hasa long association with the solidarity strugglesof the weak and the poor. If it did not existthen it would need to be invented.

Community safety remains a `wicked issue',not just for the challenges it raises for noteasily compartmentalized practices and poli-cies about harm reduction, but also for thetheoretical, moral and political challengesassociated with its nascent and contestedagenda in the new governance of crimes andharms (Hughes, 2000).

Gordon Hughes

Associated Concepts: communitarianism, com-munity crime prevention, community justice,left realism, multi-agency crime prevention,self-policing, social crime prevention, socialharm

Key ReadingsHope, T. (1995) `Community crime prevention', in

M. Tonry and D. Farrington (eds), Building a SaferSociety. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Hughes, G. (2000) Ìn the shadow of crime anddisorder: the contested politics of communitysafety', Crime Prevention and Community Safety,2 (4), pp. 47±60.

Crawford, A. (1997) Local Governance of Crime.Oxford, The Clarendon Press.

43COMMUNITY SAFETY

Gilling, D. (1997) Crime Prevention: Theory, Policy andPractice. London, UCL Press.

Pease, K. and Wiles, P. (2000) `Crime prevention andcommunity safety: Tweedledum and Tweedle-dee?', in K. Pease, S. Ballintyne and V. McLaren(eds), Key Issues in Crime Prevention, CrimeReduction and Community Safety. London, IPPR.

COMMUNITY SENTENCES

De®nition

Penalties, imposed on offenders by criminalcourts, that do not involve imprisonment.These include various forms of reprimand,®nancial penalties, supervision and unpaidwork and are sometimes referred to as `non-custodial' sentences or àlternatives to prison'.


Although community sentences vary aroundthe world, it is possible to classify them in threeways: self-regulatory, ®nancial and super-visory (Worrall, 1997). Self-regulatory penal-ties involve some form of public admonition orreprimand which is assumed to be suf®cientlyshaming of itself to deter the offender fromfurther law-breaking. Financial penalties are oftwo kinds: ®nes are both retributive anddeterrent in purpose and are generally paidto the central administration of a criminaljustice system; compensation is paid (throughthe courts) to the victim of a crime and isintended to provide reparation. Supervisorysentences are imposed when courts believethat the offender is unable to stop committingcrimes without support or surveillance andthey may contain one or more of threeelements: rehabilitation (through education,therapeutic programmes, counselling andwelfare advice), reparation (through unpaidwork for the community) and incapacitation(through curfews and electronic monitoring).

Some community sentences have long his-tories, while others have been introducedmore recently. For example, in many coun-tries, the origins of probation (the main formof supervision) can be traced back to the latenineteenth century, whereas community ser-vice (unpaid work) was introduced in the1960s and 1970s and electronic monitoring inthe 1980s.

Expansion in the use of supervisory sen-tences since the 1970s has been due to the

desire of many governments to be seen to be®nding less expensive, but equally demand-ing, alternatives to imprisonment. This hasbeen termed the `decarceration' debate andresulted from a loss of con®dence in the 1950sand 1960s in the `rehabilitative ideal' (basedon the discredited therapeutic possibilities ofinstitutions). In reality, such expansion hasbeen an accompaniment, rather than analternative, to a rising prison population.

Evaluation

Community sentences have many advantagesover imprisonment. They allow offenders toretain family, work and social ties while, at thesame time, giving them the opportunity torepair the damage they have done to the com-munity and resolve the personal and socialproblems which may have led to theiroffending in the ®rst place. They enable theoffender to avoid the stigma of imprisonmentand the risk of becoming embedded in acriminal culture as a result of constant associ-ation with other criminals in prison. Commu-nity sentences are also far less costly toadminister than imprisonment.

Despite these advantages, community sen-tences have an ìmage' problem. Althoughmany more offenders receive some form ofcommunity sentence than are imprisoned,penal debates and policies focus overwhel-mingly on prisons and neglect other forms ofpunishment. Attempts to raise the pro®le ofcommunity sentences encounter a number ofobstacles.

First, and of most signi®cance, is the publicand media perception that community sen-tences are but a poor substitute for the `realpunishment' of prison. Viewed as `softoptions', community sentences are often rep-resented in policy documents as weak andundemanding `let offs', which do not com-mand public con®dence. There is, therefore, aconstant search among advocates of commu-nity sentences to include more and moredemanding conditions which distinguishìntermediate sentences' (as they are some-times called) from traditional welfare-orientedsupervision (Byrne et al., 1992; Petersilia,1998). Second is the obstacle of unfair andinconsistent sentencing. Despite increasinglysophisticated guidelines on the use of com-munity sentences, there remain concerns thatcertain groups of offenders are over-repre-sented in prison for reasons that may havelittle to do with the seriousness of theiroffences. Community sentences tend to be


available only to the relatively advantagedsocially ± those with suf®cient money to pay a®ne, those who are employed and those whoare perceived to be able to `bene®t' fromsupervision. Third is the obstacle of `net-widening', a term which entered criminaljustice vocabulary in the 1960s in the wake oflabelling theory. With the proliferation ofalternatives to custody comes the danger thatinstead of keeping people out of prison,community sentences will simply draw moreand more people into the `net' of the criminaljustice system and thereby increase the like-lihood that they will eventually end up inprison. With `net-widening' comes the conceptof the `dispersal of discipline' (Cohen, 1985)which proposes that community sentencesextend the restrictions of liberty experiencedin prison to the community outside the prisonwalls. The electronic monitoring of offendersin their own homes is a concrete example ofthis concept. The fourth obstacle is that ofenforcement. Ensuring compliance with com-munity sentences is notoriously dif®cult andcourts have the right to send to prison anyoffender who fails to pay a ®ne or whobreaches the conditions of a supervisory order.In this way, community sentences alwaysfunction ìn the shadow' of imprisonment.

Anne Worrall

Associated Concepts: community justice, dec-arceration, electronic monitoring, incapacita-tion, net widening, probation, rehabilitation,reparation, restorative justice, shaming

Key ReadingsBrownlee, I. (1998) Community Punishment: A Critical

Introduction. Harlow, Addison Wesley Longman.Byrne, J.M., Lurigio, A.J. and Petersilia, J. (1992)

Smart Sentencing: The Emergence of IntermediateSanctions. London, Sage.


Mair, G. (1997) `Community penalties and theprobation service', in M. Maguire, R. Morganand R. Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook ofCriminology, 2nd edn. Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress.

Petersilia, J. (ed.) (1998) Community Corrections.Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Worrall, A. (1997) Punishment in the Community: TheFuture of Criminal Justice. Harlow, AddisonWesley Longman.

COMPARATIVE METHOD

De®nition

The selection and analysis of cases which aresimilar in known ways and which differ inother ways, with a view to formulating ortesting hypotheses.


The types of cases which are the basis forcomparison can vary and can include indivi-duals, groups, institutions, situations, cultures,geographical areas and time periods. Wheredifferent societies or cultures are compared itis common to refer to cross-cultural compar-ison. Comparison can be used both to developand to test hypotheses.

One way of developing hypotheses is by theprocess of theoretical sampling, which isclosely associated with qualitative, ethno-graphic research. This process involves theselection of cases for analysis (such as settings,groups or individuals) with a view to forminggeneralizations about how and why such casesdiffer. For example, it could involve theobservation of beat police of®cers and criminalinvestigation of®cers in order to form general-izations about the differing ways in whichthey take decisions and the factors that in¯u-ence decision-taking. Often comparison takesplace by maximizing and minimizing differ-ences, for example by ensuring that all theof®cers are of the same age, sex, social classand ethnic background whilst they differ interms of the nature of their police role andpolice training. The process can be continuousas the researcher seeks out new cases andmaximizes and minimizes other differences inorder to modify and extend hypotheses. Forexample, this could involve comparing deci-sion-making by beat and criminal investiga-tion of®cers in both urban and rural areas.When no extra insight can be gained byfurther comparisons the stage of theoreticalsaturation has been reached. Another way ofdeveloping research questions or hypothesesis by the examination of `deviant' or `critical'cases in comparison with cases that are closeto the norm. For example, this could involvethe comparison of a geographical area that hasan extremely high level of crime with areasthat are close to the average in order toformulate generalizations about factors thatcan account for these differences of extreme.

45COMPARATIVE METHOD

Using comparison for hypothesis testing canbe illustrated by forms of statistical analysis(although qualitative research also testshypotheses, by using a process known asanalytic induction). Assume that a researcherwishes to test a hypothesis that the level ofcrime in geographic areas is associated withlevels of unemployment. This can be done bygrouping areas according to their level ofunemployment (high, medium, low). Each ofthe three categories of area will be measuredin terms of their average level of crime andstatistical tests can be applied in order toprovide evidence as to whether differencesbetween the areas are so substantial andsigni®cant that levels of crime must beassociated with levels of unemployment (orvice versa).

The comparative method is re¯ected indifferent research styles. For example, the useof quasi-experimental or evaluative designs toassess policy initiatives involves the compar-ison of the two groups or areas, one of whichreceives the policy initiative whilst the otherdoes not. The two groups are compared beforeand after the introduction of the initiative withregard to the feature at which the policy isaimed. This two-way comparison (of twogroups on a before±after basis) facilitatessome evaluation of the effectiveness of thepolicy initiative. The comparative method insocial surveys is illustrated by the way inwhich categories of people in a sample (forexample, men and women; old and young) arecompared in terms of their having or nothaving an attribute (for example, a scale thatmeasures `fear of crime'). Qualitative, ethno-graphic work emphasizes the development ofgeneralizations and of `grounded theory' bythe systematic comparisons of cases in termsof their similarities and their differences. Thecases that are compared include interactions,social meanings, contexts, social actions andcultural groups. Because this is a continuous,rather than once and for all activity, it issometimes referred to as the constant com-parative method. Other methods to usecomparison include content analysis (thecomparison of documents), historical research(the comparison of historical periods) andanalysis of of®cial statistics (comparison ofareas, groups or time period in terms of socialindicators).

Comparison permeates different stages ofresearch. For example, in research design it isillustrated in the ways in which samples areselected for study so as to compare subsets onsome variables while holding others constant.At the analysis stage different areas or social

groups can be compared on a variable at thesame point in time (cross-sectional analysis) orthe same areas or groups can be compared ona variable at different points in time (long-itudinal analysis). Sometimes comparisontakes place after publication of results fromseveral researchers working independently,for example, in examining the conclusions ofprojects from different parts of the world toconsider how different societies deal withdomestic disputes. In other cases researchersfrom different countries collaborate to pro-duce inter-societal comparisons (see, forexample, Van Dijk et al., 1990: Mawby andKirchoff, 1996).

Evaluation

Comparison is an essential part of researchmethodology. It involves deliberately seekingor anticipating comparisons between sets ofobservations. Without comparison with abaseline or against a control group it is notpossible to reach plausible and credibleconclusions. However, this requires the clearestablishment of a baseline and the ability tocontrol for factors the researcher does not wishto vary.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: content analysis, ethno-graphy, evaluation research, social survey

Key ReadingsMawby, R. and Kirchoff, G. (1996) `Coping with

crime: a comparison of victims' experiences inEngland and Germany', in P. Davies, P. Francisand V. Jupp (eds), Understanding Victimization.Newcastle, University of Northumbria Press.

May, T. (1997) Social Research: Issues, Methods andProcess. Buckingham, Open University Press.

Van Dijk, J.J.M., Mayhew, P. and Killias, M. (1990)Experiences from across the World: Key Findings ofthe 1989 International Crime Survey. Deventer,Netherlands, Kluwer.

CONDITIONING

De®nition

The processes by which an organism's behav-iour is related to, or conditioned by, theenvironment; often used to mean learning.



In the history of psychology, the termconditioning is most closely associated withthe Russian Nobel prizewinner Ivan Pavlov(1849±1936). Pavlov was a physiologist whosework was concerned with the canine digestivesystem: it was in the course of this experi-mental work that he observed an unusualpattern of salivation in dogs. Dogs naturallysalivate at the sight of food (a re¯ex or uncon-ditioned response), but Pavlov also observedthat his dogs salivated at cues such as thesound of the food pails in the laboratory.Clearly, dogs are not born with the capacity tosalivate at the sound of clanking metal, sothere must be another explanation for theirbehaviour. In a series of famous experimentalstudies Pavlov established that it was the closetemporal pairing of sound and the appearanceof food that elicited the wayward salivation. Inother words, the sound became associatedwith the food, so that the sound elicited theanimal's behaviour. Thus, the salivation hadbecome conditional to the sound and so couldbe thought of as a conditioned response. Thisprocess of learning by association is calledclassical conditioning.

The concept of classical conditioning isfundamentally important in advancing theposition that the origins of behaviour lie notwithin the organism but are located in theenvironment. Thus, the way in which a personbehaves can be understood by reference tothat person's environment rather than theperson's inner world.

The discovery of the phenomenon oflearning by association surfaced alongsidethe emergent discipline of psychology inAmerican universities in the early 1900s. Atthat time psychology in Europe was domi-nated by Freudian theory, so perhaps it is notsurprising that the emerging New Worlddepartments of psychology searched for afresh theoretical paradigm. The key ®gure inthe struggle for this new paradigm was theacademic researcher John B. Watson (1878±1958). Watson rejected the non-scienti®ctheories prevalent in Europe and looked toformulate a new basis for psychology. InWatson's vision the task would be to under-stand behaviour, not by drawing on the ghostin the machine of psychodynamic forces andthe niceties of philosophical debate, but byproducing empirical evidence ®rmly basedwithin a scienti®c tradition. Such an experi-mental approach to psychology would beinformed by evolutionary biology, neu-roscience and the principles of conditioning.

The focus of this endeavour would bebehaviour, and the work of Pavlov and hiscontemporaries would be the starting point.Watson's position, expounded in a classicpaper published in 1913, Psychology as theBehaviorist Views It, ®nally gave behaviourismto the academic world.

Can behaviour really be viewed as a stringof classically conditioned responses? B.F.Skinner (1904±90) took Watson's vision anddeveloped behaviourism into a dominantforce in psychological method and thought.Acknowledging the role of learning byassociation, Skinner's signi®cant contributionwas to cultivate the notion of learning throughthe consequences of behaviour, and hence tothe unfolding of radical behaviourism. Simply,Skinner's experimental work demonstratedthat as behaviour acts upon the environment,the resultant environmental consequences ofthat behaviour then act to increase or decreasethe probability of future instances of suchbehaviour. A behaviour that produces con-sequences that the individual ®nds rewardingand increase the rate of behaviour is said to bereinforced; a behaviour that produces conse-quences that the individual ®nds aversive anddecrease the rate of behaviour is said to bepunished. (In the technical sense used here,punishment simply means that a behaviourdecreases in frequency.) Further, the organismlearns that the environmental conditions, orsetting events, signal the likelihood that acertain behaviour will produce certain con-sequences. The relationship between a settingevent, the behaviour and its consequences iscalled a three-term contingency. The processof learning through consequences is referredto as operant (or instrumental) conditioning.

In operant conditioning, behaviour isunderstood in terms of an interaction betweenthe person and the environment. The environ-ment in¯uences the person and the personin¯uences the environment. The range ofenvironmental in¯uences on our behaviour isvast: the list would encompass political, econ-omic, educational and legal systems, images inthe popular media, and the words and actionsof friends, peers, and parents. All of theseenvironmental forces, to a greater or lesserextent, shape our behaviour; our behaviour, toa greater or lesser extent, moulds the world inwhich we live.

Evaluation

The notion of conditioning received a badpress in novels such as Brave New World and

47CONDITIONING

Clockwork Orange, which to some extent in¯u-enced popular views of the motives ofadvocates of theories of conditioning. Indeed,several academic and professional commenta-tors have dismissed theories of learning byimpugning the characters of their proponents.It is noticeable that since Skinner's deathseveral texts have attempted to give a morerounded picture of behaviourism (Nye, 1992;O'Donohue and Kitchener, 1999).

There are two critical lines to consider in theevaluation of conditioning. First, the rejectionof mentalism as an explanatory concept, withthe associated forsaking of free will as avehicle for accounting for human actions.Second, the gap in understanding, at a psy-chological and physiological level, of the wayin which conditioning takes place.

Clive Hollin

Associated Concepts: behaviour modi®cation,differential association, free will, opportunitytheory, personality theory, rational choicetheory, social learning theory

Key ReadingsBjork, D.W. (1993) B.F. Skinner: A Life. New York,

Basic Books.Davey, G. (ed.) (1981) Applications of Conditioning

Theory. London, Methuen.Lee, V.L. (1988) Beyond Behaviorism. Hillsdale,

Lawrence Erlbaum.Nye, R.D. (1992) The Legacy of B.F. Skinner: Concepts

and Perspectives, Controversies and Misunderstand-ings. Belmont, Wadsworth.

O'Donohue, W. and Kitchener, R. (eds) (1999)Handbook of Behaviorism. San Diego, AcademicPress.

Watson, J.B. (1913) `Psychology as the behavioristviews it', Psychological Review, 20, pp. 158±77.

CONFLICT THEORY

De®nition

Con¯ict theory is usually contrasted withpositivism or those theories that assume that abasic consensus exists in society. It has takenthree major forms. Culture con¯ict theoryfocuses on clashes between conduct norms.Group con¯ict theory relates such clashesdirectly to the position of elites and the wield-ing of political power. Class con¯ict theoryviews power differentials in the context of the

systematic generation of structured inequal-ities in capitalist societies. All stress that tounderstand crime we must also understandthe interests served by criminal law and theway in which those in authority use theirpower.


According to consensus theory, society is heldtogether by a common acceptance of suchbasic values as right and wrong. Because ofthis common agreement social order is largelyharmonious and predictable. On the otherhand, con¯ict theory argues that there is littleagreement on basic values. Society is com-posed of many competing groups, each ofwhich promotes different interests. Con¯ict,rather than stability, is the fundamentalcharacteristic of social order. Power andauthority are re¯ections of social, economicand political inequality. Law is a means thepowerful use to enforce their own interests atthe expense of others.

Thorsten Sellin (1938) was the ®rst to arguethat con¯ict causes crime. He noted thatmodern societies were characterized by socialanonymity, poorly de®ned personal relation-ships and the existence of a wide variety ofcompeting groups, which meant that howevercertain groups behaved they would alwaysviolate the norms of some other group. Crimeoccurs when the law of one group is extendedto cover the domain of another (as in culturalmigration) and when differentiation occurswithin one group (as in disputes over lawenforcement). The conduct which the statedenotes as criminal is related directly to thedecisions of those who wield political powerand control the legislative and judicialmanifestations of authority. George Vold(1958) extended this analysis through theconcepts of `group con¯ict' and `politicalorganization'. He argued that groups con¯ictwith each other when the goals of one can beachieved only at the expense of others. Each ofmany interest groups attempts to secure itsown interests by lobbying the legislature toenact laws in their favour. Groups that areable to do so curb the behaviour of competinggroups. As a result the process of law-making,law-breaking and law enforcement is a directre¯ection of fundamental con¯icts betweeninterest groups and the relative power thatthey hold. Patterns of criminalization re¯ectthe different degrees of political powerwielded by different social groups. Crimin-ality becomes a normal and natural response


of groups struggling to maintain their ownway of life.

During the 1960s several criminologists, alsoin¯uenced by labelling, further re®ned crim-inological con¯ict theory. In the USA AustinTurk (1969) developed the thesis by account-ing for speci®c processes of criminalization insocieties based on relationships of con¯ict,domination and subordination between auth-orities and subjects. Richard Quinney's earlywork (1970) set out a number of propositionsto establish the social reality of crime. Crimewas de®ned as human conduct created byauthorized agents in a politically organizedsociety. Criminal de®nitions describe beha-viours that con¯ict with the interests of thosewith the power to shape public policy. Thesocial reality of crime is constructed by theformulation and application of criminal de®-nitions by `certain social segments', theirdiffusion within the rest of society, thedevelopment of behaviour patterns related tocriminal de®nitions and the construction ofcriminal conceptions. As such, the de®ningquality of crime lies not in criminal behaviourbut in the power to criminalize. The greaterthe social con¯ict the more likely that thepowerful will criminalize the behaviour ofthose who challenge their interests.

Chambliss (1975) and Quinney in his laterwork (1974) subsequently developed con¯icttheory by relating such pluralist notions as`social segments' to speci®c class divisions andspeci®c modes of economic production. Classcon¯ict theory, derived from Marxism,included the premises that:

· Acts are de®ned as criminal because it isin the interest of the ruling class to de®nethem as such.

· The ruling class will violate laws withimpunity while members of the subjectclasses will be punished.

· Criminal behaviour is a consequence ofthe repression and brutalization of capit-alism.

· Criminal law is an instrument of the stateto maintain the existing social order.

· Crime diverts the working class's atten-tion from the exploitation they experience;it contains their resistance.

· Crime will persist in capitalist societiesbecause of the fundamental tendency ofsuch societies to promote inequality andclass con¯ict.

In these ways, con¯ict theory has produceda series of complex analyses of why certainbehaviours are criminalized by the state while

others are not, and how a capitalist economicsystem itself is capable of generating certainpatterns of crime.

Evaluation

Con¯ict theory has taken many forms withinthe rubric that con¯ict is natural to society.Initial formulations adopted an interactionistor pluralist view of con¯icting interest groups;later formulations, in¯uenced by Marxism orpolitical anarchism, have emphasized thecentrality of structured class inequalities andruling class power. The heyday of con¯icttheory was in the political turmoil of 1960sand 1970s America. By the mid-1970s it waslargely superseded by the New Criminologyand critical criminology developed in the UK.Its key propositions that law always arisesfrom con¯ict and that criminalization alwaysserves the interests of the ruling class havebeen severely tested. Such a priori general-izations have either been outrightly rejectedby neo-conservative criminology or critiquedby critical criminology as one-dimensionaland deterministic. Con¯ict theory tends toview the relationship between power andconsciousness as relatively simple. It suggeststhat crime only exists when it is recognized bythe powerful or when one is in a position ofdisadvantage in an unequal society. It fails tograsp adequately the ¯uidity and negotiationof class relations, whilst more or less ignoringthose of `race' and gender. But whatever itslimitations its lasting legacy is to have startedthe process of politicizing criminology; turn-ing attention to the fact that the study of crimecannot adequately proceed in isolation fromthe study of criminal law.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: criminalization, criticalcriminology, interactionism, labelling, Marxistcriminologies, new criminology, radical crim-inologies, the state

Key ReadingsChambliss, W. (1975) `Toward a political economy of

crime', Theory and Society, 2, pp. 149±70.Quinney, R. (1970) The Social Reality of Crime. Boston,

Little, Brown.Quinney, R. (1974) Critique of the Legal Order. Boston,

Little, Brown.Sellin, T. (1938) Culture Con¯ict and Crime. New

York, Social Science Research Council.Turk, A. (1969) Criminality and Legal Order. Chicago,

Rand McNally.

49CONFLICT THEORY

Vold, G. (1958) Theoretical Criminology. New York,Oxford University Press.

CONFORMITY

See Social control theory

CONSTITUTIVE CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

Constitutive criminology is a postmodernisttheoretical perspective that draws on severalcritical social theories, most notably symbolicinteractionism, phenomenology, social con-structionism, structural Marxism, structura-tion theory, semiotics, chaos theory andaf®rmative postmodernism. The core of theconstitutive argument is that crime and itscontrol cannot be separated from the totalityof the structural and cultural contexts in whichit is produced, nor can it lose sight of humanagents' contribution to those contexts (Henryand Milovanovic, 1994, 1996).


Constitutive theory rejects the argument oftraditional modernist criminology that crimeand offenders can be separated from socialprocesses of societal production and analysedand corrected in isolation from the whole. Noris crime understandable as a determined pro-duct of cultures and structures. Instead ofsetting out to identify factors that `cause'offending, constitutive criminology seeks toexamine the relations that co-produce crime.

Constitutive criminology is founded on theproposition that humans are responsible foractively creating their world with others. Theydo this by transforming their surroundingsthrough interaction with others, not least viadiscourse. Through language and symbolicrepresentation humans identify differences,construct categories, and share a belief in thereality of that which is constructed that ordersotherwise chaotic states. It is towards thesesocial constructions of reality that humans act.

In the process of investing energy in theirsocially constructed, discursively organizedcategories of order and reality, human subjectsnot only shape their social world, but are also

shaped by it. They are co-producers and co-productions of their own and others' agency.Constitutive criminology is about how someof this socially constructed order, as well assome of the human subjects constituted withinit, can be harmed, impaired and destroyed byboth the process, and by what is built duringthat process: ultimately by each other as fellowsubjects.

Constitutive theorists argue that the co-production of harmful relations occursthrough society's structure and culture, asthese are energized by active human subjects± not only as offenders, but also as the socialcategories such as victims, criminal justicepractitioners, academics, commentators,media reporters and producers of ®lm andTV crime shows, and most generally, asinvestors, producers and consumers in thecrime business. They look at what it is aboutthe psycho-socio-cultural matrix (the cloth ofcrime) that provides the discursive mediumthrough which human agents construct`meaningful' harms to others. The approachtaken, therefore, shifts the criminological focusaway from narrow dichotomized issues focus-ing either on the individual offender or on thesocial environment. Instead, constitutivecriminology takes a holistic conception of therelationship between the ìndividual' and`society' which prioritizes neither one nor theother, but examines their mutuality andinterrelationship.

According to constitutive criminologists, amajor source of harmful relations emanatesfrom structures of power. Unequal powerrelations, built on the constructions of differ-ence, provide the conditions that de®ne crimeas harm. Constitutive criminology de®nescrime as the harm resulting from humansinvesting energy in harm-producing relationsof power. Humans suffering such `crimes' arein relations of inequality. Crimes are nothingless than people being disrespected. Peopleare disrespected in numerous ways but allhave to do with denying or preventing usbecoming fully social beings. What is humanis to make a difference to the world, to act onit, to interact with others and together totransform environment and ourselves. If thisprocess is prevented we become less thanhuman; we are harmed. Thus constitutivecriminologists de®ne crime as `the power todeny others their ability to make a difference'(Henry and Milovanovic, 1996, p. 116).

Constitutive criminology also has a differentde®nition of criminals and victims from that ofmodernist criminological theories. The offen-der is viewed as an èxcessive investor' in the


power to dominate others. Such ìnvestors' putenergy into creating and magnifying differ-ences between themselves and others. Thisinvestment of energy disadvantages, disablesand destroys others' human potentialities. Thevictim is viewed as a `recovering subject', stillwith untapped human potential but with adamaged faith in humanity. Victims are moreentrenched, more disabled, and suffer loss.Victims `suffer the pain of being denied theirown humanity, the power to make a differ-ence. The victim of crime is thus rendered anon-person, a non-human, or less completebeing' (Henry and Milovanovic, 1996, p. 116).

This reconception of crime, offender andvictim thus locates criminality not in theperson, nor in the structure or culture but inthe ongoing creation of social identitiesthrough discourse and leads to a differentnotion of crime causation. To the constitutivetheorist crime is not so much caused asdiscursively constructed through human pro-cesses of which it is one. Consciously strivingto reconstruct the discourse of the excessiveinvestor at both a societal and a systemic level,crime feeds off itself, expanding and consum-ing the energies intended to control it. Putsimply, crime is the co-produced outcome, notonly of humans and their environment, but ofhuman agents and the wider society throughits excessive investment, to the point ofobsession, in crime, through crime shows,crime drama, crime documentaries, crimenews, crime books, crime ®lms, crime precau-tions, criminal justice agencies, criminallawyers and criminologists. All are parasiticof the crime problem, but as constitutivecriminology suggests, they also contribute toits ongoing social and cultural production andongoing reproduction.

Evaluation

The implications of constitutive theory are,®rst that crime must be deconstructed as arecurrent discursive process, and second, thatconscious attempts must be made at recon-struction with a view to preventing recur-rence. Given this interrelated nature of socialstructures and human agents and their socialand cultural productions in the co-productionof crime, constitutive criminology calls for ajustice policy of reconstruction. This isachieved through replacement discourse whichìs directed toward the dual process of decon-structing prevailing structures of meaning anddisplacing them with new conceptions, dis-tinctions, words and phrases, which convey

alternative meanings . . . Replacement dis-course, then, is not simply critical andoppositional, but provides both a critiqueand an alternative vision' (Henry and Milo-vanovic, 1996, pp. 204±5). The new replace-ment constructions are designed to displacecrime as moments in the exercise of powerand as control. They offer an alternativemedium by which social constructions ofreality can take place. This is not a unitarymedium but, as Smart (1990, p. 82) has argued,refers instead to `subjugated knowledges,which tell different stories and have differentspeci®cities' and which aim at `the decon-struction of truth' and the power effects ofclaims to truth. Instead of replacing one truthwith another, replacement discourse invokes a`multiplicity of resistances' to the ubiquity ofpower (1990, p. 82). Beyond resistances, theconcept of replacement discourse offers acelebration of unof®cial, informal, discountedand ignored knowledges through its discur-sive diversity. In terms of diminishing theharm experienced from all types of crime(street, corporate, state, hate etc.), constitutivecriminology talks of `liberating' replacementdiscourses that seek transformation of both theprevailing political economies and the asso-ciated practices of crime and social control.Constitutive criminology thus simultaneouslyargues for ideological as well as materialisticchange; one without the other renders changeonly in part. In short, constitutive criminologyargues for a transpraxis which is deconstruc-tive, reconstructive and sensitive to thedialectics of struggle.

Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic

Associated Concepts: chaos theory, crime,deconstruction, Marxist criminologies, news-making criminology, postmodernism, praxis,social harm

Key ReadingsBarak, G. (1994) Media Process and the Social

Construction of Crime: Studies in NewsmakingCriminology. New York, Garland.

Henry, S. and Milovanovic, D. (1994) `The constitu-tion of constitutive criminology', in D. Nelken(ed.), The Futures of Criminology. London, Sage.

Henry, S. and Milovanovic, D. (1996) ConstitutiveCriminology: Beyond Postmodernism. London, Sage.

Henry, S. and Milovanovic, D. (eds) (1999) Con-stitutive Criminology at Work: Applications to Crimeand Punishment. New York, State University ofNew York Press.

51CONSTITUTIVE CRIMINOLOGY

Smart, C. (1990) `Feminist approaches to crimino-logy, or postmodern woman meets atavistic man',in L. Gelsthorpe and A. Morris (eds), FeministPerspectives in Criminology. Milton Keynes, OpenUniversity Press, pp. 70±84.

CONTAINMENT THEORY

De®nition

Developed by Walter Reckless in the 1950s,this social-psychological approach to under-standing the causes of crime and conformityfalls under the more general heading of socialcontrol theories. The main assumption is thatstrong inner controls (especially a positiveself-concept) and outer controls (particularlythe family) act to insulate or buffer adolescentsfrom delinquency.


Containment theory is one of a number ofrelated social control explanations that depicthow social-psychological factors as well associal institutions restrain individuals fromviolating societal norms. Reckless (1967) iscredited with developing this theoreticalapproach during the 1950s and 1960s. As oneof the earlier social control theorists, he wascurious as to why some boys in high crimeneighbourhoods did not break the law. Hespeculated that a positive self-concept or atti-tude (inner containment) was the key variablethat could explain why some boys did not turnto crime even in the face of outside or externalpressures, especially delinquent peers.

Reckless divided explanatory factors intotwo general categories: those that are eitherìnner' or òuter' to the individual psyche, andthose variables that act as either criminogenicor controlling behavioural in¯uences. Innercontainment and pushes are internal social-psychological in¯uences, whereas outer con-tainments, pressures and pulls are external tothe individual. Inner and outer containmentsact as defences against deviation, thus insulat-ing or buffering a youth from the criminogenicin¯uences of society's pushes and pulls.

Inner pushes are social-psychological statesand include such factors as a need for immedi-ate grati®cation, hostility, restlessness, discon-tent, alienation and frustration. Externalpressures and pulls include deviant compa-nions, membership in criminal subcultures,

poverty, unemployment, limited occupationalopportunities, minority status, and otherinequalities.

Outer containments are external to theindividual psyche or personality and act asbuffers or insulators, encouraging conformityto community and legal norms. Externalcontrols include effective parental supervisionand discipline, conforming or positive peerin¯uences, memberships in organizationsinterested in the activities of their members,etc. Inner containments are self-controls thatdevelop during socialization and include suchcomponents as a good self-concept, goaldirectedness, a well-developed superego, andhigh frustration tolerance. Inner containmentis also generally seen as a product of favour-able external socializing agencies such asteachers, peers and especially parents.

Although both inner and outer contain-ments comprise defences against deviance,inner containments (especially a positive self-concept) received the most theoretical andempirical attention from Reckless and hisassociate Dinitz (1967). Together they spentover a decade investigating the effects of innercontainment, concluding that a preconditionof conforming behaviour is a positive self-concept which acts as an insulator againstdelinquency. Indeed, they argued that youthsgrowing up even in the most criminogenicareas can insulate themselves against deviancethrough the maintenance of what theyconsidered to be the strongest defence againstdelinquency ± a positive self-concept.

If a youth's outer containments are weak,the internal and external pressures and pullsmust be controlled by the inner controlsystem. On the other hand, if the outer buffersare strong and effective, the inner containmentsystem does not have to play such a signi®cantrole. Thus, Reckless believed that strong innercontainments could compensate for weakouter containments, and vice versa. Reckless's`Prediction Model' speci®ed that deviance isgreatest when both inner and outer controlsare weak and lowest when both controlsystems are strong. In those instances inwhich one is weak and the other strong, hebelieved that weak inner containment has ahigher probability of criminality than weakouter containment.

Evaluation

Despite claims by Reckless that containmenttheory explains most forms of delinquency,that it is both social and psychological in


nature, and that unlike most other (macro)theories it can be used to explain individualcase histories, the theory has been harshlycriticized. Many consider its concepts toovague and the theory too broad to producetestable hypotheses. No conceptual informa-tion is offered concerning the interrelationsamong delinquency and the various combina-tions of inner and outer containment andenvironmental pressures, pushes and pulls.Accordingly, no interactions are hypothesizedamong inner and outer containments, pushesand pulls. Jensen (1970) points out that, otherthan his rather vaguely stated `predictionmodel', Reckless's theory appears to be littlemore than an inadequate classi®cationscheme, since apparently there is no rationalefor classifying its variables as pushes, pulls, orinner and outer containments other than interms of the behaviours to be explained.

Although differential involvement in delin-quency is explained somewhat differently bythe various social control theories, there ismuch conceptual overlap between Recklessand subsequent theorists such as Hirschi(1969). For example, `delinquent companions'(environmental pulls or attachments), `con-ventional activities' (outer containment orinvolvement), èducational expectations'(inner containment or commitment), andàttitudes toward the law' (inner containmentor belief ) are variables and concepts that areintegral to both theories (Rankin, 1977).

Nevertheless, Reckless's theory has beencriticized as conceptually vague, with littleempirical evidence that a positive self-conceptor self-esteem is negatively related to crimeand delinquency. In addition, Reckless did notexplain why a negative self-concept makesadolescents vulnerable to delinquency ± norcould he account for those adolescents withbad self-concepts who were not delinquent. Anumber of research studies found littleassociation between self-esteem and delin-quency ± a ®nding contrary to the key con-tainment hypothesis. Thus, the main ¯aw ofcontainment theory is the lack of empiricalevidence linking this concept to crime anddelinquency. This has led to containmenttheory being superseded by subsequentsocial control theories, especially Hirschi's(1969) theory of the social bond.

Joseph Rankin and Roger Kern

Associated Concepts: neutralization (techniquesof ), social control theory

Key ReadingsHirschi, T. (1969) Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley,

CA: University of California Press.Jensen, G. (1970) `Containment and delinquency:

analysis of a theory', University of WashingtonJournal of Sociology, 2, pp. 1±14.

Rankin, J. (1977) Ìnvestigating the interrelationsamong social control variables and conformity',Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 67, pp.470±80.

Reckless, W. (1967) The Crime Problem. New York,Appleton±Century±Crofts.

Reckless, W. and Dinitz, S. (1967) `Pioneering withself-concept as a vulnerability factor in delin-quency', Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology andPolice Science, 58, pp. 515±23.

CONTENT ANALYSIS

De®nition

Content analysis is a strategy of researchwhich stresses the objective, systematic andquantitative approach to the analysis of docu-ments. Typically, it is concerned with themanifest content and surface meaning of adocument rather than with deeper layers ofmeanings or with differing interpretationswhich can be placed on the same content.


In its widest sense, content analysis can referto the analysis of the content of all types ofdocument by whatever means. The range ofdocuments examined by criminologists caninclude diaries, letters, newspapers, maga-zines, stories, essays, of®cial documents,memoranda and research reports. Here, con-tent analysis is used in a speci®c sense to referto the positivist approach to documentaryanalysis which, according to Holsti (1969), hasthe following features. First, the proceduresshould be objective in that each step in theresearch process should be carried out on thebasis of explicitly formulated rules so thatdifferent researchers following the sameprocedures will get the same results. Secondly,procedures must be systematic, that is, rulesmust be applied with consistency. Thirdly,content analysis should have generality, bywhich is meant that ®ndings must have theor-etical relevance. Fourthly, content analysisshould be quantitative and include countingthe frequency with which certain words or

53CONTENT ANALYSIS

themes appear in documents. Finally, contentanalysis should be concerned with the mani-fest content and surface meaning of a textrather than with deeper layers of meaning.

Typically, research designs cluster aroundone or more of the following questions: Whatare the characteristics of the content? Whatinferences can be made about the causes andgeneration of content? What inferences can bemade about the effects of content on readers orviewers? For example, in characterizing the®lms watched by adolescents the researchermay categorize them as `high', `medium' or`low' in terms of violence by counting thenumber of actions in each ®lm which s/hede®nes as `violent'. Or research on the imagesof youth portrayed by popular newspapersmay categorize and count the number ofarticles which portray a `positive', `negative'or `neutral' image. In such cases, the de®nitionof the relevant categories comes from theresearcher. Once the categories are delineated,the analysis of content is often a technicalprocess and may be carried out by appropriatecomputer software.

Evaluation

The positivist approach to content analysisemphasizes the manifest contents of docu-ments which are subsequently categorizedaccording to de®nitions provided by theresearcher. The latent meanings of the contentand the possibility of differing interpretationsby `producers' and `receivers' are not treatedas problematic nor as a prime focus of interest.By way of contrast, an interpretative (or inter-actionist) approach places social meanings atthe centre of any analysis, that is, meaningsattributed to the contents of documents byproducers and by the variety of audiences. Indoing so, the interpretative tradition is at oddswith the positivist assumptions of a corre-spondence between intent, content and effecton different audiences and also at odds withthe belief that there is a common universe ofmeanings uniting all relevant parties. Whatthe interpretative tradition brings to theresearch agenda is a focus on the ways inwhich meanings are assigned both by authorsand audiences, and the subsequent conse-quences. It would, for example, be interestedin the ways in which the same documentsplaced before a court of law can be interpreteddifferently by defendants, prosecutors, jurorsand judge. The interpretative approach todocuments is very close to the ethnographictradition in social research.

Whilst accepting the possibility of a multi-plicity of meanings and interpretations, thecritical tradition adds further dimensions, forexample by examining the ways in which thecontents of documents come to be treated as`knowledge' and also the role of such knowl-edge in the exercise of power. This could be ata societal level, by analysing the ways inwhich of®cial reports de®ne certain forms ofaction as illegitimate and thereby justify theexercise of state power against certain sectionsof society; or it can be at a micro level, byanalysing the ways in which police andprobation records result in the ways inwhich an individual is dealt with in thecriminal justice system.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: documentary analysis,ethnography, interactionism, positivism

Key ReadingsHolsti, O.R. (1969) Content Analysis for the Social

Sciences and Humanities. Reading, MA, Addison±Wesley.

Jupp, V.R. and Norris, C. (1993) `Traditions indocumentary analysis', in M. Hammersley (ed.),Social Research: Philosophy, Politics and Practice.London, Sage.

Scott, J. (1990) A Matter of Record. Cambridge, PolityPress.

CONTROL THEORY

See Social control theory

CONVERSATIONAL ANALYSIS

De®nition

A research methodology in the social scienceswhich analyses naturally occurring conversa-tion systematically, using tape recordings andtranscripts. It aims to `describe people'smethods for producing orderly social interac-tion' (Silverman, 1993, p. 120).


Conversational analysis is one particularresearch technique associated with the


broader research perspective of ethnometho-dology, which emerged in the 1960s as areaction against the `grand theorizing' andàbstracted empiricism' of earlier sociologistssuch as Talcott Parsons (Heritage, 1984).Ethnomethodology emphasizes the impor-tance of studying the ways in which peopleroutinely ascribe meaning to daily events inspeci®c, local social contexts. Consequently,the ways in which people talk to each otherbecome worthy of study in their own right.This emphasis on naturally occurring speechcounteracted previous preferences forresearcher-dominated methods such as struc-tured interviews, observation or experimentalmanipulation of behaviour. All theseapproaches, it was argued, produced only`glossed' or idealized interpretations of howresearch subjects presented themselves withina pre-conceived theoretical framework anddenied the researcher access to the genuinely`raw' data of mundane social interaction.

The underlying assumptions of conversa-tional analysis are that spoken interaction isorganized in identi®able, stable structuralpatterns and that its meaning is dependenton its context. Therefore, it is not possible toengage in a priori theoretical construction orinterpretation of motives or meaning, in theabsence of detailed examination of actual con-versation. It is also important that no aspect ofthe conversation (for example, pauses oroverlapping speech) should be dismissed asirrelevant. For this reason, conversations mustbe tape recorded and later transcripts mustinclude every detail of the process, rather thanbeing `tidied up' versions of interviews.Analysis of transcripts involves close attentionto sequencing, timed intervals and the charac-teristics of speech production such as volume,emphasis and intonation. These features areindicated by the use of written symbols whichconstitute the agreed conventions of conversa-tional analysis (Ten Have, 1999).

The core tool of conversational analysis isthe concept of the àdjacency pair', a term usedby Harvey Sacks (Heritage, 1984) to describe asequence of two utterances which are adja-cent, produced by different speakers, orderedas a ®rst and second part and in such a wayas the ®rst part requires a particular secondpart. Examples of common adjacent pairs are`question±answer', `greeting±greeting', òffer±acceptance/refusal'. The concept of the àdja-cency pair' is a template not only fordescribing conversational action but also forinterpreting it. It can be used to demonstratehow the ®rst speaker uses his or her action asthe basis for interpreting the second speaker's

response ± and how the second speaker thencontinues the process. This sequencing leadson to the other key aspect of conversationalanalysis which concerns the obligations ofparticipants to listen, understand and turn-take. Turn-taking is viewed as the mechanismby which actors display to each other that theyare engaged in social interaction. Violation ofturn-taking (for example by interrupting,`talking over' someone or failing to respondto an invitation to speak) indicates a failure ofsocial competence. Conversational analysis isalso interested in `lexical choice' ± the wordsand descriptive terms which speakers select indiffering contexts ± and in ìnteractionalasymmetries'. Heritage (1997) identi®es fourpotential sources of asymmetry which mayexist between participants in institutional talk± inequalities of status, `know-how' (that is,understanding of the institution), knowledgeand rights to knowledge. All these factorswould shape, and would be detectable in, anyconversation between, for example, a magis-trate, a solicitor and a defendant in court.

Evaluation

Although conversational analysis is a usefultool for studying ordinary interactions in avariety of criminologically relevant situations,it may be of particular value in the study ofìnstitutional talk'. Here, an understanding ofthe basic structures and sequences of con-versation can be extended to an understand-ing of how criminal justice institutions, suchas courts and prisons, function (Atkinson andDrew, 1979). Of particular interest are theways in which professionals routinely legit-imate, or account for their actions. However,conversational analysis is a highly technicalmethodology which is not readily accessible tonovice researchers. Of more practical use maybe the similar, but broader and less technicalapproach of discourse analysis.

Anne Worrall

Associated Concepts: discourse analysis, ethno-graphy

Key ReadingsAtkinson, J.M. (1982) Ùnderstanding formality: the

categorization and production of `̀ formal'' inter-action', British Journal of Sociology, 33, pp. 86±117.

Atkinson, J.M. and Drew, P. (1979) Order in Court:The Organization of Verbal Interaction in JudicialSettings. London, Macmillan.

55CONVERSATIONAL ANALYSIS

Heritage, J. (1984) Gar®nkel and Ethnomethodology.Cambridge, Polity Press.

Heritage, J. (1997) `Conversation analysis andinstitutional talk', in D. Silverman (ed.), Qualita-tive Research: Theory, Methods and Practice. London,Sage.

Silverman, D. (1993) Interpreting Qualitative Data:Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction.London, Sage.

Ten Have, P. (1999) Doing Conversation Analysis: APractical Guide. London, Sage.

CORPORATE CRIME

De®nition

Illegal acts or omissions, punishable by thestate under administrative, civil or criminallaw, which are the result of deliberate decision-making or culpable negligence within alegitimate formal organization. These acts oromissions are based in legitimate, formal,business organizations, made in accordancewith the normative goals, standard operatingprocedures, and/or cultural norms of theorganization, and are intended to bene®t thecorporation itself.


Attention to corporate crime has a longtradition traceable back to the work of Bongerin Western Europe and Ross in the USA in theearly 1900s. With Sutherland's pathbreakingwork in the 1940s, the phenomenon of cor-porate crime received greater prominence, butalso came to be con¯ated with the concept ofwhite collar crime, a con¯ation which remainsproblematic (Nelken, 1994). A recent, signi®-cant stage in conceptual clari®cation was thedistinction between òccupational' and òrga-nizational' crimes (Slapper and Tombs, 1999,pp. 15±18).

Much research into corporate crime hassought to overcome the absence of utilizableof®cial statistics in almost all national jurisdic-tions by documenting the scale of suchoffending. Further, quantitative corporatecrime research using large data sets, typicallyfocusing upon the largest corporations such asthe Fortune 500 in the USA (Sutherland, 1983;Clinard and Yeager, 1980), has sought toisolate empirical correlates of offending, suchas industry, size, pro®tability and so on.Findings from such empirical efforts remain

contentious, save for the overwhelming con-clusion that offending is widespread andpervasive. Various strands of qualitativework have also been undertaken aroundcorporate crime. One focus has been casestudies of a particular event, very often with aview to determining via social science that aparticular corporate activity constitutes illeg-ality in the absence of any successful legalaction. Much academic work has also beendevoted to speci®c types or categories ofcrime, most notably around ®nancial crimes,crimes committed directly against consumers,crimes arising directly out of the employmentrelationship and crimes against the environ-ment. Finally, there have been several indus-try-speci®c case studies, notably in the car,chemicals, ®nancial services, oil, and pharma-ceuticals sectors. Taken together, these bodiesof work demonstrate the scale and pervasive-ness of corporate crimes across societies, andsupport the now almost universally acceptedclaim that the economic (not to mentionphysical and social) costs of corporate offend-ing far outweigh those associated with `con-ventional' or `street' offending.

Much of this work has proceeded either atthe margins of, or beyond, criminology. This ispartially explained by the fact that crimino-logy remains wedded to state-de®ned crimeand criminal law, each of which are largelyunderstood in individualistic and inter-perso-nal terms; it is little surprise that much workaround corporate crime has hailed fromcritical criminologies, which are based upona commitment to a critique of dominantde®nitions of crime and criminal law, whileat the same time examining processes ofcriminalization (and, by implication, non-criminalization). Corporate crime researchalso faces enormous methodological dif®cul-ties, may be relatively unattractive to thefunders of research and is unlikely to produceimmediately utilizable policy proposals: all ofwhich may further explain its relative omis-sion from dominant criminological agendas.

Evaluation

Conceptual disputes as to what constitutescorporate crime continue, many pursuingclassic disputes as to the `proper' domain ofcriminology. One consequence of the relativemarginality of corporate crime research tocriminology remains theoretical underdeve-lopment around this concept. Moreover, the®eld of corporate crime has constantlysuffered from problems of legitimacy, not


least because of its extensions of the term`crime' to those acts or omissions punishablebeyond the criminal law and, secondly, itsdesire to include as `crimes' acts or omissionsthat have never been de®ned as such throughany criminal justice process. These shiftsbeyond both the criminal law and formallegal processes have frequently opened upcorporate crime researchers to charges ofmoralizing. Other conceptual disputes can beunderstood as necessary responses to chan-ging social phenomena, such as the seeminglyincreasingly complex relationships betweenlegitimate and illegitimate organizations.

There are good reasons why corporate crimeresearch ± leading to both empirical andtheoretical development ± should, and maywell, proliferate. These include: the spread ofthe corporate form, as privatization has beenchampioned across nation-states; diversi®ca-tion in the nature of corporate structures andorganization; the apparent internationalizationof much corporate activity; associated claimsregarding the growing power of corporationsvis-aÁ-vis national governments and popula-tions, and resistance associated with thesetrends; the dogged persistence of so-called`quality of life' issues such as environmentalprotection which emerged to prominence inthe Western capitalist states from the 1960sonwards; and the increasing exposure of theactive role of corporations in human rightsatrocities. Against these trends, and militatingagainst corporate crime research, should benoted the power of corporations to secure, viatheir political allies, the decriminalization oftheir activities through the introduction ofvarious forms of self-regulation or throughsimple deregulation, each of which aresigni®cant trends in contemporary capitalistnation-states (Snider, 2000).

Corporate crime research remains crucial tocritical agendas within and around crimino-logy. For a focus upon corporate crime entailscontinual scrutiny of the coverage and omis-sions of legal categories, the presences andabsences within legal discourses, the socialconstructions of these categories and dis-courses, their underpinning of, treatmentwithin and development through criminaljustice systems and the ways in whichparticular laws are enforced (or not enforced),interpreted, challenged and so on.

Steve Tombs and Dave Whyte

Associated Concepts: criminalization, criticalcriminology, critical research, deviance,

hidden crime, human rights, Marxist crimin-ologies, organized crime, radical criminologies,the state, state crime, transnational organizedcrime, white collar crime

Key ReadingsClinard, M. and Yeager, P. (1980) Corporate Crime.

New York, The Free Press.Nelken, D. (1994) `White-collar crime', in D. Nelken

(ed.), White-Collar Crime. Aldershot, Dartmouth.Slapper, G. and Tombs, S. (1999) Corporate Crime.

London, Longman.Snider, L. (2000) `The sociology of corporate crime:

an obituary. (Or, Whose knowledge claims havelegs?)', Theoretical Criminology, 4 (2), pp. 169±206.

Sutherland, E. (1983) White-Collar Crime. The UncutVersion. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.

CORRELATIONAL ANALYSIS

De®nition

Correlation is the association of two variables± the predictability of the values of one fromthe values of another. We speak of positivecorrelation when high values on one variablepredict high values on the other, and negativecorrelation when high values on one variablepredict low values on another. Exampleswould be height and weight (positive correla-tion) and ®tness and exhaustion after exercise(negative correlation).


The degree of correlation is generallyexpressed as a correlation coef®cient (Pearson'sproduct-moment coef®cient being the mostcommonly used), which varies between +1(perfect positive correlation) and ±1 (perfectnegative correlation). A value of zero wouldmean no correlation whatsoever, with thevalue on one variable offering no help at all inpredicting the value on another. The correla-tion coef®cient expresses the extent to whichthe values on the two variables can be ®tted toa joint prediction line, with a high value of thecoef®cient indicating a very good ®t and a lowvalue a very poor one (see Figure 1). Corre-lational analysis usually deals with linearrelationships ± ones that can be ®tted by astraight line ± and other related methods areneeded for predicting non-linear relationships.Figure 2 illustrates linear and non-linearrelationships.

57CORRELATIONAL ANALYSIS

More than one variable can be combined viamultiple regression into a multiple correlationcoef®cient (Figure 3), estimating how well adependent variable can be predicted from anarray of possible causal in¯uences. The anal-ysis will also generally permit the researcherto determine which variables are necessary forthe prediction and which can be discarded asnot adding anything further. An elaboration ofthis method, path analysis, permits the testingof hypotheses about chains of in¯uence bytaking into account relationships between thepossible causes as well as relationships with

the dependent variable. Paths on the diagramwhich turn out not to be statistically sig-ni®cant are deleted to leave a clear indicationof the direct and indirect in¯uences on thedependent variable suggested by the data (seeFigure 4).

The technique of partial correlation is one ofthe ways in which we may control foralternative explanations by statistical means.A partial correlation coef®cient expresses therelationship between a dependent and anindependent variable with the effect of a thirdvariable removed. For example, in an analysisof the effects of age on offending behaviour wemight control for extent of previous criminalbehaviour by partialling out (removing) theeffects of previous convictions.

Evaluation

Correlational analysis is used to assess thedegree of in¯uence of one variable on another± for example, the extent to which socialcircumstances, childhood experiences andpersonality characteristics may provide expla-nations for subsequent criminal behaviour.The old maxim, however, is that `correlationdoes not prove causation'. Correlation is anecessary condition for establishing causalin¯uence ± if one variable in¯uences another,it must be correlated with it ± but it is not asuf®cient one. It is always possible that a thirdvariable, not present in the analysis, may be anexplanation both for the effect and for theapparent cause.

Roger Sapsford

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

x

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

A relatively highcorrelation

A relatively lowcorrelation

Figure 1: Good and Poor Correlation

x x x x x x x x x x x x x xx

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

Linear Non-linear

Figure 2: Linear and Non-linear relationships

Figure 3: Multiple Correlation

Figure 4: Path analysis


Associated Concepts: causation, multivariateanalysis

Key ReadingsHood, R. (1992) Race and Sentencing. Oxford, The

Clarendon Press.Sapsford, R.J. (1999) Survey Analysis. London, Sage.

CRIME

De®nition

Crime is not a self-evident and unitaryconcept. Its constitution is diverse, historicallyrelative and continually contested. As a resultan answer to the question `what is crime?'depends upon which of its multiple constitu-tive elements is emphasized. This in turndepends upon the theoretical position takenby those de®ning crime.


Key elements in determining crime are: (1)harm; (2) social agreement or consensus; and(3) of®cial societal response. `Harm' includesthe nature, severity and extent of harm orinjury caused and the kind of victim harmed.`Consensus' refers to the extent of socialagreement about whether victims have beenharmed. Òf®cial societal response' refers tothe existence of criminal laws specifyingunder what conditions (such as intent andknowledge of the consequences) that an actresulting in harm can be called crime, and theenforcement of such laws against thosecommitting acts that harm. These dimensionshave emerged from and been differentlyemphasized by six basic theoretical traditions:legal, moral consensus, sociological positi-vism, rule-relativism, political con¯ict, power-harm.

In early formulations, a simple relationshipwas assumed between each of the three keydimensions, such that if an action causedharm, people would be outraged and enactlaws that the state would enforce to penalizethe perpetrator. Thus emerged what becameknown as the moral or consensus position oncrime that states that crimes are acts, whichshock the common or collective morality,producing intense moral outrage amongpeople. In founding this view Durkheimstated that, àn act is criminal when it offendsthe strong, well-de®ned states of the collective

consciousness' (1984 [1893], p. 39). Speci®-cally, crime was a term used, `to designate anyact, which, regardless of degree, provokesagainst the perpetrator the characteristicreaction known as punishment' (1984 [1893],p. 31). As a result, the basic de®nition of crimebecame behaviour de®ned and sanctioned bycriminal law. Thus there is no crime withoutlaw, and law is based on the ìnjury' or `harmdone'. In a seminal statement re¯ecting theDurkheimian consensus view, Michael andAdler (1933, p. 5) asserted that `criminal lawgives behaviour its quality of criminality' andthat `the character of the behaviour content ofcriminal law will be determined by thecapacity of behaviour to arouse our indigna-tion' (1933, p. 23).

Evaluation

Several ¯aws in the legal consensus view ofcrime led to various critical challenges thatstemmed from those holding different theore-tical positions. The ®rst problematic is theissue of what harm has been caused and whatcounts as harm. Even classical thinkers of theeighteenth century disagreed about this. Theconcept of `harm' according to Cesare Beccariarefers to restrictions on the freedom ofindividuals to accumulate wealth. Beccariaidenti®ed three categories of crimes basedupon the seriousness of their harm to society.The most serious of these crimes were thoseagainst the state, followed by crimes thatinjure the security and property of indivi-duals; last in importance, were crimes dis-ruptive to the public peace. But for JeremyBentham, harms were behaviours that caused`pain' rather than restrictions of freedom toaccumulate wealth. Bentham discusses twelvecategories of pain whose measurement wasnecessary in order to give legislators a basis onwhich to decide whether to prohibit an act. Hebelieved that no act ought to be an offenceunless it was detrimental to the community.An act is detrimental if it harms one or moremembers of the community. Bentham elabo-rated a list of offence categories that he con-sidered to be of ®ve classes: public offences,semi-public offences, self-regarding offences(offences detrimental only to the offender),offences against the state, multiform oranomalous offences. Each should carry apunishment determined by the circumstances.Bentham declared that only harms to othersshould be criminal offences; cases of publicmorality and transactional crimes where`consent has been given' should not be subject

59CRIME

to the criminal law. In considering crime asde®ned in law therefore, the concern is notwith those who commit crime, only with thoseacts that harm others.

A related issue is who should determinewhether a consensus of outrage exists onwhether harm has been committed. Thosewho have been termed `sociological positiv-ists' argued that the measure of such con-sensus or outrage was the purview of socialscientists. Thorsten Sellin (1938), for example,advocated a science of criminal behaviour freefrom the politics of criminal law, legislatorsand lawyers. Instead scientists should employtheir own value-neutral techniques to measureindependently whether harm had been causedand to establish whether outrage existed andthrough these means establish scienti®c de®-nitions of crime (1938, pp. 20±1). Sellin pro-posed to do this based on studying naturallyexisting `conduct norms' rather than usinglegally constructed laws. Such study `wouldinvolve the isolation and classi®cation ofnorms into universal categories, transcendingpolitical and other boundaries, a necessityimposed by the logic of science' (Sellin, 1938,p. 30). The problem here is the assumptionthat science, and the scienti®c process itself, isany more free of in¯uence than law (Schwen-dinger and Schwendinger, 1970).

Rule-relativists further argued that themeaning of what is de®ned in law or inmoral consensus is not ®xed but varies. Theyargued that what is de®ned as crime in law ishistorically, temporally and culturally relative.Their insight highlights the role of changingrather than absolute values about crime. Theirchallenge to the strict legal view of crime hasbeen developed further by social construc-tionist arguments that show how what is harmdepends on social context and situationalmeaning, itself shaped by the interactionbetween interest groups, such as offender,victim, community organizations, police agen-cies in the local setting. The emergence of anact as an òffence' depends how these groupsnegotiate and honour claims that harm hasbeen created.

The legal consensus position is also criti-cized because it ignores the politics of law-making. Radical con¯ict theorists claim thatwhat gets de®ned as crime depends on havingthe power to de®ne and the power to resistcriminalizing de®nitions. Indeed, if interestsin¯uence the law creation process, then not allacts causing indignation or outrage will belegislated against. Only those harms thatpowerful interests deem worthy will besubject to criminalization. As Edwin Suther-

land (1940) ®rst stated, this would mean thatmany harms, particularly those perpetrated bypowerful corporations, remain outside thecriminal law, even though they may be subjectto civil regulation. For Sutherland, an ade-quate de®nition of crime should be based onan expanded de®nition of harm that includes`social injury'. Similarly, Quinney (1977)wanted to expand the de®nition of crime toinclude not only the legal harms resultingfrom economic domination in a capitalistsociety, but also the crimes of governmentand of their agencies of social control. How-ever, legalists such as Paul Tappan (1947)vigorously disagreed with expanding the legalde®nition, arguing that without adheringstrictly to law, the concept of crime wasopen-ended and meaningless.

But for those taking a critical con¯ictperspective an adequate de®nition of crimemust be based on a de®nition of harm tiedneither to law nor consensus but to an inde-pendent notion of `human rights'. Withoutsuch independent anchoring of the de®nitionof crime those victimized are subject to thetyranny of moral majorities or the bias ofpowerful interests who determine the law.Because of this the harms that result fromracism, sexism, ageism, or from ìnsidiousinjuries' perpetrated by corporations throughharmful work conditions, or harmful pro-ducts, were for years neither acknowledged insociety nor in law (Schwendinger andSchwendinger, 1970).

Postmodernist criminologists have alsodeveloped the idea that harm must be relatedto a concept of humanity and they argue for adynamic conception of the different ways thathumanity can be harmed. The postmodernistconstitutive approach to de®ning crime goesbeyond powerful groups and classes to thetotal context of powerful relations in situa-tional and global contexts. For example, Henryand Milovanovic (1996, p. 104) state that`crimes are nothing less than moments in theexpression of power such that those who aresubjected to these expressions are denied theirown contribution to the encounter and often tofuture encounters'. They argue that crime ìsthe power to deny others . . . in which thosesubject to the power of another, suffer the painof being denied their own humanity, thepower to make a difference'. Henry andMilovanovic (1996, p. 103) distinguishbetween `harms of reduction' and `harms ofrepression'. Harms of reduction occur whenan offended party experiences a loss of somequality relative to their present standing thatresults from another's action. Harms of


repression (or oppression) result from theactions of another that limit or restrict aperson from achieving a future desired posi-tion or standing, though one achieved withoutharming others. Harms of repression have alsobeen described as crimes against humandignity: àcts and conditions that obstruct thespontaneous unfolding of human potential'(Tifft, 1995, p. 9).

The idea of criminalizing the use of powerto reduce or suppress another is particularlyimportant in order to expose the previouslyhidden crimes of gender oppression, sexualharassment, hate crime and racism that criticaltheorists have long complained are neglectedin the legal and consensus de®nitions. It is alsocentral to the unveiling of white collar, cor-porate and state crimes. Indeed, the analysis ofpower relations in the creation of crime high-lights the intersecting forces of class, race andgender relations which coalesce in law andsocial institutions to legitimize harm andthereby render legalized relations, relationsof harm. It follows, therefore, that law itselfcan create crime, not merely by de®nition butby its use of power over others and itsconcealment of the harms of others within theprotection of law (Tifft, 1995).

Finally, there has been an increased recogni-tion of the need to integrate each of thedifferent dimensions of crime. This beganexplicitly with John Hagan's (1985) notion ofthe pyramid of crime which was furtherdeveloped by Henry and Lanier (1998) intheir notion of the `prism of crime'. The aim ofthese approaches is to capture the multipledimensions of crime simultaneously, ratherthan emphasizing any one element as pre-dominant. Henry and Lanier's prism, forexample, affords a way of incorporating indi-vidual and social harm; crimes of the powerfuland those of the powerless; crimes that areinvisible as well as those that are highly visible;and crimes that are selectively enforced as wellas those more consistently enforced. In thisway they aim for a more comprehensive de®-nition that transcends the politics of the law-making process.

Stuart Henry

Associated Concepts: con¯ict theory, constitu-tive criminology, corporate crime, crimesagainst humanity, hate crime, hidden crime,integrative criminology, labelling, organizedcrime, political crime, social harm, state crime,transnational organized crime, war crimes

Key ReadingsDurkheim, E. (1984) [1893] The Division of Labor in

Society. New York, The Free Press.Hagan, J. (1985) Modern Criminology. New York,

McGraw±Hill.Henry, S. and Lanier, M. (1998) `The prism of crime:

arguments for an integrated de®nition of crime',Justice Quarterly, 15 (4), pp. 609±27.


Michael, J. and Adler, M.J. (1933) Crime, Law andSocial Science. New York, Harcourt Brace andJovanovich.

Quinney, R. (1977) Class, State, and Crime. New York,David McKay.

Schwendinger, H. and Schwendinger, J. (1970)`Defenders of order or guardians of humanrights?', Issues in Criminology, 5, pp. 123±57.

Sellin, T. (1938) Culture, Con¯ict and Crime. NewYork, Social Science Research Council.

Sutherland, E.H. (1940) `White-collar criminality',American Sociological Review, 5, pp. 1±12.

Tappan, P.R. (1947) `Who is the criminal?', AmericanSociological Review, 12, pp. 96±102.

Tifft, L.L. (1995) `Social harm de®nitions of crime',The Critical Criminologist, 7, pp. 9±13.

CRIME CONTROL MODEL

De®nition

A crime control perspective or model whichstresses that the primary function of thecriminal courts is to punish offenders and,by so doing, to control crime.


The `crime control' model involves a system ofcriminal justice which has as its primary aimthe need to repress criminal conduct. Thecourts are thus more guardians of law andorder than upholders of impartial justice. Thefailure of law enforcement to bring criminalconduct under tight control is viewed asleading to the breakdown of public order andthence to the disappearance of an importantcondition of human freedom. That is, whilstcrime and disorder remain inadequatelychecked then the law-abiding citizen maybecome the victim of all sorts of unjusti®ableinvasions of his or her interests. The securityof person and property is diminished andtherefore the liberty to function as a memberof society. The inherent claim is that the

61CRIME CONTROL MODEL

criminal justice process is a positive guarantorof social freedom. In order to achieve this highpurpose, the crime control model requires thatprimary attention is given to the ef®ciencywith which the criminal process operates toscreen suspects, determine guilt and secureappropriate punishment (Packer, 1964).

While `due process' values prioritize civilliberties in order to ensure that the innocentare acquitted (even at the risk of acquittingsome who are guilty), `crime control' valuesstress the goal of convicting the guilty (even atthe risk of convicting some who are innocent,or of infringing some civil liberties). In a`crime control' model, formal rules of proce-dure are often seen as obstacles standing in theway of securing a defendant's conviction. Asthe ultimate aim is to punish offenders and todeter future crime, the criminal justice systemcannot afford a high acquittal rate; the systemmust work ef®ciently and speedily to appre-hend and convict offenders. Packer (1964)likens the crime control model to an assemblyline or a conveyor belt which, beginning witha presumption of guilt, moves the offender toworkers at ®xed stations who perform on eachcase to bring it one step closer to being a®nished product, or a closed ®le.

It is argued that the main tool of the pre-modern model of crime control was thespectacular, public, bloody punishment ofthe offender who had offended sovereignpower. The `Bloody Code' of crime control, ascriminal justice was popularly referred to ineighteenth-century England, was howeversupplemented by more traditional, commu-nitarian mechanisms of social control (customand informal means) which had survivedfrom the feudal era. Following criticisms fromclassical reformers there was new interest inrationality, formalism and legality. The lastingphilosophical in¯uence of classicist views oncrime and its prevention are perhaps to befound in utilitarianism and what has beencalled social contract theory (Hughes, 1998).According to this perspective the punishmentof the offender is only justi®able in terms of itscontribution to the prevention of futureinfringements on the well-being and happi-ness of others. Social contract theory derivesfrom the idea that the power and authority ofgovernment to control crime (through punish-ment amongst other means) stems from anunwritten but none the less binding contractentered into by members of society wherebythey agree to certain measures in order tosecure freedom against the invasive actions ofothers. Following this, Garland (1996) refers to`sovereign crime control', meaning that the

state is there to provide security, law andorder and crime control within its territorialboundaries.

A key meaning of the `crime control model',therefore, relates to a wide range of mechan-isms employed by the state, from the intro-duction of the police to control disruptivebehaviour, to the developing institutions ofcriminal justice and corrections, and fromsituational crime prevention to multi-agencycrime prevention work and other sophisti-cated modes of community control, to achievecrime control ends.

Evaluation

There are strong criticisms that the adoption ofa `crime control model' leads to harsh penal-ties and unnecessarily intrusive measures(Hudson, 1996). It is clearly associated with`get tough', `prisons work' and `zero tolerance'policies. Yet such movements in criminaljustice do not re¯ect unalloyed scienti®cendeavour; rather, they re¯ect political con-cerns (Stenson and Cowell, 1991).

Some radicals view the crime control meas-ures of the criminal justice system as largelyineffective and even criminogenic. Manyconcerned with justice for juveniles, forinstance, have argued that there should be aslittle intervention in young offenders' lives aspossible on the basis that criminal justiceinterventions might well exacerbate theiroffending. Others would argue that the mosteffective forms of crime control are those thatrelate to deep social and economic structures,which seemingly contribute to the onset ofcrime in the ®rst place.

In a deeply pessimistic but importantreview of crime control, Nils Christie (1993)has argued that it has become an industrywith unlimited potential for growth andwhich presents very real danger for thevalue of human life.

Loraine Gelsthorpe

Associated Concepts: crime prevention, criminaljustice, deterrence, due process model, gov-ernmentality, social control, zero tolerance

Key readingsChristie, N. (1993) Crime Control As Industry.

London, Routledge.Garland, D. (1996) `The limits of the sovereign state:

strategies of crime control in contemporarysociety', British Journal of Criminology, 36 (4), pp.445±71.


Hudson, B. (1996) Understanding Justice. Bucking-ham, Open University Press.

Hughes, G. (1998) Understanding Crime Prevention.Buckingham, Open University Press.

Packer, H. (1964) `Two models of the criminalprocess', University of Pennsylvania Law Review,113, pp. 1±68.

Stenson, K. and Cowell, D. (eds) (1991) The Politics ofCrime Control. London, Sage.

CRIME MAPPING

See Geographies of crime

CRIME PREVENTION

De®nition

Any action taken or technique employed byprivate individuals or public agencies aimedat the reduction of damage caused by actsde®ned as criminal by the state. Given thatcrimes are events proscribed only by legalstatute, it is not surprising that there is a greatplethora of activities and initiatives associatedwith the term `crime prevention'.


Crime prevention in its broadest sense has along history, stretching back to the ®rst use oflocks and bolts to protect persons and prop-erty. However, it was only during the lastthree decades of the twentieth century that itemerged as a key institutional feature ofcriminal justice systems and related sites ofsocial control across most contemporarysocieties. It is also during this recent periodthat we have seen a massive output of crimino-logical writing aimed at classifying differenttypes of crime prevention. Crime prevention isa chameleon concept which cannot be neatly orunproblematically de®ned. There continue tobe many different meanings to crime preven-tion and in turn divergent policies andpractices associated with the notion.

There is no consensus among criminologistswith regard to how best to de®ne the phe-nomenon of crime prevention. Instead, thereare competing models and typologies, often ofa limited theoretical nature, and seeminglydriven by rather narrow technical concerns

about the measurement and evaluation of`success' or `failure'. One of the leadingexperts on the evaluation of crime preventioninitiatives, Ken Pease, has recommendedcaution towards any attempt to look for uni-versality in the techniques of prevention since,when we consider the prevention of crime, weare in fact looking at a set of events joined onlyin their proscription by statute (Pease, 1997,p. 659).

A popular means of de®ning crime preven-tion in criminology in the late twentiethcentury has been in terms of the distinctionbetween situational and social strategies ofprevention (to complicate matters further, thesocial strategies are often termed `community'crime prevention). Situational crime preven-tion chie¯y concerns opportunity reduction,such as the installation of surveillance tech-nology in public spaces to reduce the oppor-tunities for the theft of vehicles or crimesagainst victims. Social crime prevention isfocused chie¯y on changing social environ-ments and the motivations of offenders. Socialcrime prevention measures thus often tend tofocus on the development of schemes to deterpotential or actual offenders from futureoffending. Both situational and social crimeprevention approaches tend to be what istermed `multi-agency' in orientation, ratherthan being driven by one agency alone, suchas the police. Common to both elements ofthis distinction is the claim to be lessdamaging than traditional (retributive) justiceapproaches. Also common to both situationaland social prevention is a narrow focus on`street crime' and speci®c categories ofoffender (young, working-class males) ratherthan other social harms and offenders.

Another approach to classifying types ofcrime prevention is that there are three majormodels of crime prevention, borrowed fromtheorizing in medical epidemiology (Weiss,1987). First, there is `primary' crime preven-tion involving the reduction of criminalopportunities without reference to criminals.In primary crime prevention attention isturned to the crime event rather than themotivated offender. In the second type ofcrime prevention, termed `secondary', thefocus is on changing people before they dosomething criminal. Here then attention is onthe prevention of criminality. Finally, `tertiary'crime prevention focuses on the truncation ofthe criminal career, or reduction of theseriousness of offending, for example throughthe treatment of known offenders.

Another attempt to provide a comprehen-sive typology of crime prevention strategies is

63CRIME PREVENTION

found in Tonry and Farrington (1995). Theseauthors distinguish four major strategies ofcrime prevention (law enforcement, develop-mental, communal and situational). Accordingto law enforcement strategy, criminal lawsexist and are enacted so that fewer of theproscribed acts take place and general pre-vention in turn is the primary justi®cation formaintaining a system of criminal punishment.This traditional law enforcement approach toboth crime prevention and punishment oper-ates chie¯y through deterrence, incapacitationand rehabilitation. Developmental preventiveinterventions are designed to prevent thedevelopment of criminal potential in indivi-duals, especially targeting the risk and pro-tective factors discovered in studies of humandevelopment. Community prevention isdesigned to change the social conditions thatin¯uence offending in residential commu-nities. And situational prevention involvesinterventions designed to prevent the occur-rence of crimes, especially by reducingopportunities and increasing risks.

Evaluation

Despite the plethora of activities and de®ni-tional distinctions noted above, there remainsa continuing dominance of a narrow focus inadministrative criminology on `what works' ascrime prevention techniques (most associatedwith situational crime prevention `®xes').Viewed critically, this technicist focus islimiting and runs the risk of missing thebroader sociological and political context interms of which trends in crime preventionneed to be understood. It may be noted thatthe concern with evaluating policies andintiatives for reducing or managing crimesmay mean that crime prevention experts losesight of the wider levers of crime, disorderand harms in contemporary societies.

According to critical authors, the `growthindustry' around crime prevention, crimereduction and community safety ± whichincludes the academic criminological commu-nity ± re¯ects important wider social trans-formations in contemporary societies(Crawford, 1997; Hughes, 1998; O'Malley,1992). This insight is crucial to the recognitionthat developments in crime prevention are notjust well-intentioned, technical solutions orresponses to speci®c new crime events butre¯ect broad trends in social control and thegovernance of diverse and often fragmentedpopulations. In particular, the increasingemphasis on (at best) crime reduction and

(more pragmatically) risk management asso-ciated with an àctuarialist' model of justicemay re¯ect the decline of the nation state'sclaims to sovereignty over crime control andmay further accentuate trends towards socialexclusion and with `safety' increasinglybecoming the `club'-like privilege of theprivileged and af¯uent.

Gordon Hughes

Associated Concepts: administrative crimino-logy, community safety, crime control model,fear of crime, governmentality, multi-agencycrime prevention, realist criminologies, situa-tional crime prevention, social crime preven-tion, surveillance


Oxford, The Clarendon Press.Hughes, G. (1998) Understanding Crime Prevention:

Social Control, Risk and Late Modernity. Bucking-ham, Open University Press.

O'Malley, P. (1992) `Power, risk and crime preven-tion', Economy and Society, 21 (3), pp. 251±68.

Pease, K. (1997) `Crime prevention', in M. Maguire,R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds), The OxfordHandbook of Criminology, 2nd edn. Oxford, TheClarendon Press.

Tonry, M. and Farrington, D. (1995) Building a SaferSociety: Strategic Approaches to Crime. Chicago,University of Chicago Press.

Weiss, R. (1987) `Community and crime prevention',in E. Johnson (ed.), Handbook on Crime and Delin-quency, New York, Greenwood Press.

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

De®nition

The International Military Tribunal at Nurem-berg impressed the concept of crimes againsthumanity into international law. These crimeswere de®ned as the `murder, extermination,enslavement or deportation, and other inhu-mane acts committed against any civilianpopulation, before or during the war or per-secutions on political, racial or religiousgrounds in the execution of or in connectionwith any crime within the jurisdiction of theTribunal, whether or not in violation ofthe domestic law of the country in question'.The international criminal tribunals for theformer Yugoslavia and Rwanda added the


crimes of rape and torture to the inventory ofcrimes against humanity. By the time theInternational Criminal Court is establishedthere will be new crimes against humanity toappend to the register. Crimes against human-ity are different from genocide because theydo not require the intention to eradicate, orattempt to eradicate, a national, ethnic, racialor religious group by mass murder. They aredistinguishable from war crimes in that theyapply in times of peace as well as war.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: genocide, hate crime,torture, war crimes

Key ReadingsBassiouni, M.C. (1999) Crimes Against Humanity in

International Law. The Hague, Kluwer Law.Gutman, R. and Rieff, D. (eds) (1999) Crimes of War:

What the Public Should Know. New York, W.W.Norton and Co.

Ratner, S.R. and Abrams, J.S. (1997) Accountability forHuman Rights. Oxford, The Clarendon Press.

Robertson, G. (2000) Crimes Against Humanity.Harmondsworth, Penguin.

CRIMINAL CAREERS

De®nition

Ordered sequences of criminal law violations.An important difference between occupationaland criminal careers is that the positions inoccupational careers are usually legitimate,are often established by formal organizations,and frequently follow a standard pattern.Criminal law violations are less widelyapproved and usually do not involve organi-zationally de®ned positions. The concept isdistinct from the linguistically similar phrase,`career criminals'.


A criminal career has a beginning and an end;its trajectory is characterized by age of onset,age of desistance, frequency of violations ofeach type of crime, and the probabilities ofswitching between offence categories. Indivi-duals, organizations and places may havecriminal careers. Most research and theorizinghas concerned the criminal careers of indi-viduals.

Criminal career research confronts anumber of methodological issues. Some ofthe most important are:

· The validity of different types of data(of®cial records, self-reports, reports ofothers). Often the trajectories derived fromdifferent sources are similar, but in somecases, those constructed from of®cialrecords differ from those based on non-of®cial sources. Arrest statistics showaggregate levels of violence rising to apeak in late adolescence and early adult-hood, and then declining. Observations ofchildren, however, suggest that aggressivebehaviour may be highest at ages 1 or 2,and declines gradually with age. Becausesmall children are weak, do little damage,and are not considered fully responsiblefor their actions, small children's aggres-sion is handled informally, and is oftenneglected in studies of criminal careers.

· Aggregate data or individual-level data?A good deal of theorizing has been basedon aggregate-level data. For a number ofdifferent offences, in different times andplaces, rates of aggregate involvement incrime rise with age and then decline.Quite different patterns of individualstarts, stops and frequencies can yieldthe same aggregate pattern. To distinguishamong these different patterns, data onindividual careers are required.

· Cross-sectional or longitudinal analyses?In a one-shot, cross-sectional study, infor-mation about crime is collected fromindividuals of different ages at a singletime. This design cannot distinguish ageeffects from cohort effects. Longitudinalresearch following one or more cohortsover time cannot distinguish the effects ofage from period. No design can disen-tangle the linear effects of age, period andcohort. Researchers have typically dealtwith this issue by assuming that one ormore of these effects is zero.

Research on aggregate patterns has estab-lished that the age distribution of involvementin crime has changed dramatically over thepast 200 years, that it differs from country tocountry, and is offence-speci®c. Studies ofindividual careers show trajectory shapes to beperson-speci®c. There is a substantial degree ofcontinuity in individual criminal involvement:those with high levels of involvement at onetime tend to have high levels at later times. Yetchange occurs, with many careers ending inadolescence or early adulthood.

65CRIMINAL CAREERS

Research has identi®ed numerous antece-dents of early onset of criminality in earlychildhood traits and family characteristics.Subsequent trajectories are in¯uenced bymarriage, employment, changing patterns ofpeer association, imprisonment and participa-tion in treatment programmes. Studies differon whether offences tend to become moreserious as careers progress.

Most offenders are not specialists. Super-imposed on a pattern of random switchingbetween crimes is a modest degree of special-ization. Specialization is somewhat greater forwhite collar criminals and sex offenders.

Evaluation

The strength of the criminal career perspectiveis that it directs attention to changes inpatterns of criminal behaviour over the lifecourse and to the dependence of age, or stageof career, on factors that in¯uence criminalbehaviour.

Thus far, research on criminal careers hastended to be individualistic: little attention hasbeen paid to the possible mutual dependenceof career trajectories of co-offenders. Statisticalanalyses have tended to lump offences ofdifferent kinds together, possibly obscuringdifferences among offences. Studies of crimeswitching have tended not to examine thetemporal shape of trajectories.

Career research has concentrated on the`common' crimes of interpersonal violence,theft, vandalism, illegal drug use, statusoffences and public order offences. Littleresearch has been done on careers in con-sumer fraud, stock market fraud, insurancefraud, price-®xing, insider trading, tax eva-sion, offering and soliciting bribes, embezzle-ment, espionage, money laundering, armstraf®cking, child molesting, perjury, makingand distributing pornography, war crimes,police and prison guard violence, and geno-cide. Some of these offences can be carried outonly by those who meet advanced educationalstandards and who hold of®ce in legitimateorganizations. For these offenders, onset isexpected to be late, and involvement to occurat older ages. Predictors of common crimin-ality (for example, impulsive personality,childhood aggressiveness, inadequate paren-tal supervision in childhood, school dif®cul-ties and low socio-economic status) may notpredict involvement for these offences. Mar-riage and employment may not promotedesistance, as they do for routine violenceand property offences. Late initiators of

careers in `common' crimes have also beenlittle studied.

David Greenberg

Associated Concepts: cross-sectional design,deterrence, deviance, deviancy ampli®cation,labelling, longitudinal study, recidivism

Key ReadingsBlumstein, A., Cohen, J., Roth, J.A. and Visher, C.A.

(eds) (1986) Criminal Careers and `Career Criminals',2 vols. Washington, DC, National Academy Press.

Farrington, D.P. (1997) `Human development andcriminal behaviour' in Mike Maguire, RodMorgan and Robert Reiner (eds), The OxfordHandbook of Criminology, 2nd edn. Oxford, TheClarendon Press.

Greenberg, D.F. (ed.) (1996) Criminal Careers, 2 vols.Aldershot, and Brook®eld, VT, Dartmouth.

Le Blanc, M. and FreÂchette, M. (1989) Male CriminalActivity from Childhood through Youth: Multileveland Developmental Perspective. New York,Springer-Verlag.

Thornberry, T. (ed.) (1997) Developmental Theories ofCrime and Delinquency. New Brunswick, NJ,Transaction.

Tonry, M., Ohlin, L. and Farrington, D.P. (eds)(1991) Human Development and Criminal Behavior.New York, Springer-Verlag.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

De®nition

The process through which the state respondsto behaviour that it deems unacceptable.Criminal justice is delivered through a seriesof stages: charge; prosecution; trial; sentence;appeal; punishment. These processes and theagencies which carry them out are referred tocollectively as the criminal justice system.


The framework of criminal justice is laid downby legislation specifying the penalties avail-able in consequence of various crimes; and thepowers, rules and procedures for each processand agency. In the UK, legislation hasgenerally prescribed maximum penalties,leaving considerable discretion to courts indeciding the actual penalty in individualcases. The life sentence for murder has tradi-tionally been the only mandatory sentence.


Other countries have more prescriptive penalcodes, with less discretion available to courts.In recent years, the UK has followed otherjurisdictions, especially the USA, in introdu-cing more mandatory sentences. Discretionhas been reduced at all points in the system.Under the slogan `truth in sentencing', poli-ticians have decreed that offenders shouldserve the sentence pronounced by the court, orat least a ®xed percentage of it, rather thanhave the length of sentence actually serveddetermined by prison governors or probationof®cers through decisions about early releaseor early termination of community orders.

Life imprisonment is the most severepunishment in most Western countries. Theimportant exception is the USA, where use ofthe death penalty has increased during the1990s; several states which did not have ithave introduced or re-introduced the deathpenalty. In most years, Texas carries out thehighest number of executions. Eastern Eur-opean countries seeking membership of theEuropean Union have abolished the deathpenalty, as part of moves to bring theircriminal justice systems into line with theEuropean Convention on Human Rights.

In the 1980s, several high-pro®le cases inEngland and Wales were shown to haveresulted in wrongful convictions. Concernwith these miscarriages of justice led to aRoyal Commission on Criminal Justice in1993. Some changes in procedures resulted,among the most important of which was therequirement upon prosecutors to discloseevidence more fully to the defence beforetrial. Gradually, however, these concerns havefaded and by the mid-1990s widespreadperception that too many guilty people werebeing acquitted has led to further changeswhich swing the balance of advantage backtowards the prosecution.

Theoretical analysis of criminal justice hasfocused on the tension between the objectiveof crime control, and the values of due pro-cess. Although crime control, or crime reduc-tion, is obviously the overall aim of criminaljustice, it is limited by rights accorded todefendants. Crime control and due processwere represented as alternative models ofcriminal justice by Herbert Packer (Sandersand Young, 1994). If crime control is thedominant consideration, severe penalties maybe imposed: penalties designed to ensureprotection of the public through removal orincapacitation of the offender, so that there isno chance of a further offence. Establishingguilt `beyond reasonable doubt' may seem lessimportant than demonstrating the conse-

quences of crimes. Due process valuesemphasize fairness and equality in criminaljustice, and respect the rights of offenders, sothat there should be proper safeguardsthrough representation, rules of evidence,and the prosecution having to establish guiltaccording to rigorous standards of proof. Dueprocess models also expect punishment to beproportionate to the seriousness of the offence,and not to be degrading or inhumane. The1980s are said to be characterized by dom-inance of due process values, while there hasbeen a marked swing towards crime control inthe 1990s.

Criminologists have been interested in thepossibility and extent of discrimination incriminal justice. Unemployment, race andgender have been shown to in¯uence criminaljustice decision-making. High unemploymentrates correlate with high imprisonment rates;black offenders have been found to be morelikely than their white counterparts to beimprisoned; being female is associated withreceiving probation where male offendersmight receive a ®ne or other non-interventivesentence. There is some disagreement amongcriminologists about whether the criminaljustice treatment of women is more or lesssevere than that of males, but general agree-ment that it is different. Conversely, consensusabout the extent of different treatment due torace has been harder to establish, but there isgeneral agreement that if there is anydifference, it is in the direction of greaterseverity for black offenders.

Barbara Hudson

Associated Concepts: crime control model,discretion, discrimination, disparity, dispro-portionality, due process model, penality,probation, social justice

Key ReadingsAshworth, A. (1994) The Criminal Process. Oxford,

Oxford University Press.Ashworth, A. and Wasik, M. (eds) (1998) Funda-

mentals of Sentencing Theory. Oxford, The Clar-endon Press.

Davies, M., Croall, H. and Tyrer, J. (1995) CriminalJustice: An Introduction to the Criminal JusticeSystem in England and Wales. Harlow, Longman.

Hood, R. (1992) Race and Sentencing: A Study in theCrown Court. Oxford, The Clarendon Press.

Lacey, N. (1994) Criminal Justice. Oxford, OxfordUniversity Press.

Sanders, A. and Young, R. (1994) Criminal Justice.Oxford, Butterworths.

67CRIMINAL JUSTICE

CRIMINALIZATION

De®nition

Crime is a status conferred on and ascribed tocertain non-approved acts legislated againstand, through the due process of law, pun-ished. Derived in social reaction theory,criminalization is the institutionalized processthrough which certain acts and behaviours arelabelled as `crimes' and òutlawed'. It re¯ectsthe state's decision to regulate, control andpunish selectively. Critical theorists havedeveloped this analysis further, arguing thatcriminalization does not occur in a vacuum. Itis in¯uenced by contemporary politics, eco-nomic conditions and dominant ideologiesand is contextualized by the determining con-texts of social class, gender, sexuality, `race'and age.


While it is clear that certain acts and behav-iours receive widespread disapproval andcondemnation transcending time, place andculture, much that is declared ùnlawful' andde®ned as `crime' is derived in social andsocietal reaction. Not all harmful acts arede®ned as crimes and not all crimes arenecessarily harmful. Criminalization repre-sents the technical process through whichacts are de®ned as crimes, legislated against,regulated through law enforcement and, viathe courts, punished. Further, however, it is apolitical, economic and ideological processthrough which individuals and identi®ablegroups are selectively policed and disciplined.

Re¯ecting on postwar USA, Spitzer (1975)argued that criminalization speci®cally targetsthose whose `behaviour, personal qualities,and/or position threaten the social relations ofproduction', challenging the established eco-nomic order, the `process of socialization forproductive and non-productive roles' and theìdeology which supports the functioning ofcapitalist society'. The deviant status ascribedto such `problem populations' is the productof a process of social categorization. ForSpitzer, critical analysis `must examine wherethese images and de®nitions came from' and`what they re¯ect about the structure of andpriorities in speci®c class societies . . .' (1975).

Although criticized for economic reduction-ism, Spitzer placed class and marginalization®rmly on the labelling and social reaction

agenda. In other words, crime and criminali-zation were inextricably, although not always,linked to subordination and oppression withinadvanced capitalist societies. This discussionreasserted the importance of Marx's analysisof the relative surplus population withindeveloping capitalism and its threat to socialorder and economic conditions. The politicalmanagement of the relative surplus popula-tion, of the marginalized, relies on the rule oflaw and its selective enforcement to disciplineoppositional forces embodying strategies ofsurveillance, regulation and control.

Within the UK, Box (1983) demonstrateshow contemporary economic crises haveimpacted on the criminalization of subordi-nate groups. Ideological constructions derivedin nineteenth-century social conditions weremobilized in the 1980s, best illustrated by thecontinua which dichotomize the rough andthe respectable, the undeserving and deser-ving poor, the subversive and the conforming.The rough, undeserving and dangerousùnderclass' ± the ènemy within' ± necessitatehardline policing, tougher sentencing andsecure containment. The implication was thatimprisonment is used to control and regulateproblem populations, particularly duringeconomic recession.

Critical analysis, however, contests thesimplistic claim that rising unemploymentand increased poverty lead inevitably to crimeand thus a swelling prison population. Boxand Hale (1982, p. 22) record a more complexpicture in which imprisonment is `not a directresponse to any rise in crime, but is anideologically motivated response to the per-ceived threat posed by the swelling popula-tion of economically marginalized persons'.They contend that increases in street crime, forexample, managed by the rhetoric andpractices of authoritarian `law and order'responses, is a myth constructed with thepolitical objective of strengthening criminaljustice control agencies.

In the USA Currie (1998, p. 185) re¯ects thatin 1967 the Kerner Commission on UrbanDisorders brought the USA to a law and ordercrossroads. He notes a common agreementthat `we could never imprison our way out ofAmerica's violent crime problem', that tack-ling violent crime meant àttacking socialexclusion' and `making a real rather thanrhetorical commitment' to defeating thematerial realities of crime and exclusion. TheUSA took another road, and at the end ofcentury `bursting prisons, devastated citiesand [a] violent crime rate unmatched in the`̀ developed'' world' was the result. According


to Parenti (1999), a right-wing cultural back-lash provided the foundation for the ideolo-gical reaf®rmation of the ùnderclass' asmarginals by choice rather than circumstance.

Marginalization and criminalizationtogether protect, reinforce and reproduceestablished order interests whether political,economic or both. Coercive intervention,however, requires not only authority but alsolegitimacy: `The power to criminalize is notderived necessarily in consensus politics but isimplicitly a political act. Criminalization[re¯ects] ideologies associated with margin-alization and it is within these portrayals thatcertain actions are named, contained andregulated . . . a powerful process because itmobilizes popular approval and legitimacy insupport of powerful interests within the state'(Scraton and Chadwick, 1991, pp. 172±3).Thus popular support has to be won for statepolicies and law reforms that are essentiallyauthoritarian, including the normalization of`special powers'. It is the political manage-ment of negative reputations and violentidentities ± developed, consolidated, trans-mitted and reproduced through ideologies ofòther' ± which underwrites a hardeningprocess of criminalization.

Evaluation

The radical critique at the heart of criticalanalysis within criminology in 1970s USA, UKand Europe was criticized for economicreductionism and false universalism. It wasaccused of over-simpli®cation regarding itsproposed close association of class, margin-alization and criminalization. The critiquenoted that crime, deviance and social con¯ictwere complex and could not be reduced tomaterial causation (unemployment, poverty,poor housing and so on).

Neo-classical, conservative criminologistsconsidered concepts such as criminalizationto be little more than justi®cations for crimescommitted by individuals who had madeinformed choices and should be held respon-sible for their acts. As conservative analysisreasserted its position through the consolida-tion of ùnderclass theory', it was matched bythe emergence of èthical socialists' who alsoemphasized `dismembered families', `lonemothers', lack of civic responsibility and life-style choice as the primary causes of povertyand violent crime. Taken together, thesecritiques reaf®rmed individual and socialpathologies as underlying conditions inwhich much crime is rooted.

From their roots within radicalism the self-styled UK `left realists' argued that criticalanalysis had been ¯awed by economicreductionism. Leading to `left idealism' and afailure to `take crime seriously'. This created aheated debate in which critical criminologistsargued that the associated structural processesof marginalization and criminalization couldnot be con®ned to the relations of productionand distribution. They emphasized the signi®-cance of patriarchy, heterosexuality, `race' andage as institutionalized and oppressive con-structs, subordinating and marginalizingpeople at the political-ideological as well aspolitical-economic level.

Conceptually, criminalization explains thestructural conditions in which certain acts arede®ned as crimes, and subsequently policedand punished. It explores the creation andpolitical management of identities in thedetermining contexts of societal power rela-tions. And it provides an understanding of thecriminal justice clampdown, the rise in puni-tive legislation and the authoritarian shiftwithin social democratic states. This clamp-down is exempli®ed in the UK by the mantra`tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime'which underpins a multi-agency or matrixapproach to social discipline: zero toleranceand `quality of life' policing; increasedsurveillance, targeting and hardline interven-tions. With the criminal justice `net' wideningto include ànti-social' behaviour, to regulatechildren at a very early age, the criminalizingcontext has been further extended.

Kathryn Chadwick and Phil Scraton

Associated Concepts: authoritarian populism,crime, critical criminology, emergency legisla-tion, labelling, left realism, net widening,racialization, radical feminism, risk, socialharm, social reaction, surveillance, underclass

Key ReadingsBox, S. (1983) Power, Crime and Mysti®cation. London,

Tavistock.Box, S. and Hale, C. (1982) Èconomic crisis and the

rising prisoner population in England and Wales',Crime and Social Justice, no.17.

Currie, E. (1998) Crime and Punishment in America.New York, Metropolitan Books.

Parenti, C. (1999) Lockdown America: Police andPrisons in the Age of Crisis. London, Verso.

Scraton, P. and Chadwick, K. (1991) `Challenging thenew orthodoxies: the theoretical imperatives andpolitical priorities of critical criminology', in K.

69CRIMINALIZATION

Stenson and D. Cowell (eds), The Politics of CrimeControl. London, Sage.

Spitzer, S. (1975) `Towards a Marxian theory ofdeviance', Social Problems, 22, pp. 368±401.

CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

Critical criminology applies critical analysis tothe `discipline' of criminology, the study ofcrime and the administration of criminaljustice. It emphasizes the contextualizingrelationship of structure and agency, locatingthe èveryday', routine world within structuraland institutional relations. It locates `crime',`deviance' and `social con¯ict' within theirdetermining contexts rather than being obsessedwith causation. It endeavours to broaden thescope of analysis to a consideration of harmrather than crime, social justice rather thancriminal justice, treatment rather than punish-ment and discourses of human rights ratherthan discipline and control. The structuralrelations of production and distribution,reproduction and patriarchy, and neo-coloni-alism are identi®ed as the primary determin-ing contexts within which the inter-relationships and mutual dependencies ofstructural forms of oppression can be under-stood.


Breaking with traditional, academic crimino-logy which prioritized liberalism, pluralismand reformism, radical criminology emergedin the early 1970s. In Britain, the NationalDeviancy Conference (NDC) was formed,uniting academics, practitioners and cam-paigners in the pursuit of a radical alternativeto mainstream criminology. From the NDCdeveloped the `New Criminology' which setthe radical agenda via the proposal for a`fully social theory' of deviance. Thisinvolved establishing theoretical connectionsbetween the law, the state, legal and politicalrelations and the functions of crime. Itsobjective was to evolve a Marxist perspectiveprioritizing a political-economic focus onclass and class relations. Implicit in thisanalysis was the connection between class,crime and the state with `crime control'providing the coercive means through which

threats to the established social and economicorder are identi®ed and regulated. It is thestate, through its legislation, that establishesof®cial means of crime control. Hence, thestate's role to guarantee continuity, to managecon¯ict and to reproduce the dominant socialand economic order.

In responding to this `radical' direction incriminology, critics targeted its implied eco-nomic reductionism. They suggested thatwithin critical analysis the rule of law and itsrelations were reduced to functional subsidi-aries of the political economy. In Europeansocieties, notably Scandinavia, Holland andWest Germany, the development of radicalcriminology was more inclined towardsabolitionism; `the product of the same counter-cultural politics of the 1960s which gave rise tothe cultural radicalism of the ``new'' or`̀ critical'' criminology' (Cohen, 1996, p. 3).

Throughout the 1980s profound differencesemerged within critical criminology, experi-enced most acutely in Britain. Key proponentsof `New Criminology' rede®ned themselves as`left realists'. The primary proposition wasthat `crime' needs to be `taken seriously' and`confronted' by politicians, policy-makers andacademics. Emphasizing crime, crime preven-tion and civil disorder, the left realist solutionto the problem of crime proposes a demo-cratic, multi-agency approach geared to amore equal distribution of resources and areformed system of legal justice. Central to thework of left realism has been the labelling andrejection of ìdealism' in radical criminology,exposing the political and theoretical weak-nesses of `left idealism' as economicallyreductionist and deterministic. Critical crimi-nology, however, cannot be so lightly dis-missed.

According to Scraton and Chadwick (1991) a`second phase' in the development of criticalcriminology can be identi®ed. Establishedtheoretical principles have not been rejectedbut re®ned, redeveloped and extended. Theinitial call from new criminology to locate theworld of everyday life within broader struc-tural relations remains a de®ning principle,setting the agenda for the consolidation ofcritical analysis within criminological theory.Signi®cant here is the relationship between`structure' and àgency'. Agency refers to theexperiential, everyday world of diverse socialrelations and interaction. Structure encom-passes the world of institutions and structuralrelations ± and their histories ± which set theboundaries to social interaction and personalopportunity within society, containing andregulating social relations.


Moreover, while critical analysis remainscommitted to an economic analysis focusingon the relations of production and distribution± emphasizing class relations and thedynamics and consequences of advancedcapitalism and globalization ± other inter-related centres of power and their institutionalrelations also are prioritized. These include thestructural relations of reproduction anddependency, emphasizing global dominationof women and the complexities, yet univers-ality, of contrasting patriarchies. Also signi®-cant are the structural relations of neo-colonialism, emphasizing the pervasivenessof institutional racism and its imperialistlegacy; connecting slavery, colonization,immigration and migration. Scraton (1991, p.93) identi®es these structural relations as the`determining contexts' of social action andhuman potential. These are relations embody-ing exploitation, oppression and subordina-tion. They are relations of power, botheconomic and political, underpinned by deepideological traditions and their contemporarymanifestation.

A further important dimension of criticalcriminology is the relationship between powerand knowledge. For Foucault (1980), power isnot unidimensional but is dispersed through-out society, not resting with one dominantstate, sovereign or class. Power and knowl-edge imply each other. Crucially, the power±knowledge axis permeates and sustains of®-cial discourses. For critical theorists, of®cialdiscourses are developed and reproducedthrough the primary determining contexts ofclass, `race' and gender. Discrimination result-ing from these determining contexts isexperienced daily, interpersonally, at thelevel of agency. Yet they also have a structuralsigni®cance in that classism, racism, sexismand heterosexism are institutionalized andoppressive constructs. They inform legislation,policy and practice throughout institutions,organizations and professions. It is throughthe process of institutionalization that therelations of domination and subordinationgain their legitimacy and achieve structuralsigni®cance.

The processes of marginalization and crim-inalization are central in explaining andanalysing the relationship between the law,crime, punishment and the state. Criticaltheorists argue that there is a direct relation-ship between economic crises and politicalresponses of the state and judiciary, leading tothe marginalization and criminalization ofcertain groups. While economic changesbring political responses, through state

action, when such action is coercive orinvolves the use of force and violence, it hasto be legitimated. This is the dichotomybetween coercion and consent. Critical crimi-nology demonstrates that the process ofcriminalization protects, reinforces and repro-duces the political, economic and socialinterests of an established order. The processrequires institutional legitimacy and also thewinning of popular consent for state policiesand legal shifts that are essentially authoritar-ian. Negative reputations, stereotyped imagesand collective, violent identities ± the stuff of`folk devils' ± are transmitted throughideologies. The state institutional responserelies heavily on winning `hearts and minds'in pursuing this ideological appeal throughpopular discourse. Political, economic andideological forces, then, are intricately con-nected in the creation, maintenance andportrayal of the process of criminalization.

Evaluation

Critical criminology contests and rejects theknowledge base, theoretical traditions andimperatives of administrative criminology. Italso challenges the emphases of left realistanalyses, arguing that this approach remainslocked into ± and constrained by ± de®nitions,policies and practices shaped and adminis-tered within the criminal justice priorities ofsocial democratic states. While taking `crime'seriously, it retains a commitment to thelocation of `crime', `deviance' and `con¯ict'within the determining contexts of power andtheir institutionalized relations.

Critical criminology also incorporates ahuman rights discourse and agenda. Thisdevelopment reaf®rms that àdvanced' demo-cracies, whatever their claims for upholdingthe principles of equality and liberty, embodyand reproduce the structural inequalities ofglobal capitalism, patriarchy and neo-coloni-alism. These inequalities are woven into thefabric of the state and civil society; hegemonicrather than ideological. They are supportedand reproduced through what Foucault calls`regimes of truth'. Critical analysis hasfocused on the structure, procedures andappropriateness of the criminal justice process(from the derivation of laws to the adminis-tration of punishments) in identifying theirspeci®c and cumulative de®cit in revealing`truth' and delivering `justice'. A humanrights discourse, agenda and process, providea processual and procedural alternative to theadministration of the law and criminal justice

71CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY

(Cohen, 1993, 1996). It is also a priority forcritical criminology in challenging the contextand consequences of state-sanctioned regimesof truth.

Kathryn Chadwick and Phil Scraton

Associated Concepts: abolitionism, authoritarianpopulism, criminalization, critical research,human rights, left idealism, Marxist crimin-ologies, new criminology, post-colonial crimi-nology, radical criminologies, radicalfeminism, the state

Key ReadingsCohen, S. (1993) `Human rights and crimes of the

state: the culture of denial', Australian and NewZealand Journal of Criminology, 26 (2), pp. 97±115.

Cohen, S. (1996) `Crime and politics: spot thedifference', British Journal of Sociology, 47 (1),pp. 1±21.

Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Inter-views and Other Writings, 1972±1977 (ed. C.Gordon). Brighton, Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Scraton, P. (1991) `Recent developments in crimino-logy: a critical overview', in M. Haralambos (ed.),Developments in Sociology: An Annual Review No. 7.Ormskirk, Causeway Press.

Scraton, P. and Chadwick, K. (1991) `Challenging thenew orthodoxies: the theoretical imperatives andpolitical priorities of critical criminology', in K.Stenson and D. Cowell (eds), The Politics of CrimeControl. London, Sage.

Sim, J., Scraton, P. and Gordon, P. (1987) `Crime, thestate and critical analysis', in P. Scraton (ed.), Law,Order and the Authoritarian State: Readings inCritical Criminology. Milton Keynes, Open Uni-versity Press.

CRITICAL RESEARCH

De®nition

Critical social research begins with thepremise that `knowledge', including the for-malized `domain assumptions' and bound-aries of academic disciplines, is neither value-free nor value-neutral. Rather, knowledge isderived and reproduced, historically andcontemporaneously, in the structural relationsof inequality and oppression that underpinestablished social orders. Challenging thequantitative foundations of positivism andthe interpretive foundations of phenomeno-logy, critical research endeavours to locate the

experiential realities of individuals and com-munities (agency) within their historical,structural and reproductive contexts (struc-ture).


Writing in the late 1950s, and demonstrating agrowing scepticism for mainstream socialscience and its application within the USA,Wright Mills (1959, p. 20) criticized the`bureaucratic techniques which inhibit socio-logical inquiry by `̀ methodological'' preten-sions', its òbscurantist conceptions' and itstrivializing of `publicly relevant issues' by anoverstated `concern with minor problems'.Such ìnhibitions, obscurities and trivialities'had created a crisis for a form of state-supported social research which decontextua-lized people's lives, their experiences and theiropportunities. For Wright Mills, researchingand teaching at the height of McCarthyism,sociology had `lost its reforming push' and its`tendencies towards fragmentary problemsand scattered causation' had been `conserva-tively turned to the use of the corporation,army and the state'.

Throughout the 1960s in the USA andWestern Europe the radical critique of socialsciences consolidated. It proposed that com-missioned research was conceptualized anddesigned to further the material interests ofthe powerful, in political and economicinstitutions, at the expense of the powerless.Of particular concern was how social researchwas used to serve and service the military±industrial complex and its international,expansionist objectives. The radical critiqueclaimed that crime and other social problemswhich were the consequence of structuralinequality, economic deprivation and culturaldiscrimination were reconstructed throughmainstream social research as the inevitableoutcomes of individual or community patho-logies.

Central to the critique was the assertion thatsocial science, far from being constituted by`value-free', òbjective' or `scienti®c' disci-plines independent of each other and distinctfrom societal relations, was directly implicatedin the maintenance and reproduction of socialorder. In its applications and interventionssocial science was a part of, rather than apartfrom, the political, economic and socialdevelopments geared to regulating con¯ictand managing change. Thus its emphases andmethodologies re¯ected its purpose andutility.


Within criminology the radical critiqueemphasized the signi®cance of social condi-tions and structural inequalities in the creationof `crime', `deviance', disorder and con¯ict.Challenging the traditions of criminality,causation, pathologization and correction,critical research switched the emphasis tosocio-legal de®nitions, social and societalreactions and the structural contexts of dailyinteraction within communities. As WrightMills had proposed: the `most fruitful distinc-tion with which the sociological imaginationworks' operates `between the personal troublesof the milieu and the public issues of socialstructure' (1959, p. 8; emphases added).

Thus, critical social research ìs under-pinned by a critical-dialectical perspective'committed to `dig[ging] beneath the surface ofhistorically speci®c, oppressive social struc-tures' (Harvey, 1990, p. 1). Initially criticalresearch was concerned with class-basedoppression but the emergence of second-wave feminist analyses and anti-racistresearch extended critical methodologies toall structural forms of oppression and theirintegration. Critical research `delv[es] beneathostensive and dominant conceptual frames inorder to reveal the underlying practices, theirhistorical speci®city and structural manifesta-tions' (1990, p. 4). In this context criticalresearch is not only historically grounded, it isconcerned with the political-ideological con-text as well as the political-economic determi-nants which shape and legitimate the socialconditions of structural inequality. Thisincludes the institutional arrangementsthrough which of®cial discourse and academicknowledge are produced and confers legiti-macy on existing social arrangements.

As Hudson (2000, p. 177) notes, òf all theapplied social sciences, criminology hasthe most dangerous relationship to power:the categories and classi®cations, the labelsand diagnoses and the images of the criminalproduced by criminologists are stigmatizingand pejorative'. Such conceptions and theirapplication inform `strategies of control andpunishment' and impact individually andcollectively on `rights and liberties'. Thus itis through critical social research that thepower±knowledge axis, at the heart ofFoucault's discussion of the material realityof societal `regimes of truth', is exposed anddeconstructed.

The search for knowledge and truth ±epistemology ± has been central to researchtraditions. Critical social research challengesthe academic knowledge base which serves toreproduce dominant power relations and their

structural inequalities. Of particular signi®-cance is of®cial discourse, re¯ecting andreinforcing the `view from above', conferringlegitimacy on political and economic institu-tions and their operation. As regimes of truthare constructed they become the institutiona-lized and professionalized manifestations ofknowledge. Thus `knowledge' becomes ìnsti-tutionally appropriate', exercised and deliv-ered through the interventions of professionalèxperts'. Through mobilizing the politics ofreputation and representation, those `knowl-edges' considered inappropriate, non-legiti-mate or oppositional are marginalized anddisquali®ed. Critical social research challengesof®cial discourses and the power, authorityand legitimacy of state institutions. Withincriminology the òbject of investigation is thecluster of theories, policies, legislation, mediatreatments, roles and institutions that areconcerned with crime, and with the controland punishment of crime' (Hudson, 2000,p. 177).

Connected to the object and substance ofcritical research is re¯exivity, through which`myths' and `hidden truths' are revealed andpeople are helped `to change the world forthemselves' (Neuman, 1994, p. 67). The objec-tive of re¯ective, qualitative action research inrevealing `the underlying mechanisms thataccount for social relations' is to èncouragedramatic social change from grass-roots level'(1994, p. 67). As Stanley (1990, p. 15) com-ments in her discussion of feminist praxis,`succinctly the point is to change the world,not only to study it'. Unpopular with govern-ments and state institutions, criticized forreductionism and over-simpli®cation anddeprived of signi®cant funding, criticalresearch has been a highly successful antidoteto the functional, self-serving apologism ofadministrative criminology and the decon-textualized relativism ± particularly regardingpower ± of postmodernist discourses on crimeand punishment.

Phil Scraton and Kathryn Chadwick

Associated Concepts: action research, criminali-zation, critical criminology, discourse analysis,feminist research, re¯exivity

Key ReadingsHarvey, L. (1990) Critical Social Research. London,

Sage.Hudson, B. (2000) `Critical re¯ection as research

methodology', in V. Jupp, P. Davies and P.

73CRITICAL RESEARCH

Francis (eds), Doing Criminological Research.London, Sage.

Neuman, W. (1994) Social Research Methods: Qualita-tive and Quantitative Approaches. Boston, MA,Allyn and Bacon.

Scraton, P. (ed.) (1987) Law, Order and the Author-itarian State: Readings in Critical Criminology.Milton Keynes, Open University Press.

Stanley, L. (ed.) (1990) Feminist Praxis. London,Routledge.

Wright Mills, C. (1959) The Sociological Imagination.New York, Oxford.

CROSS-SECTIONAL DESIGN

De®nition

A design in which a cross-section of thepopulation is selected for study and data arecollected from or about each selected case atone particular point in time.


The term cross-sectional design often refers toa type of social survey in which subsets of apopulation are selected to be part of a sample.Where the subsets are represented in directproportion to their existence in the populationit is common to refer to proportionate cross-sectional designs. Where subsets are notselected in proportion to their presence inthe population ± perhaps to give greaterweight to the views of minority groups ± theterm disproportionate cross-sectional design isused. Because data are collected from samplemembers at one single point in time cross-sectional surveys are sometimes also known asone-shot designs.

One-shot cross-sectional surveys are appro-priate to obtaining representative `snap shots'of the population in terms of basic attributes(such as class, age, ethnicity) and also in termsof subjective variables (such as opinions andattitudes). In the United Kingdom policeforces are required by legislation to carry outcrime audits of their area, including a surveyof the general public's views on the ways inwhich the community is policed. One-shotcross-sectional surveys are well suited to thispurpose. Sometimes cross-sectional surveysare also used to collect retrospective data, forexample observations about what samplemembers did in the past or had done tothem. At the analysis stage an attempt is made

to correlate past actions, behaviours or eventswith contemporary attributes, attitudes orother subjective feelings. For example, crimesurveys seek to connect respondents' previousvictimization of crime with current fears aboutthe possibility of further victimization.

The term cross-sectional design also relatesto the use of of®cial statistics and other socialindicators to describe geographical areas atany given point in time. For example, theChicago School of urban sociology useddelinquency rates (amongst others) to `map'the city of Chicago in the 1930s. This was thebasis for a concentric circle theory of urbandevelopment and the mapping of the city interms of such rates resembled a cross-sectionof an onion. Such statistical analysis was usedalongside detailed ethnographic accounts ofthe ùnderside' of life within different con-centric circles.

Evaluation

Cross-sectional designs provide a relativelycheap and quick means of describing popula-tions on a number of variables at any point intime. They also facilitate the search forpatterns of relationships between variables,for example various indicators of socialexclusion (such as unemployment, poor hous-ing standards, low educational standards) andlevels of criminal and disorderly actions.

As indicated earlier, cross-sectional surveyssometimes collect retrospective data ± aboutpast experiences, perhaps ± with a view tocorrelating past experiences with presentactions or attitudes. Such correlations subse-quently form the basis for causal inferencessuggesting, say, that previous experience ofvictimization engenders present fears ofcrime. There are, however, dif®culties withthis. For example, there are doubts about thereliability of respondents' memories of pastexperiences. More crucially, correlations indi-cating potential relationships between pastexperiences and current attitudes and feelingsdo not by themselves provide suf®cientevidence of causality. What is also needed isdirect evidence of time-ordering and of causalforces. Sometimes this can be provided bylongitudinal surveys, in which a sample ofindividuals is studied over a long period oftime (sometimes a life-time).

A further problem with cross-sectionalstudies is related to one of the strengths,namely that they provide snapshots at aparticular point in time. However, thismeans that such studies are not useful vehicles


for examining social change in society or formapping social trends over time. One way ofovercoming this is by taking equivalentsamples at different points in time andcollecting data on the same variables with aview to examining changes or trends. This isknown as a trend or a time series design, anexample of which is the British Crime Surveywhich seeks to examine changes and trends invictimization.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: Chicago School of Sociol-ogy, longitudinal study, of®cial criminalstatistics, sampling, social survey, time seriesdesign, victim surveys

Key ReadingsJupp, V.R. (1996) Methods of Criminological Research.

London, Routledge.Mayhew, P. (1996) `Researching crime and victimi-

zation: the BCS', in P. Davies, P. Francis and V.Jupp (eds), Understanding Victimization. New-castle, University of Northumbria, Social SciencesPress.

CULTURAL CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

An emergent theoretical orientation thatinvestigates the convergence and contestationof cultural, criminal and crime control pro-cesses. Cultural criminology emphasizes therole of image, style, representation and mean-ing both within illicit subcultures, and in themediated construction of crime and crimecontrol.


As developed by Ferrell (1999), Ferrell andSanders (1995) and other theorists, culturalcriminology incorporates a number of orienta-tions regarding the cultural construction ofcrime and crime control. At its most basic,cultural criminology seeks to import theinsights of cultural studies into criminology,building especially from the pioneering workof the Birmingham Centre for ContemporaryCultural Studies in the 1970s on subculturalsymbolism and mediated social control.Similarly, cultural criminology operates from

the postmodern propositions that style issubstance, that meaning resides in representa-tion, and that crime and crime control cantherefore only be understood as an ongoingspiral of intertextual, image-driven `medialoops' (Manning, 1998). Undergirding the useof these contemporary perspectives in culturalcriminology are somewhat more traditionalprojects: the expansion of existing interaction-ist understandings, and the sharpening ofcritical analysis in criminology. Culturalcriminologists attempt to develop the `sym-bolic' in `symbolic interaction' by exploringthe stylized dynamics of illicit subcultures andthe representational universes of the massmedia. Similarly, they seek to unravel thecomplex circuitry through which the meaningof crime and crime control is constructed,enforced and resisted.

These theoretical orientations inform themethodologies favoured by cultural crimi-nologists. As employed within culturalcriminology, ethnographic research draws onsociological, anthropological and culturalstudies traditions to investigate nuances ofmeaning developed within particular culturalmilieux, and to explore the situated dynamicsof illicit subcultures. At its extreme, suchresearch is designed to develop a form ofcriminological verstehen whereby theresearcher approaches an empathic, apprecia-tive understanding of the meanings andemotions associated with crime and crimecontrol. Alternatively, other cultural criminol-ogists utilize methods of media and textualanalysis to develop critical, scholarly readingsof mediated crime and crime control accounts.Such scholarship investigates both historicaland contemporary texts, ranging from news-papers, ®lm and television to popular music,comic books and cyberspace. Recently culturalcriminologists have also begun to integratethese two methodological frameworks inexploring the ongoing con¯uence of illicitsubcultures, media constructions and publicmeanings.

Framed by these theoretical and methodo-logical orientations, cultural criminologicalanalysis has developed in a number of areas.First, cultural criminology conceptualizescrime as a subcultural phenomenon organizedaround symbolic communication, shared aes-thetics and collective identity. Given this,cultural criminologists focus especially onthe dynamics of subcultural style as de®ningboth the internal characteristics of illicit sub-cultures and external, mediated constructionsof them (Hebdige, 1979). In addition, culturalcriminologists highlight the intensities of

75CULTURAL CRIMINOLOGY

collective experience and emotion within illicitsubcultures, as embodied in moments ofedgework and adrenalin, and as given mean-ing within shared vocabularies of motive.

If cultural criminologists in this sense con-ceptualize crime as culture, they also explorethe ways in which culture comes to be recon-structed as crime. Focusing on `culture wars'fought around issues of art and obscenity,alternative musical forms like punk and rap,and the allegedly criminogenic effects of tele-vision and ®lm, researchers reveal the looping,re¯exive process by which such media-generated popular culture forms are in turncriminalized by campaigns of moral enterprisethemselves fought in the mediated realm ofsound bites, press conferences and newspaperheadlines. In this sense, `cultural criminaliza-tion' occurs ± that is, the mediated re-presentation of popular culture forms ascriminal or criminogenic, with or withoutattendant legal proceedings. Signi®cantly, thisprocess also embodies contemporary politicaldynamics, as moral entrepreneurs and cul-tural reactionaries utilize mediated channelsto delegitimate alternative or illicit subcul-tures.

Cultural criminologists likewise explore thebroader mediated construction of crime andcrime control. Research in this area focuses notonly on everyday media texts, but on thecomplex, reciprocal interconnections betweenthe criminal justice system and the massmedia that shape such texts. Much of thiswork builds from, and in some cases recon-ceptualizes, Cohen's (1972) classic modelregarding the invention of folk devils andthe generation of moral panic around issues ofcrime and deviance. In this sense, this workexamines the cultural dynamics by whichcertain activities come to be constructed ascrime and threat, while others are leftùnconstructed'. It further emphasizes theironies inherent in the marketing of crime asboth threat and entertainment.

Threaded through all these areas of enquiryis a concern with relations of power, controland resistance. Cultural criminologists empha-size the new and often insidious forms ofcoercion and control that emerge withinmediated `wars' on crime and within theeveryday consumption of crime as drama andentertainment. At the same time, they high-light forms of resistance that emerge asaudiences remake and reverse mediatedmeanings, and as illicit subcultures embodytheir insubordination in stylized identities andcollectively meaningful experience. Moreover,cultural criminology itself is designed to

operate as a form of intellectual resistance, asa counter-discourse on contemporary crimeissues that through `newsmaking criminology'(Barak, 1994) and other public practices cangenerate alternative images of crime and crimecontrol.

Evaluation

Despite a common focus on representationand meaning in the investigation of crime andcrime control, much of the work in culturalcriminology has remained divided betweenthe study of illicit subcultures on the onehand, and mass media texts on the other. Yetsuch a sharp disjunction misses a number ofkey dynamics regarding crime and culture,including the reconstruction of mass mediatexts by various subcultures and audiences;the production of localized, situated media byillicit subcultures and crime control agenciesalike; and the subsequent appropriation ofthese situated images and symbols by themass media. As noted previously, some recentwork in cultural criminology has in fact begunto address this problem, by linking subcul-tural dynamics, organizational imperativesand situated media to broader, mass mediaconstructions of crime and crime control, andby highlighting the re¯exive process by whicheach party to public crime controversiesremakes and recontextualizes the meaningsof the other. Less promising is the ability ofcultural criminologists to address issues ofaudience and audience meanings; as is thecase with much media analysis and criticism,the epistemic activities of audiences remainmore imagined than investigated.

Cultural criminologists are also just begin-ning to explore a number of key domains inwhich culture, crime and crime controlconverge. Contemporary policing is comingto be conceptualized as a set of semioticpractices entangled with `reality' televisionprogrammes, everyday public surveillance,and the symbolism and aesthetics of policesubcultures themselves. Public controversiesregarding homeless populations, street gangs,graf®ti crews, and other marginalized groupsare beginning to be investigated as con¯ictsover the construction of meaning and identityin public domains, and thus over ownership of`cultural space'. Numerous investigations ofembodied emotions ± of pleasure, fear andexcitement as the affective forces driving bothcrime and crime control ± continue to emerge.Perhaps most importantly, cultural crimino-logy is beginning to move beyond its British


and US roots to explore the contested con-vergence of cultural and criminal dynamics ina variety of world settings, and to investigatethe migration of illicit meanings across realand imagined borders.

Finally, as a nascent theoretical perspective,cultural criminology perhaps constitutes tothis point less a completed, de®nitive para-digm than an eclectic constellation of critiqueslinked by sensitivities to image and represen-tation in the study of crime and crime control.Oriented as they are to the multiplicity ofmeanings and indeterminacy of images con-tinually developing around crime and crimecontrol, though, cultural criminologists them-selves would likely embrace cultural crimino-logy as an always un®nished project, open toemerging con®gurations of culture, crime andcrime control, and to emerging critiques ofthem.

Jeff Ferrell

Associated Concepts: appreciative criminology,carnival (of crime), constitutive criminology,critical criminology, discourse analysis, ethno-graphy, interactionism, newsmaking crimino-logy, postmodernism, social constructionism,subculture

Key ReadingsBarak, G. (ed.) (1994) Media, Process, and the Social

Construction of Crime: Studies in NewsmakingCriminology. New York, Garland.

Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics.London, MacGibbon and Kee. (New editionOxford, Martin Robertson, 1980.)

Ferrell, J. (1999) `Cultural criminology', AnnualReview of Sociology, no. 25, pp. 395±418.

Ferrell, J. and Sanders, C.R. (eds) (1995) CulturalCriminology. Boston, MA, Northeastern UniversityPress.

Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The Meaning of Style.London, Methuen.

Manning, P.K. (1998) `Media Loops', in F. Bailey andD. Hale (eds), Popular Culture, Crime, and Justice.Belmont, CA, West/Wadsworth.

CYBERCRIME

De®nition

The use of electronic communication forcriminal and transgressive activities that

involve the internet and web-based informa-tion and communication technologies (ICTs).


Cybercrimes are computer-mediated activitiesthat have been de®ned as illegal or illicit andare acted out through global electronic net-works. By the 1990s, cyberspace had becomeestablished as one of the fastest growing sitesof crime and transgression (Thomas andLoader, 2000). The internet not only offers itsusers access to global markets and the diffusenetworks and links that support illegal andlegal markets but also provides the means totraverse the state boundaries of national legalsystems and controls. The internet offers thepossibility of invisibility and anonymity totransgressors through the use of encryption,passwords, digital compression, steganogra-phy and remote storage and as a result hasbecome a major site of action for organizedcrime, petty crime, state crime and hate crime.It has been used in activities involving drugs,the moving of illegal money, oil traf®ckingand arms traf®cking as well as other sanction-breaking businesses. State and commercialsecrets have been stolen and sold through theinternet. Potentially harmful political ideashave also been promulgated and disseminatedwith the aim of inciting violence against ethnicand minority groups. The Internet has alsofacilitated the development of a global marketfor pornography and illegal sexual activities.

Cybercrime involves illegal activities thatare aimed at national and internationaleconomies as well as political and socialrelations and structures, thereby jeopardizingand putting at risk not only political andeconomic life but also personal everyday life.Cybercrime often involves cyberviolence thatputs the personal safety of citizens at riskthrough, for example, the manipulation of theemotions of vulnerable individuals by chatroom activities and noticeboard communica-tions. Violent acts can be planned and set uphidden from the gaze of CCTV and othersecurity measures.

Anti-social acts on the Internet have led tothe World Wide Web becoming an importantsite for the carnival of crime where protest anddisruption can be organized and practised.The use of e-mail carnivalesque to disruptstate and commercial organization has becomecommonplace, whilst the organizing of illegalpopular pleasures, such as bare knuckle®ghting or cock, quail and dog ®ghting, hasmeant that law enforcement agencies must

77CYBERCRIME

now counteract such transgressions throughtheir own development of cyber technology(Presdee, 2000).

Mike Presdee

Associated Concepts: Carnival (of crime), cor-porate crime, hidden crime, state crime,transnational organized crime

Key ReadingsGrabosky, P.N. and Smith, R.G. (1998) Crime in the

Digital Age: Controlling Telecommunications and

Cyberspace Illegalities. NSW and New Brunswick,NJ, Federation Press.

Presdee, M. (2000) Cultural Criminology and theCarnival of Crime. London, Routledge.

Thomas, D. and Loader, B.D. (eds) (2000) Cybercrime:Law Enforcement, Security and Surveillance in theInformation Age. London and New York, Routledge.

Wall, D. (1997) `Policing the virtual community: theinternet, cybercrimes and the policing of cyber-space', in P. Francis, P. Davies and V. Jupp (eds),Policing Futures. London, Macmillan.

Wall, D. (1999) `Cybercrimes: new wine, no bottles?',in P. Davies, P. Francis and V. Jupp (eds), InvisibleCrimes. London, Macmillan.


D

DECARCERATION

De®nition

The process that refers to a deliberate moveaway from the use of imprisonment as thecentral and predominant penal sanction,usually towards the use of alternative sanc-tions in the community.


Although criticisms against the form and levelof prison use and the search for alternativescan be traced back at least to the nineteenthcentury, decarceration as a distinct process is acontemporary phenomenon. As part of whatCohen (1985) has termed the destructuringimpulse in the 1960s, the decarceration move-ment grew in popularity at a time when thevery idea of institutional response to deviancewas subject to sustained critique. The prisonsystem and total institutions in general werecondemned as degrading, ineffective in termsof their stated goals (they neither deter norrehabilitate), counter-productive (they cementdeviant careers), and as part of the crimeproblem rather than its solution. Many pro-ponents of decarceration have since argued fordisplacing the use of speci®c parts of theprison system (for example, juvenile deten-tion); others have concentrated on advocatingalternative sanctions. Community-based cor-rections and treatments are regarded as morehumane, less stigmatizing, and more effectivethan institutional measures in the control ofcriminals and other problem populations.Intervention should be aimed at reintegrationrather than segregation.

From a Marxist perspective, the prisonsystem represents the symbol par excellence of

a class society and of class justice. By in¯ictingcoerced discipline and incarcerating predomi-nantly young people, unemployed and ethnicminorities, it reproduces hegemonic powerrelations in the society. Critical studies on theassociation between imprisonment and unem-ployment, the repression of political dissent,human rights violations by the prison system,and overcrowding and inhumane prisonconditions which have led to deaths andrevolts, have served to highlight the role of theprison system as a repressive and ideologicalstate apparatus. In this sense, decarceration isto be fought for as part of the class struggle.

Decarceration has also been closely associ-ated with the abolitionist social movementsand the radical penal lobby in WesternEurope, Scandinavia and North America.Thomas Mathiesen (1986) advocated theprinciple of the ùn®nished' character ofalternatives to prison and campaigned for`negative' reforms that would ultimately leadto prison abolition. As academic involvementincreased and the focus widened from theprison system to the penal system, abolition-ism developed as a new paradigm in crimino-logy and as an alternative approach to crimeand crime control.

Evaluation

Most Western criminal justice systems havewitnessed some form of reduction in the use ofcustody at various times, but decarcerationhas not had a profound effect in decentringthe prison system both in terms of actualprison population and its position in penalthinking. Critics have also pointed to theunintended and perverse consequences ofdecarceration. Scull (1984) argued that treat-ment in the community often amounted tobenign neglect, leaving people to fend for

themselves without the care and supervisionthat they required. In his seminal work on thetransformations in social control strategies,Cohen (1979, 1985) suggested that the exten-sion of community corrections seemed to ®tFoucault's model of `dispersed discipline'. Inthe case of the decarceration of delinquentsand criminals, old institutions remain whilenew community sanctions and supervisorypunishments intended as àlternatives' tocustody are used as supplements to custody,thereby widening the net of social control.More, rather than fewer, deviants are drawnin to the correctional continuum. The networkof control agencies expands both physicallyand territorially. Boundaries between libertyand con®nement have been blurred throughthe development of home curfews, tracking,and tagging.

Whilst the decarceration critique continuesto be in¯uential, it does not necessarily re¯ectthe current diverging control trends. In thecase of the mentally ill, for example, the state-sponsored closing down of hospitals andasylums has continued to take place butmainly as a response to the retrenchment ofwelfare policies and ®scal pressures. Vass(1990) also warned that an uncritical accep-tance of the decarceration critique can lead toimpasse and a paralysis of inventive thoughtand praxis.

Maggy Lee

Associated Concepts: abolition, abolitionism,diversion, penality, penology, radical non-intervention, social control, transcarceration

Key ReadingsCohen, S. (1979) `The punitive city: notes on the

dispersal of social control', in Contemporary Crises,no. 3, pp. 83±93.

Cohen, S. (1985) Visions of Social Control: Crime,Punishment, and Classi®cation. Cambridge, PolityPress.

Mathiesen, T. (1986) `The politics of abolition',Contemporary Crises, no. 10, pp. 81±94.

Scull, A. (1984) Decarceration: Community Treatmentand the Deviant ± A Radical View, rev. edn.Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice±Hall.

Vass, A. (1990) Alternatives to Prison ± Punishment,Custody and the Community. London, Sage.

DECONSTRUCTION

De®nition

A literary and social scienti®c method ofanalysis most closely linked to postmodern-ism. Deconstructionists identify communica-tion, whether spoken or written, as theconstruction of a `text' that can be endlesslyinterpreted and re-interpreted, where mean-ing is always a departure from, rather thanarrival at, ultimate truths. Deconstructionistsrecognize that texts convey multiple, contra-dictory and hidden meanings that can only beprovisionally examined and decoded. Thus, asa method of enquiry, deconstructionismreveals some of the hidden assumptions andembedded values (i.e., ideology) conveyed,knowingly or not, through the construction ofa given text.


Deconstruction has been popularized chie¯yby Jacques Derrida. In part, as a response tothe objectivistic, absolutistic and positivisticsciences, Derrida's critique of Western episte-mology and intellectual thought (i.e., `logo-centrism') reveals the hidden contradictions inwhich truth claims are asserted. Termed `themetaphysics of presence', Derrida examineshow any value can be placed in relation to itscorresponding binary term (e.g., white vs.black, straight vs. gay, objective vs. subjective,male vs. female). The value of the ®rst termstems, in part, from the value of the secondterm; however, the value of the second termstems, in part, from the value of the ®rst term.What this mutual interdependence demon-strates is that neither value can be privileged,despite the fact that we do this all the time inour constructed texts. Indeed, the ®rst termbecomes dominant, and the second repressed.The metaphysics of presence shows us how,through communication, the ®rst value isidenti®ed as presence, active, privileged,while the second value is rendered an absence,passive, dismissed. The task of deconstructionis to show how these `hierarchies' are basic toall phenomena and to demonstrate the way inwhich the texts that constitute these hierar-chies can be decoded. Thus, the aim of decon-struction is to transform that which is absentinto that which is felt and made present.

The deconstructionist strategy to decodeexisting power relations conveyed through atext is termed the `reversal of hierarchies'. By


turning the terms in binary opposition òntheir heads', so to speak, the implied andunspoken tension is revealed and theirinterdependence is made manifest. Further,deconstructionists like Derrida explain thismutual interdependence through the conceptof differance (with an à'). Differance impliesthree meanings: (1) that the two terms inbinary opposition `differ' from one another tomaintain their meaning; (2) that the two termsin binary opposition `defer' to one another inthe sense of implying the other term; and (3)that the two terms in binary opposition `defer'to one another to maintain their interdepen-dence.

Relatedly, deconstruction advocates the`free play of the text'. Once a text (e.g., alegal narrative) is constructed, it is liberated,to some signi®cant degree, from its author.That is to say, the narrative has meaningbeyond what was intended by the author ±even if the author could exhaust his/her ownintended meaning. For example, our under-standing of homosexuality, the death penalty,mental illness, homelessness, abortion, drugaddiction, politics, art, the presidency, and soon, today is considerably different from whatit was 25 years ago. Deconstructionists tell usthat this is because the meaning of each ofthese texts is historically situated; that is,different contexts create different meanings,and these various meanings are never exhaus-tible. This logic gives rise to the deconstruc-tionist claim of `foundationless' knowledge(i.e., truths absent from original, structured,anchored realities). Nihilist deconstructionistsconclude that if all is relative, why bother toeffect any change. Af®rmative deconstruction-ists conclude that there are positional, provi-sional, relational truths (i.e., contingentuniversalities) that warrant attention wherethe voices of and ways of knowing for thosemost silenced (i.e., the metaphysics of pre-sence) necessitate wholesale support andrecognition.

Evaluation

Modernity's quest for exactness, precision andultimate truths ®nds considerable critique inthe face of deconstructionism. As a method foruncovering hidden assumptions and values,deconstruction reveals how all texts (e.g.,legal, criminological) are informed by ideol-ogy. The Critical Legal Studies Movement hasrelied heavily on deconstructionism toadvance this position in relation to legaldoctrines, the Constitution and statutory law.

Criminology, although more slow in applyingthe tools of deconstruction, has raised similarquestions in relation to criminological theory,criminal law and criminal behaviour. Post-modern critical criminology has been theleading exponent of this deconstructionistagenda.

Bruce Arrigo

Associated Concepts: critical criminology, dis-course analysis, postmodernism, post-struc-turalism

Key ReadingsCaputo, J. (ed.) (1997) Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A

Conversation with Jaques Derrida. New York,Fordham University Press.

Cornell, D., Rosenfeld, M. and Carlson, D. (eds)(1992) Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice.New York, Routledge.

Derrida, J. (1973) Speech and Other Phenomena.Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press.

Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD,Johns Hopkins University Press.

Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Differance. Chicago,University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (1981) Positions. Chicago, University ofChicago Press.

DECRIMINALIZATION

De®nition

A process that refers to the removal oflabelling of social problems or deviantbehaviours as crimes.


Decriminalization grew out of the abolitionistcritique of penal responses to criminalizedproblems. It is based on a rejection of the penalreconstruction of reality (with its associatedconcepts such as crime, guilt and punishment)and its paralysing effect on attempts toaddress underlying social problems andcircumstances. Abolitionists pointed to thetop-down, repressive, punitive and in¯exiblecharacter of penal control, the appropriation ofcon¯icts from their owners, and the funda-mental shortcomings of criminal law to realizesocial justice, and argued that criminal lawsanction should be replaced by disputesettlement and redress. In policy terms,

81DECRIMINALIZATION

decriminalization means that social policyinstead of crime policy is needed in dealingwith the social problems and con¯icts that arecurrently singled out as the problem of crime.Hulsman (1986) and de Haan (1990) evenargued for the abandoning of the very notionof `crime' in criminology and for crimino-logists to talk and think about problematicevents, troubles, harms, con¯icts or mistakesinstead.

Decriminalization has also been closelyassociated with a labelling approach to crimeand deviance. If, as labelling theorists sug-gested, social reaction does not reduceoffending but con®rms deviant careers, thenthe reach of reaction should be reduced. In thenarrowest sense, decriminalization involvestaking certain offences (such as minor druguse and offences against public morality) outof the realm of criminal law. For example,proponents of decriminalization of drugsgenerally point to the costly, counter-produc-tive and unsuccessful efforts of law enforce-ment as a response to drug use. Next to a full,de iure decriminalization, many proponentsalso advocate a de facto decriminalization. Thismeans that certain acts will not be prosecutedeven though they will formally remain illegal.Opponents, however, often argue that decri-minalization would increase use, therebyincreasing serious costs to society.

Evaluation

Decriminalization has been used as a measurein penal reform in most Western criminaljustice systems with varying degrees of successin halting the trend of criminalization andchallenging the crime control and punishmentnexus. Wider developments of managerialismin criminal justice have meant that decrimina-lization is sometimes used as an attractive labelfor the state to clean up the criminal justicesystem's caseload and to transfer pettyoffences to alternative modes of control thatoffer the involved person less protectionagainst arbitrary measures than a criminallaw suit would. Critics have also argued that ade facto decriminalization of certain offencesoften involves an expansion of the policydiscretions of the prosecution and the police(as in the use of police cautioning for minordrug-related offences). Mass settlements ofoffences by administrative or ®nancial meansare presented as forms of decriminalization,whereas their punitive character is retained.

Maggy Lee

Associated Concepts: abolition, abolitionism,criminalization, decarceration, diversion,labelling, redress

Key Readingsde Haan, W. (1990) The Politics of Redress: Crime,

Punishment and Penal Abolition. London, UnwinHyman.

Hulsman, L. (1986) `Critical criminology and theconcept of crime', in H. Bianchi and R. vanSwaaningen (eds), Abolitionism: Towards a Non-repressive Approach to Crime. Amsterdam, FreeUniversity Press, pp. 25±41.

DEFENSIBLE SPACE

De®nition

The use of a range of architectural andenvironmental measures designed to reducecrime by encouraging communities to protecttheir public and private spaces from externalintrusion.


From the 1920s researchers at the University ofChicago had begun to record how rates ofcrime persisted in certain areas of cities evenwhen the composition of their populationshad changed. Such observations led to theconclusion that it was not the nature ofindividuals, but the nature of particularneighbourhoods that determined levels ofdisorder. By the 1960s a school of architecturaldeterminism emerged (Jacobs, 1961) in whichfeatures of the built environment were viewedas intrinsically criminogenic. The control ofcrime and disorder, it was argued, would bestbe achieved by restructuring residentialenvironments so that they were controlled bylocal communities empowered to mark outand defend their own territories. The mostfamous exponent of such work was theAmerican architect Oscar Newman (1972).He de®ned defensible space as a range ofmechanisms, real and symbolic barriers,strongly de®ned areas of in¯uence, andimproved opportunities for surveillance thatcombine to bring an environment under thecontrol of its residents.

Newman argued that poorly designedbuildings, such as the high-rise tower block,housing large low income families, producedcrime rates as much as three times higher than


adjacent lower-rise buildings with sociallyidentical residents and with a similar popula-tion density. For Newman a combination ofindifferent architects, land speculators, cor-porate ®nanciers and city planning depart-ments had contrived to build the maximum ofhousing space at the lowest cost and withoutconsideration of the social consequences. Thehigh-rise double-loaded corridor apartmenttower has no `defensible space' other than theinterior of the apartment itself. Everything else± the lobby, stairs, elevators and corridors ± isa `nether world of fear and crime'. Newman'ssolution to create secure environments wasfourfold:

· Enhance territoriality ± the sub division ofplaces into zones of in¯uence to discou-rage outsiders and to encourage residentsto defend their areas.

· Increase surveillance ± the positioning ofwindows so that residents can survey theexterior and the interior public areas oftheir environment.

· Improve image ± the redesign of buildingsto avoid the stigma of low-cost or publichousing.

· Enhance safety ± the placing of publichousing projects within urban areasperceived to be safe.

Whilst Newman's approach has been cri-tiqued as over-general and neglectful of socialfactors, it has been in¯uential in a number ofways. Certain design features, such asimproving external lighting, reducing anon-ymous open spaces, increasing pedestrianaccess and the resetting of windows to allowfor greater surveillance have been implemen-ted in numerous housing projects world-wide.For example, in the late 1970s new models ofspatial segregation appeared in the USA withthe emergence of `common interest commu-nities'. Af¯uent Americans were opting to lockthemselves away in carefully screened coop-erative housing schemes and defended resi-dential enclaves.

The most obvious way of reducing oppor-tunities for crime lies in the use of physicalbarriers. This target hardening, involvinglocks, bolts, gates, guard dogs, securityscreens and so on appears to be highly effec-tive. Improving access and windows securityon public housing estates is known to reducethe incidence of burglaries. Controlling access± historically evident in the moats and port-cullises of medieval castles ± ®nds itscontemporary form in entry phones, electronicpersonal identi®cation measures, fencing

around apartment blocks and street closures.The key paradox which surrounds the effec-tiveness of `defensible space' and othersituational crime prevention measures isgenerally referred to as the problem of dis-placement. The possible displacement effectsare:

· temporal ± the movement of crime/disorder to a different time;

· tactical ± the continual committal of crime,but by more sophisticated means;

· target ± the movement of crime todifferent targets;

· spatial ± the movement of criminal activityto different places.

Early empirical work appeared to supportthe premise of spatial displacement in parti-cular. Increasing the police presence in onearea of New York brought about a reductionin street crime, but also seemed to increase thelevel of crime in surrounding precincts.However Clarke (1991) argued that evenwhen such displacement occurs it is unlikelyever to be complete. If the displacement is tocrimes of lesser seriousness or to areas wherethe burden of victimization is more evenlyspread, then it may be considered `benign'rather than `malign' (Barr and Pease, 1990). Asa result, the issue of displacement remainsunresolved. Nevertheless, the concept ofdefensible space has also come to be linkedwith two other unwelcome developments.First, continual surveillance suggests theemergence of a fortress society in which fearof crime and distrust stimulate a foreverexpanding network of barricades. Secondly,the growth in the capacity and penetration ofelectronic surveillance (such as CCTV) con-jures up images of a totalitarian `Big Brother'state.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: Chicago School of Sociol-ogy, panopticism, situational crime preven-tion, social control, surveillance

Key ReadingsBarr, R. and Pease, K. (1990) `Crime placement,

displacement and de¯ection', in N. Morris and M.Tonry (eds), Crime and Justice: A Review of Research,vol. 12. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Blakely, E.J. and Snyder, M. (1997) Fortress America.Washington, Brookings Institution.

Clarke, R.V. (1991) Situational Crime Prevention:

83DEFENSIBLE SPACE

Successful Case Studies. New York, Harrow andHeston.

Davis, M. (1994) Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Controland the Ecology of Fear. West®eld, NJ, OpenMagazine Pamphlet Series.

Jacobs, J. (1961) The Death and Life of Great AmericanCities. Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Newman, O. (1972) Defensible Space: People and Designin the Violent City. London, Architectural Press.

DELINQUENCY

De®nition

A term, loosely used, to refer to any kind ofyouthful misbehaviour.


Criminologists frequently use the concepts of`crime' and `delinquency' interchangeably,especially when their object of study is youngpeople. However, there are crucial differences.Whilst a legal de®nition of crime refers tobehaviour prohibited by criminal law, delin-quency is also applied to all manner ofbehaviours that are deemed to be undesirable.It is capable of capturing the legally pro-scribed, but also waywardness, misbehaviour,incorrigibility, the ànti-social' and thatbelieved to constitute the `pre-criminal'.Much of this ambiguity derives from theestablishment of separate systems of juvenilejustice designed to punish and treat offendersbut also to protect the vulnerable andneglected. All Western jurisdictions stipulatethat under a certain age young people cannotbe held fully responsible for their actions. It iswidely assumed that juveniles are doli incapax(incapable of evil), but how certain age groups± child, juvenile, young person, adult ± areperceived and constituted in law is notuniversally agreed upon. Taking Europe asan example, in Scotland the age of criminalresponsibility is 8, in England and Wales 10, inFrance 13, in Germany 14, in Spain 16 and inBelgium 18. Each is a socially and historicallyspeci®c concept and as such is liable to reviewand change. For example, in England andWales in the late 1990s the presumption thathad been enshrined in law since the fourteenthcentury that those under 14 were incapable ofcriminal intent was abolished.

In the USA under the statutes of variousstates delinquency is in part speci®cally

de®ned, but retains a series of vague andimprecise standards that rest on the need tointervene early to prevent future offending ortackle assumed family or psychological pro-blems. Determinations of what might consti-tute reprehensible behaviour extend a court'sjurisdiction to establish conduct rather thanpurely legal norms. These are often referred toas status offences ± that is, the violation offormal or informal rules which are appliedonly to certain sections of society. The focus isless on the offence itself and more on whocommits it. In the USA such status offences asbeing incorrigible, truant or sexually preco-cious apply only to children.

Most historians agree that delinquency was®rst identi®ed as a major social problem in theearly nineteenth century. Social surveys andempirical investigations permitted a problemto be identi®ed but they presupposed existingconceptions of how youth should behave, whatrelation should exist between different agegroups and what should be the appropriaterole of the family. In the early nineteenthcentury, with the rapid growth of industrialcapitalism, factory production and high den-sity urban populations, the condition of thelabouring classes became the object of con-siderable middle class concern ± whether thiswas fear of their revolutionary potential,disgust at their morality or alarm at theirimpoverishment and criminal tendencies. InEngland, these fears galvanized around dra-matic images of gangs of `naked, ®lthy,roaming, lawless and deserted children'.Accurate estimations of the extent of `delin-quency' were impossible, not least because ofits ill-de®ned nature. Susan Magarey (1978)contends that there may have been somejusti®cation for these growing fears, particu-larly in the newly recorded prison statistics ofthe 1830s. The number of under 17s impri-soned increased from some 9,500 in 1838 tosome 14,000 in 1848. However she ®nds thatthis rise is explicable less with reference toìncreased lawlessness' and more with changesin the position of children in relation to thecriminal law and the subsequent criminaliza-tion of behaviour for which previously theremay have been no of®cial action. In particular,the Vagrancy Act 1824 and the MaliciousTrespass Act 1827 considerably broadenedlegal conceptions of `criminality' to include,for example, suspicion of being a thief,gambling on the street and scrumping applesfrom orchards and gardens. Previous nuis-ances were transformed into criminal offences.Moreover, the remit given to the MetropolitanPolice in 1829 included apprehension of àll


loose, idle and disorderly persons not givinggood account of themselves'. This alone mademany more street children liable to arrest. Inthese ways juvenile delinquency was `legis-lated into existence'.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: crime, deviance, subcul-ture

Key ReadingsMagarey, S. (1978) `The invention of juvenile

delinquency in early nineteenth century England',Labour History (Sydney), 34, pp. 11±25.

May, M. (1973) Ìnnocence and experience: theevolution of the concept of juvenile delinquencyin the mid-nineteenth century', Victorian Studies,17 (1), pp. 7±29.

Tappan, P. (1949) Juvenile Delinquency. New York,McGraw±Hill.

West, D. and Farrington, D. (1973) Who BecomesDelinquent? London, Heinemann.

West, D. and Farrington, D. (1977) The DelinquentWay of Life. London, Heinemann.

DEMONIZATION

De®nition

The act of condemning or denouncing evil thatis attributed to demonic in¯uence or powers.


Demonology refers to possession by evilspirits, as well as to the construction of acatalogue of enemies. In both cases the objectof demonization is an òther', an out-group towhich blame for misfortune is attributed, andits purpose is to erect and reaf®rm certainmoral and social boundaries. In terms ofattribution theory the argument would be thatbad events require explanation or causes andthat demonization is a method of assigningblame or guilt. Denunciation fosters a dichot-omization of ùs' and `them' that serves toshore up the moral barricades of society.Historically, witchcraft has been a key sourcefor demonology. Witches were connected towicked acts prompted by the devil. Thestrongly sexualized and gendered dimensionin this should not be ignored, such as theìnsatiable' sexual appetite attributed to

women. The nature and scale of reaction insuch events has been seen as a defensivereaction by religious groups seeking tomaintain moral boundaries, particularly attimes of rapid social change. For Erikson(1966) deviance manifests itself in the formthat is most feared, suggesting that demonsare de®ned by psychic needs.

In modern times the objects of demonizationhave been ideological and political deviantswhose `wickedness' is attributed to someshadowy and ambiguous force that enablesthem to perform feats beyond ordinary humancapabilities ± sometimes this is connected witha conspiracy theory. Thus, the subversionmyth is a narrative that explains why thingshave gone wrong by attributing blame ordemonizing certain groups or individuals byholding them responsible for bad events oroccurrences (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994).The cast list of demonized groups is extensive,including Jews under the Third Reich, theSoviet show trials, and the McCarthy era inthe USA. These state crimes are instances of themass production ± or fabrication ± of deviancethat signify the need for society to takeexceptional measures to protect itself, con-necting the concept of demonization toscapegoating and moral panics. Homosexuals,abortionists, drug users, migrants and asylumseekers, as well as counter-cultural move-ments, have all been objects of scapegoatingand demonization. Furthermore, countrieshave also been demonized, for instance thereputation of some `terrorist' Islamic states hasbeen linked to Islamaphobia and Eurocentr-ism.

In more mundane terms the identi®cation offolk devils such as particular youth cultureshas been the basis for labelling outsiders whoare then treated as legitimate targets of self-righteous anger and deserving of punishment.A folk devil is treated as the embodiment ofevil and, as such, is stripped of all positivecharacteristics and ascribed negative ones.This occurs through a symbolization processin which ìmages are made much sharper thanreality' (Cohen, 1972, p. 43). New folk devilsare placed into and connected with a gallery ofcontemporary folk devils that may underlie amoral panic. The identi®cation of groups andtheir characteristics are listed in stereotypicalmanner by the media and reaf®rm theirnegative characteristics and may set in processdeviancy ampli®cation. Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994) have emphasized the need forcareful attention to the speci®c social contextof demonization ± particularly its timing,content and targets.

85DEMONIZATION

Evaluation

Like scapegoating, the term demonization isloosely used in a generalized way that makesit dif®cult to assess its usefulness, unless thereis some attention to the details of thediscursive process of attribution. Historicalwork on witchcraft has connected demoniza-tion to a cosmology that invokes and attributesevil to some people or groups. Moderninstances of demonization seem to focus onconservative moral rhetorics reacting to theerosion of a `way of life', linking demonizationto moral enterprise and symbolic crusades tobolster moral barricades.

Karim Murji

Associated Concepts: deviancy ampli®cation,folk devil, moral panic, racialization, scape-goating, social censure, stereotyping

Key ReadingsCohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics.

London, MacGibbon and Kee (new edition,Oxford, Martin Robertson, 1980).

Erikson, K. (1966) Wayward Puritans. New York,Wiley.

Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994) Moral Panics:The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford, Black-well.

Pfohl, S. (1985) Images of Deviance and Social Control:A Sociological History. New York, McGraw±Hill.

DENIAL

De®nition

The various processes by which individualactors, social groups or states either `block,shut out, repress or cover up certain forms ofdisturbing information [about wrong doing]or else evade, avoid or neutralize' itsconsequences (Cohen, 1995, p. 19).


Classic accounts of the denial of responsibilitywould include Sykes and Matza's (1957)seminal work on `techniques of neutraliza-tion', which identi®ed ®ve major techniquesfor denying or de¯ecting blame for wrong-doing away from the perpetrator. These were:denial of responsibility for the act; denial ofthe injury caused; denial of the victim;

condemnation of the condemners and appealto higher loyalties. Somewhat later, Scott andLyman (1968) made the crucial distinctionbetween èxcuses', in which the perpetratoradmits the act in question was wrong, butdenies full responsibility for it; and `justi®ca-tions', in which the perpetrator acceptsresponsibility for the act, but denies that itwas wrong.

Denial may be either conscious or uncon-scious. Conscious denial is a rhetoricalrejection or evasion of the truth or its conse-quences. As Mary Douglas has argued, it is a`forensic' strategy in the sense that theaccounts in question are aimed at manipulat-ing or de¯ecting attributions of `responsibility'or blame away from the person, group orentity doing the denying (Douglas, 1992).Stanley Cohen (1995) later developed theargument that, what is being denied may bematters of `fact' (for example, how manypeople were `disappeared' by the Pinochetregime); matters of interpretation (whethercertain actions constitute torture or `moderatephysical pressure'); or the implications orconsequences of the acts in question (forexample, the acknowledgement of the harmdone to the victim).

In contrast to these rhetorical forms ofdenial (lying to others), unconscious forms ofdenial are the expressions of the psychologicalprocesses (or `defence mechanisms') thatenable a person to evade or distort the`claims of external reality' ± a form of lyingto one's self. This denial or disavowal of anexternal truth is only one element in a largerpsychological repertoire for dealing withextreme threat or social injury. Other defencesinclude psychic numbing, a form of dissocia-tion involving the diminished capacity orinclination to feel; and doubling, the formationof a separate self, speci®c to the context ofatrocity (Lifton and Markusen, 1990). Forpsychoanalysts, there is an important distinc-tion to be made between this form of uncon-scious denial or disavowal of external realityand the psychological process whereby thedemands of internal desires are `repressed'from a person's consciousness.

Evaluation

Stanley Cohen's recent work on denialsharpens the distinction between conscious`rhetorical' forms of denial and the forms ofdenial that involve unconscious processes thatserve to disavow or block out the claims ofexternal reality. An additional focus of


Cohen's work on the denial of responsibility isthe extension of the analysis of denial byindividuals to include collective forms ofdenial, such as denial of human rights viola-tions by representatives of the state. In principle,there is no reason why this approach to`denial' could not be applied to the analysis ofthe motivational accounts offered by perpe-trators of other forms of crime ± for example,the white collar crime of insider trading or thecorporate criminality of transnational corpora-tions involved in the dumping of toxic waste.Researchers working in these areas willconfront the problem of accounts that aredriven by economic and other interests ratherthan personal deceits. Criminologists andcriminal lawyers working on issues of denialin the future will face the continuing challengeof avoiding reducing the issue to the play ofdiscourses rather than the expression ofspeci®c interests and personal responsibility.

Ruth Jamieson

Associated Concepts: corporate crime, humanrights, neutralization (techniques of ), statecrime

Key ReadingsCohen, S. (1995) Denial and Acknowledgement: The

Impact of Information About Human Rights Viola-tions. Jerusalem, The Hebrew University ofJerusalem, Centre for Human Rights.

Douglas, M. (1992) Risk and Blame. London,Routledge.

Lifton, R.J. and Markusen, E. (1990) The GenocidalMentality. London, Macmillan.

Scott, M. and Lyman, S. (1968) Àccounts', AmericanSociological Review, 33 (10), pp. 46±62.

Sykes, G.M. and Matza, D. (1957) `Techniques ofneutralization: a theory of delinquency', AmericanSociological Review, 22, pp. 664±70.

DETERMINISM

De®nition

There is no easy de®nition of the term `deter-minism'. Honderich (1993) describes threemeanings of the term, each with its ownsubtle shifts and variations. Alongside its usewith reference to small particles in physics,determinism can be used as an opposite to freewill, or it can be used in a more restrictedsense to mean that human action is subject to

causal laws. In a more general sense, as usedhere, determinism can be taken in the sense ofinevitability: once the antecedents to an eventare understood, so prediction of future similarevents becomes possible.


Bertrand Russell's (1961) A History of WesternPhilosophy traces the concept of determinismback to 440 BC and the philosophers Leucip-pus and Democritus. As the basis of theirphilosophical stance, known as atomism, theyargued that nothing happens by chance, thateverything is explicable by natural laws. In aposition akin to much modern science, theatomists said that science should be empirical,seeking to discover the natural laws by whichto understand the universe. Not all philoso-phers agreed with this view and, fromSocrates, Plato, and Aristotle onwards, thedebate has continued.

In the ®eld of human behaviour, includingcriminal behaviour, the match is madebetween, on the one hand, determinism, andfree will on the other. If determinism holdsthat behaviour is predictable (once the lawsgoverning behaviour are eventually under-stood), so free will takes the contrary stance:no matter what the antecedents might be atthe point of acting, individuals could, hadthey wished, have acted differently than theydid.

What might determine human behaviour?There are many levels of explanation, rangingthrough genetic, psychological, social andpolitical theories. Regardless of whether theantecedents are said to be inside the person orin the environment (or a combination of thetwo), human action is a function of itsantecedent conditions. Such antecedent con-ditions may be unique to the individual, nonethe less it is these conditions that determinebehaviour. Explanations of behaviour thenmove beyond the concepts of freedom anddignity (Skinner, 1971).

In thinking about criminal behaviour, theissue of determinism is of importance. Ifbehaviour is determined, then this directlychallenges the principles of free will, respon-sibility and choice, the principles upon whichmany systems of justice are based. At both aphilosophical and scienti®c level the issues arecomplex (Alper, 1998): it seems unlikely thatthe debate started by the atomists is likely tobe resolved in the foreseeable future.

Clive Hollin

87DETERMINISM

Associated Concepts: biological criminology,free will, individual positivism, positivism,prediction studies, sociological positivism

Key ReadingsAlper, J.S. (1998) `Genes, free will, and criminal

behavior', Society, Science, and Medicine, 46, pp.1599±1611.

Honderich, T. (1993) How Free Are You? TheDeterminism Problem. Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress.

Russell, B. (1961) A History of Western Philosophy, 2ndedn. London, George Allen and Unwin.

Skinner, B.F. (1971) Beyond Freedom and Dignity. NewYork, Knopf.

DETERRENCE

De®nition

A philosophy of punishment that aims toprevent criminal activity through the develop-ment and application of effective and ef®cientsanctions. It involves demonstrating to boththe citizenry and the reasoning criminal thatthe pains and losses associated with apprehen-sion and punishment will overshadow thepossibility of criminal gain or pro®t.


Utilitarian or rational choice theories ofhuman nature posit that individuals areresponsible for their actions and will naturallyindulge in behaviours that bring them max-imum bene®ts and goods and minimize risksand costs. For Cesare Beccaria (1738±94) andJeremy Bentham (1748±1832) the over-ridingpurpose of their work was to provide thecriminal justice system with a uni®ed philo-sophy. They concluded that the role of thecriminal law was to promote the well-being ofthe community and it did so when it deterredthe commission of crime and minimized theseverity of the crimes committed. Because it isnatural that human beings will violate the lawif they are allowed to do so, to prevent crimesociety must make the punishments forcriminal behaviour greater than the pleasuresderived from the successful completion ofcriminal acts. Deterrence requires three keyelements:

· The certainty of apprehension, convictionand punishment.

· The severity of the punishment to begreater than the potential bene®ts of thecriminal act.

· The clarity of punishment to ensure thatthe offender is in a position to make thelink between her/his punishment andher/his criminal behaviour.

Deterrence assumes two principal forms andboth are supposed to make it clear that crimedoes not pay. General deterrence is aimed atin¯uencing the total population with future orpotential criminal activity being prevented bythe universal threat and fear of punishment.Speci®c deterrence is targeted at the knownoffender to ensure that this individual isdeterred from further involvement in criminalactivity. The ultimate form of individual deter-rence is the death penalty. Although positi-vism replaced deterrence theory during the®rst half of the twentieth century, it re-emerged in the aftermath of `nothing works'in the form of rational choice and routineactivity approaches to crime control.

Critics of deterrence focus on its limitedconception of human beings and humanaction. They argue that we need to develop aconsiderably more sophisticated theory ofhuman behaviour which explores the internaland external checks on why people do or donot engage in criminal activity. This theorymust also recognize that there are a bewilder-ing number of motivational states, rationaland irrational, that lead to the commission ofcriminal acts. We also need to research thecomplexities of communication and under-standing. It is evident that many pettycriminals are not capable of accuratelybalancing the costs and bene®ts of crimebefore the commission of the act. It is also thecase that many young males who get involvedin street ®ghts with other young men do notthink about the consequences of their actionseither for themselves or others. Deterrencetheory has also been criticized because it failsto think through the consequences of what it isproposing for offenders. Many offenders aredriven to re-offending because, as a result ofbeing processed by the criminal justice system,they have no alternative. The labelling processand `naming and shaming' effectively close offthe possibility of `going straight'.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: rational choice theory,routine activity theory, situational crimeprevention


Key ReadingsGrasmick, H. and Bursik, R. (1990) `Conscience,

signi®cant others and rational choice: extendingthe deterrent model', Law and Society Review, 24,pp. 837±61.

Klepper, S. and Nagin, D. (1989) `The deterrent effectof perceived certainty and severity of punishmentrevisited', Criminology, 27, pp. 721±46.

Matravers, M. (ed.) (1999) Punishment and PoliticalTheory. Oxford, Hart Publishing.

Piliavin, I., Gartner, R., Thornton, C. and Matsueda,R. (1986) `Crime, deterrence and rational choice',American Sociological Review, 51, pp. 101±19.

Scarre, G. (1996) Utilitarianism. London, Routledge.

DEVIANCE

De®nition

Deviance is a twentieth-century sociologicalconcept intended to designate the aggregate ofsocial behaviours, practices, acts, demeanours,attitudes, beliefs, styles or statuses which areculturally believed to deviate signi®cantlyfrom the norms, ethics, standards and expec-tations of society. It emerged in the USAaround 1937, within the context of Roosevelt'sNew Deal, as a solution to the problem of howsociologists in an emergent welfare state wereto summarize categorically such matters asdelinquency, mental and physical disability,criminal behaviour, drug abuse, culturalrebellion, sustained dependency upon statebene®ts, street-level political opposition, intel-lectual and artistic radicalism, homosexuality,and the behaviour of native American popula-tions ± without insulting but yet implying thevalue of both psychiatric and sociologicalexplanations of these phenomena as forms ofsociopathy. Social deviance refers to thatwhich is censured as deviant from the stand-point of the norms of the dominant culture. Itis an effect of the bio-politics of social-democratic welfare capitalism.


Social deviance is a broader concept thancriminal behaviour, referring to a range ofsocial phenomena which the dominant culturehas stood against either in principle or inpractice. As such, it is intertwined with thedominant culture ± the very identity andhistorical formation of which are de®ned,driven and sustained by what it censures as

social deviance. As a de®ning feature of adominant culture and a re¯ection of divisionsin a political economy, social deviance is apivotal aspect in the constitution of society.Society's norms and virtues are de®ned,partly, by their opposition to its enemies'sins and vices. It is therefore seen as legitimatefor the agencies of social control, and the stateas a whole, to violate the liberty of those whoare held by those agencies to violate the rightsand principles of others or of the state itself.

Without that differential in authoritativebacking, there is often little in the physicsof the respective behaviours which woulddifferentiate them. It is the signi®cance weattribute to behaviours which locates themwithin the moral order of virtue, deviance,criminality, insanity or evil. How an act, suchas a killing, for example, is perceived withinthe dominant culture depends more upon ourhistorically shaped principles of morality andthe circumstances of its execution than uponany behavioural feature. Killing could bedescribed as a heroic act in war, a sign ofevil or madness when perpetrated upon astranger, a crime of passion in a domesticrelationship, an act of mercy in the case ofeuthanasia, or as tortious negligence inindustrial situations.

The concept of deviance is distinct from thatof mere difference in that the former containsthe implicit likelihood of possible authorita-tive intervention or sanction. Difference inmodern society is respected as a right:deviance is always liable to be penalized orregulated. Deviance is a culturally unaccep-table level of difference which is subject toconstant suspicion and surveillance fromsocial control agencies. Difference is seen tocontribute to the vitality and creativity ofmodern capitalist society, whereas deviancealways holds a threat to the social fabric.

Evaluation

Many social scientists today feel that the con-cept of deviance has run its historical course orat least has lost its cutting edge. Until the 1970s,the sociology of deviance focused on the socialprocesses whereby certain acts, individuals orgroups were targeted for social censure,stigmatization, exclusion or punishment. Thatstudy advanced criminology away from thenaive idea that crimes were unambiguous actsof evil committed by born criminals. It served asocial-democratic movement which high-lighted the social roots of misbehaviour, thusplacing the blame more upon society than the

89DEVIANCE

individual and raising important questionsabout dominant social norms, the dangers ofcriminalization, the impartiality of policing,the neutrality of justice, and the counter-productiveness of punishment.

At the beginning of the new millennium,however, social scientists cynically believe thatmoral judgements are always made from astandpoint of partisan interest as well asgeneral principle and that they are thereforeprofoundly relative to the culture or periodwithin which they are embedded. Events of thetwentieth century, such as the Holocaust, havegiven many an awareness of the horrors thatcan be involved in scapegoating censuredsocial groups. In addition, globalization, masscommunications, travel and mobility haveresulted in a greater moral tolerance in ahighly differentiated, multicultural, world ±who is to say what is now deviant? Conse-quently, all moral judgements are now seen asquestionable in principle, not just thosepertaining to areas of ambiguity. Indeed, anylack of ability to challenge a moral judgementwould be taken as a negative sign regarding itsauthority. In a depoliticized age, the power ofauthority to de®ne and control popularmorality and culture has been reduced.Deviance could be anything within a multi-cultural pluralism and has therefore lost itssigni®cance as a social issue. Society hasadvanced to the point where condescendingsensitivity to insulting the urban poor has beensupplanted by critiques of social censure andof political authority itself. The core meaningand purpose of the concept of social deviancehas thus been eroded. When norms lose theirauthority, authority loses its norms.

What concerns politicians and social scien-tists at the beginning of a new century are twoissues that co-exist and interrelate in aconstant tension: (1) to locate, understandand create areas of social agreement whichmight constitute the basis of social censureand control for a more healthy, secure andpeaceful society, and (2) to expose, criticizeand explain social norms and systems of socialcontrol which are discriminatory, hypocriticaland oppressive in order to enable a societywhere its members are allowed to developtheir positive capacities to the full. Authorityis trying to regain its moral power and moralcritique is trying to expose authority. Thecontinuing harsh reality of poverty, inequality,oppression, misinformation and ill-health on aglobal scale means that both these utopianconcerns face massive challenges.

Colin Sumner

Associated Concepts: crime, delinquency, gov-ernmentality, labelling, moral panic, penality,penology, social censure, social control, socialexclusion, stigma

Key readingsBecker, H. (1963) Outsiders. New York, Free Press.Goffman, E. (1968) Stigma. Harmondsworth, Pen-

guin.Lemert, E. (1951) Social Pathology. New York,

McGraw±Hill.Matza, D. (1969) Becoming Deviant. Englewood

Cliffs, NJ, Prentice±Hall.Sumner, C.S. (1994) The Sociology of Deviance: An

Obituary. Buckingham, Open University Press.Young, J. (1999) The Exclusive Society: Social Exclu-

sion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity.London, Sage.

DEVIANCY AMPLIFICATION

De®nition

The process whereby media, police, publicand political reaction to non-conformity actsnot to control deviancy but has the obversereaction of increasing it.


Leslie Wilkins (1964) ®rst used the term`deviation ampli®cation' to explore therelationship between levels of tolerance/intolerance and the reinforcement of deviantidentities. He noted how societies that haddeveloped an intolerant response to deviancytended to de®ne more acts as criminal andtook more formal action against criminals.This in turn led to the increased alienation ofdeviants, more crime by deviant groups anda corresponding af®rmation of intolerance ofdeviants by conforming groups. The produc-tion of intolerance is subject to a `positivefeedback loop', in which the identi®cation ofand reaction to deviancy becomes self-perpetuating. The further an individual isde®ned as having moved away from thecultural norm the more they are likelyactually to behave in a non-conformistfashion. As a result Wilkins argued thatdeviancy control is best achieved by buildingsocial systems that can tolerate difference andminimize the number of persons who arede®ned as deviant.


The concept of deviancy ampli®cation hasclear resonances with many of the proposi-tions of a labelling approach in which the keyfactor in deviancy creation is believed to besocial reaction, rather than individual beha-viour. In Britain, Jock Young (1971b) appliedthe concept in his participant observationstudy of marijuana users in Notting Hill,London in the late 1960s. He showed how therelatively harmless social activity of marijuanasmoking was transformed into a serious socialproblem through the combined reaction of themass media, the police and the public.Through sensational reporting, users wereportrayed by the media as sick, promiscuousand dangerous outsiders. During 1967 suchstereotypes in¯amed popular indignation.Media pressure forced the police to takemore direct action by increasing surveillanceand rates of arrest. For the drug users whatwas once a peripheral activity became asymbol of their difference and a key part oftheir de®ance of perceived social injustices.Police activity acted to amplify the extent andsymbolic importance of drug usage for theusers themselves. Moreover as drug takingwas driven underground it moved from beinga low key, low pro®t activity to one organizedby a `criminal underworld' and practised in aneven more secretive fashion. In this way socialreaction ampli®es deviance in both mythicaland actual terms. A vicious spiral of escalationensues.

The concept has also been used by StanCohen (1972) in his study of the moral panicassociated with the Mods and Rockers inBritain in the mid 1960s. Here again it wasargued that relatively minor scuf¯es betweengroups of youths were exaggerated by mediareportage and magni®ed by subsequent policeand judicial targeting. Again their deviancewas initially ampli®ed through social reactionwhich in turn produced an actual ampli®ca-tion in real levels of deviancy as the Mods andRockers took on aspects of their new publiclyde®ned personas.

Evaluation

Together with the labelling approach, theconcept of deviancy ampli®cation drawsattention to the unintended consequences ofpublic perceptions, police actions and socialreaction in general. It reveals how processes ofreaction are also processes of invention andcreation. The concept has been most com-monly applied to explain escalations inexpressive forms of deviancy. Its wider

applicability to other less publicized forms ofrule-breaking are less clear. It may remain thecase that in other instances (for example,domestic violence) it is a lack of negative socialreaction (intolerance) which provides a cli-mate for its continuation. The extent to whicha real ampli®cation of deviance is driven by itspublic identi®cation also remains questionable(and probably unknowable). A complex ofmotivations may underlie the development ofdeviant careers, of which social reaction mightplay a relatively small part.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: deviance, labelling, moralpanic, social reaction


London, MacGibbon and Kee.Wilkins, L.T. (1964) Social Deviance. London, Tavi-

stock.Young, J. (1971a) `The role of the police as ampli®ers

of deviancy, negotiators of reality and translatorsof fantasy', in S. Cohen (ed.), Images of Deviance.Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Young, J. (1971b) The Drug Takers: The Social Meaningof Drug Use. London, Paladin.

DIFFERENTIAL ASSOCIATION

De®nition

Initially developed by Edwin H. Sutherland(1883±1950), the concept of differential associ-ation is an attempt to account for the acqui-sition and maintenance of criminal behaviourin terms of contact, or association, with par-ticular environments and social groups.


Much of the very early research and theoryconcerned with the causes of crime hadfocused attention on the individual charac-teristics of the offender: these individualfactors included genetic and biological func-tioning, psychological factors and psychiatricstatus. During the 1920s and 1930s a group ofresearchers, including Clifford R. Shaw andHenry D. McKay, at the University of Chicagobegan to challenge the view that explanationsfor crime were to be found at an individuallevel. The signi®cant contribution of the

91DIFFERENTIAL ASSOCIATION

Chicago School was the advancement of thethesis that crime was brought about not byindividual factors, but was a product of socialforces.

As the attention of criminologists turned tosocial factors, the particular role of socialorganization and disorganization in explain-ing crime came to prominence. A broad posi-tion evolved that people, perhaps particularlyyoung people, living in parts of cities that arecharacterized by social disadvantage anddisorganization were at a greatly increasedrisk of participating in delinquency. Further,once a neighbourhood becomes a focus for adelinquent culture, then the possibility arisesthat through cultural transmission of delin-quent values other young people will bedrawn into that crime. In a sense, theseemerging sociological theories shifted patho-logy from the individual to the socialstructure.

During the 1930s Sutherland spent part ofhis academic career at the University ofChicago, working alongside the researcherswho developed a sociological theory of crime.However, Sutherland's own contribution wasin part driven by a strain that was evident inthe data collected by the Chicago researchers.While formulating a cogent theoretical per-spective based on social disorganization, thedata also spoke of a social cohesion andorganization at the centre of criminal activity.For example, it was dif®cult to argue thatwhite collar crime was a product of socialdisorganization.

Sutherland took a broad perspective, advo-cating that crime itself is a socially de®nedconstruct, with the power to de®ne crime heldby certain in¯uential sections of society. It wastherefore not the case that he ascribed to aview of crime as a product of individualpsychopathology. However, he did not losesight of the individual: he was concerned tounderstand how crime was transmittedthrough generations, and how a given indivi-dual was drawn into crime. The mechanismfor cultural transmission was seen to be learn-ing, such that criminal behaviour is learned inthe same way that any other behaviour islearned. Sutherland argued that the answer tothe next question, how criminal behaviour islearned, lies in understanding how socialin¯uences impact on the individual. Speci®-cally, each individual has a differential associa-tion with other people more or less disposed todelinquency.

As an explanatory concept of the impact ofdifferential associations, Sutherland invokedthe notion of a `de®nition': those individuals

with more contact with other people favour-ably disposed towards crime would them-selves develop de®nitions favourable to crime,and vice versa. A de®nition towards crimewould indicate learning not only of the skillsto commit an offence, but would also incor-porate the attitudes and moral values thatsupported criminal activity. It is important tonote that Sutherland is not suggesting that theassociation has to be with criminals, ratherthat the association is with people who mighteither encourage crime or fail to censurecriminal acts.

As the theory developed in sophistication,Sutherland set out a number of postulates:

1 Criminal behaviour is learned.2 Learning takes place through association

with other people.3 The main setting for learning is within

close personal groups.4 Learning includes techniques to carry out

certain crimes and attitudes and motivessupportive of committing crime.

5 Learning experiences ± differential asso-ciations ± will vary in frequency andimportance for each individual.

6 The processes involved in learning crim-inal behaviour are no different from thelearning of any other behaviour.

Evaluation

With the articulation of this position as Differ-ential Association Theory, Sutherland offeredperhaps the ®rst integrated social psychologi-cal account of crime. Sutherland continued tore®ne his ideas throughout his writings, andafter his death his colleague Donald Cresseycontinued the work (e.g. Sutherland, 1939,1947; Sutherland and Cressey, 1974). Suther-land's views are remarkable in that theyanticipate much of what is to follow in bothpsychology and criminology. The theory isclearly sociological in its portrayal of powerfulsocial forces as de®ning the nature of crime.However, with its concern for the individual,it is also psychological in orientation. Theproposition that learning takes place throughassociations within social groups and intimaterelationships is evident in contemporary sociallearning theory and in social structure theoriesin criminology. The view that each indivi-dual's unique learning experiences lead to theacquisition of speci®c skills and cognitions ®tswith contemporary learning theory. Indeed,offenders' cognitions in the form of rationalchoice and decision-making have become a


focus for much debate in the recent literature.Finally, Sutherland's view of the normality ofthe learning that leads to criminal behaviour isin accord with the many contemporary theor-ists who reject explanations of crime based onindividual psychopathology.

Sutherland's theory does leaves manyquestions to be answered. How does learningoccur? What exactly are the social conditionsthat lead to learning criminal skills andattitudes? At an individual level, how doskills and attitudes function? Sutherland didnot have the empirical base from which hecould begin to answer such questions but heset an agenda for future generations ofresearchers.

Clive Hollin

Associated Concepts: appreciative criminology,Chicago School of Sociology, conditioning,differential reinforcement, interactionism,rational choice theory, social learning theory

Key ReadingsSutherland, E.H. (1939) Principles of Criminology.

Philadelphia, Lippincott.Sutherland, E.H. (1947) Principles of Criminology, 5th

edn. Philadelphia, Lippincott.Sutherland, E.H. and Cressey, D.R. (1974) Principles

of Criminology, 9th edn. Philadelphia, Lippincott.

DIFFERENTIAL REINFORCEMENT

De®nition

In learning theory the concept of reinforce-ment refers to the relationship between abehaviour and the outcomes it produces.Attempts to understand criminal behaviourin terms of its outcomes are called differentialreinforcement.


Sutherland's concept of differential associationhighlights the importance of learning inattempts to understand criminal behaviour.In the 1950s such ideas were being developedin criminology, whilst within mainstreampsychology there were signi®cant advancesin the development of theories of learning. Inparticular, B.F. Skinner's work on the princi-ples of operant conditioning had demon-strated the relationship between behaviour

and its consequences (Skinner, 1938, 1969).Skinner's experimental research showed thatthe environmental consequences that follow aspeci®c behaviour act either to increase ordecrease the probability of that behaviourhappening again in the future. When beha-viour produces consequences that the indivi-dual ®nds rewarding and the frequency ofthat behaviour is increased, it is said to bereinforced. Alternatively, a behaviour thatproduces outcomes that the individual ®ndsaversive and which therefore act to decreasethe rate of behaviour is said to be punished. (Inlanguage of operant conditioning, the term`punishment' simply means that a behaviourdecreases in frequency.)

The principles of reinforcement wereapplied to criminal behaviour, as an extensionof differential association theory. They offereda means, consistent with learning theory, toaccount for the way in which offending couldbe both acquired and maintained (Burgess andAkers, 1966). Jeffery (1965) suggested thatcriminal behaviour can be viewed as operantbehaviour: that is, within the context of theassociations that an individual experiences,criminal behaviour is acquired and main-tained by its reinforcing consequences.Further, extending the principles of operantlearning, criminal behaviour will occur whenthe environment signals that a criminal act islikely to produce rewards. To understand whya person commits a crime, it is necessary tounderstand that individual's learning history.The task of understanding an individual'slearning history means understanding therewarding (and punishing) consequences ofthe criminal behaviour for the individualconcerned. It is necessary, therefore, to under-stand not only the person but also theirenvironment which provides the setting forcriminal acts.

The setting conditions for crime operate attwo levels: ®rst, conditions of the type knownto be precursors to persistent offending;second, the immediate situational cues thatsignal that a criminal act is likely to producerewarding consequences. With regard to theformer, this might include individual factorssuch as poor school attainment, family andpeer relationships, and social disadvantagesuch as low family income and poor housing.

The importance of immediate setting eventshas been increasingly recognized over the pastfew years. For example, houses may betargeted for burglary because they offer aneasy opportunity, such as an unlocked door oran open window; or because of designfeatures, such as thick trees or high hedges,

93DIFFERENTIAL REINFORCEMENT

that hide the criminal from observation anddetection; or that goods such as televisionsand video recorders are easily observed,making the property an attractive target. Thissituational analysis of the environment inwhich crimes occur has informed both under-standings of criminal behaviour and situa-tional crime prevention strategies to reducecrime.

Moving to the consequences of criminalbehaviour, in acquisitive crimes such asburglary and embezzlement, the rewards areplainly ®nancial and material gain. Such gainscan be positively reinforcing in that theyproduce material outcomes that the offender®nds rewarding. Alternatively, the gains canbe negatively reinforcing in that they allow theoffender to avoid the aversive situation ofhaving no money. The link between unem-ployment and crime would serve as a broadexample of how offending might be related tothe need to avoid an unwanted ®nancial andsocial situation. As well as tangible, materialrewards, criminal behaviour can also producesocial rewards such as peer group status andesteem.

Jeffery also noted that criminal behaviourcan produce aversive consequences, such asloss of liberty and disrupted intimate relation-ships, that can have a punishing (in thelearning theory sense of the word) effect onbehaviour. Overall, for each and everyindividual it is the historical balance ofreinforcement and punishment that deter-mines the likelihood of criminal behaviourwhen the opportunity presents itself. (For acase study applying behavioural analysis to acomplex set of criminal behaviours seeGresswell and Hollin, 1992.)

Evaluation

As the research on processes of learningmatured two crucial issues emerged. First,the complexity of people's lives means that itis impossible to know their full learninghistory. Thus, there can never really be acomplete understanding of any behaviour,criminal or otherwise. A behavioural analysisof an individual's criminal behaviour willalways be limited by the boundaries of theavailable information. Secondly, in adoptingoperant conditioning as an explanatory frame-work, differential reinforcement falls prey tothe criticism that it does not consider whathappens inside the individual.

Clive Hollin

Associated Concepts: conditioning, differentialassociation, rational choice theory, situationalcrime prevention, social learning theory

Key ReadingsBurgess, R. and Akers, R. (1966) À differential

association-reinforcement theory of criminalbehavior', Social Problems, 14, pp. 128±47.

Gresswell, D.M. and Hollin, C.R. (1992) `Towards anew methodology for making sense of casematerial: An illustrative case involving attemptedmultiple murder', Criminal Behaviour and MentalHealth, 2, pp. 329±41.

Jeffery, C.R. (1965) `Criminal behavior and learningtheory', Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, andPolice Science, 56, pp. 294±300.

Skinner, B.F. (1938) The Behavior of Organisms: AnExperimental Analysis. New York, Appleton±Century±Crofts.

Skinner, B.F. (1969) Contingencies of Reinforcement: ATheoretical Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Pre-ntice-Hall.

DISASSOCIATION

See Neutralization (techniques of ); Subculture

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

De®nition

A generic term covering a heterogeneousrange of social science research methodswhich are concerned with the activitiespresent in recorded talk and their relationshipto other texts (for example, of®cial statementsof policies and practices). It is concerned with`the way versions of the world, of society,events and inner psychological worlds areproduced in discourse' (Potter, 1997, p. 146).


Discourse analysis is a perspective on sociallife which combines theoretical ideas andanalytical orientations from different disci-plines such as linguistics, psychology andsociology. It shares many of the features ofconversational analysis in that it is concernedwith the ways in which people ascribemeaning to routine social interactions through


talk. However, discourse analysis differs fromconversational analysis in a number of ways(Silverman, 1993). It deals with a wider rangeof social science concerns (such as genderrelations and social control) and, conse-quently, does not eschew the use of theoreticalframeworks. It uses a variety of written, aswell as spoken, ùtterances', especially inrelation to the analysis of institutional talk.Finally, it does not require the same degree ofmechanistic precision in the analysis oftranscripts.

The concept of `discourse' developed as areaction against both positivistic epistemolo-gies seeking scienti®c `truths' and relativisticperspectives on knowledge which claimedthat the process of knowing is ineluctablycontradictory, uncertain and contingent(Worrall, 1990). It sought to identify themechanisms whereby `truths' are sociallyconstructed through talk and, despite (orbecause of ) underlying incoherence, becomethe accepted (and, therefore, powerful) ver-sion of events. According to Foucault (1972)discourse is the key to power. Power, heargues, is not the overt domination of onegroup by another but the acceptance by allthat there exists a reliable, smooth andcoherent `text' underlying all the apparentparadoxes of life. This process of reconstruct-ing paradox as coherence is the fundamentalproject of discourse.

Analysis of discourse involves the decon-struction of coherence to reveal the underlyingparadox and expose the absence of that whichis represented as being present. For example,one way of ensuring the continuity of dis-course is to demarcate its boundaries byemploying `practices of exclusion'. Such prac-tices might include the prohibition of certaintopics or explanations on grounds of ìrrele-vance' (for example, poverty as an explanationof crime), the disquali®cation of certainindividuals from being authorized speakers(for example, victims of crime in the court-room) and the rejection of certain statementsas illegitimate (for example, a sex offenderclaiming that his offence `just happened').

In order to analyse discourse one has to askquestions not just about the content ofdiscourse but also about its author (whosays it?), its authority (on what grounds?), itsaudience (to whom?), its object (aboutwhom?) and its objective (in order to achievewhat?). Discourse analysis is particularlyinterested in the way in which rhetoric andargument are organized in talk and texts soas to undermine alternative or oppositionalversions.

Evaluation

Potter (1997, p. 147) says that à large part ofdoing discourse analysis is a craft skill, morelike bike riding or chicken sexing thanfollowing the recipe for a mild chicken roganjosh'. The main dif®culty in de®ning discourseanalysis is that it covers a wide range ofactivities from linguistic analysis (akin toconversational analysis) to postmodern analy-sis of the relationship between the construc-tion of knowledge and power (Lyon, 1999). Insome of its variations it would not berecognized as a research `method' at all bymany social scientists. Despite these criticisms,discourse analysis has played an importantrole in encouraging a re¯exive and criticalapproach to the conventional wisdom, whichpasses for knowledge in penal policy and thecriminal justice system. It has exposed theinconsistencies and contradictions which arerendered coherent in institutional and routinetalk about crime and criminals.

Anne Worrall

Associated Concepts: conversational analysis,deconstruction, documentary analysis, post-modernism

Key ReadingsBurton, F. and Carlen, P. (1979) Of®cial Discourse.

London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge.

London, Tavistock.Lyon, D. (1999) Postmodernity, 2nd edn. Bucking-

ham, Open University Press.Potter, J. (1997) `Discourse Analysis as a way of

analysing naturally occurring talk', in D. Silver-man (ed.), Qualitative Research: Theory, Methodsand Practice. London, Sage.

Silverman, D. (1993) Interpreting Qualitative Data:Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction.London, Sage.

Worrall, A. (1990) Offending Women: Female Law-breakers and the Criminal Justice System. London,Routledge.

DISCRETION

De®nition

The power conferred on criminal justiceprofessionals to use their judgement todecide what action to take in a given situation.

95DISCRETION

This includes the decision to take no action.Discretion is of®cially delegated within thecriminal justice system and it is not limited toone decision point. Because it extends to allpoints of decision-making and encompassesprocedures and working methods, ¯ows backand forth through all parts of the criminaljustice system.


Discretion is one of the most contentiousissues in criminal justice because the profes-sionals involved at each stage of the criminaljustice process enjoy a considerable degree ofmandated ¯exibility in the decisions they canmake about the processing of individual cases.It is the day-to-day discretionary actions ofpolice of®cers, prosecutors, defence lawyers,judges and prison and probation of®cers thatlubricate the criminal justice system andensure that `justice' is discharged. Discretionprovides criminal justice professionals withthe space both to engage in discriminatoryactivities and to subvert policies that they donot agree with.

There is wide agreement that the establish-ment of consistent criminal justice policies andthe fair and equal treatment of all individuals,irrespective of class, gender or race, requiresthe regulation of discretionary powers.

Particular attention has focused on thediscretionary powers of police of®cers becausethey are the `gatekeepers' to the criminaljustice system, and unlike many other organ-izations, discretionary power is located pri-marily with the lowest-ranking employees.The police role requires discretionary powerbecause of®cers are required to deal with avast range of laws, incidents and forms ofbehaviour and make critical decisions. Thesource of police discretion lies with the legalpowers they are given, the nature of thecriminal law they have to enforce, the contextwithin which policework takes place andlimitations on resources. However, the loca-tion of a considerable degree of unregulatedautonomy at the bottom of the organizationposes serious problems for supervisors. Policeof®cers can use their discretion to discriminatefor or against sections of the community eitherthrough under- or over-enforcement of thelaw. The injudicious, provocative and abusiveapplication of police powers triggered seriousconfrontations between the police and minor-ity ethnic communities in the USA and UKduring the 1990s.

As a result of judicial judgements, commu-

nity complaints about misconduct, miscar-riages of justice and an increasing number ofexpensive civil actions, police forces have paidconsiderably more attention to structuringthe discretionary powers of of®cers. This hasresulted in:

· Training programmes to equip of®cers touse discretion in a more professionalmanner.

· The creation of ethical principles andguidelines governing the whole organiza-tion.

· Codes of practice and internal circulars tolimit and/or guide stop and search,interrogation, use of deadly force andresponse to domestic violence and racistviolence.

· Strategies to raise the visibility of of®cers'work practices.

· The establishment of internal and externalreviews bodies.

These strategies are premised on the prin-ciple that discretion is an inescapable part ofpolice work. However, there are many whobelieve that the problem of police discretionwill not be resolved until discretionary powerssuch as stop and search are abolished ormeaningful complaints systems and modes ofdemocratic accountability are implemented.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: `broken windows', crim-inal justice, discrimination, disparity, dispro-portionality, net widening, social control, zerotolerance

Key ReadingsGalligan, D.J. (1990) Discretionary Powers: A Legal

Study of Of®cial Discretion. Oxford, The ClarendonPress.

Hawkins, K. (ed.) (1992) The Uses of Discretion.Oxford, The Clarendon Press.

Ohlin, L.E. and Remington, F.J. (1993) Discretion inCriminal Justice: The Tension Between Individualiza-tion and Uniformity. Albany, State University ofNew York Press.

Walker, S. (1993) Taming the System: The Control ofDiscretion in Criminal Justice 1950±90. Oxford,Oxford University Press.

Vizant, J.C. and Crothers, L. (1998) Street-LevelLeadership: Discretion and Legitimacy in Front-LinePublic Service. Washington, DC, GeorgetownUniversity Press.


DISCRIMINATION

De®nition

Discrimination consists of unfavourable treat-ment based on a person's sex, gender, `race',ethnicity, culture, religion, language, class,sexual preference, age, physical disability orany other improper ground. It limits theeconomic, social and political opportunities ofthe individual or group discriminated against.In some contexts discrimination has beenlegally enforced (for example, apartheid inSouth Africa). In many other contexts dis-crimination exists de facto, in spite of lawsintended to prevent its occurrence.


Discrimination includes behaviour ranging inseverity from aversion and avoidance toharassment and violence. It includes insulting,patronizing or disrespectful behaviour, refusalto offer employment (or pay fair wages), toprovide housing or medical treatment, orto provide a commercial or social service.Discrimination directly restricts civil libertiessuch as freedom of movement and association.It can also take the form of harassment, attack,exclusion and expulsion. In its most extremeform, discrimination has led to mass murder.Some theorists emphasize an investigation ofthe `life form' of discrimination and its roots inlocal histories. Others emphasize the effects ofdiscrimination in creating disadvantage andlimiting the life chances of those discriminatedagainst. Poverty, unemployment, ignorance,crime, increased infant mortality and ashortened life expectancy have all beenshown to be consequences of discrimination.Racial discrimination has been one of the mostprominent explanations for the over-represen-tation of black people among arrestees and in-prison populations.

A distinction can be made between directand indirect discrimination. Among the bestexamples of direct discrimination are those thathave been enshrined in national or statelegislation such as the Jim Crow laws in theUSA. These laws enforced segregation ineducation and public transport and alsoprohibited sexual relationships across the`colour-line'. In some places African Amer-icans were denied the right to vote and, as aconsequence, to serve on juries or gain equalaccess to justice. In South Africa, until theapartheid regime ended in 1990, blacks were

not allowed to vote or travel without restric-tion. Similarly, restrictions on women's abilityto own property, to vote and so on have beenin place in many countries. An explicit ban onthe employment of openly homosexual peoplein the police or military is another example ofdirect discrimination. Such legal restrictionshave obvious and wide-ranging consequencesfor fairness and social justice.

These de jure forms of discrimination areeasy to identify and criticize as unjust. Evenwhen there are no laws promoting orrequiring discrimination, however, peopleare often directly excluded or singled out forunfavourable treatment. In many criminaljustice agencies (including police, prisonsand the courts) explicit, overt and directdiscrimination has led to informal restrictionson the recruitment and promotion of women,ethnic minorities and other social groups.Discrimination also contributes to explainingwhy there are often marked inequalities inservice provision (Brown, 1997). Sometimesdiscriminatory practices persist even in theface of laws or policies designed to eliminatediscrimination. This de facto discrimination canbe the result of covert activity ± that which isintentional, but hidden ± but can also resultfrom indirect discrimination.

Indirect discrimination refers to treatment thatmight be described as èqual' in a formal sensebetween different groups, but is discrimina-tory in its actual effect on a particular group.The `minimum height' requirement for policeof®cers in some jurisdictions is an example ofindirect discrimination. Women and peoplefrom some ethnic groups are less likely to beable to meet the minimum requirement whileheight is irrelevant to the job of being a policeof®cer. This requirement, irrespective of itsintent, clearly has the effect of restricting jobopportunities for some groups, and may,therefore, be considered discriminatory.

Sometimes indirect discrimination occursknowingly, but covertly to exclude women,homosexuals or people from ethnic minoritycommunities, but there are many otherinstances where such exclusion appears to beneither conscious nor deliberate. For example,few criminal justice agencies provide servicesfor non-English speakers in the UK or USA.Although it is probably not the intent of theseorganizations speci®cally to exclude non-English speakers, this is, in fact, what happensand can be seen as having an indirect dis-criminatory effect.

Discrimination is closely tied to the conceptof prejudice: ideas that identify particulargroups as ìnferior' or à problem'. The

97DISCRIMINATION

expression of prejudiced opinions and the useof negative stereotypes are often found toaccompany discriminatory practice. Such pre-judices (as racism, sexism and homophobia)are frequently explicit. In some criminal justiceoccupations, women and people from ethnicand other minorities are seen by the dominantgroup of white men as inferior, less able to dothe job (in both front-line and managerialcontexts) and ®nd their employment prospectsaffected as a result. For example, in Britain,male police of®cers have strongly resisted theidea of women joining the police service innumbers. When they were employed, somemen felt that women should be kept ìn theirproper place', and away from `real' police-work (Brown, 1997). The experience of abusiveand discriminatory practices in the workplaceand the so-called `glass ceiling' to careeradvancement has led to many employeestaking legal action against employers incriminal justice agencies.

Evaluation

Studies of discrimination in action in thecriminal justice process have suggested that itoccurs under certain conditions. Where thelaw is permissive, individual discretion wide,and where there is a lack of guidelines as tohow a decision should be taken, decision-making is often based on subjective judge-ments. For example, police of®cers have thepower to stop and search a person of whomthey have `reasonable suspicion', an ambig-uous and ill-de®ned concept. In such instancesof wide discretion and autonomy, and wherecultural norms support particular kinds ofstereotypes and prejudices, the results arefrequently discriminatory. It has been shownthat police of®cers use colour as a criterion forstop and search and that black people aremuch more likely to be stopped than would beexpected given their numbers in the generalpopulation. Where decisions, and how theyare reached are not monitored and whereaccountability is weak, discrimination can gounchecked.

The right to equality before the law andprotection against discrimination has beencentral to conceptions of basic human rightsthat underpin the formation of the UnitedNations and the European Union. Protectionagainst discrimination is recognized in Article7 of the Universal Declaration of HumanRights, and in Article 14 of the EuropeanConvention on Human Rights. These call forfundamental rights and freedoms to be

secured `without discrimination on anygrounds such as sex, race, colour, language,religion, political or other opinion, national orsocial origin, association with a nationalminority, property, birth or other status'. Theinternational conventions on the eliminationof all forms of discrimination against womenand against racial discrimination are morestringent. These require governments toreview national and local policies, and toàmend, rescind or nullify' any laws orregulations which have the effect of creatingor perpetuating discrimination and also a dutyto promote tolerance and equality of opportu-nity (Banton, 1996).

Legislation based on these internationalprinciples can be found in many countries.These focus on the concepts of anti-discrimi-nation (for example, anti-racism/anti-sexism/anti-homophobia), equal opportunities, oraf®rmative action. In the USA, the CivilRights Act 1963 prohibited discriminationagainst blacks and other minorities in respectof voting, employment and the use of publicaccommodations. The Fair Housing Act 1968prohibited property companies from discrimi-nating when seeking buyers for houses.Similarly, in Britain, Race Relations Acts of1965 and 1968 prohibited direct discriminationon the grounds of `race' and ethnicity, and the1976 Race Relations Act extended the law toprohibit indirect discrimination. Similar legis-lation prohibits discrimination against dis-abled people and against women. The RaceRelations (Amendment) Act 2000 will applythese principles for the ®rst time to publicservices, including the police.

The concept of discrimination is helpful tounderstand the processes by which the lifechances of less powerful individuals andgroups are shaped by the responses to themby the powerful. It contributes to under-standing how, for example, women andpeople from ethnic minority communitiesmake up a disproportionately small numberof the ranks of criminal justice professions(especially those at the top, such as chiefs ofpolice and judges). It helps to explain why theculture of these professions is often hostile ±in both language and practice ± to particulargroups (such as women, gay people, disabledpeople and those from ethnic minority com-munities). It also helps to explain why theprotections of the criminal justice process areso often described as unsatisfactory bymembers of these excluded groups.

The notion of anti-discriminatory practice isa perspective that acknowledges the existenceand impact of `race', gender and homophobic


stereotyping, prejudice and their echo in directand indirect discrimination. From this per-spective, positive action is required actively toeliminate discrimination and promote equalityof opportunity.

Ben Bowling

Associated Concepts: criminal justice, criminali-zation, discretion, disparity, disproportional-ity, human rights, social justice

Key ReadingsBanton, M. (1996) International Action Against Racial

Discrimination. Oxford, The Clarendon Press.Bowling, B. and Phillips, C. (2000) Racism, Crime and

Justice. London, Pearson.Brown, J. (1997) Èqual opportunities and the police

service in England and Wales: past, present andfuture possibilities', in P. Francis, P. Davies and V.Jupp (eds), Policing Futures. London, Macmillan.

Kleg, M. (1993) Hate, Prejudice and Racism. Albany,NY, State University of New York Press.

DISPARITY

De®nition

The concept of `disparity' is most clearlyassociated with sentencing and the practice ofgiving different sentences for similar offences,but it also has wider relevance in terms ofoffenders and victims being treated differentlyor unequally throughout the criminal justicesystem when their circumstances are similar.


Discoveries of disparity in the treatment ofoffenders in the criminal justice system strikeat the heart of the ideal that justice is abstractand that all are equal before the law. Whilstdisparity is concerned more with differences inprocess than differences in outcome, it is oftenused interchangeably with `discrimination'and most pointedly concerns èqual treatment'.Indeed, most people appear to believe thatfairness necessarily involves treating `likecases alike'. But equal treatment involves atone extreme the impartial application ofexisting rules and procedures, regardless ofthe outcome (procedural justice), and at theother, the idea that any policies or proceduresthat have the effect of punishing a higherproportion of one social group than another

are unjust, and that law and policy should beadjusted so as to achieve equal outcomes(substantive justice). Techniques for reducingdisparity include: judicial self-regulation (withcourts of appeal and the like), statutorysentencing principles (as in penal codes),numerical guideline systems (as in the Minne-sota system ± with clear classi®cations ofoffences and categories of relative gravity), andmandatory sentences (prescribed maximumand minimum penalties) (Ashworth, 1998).

Calls to eradicate disparity have includedcalls for equal treatment, but this is not unprob-lematic. Following critiques of the sentencingof women for example, both in principle andpractice, èqual' has come to~mean `like men'.As punishment has become increasingly moresevere in England and Wales, the USA andelsewhere, èqual treatment' with men is farfrom desirable (let alone `just' some wouldargue) and so the quest for equal treatment isincreasingly questioned.

In the USA, Tonry (1996) has revealed thatthe success of sentencing guidelines in variousstates has led to increased imprisonment ofwomen as the disparities between sentencingfemales and males have been reduced. Indeed,this process of `levelling-up' in order to reducesentencing disparities is not uncommon. The`split the difference' policy of California israther unusual, however, involving a loweringof sentences for men and a raising of sentencesfor women.

In jurisdictions where there are sentencingguidelines rather than rigid systems ofmandatory sentencing, the move towardsconsistency, equality and proportionality ofpunishment to crime has meant that mitigat-ing circumstances, such as child care or familyresponsibilities, have ceased to be available.Thus the call for èqual treatment' has beenreplaced by a call for àppropriateness'. Thatis, it is argued that what is required is thatcircumstances appropriate to each personshould be considered regardless of assump-tions about gender-based and other stereo-typical perceptions of `needs' (Hudson, 1996).

Evaluation

The concept of disparity is often confused withand used interchangeably with `discrimina-tion'. Whereas disparity concerns the consis-tency with which criteria are applied to cases,discrimination, properly understood, refers tothe use of illegitimate criteria. For instance,race is a prime example of a criterion that hasbeen recognized as illegitimate. However, the

99DISPARITY

concepts are closely intertwined. A good dealof research has been carried out to measureboth disparity and discrimination, thoughmuch of this has been statistical in naturewith obvious limitations. First, there is anassumption that disparity or discriminationcan be proved or dismissed through sophisti-cated statistical analysis. Secondly, it ignoresthe more dynamic aspects of decision-making± the signi®cance of appearance and demea-nour, prejudices revealed in attitude ratherthan in speci®c decision, and the interactionbetween defendants and of®cials. Thirdly,such research has often focused on a singleprocess or moment in decision-making, and ona single factor (for example, race or gender),when a number of factors may be relevant incombination. Equally, treating `like cases alike'in terms of outcomes (sentencing outcomes forinstance) can mask processual differences. Butthe real problem is that `disparity' is an emptycategory that can be ®lled only by reference tosome standard, and in principle the standardcould be set by any criteria.

Loraine Gelsthorpe

Associated Concepts: discrimination, dispropor-tionality, racialization

Key ReadingsAshworth, A. (1998) `Four techniques for reducing

disparity', in A. von Hirsch and A. Ashworth(eds), Principled Sentencing: Readings on Theory andPolicy. Oxford, Hart Publishing.

Daly, K. (1994) Gender, Crime and Punishment. NewHaven, CT, Yale University Press.


Tonry, M. (1996) Sentencing Matters. New York,Oxford University Press.

DISPLACEMENT

See Defensible space; Rational choice theory;Repeat victimization; Situational crime pre-vention; Surveillance.

DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES

De®nition

An alternative means of describing positivistand some interactionist theories. Its key

characteristic is to argue that because ofcertain biological, psychological or sociologi-cal conditions some people are born with orcome to acquire a disposition to behave in acriminal manner. A `dispositional bias' is at itsstrongest in positivism but is also present inthose interactionist and labelling theorieswhich maintain that the labelling of peopleas deviant cements a deviant identity andpredisposes them to commit further criminalacts. An alternative to dispositional theory canbe found in rational choice theory.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: criminal careers, deviancyampli®cation, individual positivism, labelling,positivism, sociological positivism

DISPROPORTIONALITY

De®nition

The extent to which something appears to beinappropriate or òut of proportion' in relationto something else. The term has been used incriminology to describe a disparity, or imbal-ance, in patterns of crime and the administra-tion of criminal justice.


It is common to describe a situation where anindividual or a group is privileged or dis-advantaged in comparison to another asdisproportionate. Five examples illustrate theusage of the term.

1 Disproportionality in punishment. Thepenological notion of proportionality is centralto just desert theories of sentencing (vonHirsch, 1998). A sentence of the court could bedescribed as disproportionate if a personconvicted of a minor offence were sentencedto a long prison term or if a judge ormagistrate failed to take into account mitigat-ing circumstances. Disproportionality in sen-tencing can also be identi®ed at the grouplevel. For example, Hood's (1992) study ofCrown Courts in the English Midlands foundthat black people were disproportionatelygiven custodial sentences in comparison towhites, even once all legally relevant variableshad been taken into account. This study alsoindicated that where a custodial sentence wasgiven, the average sentence length was longer


for black and Asian defendants, in comparisonwith their white counterparts.

2 Disproportionality in the use of policepowers. The use of a power ± such as that tostop and search under s.1 of the Police andCriminal Evidence Act in the UK ± can bedescribed as disproportionate if it is usedexcessively on speci®c social groups. Forexample, police statistics show that blackpeople in London are about ®ve times aslikely to be stopped and searched in compar-ison with white people. The term has alsobeen used in human rights jurisprudence todescribe an imbalance in the intrusiveness of apolice power ± such as planting a listeningdevice ± in comparison with the seriousness ofthe crime being investigated.

3 Disproportionality in imprisonment. Thereare a disproportionately large number of blackpeople in the prison population in Britain, incomparison with their numbers in the generalpopulation: while there are 176 white peoplein prison per 100,000, there are 1,245 blackpeople in prison per 100,000 (cf Tonry, 1994).The obvious question that arises from thesestatistics is why the British criminal justicesystem imprisons so much greater a propor-tion of the black population than the whitepopulation. Among the possible explanationsare a disproportionate risk of being arrested,convicted or sentenced to custody, or dis-proportionately long prison sentences. Dis-proportionate rates of imprisonment couldalso re¯ect rates of offending among the blackpopulation.

4 Disproportionality in victimization andoffending. Evidence from victimization surveysindicating that people from ethnic minoritiessuffer a level of victimization that exceeds thatof white people can be described as `dispro-portionate victimization'. The term can also beused to describe unexpectedly high actual orsupposed `crime rates' among, for example,black people. In this usage, `disproportionalityin offending' is a rival explanation to `dis-crimination in criminal justice' for dispropor-tionate imprisonment rates (Russell, 1998: 46).

5 Disproportionality in employment in thecriminal justice professions. Statistical evidenceshows that many fewer women and peoplefrom ethnic minority groups are employed incriminal justice agencies, especially in moresenior ranks, than would be expected on thebasis of their numbers in the population. Thisappears ± on the face of it ± to be the result ofdiscrimination on the part of employers, andthere is certainly evidence that such discrimi-nation does occur. However, this imbalancemay also be explained by legitimate factors ±

such as a lack of suitably quali®ed applicants,or an unwillingness to apply for reasons ofpreference for other occupations.

Evaluation

Disproportionality is a slippery concept, notleast because it has subtly different meaningsdepending on the context in which it is used.The example of the `race and crime debate' ±where the term is frequently used ± can serveas an illustration of the various competingde®nitions.

There is more or less universal agreementthat black people are more likely than whitepeople to be stopped, searched, arrested andimprisoned. The question on which the `raceand crime' debate has turned is whether thisdisproportionality ± found in the òutcomes'of the criminal justice process ± is the result ofdiscrimination (at one or more points in theprocess), disproportionate involvement ofblack people in offending, or a combinationof both. Further questions are also raised ofhow the disproportionately high rates ofunemployment, poverty, exclusion fromschool and the concentration of black peopleinto urban areas impacts on their experiencesof crime and criminal justice. These uses of theterm are subtly distinct from the penologicalnotion of proportionality, referring to theextent to which punishment and crime arecommensurate. The de®nitions coincide whenit can be shown that the punishment of blackpeople is not only disproportionate in com-parison to their numbers in the population,but also unduly harsh given the nature of theiroffending.

Identifying disproportionate outcomes ofthe criminal justice process is a necessary, butnot suf®cient step towards establishing dis-crimination. In civil rights jurisprudence,disparities in the treatment of women,people from ethnic and other minorities canbe taken as prima facie evidence of discrimina-tion which can be tested by assessing theextent to which differences can be explainedby legitimate factors. Where disparities areshown to be unjusti®ed, the discriminatorypractices that create and sustain them may beruled unlawful and complainants entitled toredress.

Ben Bowling

Associated Concepts: discrimination, disparity,just deserts, penology, victimology

101DISPROPORTIONALITY

Key ReadingsBowling, B. and Phillips, C. (2001) Racism, Crime and

Justice. London, Pearson.von Hirsch, A. (1998) `Proportionate sentences: a

desert perspective', in A. von Hirsch and A.Ashworth (eds), Principled Sentencing: Readings onTheory and Policy, 2nd edn. London, Hart Publish-ing.

Hood, R. (1992) Race and Sentencing. Oxford, OxfordUniversity Press.

Russell, K. (1998) The Color of Crime. New York andLondon, New York University Press.

Tonry, M. (1994) `Racial disproportion in US prisons',British Journal of Criminology, 34, pp. 97±115.

DISPUTE SETTLEMENT

See Informal justice; Redress; Restorativejustice

DIVERSION

De®nition

The process of keeping offenders and otherproblem populations away from the institu-tional arrangements of criminal justice orwelfare.


Diversion has its roots in what Stanley Cohen(1985) termed the `destructuring moves' of the1960s. Its orientation toward an alternativeprocedural rationale grew out of a radicalcritique of the penal welfare strategy and wasclosely associated with measures of decarcera-tion (away from prison), delegalization (awayfrom the state) and deprofessionalization(away from the expert). Diversion subse-quently emerged as a dominant trend injuvenile justice reform. Short of rejecting penalsanctions completely, proponents of diversionin juvenile justice advocated the developmentof initiatives to keep juveniles out of court,custody and residential care. Their generalaim was to remove or minimize the juveniles'penetration into the justice system. For criticsof treatment-type interventions, increasedprofessional services were seen as either fail-ing to reform the delinquent or were morally

unacceptable. Social work professionalsrede®ned their mission in terms of `leavingthe kids alone'. In the process, social sciencesarguments (especially from the labellingperspective) suggesting that the process ofarrest, trial and conviction can have poten-tially damaging effects of stigmatization, wererediscovered.

In a parallel debate, diversion ®tted in withthe demands for a `return to justice' from theliberal justice lobby (Morris et al., 1980). Theircentral arguments are that due process safe-guards have been undermined by the rise ofindividualized treatment in juvenile justice.The expectation is that, by re-establishingvalues of proportionality, procedural justiceand predictability of legal administration, theextent of penal intervention would also bereduced. Similar `just deserts' arguments havesince been used to support the use of policecautioning outside the formal court system asthe proportionate response to minor forms oflaw-breaking or to offences committed bypersons of low culpability (such as the old andthe mentally ill).

Evaluation

Diversionary initiatives (especially alterna-tives to formal court processing) have prolif-erated in most Western juvenile justicesystems. They are frequently state-sponsoredand administered or controlled either byof®cials (such as the police) or community-based agencies. Because of its de®nitionalambiguity, diversion has developed in differ-ent directions at different times and came tohave a variety of meanings in terms of policiesand programmes. In particular, the distinctionbetween `diversion from' and `diversion to'has been a major concern in juvenile justiceliterature. In this latter version of diversion asa referral to alternative programmes, theparadox is that more, rather than fewer,juveniles ended up being subject to newforms of community-based intervention.

Diversion can also mean keeping theyounger and less delinquent populationaway from a career of crime through earlyidenti®cation and treatment. The expansionof delinquency prevention initiatives canthus generate an in¯ationary spiral in theprocessing of delinquency cases, leading togreater regulation in the lives of youngpeople and their families (Klein, 1979).Furthermore, critics argued that diversionhas sometimes been con¯ated with a crimecontrol ideology. In the United States,


intensive programmes such as `boot camps',which were originally promoted as analternative measure to divert offenders whowould otherwise be sentenced to long-termincarceration, are increasingly being used asa sentencing option in their own right forless serious offenders.

Wider developments of managerialism incriminal justice in the 1990s have meant thatcriminal justice of®cials supported diversionout of the practical need for a rationalizationof resources and the establishment of anef®cient crime management apparatus. Diver-sion of cases in preliminary phases is now partof the state's strategy of `de®ning deviancedown' to adapt to high crime rates andincreased caseloads in most Western criminaljustice systems (Garland, 1996).

Maggy Lee

Associated Concepts: bifurcation, communitysentences, crime prevention, decarceration,decriminalization, just deserts, labelling, man-agerialism, net widening, radical non-inter-vention, social control

Key ReadingsCohen, S. (1985) Visions of Social Control: Crime,

Punishment, and Classi®cation. Cambridge, PolityPress.

Garland, D. (1996) `The limits of the sovereign state± strategies of crime control in contemporarysociety', British Journal of Criminology, 36 (4), pp.445±71.

Klein, M. (1979) `Deinstitutionalization and diver-sion of juvenile offenders: a litany of impedi-ments', in N. Morris and N. Tonry (eds), Crimeand Justice: An Annual Review of Research, vol. 1.Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Morris, A., Giller, H., Szwed E. and Geach, H. (1980)Justice for Children. London, Macmillan.

Pratt, J. (1986) `Diversion from the juvenile court',British Journal of Criminology, 24 (2), pp. 81±92.

DOCUMENTARY ANALYSIS

De®nition

The detailed examination of documents with aview to making assertions about some aspectof the social world, for example, the social orhistorical context in which the documentswere produced, the social meanings which

they transmit, the effects of such meanings onsocial groups and the social control function ofdocuments.


A wide range of documents has been used insocial research including life histories, diaries,newspapers and magazines, stories, essays,of®cial documents and records, web pagesand research reports. Such documents may bemade up exclusively of the written word orthey may include statistics, as in a report ofcrime trends.

The life history is similar to a biography orautobiography and is a means by which anindividual provides a written record of his orher own life in his or her own terms. It caninclude a descriptive summary of life eventsand experiences and also an account of thesocial world from the subject's point of view.The use of newspapers has been central inwhat is usually referred to as media analysis.Media analysis has several interests, one ofwhich is an examination of the way in whichstereotypes of categories of people or types ofaction are created, reinforced and ampli®edwith wide-ranging consequences for thosepeople and actions. For example, newspapershave been used to examine the portrayal offolk devils and also the creation and career ofthe label and stereotype of the `mugger' in theBritish press.

Researchers can make use of essays or otherwritings which are already in existence or cansolicit such writings as part of their researchdesign. For example, Cohen and Taylor's(1972) examination of the subjective experi-ences of imprisonment and strategies ofpsychological survival among long-term pris-oners was in part founded on an analysis ofessays and poems and topics suggested byCohen and Taylor themselves. Of®cial docu-ments, for example reports of public inquiries,provide valuable data for the analysis ofof®cial de®nitions of what is de®ned asproblematic (for example, public disorder),what is viewed as the explanation of theproblem and what is deemed as the preferredsolution. Apart from documents at a societalor macro level, there are other of®cialdocuments at an institutional or micro levelwhich can be just as important to the disposaland destination of individuals, for example,offenders. These are organizational records,such as probation reports, which de®ne whatis, or is not, problematic about individuals,which put forward explanations for behaviour

103DOCUMENTARY ANALYSIS

and actions and which record decisionsrelating to outcomes. Such individual recordsare not insulated from of®cial documentsoperating at a societal level in so far as there isoften a close connection between the formula-tion of concepts, explanations and solutions atone level and such formulation and applica-tion at another.

Evaluation

The validity of any document is dependent onits authenticity (whether it is original andgenuine), its credibility (whether it is accu-rate), its representativeness (whether it isrepresentative of the totality of documents inits class) and its meaning (what it is intendedto say) (Scott, 1990). What is more, anyevaluation of documentary analysis mustconsider the way in which it is in¯uenced bybroad theoretical approaches and the types ofresearch questions posed by these approaches.For example, the positivist approach to docu-ments ± sometimes also known as contentanalysis ± assumes that there is a correspon-dence between the manifest content of docu-ments and their meaning: documents arerepresentations of what they mean. Research-ers using this approach analyse the manifestcontent of documents to ask questions such as:What are the characteristics of content? Whatinferences can be made about the causes andgeneration of content? What inferences can bemade about the effects of communication?

By way of contrast, the interpretativeapproach starts from the assumption thatdifferent meanings can be attributed by differ-ent individuals to the same manifest content. Itwould, for example, be interested in thevarying ways in which defendants, prosecu-tors, judges and jurors make sense of docu-ments placed before a court of law and withwhat consequences.

A critical approach to documentary analysisis concerned with how and when certain kindsof documents come to be treated and acceptedas `knowledge' and with the social controlfunctions of such knowledge. In this way,critical analysis emphasizes the close connec-tion between documents and the exercise ofpower. One variant of this critical approach todocuments is discourse analysis, associatedwith Michel Foucault.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: content analysis, discourseanalysis, folk devil, positivism, stereotyping

Key ReadingsCohen, S. and Taylor, L. (1972) Psychological Survival:

The Experience of Long-term Imprisonment.Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Jupp, V. and Norris, C. (1993) `Traditions in docu-mentary analysis', in M. Hammersley (ed.), SocialResearch: Philosophy, Politics and Practice. London,Sage.

Scott, J. (1990) A Matter of Record: DocumentarySources in Social Research. Cambridge, Polity Press.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

See Family crime; Violence; Victimology.

DRIFT

See Subculture

DUE PROCESS MODEL

De®nition

A `due process' model or perspective empha-sizes the need to administer justice accordingto legal rules and procedures which arepublicly known, fair and seen to be just.


In a `due process' model of criminal justice themain function of the criminal courts is to act asan impartial arbitrator of con¯icts arisingbetween the state and its citizens. Central tothis perspective are the presumption ofinnocence, the restraints of arbitrary powerand the inviolability of legal rules andprocedures. Such procedures do not weightthe process against the accused or in favour ofthose in power, but rather seek to guarantee ameasure of judicial equality to all parties:hence the absolute need to abide by strict andformal procedures, to ensure that adherence to`due process' results in a smooth-running, fairand impartial system. Other key elements(legal safeguards) in a `due process model'might be described as follows: arrestedpersons must be informed as to what the


charges are and, where relevant, why they aregoing to court; there are clear standards ofproof (with the plaintiff or prosecutionbearing the onus of proof ); there are extensiverules which determine what is allowable ornot as legal evidence (with `hearsay evidence',crudely translated as `gossip', being admissi-ble only under certain conditions), and witheach party being given the opportunity totender evidence before the court (and jury) tocross examine the other party so as to clarifymatters or raise objections. In addition, withina `due process model' judicial proceedings arenormally conducted in open court so as toavoid situations like the Inquisition, where`justice' is arrived at behind closed doors withfew public checks and balances upon judicialpower. Herbert Packer, who offered anincisive account of both a `due process'model and a `crime control' model in 1964,suggests that whilst the crime control modelresembles an assembly line, the due processmodel looks very much like an obstacle course± with successive stages being designed topresent formidable impediments to carryingthe accused any further along the process.Whilst `justice must be seen to be done'though, in the case of minors there may besome limitations on this procedure, withspecial `juvenile' or `youth courts' being heldbehind closed doors so as to protect them frompublic gaze. Also, there may be exceptions tothe rule of òpen court' when it is thoughtappropriate, especially in sensitive or dif®cultsituations, to hear testimony ìn camera'(behind closed doors, with bans on publishingthe proceedings). Broadly speaking, however,the institutional processes associated with`due process' are designed to protect acitizen's rights.

The concept of `due process' has its originsin the Classical School of criminology, whichitself was reacting against punishment underthe ancien reÂgime of eighteenth-century Europewhich was both arbitrary and harshly retribu-tive, dominated by capital and corporalpenalties. As a protagonist of the ClassicalSchool, jurist and philosopher Cesare Beccaria(1738±94) published Dei Delitta e delle Pene(1764) (On Crimes and Punishments), whichprovided a thorough and searching critique ofthe criminal justice systems of Europe.Beccaria, along with others in the ClassicalSchool called for reform, for clarity in the lawand `due process' in criminal procedure,combined with certainty and regularity ofpunishment.

In England, the due process approach isoften associated with the attitudes of the legal

profession, particularly those involved indefence work, and with the aims of suchorganizations as Liberty. The concept has beenbrought to bear in a number of areas withinthe criminal justice system where there hasbeen concern about a lack of fairness andopenness in decision-making processes. Forexample, there have been criticisms of the lackof `due process' safeguards associated withthe system of parole ever since its inception.By this is meant that there have been criticismsabout the secretive nature of the decision-making processes, a lack of accountability, anda lack of attention to offenders' rights in thewhole process. The concept has been similarlyemployed to describe procedural irregularitiesin decision-making processing affecting cau-tions and prosecutions, with evidence tosuggest that some people might be givencautions where there is insuf®cient evidenceto convict or where there is no admission ofguilt (see Wasik et al., 1999, chapter 2).

Evaluation

The concept of `due process' has been usefullyemployed in critiques of criminal justice prac-tice in recent years, particularly in Englandwith regard to the lack of procedural safe-guards in police interviews, the use ofcautions, legal representation, parole deci-sions, prisoners' rights and the use of theCrown Court (with adult style criminalproceedings) for juveniles.

Whilst the concept of due process may beuseful as a representation of `the ideal', settingout how the system ought to be, there are thosewho would argue that `the reality', that is howthe system is, may be so far removed that theìdeal' becomes increasingly dif®cult toachieve with the result that the criminal justiceprocess ®nds it harder and harder to functionef®ciently. In this case, complexity and highstandards may militate against justice.

It has also been argued that proceduraljustice (due process) is a far cry from sub-stantive justice and that really it is substantivejustice (that is, justice which relates to speci®chuman rights aims or to penological aims suchas abolitionism, restorative justice, rehabilita-tion and deterrence) which should be ofcentral importance. Formal legalism ± mereadherence to rules and adoption of legalsafeguards ± does not in itself make a systemjust.

Loraine Gelsthorpe

105DUE PROCESS MODEL

Associated Concepts: classicism, crime controlmodel, disproportionality, just deserts

Key ReadingsHudson, B. (1996) Understanding Justice. Bucking-

ham, Open University Press.

Packer, H. (1964) `Two models of the criminalprocess', University of Pennsylvania Law Review,113, pp. 1±68.

Wasik, M., Gibbons, T. and Redmayne, M. (1999)Criminal Justice. Text and Materials, London,Longman.


E

EDGEWORK

See Carnival (of crime); Cultural criminology;Postmodernism

ELECTRONIC MONITORING

De®nition

The process by which offenders' movementsor whereabouts may be checked for thepurpose of enforcing a curfew or court order.Most systems in current use involve the ®ttingof a small electronic device, or `tag' on theankle or wrist of the offender and checkingcompliance with the conditions of a curfew orhouse arrest by using a static monitoring unitat the offender's home. Developing systemsinclude computer aided voice recognition toallow checks from different locations, GMSlocator systems using the mobile telephoneinfrastructure and GPS (ground position bysatellite) technology to provide continuouschecks on movement and location. These lasttwo are as yet untested except in small-scaleprojects. All have the same aim ± to offer somespatial control short of the total separationimposed by custody.


Electronic monitoring in criminal justicesystems started in 1984 in the USA as ameans of enforcing house arrest. Early pilotprojects grew fairly rapidly ± there were thirtywithin two years ± and by 1988 over 3,000

offenders were being tagged. The early yearswere, however, dogged by technical problems,unrealistic expectations and poor outcomes.Although designed to reduce both prisonpopulations and criminal justice costs, thegenerally low risk offenders on whom theywere made, coupled with the ability to detectbreaches of the order at any time, led tosigni®cant net widening. A 10-year summaryof experience by the National Institute ofJustice in Washington concluded that, all toooften, both costs and prison populations hadrisen.

Nevertheless, continued experimentationand development covered bail enforcement,`front door' schemes (as a sentencing optionfor the courts, either on its own or inconjunction with another community penalty)and `back door' schemes (as a condition ofearly release from prison). Canada, Australiaand Singapore (where it was extensively usedas part of a home release programme fordrug addicts) were all early users; Englandand Wales, Sweden and the Netherlandsstarted different types of applications in 1995.Much of Western Europe now has, or isplanning for, pilot projects to test its useful-ness.

England and Wales is set to be one of thelargest users. A `back door' home detentioncurfew scheme for prisoners serving up to 4-year sentences started in January 1999 andcurfew orders as a sentence of the courtsbecame available from December 1999.Jointly, they should produce about 35,000orders per year. They followed a substantialpilot project over 4 years (Mortimer and May,1997). In most jurisdictions, though, taggingremains a small-scale sentencing option ± theUSA had about 77,000 monitored offenders atany one time in 1998 compared with 1.7million in prison and 3.6 million on probationor parole.

Evaluation

Providing electronic monitoring to low riskoffenders has been found to increase recidi-vism rates and further increase costs. It is costeffective when used on moderate and highrisk offenders and coupled with appropriateinterventions that target speci®c criminogenicfactors. The evidence is that electronic mon-itoring is more effective when combined withother rehabilitative programmes (Evans, 1996).It is also most effective as a short-term option,`buying time' for other community options,including treatment programmes, to takeeffect. Compliance rates have been found tofall steeply after 3 months (Whit®eld, 1997).

The most successful outcomes have beendemonstrated in Sweden, where a carefullytargeted `front door' scheme to replace prisonsentences of up to 3 months has, over 3 years,reduced the prison population by 25 per centand saved an estimated 150m kroner. Target-ing remains the key issue if electronicmonitoring is to develop, long term, as aviable community-based sentencing option ±although its future as a device for controllingprison numbers through `back door' schemesis probably more certain. All too often, elec-tronic monitoring has been used as a simplepunishment or for offenders other than thosefor whom it was designed ± people whosemovements are linked to their offending.Critics see it as redolent of excessive statecontrol and part of the increasingly stringentapparatus of criminal sanctions; supporters, asa way of reducing prison populations and costswithout increasing risks. The dangers, as wellas the opportunities offered by new technolo-gies, will continue to need careful assessment.

Dick Whit®eld

Associated Concepts: community sentences, netwidening, social control, surveillance

Key ReadingsEvans, D. (1996) Èlectronic monitoring: APPA

testimony to Ontario Standing Committee onAdministration and Justice', Perspectives, Fall1996, pp. 8±10 (Lexington, KY; APPA).

Mortimer, E. and May, C. (1997) Electronic Monitor-ing in Practice, Research Study no. 177. London,Home Of®ce.

Whit®eld, D. (1997) Tackling the Tag ± the ElectronicMonitoring of Offenders. Winchester, WatersidePress.

EMERGENCY LEGISLATION

De®nition

Laws introduced following the suspension of,or departure from, legal normality wheneither a state of emergency is declared or isassumed to exist. They typically involve thepervasive violation of human rights.


States of emergency occur with remarkablefrequency throughout the world and at anyone time a large proportion of the worldpopulation is subject to emergency legislation.Once introduced, it often has a permanencywhich belies its nomenclature. Internationallaw, in particular human rights law, however,lays down standards to govern the use ofemergency legislation. Generally, for example,where such standards apply, the threat mustbe proximate and the use of the powerslimited spatially, but these criteria are largelyignored.

Both totalitarian and democratic regimesresort to this form of law (see, for example,Amnesty International, 1999), notwithstandingthat they may be signatories of internationalhuman rights treaties. In totalitarian ormilitary regimes the introduction of emer-gency powers and the suspension of the legalsafeguards for the protection of the citizenhave frequently permitted the security forcesto resort to anonymous arrests, secret deten-tions, torture, disappearances and extra-judi-cial killings. In democratic regimes theviolation of human rights is generally lessbut nevertheless involves fundamental dero-gation from the rule of law permittingarbitrary arrest, detention without trial andwidespread restrictions on the freedom ofmovement and expression. For example, theUnited Kingdom ± a signatory of internationalhuman rights treaties ± introduced emergencylegislation in Northern Ireland in 1973 repla-cing other special powers (Farrell, 1986) whichhad been in existence since the state wasestablished in 1921. It involved expandedpowers of arrest, detention without trial andjury-less courts (Ni Aolain, 1996). Emergencylegislation, even in democratic regimes, isoften accompanied by `dirty tricks' and secretwars and the use of state directed or ìnde-pendent' pro-state death squads (McLaughlin,1996, p. 287). States that resort to emergencylegislation typically deny that any abuses have


occurred and devise a number of techniquesof denial (Cohen, 1993). In addition, theappearance of legitimacy and justi®cationcan be lent to the laws concerned and theviolations of rights they allow by an explicitdeclaration of a state of emergency inaccordance with speci®c human rights lawinstruments which the state concerned hasrati®ed.

Evaluation

Emergency legislation is an important conceptbecause of its prevalence throughout theworld. It has, however, been little studied bycriminologists. Political crimes committedunder it have largely been ignored in tradi-tional texts. In addition, there has been verylittle analysis of the form of criminal justicewhich is established by emergency legislationor the patterns of abuse which occur. As aresult, generalizations about criminal justicesystems have, at best, been partial, or, at worsta caricature of the reality.

Paddy Hillyard

Associated Concepts: human rights, politicalcrime, the state

Key ReadingsAmnesty International (1999) Annual Report 1999.

London, Amnesty International Publications.Cohen, S. (1993) `Human rights and crimes of the

state: the culture of denial', Australian and NewZealand Journal of Criminology, 28 (1), pp. 87±115.

Farrell, M. (1986) The Apparatus of Repression:Emergency Legislation. Derry, Field Day Publica-tions.

International Commission of Jurists (1983) States ofEmergency: Their Impact on Human Rights. Geneva,International Commission of Jurists.

McLaughlin, E. (1996) `Political violence, terrorismand crimes of the state', in J. Muncie and E.McLaughlin (eds), The Problem of Crime. London,Sage.

Ni Aolain, F. (1996) `The forti®cation of anemergency regime', Albany Law Review, 59 (4),pp. 1353±87.

ENVIRONMENTAL CRIMINOLOGIES

See Chicago School of Sociology; Geographiesof crime; Social ecology

ESSENTIALISM

De®nition

This concept has been used in various ways inthe philosophy of the social sciences. Essenti-alists believe that it is possible to establish thetruth of a scienti®c theory and arrive at totalexplanations by identifying the essence or thereality that lies behind the appearance of aphenomenon. The concept also refers to theassumption that human beings possess indis-pensable qualities or characteristics whichclassify their true nature. An essence is areality ®xed in an originating moment andapplies to both the inherent, innate propertiesof an individual human being and the abstractuniversal governing the type to which allexamples conform.


In criminology there has been a remarkabletendency to essentialize crime and the rela-tionship between class and crime; gender andcrime; race and crime and social structure andcrime. Essentialism also has a critical place incommon sense conversations about crime andcriminality and provides the basis for theconstruction of stereotypes and the markingout of differences such as criminal and non-criminal; normal and abnormal; and deviantand non-deviant.

Essentialist ways of thinking are challengedby post-structuralists and postmodernists whostress that `truth' and `reality' are contingent,contestable, historical, relational, provisionaland plural in nature and demand that weinterrogate the power relations inherent in theact of naming. In criminology, it was interac-tionist or labelling approaches that ®rstchallenged essentializing theories.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: biological criminology,interactionism, Marxist criminologies, person-ality theory, positivism, postmodernism, post-structuralism, stereotyping

ETHNIC CLEANSING

See Genocide

109ETHNIC CLEANSING

ETHNOGRAPHY

De®nition

The study of small groups of people and ofmicro social situations and contexts. Theemphasis is usually on explanations based onunderstanding the ways in which individualsinterpret and socially construct their world.


Ethnography has its roots in the social anthro-pology of the late nineteenth century and earlytwentieth century and literally means thedescription (graphy) of cultures (ethno). Socialanthropologists studied the institutions, beliefsand customs of pre-industrial societies, mainlyin Africa, the Paci®c and the Americas. Themain forms of ®eldwork were observation ofcultural groups in their natural habitat and`talking' to members of these groups. The com-mitments and the methods of social anthropo-logists were adapted by sociologists to the studyof subcultural groups within the fast advancingindustrial, urban society of the twentiethcentury. For example, the Chicago School ofurban sociology advocated the detailed exam-ination of small groups and subcultures withina complex urban context by seeking to examineactions and events as if they were ànthro-pologically strange'. They produced detailedqualitative accounts of the underside of Chi-cago, for example a delinquent boy's own story:The Jack Roller (Shaw, 1930). Such accounts stoodalongside quantitative analyses of the city,usually in the form of `mappings' of its socialecology, for example by using indices such asdelinquency rates. Ethnographic accounts pro-vided description of the subcultures withinparticular ecological areas or `zones'.

Ethnography continues to play an importantrole in criminological research, especially whenlinked to theoretical perspectives such as newdeviancy, interactionism, labelling and appre-ciative criminology. As a research style it isespecially suited to such perspectives becauseof their emphasis on interactions, social mean-ings and constructions, labelling, stereotyping,and to explanations based on these.

A number of methodological commitmentsare associated with ethnographic research.First, there is a focus on studying the socialworld from the perspectives of the individualsbeing studied. It is emphasized that socialscienti®c explanations should be based or`grounded' (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) in the

everyday perspectives of everyday peoplerather than in the pre-constituted and abstracttheories of social scientists. Secondly, it isassumed that different individuals and cate-gories of individuals can have differentperspectives. A social context comprises sev-eral perspectives, each of which is equally validfor the people who hold them. There is, then, nosingle objective reality: rather there is a multi-plicity of realities and the role of the ethno-grapher is to capture and describe these.Thirdly, social perspectives (and the socialmeanings, de®nitions, labels and stereotypeswhich comprise them) cannot be separatedfrom social interactions. Indeed they are thevery substance of interactions. For this reasonethnographers pay particular attention toobserving the ways in which people interactin social contexts. Fourthly, there is a belief thatsuch observation should be naturalistic, that is,that everyday people should be studied inter-acting in what for them are everyday situations,and as they would normally and naturally doso. Therefore, ethnographic research is oftencovert rather than overt, so as not to disturb thesocial context which is being examined.

The ethnographic tradition has refused tolink itself to any particular form of datacollection. It rejects ®xed protocols as to howdata should be collected and analysed.However, the main sources of data includeunstructured interviews (for example, lifehistories and narrative interviews), documentsand forms of observation. Participant observa-tion is often cited as being central to ethno-graphic research, although other forms ofunstructured observation are used. Participantobservation involves the collection of ®ndingsby participating in the social world of thosebeing studied: taking on some role in thesocial group, or on its margins, and observing,re¯ecting upon and interpreting the actions ofindividuals in the group.

The close involvement of the researcher inwhat he or she is studying can mean that theresearcher has a major impact on the ®ndingsand the conclusions derived from them.Therefore, in order to assess their validity itis important for the researcher to re¯ect uponand report his or her role in all stages of theresearch. This is known as re¯exivity.

Evaluation

There are key issues regarding the validity ofcriminological research based on ethnography.One concerns whether a researcher canprovide an accurate account of a social context


as opposed to a personal interpretation.Related to this is the issue of reliability, thatis, whether different researchers would pro-duce the same account and reach the sameconclusions. Further, there is the danger thatthe emphasis on small-scale contexts inhibitsthe extent to which conclusions can be general-ized from such contexts. Much depends ontheir representativeness and typicality.

These issues apart, ethnography has madean important contribution to criminology interms providing an appreciative and huma-nistic dimension, opening up explanationsbased on empathy and subjective understand-ing and in making visible the ùnderside' ofthe social world in a way that would not bemade possible by the more formal methods ofsocial surveys and experimentation.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: appreciative criminology,Chicago School of Sociology, cultural crimino-logy, interactionism, labelling, new deviancytheory, participant observation, re¯exivity

Key ReadingsFerrell, J. and Hamm, M. (eds) (1998) Ethnography at

the Edge: Crime, Deviance and Field Research.Boston, Northeastern University Press.

Glaser, B. and Strauss, A.L. (1967) The Discovery ofGrounded Theory. Chicago, IL, Aldine.

Hammersley, M. (1992) What's Wrong With Ethno-graphy? London, Routledge.

Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (1995) Ethnogra-phy: Principles in Practice, 2nd edn. London,Routledge.

Hobbs, D. and May, T. (eds) (1983) Interpreting theField: Accounts of Ethnography. Oxford, OxfordUniversity Press.


EUGENICS

See Genetics

EVALUATION RESEARCH

De®nition

The form of policy research devoted to assess-ing the consequences (intended and unin-

tended) of either a set of existing policies or anew policy programme. It has a particularfocus on the measurement of the extent towhich stated goals and objectives of policiesand programmes are being, or have been, met.


This is a broad body of research ®ndingswhich is focused on testing and measuring`what works' in terms of the outputs andoutcomes of initiatives and programmes ofintervention and policy innovation in criminaljustice and crime control. Most evaluativeresearch is sponsored by the bodies whothemselves are responsible for the particularprogramme or innovation. It is often ìn-house' in character and is generally based onshort-term funding. By the end of the twentithcentury the evaluation industry had grownsubstantially. The question of the effectivenessof the myriad of measures employed to reducecrime and criminality came to occupy thecentre of policy debates in many Westerncriminal justice jurisdictions. And yet theproblem remains as to how the meaning ofeffectiveness can be adequately pinned down.The development of a renewed interest in`what works' is for some heartening followingthe years of pessimism in criminology engen-dered by Martinson's in¯uential evaluationthat `nothing works' in rehabilitation pro-grammes for offenders (Martinson, 1974).

Evaluation

Much evaluation research has been criticizedby criminologists for being compromised byits dependency on the sponsorship of the veryagencies whose work it is asked to evaluate.However, it should not be inferred from suchcriticisms that independent, academic evalua-tion research is ¯awed per se and insigni®cantto both criminology and the policy process. InTilley's (2000) view, `What evaluations canoffer is a way of winnowing over a period oftime what works in producing varying out-comes, at least for a while, for whom and inwhat circumstances.'

At its worst, much evaluation research isshort-term in character, poorly funded, oftenundertaken by inadequately trained employ-ees of one of the agencies implicated in theprogramme concerned and characterized bysevere technical dif®culites. The lack of ade-quate and proper evaluations in criminaljustice and crime reduction is widely recog-

111EVALUATION RESEARCH

nized and remarked on by academic com-mentators. As Nick Tilley (2000) notes, thereare many areas of uncertainty in this body ofwork. In particular, the ìndustry' aroundevaluation is described by Tilley as an èvalu-ation jungle' in which there are dangers,pitfalls and dif®culties, and risks of becominglost in the thickets. The rhetorical power ofevaluation is substantial and hard(-looking)evidence can be effective in eliciting resources.Most commissioners of evaluation researchwant the `facts' but facts do not speak forthemselves in research and they are oftencontested. As noted earlier, much evaluativeresearch is tied to the àpron strings' of thesponsor, is often ìn-house' in character andbased normally on short-term funding. Allthese factors mitigate against its success asacademically credible research.

It is important to distinguish ìn-house'audits from detached and `scienti®c' research-based evaluations. Other dif®culties are asso-ciated with independent evaluations of pro-grammes. Most of those involved in theprogramme (bar the independent evaluator)are characterized by a strong success impera-tive and will be looking for good news. Andindependent and objective evaluation is attrac-tive not least for the external credibility itbrings. Negative or sober ®ndings and uncer-tain and nuanced narratives of achievementfrom academic evaluations ± which has beenthe norm ± are likely to result in tears for thosecommitted to the programme in question. Toadd to the potentially tangled terrain of evalu-ation research, it important to recognize thatacademic evaluators also have their ownagendas which may not serve the policy andpractice purposes of evaluation (such as pursu-ing their own academic research interests ratherthan those of the commissioning agency).

The attractions of evaluation research toboth the public and policy-makers lie in itsconcern with discovering just what works andwhat doesn't in speci®c contexts and pro-cesses. Indeed, the case for systematic evalua-tions of crime control and reduction initiativesmay be said to be taken as given. It is dif®cultto argue with efforts to reduce crime in themost ef®cient, effective and economical fash-ion. Indeed, all those engaged professionallyin criminal justice and crime preventiondoubtless wish to know whether their workis having a real impact. None of thoseinvolved in the work of crime reduction andcriminal justice wishes to spend time, money,effort and indeed whole careers achievinglittle or nothing. Furthermore, given thebroader backdrop of a managerialized àudit

culture' increasingly at work in criminaljustice systems, with its emphasis on themonitoring of measurable outputs, it isunlikely that the pressure on public agenciesto measure effectiveness through evaluationaudits will diminish.

It is important to note that both crime andcrime control are not `closed systems'; insteadthere are both exogenous and endogenoussources of change in these òpen systems'which undermine the predictability of futureeffectiveness on the basis of past effectiveness(Tilley, 2000). Modesty in what evaluationresearch may offer policy-makers and practi-tioners in criminal justice would appearnecessary. It is widely recognized by crimin-ologists that, however objective, academicevaluations cannot provide the sole basis fordeciding on policy and practice. Policy andpractice are necessarily the site for contestedvalue positions about which the evaluator hasno authoritative opinion.

Gordon Hughes

Associated Concepts: action research, actuarial-ism, administrative criminology, experiments,managerialism

Key ReadingsMartinson, R. (1974) `What works? Questions and

answers about prison reform', Public Interest, 35,pp. 22±54.

Pawson, R. and Tilley, N. (1997) Realistic Evaluation.London, Sage.

Sherman, L., Gottfredson, D., MacKenzie, D., Eck, J.,Reuter, P. and Bushway, S. (1997) `PreventingCrime: What Works, What Doesn't, What'sPromising'. A Report to the US Congress,http://www.ncjrs.org/works/index.htm

Tilley, N. (2000) `The evaluation jungle', in K. Pease,S. Ballintyne and V. McLaren (eds), Key Issues inCrime Prevention, Crime Reduction and CommunitySafety. London, IPPR.

EXPERIMENTS

De®nition

An experiment is a research study in whichthe researcher makes a measured interventionor treatment ± a manipulation of the indepen-dent variable(s) ± and observes its effect on adependent variable, with (ideally) every otherpossible source of variation in the dependent


variable controlled by the design of the study.Where literally every other possible source ofvariation has been controlled, any observedchange in the dependent variable must bedue to the manipulation of the independentvariable.


Figure 1 illustrates a typical two-group experi-ment. The upper line represents a group whoreceive the treatment or intervention, and weshall assume that their experience betweentime 1 and time 2 is carefully controlled. Theirstate at time 1 and time 2 is carefullymeasured, and any change is recorded. Achange at time 2 might not be due to themanipulation, however, it might have hap-pened in any case simply from maturation(growing older). We therefore have a secondgroup who are as similar as possible to the®rst at time 1 and whose experience betweentime 1 and time 2 is as near as possible thesame, except that they do not receive thetreatment. If Group 1 differs from Group 2 attime 2, having been similar at time 1, then thedifference must logically be due to thetreatment, which is the only difference in thetwo group's experiences.

One further check that is generally made ison the operation of chance itself. Becauseeffects are normally probabilistic rather thanabsolute, a small difference between the two

groups may not signify more than theoperation of chance. That is, if the manipula-tion had no effect whatsoever, we would stillexpect group scores not to come out exactlyidentical but to vary a little. The question is,how large is `small' or `very slightly'? In otherwords, how big does a difference have to bebefore we pay attention to it? As a decisionrule we use statistical techniques based on themathematics of probability which can specify,given certain assumptions, how likely a givensize of difference is to be obtained by chancealone. Arbitrarily we tend to reject the `nullhypothesis' of only chance variation when theodds on obtaining our result by chance aloneare as long as one in twenty (p <0.05) or one ina hundred (p <0.01). If the observed result issuf®ciently unlikely on one of these criteria itis described as statistically signi®cant andaccepted as probably re¯ecting a real under-lying difference. (Statistical mathematics iscomplex but the application of statistical testsis relatively easy, given computer packages todo the calculations for us.)

One use of experimental designs is in theevaluation of treatments, policies and institu-tional changes. To evaluate the effectiveness ofa new way of running a prison, for example,one might institute the new regime in onesetting and refrain from instituting it inanother. If the two settings are very similar,and the inmate groups are also very similar toeach other, then differences in inmate beha-viour between the two might be taken as

Experimentalgroup Start End

Manipulation

Measuredsimilarity

Start End

Measureddifference

Controlgroup

Time 1 Time 2

Managedsimilarity

Figure 1: The design of the ideal experiment

113EXPERIMENTS

probably the result of the innovation (but withconsiderable reservations, discussed below).Experimental research is seldom used forthe study of crime and the causes of crime,because it is generally impossible and alwaysunethical to institute a manipulation of somepeople's lives and refrain from doing so withothers, at random, in order to make observablechanges in their behaviour or attitudes. Thegross factors known to be linked to crime anddisorder ± gender, class, material deprivationand unemployment, membership of particulargroups or subcultures, perhaps personalityvariables ± are not susceptible to manipulationby the experimenter.

Evaluation

The logic of experimentation is impeccable,but its preconditions can seldom be met. Forthe experiment to prove causation conclu-sively, every extraneous factor must be con-trolled and every variable precisely measured.It is very dif®cult to control every extraneousfactor outside the laboratory (or at all, withhuman subjects). Real-life experimental eva-luations tend to founder on the dif®culty ofmeasuring the intervention (the treatment):when something is `shown to work' it isgenerally very dif®cult indeed to specifyprecisely what that `something' is.

Roger Sapsford

Associated Concepts: causation, evaluationresearch

Key ReadingsFowles, A.J. (1978) Prison Welfare: An Account of an

Experiment at Liverpool. Home Of®ce ResearchStudy No. 35. London, HMSO.

Haney, C., Banks, C. and Zimbardo, P.G. (1973)Ìnterpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison',International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1,pp. 69±97.

Jupp, V. (1989) Methods of Criminological Research.London, Unwin Hyman.

EXTRATERRITORIAL LAWENFORCEMENT

De®nition

Law enforcement activity which extends out-with the boundaries of the state in which the

law enforcement agency so engaged is of®-cially headquartered.


There are a number of legal principles thatgive meaning to the idea of èxtraterritoriallaw enforcement'. The most important is the`territorial principle', which is a concept thatre¯ects an important aspect of sovereignty.Under this principle the state has the authorityto act as the sovereign power within itsterritory. According to Shaw (1997, p. 458),this ìs the indispensable foundation for theapplication of the series of legal rights a statepossesses'. In the criminological domain it iswell accepted that a state should be able toprosecute offences committed, or allegedlycommitted, on its soil, since territoriality is alogical manifestation of the international state-system which vests power in the authoritiesrepresenting the individual state's sovereignpower. The logical corollary of this is thatother states do not have the right to exerciselaw enforcement powers within the territoryof another sovereign state. To do so is toundertake èxtraterritorial law enforcement'.Unless states affected by extraterritorial lawenforcement consent to such it may beconsidered a violation of state sovereignty.

It is the state's authorities who are respon-sible for the conduct of law and the main-tenance of good order within its territory.Thus all crimes committed (or alleged to havebeen committed) within the territorial jurisdic-tion of a state may come before the municipalcourts and the accused, if convicted, may besentenced. This is so even if the accused is aforeign national (with the possible exceptionof persons who have diplomatic immunitywho are normally protected from suchactions).

The territorial concept has been modi®ed incertain ways in order that certain anomaliescan be answered. Thus territoriality has beenextended so as to include crimes where onlypart of the offence has occurred on a givenstate's territory. A classic illustrative examplewould be where a person ®res a weaponacross an international frontier resulting insomeone's death. In such situations both thestate where the gun was ®red and the statewhere the death takes place may exercisejurisdiction, but the actual exercise of suchpowers often depends on where the offenderis apprehended. A similar logic might also beapplied in cases involving criminal conspiracywhere criminal activities are alleged to have


occurred in each of two or more countries.This instance is, however, complicated by thefact that `criminal conspiracy' is not recog-nized in every jurisdiction.

Advances in communications and travelhave transformed the context in which theseprinciples are applied. For example, in Europethe Protocol concerning Frontier Controls andPolicing, Co-operation in Criminal Justice andMutual Assistance relating to the ChannelFixed Link (1991) was established to facilitatejoint French-British policing of the ChannelTunnel. Under this Protocol police, customsand immigration of®cers may carry out theirduties in speci®ed `control zones' in oneanother's territory, and on board throughtrains and at international railway stations. Ineffect, the Protocol creates a `reciprocalconstitution of sovereign territory in thedomain of the other' (Sheptycki, 1998, p. 62).Under these arrangements each state can claimjurisdiction and can apply its own law when itcannot be ascertained with certainty whereprecisely an offence has been committed.However, it is also the case that the state that®rst receives the person suspected of havingcommitted such an offence has priority inexercising jurisdiction. Thus, although juris-diction is primarily territorial it is not exclu-sively so. States may enter into arrangementswhereby jurisdiction is exercised outside thenational territory and whereby jurisdiction byother states is exercised within the territory.

The `nationality principle' also may affectstates' view of criminal jurisdiction. Forexample, Germany claims jurisdiction overcrimes committed by German nationals, not-withstanding that the offence may have beencommitted abroad. The nationality principlemay be useful in proceeding in instanceswhere it is alleged that persons have under-taken foreign travel for the purposes ofengaging in criminal activity, for exampleillicit sexual activity with under-age persons.In the German case, charges may be brought inthe `tourist's' home country and is, in fact, theonly way to proceed since Germany will notextradite its own nationals. According to Shaw(1997), English courts usually limit suchactions to serious cases; treason, murder andbigamy have provided the case law.

The `passive personality principle' assertsthat states may exercise jurisdiction in order totry individuals for alleged offences committedabroad which affect the nationals of the stateso claiming. The International ConventionAgainst the Taking of Hostages (1979) allowsstates to claim jurisdiction in hostage incidentson the basis of the passive personality

principle, ìf the state considers it appropriate'.Further, the Comprehensive Crime ControlAct (1982) extends the jurisdiction of the USAto include `[a]ny place outside the jurisdictionof any nation with respect to an offence by oragainst a national of the United States' (Shaw,1997, p. 468). It seems likely that, as the global®ght against terrorism and transnationalorganized crime develops, so will applicationsof the passive personality principle.

The `protective principle' or the `statesecurity principle' allows states to exercisejurisdiction over àliens' (i.e. non-nationals)who have committed, or have allegedlycommitted, an act abroad that is prejudicial tothe security of the state concerned. Thisprinciple is justi®ed on the basis that it allowsfor the protection of the `vital interests' of thestate concerned. However, this is a compli-cated matter since the alleged perpetrator maynot be committing an offence under the law ofthe country of residence and an extraditionrequest may be refused on the grounds that thealleged offence is `political'. The classic case inUK law is Joyce v Director of Public Prosecutions,which pertained to the infamous pro-NaziSecond World War propagandist Lord HawHaw, who was convicted of treason.

In the wake of the Achille Lauro incident, theOmnibus Diplomatic Security and Anti-Ter-rorism Act (1986) provided for jurisdictionover homicide and physical violence outsidethe USA where an American national is thevictim. This legislation combines aspects ofboth the passive personality principle and thestate security principle. Article 6 provides thatjurisdiction may be claimed over an offencewhen a US national has been seized, threa-tened, injured or killed; or if the offence hasbeen committed in an attempt to compel theUS government to do or abstain from doingany act.

On the `high seas' criminal law enforcementis exclusive to the ¯ag-state of the vesselconcerned. The ¯ag-state may give permissionto another state's vessels to exercise criminallaw jurisdiction, or the captain of a vessel mayinvite of®cers aboard, but in the absence ofsuch permission, no vessel may be boarded onthe high seas by another country's personnel.Notable exceptions are in cases of piracy andwhen a vessel has engaged in `hot pursuit'from a place within territorial waters.

Evaluation

Extraterritorial law enforcement is frequentlycontested, even when one of the above

115EXTRATERRITORIAL LAW ENFORCEMENT

principles can be invoked. There are instanceswhere apprehension of a suspect and theexercise of criminal law jurisdiction might beconsidered illegal, especially when extraditiontreaties provide for the legal transfer ofalleged criminals. The case US v Alvarez-Machain is one example. The Supreme Courtdecision in this case suggests that, notwith-standing the existence of an extradition treatybetween the USA and Mexico, unlawfulapprehension of a suspect by state agentsacting in the territory of another state wouldnot, under American law, be considered a barto the exercise of jurisdiction. In the UK, thecase of R. v Horseferry Road Magistrates Courtex parte Bennet, the House of Lords declaredthat, where an extradition treaty exists withthe relevant country, òur courts will refuse totry him if he has forcibly been brought withinour jurisdiction in disregard of those proce-dures by a process to which our own police,prosecuting or other executive authority havebeen a knowing party' (Shaw, 1997, p. 480).

James Sheptycki

Associated Concepts: the state, transnationalorganized crime, transnational policing

Key ReadingsShaw, M.N. (1997) International Law, 4th edn.

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.Sheptycki, J.W.E. (1998) `The global cops cometh',

British Journal of Sociology, 49 (1), pp. 57±74.

EXTROVERSION/INTROVERSION

De®nition

Extroversion may be taken as meaning òut-ward turning', as in turning one's thoughts tothe world; introversion as ìnward turning', asin self-contemplation.


Carl Jung (1875±1961) used the terms to referto an outward (extroverted) or inward (intro-verted) turning of psychic energy. Jungsuggested that this distinction was, indeed,one of the most fundamental aspects of humanpersonality. Sigmund Freud (1856±1939) alsodrew on the notion of extroversion andintroversion in his theories of psychopathol-ogy. Freud saw an outward approach to life as

bene®cial, contraindicative of psychopathol-ogy; while introversion was seen to be a signof not at all healthy psychic functioning.

Personality theory, most prominent in main-stream psychology from the 1940s through tothe 1970s, also used the notion of extrover-sion/introversion. However, the terms extro-version and introversion were often used torefer to social behaviour, rather than psychicfunctioning. In particular, the psychometricapproach to the measurement of personalityidenti®ed outgoing, sociable behaviour andinward-looking, withdrawn behaviour asopposite poles of a basic personality type.This personality type was described in detailin the work of Hans Eysenck (1916±97), withExtroversion (E), alongside Neuroticism (N)and Psychoticism (P), as the three basicdimensions of personality (Eysenck, 1959).

Eysenck's work is important because heattempted to connect his basic personalitytypes to other areas of research and theory soas to produce a more complete account ofhuman functioning. In particular, Eysenckmade connections between physiological func-tioning (primarily the central and autonomicnervous systems), conditionability in Pavlo-vian terms, and social development. Simply,Eysenck argued that a personality type whichcombined High E and High N would con-dition least well; while a Low E±Low Ncombination would condition most effectively.Eysenck developed this theme to give anaccount of criminal behaviour based on histheory of personality (Eysenck, 1964, 1977).

The force of Eysenck's contribution was topresent a testable theory of antisocial beha-viour. The evidence testing the theory is mixed,with some studies indicating support forEysenck's position. However, psychologicaltheories have moved on to become much moreenvironmental in nature, placing a greateremphasis on the role of the social and physicalenvironment in explaining behaviour.

Clive Hollin

Associated Concepts: conditioning, individualpositivism, personality theory

Key ReadingsEysenck, H.J. (1959) Manual of the Maudsley

Personality Inventory. London, University ofLondon Press.

Eysenck, H.J. (1964) Crime and Personality. London,Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Eysenck, H.J. (1977) Crime and Personality, 3rd edn.London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.


F

FAMILY CRIME

De®nition

An emergent generic term which drawsattention to the extent and range of violenceand abuse in `private' domestic life.


Historically, one of the major consequences ofrepresenting crime as part of the public sphereis that events occurring within the privatesphere of the family have been considered tobe less serious than `real crime' and as some-thing distinct from crises of law and order. Forexample, domestic violence, child abuse andelder abuse have rarely been discussed as partof political and public concerns about the`problem of crime'. This partiality is alsore¯ected in academic criminology. Relativelyfew texts discuss child abuse and elder abuse,in particular, except in the context of victimi-zation.

Family violence, understood primarily interms of cruelty to children, but also involvingwhat was described as conjugal violence, was®rst identi®ed as a social problem in the latenineteenth century. The public concern at thetime was short-lived, and did not re-emergeuntil the second half of the twentieth century.Events outside the family which might beidenti®ed as criminal have tended, except inèxtreme' cases, to be seen as normal if theyoccur within the con®nes of family relation-ships. For example, if an adult assaults anotherin the street, it is likely to be considered acriminal act; but if a man hits his wife at homethis is more likely to be seen as a domesticargument. Equally, if parents hit a child, thismay be seen as normal discipline, an under-

standable reaction to a dif®cult child, or atworst cruelty, yet infant murders are morecommon than murders in any other age group.

Since the 1960s different forms of familyviolence have come to be identi®ed and mademore visible: physical abuse and neglect ofchildren in the 1960s, domestic violence in the1970s, child sexual abuse in the 1980s andelder abuse in the 1990s. As a result it has beenargued that the family is the predominantsetting for every form of physical violence:from slaps to torture and murder. Some formof physical violence in the life cycle of familymembers is so likely that it can be said to beàlmost universal' (Hotaling and Straus, 1980).

By the end of the twentieth century domes-tic violence in particular assumed a newvisibility. In the UK evidence from victimiza-tion surveys revealed that:

· one woman in four experiences domesticviolence at some stage in their life;

· two women are killed by current orformer partners every week;

· thousands of children witness cruelty andviolence everyday;

· domestic violence accounts for one-quar-ter of all violent crime.

In contrast, child abuse does not typicallyappear in victim surveys; estimates of itsextent are usually taken from the numbers ofchildren whose names have been placed onchild protection registers, but even then theynumber tens of thousands every year.

Evaluation

As a result there now appears to be a greateragreement that family crime not only existsbut is extensive. But there remains littleconsensus on how such violence and abuse

should be understood and tackled. Histori-cally the issue has been seen as primarily aprivate, a welfare or a civil, rather than acriminal, matter. It remains signi®cant that the®rst Society for the Protection of Children wasonly set up in New York in 1871 when a childwho was being treated cruelly by her adoptiveparents could only be `rescued' when a judgeinterpreted that the word ànimal', in the lawsagainst cruelty to animals, might also includechildren. Similarly from the earliest record,many, if not most, societies have given thepatriarch of the family the right to use forceagainst women and children under hiscontrol. The issue of `legitimate chastisement'is most strikingly illustrated by the `rule ofthumb', which is reputedly derived from theancient right of a husband to beat his wifewith a stick no thicker than his thumb.

Since the 1970s feminist research and cam-paigning have been pivotal in providingresources for women survivors of maleviolence and in ensuring that, ®rst, rape anddomestic violence and, latterly, child sexualabuse have been ®rmly placed on the politicalagenda. Gordon (1989) challenged the idea thatstate intervention was an intrusion into privatematters by asking `whose privacy' and `whoseliberties' were being violated. Many jurisdic-tions now recognize domestic violence as acrime and as a police priority. However, thestate response to violence against children hasbeen more ambivalent and clouded in notionsof child protection, rather than criminalizingabusers. Although corporal punishment ofchildren has been condemned by manyWestern jurisdictions and by international con-ventions of human rights, the constitution of`reasonable chastisement' remains contested.In the UK, for example, there is no singlecriminal offence of abusing a child. Strategies totackle domestic violence also remain presentedas part of crime reduction policies rather thanin terms of analyses of gender relations or of thenature of families (Saraga, 2001).

A constantly shifting balance betweenfamily privacy, support for parental authorityand public recognition of familial violencecontinues to marginalize the issue of familycrime in broader law and order agendas. Itremains to be seen how far emergentdiscourses of human rights will be able toovercome such persistent ambivalence.

Esther Saraga and John Muncie

Associated Concepts: masculinities, radical fem-inism, victimology, violence

Key ReadingsBiggs, S., Phillipson, C. and Kingston, P. (1995) Elder

Abuse in Perspective. Buckingham, Open Univer-sity Press.

Dobash, R.E. and Dobash, R.P. (eds) (1998) Rethink-ing Violence against Women. London, Sage.

Gordon, L. (1989) Heroes of their Own Lives: ThePolitics and History of Family Violence, 1880±1960.London, Virago.

Hotaling, G.T. and Straus, M.A. (eds) (1980) TheSocial Causes of Husband±Wife Violence. Minnea-polis, University of Minnesota Press.

Morgan, J. and Zedner, L. (1992) Child Victims.Oxford, The Clarendon Press.

Saraga, E. (2001) `Dangerous places: the family as asite of crime', in J. Muncie and E. McLaughlin(eds), The Problem of Crime, 2nd edn. London,Sage.

FEAR OF CRIME

De®nition

Fear of crime is a rational or irrational state ofalarm or anxiety engendered by the belief thatone is in danger of criminal victimization.


Life in complex highly urbanized societiesrequires high levels of trust in others,especially strangers, and there is considerableevidence that `strangers' are a potent source offear in the public imagination. Particularforms of `dangerous stranger' crime and/orhigh levels of crime can have a corrosive effecton everyday life because of the individual andpublic fear and anxiety they generate. Apervasive fear of crime encourages physicaland psychological withdrawal from the com-munity. It weakens informal social controlsystems and undermines the capacity ofindividuals and communities to respond tothe problems that they face. As a consequence,it provides space for further crime anddisorder. Public faith in the criminal justicesystem and the capacity of the state to protectits citizens is also damaged by fear of crime.This produces public calls for tougher law andorder policies and creates the demand for highlevels of private anti-crime security and self-protection.

Research suggests that the fear of crime isan ill-de®ned term that covers a variety ofcomplex worries and anxieties. It relates to an


individual's judgement about the amount andnature of crime in society and her/his ownneighbourhood. Self-perceived vulnerability isalso crucial to levels of individual fear. It alsorelates to a multitude of anxieties about thepace and nature of social and cultural change.For example, a sense of neighbourhooddecline and shifts in racial and ethnic demo-graphics seem to be particular sources of fearand anxiety. Conventional wisdom holds thatthe members of the public most afraid of crimeare the ones who have been victimized.However, research in a variety of jurisdictionssuggests that the relationship between the riskof victimization and fear of crime is notstraightforward. Although it is true thatamong certain sections of the public fear ofcrime would seem to be out of all proportionto the actual risk of becoming a victim, thisgeneral statement about risk needs to bequali®ed. In-depth research among women inspeci®c localities, for example, suggests thattheir fears and concerns are not exaggerated.On the contrary, women have a well-foundedand precise understanding of their vulner-ability with regard to sexual violence.

Fear of crime can escalate because of: directexperience; secondary knowledge fromfamily, friends and acquaintances; the cam-paigning work of pressure groups represent-ing victims; police of®cers and politicians whowant to play the law and order card; theactivities of private security ®rms looking forbusiness; and insurance companies protectingtheir interests. Sections of the news mediahave a key role to play in circulating fear ofcrime through: over-reporting of violent andsexual crimes; personalization and sensatio-nalization techniques; intense coverage of, andcommentary on, crimes that grip the publicimagination; and hard line and alarmistcampaigns against particular types of crim-inals.

Evaluation

For criminal justice policy-makers in manyjurisdictions tackling the fear of crime hasbecome a priority. Government-sponsoredadvertising campaigns have been run in anattempt to persuade the public that many oftheir fears are irrational. Efforts have also beenmade to persuade the news media to be moreresponsible in their crime reporting activities.Situational crime prevention strategies havebeen used by administrative criminologists totarget harden both potential victims andlocations. Left realist inspired local authorities

in the UK have developed situational andcommunity-based safety strategies that areintended to protect citizens from the criminalor anti-social behaviour of others and enablethem to pursue their lives without the fear ofvictimization. These strategies speci®cally takeaccount of the safety needs of vulnerablemembers of the community. Police forces havealso developed aggressive, high pro®le opera-tional strategies to shift the burden of fearfrom potential victims to offenders.

These policy developments and practicalinitiatives aside, there remains an urgent needto reach a more sophisticated theorization ofsuch concepts as `fear', `risk', `danger',`security' and `safety'.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: left realism, moral panic,personal safety, risk, situational crime preven-tion, victimology

Key ReadingsBest, J. (1999) Random Violence: How we Talk About

New Crimes and New Victims. Berkeley, Universityof California Press.

Davis, M. (1998) Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and theImagination of Disaster. New York, MetropolitanBooks.

Ferraro, K.F. (1995) Fear of Crime: InterpretingVictimization Risk. Albany, State University ofNew York Press.

Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2000) `The role ofanxiety in fear of crime in everyday life', in T.Hope and R. Sparks (eds), Crime, Risk andInsecurity: Law and Order in Everyday Life.London, Routledge.

Lewis, D.A. and Salem, G.W. (1985) Fear of Crime:Incivility and the Production of a Social Problem.New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction.

Schlesinger, P. and Tumber, H. (1994) ReportingCrime: The Media Politics of Criminal Justice.Oxford, The Clarendon Press.

FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGIES

De®nition

Varied analyses using feminist or criticalsocial theories that ask: what is the place ofsex/gender in crime and justice? And what isthe place of sex/gender in criminological andjustice theories?

119FEMINIST CRIMINOLOGIES


Feminist criminologies challenge the andro-centrism (or male-centredness) of the ®eld ofcriminology and its explanations of crime andjustice system practices in varied ways. Takinga broad and inclusive de®nition of feministperspectives, two major axes are apparent: onedrawing on liberal theory and the other oncritical social theory (Daly and Chesney-Lind,1988).

Liberal feminist criminologies assume thatmen and women are `the same' but womenare denied opportunities to do the same thingsas men, including participating in crime. Thisperspective typically ignores class and racial-ethnic differences among women, and de®nesgender either as the possession of masculineor feminine attitudes or as role differencesbetween men and women. By contrast,feminist criminologies that draw on criticalsocial theories assume that men and womenare both the same and different, and theyfocus on gender power relations not roledifferences. They argue that traditional crim-inological theories are incapable of explainingthe relationship of sex/gender to crime orjustice system practices. This latter set offeminist criminologies is diverse; it includesscholars who focus exclusively on sex/gender,who are interested in the intersections of class,race and gender, and who analyse sex/genderas an active accomplishment or as a discursive®eld. They often draw from feminist workoutside criminology, including post-struc-tural, post-colonial, critical race, philosophical,discourse and psychoanalytical theories.

Feminist criminologies are new, havingemerged in the 1970s inspired by the women'smovement. Beginning in the mid-1980s, theybegan to change, re¯ecting shifts in feministthought more generally. Recent work attendsto differences among women, to the impact ofpost-structuralist thinking in representing`women', and to different epistemologies inproducing feminist knowledge: empiricist,standpoint and postmodern. Whereas scholarsin the 1970s and 1980s focused on depicting`real women' and `women's experiences',those in the 1990s became interested in prob-lems of representing `women' in light of thediscursive power of social, criminological andlegal texts to contain sex/gender and womenin ways that seemed obdurate to change(Smart, 1995).

During the 1990s, three modes of analysingsex/gender have emerged: class±race±gender,doing gender and sexed bodies (Daly, 1997).Class±race±gender focuses on the intersec-

tions of different social relations on women's(and men's) lives; doing gender (and subse-quently doing masculinity) centres on thesituations and social practices that producegender; and sexed bodies focuses on sexualdifference and on the relationship of sex andgender as corporeal and cultural categories.During this period there has been increasinginterest to portray women victims and law-breakers as having choice and agency, ratherthan depicting women (or girls) as passivevictims of male (or white) oppression (Daly,1998).

Evaluation

Feminist perspectives in criminology are avery recent development, having only begunto appear in criminology or criminal justicetexts in the early 1990s. As a set of perspec-tives, feminist criminologies make diverseclaims about the relationship of sex/genderto crime and justice system practices. There isno one feminist criminology, and somesuggest that the term feminist criminologyshould be abandoned. Over the past threedecades, feminist perspectives in criminologyhave been applied most frequently to victimi-zation, especially to family violence andsexual assault. While developed feministtheories of victimization and men's violencetoward women have emerged, feminist the-ories of crime are less evident.

Different sources of ®eld expansion, onebeginning with theories of crime and the otherbeginning with theories of gender, havecreated different types of knowledge aboutwomen, gender and crime. The ®rst follows inthe footsteps of traditional criminology and isliberal feminist in orientation; it seeks to devisea comprehensive theory that would explaingender differences in law-breaking (Steffens-meier and Allan, 1996). The second is theprovince of more critical feminist criminolo-gists, who begin with theories of sex/genderand with studies of women's (and men's) lives,and apply this body of knowledge to crime.This group is less interested in devising acomprehensive theory of gender and crime,and more inclined to identify the ways inwhich sex/gender structures men's andwomen's lifeworlds, identities and thinkablecourses of action (Maher, 1997). Future workwill likely re¯ect theory-building preferencesstructured not only by liberal and critical socialtheories, but also by the theorist's gender.

Kathleen Daly


Associated Concepts: critical criminology, hege-monic masculinity, liberal feminism, feministresearch, masculinities, postmodern feminism,radical feminism, sexuality, victimology

Key ReadingsDaly, K. and Chesney-Lind, M. (1988) `Feminism

and criminology', Justice Quarterly, 5 (4), pp. 497±538.

Daly, K. (1997) `Different ways of conceptualizingsex/gender in criminological theories and theirimplications for criminology', Theoretical Crimino-logy, 1 (1), pp. 25±51.

Daly, K. (1998) `Gender, crime, and criminology', inM. Tonry (ed.), The Handbook of Crime andPunishment. New York, Oxford University Press.

Maher, L. (1997) Sexed Work: Gender, Race andResistance in a Brooklyn Drug Market. Oxford, TheClarendon Press.

Smart, C. (1995) Law, Crime and Sexuality. London,Sage.

Steffensmeier, D. and Allan, E. (1996) `Gender andcrime: toward a gendered theory of femaleoffending', Annual Review of Sociology, 22, pp.459±87.

FEMINIST RESEARCH

De®nition

The term `feminist research' escapes anysimple or ready de®nition. The questions:`what makes research feminist?' and ìs itpossible to speak of feminist methodology/iesor method?' have been the subject of continu-ing debate since at least the early 1980s.


Early debate centred on the assertion thatfeminist research was `research about women,by women, for women'. Feminists recognizedthat women had been marginalized, stereo-typed and sexualized in pre/non-feministresearch. This àbsence' was ®rst addressedby making women visible as autonomoussubjects. However, the far-reaching nature offeminist critique generated complex methodo-logical and epistemological questions to theextent that the feminist research project cameto entail more than a simplistic adding ofwomen to existing research agendas.

In criminology this is evident in a body ofempirical studies examining women's relation

to patriarchal institutions, for example in law,criminal justice and policing. As well asredressing absences in such research, thesestudies, consistent with feminism, advocatedpolitical and policy interventions designed tosecure bene®cial changes to the circumstancesof those found to be experiencing oppressionor discrimination. From the outset, feministresearch aimed to both understand the natureof patriarchal oppression and to bring aboutchange (Kelly et al., 2000).

Although the àbout women, by women, forwomen' formulation became something of anorthodoxy in the early 1980s, it has provedinadequate as a de®nition. Duelli Klein (1983)dismissed the notion that focusing on womenas subjects is suf®cient to de®ne research asfeminist, arguing that without a feministframework, research about women can perpe-tuate dominant androcentric assumptions. Theformulation was also limiting in its exclusionof research into the operation of male power,patriarchal institutions, men and masculinity,although these issues featured signi®cantly infeminist research agendas. The early formula-tion also suggested that to be feminist,research had to be conducted by women,although it is clear from Duelli Klein that thesigni®cant factor is a commitment to femin-ism. As a result, the assertion that feministresearch was `for women', came closest toidentifying what makes research feminist.De®ned by Duelli Klein (1983, p. 90) as `. . .research that tries to take women's needs,interests and experiences into account andaims at being instrumental in improvingwomen's lives . . .' the `for women' tenetestablished feminist research as `women-centred'.

Through its commitments to feminism and awomen-centred research practice, feministresearch presents a major challenge to theempiricist orthodoxy that social scienceresearch should strive for objectivity and bevalue-free. In relation to criminology, it isrevealed that what previously passed asobjective was imbued with masculinist mis-representations of women. Recognizing thatscholarship inevitably re¯ects the conditionsof its production, including the genderstandpoint of its producers, feminism rejectsthe possibility of objective knowledge. Rather,the subjectivity of the researcher is acknowl-edged as signi®cant in the research process.Re¯exivity at the personal level is a coremethodological principle in feminist research.As Holland and Ramazanoglu (1994, p. 130)note, a key innovation of feminist research is`the attempt to grasp the parts that experience,

121FEMINIST RESEARCH

emotion and subjectivity play in the researchprocess, rather than seeing these as weak-nesses to be controlled'.

The critique of objectivity extended toresearch practice. Feminism demonstratedhow the aim of objectivity resulted in theobjecti®cation of research participants. Incontrast, feminist researchers respect partici-pants as holders of valuable knowledge andexperience. Being granted permission togather and use this knowledge is considereda privilege. In accordance with feminist ethicsis the commitment to developing researchpractices that ensure that women are notexploited or hurt by the research process. Incontrast to the positivist commitment toòbjectivity', the `women-centred' character offeminist research highlights the importance ofsubjectivity and meaning. MacKinnon (1987),for example, makes connections betweenfeminist research, consciousness raising andthe practice of sharing individual and perso-nal experiences. Without structural and cul-tural location, subjectivity in itself is not asuf®cient basis for theory-building, but whencontextualized, it represents a signi®cantstarting point.

Placing women's experience at the centre ofresearch carries the danger of exclusions inrelation to marginalized groups, for example,black and minority ethnic women, lesbiansand those belonging to minority faith groups.The question of `which women?' must also beinterrogated. This point has been emphasizedin black feminist critiques and in research thatis sensitive to issues of inclusion and exclu-sion.

Considerable emphasis was initially placedon qualitative methods in order to be sensitiveto subjective experience and the meaningsaccorded to it. This approach also enabledpower imbalances between the researcher andresearch subjects to be more readily negotiated.In fact, by the late 1980s, feminist research wasoften represented as synonymous with quali-tative methodology. However, for feministsinvolved in activism, awareness of the strategicrole of statistics in establishing a case forpolitical intervention meant that quantitativeresearch also became something of a necessaryevil. But feminist attempts to develop more`participant friendly', sensitive and accounta-ble survey practices led to some creativeinnovations. Contrary to some academicrepresentations, feminist research practice hasdemonstrated that all methods ± surveys,discourse analysis, as well as autobiographicalaccounts and face-to-face interviewing ± havebeen drawn on by feminists.

It is not the research methods that makeresearch distinctively feminist. Rather, whatdistinguishes feminist research is its feministcommitment to producing research `forwomen', the identi®cation of women's experi-ences as a new empirical resource and thepositioning of the researcher within theresearch processes. The distinctiveness offeminist research lies at these related levelsof methodology and epistemology:

· Feminist research is explicitly positionedwithin the feminist project of understand-ing the nature of women's oppressionwith a view to ending it.

· The research agenda re¯ects women'sconcerns.

· Its underlying theory is feminist and itspractice centres on women's experienceswithin a framework that acknowledgescontinuity and difference between womenpositioned differently in relation to othermajor power structures, signi®cantly race,sexuality, culture and class.

· Its outcomes are presented accessibly andmade available to those for whom theywill be useful.

· It recognizes the signi®cance of genderand gender power relations in all dimen-sions of social life.

· It accepts the importance of subjectivityand personal experience of the researcher.

· It minimizes or eliminates exploitativerelations between researchers and partici-pants.

These principles are embedded in practiceat all stages of feminist research fromtheorizing the initial problem, its underpin-ning epistemologies, the data-gathering pro-cess, to the writing and publication ofoutcomes, including a strategic considerationof how to frame the issues and whether andwhere to publish.

Evaluation

Feminist research is not primarily aboutmethods. It is a theoretical, empirical, inter-pretative, critical and engaged process,informed by the goal of ultimately eliminatingthe oppression of women. Acknowledgingthat feminist work is positioned within astruggle for change does not mean that it isbiased, simply subjective and anecdotal. Onthe contrary, the development of strategies forchange requires an accurate naming andanalysis of the existing situation or problem.


Feminist research aims to produce outcomesthat can be veri®ed. Its openness regardingmethodological and theoretical assumptionsfacilitates accountability and criticism. Howfeminist research is evaluated depends pri-marily on the standpoint of the reviewer.Those hostile to feminism criticize its overtlypolitical standpoint, its emphasis on subjectiv-ity and rejection of objectivity and its lack of acommon method. Those more persuaded byfeminism evaluate it against its own aims andachievements, including its usefulness ingenerating change.

Jill Radford

Associated Concepts: critical criminology, criti-cal research, liberal feminism, radical femin-ism, re¯exivity

Key ReadingsDuelli Klein, R. (1983) `How to do what we want to

do: thoughts about feminist methodology', in G.Bowles and R. Duelli Klein (1983) Theories ofWomen's Studies. London, Routledge and KeganPaul.

Holland, J. and Ramazanoglu, G. (1994) `Power andinterpretation in researching young women'ssexuality', in M. Maynard and J. Purvis (eds),Researching Women's Lives from a Feminist Perspec-tive. London, Taylor and Francis.

Kelly, L., Burton, S. and Regan, L. (1994) `Research-ing women's lives or studying women's oppres-sion? Re¯ections on what counts as feministresearch', in M. Maynard and J. Purvis (eds),Researching Women's Lives from a Feminist Perspec-tive. London, Taylor and Francis.

Kelly, L., Radford, J. and Scanlon, J. (2000)`Feminism, feminisms: ®ghting back for women'sliberation', in K. Atkinson, S. Orton and G. Plain(eds), Feminisms on Edge: Politics, Discourses andNational Identities. Cardiff, Cardiff AcademicPress.

MacKinnon, C. (1987) Feminism Unmodi®ed: Dis-courses on Life and Law. Cambridge, MA, HarvardUniversity Press.

FOCUS GROUPS

De®nition

A form of interview which involves a numberof individuals who discuss a particular topicunder the direction of a facilitator whopromotes interaction between individuals

and assures that the discussion remains onthe topic of interest. The data are not just theoutcome of an exchange between the facil-itator and the group but also the outcome ofinteractions between group members.


The term `focus group' is derived from Mertonand Kendall's (1946) work on the persuasive-ness of wartime propaganda in the USA.Focus groups subsequently became a favouredtool within market research, for example, toexamine product imagery. In the l980s andl990s they became widely used by socialscientists and also by political parties to gatherideas regarding policy formation and presen-tation.

Social scientists use focus groups in threeways. First, they are used in an exploratoryrole, as a preliminary to more extensiveresearch. For example, data collected fromthe groups can be used to identify issueswhich are crucial to the participants them-selves, rather than what social scientists thinkare important; they may help to devise sub-sequent research design; and they can assist inthe formulation of questions to be used instructured interviews. Secondly, focus groupscan be employed as a method in their ownright and as a central part of a research study,for example, to ®nd out about how represen-tatives of a community experience crimevictimization and what views they haveabout strategies for prevention. Thirdly,focus groups can be used to triangulate orsupport ®ndings from other forms of research.Focus groups can generate in-depth attitudes,opinions, examples and case studies which areoften not obtainable from large-scale butshallow social surveys.

Typically, focus groups comprise betweenfour and 12 participants, who will have beenselected because they ®t some criteria that arerelevant to the research topic. Usually anattempt is made to ensure that the composi-tion of the group is representative of thepopulation to which the researchers wish theconclusions to apply. Discussion of topics isinitiated by a facilitator who starts withintroductions and general issues and thenmoves progressively to more focused ques-tions. The role of facilitator is not solely toinitiate an exchange with group members (asin-depth interviews) but to encourage interac-tions between group members which generatedata not usually obtained in one-to-one inter-views. The advantages of this interactive effect

123FOCUS GROUPS

are that group members can be reminded ofissues by others in the group; they cangenerate ideas new to the researcher; andthey can give support to each other in dis-cussing sensitive topics. For example, researchinvolving a group discussion on domesticviolence with a group of women from refugesfound that they were prepared to shareinformation of a personal and harrowingnature because they had had similar experi-ences. Once one group member began to talk,others were prepared to join in.

Evaluation

As with all methods of research there is atrade-off between strengths and weaknesses inrelation to the topic of research. Focus groupsare quicker and cheaper than detailed inter-views with an equivalent number of indivi-duals. They provide the depth and ¯exibilityof approach of unstructured interviews but inaddition provide insights into the effects ofinteractions between group members. Inaddition, group interviews can support indi-viduals in discussing sensitive topics and alsofacilitate the brainstorming of original ideas.However, a good deal of skill is required ofthe facilitator in encouraging interactions,managing group dynamics and keeping dis-cussion on the central topic. There can also beproblems of generalizability and researchersshould exercise caution in making inferencesfrom a focus group to a wider population. Thisis one of the criticisms levelled at the use offocus groups by political parties to assist in theformulation of policy.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: ethnography, feministresearch, triangulation

Key ReadingsKreuger, R.A. (1994) Focus Groups: A Practical Guide

for Applied Research. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage.Merton, R. and Kendall, P. (1946) `The Focused

Interview', American Journal of Sociology, 51, pp.541±57.

Morgan, D.L. (ed.) (1993) Successful Focus Groups.Newbury Park, CA, Sage.

Stewart, D.W. and Shamdasani, D.N. (1990) FocusGroups: Theory and Practice. Newbury Park, CA,Sage.

FOLK DEVIL

De®nition

A category of persons which becomes de®nedas a threat to societal values and interests andthe embodiment of `what is wrong withsociety'. Folk devils are presented in a stylizedand stereotypical fashion by the mass media.


The concept of `folk devil' is closely associatedwith Cohen's (1972) analysis of the ways inwhich confrontations between Mods andRockers in an English holiday resort werereported in the media. The analysis owesmuch to the development of interactionist,labelling and new deviancy approaches withincriminology during the mid to late 1960s.These approaches in¯uenced the direction onCohen's empirical work, which was essen-tially qualitative and ethnographic andinvolved an examination of the role of themedia in reporting the events. His conclusionswere that the media play a key role in sym-bolization in which key symbols, such aslifestyle, are portrayed as different from thenorm and in a socially unfavourable light.Within symbolization a word, such as `Mod',becomes symbolic of a certain status, such asdelinquent or deviant. Objects, such asdistinctive hairstyles and clothing, symbolizethe word and the objects themselves becomesymbolic of the status, including the emotionsattached to the status. Symbolization is crucialto the creation of folk devils.

The media also play an important part inthe exaggeration and distortion of events, alsoin making predictions about future events,perhaps elsewhere, which are likely to be evenworse than the exaggerations and distortions.This produces forms of societal reaction to thefolk devils, such as greater police vigilanceand surveillance and public campaigns tocontrol or prohibit events. With regard to theMods and Rockers, there was pressure forgreater police vigilance and stronger actionfrom the forces of law and order. The policereacted by intensifying foot patrols andgreater levels of surveillance and interventionin seaside towns, dance halls and fairs, whichwere seen as potential areas of trouble. It is afundamental element of Cohen's thesis thatsuch societal reaction to folk devils increasesrather than decreases subsequent deviance, aprocess known as deviancy ampli®cation. The


public and police react to the folk devils interms of the images and symbols presented tothem by the media. Individuals respondaccordingly, thereby con®rming their statusas deviant and as a threat to what is viewed asnormal.

The concept `folk devil' is inextricablylinked to another, namely `moral panic'. Thethesis is that societies go through periods ofsocial change which instil feelings of uncer-tainty, fear and threat in their members andthat during such periods folk devils emerge asthe symbol, and even the cause of what iswrong. There is a middle range explanationfor the emergence of folk devils in the mediain terms of the need for `news value' and`good copy'. However, Cohen's thesis alsosuggests a much more fundamental explana-tion in the rapid social change which Britainwas undergoing in the 1960s (decline of thetraditional working-class community,increased permissiveness) and the dissipationof ensuing public anxiety by identifying folkdevils as scapegoats and as symbols of whatwas wrong.

Hall et al. (1978) drew on Cohen's work inthe analysis of the young-black-mugger-as-folk-devil. Their work was similar to Cohen'sin the way in which it identi®ed an increase instreet mugging as a socially constructedphenomenon and traced its creation as amoral panic in the media during the 1970s.However, Hall and his colleagues linked themoral panic and the portrayal of young blackmuggers as folk devils to a crisis in hegemonyduring an economic recession in a capitalistsystem. It was argued that public concernabout mugging served to distract attentionaway from the underlying causes and inher-ent problems of increasing economic decline.It thrust social anxieties on to black youthswho were perceived as threats to ordinary(often old) citizens and to social order on thestreets of inner city areas. Also, the threatfrom young black muggers was used to justifyincreased and heavier policing and a generaldrift towards a law and order society. Inoffering this analysis Hall et al. extendedCohen's thesis by adding a Marxist andcritical slant to what was a predominantlyinteractionist and labelling approach to crimeand deviance.

The concept `folk devil' is capable of wideapplicability but has been applied mostforcefully in analysis of youth and of youthcultures (although often in couplets such as`black youth', `working-class youth', ìnnercity youth'). A key reason for this is that youthare treated as a barometer of the current social

health of society and as a means of forming aprognosis for its future.

Evaluation

`Folk devil' is a robust and enduring theore-tical concept which has made importantcontributions to criminology by opening upfruitful lines of theorizing and empiricalenquiry. It has facilitated the fusion ofvaluable aspects of interactionism and label-ling theory with those offered by criticalcriminology and analysis at a social structurallevel. In doing so it has encouraged enquiry ofmicro and macro aspects of social life andinterconnections between these. What is more,more recent applications of discourse analysiswithin criminology have embraced the con-cept of `folk devil' in terms of addressing whattypes of people are portrayed as problematicwithin discourses at different levels of society,why, and with what effect.

Empirical enquiries, especially those basedon ethnographic methods, have used `folkdevil' as a sensitizing device for guidingresearch. These include documentary analysisof media reports, police reports and publicstatements by politicians and judiciary; exam-ination of the social construction of of®cialstatistics and of their role in creating crimewaves and moral panics; observation of inter-actions between `deviants' and law enforce-ment of®cers in terms of the application,receipt and ampli®cation of deviant labels. Theconcept has also had some policy applications,for example in terms of introducing topics onthe negative aspects of stereotyping into theeducation and training of criminal justicepersonnel and related professions.

Despite these contributions there is a dangerthat the discourse of `folk devil' as an exag-gerated and distorted image which is sociallyconstructed and then used as a scapegoat forsome other problems masks the fact that crimeis a reality for those victims who have experi-enced it and for those who live in fear of it.Such a viewpoint is associated with those whocome from a position of criminological realismand who emphasize the need to face up to thereality of crime.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: criminalization, demon-ization, deviance, discourse analysis, ethno-graphy, interactionism, labelling, moral panic,new deviancy theory, racialization, scapegoat-ing, social reaction, stereotyping

125FOLK DEVIL

Key ReadingsCohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The

Creation of Mods and Rockers. London, MacGibbonand Kee. (London, Paladin, 1973; new editionMartin Robertson, Oxford, 1980.)

Goode, E.R. and Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994) Moral Panics:The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford, Black-well.


Thompson, K. (1998) Moral Panics. London, Routle-dge.

FREE WILL

De®nition

Within the discipline of criminology this con-cept generally refers to the ability to choose acertain course of action against another, one ofwhich may be regarded as `deviant'. Althoughthis supposition does not presume that allbehaviour is necessarily freely and rationallychosen, it implies that individuals can recog-nize rules and laws and decide which to obey.To what extent free will exists therefore facili-tates discussions surrounding the motives andpredictability of human behaviour. Ratherthan certain acts being determined, either byforces within, or external to, the individual,this allows crime to be viewed as a matter ofpersonal autonomy.


The concept of free will has a number ofimportant implications for the study of crime,criminality and penal policy. Within each ofthese three areas theorists have sought causalexplanations, predictive models and thejusti®cation or effectiveness of modes ofpunishment. As autonomy underpins classi-cist criminological approaches and determin-ism is a central tenet of the contrastingparadigm of positivist criminologies, thenotion of freely chosen behaviour is centralto many disagreements within the discipline.Indeed, whether criminal acts are freelyenacted or externally driven is the crux ofthis major area of debate. As the legal theoristHerbert L.A. Hart, known for his in¯uentialwork on jurisprudence, argues, responsibilityfor most crimes relies upon certain `mentalelements'. Without proof that someone has the

knowledge and foresight to predict the con-sequences of their actions and their potentialharm, then although negligence may beshown, criminal responsibility would not. Heclaims that for legal purposes àn act is some-thing more than a mere movement of thebody: it must be willed' (1963: 41). To claim inthe criminal courts, for example, that anindividual is responsible and purposive intheir actions may invalidate mitigating factors,which may have led to an accusation ofmurder being reduced to manslaughter. Con-versely, if criminal intent or mens rea is notproven, if the accused is judged insane,provoked, or claims to have simply actedrecklessly, then the concept of autonomousaction may be disregarded. Being able toprove that the individual acted within therealm of freedom of choice is therefore linkedto notions of justice and legitimacy, not only intheoretical debates but also in case law.

Evaluation

One of the assumptions underpinning the ideathat individuals can exercise free will is thatsociety, law and justice are based uponequality. Individuals within this broadlyclassicist approach may not be viewed asbeing free to choose whether to take part in thesocial contract, but they have faculties ofreasoning and access to social justice. Theproblem with assuming that free will isenacted by individuals is that structureswithin society constrain different groups atdifferent times in various ways, although asBottoms and Wiles (1992/1996, p. 101) argue,ìt is dangerous to assume that place or designacts as a monocausal variable'. In paraphras-ing Anthony Giddens's work on structurationtheory (1984), they propose that althoughsociety enforces constraints, `[H]uman subjectsare knowledgeable agents . . . [who] largely actwithin a domain of `̀ practical consciousness'''(1992/1996, pp. 102±3). Finally, they quoteMarx's famous dictum that human beings`make history but not in circumstances of theirown choosing' to illustrate the dif®culties ofexplaining the constraints and choices sur-rounding the behaviour de®ned as criminal.

Similarly, in response to more individualist,psychological approaches in some cases itmight be argued that the actor's behaviourwas ìnvoluntary' due to a number of factorswhich are dif®cult to disprove. Instances ofthis include being subject to compellinginternal psychological drives, the addictionto substances such as drugs, extreme provoca-


tion or automatous behaviour such as sleep-walking. More recent work on sociobiology,twin and adoption studies also suggests that`some factor' (Mednick et al., 1987/1996) istransmitted genetically to children whichincreases their propensity to commit crime.

Other more recent advocates of thisapproach are Wilson and Hernstein (1986),who suggest that although individuals are freeto choose a course of action that may becriminal, a combination of inherited traits andlearned behaviour will in¯uence their choice.Whether the act is outweighed by potentiallynegative outcomes is therefore in¯uenced,according to this sociobiological approach, bya combination of nature and nurture.

Louise Westmarland

Associated Concepts: classicism, determinism,neo-conservative criminology, rational choicetheory

Key ReadingsBottoms, A.E. and Wiles, P. (1992) Èxplanations of

crime and place', in J. Muncie, E. McLaughlin andM. Langan (eds) (1996) Criminological Perspectives.London, Sage.

Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society.Cambridge, Polity.

Hart, H.L.A. (1963) Àcts of will and legal respon-sibility', in D.F. Pears (ed.), Freedom and the Will.London, Macmillan.

Mednick, S.A., Gabrielli, W.F. and Hutchings, B.(1987) `Genetic factors in the etiology of criminalbehavior', in J. Muncie, E. McLaughlin and M.Langan (eds) (1996) Criminological Perspectives.London, Sage.

Wilson, J.Q. and Hernstein, R.J. (1986) Crime andHuman Nature. New York, Simon and Schuster.

FUNCTIONALISM

De®nition

A structuralist perspective that argues that,although crime and deviance are problematic,they must also be understood as `social facts'and analysed in terms of the possible manifestand latent functions that they perform inenabling the smooth running of the socialsystem as a whole. Hence functionalismdistances itself from those criminologicalperspectives that view crime and deviance aspathological and abnormal.


There is a long tradition of functionalisttheorizing and explanation across the socialsciences. It was introduced into sociologyduring the nineteenth century and developedand reworked within anthropology. Fromthe 1920s through to the 1950s the function-alist paradigm dominated North Americansociology and the approach was embodiedmost famously in the work of Talcott Parsonswho developed a grand theory of socialsystems.

Functionalists argue that studying society asif it were a living organism is necessary if weare to understand its major structural institu-tions and be able to explain human behaviour.Society is viewed as a delicate system wherethe interdependent parts work in an inte-grated manner for the common good. Societyis deemed to be an independent entity that isgreater than the number of individual mem-bers. In order to survive and perpetuate itself,society has needs that have to be met and incertain instances these take priority overindividual needs. Structures, institutions,practices, roles, values and norms existbecause they contribute to the maintenanceand proper functioning of society. Functionsare assumed to be either manifest (intended)or latent (unintended or unrecognized). If aninstitution is unable to carry out its functions itwill eventually cease to exist and be replacedby new institutional arrangements. Accordingto Percy Cohen (1968, p. 167), functionalisttheorizing is marked by the following basicassumptions:

· norms and values are the basic elementsof social life;

· social life involves commitments to agreednorms and values;

· societies are necessarily cohesive;

· social life depends on solidarity andgenerates harmony;

· social life is based upon reciprocity andcooperation;

· social systems rest on consensus;

· society recognizes power as legitimateauthority;

· social systems are integrated and stable;

· social systems tend to persist ± con¯ictis temporary until equilibrium is re-established;

· change is functional adaptation.

Functionalists such as Daniel Bell andTalcott Parsons were attracted to the study of

127FUNCTIONALISM

crime and deviance because in many respectsit would provide the ultimate test of theirtheorizing. However, the social theorist mostclosely associated with the initial applicationof functionalist theorizing to crime anddeviance was Emile Durkheim. His socio-logical positivism sought to identify andexplain `social facts': ways of thinking, feelingand acting that a society imposes upon itsmembers to produce order. Even though hedid not produce a systematic treatise on thesubject, crime and deviance were of interest toDurkheim because his central political projectwas working out how social cohesion andsolidarity can be secured in the face of rapidsocial and economic change.

Durkheim's contribution to functionalistcriminology is two-fold. First, he argued thatcrime and deviance are normal (social facts)because acts that offend collective norms andexpectations exist in all societies and theiruniversal presence points to their systemicfunctionality. For Durkheim, crime anddeviance, so long as they are not excessive,are functional because (i) the ritual of punish-ment is an expressive experience that serves tobind together members of a social group andestablish a sense of community and (ii) theyare useful in inaugurating necessary changesand preparing people for change. Even ifsociety discovered the means for eradicatingreal crimes, it would have to elevate humanweaknesses and petty vices to the status ofcrime. Albert Cohen (1966) built on Dur-kheim's position by clarifying the variousways that crime and deviance make positivecontributions to society:

· deviance cuts through `red tape';

· deviance acts as a safety valve for societalpressures and discontents and reducesstrains;

· deviance clari®es the rules;

· deviance unites the group against thedeviant(s) and provides commonality andsolidarity;

· deviance de®nes and heightens confor-mity and normality;

· deviance acts as a warning signal todefects in society.

A classic example of functionalist theorizingon the positive contribution of crime anddeviance to the social order remains KingsleyDavis's controversial analysis of the roleplayed by prostitution in contemporarysociety. He argues that prostitution existsdespite near universal condemnation and pro-hibition because it enables a small number of

women to take care of the sexual needs of alarge number of men: ìt is the most con-venient sexual outlet for armies and forlegions of strangers, perverts, and the physi-cally repulsive in our midst. It performs a rolewhich apparently no other institution fullyperforms' (1971, p. 351). Davis intimates thatprostitution reinforces the norms and valuesand equilibrium of the family by providing asafety valve for married men's pent up sexualfrustrations and deviant needs. Hence, pros-titution allows the family to be a model oftemperance and moderation and certi®es therespectability of married women. Prostitutionis functional for the women involved, accord-ing to Davis, because it enables them to earnmore money than they would in otheroccupations. This led to the conclusion thatthere will always be a system of socialdominance that provides the motive forcommercial sex.

Durkheim's second contribution was histheorizing on anomie. Durkheim neverspelled out how much crime and devianceare healthy and normal. For him, too littlecrime and deviance are indicative of anoverly regulated society and excessive intol-erance, whereas too much crime anddeviance lower the levels of trust and inter-dependence that are necessary for thesurvival of society. It is this point thatconnects across to Durkheim's notion of theanomic society. This is a society in which therules of behaviour and norms have brokendown during periods of rapid social changeand economic transition (recession, depres-sion or economic boom). If a gap occursbetween what the population expects andwhat the economic and productive forces ofsociety can deliver, a situation of straindevelops that can manifest itself in norm-lessness or anomie. A state of anomieundermines a society's capacity to exercisesocial control. Robert Merton (1957) subse-quently reworked the concept of anomie inan attempt to illustrate how the USA's socialstructure exerted pressure on individuals toengage in non-conformist behaviour andcould generate dysfunctionality. Durkheimviewed anomie as problematic and asso-ciated it with institutional normlessness andabnormality, but for Merton anomie resultedfrom the incongruity between culturallyvalued goals associated with the ÀmericanDream' and the number of legitimate oppor-tunities available to pursue and achieve thesegoals. The resulting strain and frustrationproduce ®ve `modes of adaptation' ± con-formity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism and


rebellion. Not surprisingly, the most commondeviant response ± innovation ± was to befound among the lower classes. Many of themajor sociological theories of delinquencyare indebted to Merton's reworking ofDurkheim's theorizing (as evidenced in sub-cultural theories and variants of controltheory, for example).

Evaluation

Functionalist theorizing was attacked duringthe 1960s and stood accused of teleology andover-determinism. Its obsession with stability,consensus and social order, its emphasis onthe self-governing nature of society and itslack of a theory of power also laid it open tothe charge of being ideologically conservativeand supportive of the status quo. Although itfell out of favour, it is possible to ®ndexamples of functionalist theorizing and logicacross a variety of positivist, structural andmaterialist criminologies. Elements of whatwe might describe as a neo-functionalist

criminology retain a ®rm presence in muchof North American criminology.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: anomie, determinism,positivism, social control theory, sociologicalpositivism, strain theory, subculture

Key ReadingsCohen, A.K. (1966) Deviance and Control. Englewood

Cliffs, NJ, Prentice±Hall.Cohen, P. (1968) Modern Social Theory. London,

Heinemann.Davis, K. (1971) `Prostitution', in R. Merton and R.

Nisbet (eds), Contemporary Social Problems, 3rdedn. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Durkheim, E. (1964) The Rules of Sociological Method.New York, The Free Press.

Merton, R. (1957) Social Theory and Social Structure.New York, The Free Press.

Messner, S. and Rosen®eld, R. (1996) Crime and theAmerican Dream. Belmont, CA, Wadsworth Pub-lications.

129FUNCTIONALISM

G

GATED COMMUNITIES

See Defensible space

GENETICS

De®nition

A genetics-based criminology concentrates onattempting to identify the biological source orsources of criminal and anti-social behaviour.


Genetic determinism, in a variety of forms, hasbeen a constant if largely hidden part of theWestern criminological tradition. The bestknown early genetic approach to criminalitywas proposed by Cesare Lombroso (1835±1909) as part of his assertion of a positivistcriminology that viewed crime as the productof physical and scienti®cally measurablevariables that were beyond the control of theindividual. Lombroso developed his theory of`the criminal type', which depended on theidenti®cation of physical characteristics thatindicated a biological reversion to a primitiveor atavistic stage of evolution. The examina-tion of the skull of a notorious Italian criminalled Lombroso to this discovery: Àt the sightof that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden,lighted up as a vast plain under a ¯aming sky,the problem of the nature of the criminal ± anatavistic being who reproduces in his personthe ferocious instincts of primitive humanityand the inferior animals.' Even thoughLombroso subsequently quali®ed his `borncriminal thesis', the conviction that crime was

hereditary generated studies such as thosecarried out in the USA by Hooton in the 1930sand Sheldon in the 1940s.

It must be noted that the Eugenics move-ment of the ®rst 30 years of the twentiethcentury is largely written out of the history ofcriminology's ¯irtation with biology. Theorigins of Eugenics lie in Darwin's theory ofevolutionary progress and it was de®ned byits originator, Sir Francis Galton (1822±1911),as `the study of the agencies under socialcontrol that may improve or impair the racialqualities of future generations either physi-cally or mentally'. The Eugenics movement ±which both conservatives and progressivesadhered to ± was obsessed with the fear thatthose with negative genes such as lowintelligence, insanity, pauperism and crimin-ality, would swamp the human race. In orderto reverse the imminent collapse of Westerncivilization, this movement argued that thebiologically un®t and undeserving should beeliminated or limited in number and thebiologically ®t and worthy be encouraged toreproduce. This highly racialized scienti®capproach to `social problems as diseases'resulted, in a variety of countries prior to theSecond World War, in immigration restric-tions, marriage laws, segregation of thementally and physically handicapped, selec-tive reproduction and the widespread practiceof sterilization. Because the historical researchhas not been carried out we do not know howmany criminologists were involved in theEugenics movement. Eugenics was ideologi-cally discredited, largely as a result of theNazis' Lebensborn and `racial self-defence'programmes, which took its core ideas totheir logical conclusions.

Human genetics ®nally emerged as acleansed discipline in the 1950s and it stayedwell away from making pronouncements oncontroversial social problems such as crimin-

ality. This was also the period when socio-logical explanations of crime were dominant.However, during the 1980s crime was revis-ited by the sociobiologists and by thoseresearchers who continued to carry out twinand adoption studies. Those presentingpapers at controversial conferences on genet-ics and crime held in the UK and USA during1995 rejected the search for the `gene forcrime'. However, they also stressed that theresearch capabilities were now available toenable scientists to untangle the genetic andenvironmental sources of crime and disorderand identify the temperamental traits andbehavioural predispositions that may triggersome individuals to engage in speci®c formsof criminality and disorder. More recently,there has been renewed speculation that thehuman genome project will allow scientists topronounce on the complex ways criminalityand disorder are genetically encoded.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: biological criminology,individual positivism, positivism, racialization

Key ReadingsBock, G.R. and Goode, J. (eds) (1996) Genetics of

Criminal and Anti-Social Behaviour. Chichester,John Wiley and Sons.

Burley, J. (1998) The Genetic Revolution and HumanRights. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Jones, S. (1996) In the Blood. London, Harper Collins.Lombroso, C. (ed.) (1911) Criminal Man According to

the Classi®cation of Cesare Lombroso. New York,Putnam.

Seldon, S. (1999) Inheriting Shame: The Story ofEugenics and Racism in America. New York,Teachers College Press.

Wilson, J.Q. and Herrnstein, R. (1985) Crime andHuman Nature. New York, Simon and Schuster.

GENOCIDE

De®nition

Acts organized and committed, in time ofpeace or war, with the intent to exterminate, inwhole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial orreligious group. It is distinguishable from allother crimes, including ethnic cleansing,because it is state organized.


In 1933, the Polish scholar Raphael Lemkinproposed that an international treaty beagreed to de®ne aggression towards national,ethnic and religious groups as an internationalcrime. In 1944, Lemkin, who was by then anadvisor to the United States War Department,coined the term genocide because he believedthat the terms `mass murder' and `war crimes'were inadequate to the task of describing andexplaining what had happened in NaziGermany. Existing criminal categories couldnot account for the motive for the crime, thatis, acting on the principle that the victim is nothuman. Lemkin de®ned genocide as a coordi-nated plan to destroy the essential foundationsof the life of national groups, with the aim ofannihilating the groups themselves. Accord-ing to Lemkin, genocide had two phases: ®rst,the destruction of the national pattern of theoppressed group; and secondly, the imposi-tion of the national pattern of the oppressor.What is signi®cant to note from the originalformulation is that physical extermination isonly the most extreme form of genocide.

In the aftermath of the Nuremberg warcrimes trials, the UN General Assemblyadopted a resolution verifying that genocidewas the most serious crime against humanityand that it was prohibited under internationallaw irrespective of whether it occurred inpeace or war. The 1948 UN Convention on thePrevention and Punishment of the Crime ofGenocide de®ned genocide as àcts committedwith the intent to destroy, in whole or in part,a national, ethnical, racial or religious group'.Genocidal acts include: killing members of thegroup; causing serious bodily or mental harmto members of the group; deliberately in¯ict-ing on the group conditions of life calculatedto bring about its destruction in whole or inpart; imposing measures intended to preventbirths within the group; and forcibly transfer-ring children of the group to another group.The 1948 Convention also outlawed conspi-racy to commit genocide, attempts to commitgenocide and complicity in genocide. Cru-cially, the convention covers both individualand state responsibility for acts of genocideand imposed a general duty on all signatorystates not only to punish but to prevent andsuppress such acts. The convention ruled thatthose charged with genocide could be tried bycourt in the territory within which the act wascommitted or by a specially convened inter-national court. To facilitate extradition pro-ceedings between states, genocide was alsodecreed to be a non-political crime.

131GENOCIDE

As a result of realpolitik, the 1948 Conven-tion settled on a more limited de®nition ofgenocide than the one coined by Lemkin. Ithas been noted, for example, that thecategories of `politically de®ned groups' andèconomically de®ned groups' were deliber-ately omitted from the de®nition, as was thenotion of cultural genocide, destroying agroup through compulsory incorporationinto a dominant culture. The principle ofìntentionality', which was embedded in thede®nition, has also been criticized by humanrights activists because it allows governmentsand individuals to argue that their actionswere accidental and/or unplanned, happen-ing in the heat of battle.

There was also considerable disagreementabout the acts of mass violence that could becovered by the de®nition. For example, in 1966,the year after General Suharto seized power inIndonesia, the military dictatorship is esti-mated to have murdered between 500,000 andone million people. After the Indonesianinvasion and annexation of East Timor in1975, an estimated 200,000 out of a totalpopulation of 700,000 were killed. During theKhmer Rouge's reign (1975±8) in Cambodia, itis estimated that between one and two millionpeople died in the `killing ®elds' as a result ofthe conditions of state-initiated massacres andprison-based execution programmes. How-ever, the international community arguedthat these acts did not meet the de®nition ofgenocide laid down by the 1948 Conventionsince both perpetrators and victims were fromthe same ethnic/racial background. In part thehesitation to de®ne these actions as genocidalalso emanated from the desire not to over-usethe term and thereby trivialize the nature andmeaning of the Holocaust.

In 1993 the ®rst international tribunal wasestablished to prosecute those responsible forcommitting or ordering serious violations ofinternational humanitarian law, includinggenocide, in the former Yugoslavia (ITY). Asimilar tribunal was established in 1994 forRwanda (ITR) to investigate the murder of800,000 people, mostly Tutsi minority by theHutu majority. Both tribunals had to developrules of procedure and establish principles tode®ne the exact criminal nature of what hadhappened. In August 1998, the ITR produced alandmark decision in the history of interna-tional criminal law when it found JeanKambanda, Rwanda's former Prime Minister,guilty of the crime of genocide. During 2000the ITY heard the ®rst charges of genocide tocome before it. The indictment of seniorof®cers of the Bosnian Serb army represented

a breakthrough in international criminal lawbecause it established that there was evidencethat senior politicians and military leaders hadplanned the massacre of 7,000±8,000 BosnianMuslims in the UN `safe haven' of Srebrenicain 1995.

In 1998 120 nation-states signed a resolutioncalling for the establishment of a permanentInternational Criminal Court (ICC) with thepower and organizational capacity to investi-gate and prosecute genocide, war crimes andcrimes against humanity. If the resistance ofpowerful nations such as the USA and Chinacan be overcome, the ICC will come intoexistence in 2002. In order to establish itscredibility, the new court will have to end the`culture of immunity' that was the hallmark ofthe twentieth century and establish punish-ments that are deemed to be appropriate tosuch criminality.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: critical research, crimesagainst humanity, denial, extraterritorial lawenforcement, hate crime, human rights, obedi-ence (crimes of ), political crime, the state, statecrime, transnational policing, torture

Key ReadingsBall, H. (1999) Prosecuting War Crimes and Genocide:

The Twentieth Century Experience. Lawrence, KS,University of Kansas Press.

Destexhe, A. (1995) Rwanda and Genocide in theTwentieth Century. New York, New York Uni-versity Press.

Gourevitch, P. (2000) We Wish to Inform You thatTomorrow We Will Be Killed. London, Picador.

Honig, J.W. and Both, N. (1996) Srebrenicia: Record ofa War Crime. Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Jonassohn, K. (1998) Genocide and Gross HumanRights Violations. Plymouth, Transaction.

GEOGRAPHIES OF CRIME

De®nition

Geographies of crime address the complex ofrelationships constructed through crime,space and place.


Cartographic schools of criminology wereestablished in various European countries


during the nineteenth century, most notably inBelgium by Adolphe Quetelet (1796±1874) andin France by A.M. Guerry. Maps were drawnto plot regional patterns of crime, comparerural and urban differences and survey therelationship between crime and other socio-economic conditions. In an allied develop-ment, in England observational studies wereundertaken within the newly industrializedcities by Mayhew and Booth to identify andexamine `criminal areas' such as the `rookeries'of London. Many of these early surveys wereundertaken to further the case for social andmoral reform. An ecological approach to thestudy of urban crime was more fully devel-oped by the Chicago School of social researchduring the 1920s. The guiding principle of theChicago School was that cities were livingorganisms, composed of interconnected partsand the task of researchers was to understandhow each part related to the overall structureof the city and the other parts. The zonaltheory of city growth developed by RobertPark and Ernest Burgess enabled them to mapthe contours of crime more precisely and tooffer an explanation as to why crime wasconcentrated in the zone of transition. CliffordShaw and Henry McKay used this conceptualframework to construct their path-breakingstudy of the relationship between juveniledelinquency, gang membership and urbansocial disorganization. Versions of the eco-logical model and methodologies developedby the Chicago school dominated studies ofurban crime undertaken between the 1920sand 1960s in cities across the United States andEurope.

As a result of theoretical and methodologi-cal developments in the 1980s and 1990s,environmental criminologies have given wayto research on how crime is spatialized. A newgeneration of criminologists from a variety ofdisciplinary backgrounds became interested intheorizing the complex human public interac-tions and relationships associated with livingin `the city'. Contemporary spatial approachesto the study of crime can be grouped into fourbroad research areas:

· Studies concerned with identifying thespatial distribution of crime, criminogeniclocalities, vulnerable areas, defendedspaces and sites of contestation andresistance.

· Studies of how and why the risk of crimevictimization is distributed over space andthe differential risks within and betweendifferent localities and various sections ofthe population.

· Studies of how and why the fear of crimeis spatialized. This involves analysing thepublic's perception of where the crimeproblem is located and working throughtheir mental mappings of safe anddangerous places.

· Studies of the ¯ow and movement of par-ticular crimes such as drugs and prosti-tution between different localities andcountries.

Evaluation

Geographical research on crime and crimin-ality has continued to play a central role in thedevelopment of crime prevention program-mes, ranging from situational crime preven-tion strategies such as target hardening andcrime prevention through environmentaldesign (CPED). The underlying premise ofthese crime prevention efforts is that properdesign and utilization of the built environmentin conjunction with new surveillance technol-ogies can lead to a reduction in the fear andincidence of crime and an improvement in thequality of urban life. De facto spatial policing isalso taking place through the privatization ofpublic space and the development of gatedor `crime-proof' communities. Sophisticatedcrime mapping techniques such as GeographicInformation Systems (GIS) are also a logical, ifcontroversial, outcome of spatial research intocrime `hotspots' (places where according to avariety of statistics the opportunities forcertain forms of crime are highest). GISconsists of specialist database managementsystems, spatial analysis packages and sophis-ticated computer mapping systems whichfacilitate `geocoded' proximity analysis, spa-tial clustering analysis and spatial correlationprocedures. It is these features that have madeGIS an invaluable tool not only for mappingcrime `hotspots' but for analysing crime trendsand managing criminal investigations.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: Chicago School of Sociol-ogy, defensible space, fear of crime, situationalcrime prevention, social ecology, surveillance,victimology

Key ReadingsCohen, J. (1941) `The geography of crime', Annals of

the American Academy of Political and SocialSciences, 217, pp. 29±37.

Fyfe, N. (2001) Geography of Crime and Policing.Oxford, Blackwell.

133GEOGRAPHIES OF CRIME

Grescoe, T. (1996) `The geography of crime',Geographical Magazine, 9, pp. 26±7.

Hirsch®eld, A., Brown, P. and Todd, P. (1995) `GISand the analysis of spatially referenced crimedata: experiences in Merseyside UK', InternationalJournal of Geographical Information Systems, 9 (2),pp. 191±210.

Longley, P.A., Goodchild, M., Maguire, D. andRhind, D.W. (1999) Geographical Information Sys-tems. London, John Wiley and Sons.

McLaughlin, E. and Muncie, J. (1999) `Walled cities:surveillance, regulation and segregation', inS. Pile, C. Brook and G. Mooney (eds), UnrulyCities. London, Routledge.

GOVERNMENTALITY

De®nition

The term applies to the characteristically`modern' form of government that governseach individual and the `population' throughapparatuses of security (police, courts, healthand welfare departments, etc.). The term alsorefers to an approach that focuses on theintellectual, linguistic and technical ways inwhich phenomena are constituted by govern-ment as governable problems. It is primarilyin the latter sense that governmentality has aplace in criminology.


Studying social relations from the point ofview of governmentality means focusing ongovernance as a mentality or rationality ofrule, stressing that phenomena have to beintellectually and linguistically represented asa certain kind of problem in order for them tobe governed. For example, Simon (1997) hasargued that American society increasingly is`governed through crime', as more and morematters are represented as problems of`criminality' and its effects, to be governedthrough criminal justice, crime prevention andso on. In turn, governmentality characteristi-cally examines how such `problematizations'are linked to practicable techniques forachieving their government. For example,crime is said increasingly to be governedthrough risk. This marginalizes therapeutic orpunitive techniques for governing offenders,and valorizes such techniques as crime pre-vention, offender incapacitation and victimcompensation and èmpowerment' (O'Malley,

1998). Governmentality thus focuses on ques-tions of how government is planned as apractical exercise. Typical research has exam-ined such issues as: how are the nature ofoffenders and the mainsprings of crime re-imagined when we move from welfare statesto neo-liberal government? How is this changelinked to changes in the types of sanction thatare deployed to deal with crime? What new`problems' of crime emerge ± for example:how to make potential victims more active insecuring themselves and their propertyagainst crime? And how to make policemore `responsive' to public demands forsecurity?

Governmentality also assumes the dispersalof governance in contemporary societies. `Thestate' becomes merely one site ± or, rather, acomplex of sites ± in which government islocated. Governmentality work has examinedhow government of crime is practised, notsimply by police and the criminal justice`system', but also by the insurance industry,communities, potential victims, shoppingcentre managers and so on. Such work, it canbe seen, avoids explanation, especially wherethis reduces government to a re¯ex of someother force, such as class interests or post-modernity. Rather, government is seen to beàssembled' from available intellectual andmaterial resources ± and so is regarded ashumanly contingent rather than theoreticallydetermined. Governmental accounts are alsocharacterized by a refusal to subject govern-ment to critique, rather seeing such evaluationas internal to government itself. These charac-teristics re¯ect a methodological suspension ordenial of truth judgements ± for understand-ing how government `makes up' its truths is akey object of analysis. Governmentality deniesan accessible `real truth' from which critiqueand explanation are mounted.

Evaluation

Governmentality is an in¯uential but stillinchoate approach, and there are debatesamong its adherents about its nature andpurpose (O'Malley et al., 1997). Consequently,making comment upon its strengths andshortcomings is subject to dispute. However,on the positive side, it has provided originaland incisive analyses of the government ofcrime, especially related to risk techniques andneo-liberal politics. Perhaps this is because itbreaks away from highly abstract theoriza-tions, and focuses on detailed con®gurationsof rule. Perhaps too it is because the refusal to


engage in critique has generated a kind ofnon-committed analytic that has opened upmany new insights. However, these possiblesources of strength are also its most criticizedfeatures.

One of the most contentious features is itsfocus on the ìdeal knowledges' or mentalitiesof governance, rather than on `what actuallyhappens'. For many critics of this aspect ofgovernmentality, it is èssential to explore thereal practices and processes in which theseprograms and rationalities and technologiesare selectively and sometimes unexpectedlyused, with all their compromised formationsand unintended effects' (Garland, 1997). Forsome governmentality writers, however, thisdescends into familiar, realist, sociologicalterrain, unlikely to provide resources to thinkbeyond what already exists, and ± perhapsironically ± unlikely to destabilize rule. Forothers, however, this exercise may be essen-tial, as part of the process of understandinggovernment's key characteristic of failure.

Another contested feature is governmenta-lity's rejection of `critique'. Some criticizegovernmentality because it does not allowcommentators to identify how malfunctioninginstitutions can be reformed, how authorities'explanations of crime are wrong, how andwhy programmes fail and so on (e.g. Garland,1997). One response would argue that thiscriticism fails to escape the problematic ofgovernment ± for like government, it sets foritself the task of making us into somethingelse, to govern us better, on the basis of a

superior regime of truth. This process ofdisplaying the truth claims of government,and their contingent nature, is the operation of`diagnosis' that displaces critique withingovernmentality. Diagnosis focuses on thequestion of `how not to be governed thus?',rather than on that of `how can we best begoverned?'. Whether this is nihilistic, orpromotes contestation of government, is thekey evaluative issue; but it involves a politicalrather than methodological choice.

Pat O'Malley

Associated Concepts: discourse analysis, post-structuralism, risk, social constructionism

Key ReadingsDean, M. (1999) Governmentality. Power and Rule in

Modern Society. London, Sage.Garland, D. (1997) ``̀ Governmentality'' and the

problem of crime', Theoretical Criminology, 1, pp.173±214.

O'Malley, P. (ed.) (1998) Crime and the Risk Society.Aldershot, Dartmouth.

O'Malley, P., Weir, L. and Shearing, C. (1997)`Governmentality, criticism, politics', Economy andSociety, 26, pp. 501±17.

Rose, N. (1999) Powers of Freedom. Cambridge,Cambridge University Press.

Simon, J. (1997) `Governing through crime', in G.Fisher and L. Friedman (eds), The Crime Conun-drum: Essays on Criminal Justice. Boulder, CO,Westview Press.

135GOVERNMENTALITY

H

HATE CRIME

De®nition

A hate crime is a criminal act which ismotivated by hatred, bias or prejudice againsta person or property based on the actual orperceived race, ethnicity, gender, religion, orsexual orientation of the victim.


Certain criminal acts, if perpetrated because ofhatred, hostility or negative attitudes towardsthe group or collectivity to which the victim isperceived to belong, are de®ned as hate crime.In jurisdictions where hate crime is recognized,the concept applies to crimes committedagainst individuals because of their real orperceived race, ethnicity, gender, religion orsexual orientation. Hence, in theory if not legis-lative practice, hate crime encompasses racistcrime, sex crime, homophobia, anti-semitismand sectarianism and links across to ethniccleansing and genocide. Campaigners haveargued that hate crimes need to be acknowl-edged as different because they in¯ict dis-tinctive collectivized harms upon their victims.

In the USA, hate crime laws have beenpassed by several states which enable theestablishment of data collection systems totrack the incidents of hate crime reported to theauthorities and/or to increase the punishmentsset for criminal actions motivated by hate. Inthe UK, hate crime was of®cially recognized bythe Metropolitan Police in the late 1990s in theaftermath of the publication of the report intothe racist murder of Stephen Lawrence. Theintention was to illustrate to minority commu-nities that the police were taking their fears andconcerns seriously and to persuade rank and

®le of®cers that these were serious forms ofcriminality worth targeting. The concept ofhate crime has come under heavy criticismfrom right wing commentators in both the USAand the UK on the grounds that it will be usedby minority groups to censor and criminalizethose who oppose multi-culturalism andpositive discrimination.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: genocide, institutionalracism, racialization, violence

Key ReadingsBowling, B. (1999) Violent Racism. Oxford, The

Clarendon Press.Cuneen, C., Fraser, D. and Tomsen, S. (eds) (1997)

Faces of Hate: Hate Crime in Australia. Annandale,Hawkins Press.

Hamm, M.S. (1993) American Skinheads: The Crimino-logy and Control of Hate Crime. New York, PraegerPress.

Jacobs, J. and Potter K. (1998) Hate Crimes: CriminalLaw and Identity Politics. Oxford, Oxford Uni-versity Press.

Jenness, V. and Grattet, R. (2000) Making Hate aCrime: From Social Movement Concept to LawEnforcement. Berkeley, University of CaliforniaPress.

Kelly, J.R. and Maghan, J. (eds) (1998) Hate Crime:The Global Politics of Polarization. Carbondale,Southern Illinois University Press.

HEDONISM

De®nition

The pursuit of pleasure, sometimes consideredas the subordination of reason to the play of

desires and the attractions of the senses.Hedonism is also associated with risk-takingand excitement in criminality.


Hedonism is fundamental to the formation ofclassical criminology, especially in the work ofBentham (1823) and Beccaria. De®ned as thedesire to maximize pleasure and minimizepain, it was assumed to be the underlyingmainspring of human behaviour. The rationalchoice criminal was imagined as weighing upthe balance of pleasures and pains likely toresult from the commission of a crime. Wherethis `felicity calculus' indicated a positivebalance of pleasures, criminal offendingwould result. As such, the assumption ofhedonism underlies most punitive penologygeared to deterrence. Bentham, himself,developed tables for the in¯iction of punish-ment based on the principle that the netcalculus of pain had only marginally tooutbalance the sum of pains. This principle,in turn, played a key intellectual role in theassault on the èxcessive' punishments of theeighteenth century.

By the 1930s, much academic criminologyhad dispensed with such thinking, arguingthat few people lead such calculating lives,that most crimes are spontaneous acts of irra-tionality, and that many criminals are con-stitutionally incapable of performing thecalculation of pleasures and pains. Despitethis, the model of hedonistic behaviour per-sisted, albeit transformed. As crime increas-ingly came to be regarded as a pathology,hedonism too was pathologized ± re-createdas the inability to govern the desire forpleasure and excitement. This pathology wastheorized as a cause of crime in a multitude ofways by positivist sociology and psychology.

Sociologically, hedonism was understood inVictorian terms as a universal, animalisticquality that socialization had to overlay withdiscipline. The middle classes were under-stood as `normal' precisely because of suchself-government: `deferred grati®cation'became the norm against which hedonismwas pathologized. Predictably, weak socializa-tion emerged early as a cause of crime, and`broken' and ìnadequate' working-classfamilies were identi®ed as failing to implantthe necessary norms and techniques of self-discipline. More broadly, the breakdown ofsocial control in the chaotic environment ofinner city `transitional zones' was seen asgiving young people excessive licence for their

hedonistic desires. Other, cultural, theories ofhedonistic pathology associated the boring,mundane and routine conditions of lower-classlife with the emergence of criminogenic `focalconcerns' such as the search for èxcitement' or`thrills' (Miller, 1958). As such models hadtrouble accounting for the gendered nature ofworking-class crime, subsidiary accounts sug-gested that the close familial governance ofyoung women's (sexualized) hedonism gavewomen fewer opportunities to offend, andresulted in domesticated desires that immu-nized them against offending in later life(Cohen, 1954).

While most of these models linked crime tohedonism via social pathologies, the nexusis also found in psychological approaches.Thus Eysenck (1964) identi®ed criminalityespecially with extroversion (outgoing impul-siveness) and neuroticism (behaviouralinstability). Extroverts, because of lowerresponse thresholds in the brain's reticularformation, are said to require stronger stimulito achieve excitation, and to respond weaklyto rewards (pleasures) and punishments(pains). Therefore, they seek strong stimuliand learn conformity more slowly, and thus ±it is argued ± are more likely to commit crime.The familiar criminological formula of weakmoral control coupled with strong desire forexcitement is thereby retained: but the felicitycalculus ± the hedonistic attempt to achievesurplus pleasure over pain ± has beentranslated into a neuro-psychological functionof the brain.

More recently, this association betweencrime and excitement has been revived buttaken in new directions (e.g. Bell and Bell,1993). For example, rejecting rational choicemodels, Katz (1988) has argued that crimino-logy has underestimated crime's emotionalattractions. These extend hedonism beyondmere `pleasures' to include other sources ofexcitement (righteous slaughter, sneaky thrills,doing stick-ups) that allow the subject toemotionally transcend the mundane nature ofmodern existence. Ironically, Katz's work, likemost traditional sociological criminology,assumes a pathology (this time in the natureof modernity) that gives rise to a pressure tooffend `hedonistically'.

Such anti-rationalist developments coincidewith the return of the rational choice felicityprinciple ± embedded in the models ofsituational crime prevention and risk manage-ment that have become characteristic of ®n desieÁcle administrative criminology. For themoment, at least, the latter has been themore in¯uential.

137HEDONISM

Evaluation

Hedonism has proven almost impossible toavoid as an element in modernist (or with Katz,postmodernist) criminology ± perhaps becausethe binary of pain and pleasure is so central topost-Enlightenment thought. It appears almosteverywhere that rational choice models aredeployed and, as with Katz or Eysenck, evenwhere they are rejected. This suggests thathedonism is a category that can only beevaluated in relation to its particular crimin-ological uses. For example, in some accounts itis limited because it is gendered (women'shedonism is sexualized), it is `classed' (work-ing-class hedonism is pathological and crim-inogenic), and it is àged' (youthful hedonismis virtually taken for granted as criminogenic).However, hedonism is also fundamental to theabstract and universal `rational choice' crimi-nology that ignores the causal impact of class,age and gender. Perhaps only those crimin-ologies ± for example, Marxist ± that deny thecategory of human nature may escape this.

Pat O'Malley

Associated Concepts: carnival (of crime), cul-tural criminology, deviance, extroversion, freewill, risk, subculture

Key ReadingsBell, N. and Bell, R. (eds) (1993) Adolescent Risk

Taking. London, Sage.Bentham, J. (1823) An Introduction to the Principles of

Morals and Legislation. London, Pickering.Cohen, A. (1954) Delinquent Boys. Glencoe, The Free

Press.Eysenck, H. (1964) Crime and Personality. London,

Routledge and Kegan Paul.Katz, J. (1988) The Seductions of Crime. New York,

Basic Books.Miller, W. (1958) `Lower class culture as a

generating milieu of gang delinquency', Journalof Social Issues, 14, pp. 5±19.

HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY

De®nition

The set of ideas, values, representations andpractices associated with `being male' which iscommonly accepted as the dominant positionin gender relations in a society at a particularhistorical moment.


In an imaginative lateral shift, Bob Connell(1987, 1995) plucked the concept of hegemonyfrom its original class setting in order to try tounderstand gender relations. Where Gramscihad sought to understand how a dominantclass manages to legitimate its rule in societiescharacterized by class inequality, Connell sethimself the task of understanding how anunequal gender order manages to reproduceitself: how hierarchies of dominance andsubordination among men and between menand women come to be commonly accepted atany particular historical moment. The idea ofhegemonic masculinity as the culturallydominant form of masculinity was theanswer he proposed, which, followingGramsci, he saw as always historically con-tingent and contested. Hence, there are alwayssubordinate masculinities. Given the wide-spread cultural ascendancy of heterosexuality,the idea of homosexual masculinities assubordinate is unsurprising. Given the long-standing, well-nigh general subordination ofwomen, those masculinities that can berepresented somehow as close to femininitywill also be rendered subordinate.

In addition, Connell talks of `complicit' and`marginalized' masculinities. The former referto those large numbers of men who do notthemselves practise the hegemonic version ofmasculinity but do not challenge it either; theyare its `complicit' bene®ciaries. Marginalizedmasculinities result from the interplay ofgender with other structures such as classand race. Given the relations of domination/subordination between ethnic groups, forexample, the masculinities of such subordi-nate groups will always be subject to theauthority of the hegemonic masculinity of thedominant group, which has the power tomarginalize or to authorize admission to thehegemonic project. Certain black US athletes,for example, may be àuthorized' exemplars ofhegemonic masculinity, though this has noeffect on the social authority of black menmore generally.

Since Connell's original introduction of theterm in the late 1980s, the idea of hegemonicmasculinity has become almost ubiquitous inattempts to think through relationships amongmen, crime and masculinities. Perhaps themost common ®nding is how depressinglyoften hegemonic masculinity is implicated inthe commission of crime and its control, a®nding which testi®es both to the strength andto the weakness of the concept.


Evaluation

Connell's introduction of the term hegemonicmasculinity has inspired and in¯uenced thewhole range of contemporary writings onmen and masculinity, including that cur-rently being conducted within criminology.The strength of its appeal lies in its ability torecognize the diversity of men's lives, some-thing that the early feminist writings on maleviolence failed to do, but without losing sightof the importance of power. The idea ofpower structuring relations among men has,for example, enabled the relationshipbetween particular crimes and men's speci®cpositions in gender/race/class hierarchies tobe explored, something Messerschmidt doesin Masculinities and Crime (1993). It alsopermits analysis of organizations and cul-tures as well as individual men since hege-monic masculinity, like hegemony generally,is not just a personal matter but is deeplyembedded in institutional life across thesociety as a whole; hence the re-examinationsof a variety of criminal justice institutions toreveal the masculinities embedded withinthem (Walklate, 1995). A ®nal strength is theimportance it attaches, in true Gramscianfashion, to contestation. Since hegemony isessentially about defending the indefensible± class inequality for Gramsci, genderinequality for Connell ± it is always liableto challenge; it is never ®xed nor absolute.Sometimes, only when it gets challenged bysubordinate masculinities, in, for example,the idea of gay marriages or gay parenting,is hegemonic masculinity's commonlyaccepted, `taken-for-grantedness' revealedfor what it is: in this case, the imposition ofone kind of sexuality, heterosexuality,through all kinds of powerful institutionsfrom the Church to the State, as the commonsense of the age, the norm, the culturallyexalted, the ideal.

Despite the subtlety of Connell's theorizing,emphasizing the importance of diversity,power, institutions, and practice, and thegreater gender awareness it has undoubtedlypromoted within criminology, problemsremain. There is a tendency to deploy theterm masculinity as if it referred simply to alist of `manly' attributes ± competitive,aggressive, risk-taker, strong, independent,unemotional and so on ± a tendency which,if anything, is heightened once the term`hegemonic' is added, given the usual con-siderable overlap between the list and somecultural norm, ideal or stereotype of masculi-nity. (Students asked to write down what they

understand by masculinity will tend to comeup with very similar lists of `hegemonicattributes'.) Within criminology, this has ledto an accentuation of the negative dimensionof these features in order to make theconnections between masculinity and crime(and criminal justice), and to ignore the morepositive, caring dimensions underpinning, forexample, the father who protects and pro-vides. Messerschmidt's (1993) catalogue ofcriminals may all be doing masculinity differ-ently, depending on their place in gender, raceand class relations, but they are all doing badnot good. Moreover, in reducing hegemonicmasculinity to a set of traits or characteristics,the notion is rendered static, not the subject ofconstant contestation, as Connell's theoreticalusage would suggest. However, the problemhere may well reside partly in the originalnotion since, though Connell talks of a rangeof subordinate masculinities, hegemonic mas-culinity is always used in the singular. In otherwords, is there only ever one hegemonicstrategy at any given historical moment, asWetherell and Edley (1999) ask, or is hege-monic masculinity a much more contingentnotion, always dependent on context? If this isthe case, it poses a far more complex series ofquestions in understanding how masculinitiesand crimes are related than has beenattempted hitherto.

A ®nal problem is the oversocialized viewof the male subject that users of the concepthave generally taken, despite Connell's (1995)insistence that the depth and complexity ofFreud's study of the Wolf Man constituted achallenge to all subsequent researchers inter-ested in masculinity. Several writers havereiterated the importance of not ignoring thepsychic or subjective dimension of masculi-nity, even though they have done so fromvery different theoretical traditions, and noneis advocating a return to classical Freudian-ism (Jefferson, 1994; Wetherell and Edley,1999). To the extent that some of thesestrictures are taken seriously, we can expectmore complex and sensitive accounts of therelationships among men, masculinities andcrime to emerge. However, we would dowell to listen to Sandra Walklate (1995) whenshe warns us not to allow our interest inmasculinity to obscure the role of otherexplanatory variables. Whilst hegemonicmasculinity may well be implicated in certaincrimes on certain occasions, to expect it toprovide all the answers would be a seriousmistake.

Tony Jefferson

139HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY

Associated Concepts: critical criminology, fem-inist criminologies, hegemony, Marxist crim-inologies, masculinities

Key ReadingsConnell, R.W. (1987) Gender and Power. Cambridge,

Polity Press.Connell, R.W. (1995) Masculinities. Cambridge,

Polity Press.Jefferson, T. (1994) `Theorizing masculine subjec-

tivity', in T. Newburn and E.A. Stanko (eds),Just Boys Doing Business? London, Routledge,pp. 10±31.

Messerschmidt, J.W. (1993) Masculinities and Crime.Lanham, MD, Rowman and Little®eld.

Walklate, S. (1995) Gender and Crime. London,Prentice±Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Wetherell, M. and Edley, N. (1999) `Negotiatinghegemonic masculinity: imaginary positions andpsycho-discursive practices', Feminism and Psy-chology, 9 (3), pp. 335±56.

HEGEMONY

De®nition

An unequal relationship between the rulingclass (or alliance of classes) and the subordi-nate classes within a given social order whichis based on authority or leadership achievedthrough the production of consent rather thanthrough the use of coercion or force.


One of the earliest uses of the term hegemonyappears in the writings of Lenin in the phrase`hegemony of the proletariat'. Then it had thenarrow meaning of political leadership withina class alliance, speci®cally the need forproletarian leadership in any alliance withthe peasantry. In the writings of the ItalianMarxist Antonio Gramsci (1971), the termachieves a far broader reach. Speci®cally, heexpanded its meaning to include moral andintellectual leadership across society as awhole. He developed the idea as a way ofconceptualizing how, in the aftermath of theRussian Revolution and the First World War,the industrial capitalist democracies of Wes-tern Europe and the USA managed to avoidthe proletarian uprisings predicted for themby classical Marxism. Without ever abandon-

ing the Marxist idea of the centrality of classesand class struggle, his key insight was thatsuccessful class rule entails the creation,through alliances, concessions, compromisesand new ethico-political ideas and projects, ofa collective will which was not narrowly class-based but had popular, national appeal. Inshort, a class wishing to become hegemonichad to `nationalize' itself, had to become a`popular religion'.

When such a `national-popular' consensusis achieved, the dominant classes can be saidto be ruling hegemonically: through authorityor leadership rather than coercion or force.However, such an achievement is alwaysfragile and temporary since it is contingentupon an ever-changing set of economic,political and ideological conditions, including,crucially, the constant challenges from thesubordinate classes, whose goal, according toGramsci, should be to win over the people toan alternative hegemonic project. Conse-quently, the achievement of hegemony in aparticular historical moment, or conjuncture,could be followed by more coercive, lesshegemonic moments: new legislation, tougherpolicing and, in extremis, the use of the army,to deal with dissent, unrest, con¯ict and, atworst, civil war.

Within criminology, Stuart Hall and collea-gues used this Gramscian notion of hegemonyto underpin their attempt, in Policing the Crisis(1978), to understand the state's response tomugging in the 1970s. One of the earlyexamples of Marxist criminology in Britain,Policing the Crisis argued that the hegemonyenjoyed by the ruling alliance in Britain in the1950s entered into crisis in the 1960s as theconditions underpinning the postwar socialdemocratic settlement proved impossible tosustain. Challenges to the existing consensusarose on multiple fronts, around issues to dowith youth, drugs, sexual mores, race, women,students, industrial relations, crime andNorthern Ireland. By the 1970s, the conditionsfor successful hegemonic rule had collapsed,signalled by an election-winning law andorder crusade, new laws, the tougher policingof all kinds of protest and unrest, the entry ofthe army into Northern Ireland, and intern-ment. Set within this context, the crackdownon mugging in 1972±3 by the police and thejudiciary, to the accompaniment of mediaheadlines and sermonizing editorials, wassymptomatic of the collapse of hegemony. Asone among several moral panics, the `mugger'became a convenient folk devil, or scapegoat,for the new, more troubled and con¯ictualtimes.


Evaluation

The biggest single problem with Gramsci'sconcept of hegemony was its attempts to movebeyond a class reductionist understanding ofthe reproduction of capitalism without everlosing sight of the concept's fundamental basisin economic class relations. This meanthanging onto the fact that for a class tobecome hegemonic it must move beyond itsnarrow class interests and construct a broad-based ethico-political project, whilst neveroverlooking the fact that hegemony hadnecessarily also to be èconomic'. For ChantalMouffe (1979), one of Gramsci's most sympa-thetic commentators, this meant that only thetwo fundamental classes (bourgeoisie/prole-tariat) could be hegemonic and ultimately,since only the proletariat had an interest in®nally ending exploitation, only a working-class hegemony could become genuinelysuccessful. This lingering reductionismhaunts her own attempt to work up Gramsci'sconcept of hegemony from the `practical state'in which he left it in The Prison Notebooks.Having ®rst established Gramsci's non-reduc-tive conception of ideology, then the wayelements within a hegemonic project mustdivest themselves of their class origins if theyare to be capable of nationalizing themselves,and, ®nally, the importance of disarticulation-rearticulation to ideological struggle (ratherthan the confrontation of different, opposed,class-based world-views), she is forced toconfront what it is that uni®es the hegemonicproject in a way that ensures its classcharacter. At that point she suggests that thisunity is supplied by the `hegemonic principle',and this is always class-based.

Despite this dif®culty, at the level of theory,of how to `think' the structural basis ofconcepts without lapsing into structuraldeterminism (a dif®culty common to a wholeraft of concepts in these post-structuralist/postmodernist times), when used to makesense of particular conjunctures, hegemonyremains one of the most useful of Marxistconcepts. Deployed by Stuart Hall (1988), itenabled a series of insightful and prescientreadings of the rise and popular appeal ofThatcherism and the new right in the UK.Against those who stressed Thatcher's luck inbecoming Britain's longest serving PrimeMinister this century and pulling off anunprecedented transformation of the face ofmodern Britain, Hall always saw Thatcherismas something more profound; as a hegemonicproject, albeit one based on a contradictorycombination of nostalgic morality, ruthless

modernization, authoritarian leadership andpopulist common sense. If `Blairism' is thenew common sense of the age, it is certainlyinconceivable without the `regressive moder-nization' and àuthoritarian populism' whichHall unerringly identi®ed as typifying theproject of Thatcherism.

Tony Jefferson

Associated Concepts: authoritarian populism,communitarianism, critical criminology, folkdevil, hegemonic masculinity, Marxist crimi-nologies, masculinities, moral panic, newcriminology, radical criminologies, scapegoat-ing, social reaction, the state

Key ReadingsGramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Note-

books. London, Lawrence and Wishart.Hall, S. (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal. London,

Verso.Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and

Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis. London,Macmillan.

Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds) (1996) ResistanceThrough Rituals. London, Hutchinson.

Mouffe, C. (1979) `Hegemony and ideology inGramsci', in Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London,Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 168±204.

HIDDEN CRIME

De®nition

At one level this refers to speci®c acts of crimewhich are not recorded in of®cial crimestatistics. At another level it refers to categ-ories of crime which are either not representedin of®cial statistics or which are signi®cantlyunder-recorded. Sometimes it is also referredto as invisible crime.


Of®cial statistics are known to massivelyunder-record the true extent of crime. Thereasons for this are numerous but onesigni®cant factor is that police rely heavilyon victims and witnesses to report crime andon occasions they choose not to do so. The gapbetween the true extent of crime and crimerecorded in statistics is known as the `dark®gure of unrecorded crime'. Estimates of thisgap can be obtained by comparing of®cial

141HIDDEN CRIME

crime statistics with results derived fromsurveys of victims (whereby individuals areasked if they have recently been a victim ofcrime, and if so, whether they reported it tothe police) and from self-report studies(whereby individuals are asked whether theyhave recently committed crimes and whetherthey were subsequently charged with theoffence). The extent of hidden crime can varyaccording to the category of the crime but it isknown to exist to some degree in relation to allsuch categories. Even in relation to so-calledconventional crimes ± for example streetcrimes, car crimes and house burglary ±some proportion remain hidden.

Outside of so-called conventional crimesthere are other types which, because of theirnature, are not represented in of®cial statisticsor are massively under-represented. The rangeincludes, ®rst, crimes committed by employ-ees against organizations for which they work,such as using an organization's facilitiesillegally and stealing work-based materialsfor personal use. Secondly, there are crimesperpetrated by organizations against theiremployees, including breaches of health andsafety regulations resulting in workplaceinjuries, illnesses, accidents and sometimesdeaths. A third example is fraudulent beha-viour, including the use of another's moneyfor personal or organizational gain withouttheir knowledge or consent, and the use of`sleaze' money to change the course of events,such as in political life or in the ®eld of sportand leisure. Fourthly, the range encompasseshitherto neglected green crimes, including thepollution of the environment by industrialorganizations and the smuggling of endan-gered species and products produced fromthem. A ®fth category can be given the generictitle `cybercrime'. This includes computercrimes such as hacking, the illegal appropria-tion of image and likeness and the use of theInternet in order to sell drugs, to publishobscene materials or to advertise services inrelation to paedophilia.

Seven features of hidden or invisible crimescan be identi®ed (Jupp et al., 1999). First, noknowledge, that is, there is little individual orpublic knowledge that the crime has beencommitted. The ingenuity of the fraudster, thecomplexity of the act and the lack of knowl-edge and vigilance can all conspire to render acrime invisible. Even where individuals areaware that an act or event has taken place itcan be taken for granted as normal rather thanas criminal. For example, workers in hazar-dous industries may see themselves as doing adif®cult job rather than as victims of illicit

health and safety practices. A second feature isthat there are no statistics, that is of®cialstatistics fail to record or classify the crime.This may be because victims are unaware acrime has been committed, they may treat thecrime as normal and not something to bereported, they may be frightened or intimi-dated or they may be unwilling to report thecrime to the police because it is something inwhich they have colluded. Even where anaction or event is reported to the police thecomplexity of some of the crimes, especiallythose relating to ®nancial transaction, togetherwith the ingenuity and specialist knowledgeof those carrying them out, often means thatthe police are unable to satisfy themselves thata crime has been perpetrated and can there-fore be recorded as such.

A third feature of hidden crime is no theory,that is, criminologists and others haveneglected to explain the crime, its existenceand its causes. Criminology has been heavilyin¯uenced by studies of sections of thepopulation which are most visible in of®cialcrime statistics and by explanations which canbe cast in terms of individual pathology. In themain, hidden crimes do not ®t into thesecategories. Also, the sheer diversity of hiddenor invisible crimes and of the sites at whichthey are committed ± at the workplace, on theInternet, in the ®nancial marketplace ±probably militates against the developmentof any comprehensive theory of such crimes.

Fourthly, hidden crime is characterized byno research. There are a number of reasons forthis, for example there are the mutuallyreinforcing effects of the paucity of knowl-edge, statistics and theory in relation toinvisible crimes. Further, there are practicalaspects of conducting social inquiry whichrestrict the feasibility and possibility ofresearching invisible crimes. One of theserelates to access. There are often parties whohave vested interests in relation to with-holding information about their activities ±parties who by one means or another are ableto exercise power to deny researchers access todata with which to formulate and supportconclusions. In the absence of such data eitherthe research is not carried out or it is carriedout by means that are not typically found instandard texts on research methods. Wherethe latter occurs, investigators are open to the,often unjusti®able, criticism of being non-scienti®c and biased.

Fifthly, there is the characteristic of no con-trol, that is, there are no formal or systematicmechanisms for control of such crimes. Thiscan be the result of blurring of boundaries


between what is legitimate and illegitimate,because of the complexity of many crimes, forexample, fraud, and also because of thediffusion of offenders. Further, where crimeis international, especially in the context ofincreasing globalization and fewer barriersbetween nation-states, the possibility of detec-tion, let alone prevention and control is mademore dif®cult. Sixthly, hidden crimes arecharacterized by no politics, that is, suchcrimes as breaches of health and safety legis-lation do not typically appear as a signi®cantpart of the political agenda. Much moreemphasis is placed on conventional andstreet level crimes and on law and ordercampaigns to combat them. Finally, there is nopanic, that is, hidden crimes are not consti-tuted as moral panics and their perpetratorsare not portrayed as folk devils. There is aclose connection between the formulation ofthe political agenda and the construction andampli®cation of moral panics and folk devilsin the media. There has been increased aware-ness of ®nancial irregularities, `sleaze' andbreaches of food safety regulations but theseare invariably portrayed as scandals which areexposed rather than examples of sustaineddeviant or criminal activity. They are oftentreated as òne-offs' and the fault of particularindividuals at particular times rather than asdeep-seated structural problems.

Evaluation

The above features help provide a means ofcategorizing and characterizing a wide rangeof acts and events which remain invisible ineveryday life. Moreover, when combined, suchfeatures constitute a template with which toassess relative invisibility. The elements of thistemplate (knowledge ± statistics ± theory ±research ± control ± politics ± panic!) can beviewed as independent of one another butthere is also the potential for interaction andmutual reinforcement. For example, ignoranceof victimization (no knowledge) often leads tonon-recording in of®cial statistics (no statistics)which in turn can have consequences in termsof under-theorizing (no theory), lack of policy-making at government level (no politics) andlittle consideration by the popular media (nopanic).

Particular acts or events do not necessarilyexhibit all of the above features nor will theyexhibit them to the same degree at any givenpoint in time. The relative invisibility ofparticular acts and events and their subse-quent recognition and identi®cation as crime

depends on whether the template ®ts (do theelements apply?), the degree to which it ®ts (towhat extent does it apply?) and the power ofinteractive effects (to what extent do theelements reinforce one another?).

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: corporate crime, crime,cybercrime, family crime, of®cial criminalstatistics, self reports, social harm, statecrime, victim surveys, white collar crime

Key ReadingsBox, S. (1992) Power, Crime and Mysti®cation. London,

Routledge.Davies, P., Francis, P. and Jupp, V.R. (eds) (1999)

Invisible Crimes: Their Victims and Their Regulation.London, Macmillan.

Jupp, V.R., Davies, P. and Francis, P. (1999) `Thefeatures of invisible crimes', in P. Davies, P.Francis and V.R. Jupp (eds), Invisible Crimes: TheirVictims and Their Regulation. London, Macmillan.

HISTORICAL METHODS

De®nition

In the last third of the twentieth century socialhistorians increasingly turned their attentionsto questions of crime and criminal justiceinstitutions. Their principal aim was not todevelop a better understanding of crime butrather to use the examination of crime andcriminal justice as a means of broadening anddeepening the understanding of past societiesand of change through time.


The work grew out of the new social history ofthe 1960s and the fascination with `historyfrom below' typi®ed by the work of E.J.Hobsbawm, George RudeÂ and E.P. Thompson.Initially the approach was rooted in a class-con¯ict perception of society. It was believedthat an analysis of criminal justice recordswould bring the historian closer to the voicesof those who seemed generally to have beenignored by historians. Much of the early workfocused on periods of major economic uphea-val, such as the eighteenth and early nine-teenth centuries when, it was assumed, much

143HISTORICAL METHODS

`crime' in the form of rioting and the appro-priation of property was, in fact, a response tonew concepts of private property, to newwork practices and to new systems of pay-ment for labour. More recently, and thankslargely to the growth of women's history,there has been a shift away from class togender perceptions. This has tended to shiftthe focus away from property offences tointerpersonal violence while, at the same time,generating questions about, ®rst, the genderperceptions of agents of the criminal justicesystem, and secondly, about the extent towhich notions of gender, particularly mascu-linity, have fostered aspects of criminality.

The historian's general concern with changethrough time has led to much work on theway in which different forms of criminalitywere constructed at different moments, nota-bly the construction of the image of thejuvenile delinquent, and of the `dangerous'and subsequently the `criminal classes'. Achanging perception of the criminal during thenineteenth century has also been charted, frommorally inferior to mentally de®cient. Much ofthe early work had a strong statistical basis,with several historians constructing their owndata from quarter sessions and assize records.The judicial statistics for the nineteenthcentury have been carefully assessed inconjunction with other social data to suggest,and subsequently to explain, a general level-ling out of theft and violence during theVictorian and Edwardian periods. Theseconclusions have, however, been challengedby the suggestion that, from the mid-nine-teenth century, the Treasury was imposingrestrictions on the activities of the police andthe courts through strict cash limits.

The concept of `social crime' was developedto explain offending such as poaching, smug-gling and wood theft, which, in manyinstances, had considerable community sanc-tion. But it has also been challenged as tooslippery to explain very much, especially sincein some instances both poaching and woodtheft were undertaken to meet the demands ofthe market, while eighteenth-century smug-gling was often large-scale capitalist enter-prise. The analysis of offending at theworkplace, both pre-industrial and industrial,has thrown up similar complexities, and theearly hypothesis of property crime as aresponse to industrialization and the capitali-zation of industry is now looking verytattered. Unfortunately, the extent to whichsuch economic developments fostered whitecollar crime has been far less extensivelyresearched.

Evaluation

The historian's desire to read and assesssources created by the agents of the criminaljustice system has fostered new explorationsof these agents and the institutions to whichthey belonged. There has, in consequence,been signi®cant new work on the origins anddevelopment of police organizations andprisons ± though the work of Michel Foucaultand others has been an equally importantintellectual stimulus here. There have alsobeen important explorations of the impact of,and inter-relationship between, social normsand legal norms in police practice, and in thedecision-making of both prosecutors and thecourts.

Clive Emsley

Associated Concepts: critical criminology, moraleconomy, social constructionism

Key ReadingsArnot, M.L. and Usborne, C. (eds) (1999) Gender and

Crime in Modern Europe. London, UCL Press.Emsley, C. (1996) Crime and Society in England, 1750±

1900, 2nd edn. London, Longman.Emsley, C. and Kna¯a, L.A. (eds) (1996) Crime

History and Histories of Crime: Studies in theHistoriography of Crime and Criminal Justice inModern History. Westport, CT and London,Greenwood Press.

Robb, G. (1992) White-collar Crime in Modern England:Financial Fraud and Business Morality 1845±1929.Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, H. (1998) `Rationing crime: the politicaleconomy of criminal statistics since the 1850s',Economic History Review, LI, pp. 569±90.

Wiener, M.J. (1990) Reconstructing the Criminal:Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830±1914.Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

HUMAN RIGHTS

De®nition

Throughout history various nation-states havemade declarations that list certain elementsconsidered to be basic human rights. Theseusually include civil and `natural' rightsranging from the right to life, free speech,education, political freedom and family life. Inaddition, if citizens are accused of a criminaloffence they are entitled to a fair trial, the


presumption of innocence and humane pun-ishment if convicted.


In general statements human rights act as aprotection against the action and power of thestate upon an individual. In times of war theyalso provide a set of rules of engagement foropposing sides in terms of their strategies andbehaviour towards each other and treatmentof prisoners. Various bodies and lists of rightsand privileges exist, such as the UnitedNations Declaration of Human Rights andthe European Convention for the Protection ofHuman Rights, the latter providing a basis forthe European Court of Human Rights.

One of the signi®cant aspects of the conceptof human rights for criminology is associatedwith the de®nition of crime. If basic privilegesprovide the means by which individuals canfully participate within human society, thentheir deprivation could be regarded ascriminal. As Schwendinger and Schwendinger(1970) argue, the institutions within any socio-legal system that lead to violations of theserights, resulting in racism, sexism or povertyfor example, may be regarded as criminal.

Another area of interest for criminologists isthe sphere of state crime and the enforcement,or more usually non-enforcement, of interna-tional conventions on war crimes, torture andthe process of criminalization of certaingroups who may be labelled political offen-ders or terrorists. As these groups often posefundamental challenges to the state, again,debates about what is crime and who and whyindividuals or groups are criminalized, arise.

Furthermore, within the discourse of humanrights, according to Stan Cohen (1993/1996),there are state crimes which are rightly classedas `gross' violations. He argues that there areacts committed by regimes, which includegenocide, mass political killings, state terror-ism and torture and disappearances, which interms of criminology would be de®ned asmurder, rape, espionage, kidnapping andassault. De®ning an agreed concept ofhuman rights is problematic, he argues how-ever, because the values underpinning thesedeclarations vary according to the group orstate's de®nition. Freedom ®ghters becometerrorists when they endanger social order andenemies of the state can later becomedemocratically elected leaders. Despite theseproblems Cohen argues that human rights has

become a dominant narrative and an import-ant issue for criminologists, especially throughthe growth of victimology surrounding theabuse of women and children.

Evaluation

Although the measures listed in declarationsof human rights are designed to protect theindividual from the state, and sometimes fromother nations' actions, such as in times of war,in effect there are few enforceable interna-tional laws. A number of seemingly in¯uentialbodies have rules of engagement and sup-posed cooperation, such as the United NationsDeclaration of Human Rights and the Eur-opean Court of Human Rights, but as Jong-man argues (1993), the `rhetoric' of humanrights is not supported by the power toprevent states committing crimes. It appearsthat these fundamental laws about humanconduct are left to independent human rightsorganizations such as Amnesty Internationalto highlight the behaviour of states that con-sistently violate their own citizens. Further-more, only states who are signatories to atreaty such as the European Convention onHuman Rights can be held accountable to itsaims. Hurwitz argues that clauses such as`national security, public safety or territorialintegrity' (1981, p. 139) are often used to avoidits implementation.

Louise Westmarland

Associated Concepts: denial, genocide, naturaljustice, social harm, the state, state crime,torture

Key ReadingsCohen, S. (1993/1996) `Human rights and crimes of

the state: the culture of denial', in J. Muncie, E.McLaughlin and M. Langan (eds), CriminologicalPerspectives. London, Sage.

Hurwitz, L. (1981) The State as Defendant. London,Aldwych.

Jongman, A.J. (1993) `Torture: de®nition and legalinstruments', in R.D. Crelinsten and A.P. Schmid(eds), The Politics of Pain: Torturers and TheirMasters. Leiden, Center for the Study of SocialCon¯icts.

Schwendinger, H. and Schwendinger, J. (1970)`Defenders of order or guardians of humanrights?', Issues in Criminology, 5 (2), pp. 123±57.

145HUMAN RIGHTS

I

INCAPACITATION

De®nition

A justi®cation for punishment which main-tains that the offender's ability to commitfurther crimes should be removed, eitherphysically or geographically. In certain socie-ties incapacitation can take the form ofrendering criminals harmless through theremoval of offending limbs (for instance,hands in the case of thieves), whilst in othersthe banishment of criminals to con®nedspaces, like prisons, curtails the possibilitiesfor offending behaviour. The death penalty isthe starkest form of incapacitation.


In contrast to other justi®cations of punish-ment, such as rehabilitation, the logic ofincapacitation appeals to neither changingthe offender's behaviour nor searching for thecauses of the offending. Instead it advocatesthe protection of potential victims as theessence of punishment, as opposed to therights of offenders. Many contemporarycriminal justice strategies currently subscribeto the doctrine of incapacitation. In part, this isbecause it ®lls the void created by the collapseof rehabilitation and the associated argumentthat `nothing works' in the 1970s, but alsobecause it claims to offer a means of socialdefence through removing offenders fromsociety and thereby eliminating their capacityto commit further crimes.

Examples of current criminal justice senten-cing policy that are informed by the logic ofincapacitation would include the `three strikesand you're out' penalty and selective incapa-citation, both of which usually involve long

periods of incarceration. One of the distin-guishing features of these approaches is thatthey are concerned with identifying offendersor groups of offenders who are likely tocommit future crimes on the basis of the risk,or likelihood, of offending. The argument isthat a small number of offenders are respon-sible for a signi®cant proportion of crime incertain areas and if these individuals or groupswere imprisoned then this would have apronounced effect on the local crime rate. It isrecognized that research carried out by theRand Corporation in the USA provided theintellectual origins for contemporary incapaci-tative sentencing policies (Greenwood, 1983).More generally, the doctrine of incapacitationhas become the main philosophical justi®ca-tion for imprisonment in countries that sub-scribe to the notion that `prison works' as ittakes many persistent and serious offendersoff the streets and thereby, it is claimed,reduces the crime rate (Murray, 1997).

Evaluation

Incapacitation is essentially a strategy ofcontainment and is frequently justi®edthrough a form of moral reasoning known asutilitarianism, which maintains that the ®nan-cial and social bene®ts outweigh the costs ofan ever expanding prison population. Themodel for this approach is what is known asthe American `prison experiment', wherethere has been a dramatic growth in theprison population over the past 30 years. Forinstance, in 1970 there were 196,000 prisonersin state and federal prisons in the UnitedStates, but by the mid 1990s the state andfederal prisons were holding over 1.1 millionprisoners on any given day (Currie, 1996).

An in¯uential attempt to think throughthese changes is provided by Malcolm Feeley

and Jonathan Simon (1992). Their argument isthat a `New Penology' has risen at the expenseof an Òld Penology'. For them, the ÒldPenology' was preoccupied with such mattersas guilt, responsibility and obligation, as wellas diagnosis, intervention and treatment of theindividual offender. Whereas, they claim the`New Penology' is radically different andactuarial in orientation as it is concerned withtechniques for identifying, classifying andmanaging groups sorted by levels of danger-ousness. The aim is not to intervene inoffenders' lives for the purposes of ascertain-ing responsibility or rehabilitating them. It isinstead a strategy of managing dangerousness,and incapacitation is part of this broader,apolitical displacement of individualized dis-cipline and rehabilitation.

Critics of incapacitation, like Elliot Currie(1996), argue that whilst this strategy mighthave had some effect on the crime rate, thiseffect is distressingly small in relation to thehuge costs involved. At best it can be arguedthat the effect of this massive experiment withimprisonment on the crime rate has beenmodest. For instance, whilst the overall crimerate declined by 3 per cent between 1993 and1996 in the United States, it still remains at avery high level ± with a homicide rate seventimes that of England and Wales (Young,1999). However, what is more alarming is theclear racial dimension to this strategy ofcontainment, to the extent that one in nineAfrican-American males aged 20±29 is inprison, whilst a staggering one in three iseither in prison, on probation or parole(Mauer, 1997).

These ®gures raise fundamental ethical andmoral questions on the nature of US societyand the dangers posed by the wholesaleimportation of the incapacitation doctrine.For it is clear that the èxperiment' has beenfunded by the diversion of public expenditurefrom welfare to the prison, whilst the level ofviolence, particularly among the young anddisadvantaged, continues to decimate life inmany North American cities. Incapacitation asa penal policy amounts to little more than the`warehousing' of prisoners, since there isscarcely any recognition of the human char-acter of the offender nor are the reasons foroffending addressed in any fundamental wayas this is viewed as a pointless exercise.

Eamonn Carrabine

Associated Concepts: actuarialism, capital pun-ishment, crime control model, deterrence,

penality, penology, rehabilitation, retribution,social defence theory

Key ReadingsCurrie, E. (1996) Is America Winning the War on Crime

and Should Britain Follow its Example? London,NACRO.

Feeley, M. and Simon, J. (1992) `The New Penology.Notes on the emerging strategy of corrections andits implications', Criminology, 30 (4), pp. 449±70.

Greenwood, P. (1983) `Controlling the crime ratethrough imprisonment', in J.Q. Wilson (ed.),Crime and Public Policy. San Francisco, Institutefor Contemporary Studies.

Mauer, M. (1997) Intended and Unintended Conse-quences: State Racial Disparities in Imprisonment.Washington, DC, The Sentencing Project.

Murray, C. (1997) Does Prison Work? London,Institute for Economic Affairs.

Young, J. (1999) The Exclusive Society. London, Sage.

INCARCERATION

De®nition

The process of con®ning and segregatingdeviant populations into specialist institutionsfor the purposes of punishment, treatment orcare.


The eighteenth century marks a decisivemoment in the history of social control inNorthern Europe, as imprisonment becamethe dominant means of dealing with undesir-able conduct and the preferred form ofpunishment. Up until this point the twomain purposes of imprisonment were, ®rst,to hold in custody those awaiting trial orexecution of sentence and, secondly, coercing®ne defaulters and debtors into making goodtheir misfortune. Whilst custody could beused for punishment, it was primarily used fordetention, and makeshift structures, likefortresses, castles, cellars and town gates,were deployed for this purpose. Instead themain forms of punishment were primarilycorporal and included execution, mutilation,branding, whipping and other forms of publicshaming (such as stocks and pillories).

However, as feudal systems of existencebegan to break down with the advent of mer-cantile capitalism and there were signi®cant

147INCARCERATION

population migrations from rural areas toburgeoning towns and cities ± as dispossessedpeasants and labourers were forced to becomeurban scavengers ± there emerged innovativeresponses to the anxieties provoked by thisupheaval. From the 1500s galley slavery,transportation, bridewells and workhousescame to complement conventional forms ofcorporal punishment, as a means of distin-guishing the `deserving' poor from theùndeserving' poor and fuelling colonialexpansion.

Nevertheless, it is the Enlightenment thatgave birth to incarceration as the generalizedresponse to crime and deviance, as opposed tothe myriad public spectacles of suffering, andproposed the architecture of segregation as thesole means of manufacturing virtue andcommunicating deterrence. But this was notan isolated event as whole populationsbecame subject to processes of incarceration;not only were thieves consigned to prisons,but the mad became subjected to asylums,children were introduced to schools, workerscame to exchange their labour power infactories, and the ill began to be treated inhospitals.

The question that needs to be answered iswhy did incarceration become the dominantresponse to crime from the end of theeighteenth century? Up until the 1970s theexplanation would have been that imprison-ment represents an enlightened, humanitar-ian, progressive response over the barbarismof earlier epochs. This Whig view of historyemphasized how early forms of punishment,based on vengeance, irrationality and crueltyhave been replaced by informed, professionaland expert intervention and would celebratethe zeal of benevolent reformers in explainingwhy contemporary penal systems exist.However, this interpretation has beenwidely challenged by a range of `revisionist'histories of the `Great Incarcerations' (Cohen,1985).

The earliest work that looked behind therhetoric of reformers and asked why particu-lar punishments gain prominence duringcertain historical periods is provided byRusche and Kirchheimer (1968). Their argu-ment is informed by a Marxist understandingof social relations and highlights the relation-ships between the form of punishment and theeconomic requirements of particular modes ofproduction. For instance, they argue that theprison emerged with the advent of industrialcapitalism as a means of creating a submissiveand regulated workforce. Their account hasbeen criticized for the way in which it

provides a one-dimensional explanation ofpenal relations that prioritizes the signi®canceof the labour market at the expense of otherfactors. A more sophisticated account isIgnatieff's (1978) analysis of the birth ofimprisonment. He rejects economic function-alism and argues that incarceration was aresponse to the crisis in class relationswrought by the Industrial Revolution as itserved to establish the legitimacy of the lawand was understood as an element of a largervision of securing popular consent in anincreasingly unequal, class-divided society.

However, the most in¯uential `revisionist'history of imprisonment is Foucault's Disci-pline and Punish (1977), where he argues thatthe emergence of the prison does not mark amore humanitarian form of punishment.Instead, it represents an attempt to punishmore ef®ciently and extensively to create adisciplined society, through the techniques ofsurveillance, classi®cation and examinationperfected in the new institutional spaces (e.g.Bentham's Panopticon). The originality ofFoucault's argument lies in the importancehe attaches to the relationship between powerand forms of knowledge. The emergence ofthe prison is just one instance of the dispersalof new forms of knowledge and his project isto examine how domination is achieved andhow individual subjectivity is socially con-structed. The prison has always been a failure,as it does not reduce crime, yet the reason whyit persists is because it stands at one end of acontinuum in which surveillance and regula-tion have become normalized throughoutsociety. Foucault employs the phrase `carceralarchipelago' to describe the chain of institu-tions that stretch out from the prison to implythat Western liberal democracies are inti-mately bound up with forms of oppression.

Evaluation

Whilst `revisionist' histories continue to bein¯uential, a number of critics have foundfault with the way in which all social relationshave been described in the language ofdomination, oversimplifying complex pro-cesses and overstating the instrumentalaspects of punishment at the expense of thesocial support commanded by condemnation(Garland, 1990). Moreover, there is a failure toconsider the punishment of women, whichproblematizes thinking on the role anddevelopment of incarceration. For instance,why women are more likely to be treated as`mad' rather than `bad' poses questions that


conventional and revisionist histories areunable to answer.

Eamonn Carrabine

Associated Concepts: carceral society, decarcera-tion, historical methods, normalization, pan-opticism, social control, transcarceration

Key ReadingsCohen, S. (1985) Visions of Social Control. Cambridge,

Polity Press.Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of

the Prison. Harmondsworth, Penguin.Garland, D. (1990) Punishment and Modern Society: A

Study in Social Theory. Oxford, Clarendon Press.Ignatieff, M. (1978) A Just Measure of Pain: The

Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution. London,Macmillan.

Rusche, G. and Kirchheimer, O. (1968) Punishmentand Social Structure. New York, Russell andRussell (originally published 1939).

INDIVIDUAL POSITIVISM

De®nition

A theoretical approach that views crime asbeing generated primarily by forces locatedwithin the individual. It usually takes one oftwo forms. Criminal predisposition is to befound either in biologically given constitu-tional factors or in the psychological make-upof particular individuals.


A key de®ning characteristic of individualpositivism is that the fundamental predisposi-tion to crime lies in the individual. Crime isdetermined by innate genetic or physiologicalincapacities or by inadequate child-rearingpractices in dysfunctional families.

In the early twentieth century severalattempts were made to isolate key physiologi-cal characteristics of known criminals. Goring(1913) studied more than 3,000 male prisonersin and around London and compared themwith various control groups of non-prisoners.Using correlational analysis he found that thecriminal tended to be shorter in height andweigh less. He explained such difference withreference to notions of ìnbreeding within acriminal class' which generated a lineage ofmental de®ciencies within certain families.

Such correlations of body build and beha-vioural tendencies reached their most sophis-ticated in the work of Sheldon (1949). Hisanalysis suggested that the shape of the bodycorrelated with individual temperament andmental well-being. Analysing and comparing200 boys in a reformatory in Boston with 4,000students, he concluded that most delinquentshad a body shape of well-developed musclesand an athletic appearance. Their personalitieswere strong, active, aggressive and sometimesviolent.

The earliest attempts to isolate a geneticcause of criminality involved analyses of thefamily trees of known criminals. Dugdale(1910), for example, traced more than 1,000descendants of the Jukes ± a New York familyinfamous for criminality and prostitution ±and found 280 paupers, 60 thieves, 7 mur-derers, 140 criminals and 50 prostitutes. Heconcluded that ùndesirable' hereditarycharacteristics were passed down throughfamilies. Criminal families tended to producecriminal children. Criminals were born notmade. Evidence from the Cambridge study inDelinquent Development in the 1970s con-tinues to suggest that crime does indeed run infamilies. This study noted that of 397 familieshalf of all convictions were concentrated injust 23. Convictions of one family memberwere strongly related to convictions of eachother family member. Three-quarters of con-victed mothers and convicted fathers had aconvicted child.

More rigorous research directed at isolatinga genetic factor has been carried out withtwins and adoptees. These have concludedthat children's behaviour is more similarto that of their biological parents than to thatof their adoptive parents. Mednick concludedthat some factor is transmitted by convictedparents which increases the likelihood thattheir children, even after adoption, would beconvicted for criminal offences (Mednick et al.,1987). Further research has examined a widerange of bio-chemical factors (such as hor-mones, testosterone, adrenalin and bloodsugar levels) in attempts to isolate anindividual causal factor in the generation ofdeviant, anti-social, criminal or violent beha-viour. However most current research in thistradition would not claim that biologicalmake-up alone can be used as a suf®cientexplanation of crime. Rather, some biologicalfactors may generate criminality, but onlywhen they interact with certain other psycho-logical or social factors. Nevertheless this typeof research continues to attract signi®cantresearch funding and publicity.

149INDIVIDUAL POSITIVISM

Another form of individual positivism,often termed the `psychogenic school', hasshifted the focus of analysis away from bio-logically given constitutional factors andtowards more dynamic mental processes. Psy-chologists and psychiatrists have attemptedsystematically to associate particular person-ality traits with criminal behaviour. Much ofthis has depended on the construction ofperformance tests, personality scales andmeasurements of intelligence. From these awide range of traits have been singled out asbeing indicative of delinquent and criminalpropensities. They include extroversion, de®-ance, suspicion, low IQ, excitability andimpulsiveness (Eysenck, 1964). Farrington(1996) details numerous risk factors including:being the child of a teenage mother, impulsivepersonality, low intelligence and poor perfor-mance in school, harsh or erratic parentaldiscipline and parental con¯ict, as well as peergroup in¯uences and socio-economic status.

Evaluation

Individual positivism formed the bedrock ofcriminological studies for the ®rst half of thetwentieth century and regained importance inthe 1990s. For some, because of advances in ourknowledge of genetic structures it offers a wayforward in understanding criminality which isfree from a multitude of complicating socialvariables. For others it is little more than adangerous political gambit to segregate thosedeemed to be physically or emotionally un®t.From within psychology, positivism has beenattacked for its lack of attention to processes ofhuman cognition and social learning in whichindividuals are viewed as capable of self-re¯ection and self-development, rather than asbeings who simply act upon pre-given deter-minants. Whilst individual positivists tend tocharacterize deviant behaviour as pathological,it has also been argued that deviancy is ameaningful behaviour pattern which onlybecomes undesirable when judged andlabelled by others. There are two majorlimitations of those theories which attempt toreplicate principles of scienti®c determinism.First, the more that criminological research hasdeveloped, the more the number of variablesthought to be important in crime has increased.Even if such variables were capable ofadequate measurements, controlling for theirrelative effect is probably impossible. Thisleads to sampling variations between studiesso that results are always dif®cult to replicate.A long list of correlations tends to be produced

which, though interesting in themselves, shedno light on the question of causation. Secondly,psychological research may be capable ofunearthing more and more variables, butthen usually attempts to explain crime withreference to some existing psychologicaltheory which is designed to account for somepsychological abnormality.

Nevertheless, theories based on individualpositivism continue to have widespreadpopular and political appeal. Notions ofparental neglect, `bad blood' and psycho-pathology all have their roots here. The searchfor the causes of crime by identifying acriminal type or a criminal personality willcontinue because of the general reluctance tobelieve that criminality is in any way `normal'.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: biological criminology,causation, conditioning, correlational analysis,determinism, dispositional theory, genetics,personality theory, positivism, somatotyping

Key ReadingsDugdale, R. (1910) The Jukes. New York, Putnam.Eysenck, H.J. (1964) Crime and Personality. London,

Routledge and Kegan Paul.Farrington, D. (1996) Understanding, and Preventing

Youth Crime. Social Policy Research Findings No.93. York, Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Goring, C. (1913) The English Convict. London,HMSO.

Mednick, S., Mof®t, T. and Stack, S. (eds) (1987) TheCauses of Crime: New Biological Approaches. Cam-bridge, Cambridge University Press.

Sheldon, W. (1949) Varieties of Delinquent Youth. NewYork, Harper.

INFORMAL JUSTICE

De®nition

Informal justice refers to a variety of initiativesthat are intended either to overcome the majorlimitations of formal criminal justice processesor replace the criminal justice system.


During the 1960s and 1970s socio-legalscholars campaigned for the move awayfrom the formal criminal justice system and


dependence on state-centred forms of law toalternative forms of dispute resolution. Con-siderable attention was paid to the applic-ability of non-Western practices and the needto do justice differently. Amongst more radicalwriters efforts were made to locate or imagineforms and processes of socialist justice thatwere built on different principles to thoseoperating in Western capitalist societies. Noone model of informal justice was developedbut common features included advocacy ofnon-formal, non-adversarial, non-con¯ictualprocedures and greater levels of direct com-munity participation. The purpose of informaljustice was de®ned as arbitration, mediation,reconciliation, reparation and restoration andwould require decentralization, delegaliza-tion, deprofessionalization and deregulation.A critique of informal justice soon appearedpointing, for example, to the potential forreactionary and very coercive forms of com-munity or popular justice. But perhaps moresigni®cant were evaluations of a variety ofinitiatives that suggested that àlternatives'rather than replacing formal practices were infact being added on to the existing unre-formed system. The result was the blurring ofthe boundaries between formal and informal,the expansion of the overall system of socialcontrol and the creation of new forms ofunaccountable governance. The remnants ofthe heated debates about informal justice nowtake place in relation to the possibilities foralternative forms of policing ± dispute resolu-tion and peacemaking initiatives and, perhapsmost signi®cantly, restorative justice projects.Those who are wary of the whole idea ofìnformal justice' continue to focus on thelogical outcome of such a process ± sponta-neous or organized vigilantism where self-appointed `guardians' mete out justice. Lynch-ings in the southern states of the USA,`burning tyre' justice in the townships ofSouth Africa, punishment beatings in North-ern Ireland can all be cited as disturbingexamples of informal justice.

What is perhaps equally signi®cant areongoing examples of `community justice'where speci®c types of dangerous or threaten-ing offenders are, in the absence of decisiveactions from the criminal justice system,hounded from neighbourhoods.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: abolitionism, communityjustice, peacemaking criminology, redress,restorative justice

Key ReadingsAbel, R. (ed.) (1982) The Politics of Informal Justice,

vols. 1 and 2. New York, Academic Press.Cohen, S. (1985) Visions of Social Control. Cambridge,

Polity Press.Findlay, M. and Zvekic, U. (1988) Analysing Informal

Mechanisms of Crime Control: A Cross CulturalPerspective. Rome, UNSDRI.

Matthews, R. (1988) Informal Justice. London, Sage.Merry, S.E. and Milner, N. (1993) The Possibility of

Popular Justice: A Case Study of CommunityMediation in the United States. New Brunswick,Rutgers University Press.

Pavlich, G.C. (1996) Justice Fragmented: MediatingCommunity Disputes Under Postmodern Conditions.London, Routledge.

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM

De®nition

Institutional racism refers to the processes ±intentional and unintentional ± by whichcriminal justice agencies systematically dis-criminate against certain social groups ongrounds of race or ethnicity.


In the seminal text Black Power: The Politics ofLiberation in America, Stokely Carmichael andCharles V. Hamilton distinguished betweenindividual and institutional racism. Theyde®ned individual racism as overt acts carriedout by individuals which cause death, injuryand/or violent destruction of property. Classicexamples of individual racism would includewhite people driving out black people from aparticular neighbourhood or arson attacks onblack property. Institutional racism ìs lessovert, far more subtle, less identi®able interms of speci®c individuals committing theacts' (1967, p. 4). It is equally, if not more,damaging in terms of its consequences asindividual acts of racism. Because of its per-vasive and insidious nature, they argue that itis institutional racism that denies black peopleproper welfare provision, health care ame-nities, education, access to proper jobs andtraps them in slum tenements where they areexploited by landlords and loan sharks. Andin terms of its outcomes institutional racism isremarkably similar to colonialism.

Carmichael and Hamilton used the term topresent a devastating `Black Power' critique of

151INSTITUTIONAL RACISM

white liberal attitudes towards `race' in theUSA, arguing that although institutionalracism `relies on the active and pervasiveoperation of anti-black attitudes' because itoriginates ìn the operation of the establishedand respected forces in the society' it receivesless attention and public condemnation.Institutional racism is maintained and perpe-tuated not just by the procedures and practicesof white institutions but through indifference,inertia and ignorance on the part of whitemasses and of®cials. This led them to twoprimary conclusions. First, it is institutionalracism that is at the root of the alienation ofblack people and causes of multitude ofoppressive conditions for serious disturbancesin black neighbourhoods. When these neigh-bourhoods do explode it is the residents whoae characteristically blamed for the criminalityand in due course experts are appointed toprepare àuthoritative' reports which typicallyrefuse to address deep-seated institutionalracism. Second, race relations policies basedon inclusion, assimilation and the adoption ofwhite middle-class values tend only toincorporate black people into their owninstitutionalized oppression.

Evaluation

Because of its origins and its radical critiqueconsiderable efforts were made to discreditthe value of the term by insistence amongstmany social scientists that it was toosweeping and ill-de®ned and made it dif®cultfor race relations bodies to `prove' intentionand causation. However, its potency foractivists lay in its insistence that racism beaddressed at an institutional or systemic levelrather than concentrating efforts on identify-ing individual racists. Carmichael and Hamil-ton had also provided an intriguingexplanation for how racism could persist inorganizational settings despite the existenceof of®cial legislation geared to the removal ofdiscriminary practices and equality of oppor-tunity.

In the sphere of criminal justice in a varietyof jurisdictions, a heated debate has takenplace concerning the extent of racial discrimi-nation, particularly the disproportionateapplication of discretionary police powers toblack communities and the over-representa-tion of young black men in the prisonpopulation. Black community groups insistedthat institutional racism was at work, withyoung black men receiving less favourabletreatment at every point between arrest and

conviction. The cumulative effect was theirdisproportionate representation in the prisonpopulation. Community groups were alsocritical of the manner in which the criminaljustice system discriminated against blackvictims of crime and the serious under-representation of black people in criminaljustice agencies. However, of®cial explana-tions such as those articulated by LordScarman in his report into the inner city riotsin the UK in 1981, rejected allegations ofinstitutional racism, focusing on the criminaltendencies of young black men and the overtlyracist actions of a minority of front line policeof®cers.

In the UK, the controversial and unresolvedissue of institutional racism resurfaced duringthe of®cial inquiry into the unsolved racistmurder of Stephen Lawrence in South Londonin 1993. To the consternation of the Metropo-litan Police, the inquiry team concluded thatthe police investigation `was marred by acombination of professional incompetence,institutional racism and a failure of leadershipby senior of®cers'. The ®nal report alsoprovided the UK government with an of®cialde®nition of institutional racism: `the collec-tive failure of an organization to provide anappropriate and professional service to peoplebecause of their colour, culture or ethnicorigin. It can be seen or detected in processes,attitudes and behaviour which amount todiscrimination through unwitting prejudice,ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereo-typing which disadvantage minority ethnicpeople' (1999, paragraph, 6.34). The reportemphasized that there must be unequivocalrecognition and acceptance of the problem ofinstitutional racism and commitment to fun-damental organizational change. The govern-ment established an ambitious programme ofreform to ensure that the policies, proceduresand practices of the criminal justice agenciesare consciously and actively anti-racist andpromote racial fairness and equality. Whetherthe momentum for change will be sustainedand the reform programme realized is open toquestion. As yet, there is little evidence thatthe criminal justice agencies have any under-standing of how their policies and proceduresand practices turn out to be `racialized'.However, what is truly remarkable is that asa result of the Stephen Lawrence inquiryreport, a version of a concept ®rst coined by`Black Panthers' now stands as the acceptedcentre of the race relations strategy of the UKcriminal justice system.

Eugene McLaughlin


Associated Concepts: criminal justice, discretion,discrimination, disproportionality, racializa-tion

Key ReadingsCarmichael, S. and Hamilton, C.V. (1967) Black

Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. London,Jonathan Cape.

Scarman, Lord (1981) The Brixton Disorders, 10±12April 1981. London, HMSO.

Stephen Lawrence Inquiry (1999) Report of an Inquiryby Sir William MacPherson of Cluny. London,HMSO.

INTEGRATIVE CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

An interdisciplinary approach to understand-ing crime and crime control which incorpo-rates at least two disciplinary (or non-disciplinary) bodies of knowledge. This incor-poration of criminologies and other bodies ofknowledge should ideally aspire to encompassany and all data, theories and methods thatshed light on the production of crime,criminals and social control, including the®eld of criminology itself.


Unlike single perspectives or disciplinaryapproaches within criminology that assumethat crime and crime control are the productsof primarily biological, psychological, eco-nomic, political, social, or cultural factors, theemerging integrative paradigm argues thatcriminological knowledge should incorporateanalyses that assimilate the realities from eachof these areas of inquiry. Integrative crimino-logy also assumes that the study of the causesor aetiology of crime and the study of thecontrol or regulation of criminals are notseparate but related phenomena. Together,these areas of criminology constitute theintegrative parts of the whole of crime andsocial control. Thus, in order to understandcriminals, crime control and prevention, orcriminology, criminologists should not onlystudy each of these in relationship to the other,but also as these are connected with otherbodies of interdisciplinary knowledge such ascultural, media and gender/sex studies.Finally, integrative criminology endeavoursto provide analyses that link the various

bodies of knowledge that focus on the con-nections between the aetiology of crime, thebehaviour of criminals, and the policies andpractices of crime control.

C. Ray Jeffery made one of the earliestexplicit cases for integration in his textbookCriminology: An Interdisciplinary Approach(1990, Prentice-Hall). In this work he arguedthat criminology had to integrate variousbodies of knowledge from biology, psychol-ogy, sociology, law and other ®elds. Subse-quently, he has argued that what is required isan integration of both a theory of crime and atheory of criminal behaviour. In order toaccomplish this, Jeffery has maintained thatcriminology has to develop an interdisciplin-ary theory of behaviour and then apply it tothe explanations of crime and criminal behav-iour. Presently, the study of crime and crimecontrol or of crime and justice reveals anassortment of integrative strategies (Barak,1998a).

Integrating criminologies are expressed in amyriad of ways that may include the mergingof the goals and objectives within or across thetraditional and non-integrative approaches ofclassical, positivist and critical criminologies.Basically, however, there are three kinds ofintegrative approaches that may be adopted:(1) disciplinary perspectives that connectvarious explanations of crime and crime con-trol from within one ®eld of study, operatingup and down, such as sociology, psychology,or anthropology; (2) multidisciplinary per-spectives that partition the subject matter ofcrime and crime control into levels of analysisthat are explained by different disciplines,operating side by side, such as sociology,psychology and anthropology; and (3) inter-disciplinary perspectives that integrate crimeand crime control, operating as holistic-interactive analyses, that incorporate the fullrange or varieties of knowledge from suchdiverse ®elds as the social sciences, naturalsciences, and the humanities.

Essentially, there are two kinds of integra-tive criminology taking place today: `moder-nist' and `postmodernist' (Barak, 1998b). Bothtypes of synthesis call for conceptual integra-tion. However, modern forms emphasize thecentrality of theory in scienti®c endeavoursand the construction of `causal models'.Postmodern forms emphasize the ever chan-ging voices of plurality that provide meaningfor the local sites of crime, justice, law andcommunity and the construction of reciprocal,interactive or dialectical models of `causality'.In comparison, the modern approaches aremore concerned with integrating theories

153INTEGRATIVE CRIMINOLOGY

while the postmodern approaches are moreconcerned with integrating knowledges.Rather than pursuing the cause-effect predic-tions of theoretical integration within one orbetween a few disciplines like the modernists,postmodernists are developing explanatorymodels of crime and crime control thatintegrate the entire group of interdisciplinaryknowledges.

An important distinction between thevarious models of integration hinges on thescope or range of deviance and criminalityaddressed by a speci®c approach. Usually, thecausal logic of integrative theorization tends tobe a composite of causal relationships takenfrom other theories that combine elementsfrom social ecology theory, social learningtheory, social control theory and subculturaltheory. For example, Elliott, Huizinga andAgeton's (1985) integrated macro±microtheory of delinquency and drug use contendsthat social disorganization, strain and inade-quate socialization cause a weakening ofconventional bonding and a strengthening ofdelinquent bonding, which results in delin-quent behaviour.

Other modernist formulations such as thesocial process-micro models tend to empha-size the integration of kinds-of-people expla-nations of human behaviour. For example,Wilson and Herrnstein (1985) have proposedan eclectic, social learning-behavioural choiceformulation that relies on both positivistdeterminism and rational free will. Thismodel of theoretical integration combinesfactors involving human agency, individualaction and social process, while it omitsconsiderations of social organization andculture. A third type of modernist integrationincludes the social structural-macro models,such as Quinney's (1977) structural theorywhich argues that all criminal activities areclass-speci®c. In this formulation, the contra-dictions of capitalist development result intwo interconnected sets of crime: the crimes of`domination and repression' committed by thecapitalists and agents of crime control; and,the crimes of àccommodation and resistance'committed by workers and ordinary people.

Finally, there are the postmodernist effortsat integration. These argue that crimes arerecursive productions, that is, routinizedactivities which cannot be separated fromhistorically and culturally speci®c discoursesand structures that have attained a relativestability over time and place. For example,Henry and Milovanovic's (1996) constitutivecriminology argues, such discourses of differ-ence and structured inequality become

courses of social action where criminals andcrime-®ghters alike represent excessive inves-tors in the accumulation and expression ofpower and control. Similarly, Gregg Barak'sRepresenting O.J.: Murder, Criminal Justice, andMass Culture (1996, Harrow and Heston)argues that in order to understand thereactions of different groups of Americans tothe O.J. Simpson trial, for example, anintegration of the legal and cultural factors,such as the social and psychological groupexperiences that have helped to shape variouspeoples' attitudes and perceptions of crimeand justice, must be adopted.

Evaluation

Although the ®eld of criminology has alwaysformally identi®ed itself as an interdisciplin-ary exercise, most of its theoreticians andpractitioners have worked primarily fromnarrow disciplinary frameworks. Hence, inte-grative or interdisciplinary criminology repre-sents a challenge to the more traditionaldisciplinary approaches applied by the major-ity of criminologists. As an emerging para-digm within criminology, integration isrelatively new; so the verdict is still out andpending. A number of criminologists todayare sceptical of the ability of integrativecriminology to deliver on its promises andpossibilities. Some criminologists, such asTravis Hirschi, have already concluded thatintegrative criminology does not work andwill not succeed. On the other hand, somecriminologists, like John Braithwaite, believethat integration is the only way to proceed.

Gregg Barak

Associated Concepts: constitutive criminology,interactionism, social constructionism, sociallearning theory

Key ReadingsBarak, G. (ed.) (1998a) Integrative Criminology.

Aldershot, Ashgate.Barak, G. (1998b) Integrating Criminologies. Boston,

MA, Allyn and Bacon.Elliott, D.S., Huizinga, D. and Ageton, S. (1985)

Explaining Delinquency and Drug Use. BeverlyHills, CA, Sage.

Henry, S. and Milovanovic, D. (1996) ConstitutiveCriminology. London, Sage.

Quinney, R. (1977) Class, State, and Crime. New York,David McKay.

Wilson, J.Q. and Herrnstein, R.J. (1985) Crime andHuman Nature. New York, Simon and Schuster.


INTERACTIONISM

De®nition

A theoretical approach which focuses oninteractions between individuals as symbolicand linguistic exchanges and as means ofcreative action. It views the social world as theproduct of such interactions. Sometimes thistheoretical approach is also referred to assymbolic interactionism.


Interactionism is part of a broad strand oftheorizing in the social sciences which seeks tointegrate notions of purposeful and mean-ingful action into explanations of socialphenomena such as crime and deviance. Thewritings of Max Weber were in¯uential inbuilding social meanings into theory but thespeci®c formulation of symbolic interaction-ism emerged and developed during the inter-war years, mainly at the University of Chicagoand principally as a result of the work of thesocial psychologist George Herbert Mead.Mead did not systematically produce histheoretical ideas in written form. The pub-lished material is a compilation of lectures andnotes and as a result there are a number ofcontradictions and areas for clari®cation interms of ®ne detail (Mead, 1934). However,Mead's general thesis is as follows. Animalbehaviour is largely determined and charac-terized by stimulus±response. Human beha-viour, on the other hand, is ¯exible anddynamic and has the potential for creativity.An individual forms a concept and image ofhim or herself (`the self') by interacting withothers and developing a re¯exive awarenessof how he or she is viewed by others. This ismade possible through the signi®cant symbolsthat people share. Human language is madeup of symbols and it is through these thatindividuals can communicate meaningfully.This is what is known as symbolic interaction-ism. It is by such communication that theindividual takes on the perspective of othersand learns to act accordingly to them and toothers. However, there is also an element ofthe self which has the potential for rejecting orchanging the perspectives of others and foracting spontaneously and creatively.

Mead was especially interested in the devel-opment of `the self' and in child development.These interests were encased in a generaltheoretical framework and set of insights

which in¯uenced other theorists, not just insocial psychology but also in sociology (forexample, Herbert Blumer, who made signi®-cant contributions in the 1960s). These insightswere transferred and applied to a wide rangeof forms of social interaction, including thoseassociated with crime and deviance.

Interactionism is not a grand theory in thesense of a set of integrated propositions.Rather, it is a framework which offers a set ofassumptions about the nature of social action,the nature of the social world and relation-ships between them. It also comprises a set ofkey concepts. The main assumptions are thathuman action is characterized by free choice,¯exibility and dynamism. It is forever chan-ging according to types of interaction andtypes of context. Forms of social action areformed, adapted, re®ned or changed ininteractions with others in micro-social con-texts. Social order in such contexts and insociety in general is not ®xed and external, butthe product of such interactions. Social orderis not consensual; rather it is a plurality ofperspectives, values and norms. Key conceptsinclude ìnteraction', `meaning', `social learn-ing', `negotiation', `process', `stereotyping',`labelling' and `career'.

The interactionist framework and theassumptions and concepts which compriseit provide a basis for seeking explanationsof social phenomena (such as crime) whichtypically are non-positivist. Instead, explana-tions are cast in terms of processes andinteractions rather than predispositions,pathologies, determinants and causes, espe-cially where these are seen as located in theindividual. Interactionism also provides abasis for empirical inquiry, often using themethods and practices of ethnography. Ethno-graphy has a particular af®nity with inter-actionism because they share an interest in`capturing the actor's point of view' and alsobecause methods such as participant observa-tion are especially suited to the study of socialinteractions. The use of ethnographic enquiry,guided by interactionist concepts, to studycriminal subcultures is sometimes referred toas appreciative criminology.

The interactionist perspective has in¯u-enced criminological thinking at variousjunctures since its emergence out of symbolicinteractionism of the 1930s. It was particularlyin¯uential as part of the radical reaction, in the1960s and early 1970s, to the dominance ofpositivism in criminology. It was typi®ed bythe labelling approach to deviance whichemphasized that deviance is what peoplelabel as such. It encouraged many lines of

155INTERACTIONISM

enquiry. These included foci on: crime as theoutcome of social interaction; crime as theresult of negotiated processes involving ruleviolators and control agents as de®ners;changing de®nitions of crime in law enact-ment; police discretion in the enforcement ofthe law; crime as a meaningful act; and theconsequences of being labelled deviant, forexample in terms of further deviancy ampli-®cation.

Evaluation

An important element of social interaction isthe exercise of power. Interactionists are inter-ested in power, for example in the ways inwhich some categories of people are ableto make deviant labels `stick' and others areunable to cast them off. One of the challenges ofinteractionist-inspired criminological enquiryhas been the ability successfully to demonstratehow the exercise of power in micro-socialcontexts has its source in wider, structuralpower inequalities in society. This requirescriminologists to produce a synthesis of theor-izing and empirical enquiry at micro andmacro levels.

The contribution of the interactionist strandwithin criminology has been to challengepositivist approaches, with their emphasis oncausality, by raising de®nitional issues (whogets labelled as deviant?) and by encouraginga focus on control agents as generators ofcrime (who does the labelling?). It has alsoproduced a rich vein of ethnographic studiesof deviant subcultures, criminal justice agen-cies and processes of social control.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: appreciative criminology,ethnography, labelling, new deviancy theory,social learning theory

Key ReadingsBecker, H. (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of

Deviance. New York, The Free Press.Blumer, H. (1969) Symbolic Interactionism. Engle-

wood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice±Hall.Mead, G.H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society. Chicago,

University of Chicago Press.Sumner, C. (1994) The Sociology of Deviance: An

Obituary. Buckingham, Open University Press.


J

JUST DESERTS

De®nition

The proposition that the principles of propor-tionality, due process, determinant sentencingand non-discretional decision-making shouldbe the central elements of systems of criminaljustice.


The principles of `just deserts' in sentencing areusually compared with those of rehabilitation,treatment or welfare. In the 1970s liberallawyers and civil libertarians in the USAwere becoming increasingly critical of rehabi-litative sentencing. They argued that the `needfor treatment' acted as a spurious justi®cationfor placing excessive restrictions on individualliberty, particularly for young women, whichwere out of proportion either to the seriousnessof the offence or to the realities of being in`need of care and protection'. Indeterminatesentencing schemes, notably in California,meant that length of sentence was at thediscretion of an Adult Authority (parole)board rather than a judicial body. Time inprison rested on psychological assessments ofhow far an offender had ìmproved' ratherthan with reference to the actual crime com-mitted. As a result minor offenders could servelonger sentences than those convicted of moreserious offences, particularly if they declinedthe òffer' of treatment. In a series of prisonriots, most notably at Attica, a key grievancewas the indeterminacy and lack of proportion-ality in sentencing. Probation, social work andwelfare judgements were viewed as a form ofarbitrary and discretional power. Many offen-ders, it was argued, were subjected to

apparently non-accountable state proceduresand their liberty often unjusti®ably denied(American Friends Service Committee, 1972).

In the ®eld of juvenile justice it was simi-larly argued that investigation of social back-ground was an imposition: that social workinvolvement not only preserved explanationsof individual pathology, but also underminedyoung persons' right to natural justice. Youngpeople were placed in double jeopardy ±sentenced for their background as well as fortheir offence ± and as a result their movementup the sentencing tariff was often accelerated(Morris et al., 1980).

In the wake of these criticisms a new justice-based model of corrections emerged. Itsleading proponent in America, von Hirsch(1976), proposed that the following principlesbe reinstated at the centre of criminal justicepractice:

· proportionality of punishment to crime, orthe offender is handed a sentence that is inaccordance with what the act deserves;

· determinacy of sentencing and an end toindeterminate, treatment oriented sen-tences;

· an end to judicial, professional andadministrative discretion;

· an end to disparities in sentencing;

· equity and protection of rights throughdue process.

The idea of punishing the crime, not theperson, had clear attractions for those seekingan end to the abuses of discretional power.

Evaluation

However this liberal critique also coalescedwith the concerns of traditional retributiviststhat rehabilitation was a `soft option'. Forthem tougher sentencing would also enable

criminals to get their `just deserts'. For thisreason Clarke (1985) maintained that thestaking out of `justice' as a strategy for reformis always liable to allow proponents of law andorder to recruit the arguments of `naturaljustice' for their own ends, although the formeris more concerned with retribution and thelatter with judicial equality and consistency.Within the political climate of the 1980s notionsof `just deserts' and ànti-welfarism' wereindeed politically mobilized by the right. Thelanguage of `justice and rights' was appro-priated by one of `self responsibility andobligation'. Accordingly, Hudson (1987, 1996)has argued that the `just deserts' or `back tojustice' movements that emerged in manyWestern jurisdictions in the 1980s wereevidence of a `modern retributivism' ratherthan necessarily heralding the emergence ofnew liberal regimes and sentencing policies.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: disproportionality, dueprocess model, natural justice, rehabilitation,retribution

Key ReadingsAmerican Friends Service Committee (1972) Struggle

for Justice. New York, Hill and Wang.Clarke, J. (1985) `Whose justice? The politics of

juvenile control', International Journal of theSociology of Law, 13 (4), pp. 405±21.

von Hirsch, A. (1976) Doing Justice: The Choice ofPunishments. New York, Hill and Wang.

Hudson, B. (1987) Justice Through Punishment.London, Macmillan.


Morris, A., Giller, H., Geach, H. and Szwed, E.(1980) Justice for Children. London, Macmillan.

JUSTICE

See Actuarialism; Crime control model; Crim-inal justice; Due process model; Informaljustice; Just deserts; Natural justice; Popularjustice; Restorative justice; Social justice

JUVENILE JUSTICE

See Bifurcation; Decarceration; Delinquency;Diversion; Just deserts; Multi-agency crimeprevention; Net widening; Rehabilitation;Restorative justice; Social control theory


L

LABELLING

De®nition

A sociological approach to understandingcrime and deviancy which refers to the socialprocesses through which certain individualsand groups classify and categorize thebehaviour of others. On this basis labelledindividuals are stereotyped to act in certainways and are responded to accordingly. Suchreaction tends to reinforce a self conception asdeviant and has the unanticipated conse-quence of promoting the behaviour that it isdesigned to prevent.


Unlike traditional approaches which assumethat the causes of crime and deviance lie eitherwithin individual offenders themselves orwithin their socio-economic circumstances,the labelling approach argues that criminolo-gical analysis should begin with how peoplecome to be de®ned as deviant and examine theimplications that such de®nitions hold forfuture offending behaviour. The approach iswidely associated with the work of HowardBecker (1963), who famously claimed thatdeviance is not inherent in any action, but iscreated when rules and sanctions are appliedto behaviour considered to be òffending'.Behaviour only becomes deviant when it islabelled as such. Traces of such an approachcan be found throughout the nineteenthcentury. The penal reformer and utilitarianphilosopher Jeremy Bentham, for example,argued that certain social reactions to crime ±the unreformed prison ± are more likely topromote offending than curtail it. HenryMayhew, the social commentator, considered

that over-zealous policing was a signi®cantfactor in the creation of juvenile delinquencyin the mid-nineteenth century. Such themesare widely repeated in the perennial claim thatprisons are `colleges of crime' and that theycement `criminal careers'. In the 1930s FrankTannenbaum (1938) argued that deviance wascreated through a process of social interaction.Whilst a majority commit deviant acts only aminority come to be known as deviant. Theknown deviant is then targeted, identi®ed,de®ned and treated as such even though theirbehaviour may be no different from those whohave not been so identi®ed. As a result certainpeople `become deviant' through the imposi-tion of social judgements on their behaviour:they become the very essence of what is beingcomplained of. In the 1950s Edwin Lemertfurther re®ned the approach by distinguishingbetween primary and secondary deviation. Heargued that primary deviance is often atemporary waywardness and perpetratorshave no conception of themselves as deviant.Secondary deviance is created through thereaction of others to the initial deviance.Through name-calling, stereotyping and label-ling, a deviant identity is established andcon®rmed. Often deviants resolve this perso-nal crisis by accepting their deviant status andby reorganizing their lives accordingly. Theybecome more, rather than less, deviant.Lemert's conclusion that social control causesdeviancy was a crucial turning point in thedevelopment of a radical criminologicalimagination that has ¯ourished since the1960s.

A fully ¯edged labelling approach emergedthrough the work of Howard Becker, KaiErikson and John Kitsuse in the 1960s. Foreach, the key to understanding the origins ofdeviance lay in the reactions of a socialaudience, rather than in the behaviour of anindividual actor. It is the audience which

determines whether or not any behaviourcomes to be de®ned as deviant. A number ofstudies were published in the 1960s and 1970swhich revealed the processes of becoming amarijuana smoker, a prostitute, a homosexual,a prisoner and so on. In each it was the stigmaattached to the label that was consideredpivotal in informing future behaviour pat-terns. De®ned as òutsiders', it is such groupsthat come to epitomize what is considered tobe criminal. A self-ful®lling prophecy ensues.Criminality is continually sought only in thoseidenti®ed as criminal. And the power of thelabel of `criminal' ensures that `criminalcareers' are exacerbated.

To counter this process labelling theoristsargue that only a diminution or absence ofof®cial reaction is able signi®cantly to reduceoffending. When no stigma, ostracism orexclusion is applied to a deviant act thendelinquent `careers' will not be established. Incontrast to reactive `get tough' approaches,decriminalization and a radical non-interven-tionism are called for.

By focusing on the processes wherebybehaviour comes to be criminalized and byadopting a relatively non-judgemental orappreciative stance to primary deviance,labelling opened up whole new areas ofinterest in criminology, in which the conceptsof stigma, social reaction and control were tobecome pivotal. Through labelling, the tradi-tional behavioural questions ± why do they doit? ± were subordinated to a more critical lineof enquiry ± who de®nes another as deviant?,for what purposes? and with what implica-tions for future deviant activity?

Evaluation

Labelling continues to offer an important chal-lenge to traditional criminological approaches.By focusing on de®nitional issues it is able toreveal how the concepts of `crime' and`deviance' are not universally agreed upon,but are socially constructed, contingent andcontestable. By drawing attention to the role ofsocial reaction (and law and order enforce-ment in particular) it warns of the ways inwhich criminal justice may cause that whichit is designed to curtail. However, a numberof radical authors have subsequently arguedthat the logic of labelling is limited whenemployed without any analysis of the socialand political structures and inequalities inwhich such labels are constructed and upheld.Labelling fails to explain why it is only somebehaviours that come to be de®ned in a

historical and political context as deviant,whilst others do not. The key question ±whose law and whose order is being pro-tected? ± was notably overlooked. As a result,some critical criminologists in the 1970sargued that the insights of labelling neededto be wedded to a Marxist model of societyand the state. Only then could the subjectiveencounters of social reaction and social controlbe viewed as objective social processes setin particular social formations. As a resultlabelling has been critiqued as merely offeringan approach and not meeting the requirementsfor a fully worked up criminological theory.

A different critique offered by positivistcriminologists focuses on the lack of seriousattention that labelling gives to primarydeviance. By concentrating on such `victim-less' crimes as drug taking, homosexuality andso on, it has failed to recognize suf®ciently thefundamental deviance attached to other`serious crimes' such as murder, robbery andinstitutional violence. In addition, it has beensuggested that the origins of a `deviantidentity' lie not in the processes of socialreaction, but in local community and neigh-bourhood settings. The multiple sources anddifferential impacts of a range of negativelabels are likely to be far more complex thanthat offered by the labelling perspective of the1960s.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: criminal careers, deviancyampli®cation, interactionism, radical crimin-ologies, radical non-intervention, social con-structionism, social reaction


Deviance. New York, The Free Press.Erikson, K.T. (1966) Wayward Puritans: A Study in the

Sociology of Deviance. New York, Wiley.Kitsuse, J. (1962) `Societal reaction to deviant

behaviour', Social Problems, no. 9, pp. 247±56.Lemert, E. (1951) Social Pathology. New York,

McGraw±Hill.Plummer, K. (1979) `Misunderstanding labelling

perspectives', in D. Downes and P. Rock (eds),Deviant Interpretations. Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress.

Tannenbaum, F. (1938) Crime and the Community.New York, Colombia University Press.


LEFT IDEALISM

De®nition

A sociological approach to crime and punish-ment whose roots lie in Marxist and neo-Marxist theory. This requires taking theproblem of crime seriously while criticallyanalysing the processes of criminalization,social construction and state power, whichcontribute to making crime and the responsesto it a complex social process. Therefore, aca-demic research should be critical and inter-ventionist built on analysing the widerstructures of power that reproduce the socialdivisions underpinning the social order ofcontemporary capitalist democracies.


Left idealism sits on the critical wing ofcriminology and is often contrasted with leftrealism. Both perspectives have their roots inthe early 1970s and the shift towards aMarxist-oriented approach to the understand-ing of crime and deviance. In 1975 Jock Youngargued in his in¯uential essay `Working ClassCriminology' (in Taylor et al., 1975) that criti-cal criminology was fragmenting into anumber of distinct strands, two of which heidenti®ed as realism and idealism. By the mid-1980s the rise and consolidation of the NewRight led realists such as Kinsey, Lea,Matthews and Young to call for a reappraisalof the role of criminology. In particular, theydemanded that criminologists should rejectthe idealization of the criminal and theutopian romanticism they identi®ed as centralto idealist thought. Instead, they argued thatcriminologists should take crime and the fearof crime seriously, especially its impact on thepowerless.

However, those labelled as idealists did notaccept Young's argument:

The critics of the new realists . . . reject theircategorization as left idealists and argue force-fully that their interventionist work within criticalcriminology has responded to the realities of lifeunder Thatcherism. Further, they challenge newrealism on its misreading of history, under-theorization both of the structural contradictionsunder advanced capitalism and the advancedcapitalist state form and its rule of law, and on itsessentially super®cial approach to the complex-ities of crime, crime control and the criminaljustice process. (Sim et al., 1987, p. 39)

Thus British idealists such as Gilroy,Hillyard, Bunyan, Scraton, Sim and Gordonnot only rejected a label which was, and is,identi®ed with them but also they highlighteda series of key theoretical and political dis-tinctions between their conceptualization ofpolitics and criminology and that propoundedby Young and his colleagues.

First, contrary to the theoretical `straw man'that realists had established, those labelled asidealists did not see the state as an homo-geneous entity incapable of change. This`crude and simplistic' caricature (van Swaanin-gen, 1997, p. 201) seriously underestimated theidealist position that the state was a contingentand contradictory set of institutions. Criticalcriminologists should therefore exploit thesecontradictions through research whose resultsshould be made available to those groupsstruggling to reform and radically change thecriminal justice system. This `criminology frombelow' (Sim et al., 1987, p. 7) led to a range ofinterventionist work in Britain throughout the1970s and 1980s around prisons, the police,Northern Ireland, violence against women,institutionalized racism and deaths in custody.Like abolitionists, idealists understood politi-cal action as a hegemonic process whichinvolved analysing the state both as a coerciveset of institutions and as a site where dominantideas could be fought over, challenged andresisted. Consequently, they supported com-munity groups involved in of®cial andunof®cial inquiries into the operation ofdifferent criminal justice institutions to ensurethat state de®nitions of `truth' did not prevailand that alternative accounts from below werenot marginalized. This remained a key aspectof left idealism in the 1990s.

Secondly, idealists maintained that crimeand public concerns about it were complexphenomena which needed to be unpacked andunderstood. The realist's ùndifferentiated andabstract view of crime' was:

Theoretically and politically problematic not onlybecause it allows the already elastic concept ofcrime to become a catch-all category but alsobecause it presents an idealized view of theworking class community as a `homogeneousgroup united by its fear of crime despite theeveryday divisions of gender, race, craft, incomeand employment'. (Gilroy and Sim, cited in Sim etal., 1987, p. 45)

Thirdly, they argued that the state was con-cerned with the reproduction of an unequalsocial order rather than, as in the case of thepolice, offering a `service' to the powerless.

161LEFT IDEALISM

This did not mean that its institutionsdefended processes of domination in everyinstance but that wider structures of powerplayed a central role in the construction ofcriminal justice policies and the deploymentof state personnel. Finally, like abolitionists,they contended that the state's response tocrime should be deconstructed and replacedwith an alternative set of democraticallyembedded policies and practices. This posi-tion contrasted with realists, who `with theirfocus on the beginning of the `̀ penal chain''(crime prevention and the police) . . . nearlyforgot where this chain ends: in punishment'(van Swaaningen, 1997, p. 200).

Evaluation

Left idealism remains a central strand incritical criminological praxis. While the chargeof utopianism is still leveled at them, idealistswould say that the events of the 1990s haveonly underlined the strength of their thesis.The consolidation of the New Right, particu-larly in the UK and USA in the ®rst half of thedecade, coupled with an intensi®cation in theauthoritarian capabilities of the state, illus-trates and reinforces their view that whilecrime should be taken seriously the state'sprimary focus is on the maintenance andreproduction of a social order that remainsdeeply divided along the fault lines of socialclass, gender, `race', age and sexuality.

At the same time the moral panics aroundjuvenile crime, single parents, asylum seekersand drug users during the decade illustratehow discourses surrounding conventionalde®nitions of crime and deviance can still bemobilized ideologically to reproduce struc-tures of domination and subordination. Theelection of New Labour in the UK in 1997,many of whose ideas on law and order can betraced back to left realism, has reinforced theidealist argument still further. While idealistswould not support the sociologically reduc-tionist position which contends that Labourhas abjectly followed the policies of previousConservative administrations, they wouldcontend that many of the government'spolicies on law and order are built on afurther consolidation of state power. This con-solidation includes: a range of new powers forstate servants; an ideological construction ofparticular groups as criminalistic and deviant;a failure to confront the issue of the demo-cratic accountability of state institutions; and areluctance to deal with crimes committed bythe powerful, for example, in terms of deaths

at work and in custody. As Sumner (1990, p. 3)notes, tying theory and research to a socialdemocratic agenda means that `there is agrave danger of running into the cul-de-sac ofa social democratic, parochial reformismwhich is not so far away from neo-positivist,administrative criminology'.

Realists maintain that idealists still concep-tualize the state as a homogeneous entitywhich operates at all times and in all places forthe bene®t of those in power. Idealists wouldmake two responses to this point. First, itremains necessary to scrutinize the statesociologically, its lack of democratic account-ability and the institutional and personalaccumulation of power that has underpinnedits development since the beginning of thenineteenth century. Indeed, the trend towardspost-structuralist and postmodernist thoughtin the social sciences has led to the state beingairbrushed out of academic analysis. The stateshould therefore be brought back in as a focusfor research and theorizing. This can be donewithout degenerating into a reductionist andinstrumental view of state power.

Second, idealists would contend that theinterventionist work of the 1970s and 1980s,built on exploiting the contingencies andcontradictions in the state, continued into the1990s. In a range of areas including deaths incustody, health and safety at work, violenceagainst women and state behaviour in North-ern Ireland, idealist academics have continuedto work with community groups and others tochange laws and state practices. Additionally,in the UK they have provided support to, andworked with, groups involved in majorpolitical issues such as the Hillsborough dis-aster and the Stephen Lawrence inquiry. Theywould also maintain that they have had anin¯uence not only on public and politicaldebate but, in working with particularpressure groups, have been instrumental inhelping to achieve changes in the law, forexample, around inquest procedures affectingdeaths in custody.

In terms of future developments, idealistswould argue for greater utopianism in socialand criminological theory and that theiralternative de®nition of crime and punish-ment remains central to their overall vision ofa society devoid of the hierarchies of powerthat limit human capacities and capabilities.They would also agree with Stan Cohen thatthe choice for academics is not necessarilybetween scepticism and realism `but to showin concrete situations where intellectual sub-version might or might not lead'. For Cohen,this `raises questions of strategy, tactics and


alliances'. It follows from this that criminologyhas to try to satisfy:

A triple loyalty: ®rst an overriding obligation tohonest intellectual inquiry itself (however scep-tical, provisional, irrelevant and unrealistic);second, a political commitment to social justice;and third (and potentially con¯icting with both),the pressing and immediate demands for short-term humanitarian help. We have to appeasethese three voracious gods. (Cohen, 1998, pp.118±22; emphasis in the original)

Roy Coleman and Joe Sim

Associated Concepts: abolitionism, critical crimi-nology, critical research, hegemony, leftrealism, the state

Key ReadingsCohen, S. (1998) Ìntellectual scepticism and political

commitment: the case of radical criminology', inP. Walton and J. Young (eds), The New Crimino-logy Revisited. Basingstoke, Macmillan.

Pearce, S. and Tombs, S. (1992) `Realism andcorporate crime', in R. Matthews and J. Young(eds), Issues in Realist Criminology. London, Sage.

Ryan, M. and Ward, T. (1986) `Law and order: leftrealism against the rest', The Abolitionist, 22 (2),pp. 29±33.

Sim, J. Scraton, P. and Gordon, P. (1987) Ìntroduc-tion: crime, the state and critical analysis', inP. Scraton (ed.), Law, Order and the AuthoritarianState. Milton Keynes, The Open University Press.

Sumner, C. (1990) Ìntroduction: contemporarysocialist criminology', in C. Sumner (ed.), Censure,Politics and Criminal Justice. Buckingham, TheOpen University Press.

Taylor, I., Walton, P. and Young, J. (eds) (1975)Critical Criminology. London, Routledge.

Van Swaaningen, R. (1997) Critical Criminology:Visions From Europe. London, Sage.

LEFT REALISM

De®nition

A school of criminology which emergedinitially in Britain in the early 1980s as aresponse both to the punitive and exclusion-ary policies of conservatism and to theutopianism of New Left radical criminologies.


Left realist criminology, as its name implies, isradical in its criminology and realistic in its

appraisal of crime and its causes. It is radicalin that crime is seen as an endemic product ofthe class and patriarchal nature of advancedindustrial society. It is not a cosmetic crimino-logy of an establishment sort which viewscrime as a blemish which, with suitabletreatment, can be removed from the body ofsociety, which is, in itself, otherwise healthyand in little need of reconstruction. Rather itsuggests that it is within the core institutionsof society (its relationships of class and ofgender) and its central values (such ascompetitive individualism and aggressivemasculinity) that crime arises. Crime is not aproduct of abnormality but of the normalworkings of the social order. Secondly, it isrealistic in that it attempts to be faithful to thereality of crime. This involves several tasks:realistically appraising the problem of crime,deconstructing crime into its fundamentalcomponents (the square of crime), criticallyexamining the nature of causality, beingrealistic about the possibilities of interventionand, above all, fully understanding thechanging social terrain in which we now live.

The particular political space in which leftrealism emerged was in the mid-1980s. Thejuxtaposition was with the emergence of con-servative (`neo-liberal') governments in manyWestern countries which pursued an overtlypunishment-oriented approach to crime con-trol. At that time a liberal/social democraticopposition was on the defensive. The neo-liberals actively pointed to the rise in thecrime rate and entered vigorously into lawand order campaigns on behalf of `the silentmajority', holding offenders responsible fortheir actions and advocating punishment asthe solution. The New Left position, whichhad its origins in the libertarianism of the1960s, tended to resemble a mirror image ofthe right. That is, it denied or downplayedthe level of crime, portrayed the offender asvictim of the system, and stressed a multi-culturalism of diversity and struggle whereradicalism entailed the defence of the com-munity against the incursions of the state,particularly the police and the criminaljustice system. What was necessary was acriminology which could navigate betweenthese two currents: which took crime ser-iously but which was radical in its analysisand policy.

It was, therefore, no accident that two keyrealist texts were published in the mid-eighties: What is to be Done About Law andOrder? (by John Lea and Jock Young) in 1984in Britain, and Confronting Crime (by ElliottCurrie) in 1985 in the United States, whilst the

163LEFT REALISM

®rst realist crime survey was carried out in1985 by the Canadian Brian Maclean.

The evocation to `take crime seriously'involved realists in large-scale local victimiza-tion studies directly and `democratically'asking people about their problems of crimeand their assessment of police effectiveness.These surveys, frequently funded by radicallocal councils, pointed both to the greaterburden of crime on the poor, ethnic minoritiesand women and the extent of police abusesand inef®ciency. Later surveys were widenedout to include white collar crime and domesticviolence (Mooney, 2000). In Britain such workhas had considerable impact on the re-orientation of Labour Party policies towardsa heightened concern with crime controlissues. Although such quantitative work hasbecome identi®ed with realism, the need forqualitative research to make sense of the®ndings and provide clues to causality isconstantly stressed.

A fundamental task of left realism is todeconstruct the concept of crime. First it isnoted that crime is inevitably the product ofaction and reaction and that the failure ofprevious criminologies is that they haveproblematized one component and ignoredthe other. Thus positivism focuses on crimeand tends to take the de®nition of crime forgranted whereas constructionism (that is,labelling theory, abolitionism and much ofcritical criminology) problematizes the way inwhich crime is de®ned and constructed yettends to ignore crime itself. The left realistcritique argues that to explain crime necessi-tates a double aetiology of action and reactionand a corresponding denial of any essence ofcrime. Rather crime is viewed as a conceptconstantly changing over time and varyingfrom the perspective of different groups. Itoccurs in the interrelationship between offenderand victim within the varying de®nitional ¯uxof formal and informal systems of control(Young, 1992). (Hence the square of crimebetween these four points.)

Realism stresses the need to seek the causesof crime but is critical of any positivisticnotion of a mechanistic nature. A key causalconcept is relative deprivation, which encom-passes both the subjective and material natureof discontent. Such an emphasis on both thesubjective and objective dimensions of humanaction is mirrored throughout realist analysis.Thus just as it is stressed that the causes ofcrime cannot be reduced to material depriva-tion alone, fear of crime cannot be understoodas merely a re¯ection of risk rates and the rateof imprisonment cannot be simply correlated

with crime rates. For all of these processesinvolve human evaluation and re¯ection uponmaterial circumstances. And because of thisdouble nature, the opposite reduction isequally invalid: for material inequality is thebasis of crime, fear of crime cannot bedissociated from the risk of crime, and levelsof punishment cannot be discussed withoutresort to the crime rates.

Realism is an integrated theory synthesizingtheoretical traditions (particularly subculturaltheory and labelling theory) and fuzing themtogether within a socialist feminist frameworkthat stresses class and gender inequality (seeMooney, 2000).

Intervention to control crime is a centralconcern, involving multi-agencies and atdifferent points in the natural history of aspeci®c crime. Social crime prevention isstressed although situational crime preventionand deterrence from the criminal justicesystem play minor backing roles. The ultimatetask is to make fundamental changes in thesocial order whilst at the same time interven-ing on a day-to-day basis to protect the publicand push reform onwards. Like all radicalpolitics the central problem is to remaincommitted to change without being merelyutopian and to be immediately effectivewithout being simply technocratic and prag-matic.

Evaluation

Left realism has moved in the last decade froma polemical position that stressed the need forradicals to take crime seriously to the founda-tion of an integrated theory that attempts tosynthesize the major strands of criminologicalthought. What is now necessary is the devel-opment of a sociology that relates to thetransition to late modernity and a politics thatis in dialogue with contemporary feminist andsocial democratic theory. A start has beenmade in this direction, but much exacting andexciting work remains to be done.

Jock Young

Associated Concepts: fear of crime, left idealism,neo-conservative criminology, relative depri-vation, social crime prevention, victim surveys

Key ReadingsCurrie, E. (1995) Confronting Crime. New York,

Pantheon.Currie, E. (1998) Crime and Punishment in America.

New York, Metropolitan Books.


Lea, J. and Young, J. (1984) What is to be Done AboutLaw and Order? Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Lowman, J. and Maclean, B. (eds) (1992) RealistCriminology. Toronto, University of Toronto Press.

Mooney, J. (2000) Gender, Violence and the SocialOrder. London, Macmillan.

Young, J. (1992) `Ten points of realism', in J. Youngand R. Matthews (eds), Rethinking Criminology:The Realist Debate. London, Sage.


LIBERAL FEMINISM

De®nition

Liberal feminism was the ®rst of the theoreticalfeminist perspectives, developed in the 1920sfrom the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and J.S.Mill, and it greatly in¯uenced the `®rst wave'of modern Western feminism. Its emphasis isvery much on the equality of men and women,especially with regard to their moral andintellectual characteristics, thus liberal femin-ists have argued for social and politicalchanges in the educational and legal frame-work which they see as constraining women.In the sphere of criminal justice studies, liberalfeminism has had a powerful impact onanalyses of equity and discrimination.


Liberal feminism has claims to be the oldestand the original feminist theory, with its rootsin eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkingand in the American Revolution (Banks, 1981).While the French Revolution did little toadvance the emancipation of women, theintellectual ferment of ideas which it provokedinspired debate in England and Americawhich did challenge the status quo, in whichwomen had effectively no political rights. In1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindi-cation of the Rights of Woman in which shechallenged notions of female inferiority andinsisted that there should be equal educationalopportunities for women with men andemployment for single women. In 1869, J.S.Mill's On the Subjection of Women took upsimilar arguments in support of the contem-porary campaigns for female enfranchisement:`the legal subordination of one sex to the other± is wrong in itself . . . and that it ought to bereplaced by a principle of perfect equality'.

The American Declaration of Independence

inspired the statement of feminist principlesthat emerged from the Seneca Falls Conven-tion in 1848. This event, which marked thefounding of organized feminism in the USA,laid claims to sexual equality and equal rightsfor women alongside men.

Thus both the early feminist writers and thecampaigners whom they inspired, relied on anindividualist notion of equality and oncomparing women with men. Campaignsfocused on formal recognition of females asfree and equal individuals who could enjoyfull legal and civil rights to vote, to enter intocontracts, gain an education and membershipof professions. Much effort in the USA andBritain went into the lengthy struggles to gainthe vote, sometimes, as in certain US states,before all of the male population had beenenfranchised. Nevertheless, insistence onrights-based claims to enfranchisement weresuccessful in the early twentieth century inAustralia, New Zealand and later in Britainand the USA.

In the later twentieth century, a second waveof feminism ¯ourished, which had notablydifferent aims. Nevertheless, there are clearlinks between this phase and the earlier one,chie¯y through the modern version of liberalfeminism. The central notion remains that ofremoving barriers and constraints to achievingequality. Equal rights and equal opportunitiesare key issues: sex discrimination must go,there must be more women in politics andpositions of power, and in senior posts inindustry and commerce, and sex stereotypingin the media, education and public attitudesshould be combated (Dale and Foster, 1986).In the USA the National Organization ofWomen, in Britain the Equal OpportunitiesCommission are institutional examples ofliberal approaches to women's rights.

In criminology, liberal feminists demon-strated many instances of inequitable treat-ment of girls and women: the extra penaltiesincurred by `wayward' girls in the USA, or themore limited options available in prisons forwomen. However, some research has indicatedthat women may be less severely sanctionedthan men and equalizing punishment (forexample, through strict sentencing guidelines),may lead to the harsher, male norm beingimposed (Chesney-Lind and Faith, 2000).

Evaluation

Liberal feminists have sought to play downbiological differences between the sexes and toargue that women can achieve equality with

165LIBERAL FEMINISM

men. These views have been criticized forignoring structural differences between thepower positions of men and women, espe-cially in the family, and also for offeringstrategies that relate mainly to the interests ofwhite, middle-class women and not to those ofblack or working-class women. This criticismhas had particular relevance in criminology(Daly and Stephens, 1995) since women (andmen) from some minorities are heavily over-represented in offender populations.

Campaigns mounted by ®rst wave feministsto ensure the entry of women into policing, thelegal and correctional professions were ulti-mately successful, although representation isstill low in many countries. Nor has the smallfemale presence achieved signi®cant change, asearlier reformers had hoped (Chesney-Lindand Faith, 2000). Critics of liberal approacheshave argued that institutions such as the lawand the state are too imbued with patriarchalassumptions and sexist practices to enable realchanges to be brought about. While liberalfeminism clearly has its limitations, it has hadin¯uence and impact on much subsequentthinking and is the basis for later and moreradical perspectives. Eisenstein (1981) hadcontended that because of its `self-contradictorynature', liberal feminism logically leads to thedevelopment of much more radical approaches.

Frances Heidensohn

Associated Concepts: discrimination, feministcriminologies, radical feminism

Key ReadingsBanks, O. (1981) Faces of Feminism. Oxford, Martin

Robertson.Chesney-Lind, M. and Faith, K. (2000) `What about

feminism? Engendering theory-making in crimi-nology', in R. Paternoster and R. Bachman (eds),Explaining Criminals and Crime: Essays in Con-temporary Criminological Theory. Los Angeles,Roxbury Publishing Co.

Dale, J. and Foster, P. (1986) Feminists and StateWelfare. London, Routledge.

Daly, K. and Stephens, D. (1995) `The `̀ Dark Figure''of criminology: towards a black and multi-ethnicfeminist agenda for theory and research', in N.Rafter and F. Heidensohn (eds), InternationalFeminist Perspectives in Criminology. MiltonKeynes, Open University Press.

Eisenstein, Z. (1981) The Radical Future of LiberalFeminism. London, Longman.

Wollstonecraft, M. and Mill, J.S. (1929) The Rights ofWomen, The Subjection of Women (ed. G. Catin).London, Dent.

LONGITUDINAL STUDY

De®nition

A form of study in which observations arecollected from the same people at different,sometimes key, points in their lifetime, oftenwith a view to studying personal or individualdevelopment. Variants are sometimes alsoknown as cohort studies and panel studies.In both cases there is repeated contact with thesame individuals over a period of time.


With longitudinal cohort studies, a sample isdrawn from a particular `cohort', which isde®ned by membership of a particular groupor category of individuals such as those bornin a particular week or year, children enteringschool at the same time or offenders sentencedto imprisonment at the same time. The samesample members are contacted at regularintervals and over a much longer period oftime than is typical of other forms of survey.In this respect, longitudinal surveys are alsoprospective designs (studying people as theydevelop) rather than retrospective designs(collecting observations about people's back-grounds retrospectively). Although it is not anecessary feature of longitudinal cohortstudies, there is often an emphasis upondescribing and explaining personal develop-ment, the progression of life events and theonset of behavioural patterns or physicalillness. Sometimes these descriptions andexplanations are used as a basis for makingpredictions about changes in other, but similartypes of people, for example predictions aboutthe kinds of people who are likely to embarkon and pursue criminal careers.

Longitudinal surveys have been used in awide range of areas, for instance psychiatry,paediatrics, child development and health. Incriminology such surveys are associated withstudies of the causes of delinquency and crimeas typi®ed by the Cambridge Study inDelinquent Development. In 1961 a sampleof 411 working-class boys, aged about 8 yearsold, was selected from the registers of six stateprimary schools in an area of London. Girlswere not included in the sample. The samplemembers were contacted at regular intervalsup until the age of 21 and a subsample wasinterviewed. Finally, all sample members werecontacted when they were 32 years old toexamine which of them had continued a `life


of crime' into adulthood and why. Five keyfactors relating to the boys when they were 8±10 years old were identi®ed as being statisti-cally related to subsequent delinquency. Thesewere low family income, large family size,parents with a criminal record, low intelli-gence and poor parental child-rearing prac-tices (West, 1982). Six predictors of offendingin later years, up to the age of 32, were alsoidenti®ed. These were poverty, poor parent-ing, family deviance, school problems, hyper-activity/impulsiveness/attention de®cit andanti-social behaviour (Farrington, 1989).

The strategy of analysis used to explaindelinquency and subsequent criminal careersowes much to the logic of the comparativemethod. At the point at which two subgroupswere identi®ed within the sample ± those`delinquent' and those `non-delinquent' ±these groups were compared on a range ofvariables to examine which were the bestpredictors of differences between them (ineffect asking the question `which factors dothe delinquents share in common which arenot shared to the same extent by the non-delinquents?). This form of analysis is not onlycomparative but also multivariate in so far as anumber of variables are introduced in order toexplain the variables `delinquency' and `sub-sequent criminal careers'. These are not onlyexplanatory variables but also predictors ofdelinquency and crime. Such predictors pro-vide the basis for suggesting policy initiatives,such as introducing training in child-rearingmethods for parents.

Although the distinction is not precise,panel studies differ from cohort studies in sofar as they are based on representativesamples of the population to be studiedrather than cohorts based on birth or a par-ticular entry point (for example, admission toa prison).

Longitudinal studies can also vary accord-ing to the period of time over which data arecollected from the cohorts or panels. Theremay also be variations in the frequency of theintervals between data collection points(sometimes known as `sweeps'). Birth cohortstudies often extend over a lifetime andbecause they are usually interested in matura-tion and development (for example, of acriminal career) they collect data over longertime intervals than is typical for panel studies.

Evaluation

The strengths of longitudinal designs are asfollows. First, unlike one-shot cross-sectional

designs, longitudinal research is not depen-dent on the collection of retrospective data inseeking to relate past experiences to presentday attitudes and actions. It can collect a widerange of data about a wide range of variablesat different stages in an individual's life.Secondly, the collection of data at the stages inan individual's life to which they relatereduces the invalidity associated with thecollection of retrospective data (for example,inaccuracies of memory). Thirdly, longitudinalstudies can focus on individual developmentand can provide direct evidence of time-ordering of variable which gives credence tocausal inferences that link contemporaryattitudes and action to previous backgrounds,experiences and events.

On the negative side, however, longitudinalsurveys are very costly and they produce theirresults very slowly, especially those relating tothe later stages of development. Also, there isalways a risk that members will change as aresult of being part of the study, perhaps byresponding in ways that they believe areexpected of them. What is more, the sampleruns the risk of being seriously depleted bydrop-out over the years, something known as`sample attrition'. A further problem is thatvariables about which data are collected atearly stages may not anticipate theoreticaldevelopments at a later stage, with the resultthat crucial data relevant to such develop-ments may not have been collected. This issometimes referred to as the problem of`fading relevancy'. A much more fundamentalcritique is of the causal and positivistassumptions of such surveys. Critical crimin-ologists, for example, would argue that inplacing emphasis on the causal agents in theearly lives of individuals they distract atten-tion away from contemporary inequalities andoppressions and also that they do not address`crimes of the powerful'.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: causation, cohort studies,comparative method, cross-sectional design,positivism, prediction studies, sampling

Key ReadingsFarrington, D. (1989) `The origins of crime: the

Cambridge Study of Delinquent Development', inResearch Bulletin, Home Of®ce Research andPlanning Unit, no. 27, pp. 29±33.

Magnusson, D. and Bergman, L.R. (eds) (1990) DataQuality in Longitudinal Research. Cambridge, Cam-bridge University Press.

167LONGITUDINAL STUDY

Magnusson, D., Bergman, L.R., Rudinger, G. andTorestad, B. (1990) Problems and Methods inLongitudinal Research. Cambridge, CambridgeUniversity Press.

Robins, L. and Rutter, L. (1990) Straight and DeviousPathways from Childhood to Adulthood. Cambridge,Cambridge University Press.

West, D.J. (1982) Delinquency: Its Roots, Careers andProspects. London, Heinemann.


M

MANAGERIALISM

De®nition

Managerialism is a set of techniques andpractices which aim to fracture and realignrelations of power within the criminal justicesystem in order to transform the structuresand reorganize the processes for both fundingand delivering `criminal justice'.


Managerialism, or to be more speci®c, NewPublic Managerialism (NPM), is a set of post-bureau-professional knowledges, practicesand techniques drawn from a wide variety ofsources (reinventing government, new publicadministration, new wave management,human resource management, postmodernorganizational theory). NPM is a hybridtheoretical and political construction whosepurpose is to alter all aspects of the formula-tion and delivery of public services in an era ofthe smaller state. The UK has been in thevanguard of managerialization and it ispossible to identify two waves of NPM thathave enveloped the criminal justice system.Under successive Conservative administra-tions (1979±1997) managerialization of crim-inal justice was progressed through the quasi-marketization of certain criminal justice func-tions and the responsibilization of individualsand communities. The overall purpose of this®rst wave of managerialization was to create acost-effective, ef®cient and uni®ed criminaljustice system which would work withinnationally agreed sets of guidelines andstandards to reduce the crime rate and thefear of crime to àcceptable' levels.

New Labour's long-term programme ofnational renewal and governmental reformacknowledges that the managerial reformprocess of the late 1980s and early 1990s wasa necessary act of modernization thatimproved productivity and delivered bettervalue for money and enhanced quality ofservice. Under the guise of `modernization',New Labour initiated a second wave of `joinedup' managerialization to entrench `perfor-mance management' across the criminaljustice system. This involves the: establish-ment of consistent and mutually reinforcingaims and objectives; installation of a `whatworks'/`best practice' culture; development ofan evidence-based approach to the allocationof resources; the institutionalization of perfor-mance management to improve productivity;and the establishment of `partnerships'.

Thus, the UK is witnessing the intensi®ca-tion of the NPM disciplines of ef®ciency,effectiveness and economy that were alreadyworking their way, albeit unevenly, throughthe various parts of this intricate policyenvironment. In certain important respects,further managerialization is necessary if thecontradictions and tensions generated by theConservatives' uneven and un®nished reformproject are to be `resolved'. Virtually everyHome Of®ce policy document now stressesthat `modernization' will be achieved throughconstant auditing, priority and target setting,monitoring, evaluation and inspection.

Evaluation

There is considerable disagreement aboutwhat is driving managerialization. For somecriminologists it is linked to neo-liberal formsof crime control, for example, privatization,commodi®cation and actuarialism, neo-con-servative criminology and/or administrative

criminology while for others managerializa-tion is a relatively autonomous process andneeds to be analysed on its own terms. Aviable post managerialist vision of criminaljustice has yet to be articulated by critics.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: actuarialism, administra-tive criminology, neo-conservative crimino-logy, risk

Key ReadingsClarke, J. and Newman, J. (1997) The Managerial

State. London, Sage.James, A. and Raine, K. (1998) The New Politics of

Criminal Justice. London, Longman.McLaughlin, E. and Muncie, J. (2000) `The criminal

justice system: New Labour's New Partnerships',in J. Clarke, S. Gewirtz and E. McLaughlin (eds),New Managerialism, New Welfare. London, Sage.

McLaughlin, E. and Murji, K. (2001) `Lost connec-tions and new directions', in K. Stenson and R.Sullivan (eds), Neo-Liberalism and Crime Control.Cambridge, Willan Press.

O'Malley, P. (1997) `Policing, politics and postmo-dernity', Social and Legal Studies, 6 (3), pp. 363±81.

MARXIST CRIMINOLOGIES

De®nition

A variety of criminological perspectives thatdraw on the Marxian tradition in sociologicaltheory in order to explicate the dimensions ofcrime and its control that revolve around class,power and state.


Some social theorists have argued that Marxistcriminology is not possible, strictly speaking,because Marxism, as a form of theoreticalsystem, speci®es its own objects of analysis(such as `the mode of production', `classrelations', àlienation', ìdeology', `hegemony')and thus subsumes the analysis of crimeunder much more general concerns (Bank-owski et al., 1977). The bulk of Marx's vastcorpus of work did not concern itself withcrime. However, it is still possible to discoversomething of his perspective on crime and itscontrol. In his early journalism Marx wrote an

extended essay based on the Proceedings ofthe Sixth Rhine Assembly debates on The Lawon Thefts of Wood which was published in theGerman paper the Rheinische Zeitung inOctober of 1842. In this article, Marx discussedhow the peasants living in the Rhine Valleyhad taken away their traditional right togather fallen wood (a primary source of fuelfor cooking and heating) as the framework ofthe old feudal form of law was redrafted inline with the needs of the emergent orderof industrial capitalism. This is an example ofcriminalization, which contemporary crimin-ologists would clearly recognize, and it hadnegative consequences for those at the bottomend of the `class structure'.

`Property is Theft' is an aphorism frequentlyassociated with Marx. In truth that maxim wasProudhon's (La proprieÂteÂ, c'est le vol) ± Marxwas seldom so pithy. Still, that sort of revo-lutionary rhetoric, and the sympathies whichit represented, was vigorously articulatedduring the recrudesence of student rebellionof the late 1960s. May 1968 seemed to sym-bolize the possibility of revolutionary changein af¯uent Western societies and in thatmoment many academics who had beeninspired by, or were instrumental in develop-ing, the sociology of deviance, were galva-nized into a radical mode of enquiry that drewheavily on the Marxian tradition. There aremany examples of work carried out in thisvein. They all exhibit a concern to illuminatethe `class dimensions' of power insofar as theyrelate to instances of crime and crime control.Within this perspective, the `capitalist order'itself is held to be criminogenic, and the crimepanics that emerge from time to time areanalysed as being an attempt at the orchestra-tion of a public consensus (in Marxian terms,`hegemony') by the police, the media, thejudiciary and other elements of the `state±corporate apparatus': this not only de¯ectspublic concern away from the central contra-dictions of capitalism (which emanate fromthe `wage±capital relation'), but also serves toprovide a justi®cation for ratchetting up thepower of the system of social control which,perversely, contributes to the intensi®cation ofthe conditions that produced the crimephenomena in the ®rst place. This reasoningwas employed to considerable effect inPolicing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978), whichremains one of the seminal contributions ofBritish criminology. Focusing on a `muggingpanic' in London during the early 1970s, thedenouement of their argument was that,because crime is one of the few symbolicsources of unity in an increasingly divided


and embittered class society and, moreover,because the traditional elements of consensus(especially deference to authority, the trap-pings of class power and the threat of externalenemies) were exhausted, bringing the `hege-mony of the state' under threat, the `waragainst crime' becomes the primary source ofre-legitimation. The state's main concern, sothe argument goes, is to de®ne the elements ofthe crisis of capitalism away. The crisis isdepicted in such a way that images of deviants(criminals, industrial dissidents, ethnic mino-rities, drug-takers, youth, welfare scroungers,political deviants etc.) are foregrounded. Thusconfusion is created and the working classcome to mis-recognize their enemy. The crisisis de¯ected on to youth, crime and race andaway from capitalist class relations.

Evaluation

One of the earliest attempts to situate thestudy of crime within a Marxian problematiccan be found in the work of Willem Bonger,but these works have had little lasting in¯u-ence and were dismissed by latter progeny as`not so much the application of a fully ¯edgedMarxist theory as they are a recitation of a`̀ Marxist catechism'' in an area which Marxhad left largely untouched' (Taylor et al., 1973,p. 222). The `new criminologists' of the 1970sattempted to synthesize a `fully social theoryof deviance' and they did so very muchthrough Marx's preferred style of intellectuallabour. The New Criminology is largely a workof critique; the ®rst eight chapters of the bookare given over to a sustained criticism ofliberal criminology, positivism, ecological andanomie theories, labelling theory, interaction-ism and phenomenology, classical Marxism(including the writings of Marx, Engels andBonger), and, lastly, con¯ict theory. This tourd'horizon of early and mid-twentieth centurycriminological thinking remains a usefulsummary, even if the theoretical predilectionsof its authors are not widely shared. In the®nal chapter a `synthesis' is presented whichtries to salvage the useful elements of thetheories that preceded `the new criminology'.Brie¯y, this synthesis argues that it isaxiomatic that capitalism is criminogenic andthat a society based on `socialist diversity' isthe only social formation that, in principle,holds out any possibility of being crime-free.For the criminologist then, the goal should bethe demise of capitalism and the transforma-tion of society to one of socialist diversity.Anything else, by de®nition, implicates the

criminologist in `correctionalism', that is: thecoercive use of the criminal sanction to`correct' behaviour on a personal basis whenthe roots of crime lie in the social structuralinequalities of wealth and power. Their laterwork (Taylor et al., 1975) was not a signi®cantdeparture from this line, but in it Jock Youngdid lay the basis for the argument thatworking-class control over policing shouldbe greatly extended, an idea that presaged theschool of left realism.

In What is to Be Done About Law and Order?(Lea and Young, 1984/1993) `left realists' wereto argue that the fatal ¯aw of the Marxistapproaches to criminology had been theirfailure to offer any realistic solutions to crime,other than emphasizing `changing the socialorder'. But Marxist-based criminologies donot succumb to realist criticisms so easily.Steven Box (1983, p. 3) pointed out thatòf®cial crime' was real enough and that àradical criminology which appears to denythis will be seen as naive and rightly rejected',but `before galloping off down the `̀ law andorder'' campaign trail, it might be prudent toconsider whether murder, rape, robbery,assault and other crimes focused on by stateof®cials, politicians, the media and thecriminal justice system do constitute themajor part of our real crime problem'. Hesuggested that `maybe they are only one crimeproblem and not the crime problem'. The clueto ùnderstanding most serious crimes', Boxargued, `can be located in power, notweakness, in privilege, not disadvantage, inwealth, not poverty'. Further, in another earlycontribution to the radical perspective, Wil-liam Chambliss's work On the Take: From PettyCrooks to Presidents (1978, Bloomington, IN,Indiana University Press) charted the socialcomposition of racketeering in Seattle show-ing that the `hidden hands' in Americanorganized crime were leading lights of thepolitical and economic elite. Extensive ®eldwork allowed Chambliss to piece together thelinks between the front-line operators and theshadowy entrepreneurs who ultimately con-trolled the crime networks: key personnel inthe police force, the legal profession, business,local government and the prosecutor's of®ce.Writing in the late 1970s, Chambliss was ableto assert that these connections extended tothe highest of®ce in the land. PresidentsNixon and Johnson were said to havesubstantial dealings with men `whose busi-ness pro®ts derived at least in part fromillegal business'. Evidence of the pervasiveconnections between the ùnderworld' and theùpper world' of the capitalist order seemed

171MARXIST CRIMINOLOGIES

ample enough to indicate that criminality wasindeed an endemic feature of Americancapitalism.

Criminologists who follow the lead ofDurkheim might maintain that Marxist ana-lyses represent an unnecessary narrowing ofconcern to the criminogenic properties ofcapitalist society; `crime is a normal socialfact', it is a feature of any social order. Thosewho wish to draw on insights from theMarxist tradition might argue in turn that, inthe contemporary period when free-marketliberalism has become hegemonic (to use aMarxist term) globally, this narrowing is notso much the product of theoretical blinkers(that is, the result of idealist assumptions),but rather is the realistic basis on whichcriminology must inevitably build. In thisregard it would do to cite W.G. Carson's TheOther Price of Britain's Oil (New Brunswick,Rutgers University Press, 1982). Carson'sbook took as its starting point the unaccep-table level of fatal and non-fatal accidents thatoccurred during the United Kingdom'sscramble to develop its off-shore oil and gasreserves. He was moved to remark that it wasconditions in the capitalist world economythat èxplain why successive governmentswould opt to get their hands on the new-found wealth of the Continental Shelf asrapidly as possible and at almost any cost'. Itis only by seeing the development of Britain'spetroleum extraction industry in the contextof global capitalism that `the troubles enduredby those who have been killed or injured inthe North Sea can be viewed in terms of the`̀ historical change and institutional contra-diction'' which earns them anything morethan a coincidental place in `̀ the course ofworld history'''.

The crimes of the powerful remain asigni®cant blind spot for conventional crimi-nology. Yet, if there is any sense in the notionthat `property is theft', there is muchcriminological work to be done. A signi®cantnew frontier is being opened up through theinstitution of intellectual property. Patent lawhas been extended in such a way as to allowthe ownership of DNA and other biologicalmaterials. It has become possible for multina-tional corporations to òwn' DNA sequences.`Biopiracy' is a term that has been given to thepractices of some companies who haveasserted the right of ownership over geneticmaterials taken from living organisms (Man-ning, 2000). If the roots of Marxist crimin-ologies can be said to lie in the article on TheLaw on Thefts of Wood, it would seem that thecrimes of capitalist accumulation continue to

provide fertile ground for critical scholarshipin this ®eld.

James Sheptycki

Associated Concepts: con¯ict theory, corporatecrime, criminalization, critical criminology,labelling, left realism, new criminology, newdeviancy theory, radical criminologies

Key ReadingsBankowski, Z., Mungham, G. and Young, P. (1977)

`Radical criminology or radical criminologist?',Contemporary Crisis, 1 (1), pp. 37±51.

Box, S. (1983) Power, Crime and Mysti®cation. London,Tavistock.

Greenberg, D. (1980) Crime and Capitalism. Palo Alto,CA, May®eld Publishing Company.


Lea, J. and Young, J. (1984/1993) What is to be DoneAbout Law and Order? Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Manning, P.K. (2000) `Policing new social spaces', inJ.W.E. Sheptycki (ed.), Issues in TransnationalPolicing. London, Routledge.

Taylor, I., Walton, P. and Young, J. (1973) The NewCriminology. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Taylor, I., Walton, P. and Young, J. (eds) (1975)Critical Criminology. London, Routledge andKegan Paul.

MASCULINITIES

De®nition

Variable sets of ideas, values, representationsand practices associated with `being male'which structure relations among men as wellas between men and women, and produceeffects on individuals, organizations andcultures.


The traditional idea of masculinity (in thesingular) as a set of psychological attributeswas developed to understand differencesbetween the sexes. In its classical psycho-analytic variant, naturally bi-sexual infants areprecipitated into sexed identities throughthe dif®culties of coping with the entry ofthe father into the mother±child dyad.Rather than continue an unequal struggle totake the place of the father, boy children,


fearful of the potentially castrating father,forsake desire for the mother and settle forbecoming like the father (and hence theculturally masculine he embodies) throughidentifying with him (which, for Freud, was adif®cult and never-completed process). Thesocial psychological variant married researchinto differences between the sexes (whichalways found remarkably few) with roletheory (how social positions, like father, getreproduced), to produce the idea of male andfemale sex-roles (or masculinity and feminin-ity), the successful learning of which ensuresthe cultural reproduction of sexual difference.

Second wave feminists concerned withunderstanding the oppression of womenintroduced the importance of power, the ideathat the key difference between men andwomen was the greater power men system-atically enjoyed. When the spotlight wasturned speci®cally onto violence, and themaleness of the perpetrators was noticed andnamed, the notion of masculinity began toenter criminology's ®eld of vision. Men'sviolence against women was seen as part ofthe system of male power and a key to itsreproduction ± hence explaining why domes-tic violence and rape were often not takenseriously. The early interest in male psychol-ogy, whether based in biology, early relation-ships or the social learning of sex-roles, hadshifted to an interest in the social structures ofmale domination (or patriarchy). This pro-vided the basis for a less individually basedunderstanding of masculinity, but the concep-tion of masculinity informing the work (wherethere was one) was still a singular one.

The emergence of feminist-inspired, gender-aware historical and ethnographic work onmen revealed not only the diverse formsmasculinity has taken over time and cross-culturally, but also the co-existence of differ-ent forms of masculinity within particularcultures; thus was born the idea of masculi-nities. And, just as power affects the relationsbetween men and women and masculinity/femininity, so it was seen to affect relationsamong masculinities. Masculinities wereargued to be `structured in dominance', withthe most powerful (or valued), culturallyspeaking, in any given social order, being`hegemonic'.

In attempting to understand the complex,contradictory and uneven nature of maledomination and thus move beyond thereductiveness of the idea of `the structure ofpatriarchy', certain feminist writers had begunto posit several structures underpinninggender relations, each with their own speci®c

forms of oppression and particular historicaltrajectory. Building on this idea, Connell (1987,1995), the most in¯uential contemporarywriter on masculinities, suggested the exist-ence of three distinct but inter-related struc-tures: labour (to do with work and thedivision of labour); power (to do withauthority, control, coercion and violence);and cathexis (to do with sexuality, emotionalrelationships and desire). None of these wasaccorded primacy and all were to be under-stood as the outcome of practice (albeit alwaystaking place within structured, or constrained,situations). Collectively, the product of thesemanifold structured practices at any giventime was the historical pattern of genderrelations: the `gender order'.

Within criminology, Messerschmidt (1993)has developed these ideas and applied themto thinking about crime. He utilizes Connell'snotions of a tripartite structure of genderrelations and hegemonic and subordinatedmasculinities, as well as the importance ofpractice. In addition, he addresses the struc-tures of race and class by conceptualizing allstructures as implicated simultaneously in anygiven practice, and practice as situationallyconstrained by the need to àccount' for ouractions to normative conceptions (of appropri-ate gender/race/class conduct). In differentsituations class, gender or race àccounting'may be more or less salient. Within thisschema, crime becomes a resource for certainmen in certain situations for accomplishingmasculinity. Its salience for particular men assuch a resource will depend on otherresources at their disposal, which, in turn,will be a product of their position in class,gender and race relations and the sorts ofsituations they ®nd themselves in.

Evaluation

Freud thought the concept of masculinity wasone of the most `confused' in science. Unfor-tunately, pluralizing the term has not elimi-nated all confusions. In particular, there is aconstant tendency to elide men and mascu-linities, to reduce the latter to lists of attri-butions, what men do (`take risks', compete,etc.) or should do (be strong, stoical, etc.), asopposed to what women do/should do, ratherthan use the term consistently in relationalterms: as places within gender relations thatonly exist in contrast to femininities. Nofemininities, no masculinities. No doubt thisattributional tendency stems in part from ourdesire to concretize, to turn abstract relations

173MASCULINITIES

into de®nable objects, as well as from the sortsof observable differences between men andwomen which we encounter daily.

One development of a strictly relationalapproach has been to see masculinity purelyas an ideology developed to help people makesense of the continuation of sexual inequalityin an age of formal equality (MacInnes, 1998).Others, like Collier (1998), in¯uenced bydebates about embodiment, have attemptedto develop relational accounts in a way thatputs back the `sexed' body, but withoutreverting to a biological essentialism. Therelentlessly sociological nature of most con-temporary accounts has reawakened aninterest in the psychological dimension ofmasculinity, in¯uenced this time by post-structuralism and the òbject relations' schoolof psychoanalysis (Jefferson, 1997). Critics ofMesserschmidt's attempts to explain the`doing' of all kinds of crime, from varietiesof work-based crime to diverse forms of streetcrime, as different ways of `doing' masculi-nity, have begun to question whether this keyidea of his is always necessary to explain aparticular crime, and, more generally, whetherit is suf®cient as an explanation of any crime.The idea of masculinity as a key concept inunderstanding why most crimes are com-mitted by men was an exciting, post-feministdevelopment. Whether the spate of newwritings this idea has generated can surmountthe many theoretical confusions intrinsic to ittime alone will tell.

Tony Jefferson

Associated Concepts: feminist criminologies,hegemonic masculinity, hegemony, psycho-analytic criminology, radical feminism

Key ReadingsCollier, R. (1998) Masculinities, Crime and Crimino-

logy. London, Sage.Connell, R.W. (1987) Gender and Power. Cambridge,

Polity Press.Connell, R.W. (1995) Masculinities. Cambridge,

Polity Press.Jefferson, T. (1997) `Masculinities and crimes', in M.

Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds), TheOxford Handbook of Criminology, 2nd edn. Oxford,The Clarendon Press.

MacInnes, J. (1998) The End of Masculinity. Bucking-ham, Open University Press.

Messerschmidt, J.W. (1993) Masculinities and Crime.Lanham, MD, Rowman and Little®eld.

MEDIATION

See Reparation; Restorative justice

MORAL ECONOMY

De®nition

The concept of the moral economy, in thecontext of criminal offending, was developedby E.P. Thompson as a means of analysing andexplaining eighteenth-century crowd action.


Dissatis®ed with social tension charts and thereductionist argument that food shortages andhigh prices led to hunger which, in turn, led tofood riots, Thompson looked for the notionsthat legitimated rioting in the eyes of theparticipants, the communities that supportedthem, and the authorities who, for much of theeighteenth century, gave them a measure oflicence. He concluded that the men andwomen in the crowds were motivated bybeliefs that they were defending customs ortraditional rights. They were not entirelyhelpless or hopeless, but sensed that theyhad some power to help themselves andensure food of decent quality at a fair price.Eighteenth-century rioters rarely took foodwithout payment of some kind, and theywould destroy grain or bread to punish adouble-dealing farmer, miller or baker, ratherthan simply taking them. For much of thecentury landed gentry, eyeing middlemen aspro®teering interlopers, were sympathetic tosuch crowds. A gradual change began withthe increasing acceptance of Smithian econom-ics, particularly the importance of the freedomof the marketplace, towards the end of thecentury, particularly by a government fearingitself threatened by a radicalism that appearedto advocate French revolutionary models.

Evaluation

Criticism was levelled at Thompson's conceptof the moral economy, particularly for failure toappreciate nuances in Adam Smith's work andthe way in which the market works. After 20years Thompson replied with customarypanache and Swiftian wit. During those 20years, and subsequently, the idea of the moral


economy was also developed by those moresympathetic to his perspective, perhaps mostsigni®cantly by David Arnold and JohnBohstedt. The former traces similar patternsof rioting to that of eighteenth-century Englandin early twentieth-century India. The latterdescribed how eighteenth-century riotingmight be construed as `community politics'.According to Bohstedt, horizontal and verticalrelationship networks within communitieswere brought into play at different momentsof crowd action, and with different resultsdepending on a community's structure. In1985, following the Broadwater Farm riots inLondon, Bohstedt published a letter in TheTimes suggesting how these disturbances alsoneeded to be considered in such terms. Nohistorian can now approach crowd actionwithout some acknowledgement of the moraleconomy concept, yet, as Mark Harrison haswarned, there is danger in the way in whichcrowd and riot have often been con¯ated insocial history, and in seeking to impose a moraleconomy legitimation to every riot. Disorders,he insists, on occasions looked backward totraditional rights for legitimacy; on others theylooked forward to a vision of how society mightbe in the future, but they could also be spurredby demands to meet changing expectations.

Clive Emsley

Associated Concepts: historical research, Marx-ist criminologies, primitive rebellion, socialjustice

Key ReadingsArnold, D. (1979) `Looting, grain riots and govern-

ment policy in South India, 1918', Past and Present,84, pp. 111±45.

Bohstedt, J. (1983) Riots and Community Politics inEngland and Wales, 1790±1810. Cambridge, MA,Harvard University Press.

Harrison, M. (1988) Crowds and History: MassPhenomena in English Towns, 1790±1835. Cam-bridge, Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, E.P. (1991) Customs in Common. London,Merlin Press.

MORAL PANIC

De®nition

Disproportional and hostile social reaction to acondition, person or group de®ned as a threatto societal values, involving stereotypical

media representations and leading todemands for greater social control and creat-ing a spiral of reaction.


Since it appeared in the title of Cohen's (1972)book, the term moral panic has been ubiquitousin criminology and the sociology of deviance.Its many uses to characterize social reaction aretoo numerous to catalogue but include mediacoverage of youth, sex, drugs, juvenile crime,single parents, child abuse and diseases ofhumankind and animals (such as HIV/AIDS,as well as BSE or `mad cow' disease).

Cohen's work on the moral panic aroundMods and Rockers in Britain examines mediacoverage in the 1960s and the pronouncementsof various authorities or experts who de®nedthe `youth problem' as a symptom of the stateof society and social decline. Cohen uses theanalogy of a disaster to identify various stagesof social reaction. The inventory involvestaking stock of what happened, a time atwhich media descriptions and de®nitions arecrucial since they are the main source for mostpeople's information. Cohen categorized themedia inventory of Mods and Rockers in threeparts: ®rst, the media exaggerated the num-bers involved, the extent of the violence andthe amount of damage caused. Distortion ofthe events was multiplied by the use ofsensational headlines and the adoption of adramatic reporting style, especially in the useof words such as òrgy of destruction', `mob'and `siege'. Secondly, media coverage con-tained many predictions that there would bemore con¯ict and violence. Thirdly, Cohenargued that media coverage served to re-codeor to symbolize deviance through associatingthe word `Mod' with particular expressions ofstyle such as clothes and hairstyles. Symboli-zation leads on to sensitization so that otherevents that may otherwise have been seen asisolated or un-connected ones are linked into apattern and understood as symptomatic of thesame underlying malaise. Both processes pro-duce an increase in social control responsesand Cohen saw this control culture as con-taining three common elements:

· Diffusion, in which events in other placesare inter-connected with the initial event.

· Escalation, in which there are calls for`strong measures' to counter the threat.

· Innovation, referring to increased powersfor the police and courts to deal with thethreat.

175MORAL PANIC

Various moral entrepreneurs who call foraction to be taken against the outbreak oflawlessness usually also proclaim that currentcontrols are inadequate. As Cohen shows,entrepreneurs exaggerate the problem in orderto make local events seem ones of pressingnational concern, and an index of the declineof morality and standards. The stepping-up ofcontrols leads to further marginalization andstigmatization of deviants which, in turn,leads to more calls for action, more policeaction and so on into a deviancy ampli®cationspiral. Cohen's analysis located the nature andextent of reaction to Mods and Rockers to thesocial context of Britain in the 1960s. Inparticular, ambivalence about social changein the postwar period, the new af¯uence andfreedom of youth cultures and their apparentrejection of traditional forms of incorporationsuch as work and families are used tocontextualize the panic.

The social context of moral panics wasdeveloped by Hall et al.'s (1978) analysis ofsocial reaction to `mugging' or street crime.Working within a Marxist framework, theyargued that mugging achieved the promi-nence it did because its themes of `race', crimeand youth meshed with or crystallized politi-cal and economic shifts in the 1970s. Econom-ically, this was a period of crisis in Britain.Politically, Britain's standing in the worldcontinued to decline and, domestically, tradeunions, left wingers and the welfare state wereblamed for much of the state of `sick Britain'.New racial discourses were emerging thatidenti®ed blacks as part of the problem ofBritish society. Concerns about sexual permis-siveness and a lack of controls on youngpeople continued from earlier times. In thisclimate racialized crime statistics were used todraw attention to the problem of dispropor-tionate amounts of street crime committed byyoung blacks and drove discourses for morelaw and order to stem the rising tide of crimeand to protect innocent victims. Hall et al.argued that this moral panic underscored thedevelopment of authoritarian populism inBritain in the 1970s.

Moral panics have been seen as inevitableand periodic occurrences for societies under-going a reaf®rmation or re-de®nition of moralboundaries. Functionalism has been a recur-ring feature of moral panic theory, even in itsradical applications. In a crude version thereaction is seen as akin to a form of massdelusion where the public is `duped' intopanicking. This tends to over-state the extentof social consensus and to assume a straight-forward correspondence between the inten-

tions of an elite and outcomes. In seeking tomove beyond this, Goode and Ben-Yehuda(1994) distinguish between three theories orapproaches. The grassroots model is where apanic originates from the general public andexpresses a genuinely felt, even if mistaken,concern about a threat. The elite-engineeredapproach is where an elite deliberately andconsciously generates concerns and fears.The interest-group theory is where rule-creators and moral entrepreneurs launchcrusades for controls. Goode and Ben-Yehuda have distilled ®ve key characteristicsof a moral panic:

· disproportionality of reaction;

· concern about the threat;

· hostility to the objects of the panic;

· widespread agreement or consensus thatthe threat is real;

· volatility, that is, moral panics are unpre-dictable in terms of scale and intensity.

Evaluation

A moral panic entails simpli®cation, stigmati-zation and heightened public feeling about anindividual, group, or event. Calling this amoral panic draws attention to exaggeratedand distorted media coverage and the ways inwhich it may be seen as symbolizing diffusesocial anxieties in particular conjunctures. Awide battery of arguments has been raisedagainst the conceptualization and utilizationof moral panics as a way of capturing socialreaction. Criticizing Hall et al. (1978) inparticular, left realism maintains that crimeand the fear of crime should be taken seriouslyand not dismissed as `just' an expression ofmedia over-reaction or panic. Waddington(1986) took issue with the empirical basis ofPolicing the Crisis. He argued that, contrary tothe view presented in that book, mugging wasrising and questions the view that mediacoverage was disproportionate. Waddingtonand others have asked what a `proportionate'reaction would be. The scale of media reactioncan rarely be measured or judged in termsof either proportionality or seriousness, asthe highly uneven coverage of wars aroundthe world indicates. This casts doubt on oneof the central tenets of moral panics.

Problems have also been identi®ed with theuse of the concept of moral panic to capturereaction to diverse themes or issues. There is aproblem in reducing all episodes of over-reaction to the catch-all notion of `panicki-ness'. A more detailed understanding of


different types of social reaction, as well asto the very different conditions that seem toconstitute moral panics has been called for.Watney (1987), for example, questioned thosewho used it to characterize media and policyreactions to HIV/AIDS. He argued that moralpanic theory is unable to deal with the entire®eld of representations because it operateswith a distinction between exaggerated mediarepresentations and the `reality' of a particularissue, the latter being treated as standingoutside the ®eld of representations. Further-more, there is a problem with the implicit orexplicit contrast between the ìrrational' panicand the supposedly `rational' analysis of it.

McRobbie and Thornton (1995) argued thatthe idea of moral panic needs to be re-thoughtin an environment with multiple media outletsand where folk devils are accustomed topresenting alternative frameworks for under-standing or explaining an issue or problem.Moral panics, they add, have become routinenot exceptional. In an environment wherethere may be an institutionalized need for themedia to generate `good stories', moral panicscan easily become part of a promotional cul-ture that ìronically' uses sensationalism forcommercial purposes.

Karim Murji

Associated Concepts: authoritarian populism,deviance, deviancy ampli®cation, folk devil,labelling, left realism, Marxist criminologies,new deviancy theory, social constructionism,social reaction, stereotyping


London, MacGibbon and Kee. (New editionOxford, Martin Robertson, 1980.)

Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994) Moral Panics:The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford, Black-well.

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. andRoberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis. London,Macmillan.

McRobbie, A. and Thornton, S. (1995) `Rethinking`̀ moral panic'' for multi-mediated social worlds',British Journal of Sociology, 46 (4), pp. 559±74.

Waddington, P.A.J. (1986) `Mugging as a moralpanic: a question of proportion', British Journal ofSociology, 32 (2), pp. 245±59.

Watney, S. (1987) Policing Desire: Pornography, Aidsand the Media. London, Methuen.

MULTI-AGENCY CRIME PREVENTION

De®nition

The planned, coordinated response of severalsocial agencies to the problems of crime andincivilities. The movement to multi-agencyprevention implies that probation/correctionsservices, education, employment, family ser-vices, health and housing, and private bodiessuch as charities and business, and at timesthe `community', as well as the police, all havea role to play in crime prevention.


Such initiatives are, for the most part,elements of a `top-down', managerialist pro-ject emanating from neo-liberal states in thepast two decades of the twentieth century.This project has also involved the `localdelivery' of crime prevention by means ofmulti-agency partnerships between statutoryagencies, private business and, at times,`community' initiatives in various `watch'schemes. In both the academic literature andin policy circles, the terms `multi-agency' and`community' crime prevention are often usedinterchangeably. This is understandable on anumber of counts. First, the term `community'retains its feel-good factor and is thus a usefullegitimating, rhetorical device in crimeprevention discourses. Secondly, and lesscynically, some multi-agency preventioninitiatives have sought to adopt a social crimeprevention approach and attempt to involvemembers of local communities in their work.However, the key feature to multi-agencycrime prevention is that it is chie¯y a `top-down', neo-corporatist strategy from bothcentral and local state regimes.

Multi-agency crime prevention now has thestatus of a taken-for-granted `fact of life' inthe crime control business across many con-temporary states. Popular examples of suchmulti-agency interventions across the worldinclude both local government- and privately-run CCTV initiatives, play/sports schemesduring school holidays, activity-based projectswith (potential) young offenders, educationalprojects on drugs and so on. However, theexact contours of multi-agency crime preven-tion, not to mention the `success' of suchapproaches, remain somewhat unclear. It isimpossible to discuss multi-agency crime pre-vention, or what is increasingly termed`community safety', without engaging in a

177MULTI-AGENCY CRIME PREVENTION

debate about the changing modalities of statepower in relationship to civil society and `thepublic'. Indeed, notions of `local' and `central'state are becoming increasingly problematicwith the rise of what is often termed `gov-ernance at a distance'. This development iswell illustrated by the example of state powerbeing exercised through indirect rather thandirect agency, as in the fad for local, preventive`partnerships against crime'. In this new era,responsibility for setting up and runningmulti-agency crime prevention initiatives atthe local level is increasingly put out to`tender', inviting bids from rival competitors.

Alongside the emotionally expressive poli-tics of popular punitiveness, the discourse ofmanagerialism has come to play an increas-ingly important part in the restructuring ofcriminal justice in most mature capitalistdemocracies. The managerialist discoursesuggests that the organization and coordina-tion of public services are best realized bymeans of the processes of marketization andthe replacement of professionals and bureau-crats by managers. It assumes that bettermanagement will prove an effective and econ-omical solution for a wide range of economicand social problems. Indeed it has come toaffect the organization and operational workof the police and other agencies of criminaljustice and prevention in novel and unprece-dented ways. In most multi-agency crimeprevention initiatives a managerialist ethos isincreasingly to the fore as evidenced in theobsession with `mission statements', `perfor-mance indicators', measurable òbjectives',`customer surveys', àudits' and èvaluation'and so on, all of which re¯ect the govern-mental pressure to be able to count `whatworks' in crime and disorder reduction.

Evaluation

Supporters argue for the superiority andsuccess of such corporate and managedapproaches over traditional, single-agencyprevention approaches. However, academicresearch has been more circumspect about thesuccess of multi-agency partnerships in crimereduction, highlighting the lack of clarity andcon¯ict about shared goals between theparticipating agencies and limited, tangibleevidence of successful outcomes (Graham andBennett, 1995). Research has also pointed tothe centrality of power differentials betweenthe major agencies involved and the import-ance of sectional differences within existingcommunities `subject' to such multi-agency

cooperation. Furthermore, the conceptualboundaries of multi-agency social crime pre-vention are particularly vague, encompassinga diversity of schemes under the label. Despiteor perhaps because of this `catch-all' quality tosuch initiatives, the appeal of multi-agencycrime prevention partnerships across contem-porary states, faced by both growing rates ofcrime and disorder and declining trust intraditional crime control responses, is unlikelyto wane in the foreseeable future.

Gordon Hughes

Associated Concepts: community crime preven-tion, community safety, crime prevention,evaluation research, managerialism, realistcriminologies, situational crime prevention,social crime prevention


Oxford, The Clarendon Press.Graham, J. and Bennett, T. (1995) Crime Prevention

Strategies in Europe and North America. New York,Criminal Justice Press.

Hughes, G. (1997) `Strategies of crime preven-tion and community safety in contemporaryBritain', Studies on Crime and Crime Prevention, 5,pp. 221±44.

O'Malley, P. and Sutton, A. (1997) Crime Preventionin Australia: Issues in Policy and Research. Sydney,Federation Press.

Pearson, G., Blagg, H., Smith, D., Sampson, A. andStubbs, P. (1992) `Crime, community and con¯ict:the multi-agency approach', in D. Downes (ed.),Unravelling Criminal Justice. London, Macmillan.

MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS

De®nition

Multivariate analysis is, quite simply, theexplanation of variation in a dependentvariable using more than one independent/explanatory variable. It has three main uses:

1 determining the overall effect of severalindependent variables on a dependent one;

2 determining the independent effect of onevariable on another, controlling for theoverlapping effects of other variables;

3 statistical control of alternative explana-tions for the observed effect, for example,control for sampling inadequacies.



A (zero-order) correlation coef®cient esti-mates the amount of the variation in adependent variable which is èxplained' by asingle independent variable. A multiplecorrelation coef®cient shows the amountèxplained' by a number of variables takentogether (in statistics èxplanation' meansadequate prediction; it does not necessarilyimply and certainly does not prove theidenti®cation of a causal mechanism.) Avariant of the correlational technique is partialcorrelation, which establishes the amount ofvariation in a dependent variable explainedby an independent one with the effects of oneor more other variables held constant ± theindependent effect of the independent variableon the dependent one. Techniques such asmultiple regression (see below) allow us toestablish the minimum number of variablesneeded to make as good a prediction of thedependent variable's values as can beachieved with the information that has beencollected ± the point at which adding morevariables to the prediction yields no newinformation. They also allow us to assess theeffect of leaving a given variable out of theprediction ± by how much the proportion ofvariance explained falls ± and so to establishthe independent effects of each variable andits share in the overall prediction.

The simplest multivariate procedure istabular analysis, illustrated in Table 1. The®rst four rows show the relationship between

age and criminal conviction for the totalsample, and we can see that older people inthis mythical sample are less likely thanyounger people to be convicted during thenext year: 75 per cent of older people have nosuch convictions, compared with 55 per centof younger people, and 10 per cent of youngerpeople have more than two convictions butonly 3.9 per cent of older people. The �2 ®gureon the right is a measure of how far thepattern in the table departs from a randomone, and p <0.001 indicates that the relation-ship is statistically signi®cant ± there is lessthan one chance in a thousand of obtaining adeparture as extreme as this by chance alone.� is a correlation coef®cient, a measure of thestrength of the relationship. The remainder ofthe table looks at males and females sepa-rately. We may note:

1 that women have fewer convictions thanmen ± many more of them have none at all;

2 the relationship of age and conviction rateis signi®cant for both genders; but

3 the � coef®cient is much smaller forwomen than for men, suggesting that therelationship with age is much stronger formen than for women. Tabular analysis isthe easiest kind of multivariate analysis tointerpret. However, it is relatively crudeand insensitive, and it becomes verycumbersome when dealing with morethan three or four variables. Other com-monly encountered varieties of multivari-ate analysis include:

Table 1 Age, gender and previous convictions in a mythical survey

Convictions during Age

next year Total Younger (%) Older (%)

Total sample

None 2450 55.0 75.0

One 600 17.5 15.8 �2 = 195.62 p < 0.001

Two 480 17.5 12.6 � = 0.31More than two 270 10.0 3.9

Males

None 1000 40.0 60.0One 500 30.0 22.0 �2 = 159.94 p < 0.001

Two 480 17.5 12.6 � = 0.40

More than two 270 10.0 3.9

Females

None 1450 83.3 76.3

One 100 5.0 5.6 �2 = 63.30 p < 0.001Two 200 15.0 10.5 � = 0.25

More than two 150 10.0 5.6

179MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS

· Multiple regression, which combines theeffects of different variables into a singlepredictor of a dependent variable, makingallowance for their overlap. Statisticsgenerally produced are the multiplecorrelation and its statistical signi®cance,the signi®cance of each component varia-ble's contribution and estimates of theirindependent effects (beta coef®cients).Multiple regression needs an interval orratio-level variable as dependent variable(one where it makes sense to talk aboutsome values as being twice or half others± like money or age or number of pre-vious convictions). Dichotomies (variableswith only two values ± such as gender) orinterval/ratio variables may be used asindependent variables.

· Discriminant function analysis, whichworks in a similar way to multiple regres-sion but will allow categorical variables(e.g. type of crime) as dependent vari-ables.

· Analysis of variance works on categoricalindependent variables and on an interval/ratio dependent one. It provides anestimate of each variable's independentcontribution to the explanation of varianceand a similar estimate for each interactioneffect (each combination of variablesworking together).

· Logistic regression permits the sophisti-cated prediction of categorical variables,combining the strengths of discriminantfunction analysis, analysis of variance andtabular analysis, but it is sometimesdif®cult to interpret.

All of these methods, adapted to differentkinds of data, are used for the same purposes:to assess the overall effect of several variableson a dependent variable, to assess the inde-pendent effect of variables that may be related

to each other as well as to the dependent, and/or to control for alternative explanations to theone proposed.

Evaluation

Caution should be taken in interpretingmultivariate analyses, however.

· Most of such analyses work by takingaccount ®rst of the variable whichexplains the greatest amount of variation,then of the variable that explains thegreatest amount of what is left, and so on.The effect of the ®rst variable is thereforesometimes exaggerated because all of theoverlap with other variables is attributedto it.

· It is always possible that apparent causalrelationships are in fact spurious and dueto the effect of some other variable whichhas not been measured. Statistical controlis never as effective in eliminating alter-native explanations as control by thedesign of the study.

· While correlation is necessary for causa-tion, it is not suf®cient. There is always atendency in these analyses to move fromprediction to causal explanation, and thisis seldom appropriate without additionalevidence and argument which cannot besupplied by the analysis itself.

Roger Sapsford

Associated Concepts: causation, correlationalanalysis, experiments, prediction studies

Key ReadingsHood, R. (1992) Race and Sentencing. Oxford, The

Clarendon Press.Sapsford, R.J. (1999) Survey Research. London, Sage.


N

NATURAL JUSTICE

De®nition

A concept of natural justice emphasizes basicprinciples necessary to ensure fairness in legalproceedings; principles of justice deriving fromthe nature of humanity; and principles of justicewhich would obtain in a state of nature andwhich are independent of social relationships.


Natural justice entails practical applications inlaw of principles to ensure procedural fair-ness, in civil as well as criminal proceedings.That is, that no one should be judge in theirown cause; and that no one should be con-demned without representation.

The ®rst principle has led to proceduralrules about vested interests and about theindependence of the judiciary; the secondmandates a right to legal representation, ifnecessary paid for by the state.

Is it illogical or nonsensical to describeformally constituted laws as ùnjust'? Of®cialsenforcing pass and residence laws in apartheidSouth Africa were applying laws enacted bythe recognized legislative body, but this doesnot make the laws `just'; similarly the rulesaffecting treatment of Jews in Nazi Germanywere passed by parliamentary process and sowere `laws', but we would none the less haveno hesitation in describing them as ùnjust'. Itfollows, therefore, that there must be somequality of `justice' which is not simply thatwhich is prescribed by law; a quality which canact as a standard by which existing laws andlegal systems can be assessed.

Philosophers from the ancients onwardshave pondered the essence of natural justice.

To be natural, justice must be derived fromcharacteristics all persons have in common,and which are not derived from the cultureand institutions of particular societies; to benatural, justice must be based on charac-teristics persons have independent of theirstatus, relationships, or individual biogra-phies. Aristotle thought natural justice wasrevealed by universality: all known societieshave some common laws, for example a law ofmurder. Religious philosophers such as StThomas Aquinas have seen natural justice as are¯ection of the wisdom of God; modernreligious theorists have pointed to thecommon elements in all the major faiths asrevealing the divine source of natural justice.

Secular theories have sought the origin ofnatural justice in the nature of human beings,and have nominated reason as the character-istic possessed by all human beings just invirtue of being human. Humans possessreason, and they seek to pursue their owngoals. Since the eighteenth century, naturaljustice theories based on irreducible humancharacteristics have usually been formulatedas rights theories. These have been expressedin idealistic proclamations such as the UnitedStates Declaration of Independence in 1776and the French Declaration of Rights in 1789.More recently, after the Second World War thefounding of the United Nations was markedby the Universal Declaration of HumanRights, echoed by the European Conventionon Human Rights. Most declarations of rightsare embellishments on the common elementsof `life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'.

Evaluation

Theories of natural justice have been unfa-shionable for several decades. Awareness ofdifferences in societies' conceptions of rights

and justice led to the rise of `relativism' insocial science and `legal positivism' or `legalrealism' among legal theorists. These perspec-tives emphasize the social embeddedness ofmoral rules and the role of legislators andjudges in de®ning justice for any society. Inlegal theory there is perhaps not so muchdistance between natural justice and legalpositivism positions as between relativists anduniversalists in social science. The best-knowncontemporary theorist of natural justice, Finnis(1980), places importance on context andinterpretation, while Hart (1994), a leadinglegal realist, says that valid legal systemsnecessarily contain some minimum content ofnatural law.

Natural justice is undergoing a revival inthe form of increased adherence to humanrights theory and politics. Desire to help thoseliving under oppressive regimes has led tochampioning of the claims of human rightsagainst inviolability of sovereignty; feministsand those seeking to remove discriminationagainst ethnic and religious minorities havealso drawn on the idea of human rights. Evencommunitarian theorists and critics of `cul-tural imperialism' acknowledge the necessityof universal commitment to fundamentalhuman rights.

Barbara Hudson

Associated Concepts: communitarianism,human rights, social justice

Key ReadingsDworkin, R. (1977) Taking Rights Seriously. London,

Duckworth.Finnis, J. (1980) Natural Law and Natural Rights.

Oxford, Oxford University Press.Hart, H.L.A. (1994) The Concept of Law, 2nd edn.

Oxford, Oxford University Press.Reiman, J. (1990) Justice and Modern Moral Philosophy.

New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.Sandel, M. (1998) Liberalism and the Limits of Justice,

2nd edn. Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress.

NEO-CONSERVATIVE CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

Neo-conservative criminology treats criminal-ity as one of a group of social pathologicalphenomena, the prevalence of which is due to

the corrosive in¯uence of the liberalist modernculture. In terms of criminal justice policy,neo-conservative criminology is oriented onthe one hand to the preservation of traditionalvalues and norms and on the other to thepromotion of a technocratic rationality thatdecouples the control of crime from its socialand economic aetiology.


The term neo-conservative criminology sig-ni®es the existence of a close causal relation-ship between speci®c theoretical positions oncrime and crime control and the neo-con-servative political convictions of their authors.The main exponent of neo-conservative crimi-nology is the American James Q. Wilson, apolitical scientist who has nevertheless greatlyin¯uenced criminal justice policy through hiswidely read writings (for example, he co-authored along with George Kelling (1982) thein¯uential theory of Broken Windows), andhis numerous advisory roles during theReagan and Bush administrations.

Neo-conservative criminology does notamount to a criminological theory. It shouldrather be understood as a speci®c applicationof a broader social engineering perspectivethat utilizes theoretical, and particularlyapplied, knowledge in the service of the func-tional exigencies of the state and the economy.Whilst according to neo-conservative politicalthought, the economic, technical and manage-rial achievements of modernity should besafeguarded and further extended, the samedoes not apply to its ethical and culturalcomponents. Indeed, modernist culture withits emphasis on `subjective value orientations'and èxpressive self-realization' is held out asundermining the motivational requirements ofan èf®cient economy and a rational stateadministration', namely the individual's will-ingness to achieve and to obey (Habermas,1989). In place of such subversive modernistculture, neo-conservatives ask for a revival oftradition and call for `courage for the past' inthe state, schools and family.

The functional logic which lies behind theirjusti®cation of traditionalism in terms of itsbene®cial effects for the system can also bediscerned in certain other central features ofneo-conservative thinking. Neo-conservativesurge the state to withdraw to activities it caneffectively control ± so as to lessen legitima-tion problems. They, moreover, recommend agreater detachment of administration frompublic will-formation so as to minimize the


burden of democratic participation on con-troversial issues concerning socio-politicalgoals.

The in¯uence of neo-conservative politicalthinking can be easily traced in the speci®cunderstanding of crime and deviance that ischaracteristic of neo-conservative criminology.The latter elevates the moral culture of asociety to a key (if not the key) variable for theexplanation of long-term changes in the levelsof criminality and disorder. A central proposi-tion of neo-conservative criminology is thatthe propensity of people to commit crimesvaries in accordance to the extent to whichthey have internalized a commitment to self-control. This in turn depends on the level of asociety's investment in promoting self-control(through its socialization mechanisms) as wellas on the (not necessarily unchangeable)genetic and biological characteristics of indi-viduals, which determine the effectiveness ofthe conditioning process in speci®c cases.Existing high levels of criminality and dis-order are thus causally linked to the weaken-ing strength of the sources of social authority,namely family, schools, religion and so forth,and even more so to the corrosive in¯uence ofthe surrounding culture which èmphasizesrights rather than rightness of behaviour' andwhich celebrates self-expression ± to the pointof self-indulgence ± instead of promoting self-control and self-restraint.

In view of the detrimental effects of thisexpressive individualism neo-conservativesattempt to rede®ne what properly constitutesthe private sphere. Forms of behaviours andindividual choices that have broader socialrami®cations cannot, in their opinion, betreated as wholly private matters, but insteadcall for a public response. The use of drugs,disorderly behaviour, speci®c choices con-cerning the family structure (single mothers,and the ways children are raised) shouldaccordingly not be dealt with on the basis ofthe liberal principle of moral neutrality butrequire an af®rmative moral stance. Henceneo-conservative strong opposition to thedecriminalization of `victimless crimes', theespousal by them of a `zero tolerance'approach to disorderly behaviour, their pro-posals about introducing speci®c disincentivesfor single mothers, and so on.

The rather comprehensive conception of thegood which this neo-conservative stanceembodies re¯ects à healthy appreciation oftradition', that is, the need to exploit thosetraditional values and institutions on whichthe public order and stability of the social andeconomic structure depend.

However, the `functional traditionalist'streak of neo-conservative criminologyshould not allow us to overlook its strongtechnocratic orientation which is apparent inits attempts to rationalize the administrationof the criminal justice system. Ef®ciency andeffectiveness in the pursuit of clearly pre-scribed and realistic goals is the main, if notthe sole, criterion for the choice amongstalternative policies of crime control. If thecurbing of drug use is the goal, then oneshould concentrate on the drug users that `canbe saved' with less cost (that is, the ®rst timeusers). To àvoid wasted resources and dashedhopes' attention should, moreover, be con-centrated to those areas `where the publicorder is deteriorating but not unreclaimable'as well as to the careful selection of high-riskrepeat offenders `for arrest, prosecution andincarceration'.

However, as Wilson, the author of the abovequotes, points out, existing criminologicaltheories are generally of little use for thespeci®cation of the precise points andmethods of effective intervention. Being pre-occupied with causal analysis, (with theidenti®cation of the root or ultimate causesof crime), these theories draw our attention tofactors that cannot be changed at all or canonly be changed with great dif®culty. Thedevelopment of reasonable policy alternativesis instead thought to require `patient trial anderror, accompanied by hard-headed andobjective evaluations' (Wilson, 1985, pp. 253±4). The implicit identi®cation of social andpolicy analysis with policy-making entails ashift of focus away from the pursuit of theùtopian' goal of tackling the root causes ofcrime and towards the achievement of`marginal gains' (gains that are compatiblewith the existing constraints of the contem-porary social and economic system).

Evaluation

Neo-conservative criminology undoubtedlycontributes to the rationalization of thecriminal justice system. It does so by placinga heavy premium on the ef®cient handling ofurgent `policy' problems and by advocating akind of social analysis that is of directrelevance to the resolution of such problems.However, the instrumental type of (applied)analysis they advocate leaves no room for aserious probing of the normative questionsinvolved in the development of criminaljustice policy. `Political' policies tend to betreated as managerial ones and to be eval-

183NEO-CONSERVATIVE CRIMINOLOGY

uated in terms of their effectiveness withrespect to certain goals: namely goals that arederivable from factual `needs' and are thusessentially beyond choice.

The tendency, furthermore, of neo-conser-vative criminology to clearly demarcate causalanalysis from policy analysis and policy-making leads to a lowering of expectationswith regard to crime prevention and control,to the pursuit of marginal gains primarilythrough a ®ght against symptoms and to theabandonment of attempts to tackle the rootcauses of crime. The extent to which the latteris necessary or unavoidable remains an openquestion. Attempts to remove the root causesof criminality are portrayed by neo-conserva-tive criminology as utopian in view of avariety of more or less òbjective' biological,social, economic, political and technical con-straints. However, many of such constraintsmay themselves be manufactured and thus arein principle solvable. Causal analysis candirect our attention to new possible ®elds ofintervention and change, which policy-relatedresearch, inextricably linked ± as it is ± to therequirements of the policy-maker, is bound toexclude from its agenda.

Finally, the selective attention of neo-conservative criminology to the moral cultureof contemporary society as a major cause ofexisting levels of crime, as well as an appro-priate ®eld of intervention, is open to seriouscriticism. The importance attached to cultureas a causal factor ± largely on the basis ofspeculation rather than ®rm evidence ± isdictated by the same functional logic whichruns through neo-conservative writings. Mod-ernist culture is examined by the neo-conservatives solely from the point of viewof its functional role as an element of the`pattern maintenance' of the system. Butattempts to restore traditional values andnorms are themselves utopian. Traditional(familial) values (to take only one example),cannot be restored without `turning back theclock of modernization' (for example, byundoing the social, political and economicprocesses, which have historically led to achange of the female role and family relation-ships). As has succinctly been pointed out:`precisely the fact that today tradition must beinvoked shows that it has lost its power'(Horkheimer, 1974, cited in Habermas, 1989,p. 44).

An important question is, moreover, raisedconcerning the extent of the legitimation of theparticular normative preferences of neo-con-servative criminology. The functional under-standing and use of values does not

necessarily provide the legitimation for thembeing imposed on society's members. Therehave to also be other, morally philosophicallyvalid, reasons for attempting the refurbishingof fading values.

Tonia Tzannetakis

Associated Concepts: actuarialism, administra-tive criminology, `broken windows', manage-rialism, rational choice theory, realistcriminologies, situational crime prevention,underclass

Key ReadingsHabermas, J. (1989) The New Conservatism. Cam-

bridge, Polity Press.Wilson, J.Q. (1985) Thinking about Crime. New York,

Vintage.Wilson, J.Q. and Herrnstein, R.J. (1985) Crime and

Human Nature: The De®nitive Study of the Causes ofCrime. New York, Simon and Schuster.

Wilson, J.Q. (1991) On Character: Essays by James Q.Wilson. Washington, DC, A.E.I. Press.

Wilson, J.Q. and Kelling, G. (1982) `Broken win-dows', Atlantic Monthly, March, pp. 29±38.

Young, J. (1994) Ìncessant chatter: recent paradigmsin criminology', in The Oxford Handbook ofCriminology. Oxford, The Clarendon Press, pp.69±124.

NET WIDENING

De®nition

The processes whereby attempts to preventcrime and develop community-based correc-tions act to expand the criminal justice systemand draw more subjects into its remit.


In the 1970s diversion became a widelyacclaimed strategy for reducing the numbersof offenders, particularly young offenders,from appearing in court and thereby avoidingthe stigma and labelling of judicial processes.Sentencing alternatives such as probation andcommunity supervision were also intended toreduce the use and cost of custody. However,it was repeatedly found that while àlterna-tives' have burgeoned, so have prison popu-lations. Moreover, the very existence ofapparently benign and welfare-based options


has increased the numbers subject to someform of of®cial, rather than informal, inter-vention. In California, for example, increasingthe proportion of offenders placed on proba-tion was encouraged by providing state funds(a subsidy) to the counties for not committingcases to state institutions. However Lerman's(1975) assessment of the subsidy programmefound that many probationers were subse-quently sent into custody for probationviolations. Moreover, those not recommendedfor probation were receiving longer sentences.He suggests that the creation of new `diver-sionary' measures achieved no long-termdecarceration and ultimately expanded thenumbers subject to various forms of of®cialsurveillance and detention. This resulted notjust from courtroom decisions but from anincreased willingness on the part of socialworkers to use their discretionary power tointervene on the offender's behalf. A Canadianstudy, which examined the effects of commu-nity corrections programmes introduced inSaskatchewan from 1962 to 1979, concludedthat not only had these failed to reduce thesize of the prison population, they actuallyresulted in a three-fold increase in theproportion of persons under formal statecontrol. Similarly, the National Evaluation ofthe Deinstitutionalization of Status Offendersproject in the USA reported that the pro-grammes were so clearly biased to heightenthe intake of less serious offenders, that manymore were caught up in the referral networkthan if the project had not been established.

Stanley Cohen (1979) described such pro-cesses as `thinning the mesh' and `wideningthe net'. Allied to his wider `dispersal ofdiscipline' thesis, Cohen contended that ascontrol mechanisms are dispersed from cus-tody into the community they penetratedeeper into the social fabric. A blurring ofboundaries between the deviant and non-deviant and between the public and theprivate occurs. A `punitive archipelago' isexpanded as new resources, technology andprofessional interests are applied to an increas-ing number of `clients' and `consumers'.Entrepreneurs are drawn into the controlenterprise in search of pro®ts. Communitiesare mobilized to act as voluntary controlagents in their own right. But, throughout, theprison remains at the core of the system. Therhetoric of diversion and community camou-¯ages what is really going on. Rather, alterna-tives to prison and crime prevention policieshave failed to reduce the reach of criminaljustice and tend to draw more people into themesh of formal control:

· Petty or `potential' delinquents are subjectto more intrusive and disguised control inthe name of diversion or prevention.

· As the soft end of the system appearsmore and more benign, so the hard coreappears more hopeless and becomes atarget for such policies as selectiveincapacitation.

· Whole populations are subjected tofurther and subtler involvement in thebusiness of social control. They are madethe object of preventive social controlbefore any deviant act can take place.

For Cohen (1985, p. 37) and Austin andKrisberg (1981) the real effect of diversion anddecarceration is to increase the reach andintensity of state control:

· The criminal justice system expands anddraws more people into its reach (netwidening).

· The level of intervention, involving indi-vidualized treatment and indeterminatesentencing, intensi®es (net strengthening).

· Institutions are rarely replaced or radi-cally altered but supplemented by newforms of intervention (different nets).

Evaluation

These readings of criminal justice reform havebeen challenged in various ways as one-dimensional, unduly pessimistic and nihilistic.Indeed Cohen's (1985) later re¯ection on this`nothing works' mentality concedes that theintentions of `doing good' are not automati-cally misguided. Speci®c policies at particulartimes may have a positive and progressiveeffect ± that there remains some possibility `forrealizing preferred values'. He eventuallyargues for a slightly different reading of netwidening which would allow `sensitivity tosuccess (however ambivalent)'. McMahon(1990, p. 144) also points out that the conceptonly directs attention towards expansionarytrends and draws attention away from ànymoderation of penal control which may havetaken place and from the superseding of someprevious forms of penal control by preferableones'. Nevertheless, the concept continues toserve as a reminder of the unintendedconsequences of some criminal justice reform,particularly when that reform is couched interms of `zero tolerance', the need for early(pre-criminal) intervention or as acting in the`best interests' of others.

John Muncie

185NET WIDENING

Associated Concepts: bifurcation, carceralsociety, community corrections, decarceration,diversion, social control

Key ReadingsAustin, J. and Krisberg, B. (1981) `Wider, stronger

and different nets: the dialectics of criminal justicereform', Journal of Research in Crime and Delin-quency, 18 (1), pp. 165±96.

Cohen, S. (1979) `The punitive city: notes on thedispersal of social control', Contemporary Crises,3 (4), pp. 341±63.


Lerman, P. (1975) Community Treatment and SocialControl. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

McMahon, M. (1990) `Net-widening: vagaries in theuse of a concept', British Journal of Criminology,30 (2), pp. 121±49.

NEUTRALIZATION, TECHNIQUES OF

De®nition

A distinctive set of justi®cations that enablesindividuals temporarily to drift away from thenormative rules and values of society andengage in delinquent behaviour. This socialpsychological `social control' perspective wasdeveloped by Gresham Sykes and DavidMatza to challenge overly deterministic,positivistic subcultural theories of crimewhich denied agency and rationality.


Delinquents, according to Sykes and Matza,rather than forming a subculture that stands inopposition and antagonism to the dominantsocial order, `drift' in and out of deviantactivity. The division between `deviant' and`respectable' is not hard and fast anddelinquents are conceived of as choice-makers who move between and have tonegotiate these two interconnected worlds.The proof of this is the fact that delinquentsoften voice a sense of guilt and/or shameabout their actions; frequently convey respectfor law-abiding citizens; and regularly drawthe line between those who can be victimizedand those who cannot. Delinquents are notimmune to the demands of the dominantsocial order; are not delinquent all of the time;and do not necessarily conceive of themselvesas criminals.

Because they are intimately connected to anormative value system that is ¯exible andprovides `quali®ed guides for action', delin-quents can develop a set of techniques orrationalizations to neutralize and temporarilysuspend commitment to these values andconstruct the freedom to engage in deviantacts to cope with the moral dilemmas posed bytheir actions, and to retain their self esteem andnon-criminal self-image. For Sykes and Matzalearning the following techniques of neutrali-zation lessens the effectiveness of socialcontrols and enables the individual to becomedelinquent or justify her/his delinquency:

1 The denial of responsibility (Ì did notmean to do it').

2 The denial of injury (`No one was hurt').3 The denial of the victim (`She started it').4 The condemnation of the condemners

(`They are just as bad').5 The appeal to higher loyalties (Ì was

helping my friends').

These techniques assert the rightfulness andnormality of the behaviour and are extensionsof commonly accepted motivational accountsthat are in use in everyday life. Matza sub-sequently incorporated this thesis into his`drift' theory of juvenile delinquency, propos-ing that the techniques of neutralization are themeans through which individuals get èpisodicrelease' from established moral constraints andcan drift into and out of delinquency.

Evaluation

There have been remarkably few empiricalevaluations of neutralization theory. Thethesis has been developed generally byAgnew (1994) whilst Coleman (1994) hasreworked it conceptually in the context ofresearching white collar criminality. StanCohen (1993) has provided criminology withone of the most innovative applications ofSykes and Matza's techniques in his argumentthat they are present in of®cial state discoursesconcerning human rights violations and statecrime. Critics of Sykes and Matza, such asKatz (1987), continue to insist that certaintypes of committed criminals have differentvalues and that neutralization is unnecessary.There is also still a major debate aboutwhether delinquents and criminals engage inneutralization (before the event) or ad hocrationalization (after the event).

Eugene McLaughlin


Associated Concepts: appreciative criminology,rational choice theory, subculture

Key ReadingsAgnew, R. (1994) `The techniques of neutralization

and violence', Criminology, 32, pp. 555±79.Cohen, S. (1993) `Human rights and crimes of the

state', Australian and New Zealand Journal ofCriminology, 26 (2), pp. 97±115.

Coleman, J.W. (1994) The Criminal Elite: The Sociologyof White Collar Crime. New York, St Martins Press.

Katz, J. (1987) Seductions of Crime: Moral and SensualAttractions in Doing Evil. New York, Basic Books.

Matza, D. (1964) Delinquency and Drift. New York,Wiley.

Sykes, G.M. and Matza, D. (1957) `Techniques ofneutralization: a theory of delinquency', AmericanSociological Review, 22, pp. 664±70.

NEW CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

A form of radical criminology which ®rstcame to fruition in the UK in the early 1970s. Itwas designated `new' because of its then novelattempt to fuse an interactionist approach todeviance focusing on personal meaning with astructural approach grounded in the analysisof political economy, class relations and statepractices. It is widely cited as marking thebeginnings of a critical criminology.


The term originates from a book of the samename authored by Ian Taylor, Paul Waltonand Jock Young and published in 1973. It wasthe product of discussions and developmentsinspired by the National Deviancy Conferenceestablished in 1968 as a forum for criticalanalysis. Much of the book is a sustainedcritique of classical and positivist criminolo-gies as well as of interactionism, labelling andclassical Marxism. A ®nal chapter, however,attempts a synthesis of several of thesedifferent theoretical traditions under therubric of a fully social theory of deviance.The new criminology advocates that such atheory must include the connections between:

· the wider origins of the deviant act (theeconomic and political contingencies ofadvanced industrial society);

· the immediate origins of the deviant act (theinterpretation and meaning given todeviance by individuals);

· the actual act (the rationality of individualacts and the social dynamics surroundingthem);

· the immediate origins of social reaction (thecontingencies and conditions crucial to thedecision to act against the deviant);

· the wider origins of deviant reaction (thepolitical and ideological concerns of thestate);

· the outcome of social reaction on the deviant'sfurther action (the conscious decisionsmade by an individual to respond tosanctions);

· the nature of the deviant process as a whole(the necessity to integrate all elements ofthe deviant process while being alive tothe conditions of social determination andself-determination).

However, The New Criminology was not onlyan attempt to develop the parameters of anadequate criminological theory; it was alsodesigned to promote a form of radical politics.Its insistence that inequalities and divisions inmaterial production and ownership are intrin-sically related to the social factors producingcrime, brought notions of the possibility of acrime-free society to the fore: a society basedon principles of socialist diversity and toler-ance. The intention, then, was also to constructthe parameters of a radical praxis. Anycriminology not committed to `the abolitionof inequalities of wealth and power' wasbound to be ultimately reducible to theinterests of the economically and politicallypowerful. Above all, the new criminologysought to illustrate how crime was politicallyand economically constructed through thecapacity and ability of state institutionswithin the political economy of advancedcapitalism, to de®ne and confer criminality onothers. The study of crime could no longer becompartmentalized in a world of pathologies,deviances and otherness, but was to be usedas a means through which the exploitativemachinations of the state could be exposed.The new criminology opened a door throughwhich valuable insights could be made, notinto crime per se, but into how society works,how social order is maintained and how suchorder could be subjected to political challenge.

Evaluation

This politicization of criminology was in manyways a logical extension of the criticalquestioning of social science and its role inresearch, teaching and policy-making that had

187NEW CRIMINOLOGY

emerged in the 1960s. Becker (1967) broughtsuch questioning directly into criminologyand the sociology of deviance by asking socialscientists: `Whose side are you on?' Socialscience in general, and individual positivismin particular, were charged with lending thestate a spurious legitimacy and functioning aslittle more than a justi®cation for oppressivepower. What the new criminology managedto achieve was a radical reconstitution ofcriminology as part of a more comprehensivesociology of the state and political economy, inwhich questions of political and social controltook precedence over behavioural and correc-tional issues. By the mid-1970s such re¯ectionson the construction of crime became pivotal inthe formulation of a critical criminology. Whenthe task of criminology was de®ned as one ofcreating a society ìn which the facts of humandiversity are not subject to the power tocriminalize' (Taylor et al., 1973, p. 282), it wasclear that criminology was being transformedfrom a science of social control and into astruggle for social justice.

Such critical analysis was indeed in¯uentialin awakening interest in analysis of the role ofthe law in capitalism, in particular spawning aseries of revisionist histories of the relation-ships between what counted as `crime', classposition and systems of punishment. Suchcomplexities could not be addressed, forexample, by an uncritical adoption of theeconomic and material determinism of Marx-ism. A major stumbling block in the synthesisof Marxism, interactionism and labelling wasthat the concerns of criminology and itscontinuing observance of the concept of`crime' do not represent a theoretical ®eld ofstudy within Marxism. Rather crime is anideological category generated by state agen-cies and intellectuals. For many Marxistscholars the new criminological agenda waslimited because there could be no such thingas a Marxist criminology. Retaining theconcept of crime as the key referent inevitablylaid open the possibility of collusion withstate-sponsored de®nitions of undesirablebehaviours. It was noticeable too that thenew criminology retained a gender-speci®cmode of analysis and failed to encompass thethen emergent ®eld of gender studies or toinclude any reference to women and crime inits analysis. From a left realist perspective,subsequently developed by one of the originalauthors of the new criminology, it has beenfurther claimed that the pursuit of structuralchange and a tolerance of diversity are idealistand utopian. A lack of political pragmatismand failure to be policy prescriptive offer little

of practical help to those on the receiving endof repressive control systems or to thosemembers of the working class who suffermost from the effects of everyday criminalactions. Nevertheless the new criminology'sprogramme of focusing on agency andstructure, and on the micro as well as themacro social world, arguably created a vitalspace from which a whole range of critical,feminist and left realist positions couldsubsequently emerge.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: critical criminology, leftidealism, left realism, Marxist criminologies,new deviancy theory, radical criminologies

Key ReadingsBecker, H. (1967) `Whose side are we on?', Social

Problems, 14 (3), pp. 239±47.Taylor, I., Walton, P. and Young, J. (1973) The New

Criminology. London, Routledge.Taylor, I., Walton, P. and Young, J. (eds) (1975)

Critical Criminology. London, Routledge.Walton, P. and Young, J. (eds) (1998) The New

Criminology Revisited. Basingstoke, Macmillan.

NEW DEVIANCY THEORY

De®nition

A theoretical position which emphasizesmicro-sociological explanations of the waysin which deviance is generated in interactionsbetween individuals and law enforcementagents, with particular reference to the processof labelling and deriving from symbolicinteractionism.


New deviancy theory emerged in the 1960sand early 1970s as part of a radical response tothe positivist domination of criminology. Newdeviancy attempted to recover the `meaning'in human behaviour denied in positivism. Ithad a number of in¯uences and strandsincluding interactionism (derived fromGeorge Herbert Mead's writings on symbolicinteractionism), labelling theory and theethnographic tradition of social research.

The main features of new deviancy theoryare as follows. There is emphasis on socialaction as free, creative and spontaneous rather


than something which is determined byindividual predispositions or by external andall-constraining social reality. Social interac-tions, institutions and structures do have alimiting in¯uence on individuals but at oneand the same time they are the constructionsof these individuals. Individuals and cate-gories of individuals have the capacity tobring their own meanings to interactions,institutions and structures and there is thepotential ± indeed, certainty ± that there willbe a multiplicity of meanings and interpreta-tions. Social order is therefore characterized byplurality rather than a naturally occurringconsensus. Different groups and sections ofsociety will have their own norms and valuesand there may be con¯ict between these. Suchcon¯ict may be characterized by the exerciseof power by one group over another in orderto impose its value system. This may be donevia repressive institutions such as the policeand the penal system and more subtly byideological apparatus such as the media.

The in¯uence of labelling theory within newdeviancy can be seen in terms of conceptionsof what is, and is not, crime and deviance. Afavoured dictum is that crime and devianceare that which is labelled as such. This canhappen at a societal level in terms of lawenactment and the de®nitions in legislation ofcertain kinds of acts as `criminal'; and it canhappen at street level in terms of the ways inwhich law is enforced by individual policeof®cers. The latter involves a consideration ofthe meanings of®cers attach to others' actionsand of the ways in which they lie within oroutwith the law, as they interpret it, and in theparticular circumstances of the time.

New deviancy theory does not have aconception of crime as a distinct and separatephenomenon which is perpetrated by acategory of people who are `criminals'. Nordoes it explain the criminality of such peopleby reference to individual predispositions tocrime or other causal determinants. Rather,crime is ubiquitous and criminals are evenlydistributed across society. In order to explaincrime and its distribution and to understandhow and why categories of people becomecriminal it is necessary to examine de®nitionaland labelling processes. For new deviancytheorists this involves a focus on agents ofsocial control and institutions of criminaljustice and not a sole preoccupation with theoffender and his or her antecedents. In thisendeavour key concepts from interactionistperspectives are enlisted such as `meaning',`social de®nition', `label', stereotype', `socialreaction' and `deviancy ampli®cation'.

Methodologically, new deviancy typicallyemploys ethnographic methods of research onthe grounds that they are much morecompatible with such concepts. Ethnographicresearch can facilitate direct and naturalobservation of interactions between would-beoffenders and law enforcers and can employunstructured methods of interview and doc-umentary analysis to uncover the meanings,labels and stereotypes employed in the every-day practices of criminal justice personnel.

Policy implications of new deviancy ¯owfrom the assumptions that there can be aplurality of equally valid perspectives: thatcrime is what is labelled as such; and that socialreaction and social control are what generatecrime. Such implications can include increasedtolerance of the diversity and plurality ofcultural values and forms of action in society:of®cial de-bunking of popular but inaccuratestereotypes of crime and criminals; decrimina-lization of certain forms of action; and non-intervention in events and actions on the partof control agencies.

Evaluation

The contributions of new deviancy theory arenumerous. For example, in its emphasis oninteractions, labelling and social construction itoffers a reminder that crime is a social conceptrather than something which is `®xed' and`given'. It also encourages an examination ofde®nitional issues in law enactment and in theenforcement of law and criminal justicepersonnel. Methodologically it provides analternative perspective on of®cial crimestatistics to that provided by positivistapproaches. This perspective encourages aview of crime statistics as the outcome ofcriminal justice policies and practices ratherthan valid indicators of the `true' extent ofcrime.

One key danger of adopting a new deviancyframework is that of treating the notion ofsocial construction of crime as a universal`covering law' (that is, one which covers orexplains all forms of action deemed to becriminal). There are certain kinds of crimes,such as rape and paedophilia, where indivi-dual pathologies are likely to have a great dealof credence as explanations. What is more, thevictims of these and other crimes are unlikelyto take kindly to offences committed againstthem being treated as mere social construc-tions (within which the offender may be treatedas the victim). The critique that new deviancytheory fails to face up to the fact that crime,

189NEW DEVIANCY THEORY

and fear of crime is experienced as a reality bymany, tends to come from those who advocaterealist criminological thinking.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: deviance, ethnography,interactionism, labelling, radical criminolo-gies, social constructionism


Deviance. Glencoe, IL, Free Press.Sumner, C. (1994) The Sociology of Deviance: An

Obituary. Buckingham, Open University Press.Young, J. (1990) `Thinking seriously about crime:

some models in criminology', in M. Fitzgerald, G.McLennan and J. Pawson (eds), Crime and Society:Readings in History and Theory. London, Routledgein association with The Open University Press,pp. 248±310.

NEWSMAKING CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

The processes whereby criminologists usemass communication for the purposes of inter-preting, informing and altering the images ofcrime and justice, crime and punishment, andcriminals and victims.


Gregg Barak (1988) ®rst used the term `news-making criminology' to explore the relation-ships between the study and production ofcrime news and the interaction by criminolo-gists and others involved in the processes ofmass communication. Like students of crimeand media generally, students of newsmakingcriminology are concerned with the degrees ofdistortion and bias in the news, or with thedistance between the social reality of crimeand the newsmaking reality of crime. Likeother analysts of the news media, newsmakingcriminologists are similarly interested inseeing that the news media `tell it like it is',and better yet, `like it could be' or `like itshould be', based on an informed scienti®cview of crime and justice (Barak, 1994).

The concept of newsmaking criminologyrefers to criminologists' conscious effortsand activities in interpreting, in¯uencing, or

shaping the presentation of information or of`newsworthy' items about crime and justice.Newsmaking criminology attempts to demys-tify images of crime and punishment bylocating these in the context of all illegal andharmful behaviour; it strives to affect publicattitudes, thoughts and discourse about crimeand justice so as to affect social policies ofcrime control; and it encourages criminolo-gists to ®nd their public voices and to comeforth and share their knowledge of crime andjustice as creditable spokespeople. In short,newsmaking criminology is about analysing,participating and ideally impacting the mass-mediated, socially constructed and collectivelyconsumed images of crime and justice. Severalstyles of newsmaking criminology have beenidenti®ed, including: (1) disputing data; (2)challenging journalism; (3) self-reporting; and(4) confronting media (Henry, 1994). Each ofthese styles possesses strengths and weak-nesses for newsmaking criminologists. Asnewsmaking criminology continues todevelop, its strategies have been ®ne-tuned(Barak, 1996) and its methods have expanded.For example, as the World Wide Web grows inthe dissemination of mass communication, itis changing the manner in which we both offerand seek information on a daily basis. Today,news groups, political organizations, criminaljustice agencies, criminology associations andindividual criminologists, all make use of theWeb in order to in¯uence and shape publicknowledge and attitudes about crime andjustice (Greek, 1997; Greek and Henry, 1997).

Evaluation

The ultimate value of newsmaking crimino-logy still remains to be seen. In terms ofcriminologists having a strong in¯uence overthe social construction of crime and justice,this appears to vary by nation-state and therole of public intellectuals in particularsocieties. At the same time, newsmakingcriminology has already raised the conscious-ness of criminologists about the processes ofnewsmaking and about their interactive roleswith the mass-mediated images of crime andjustice, whether these be in the areas ofresearching, teaching, or newsmaking per se.

Gregg Barak

Associated Concepts: constitutive criminology,cultural criminology, social constructionism


Key ReadingsBarak, G. (1988) `Newsmaking criminology: re¯ec-

tions on the media, intellectuals, and crime',Justice Quarterly, 5 (4), pp. 265±87.

Barak, G. (ed.) (1994) Media, Process, and the SocialConstruction of Crime: Studies in NewsmakingCriminology. New York, Garland.

Barak, G. (1996) `Media, discourse, and the O.J.Simpson trial: an ethnographic portrait', in G.Barak (ed.), Representing O.J.: Murder, CriminalJustice, and Mass Culture. Guilderland, NY,Harrow and Heston.

Greek, C. (1997) Ùsing the Internet as a news-making criminology tool'. Paper presented at theannual meetings of the American Society ofCriminology, San Diego.

Greek, C. and Henry, D.B. (1997) `Criminal justiceresources on the Internet', Journal of CriminalJustice Education, 8, pp. 91±9.

Henry, S. (1994) `Newsmaking criminology asreplacement discourse', in G. Barak (ed.),Media, Process, and the Social Construction ofCrime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology. NewYork, Garland.

NORMALIZATION

De®nition

Implicit in the term is the idea of the normal.Whilst the normal has meaning in statisticalterms it is in¯ected with ideas of what istraditional and cultural. It con¯ates what iswith what ought to be. A normal distributionsuggests a spread around the mean but it alsopredicts values at and beyond standarddeviations either side of the mean. Thus astandardized deviance is expected yet normalcomes to be associated with the `mean'. Aconservative might speak of normalizationmeaning a return to order after a temporaryand unexpected disorder. A radical take onthe same process might emphasize the pricepaid by the `normalized'. Military humourmixes the two in the abbreviation SNAFU ±Situation Normal, All Fucked Up!

Within criminology theoretical usage of theterm is derived from Foucault's `dispositifs denormalization'. However, the term is also usedin a variety of contexts, including in the debateabout whether drug use has become normal-ized or in describing attempts to bring prisonregimes into line with human rights outsidethe prison.


For Foucault (1975) the disciplines of psychia-try, medicine and criminology produceknowledge about and exercise power overthe subject. That power may sometimes be toincarcerate or exclude but it works mosteffectively when internalized and acted uponby the self-policing, docile body ± bio-politics.We know it is `normal' to be sane, non-criminal, heterosexual, slim, hard-workingand so on. It is this knowledge as much as ±and often more than ± the power that rendersthe subject docile. However, just as the dis-ciplines produce ± rather than simply attemptto repress ± deviance as a category they alsocreate resistance. Thus the `criminal' and the`homosexual' are brought into being. Theirresistance may take the form of denying thatthey are deviant through `techniques ofneutralization' or by embracing and ¯auntingthe disciplinary norms ± black pride, gaypride.

In a self-report study of criminologists andcriminal justice practitioners, Robinson andZaitzow (1999) found 66 per cent reporteddriving under the in¯uence of alcohol ordrugs at some time and 35 per cent within thepast year. Only slightly fewer (60 per cent) hadused illegal drugs at some time, with 27 percent reporting recent use. One-third hadbought drugs and 11 per cent admitted toselling them. Thus crime can be seen to benormal ± statistically expected and measur-able. However, it is more arguable whethercrime is normalized. It is from this position ofcomplicity that criminologists have, for exam-ple, engaged in the debate ± with politiciansand practitioners ± about whether drug use insociety or amongst young people has becomenormalized.

Evaluation

Britain may have waged war in the past withChina to force the opium trade on them, butnow ± like the USA ± it sees itself at war withdrugs. Or, at least, this is the of®cial line.Shiner and Newburn (1999) open theirdiscussion of the issue by noting the furorein January 1997 over the comments of anumber of pop stars about drug use. NoelGallagher, of the UK rock group Oasis,declared in the New Musical Express (29January 1997) that `the majority of people inthis country take drugs . . . like getting up andhaving a cup of tea'. This con®rms the claim ofParker et al. (1995) that for young people

191NORMALIZATION

taking drugs has become the norm and thatnon-drug-taking can be seen as deviant. YetShiner and Newburn draw on UK and USAdata to argue convincingly that whilst drugtaking was common amongst young people itwas not the norm and that substantialnumbers continue to `say no to drugs' anddisapprove of their use.

However, it could be argued that Shiner andNewburn accept too readily the distinctionbetween legal and illegal drugs and fail to takesuf®cient account of cultural aspects. Using®gures for both prescribed and over-the-counter medicines it is possible to argue thatthere is a cultural expectation of using a `pillfor every ill' amongst the whole population. Inthis scenario tea, coffee, alcohol, Prozac,Ecstasy and aspirin are all used to get peoplethrough their life. Moreover, popular cultureand the media are saturated with references todrug use and culture. For instance, a bicycleadvertisement punningly asks, `what's heon?'.

The debate about normalization of drugsoften turns on de®nitional issues about what isor should count as normal. Similarly, theargument for the normalization of prisonregimes (Feest, 1999) or of policing (Mulcahy,1999) assumes the normality of the comparatorbeing used. Thus, in a carceral society ±returning to Foucault ± can we simply com-pare regimes inside prison with those obtain-

ing outside? Is the policing, say, of Londonnormal enough for that of Belfast to becompared to it?

Nic Groombridge

Associated Concepts: deviance, neutralization(techniques of ), pathology

Key ReadingsFeest, J. (1999) Ìmprisonment and prisoners' work:

normalization or less eligibility', Punishment andSociety, 1 (1), pp. 99±107.

Foucault, M. (1975) Surveiller et punir. Paris,Gallimard.

Mulcahy, A. (1999) `Visions of normality: peace andreconstruction of policing in Northern Ireland',Social and Legal Studies, 8 (2), pp. 277±95.

Parker, H., Measham, F. and Aldridge, J. (1995)Drugs Futures: Changing Patterns of Drug Useamongst English Youth. London, Institute for theStudy of Drug Dependency.

Robinson, M.B. and Zaitzow, B.H. (1999) `Criminol-ogists: are we what we study? A national self-report study of crime experts', The Criminologist,24 (2), pp. 1, 4, 17±19.

Shiner, M. and Newburn, T. (1999) `Taking tea withNoel: the place and meaning of drug use ineveryday life', in N. South (ed.), Drugs: Cultures,Controls and Everyday Life. London, Sage.


O

OBEDIENCE, CRIMES OF

De®nition

Harmful acts committed by a subordinate inobedience to the orders of a superior.


Explaining `crimes of obedience' took on arenewed signi®cance as a result of the returnof ethnic war and genocide in the latetwentieth century. The International CriminalTribunals for the Former Yugoslavia andRwanda established in the 1990s continue tograpple with issues of individual responsi-bility and obedience to orders, as did theNuremberg Tribunal before them.

In the immediate aftermath of the SecondWorld War, social scientists also soughtexplanations for crimes of obedience, asrepresented, in particular, by the Holocaust,through an analysis of the personality traits ofthe perpetrators. Perhaps the most notablework in this area was Theodore Adorno'sanalysis of the àuthoritarian personality' inthe 1950s. In later analysis, however, byHannah Ahrendt (1964) and Stanley Milgram(1974), the focus shifted to the social processesthat enabled such crimes, rather than thepsychological predispositions of individualperpetrators.

In a series of laboratory experiments,Milgram (1974) found that a majority (65 percent) of apparently normal people could beinduced to harm others if instructed to do soby a person in authority. In these experiments,Milgram investigated the willingness ofresearch subjects, who had been asked toplay the role of a `teacher' in a learningexperiment, to administer what they were told

would be painful electric shocks to anothersubject on the instructions of the person incharge of the experiments. Despite apparentevidence that the pain administered wasbecoming progressively more severe anddangerous, the majority of the researchsubjects (`teachers') were prepared to continueadministering shocks when urged to do so bythe authority. Milgram found that the greaterthe distance between the research subjectsgiving the shocks and the `victims', the greaterwas their willingness to obey instructions tocontinue. Conversely, the greater the distancebetween the research subject and the àuthor-ity', the less was their willingness to continue.

Milgram described the research subjectswho obeyed orders to in¯ict pain on others ashaving entered an àgentic state', one in whichupon entering the experimental authoritysystem they had relinquished their sense ofpersonal responsibility for their harmfulactions by transferring responsibility to theirsuperiors. Importantly, according to Milgram,this was a function not of individual propen-sities so much as a speci®c social conditionexplicable in terms of culturally generateddeference to authority.

Ahrendt (1964), writing about the Nazi warcriminal Adolf Eichmann, argued that itbecomes possible (though not inevitable) forordinary people to do evil when the wrong-doing is `banalized' ± that is, when it is maderoutine and morally neutral. More recently, intheir work on war crimes in Vietnam, Kelmanand Hamilton (1989) argued that crimes ofobedience are more likely to be committedwhere there has been a `weakening of moralrestraint'. Kelman (1995), in his later work onthe social context of torture, suggests that thisweakening of moral restraints against wrong-doing is brought about by three interrelatedsocial processes which simultaneously author-ize (the harm is sponsored, expected or

tolerated by those in authority) and routinizethe harmful acts and also dehumanize theirvictims. The process of authorization is one inwhich the situation is rede®ned in such a waythat normal moral principles do not apply andthe individual is àbsolved of the responsi-bility for making moral choices'. The processof routinization structures the (harmful)action so that there is no opportunity forraising moral questions or making moraldecisions. Finally, the process of dehuman-ization ensures that the `perpetrator's atti-tudes towards the victim become structuredin such a way that it is neither necessarynor possible for him to view his relationshipwith the victim in moral terms' (Kelman, 1995,pp. 29±32).

Evaluation

Social scienti®c work on `crimes of obedience'is important for the way it highlights thedifferent social contexts and social processesthat are associated with the production ofwhat otherwise might simply be dismissed(and therefore not explained) as immoral, evilor pathological acts. In his writing on theHolocaust, for example, Zygmunt Bauman hasemphasized the inescapable importance ofunderstanding the processes through whichimmoral regimes are institutionalized andgiven a `normal' authority (Bauman, 1989).Thomas Scheff's work on emotions, national-ism and war is a good example of a socialscientist trying to make sense of the ways inwhich ethnic division, rage, humiliation andthe cultural devaluation of the fate ofindividual human beings may combine toproduce the conditions of genocide and otherwar crime (Scheff, 1993). The laboratory-basedexperimental work conducted by Milgram didnot in itself identify ± and did not try toidentify ± any of these processes or the factorsthat in¯uenced the behaviour of the 35 percent of his subjects who refused to obey.Milgram's àgentic state' model of obediencefailed also to explain the temporal dimensionof obedience. People are often caught up insequences of demands for obedience, in whichthe degree of harm escalates from one momentto the next. Once they have committed their®rst crimes of obedience, they may becomeentrapped into continuing to obey.

Overwhelmingly, the concept of a crime ofobedience has been applied to activitiesconducted in circumstances of war. There is,of course, no in-principle reason why theconcept might not be applied, to useful

analytic effect, in many other areas of humanlife of interest to students of crime ± forexample, in respect of the collective collusionof middle-range employees of large corpora-tions involved in systematically fraudulentactivity or in crimes against the environment.The exploration of the utility of the concept inthese areas will be an important future taskboth for criminal lawyers involved in speci®clitigation and for social scientists involved inthe analysis of `criminal behaviour' in theseareas, as much as in respect speci®cally ofcrimes committed in circumstances of war.

Ruth Jamieson

Associated Concepts: genocide, social controltheory, state crime, torture

Key ReadingsAhrendt, H. (1964) Eichmann in Jerusalem. Har-

mondsworth, Penguin.Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust.

Cambridge, Polity Press.Kelman, H.C. (1995) `The social context of torture:

policy process and authority structure', in R.Crelinson and A. Schmid (eds), The Politics of Pain.Oxford, Westview Press.

Kelman, H.C. and Hamilton, V.L. (1989) Crimes ofObedience. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.

Milgram, S. (1974) Obedience to Authority. New York,Harper and Row.

Scheff, T. (1993) Bloody Revenge: Emotions, National-ism and War. Boulder, CO, Westview Press.

OFFICIAL CRIMINAL STATISTICS

De®nition

Statistical data compiled by the police and thecourts and routinely published by govern-ments as indices of the extent of crime.


Most countries annually collect data which area count of the volume of particular categoriesof crime as recorded by the police. In the USAdata are submitted voluntarily by local policedepartments to the FBI and published asUniform Crime Reports. In the UK similarstatistics are produced by the Home Of®ce(Criminal Statistics England and Wales and thebiannual Statistical Bulletins). Each includesdata on offences (from which trends in crime


over time are charted) and on offenders whohave eventually been found guilty or cau-tioned (from which details of the sex and ageof offenders are derived).

The ®rst national crime statistics wereproduced in France in the early nineteenthcentury (Quetelet in 1842). In England andWales crimes recorded by the police have beenpublished since 1876 and in the USA since1930. Both of these latter countries havewitnessed a dramatic rise in the crime ratesince the mid 1950s, with the only sustainedfall occurring in the mid to late 1990s. Asimilar long-term upward trend has been afeature of most Western democracies, with thenotable exception of Switzerland (Maguire,1997, p. 159).

Breaking down this overall rate into offencegroups reveals that the `crime problem' ispredominantly one of crimes against property(theft, burglary, criminal damage) and aboveall theft of, or from, vehicles. Crimes ofviolence appear small in comparison. Turningto the data on offenders, it is ®rst notable thattheir numbers are dramatically lower than thetotal number of offences recorded. Whilstsome of this disparity may be attributable tothose committing more than one offence, it isclear that in the vast majority of cases nothingis of®cially known about those responsible(Maguire, 1997, p. 173; Coleman and Moyni-han, 1996, p. 43). The data on `knownoffenders', however, produce a picture of the`typical offender' as male and young. Forexample in England and Wales the of®cialcriminal statistics have consistently found thatover 80 per cent of offenders are male andalmost half are under the age of 21.

Criminologists have long debated thereliability of these statistical measures. Selfevidently they only measure those offencesreported to and recorded by the police. As aresult these basic data are now regularlyadded to by nationwide victim surveys. In1972 the US Bureau of the Census begancollecting information about rates of victimi-zation by asking random samples of thepopulation to recall crimes committed againstthem in the past year. In 1982 Britain followedthis lead with its own British Crime Survey(BCS). Both in the USA and in Britain it wasconsistently revealed that only about 50 percent of crime is in fact reported to the police.

Evaluation

The of®cial criminal statistics do not provideany straightforward answers to the questions

of: How much crime? How many criminals?How many victims? The `true facts' of crimeare probably unknowable. They depend notonly on what we de®ne as crime, but also onthe validity of statistical measures, no matterhow they are produced. Most academicanalysts, the media, politicians and thepublic rely on of®cial statistics as `hardfacts', but they are both partial and subjec-tively constructed.

· In the USA the Uniform Crime Reportdistinguishes between index crimes andnon-index crimes. It constructs crimetrends from tabulating eight index crimes± those the FBI believes to be the mostserious. The list does not include fraud,embezzlement, offences against family orchildren, drug abuse, vagrancy and so on.In England and Wales the of®cial statisticsdo not include offences recorded by theBritish Transport Police, Ministry ofDefence Police and UK Atomic EnergyAuthority Police, who collectively recordabout 80,000 offences per year (Maguire1997, p. 149). Tax evasion (recorded by theInland Revenue) and VAT evasion(recorded by Customs and Excise) willonly appear in of®cial criminal records ifthey are subsequently brought to court.

· Crime statistics are based on those crimesreported to and subsequently recorded bythe police. But some offences may not bereported because of ignorance that a crimehas been committed (for example, taxevasion, computer fraud); there appears tobe no victim (for example, certain drugsoffences, prostitution, sexual offencesbetween consenting adults, illegal abor-tion); the victim is powerless (for example,child abuse); ambivalence towards ordistrust of the police (for example, certainyouth cultures); the offence may beconsidered trivial (for example, theftsfrom work, vandalism, minor shoplifting,brawls); the victim may be concerned thatthe offence will not be taken seriously (forexample, some cases of rape); or thevictim has no faith that the police willact to protect his or her interests (forexample, racial intimidation and harass-ment). Measurements of crime rest initi-ally and critically on the extent to whichthe public perceives and interprets beha-viour as `criminal' (Walker, 1983, p. 292).

· Not all offences reported are recorded assuch by the police. The amount ofresources available to the police andcourts is limited and thus subjective

195OFFICIAL CRIMINAL STATISTICS

and/or administrative decisions are madeconcerning which crimes to act against. Itis only recorded crime which enters theof®cial statistics. Walker (1983, p. 286)notes that, although the police in Englandand Wales have a statutory obligation torecord crimes, considerable discretionremains about whether it is consideredsuf®ciently serious to warrant their atten-tion. Violent disputes between neighboursor members of a family may, for example,be classi®ed as `domestic ± advice given'and the alleged òffence' not recorded.Similarly, how a recorded offence isclassi®ed by the police ± as `theft from aperson' or `robbery'; as `burglary, no loss'or `vandalism'; as `wounding' or `commonassault' for example ± will affect the rateat which certain crimes appear to becommitted. Problems inherent in record-ing, and variations due to local police`targeting', will also affect our under-standing of the extent of particular crimes.

· Changes in law enforcement and in whatthe law counts as crime also precludemuch meaningful discussion over theextent of historical increases and decreasesin crime. Legislative changes may meanthat existing categories are rede®ned, thusrendering historical comparison meaning-less. Some increases in crime can bearti®cially constructed solely by economicand administrative circumstance: in¯ationprovides a perfect example of such a bias.The law is not index linked and so acts ofcriminal damage, of®cially de®ned inEngland and Wales as damage exceeding£20 in value, shot up from 17,000 in 1969to 124,000 in 1977. In¯ation shifted manythousands of previously trivial incidentsof damage into the more serious crimebracket.

· Changes in police practices, priorities andpolitics will also have a dramatic effect onsuch headline statistics as `crimesrecorded by the police'. What is remark-able for example about long-term histor-ical trends in crime rates in England andWales is their consistently low levelduring the nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies followed by a consistent dou-bling in every decade (except the 1950s)until the 1990s. By examining policeinspectorate and committee reports at thetime, Taylor (1998) argues that theincreases in crime between 1914 and 1960can be largely accounted for by seniorpolice of®cers `playing the crime card' inorder to improve their establishment. By

recording large numbers of minor prop-erty offences which were traditionally`cuffed' (not recorded) chief constableswere able to persuade their police autho-rities to increase funding. The crime rate isthen more a re¯ection of police lobbyingand politics, than of criminal behaviour.

· Changes in the number of arrests, trialsand sentences may not represent actualchanges in the amount of crime, but ratherchanges in the capacity of the criminaljustice system to process individual cases.Increases or decreases in the number ofpolice, judges, courtrooms and prisonplaces will inevitably affect these statistics.More police, more judges and moreprisons appear to have a nearly in®nitecapacity to increase the amount of of®-cially recorded crime. This is partlybecause there is a forever-present unlim-ited well of unrecorded criminal behaviourwhich can be tapped when and if thepolitical will and the resources for lawenforcement are suf®ciently activated. It isalso because there exists a huge potentialto perceive and rede®ne actions as `crimes'as the technological ability to implementforms of mass surveillance increases.

Collectively, such processes of data collec-tion inevitably mean that notions of crimewaves and of perpetual increases in offendinghave to be interpreted with extreme caution.Nevertheless, the pictures they create of crime,criminals and offending remain some of thekey means through which academic, political,media and public knowledge is gained. Thestatistics cannot be dismissed as simply mean-ingless. They can provide valuable insightsinto police and court de®nitions of crime andthe operation of social, legal and organiza-tional constraints and priorities. They cannot,however, be expected to aid our understand-ing of the ìndependent entity of crime' for, byits nature, no such fact exists.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: crime, hidden crime, self-reports, victim surveys

Key ReadingsColeman, C. and Moynihan, J. (1996) Understanding

Crime Data. Buckingham, Open University Press.Maguire, M. (1997) `Crime statistics, patterns and

trends: changing perceptions and their implica-tions', in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner(eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 2ndedn. Oxford, The Clarendon Press.


Taylor, H. (1998) `The politics of the rising crimestatistics of England and Wales 1914±1960', Crime,History and Societies, 2 (1), pp. 5±28.

Walker, M.A. (1983) `Some problems in interpretingstatistics relating to crime', Journal of the RoyalStatistical Society, Series A, No.146, part 3, pp.282±93.

OPPORTUNITY THEORY

De®nition

An approach to explaining criminal behaviourthat sees crime as a function of the charac-teristics of situations that offer the opportu-nity, to those inclined to take it, to bene®t froman illegal act.


Historically, theories of crime took either a`dispositional' stance, with a focus on theindividual offender, or a `sociological'approach, with emphasis on the social condi-tions associated with crime. A rather differentapproach began to emerge following the workof Cohen and Felson (1979) and the advent of`routine activities theory'. The core of thistheoretical approach is that crime will occurwhen three elements combine: a speci®csituation (i.e., a time and location), a target,and the absence of effective guardians. Thecombination of these three elements providesthe opportunity for successful offending.

The beginnings of views about crime basedon routine activities and opportunity are to befound in research broadly concerned with theenvironmental correlates of crime. Thesestudies are concerned with the speci®cenvironmental conditions that might accountfor patterns of crime. For example, risingnumbers of burglaries can be explained by thegreater proportion of empty houses as morepeople go out to work leaving homesunguarded and offering the opportunity forundetected crime. Similarly, it can be seen thatmore street parking leads to higher rates of cartheft; street violence is more likely in dimly litareas of towns and cities; and the probabilityof vandalism to property is increased whenthere is no one with direct responsibility forthe safety of buildings and utilities.

The concept of opportunity began to comeunder increasing scrutiny, with variousdimensions of the three critical elements

being described in the literature. With respectto the target, Bottoms and Wiles (1997) notethe importance of `target attractiveness'.Target attractiveness has several dimensions:®nancial value is obvious, but other factorssuch as being simple to sell and easilytransported can be important in making atarget attractive. It is also the case, of course,that the same target will not be equallyattractive to all potential offenders.

The critical elements of the situation might,as Bottoms and Wiles (1997) suggest, be seenin terms of àccessibility'. Accessibility refersto the physical qualities of the situation suchas visibility, ease of access, and lack of obser-vation at the scene of the crime. The latterfactor, lack of observation, may be linked withthe third dimension of opportunity, absence ofa responsible guardian. A reasonable guardianmay, for example, be a neighbour, an of®cialsuch as a car park attendant, or a police of®cer.

In considering accessibility and guardian-ship, it is dif®cult to disentangle the environ-ment and the individual. For example, anindividual might need specialist knowledge torecognize the environmental cues that signalan attractive target. Thus, burglars may beaware of cues, such as type of lock or windowcatch, that signal easy entry to a property.Similarly, a guardian may be present but it isthe guardian's perceived effectiveness that isthe critical dimension with respect to thepotential offender's decision-making andeventual actions.

As the concept of opportunity is stretched toinclude a wider range of factors, so theassociated models of crime become morecomplex. Clarke (1995) presents a model ofthe opportunity structure for crime thatincorporates such diverse elements as socio-economic structure, perception, physicalenvironment, and information processing.Such deepenings also begin to overlap withthe view, reminiscent of classicism, of crim-inals as motivated by self-interest. Owingmore to economics than human science, thebasis of human action is seen in terms ofèxpected utility'. A quotation from Van DenHaag (1982) illustrates this approach in itsmost stark form: Ì do not see any relevantdifference between dentistry and prostitutionor car theft, except that the latter do notrequire a license . . . The frequency of rape, orof mugging, is essentially determined by theexpected comparative net advantage, just as isthe rate of dentistry and burglary' (p. 1,026).

Like an accountant reckoning a balancesheet, the offender considers the net gains andlosses then, as it were, moves into the market

197OPPORTUNITY THEORY

to make a pro®t. The offender is seen as arational decision-maker, as a `reasoning crim-inal', with personal bene®t a prime motivationfor crime. This theme of the criminal as arational decision-maker was developed tosigni®cant effect by Cornish and Clarke(1986). Cornish and Clarke are clear thatwhile social factors, such as family and peergroup, may be part of an individual's growingup to be involved in crime, the èventdecision', the making of a rational choice, atthe point of committing the offence, is critical.

Evaluation

The development of concepts such as oppor-tunity, routine activities and rational decision-making has had a profound practical impactin the form of situational crime prevention(Clarke, 1992). This approach to crime pre-vention takes the broad approach that bychanging elements of the situation, such astarget availability and levels of surveillance,it is possible to impact signi®cantly on theopportunities for crime and the offender'sdecision-making. There are criticisms of thisapproach at theoretical and practical levels,particularly with regard to the rationality ofsome offending and the issue of displacement.However, there is little doubt that the overallapproach has taken criminological theory intonew areas of research and practice.

Clive Hollin

Associated Concepts: classicism, defensiblespace, free will, geographies of crime, rationalchoice theory, routine activity theory, situa-tional crime prevention, surveillance

Key ReadingsBottoms, A.E. and Wiles, P. (1997) Ènvironmental

criminology', in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R.Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology,2nd edn. Oxford, The Clarendon Press.

Clarke, R.V. (ed.) (1992) Situational Crime Prevention:Successful Case Studies. New York, Harrow andHeston.

Clarke, R.V. (1995) `Situational crime prevention', inM. Tonry and D.P. Farrington (eds), Building aSafer Society: Strategic Approaches to Crime Preven-tion. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Cohen, L.E. and Felson, M. (1979) `Social change andcrime rate trends: a routine activities approach',American Sociological Review, 44, pp. 588±608.

Cornish, D.B. and Clarke, R.V. (eds) (1986) TheReasoning Criminal: Rational Choice Perspectives onOffending. New York, Springer-Verlag.

Van Den Haag, E. (1982) `Could successfulrehabilitation reduce the crime rate?', Journal ofCriminal Law and Criminology, 73, pp. 1,022±1,035.

ORGANIZED CRIME

De®nition

This concept emerged ®rst in the United Statesin the 1920s but is now used internationally,for example, by the United Nations and G8countries, as shorthand to describe a range ofserious crimes that are deemed especiallydif®cult to control. It may be de®ned as theongoing activities of those collectivelyengaged in production, supply and ®nancingfor illegal markets in goods and services.


There are two main analogies employed in thedescription and analysis of organized crime:the market and government. In the ®rst, adistinction is commonly drawn betweenòrdinary' criminals, even if in gangs, whosecrimes are `predatory', that is, concerned withthe illegal redistribution of already existingwealth, and criminal organizations commit-ting ènterprise' crime: the production anddistribution of new, though illegal, goods andservices (Naylor, 1997). This is not a hard andfast distinction: the more opportunistic thecriminal organization the more likely it is to beinvolved in both types of crime.

This basic idea of ènterprise' crime iscentral to most contemporary accounts of theconcept, both of®cial and academic, butcrucially different approaches emerge onceanalysis proceeds. In the of®cial discoursecriminal enterprises penetrate otherwise lawfulbusiness, thus undermining and corrupting it,for example, offering counterfeit supplies orprotection including threats. Such activities dohappen but they represent only a partialaccount. A fuller examination of the interac-tion between organizations and marketsshows that under certain conditions therelationship between legal and illegal organi-zations is symbiotic. For example, the study ofcorporate crime examines the extensive illegalbehaviour of organizations that are formallylegal. Similarly, Smith (1980) develops a modelof enterprises being situated on a spectrumbetween legality and illegality and explainshow the interaction of entrepreneurs and


customers leads to `strati®ed marketplaces',for example, entrepreneurs may prefer toborrow money from a bank but, if unable todo so, may go to a loan shark.

Overall, the enterprise model is at the heartof the common metaphor of the criminal`®rm'; for some, however, what is particularlysigni®cant about criminal organizationsincluding, for example, the Ma®a, is not theirmarketplace activities so much as their`governmental' behaviour. At one level, thismay re¯ect attempts by criminal organizationsto corrupt government in general, forexample, contractual bid-rigging, and lawenforcement in particular, paying-off police,prosecutors and judges for favourable deci-sions. However, more fundamentally, criminalorganizations have been characterized asthreatening the state's monopoly of functionssuch as coercion, protection and extraction(Naylor, 1997, pp. 15±16). These functions areall central to the legitimacy claims of modernstates and to the extent that other organiza-tions deploy violence, offer protection andbene®ts and extract `taxation', then they maybe seen as challenging that central claim. Post-Soviet Russia is seen as an example of this.Indeed, taking a longer historical view, thestruggles between rivals to establish mono-polies can be seen as the central feature of`state-making' (Tilly, 1985).

Evaluation

Considerable controversy has surrounded theuse of this concept, much of it centring on thenature and extent of the organization of crime.Work carried out for the US President's CrimeCommission in the 1960s presented the Italian-American Ma®a as the core manifestation oforganized crime; speci®cally that it resembled acorporate hierarchy with the associated featuresof ranks and division of labour. Critics arguedthat this image resulted from the over-relianceof researchers on ®les and other evidence froma law enforcement community that wasanyway predisposed to describe their targetsin the same hierarchical terms as they werethemselves organized. Alternative models,based more on the idea of networks, forexample, based on families or more broadly,friends and business connections (e.g. Hobbs,1998) are a more accurate depiction.

Further impetus has been given to thiscontroversy by the identi®cation of transna-tional organized crime as a major problemduring the 1990s. The reasons for this are clear:the end of the Cold War and collapse of the

former regimes of the Soviet bloc has seen a re-orientation not just of security intelligenceagencies and military forces but also ofacademic departments of international rela-tions to the analysis of `new' security threats.Coinciding as it has with the era of globaliza-tion, the result has been an outpouring ofof®cial concern at national and internationallevel that organized crime is not just a `seriousproblem' but that it actually constitutes a threatto national security. Further, the threat isnormally presented as if it were primarily anexternal one in much the same way as òrdinary'crime is normally represented as crimes of `theother'. Therefore discussion is of `Russian-',Àsian-', `Nigerian-organized crime' and so onand unreliable estimates of the values of cross-border crime are often given. Actually, morecareful analysis indicates that crime remainspredominantly local in origin and carried outby national citizens.

Thus, great care must be taken with the useof the concept: organized crime is an issue onwhich governments feel strongly the need toreassure insecure populations that `somethingcan be done' and there is consequently muchrhetoric of `wars' on crime and drugs. Inreality, organized criminality is so deeplyembedded within the operation of domesticand global markets that the most that can beachieved is to ameliorate somewhat its mostdamaging effects.

Peter Gill

Associated Concepts: corporate crime, criticalcriminology, extraterritorial law enforcement,Marxist criminologies, state crime, transna-tional organized crime, white collar crime

Key ReadingsAbadinsky, H. (1997) Organized Crime, 5th edn.

Chicago, Nelson-Hall.Hobbs, D. (1998) `Going down the glocal', The

Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 37 (4), pp. 1±19.(See also other articles in this special edition.)

Naylor, R.T. (1997) `Ma®as, myths and markets',Transnational Organized Crime, 3 (3), pp. 15±30.

Smith, D. (1980) `Paragons, pariahs and pirates',Crime and Delinquency, 26 (July), pp. 45±57.

Special Issue on Transnational Crime (1998) Interna-tional Journal of Risk, Security and Crime Prevention,3 (2).

Tilly, C. (1985) `War making and state making asorganized crime', in P. Evans (ed.), Bringing theState Back In. Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress.

199ORGANIZED CRIME

P

PANOPTICISM

De®nition

Panopticism is a theoretical concept associatedwith the French philosopher Michel Foucault(1977). Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham's eight-eenth-century design for a prison ± thePanopticon (which was never actually built)± as a starting point to analyse the generalèxercise of power' in society as a whole.


The central feature of Bentham's unusedprison design for the Panopticon was visibilityand inspection. In the words of Foucault (1977,p. 200):

We know the principle on which it [i.e. thePanopticon] was based: at the periphery, anannular building; at the centre, a tower; this toweris pierced with wide windows that open onto theinner side of the ring; the peripheric building isdivided into cells, each of which extends thewhole width of the building; they have twowindows, one on the inside, corresponding to thewindows of the tower; the other, on the outside,allows the light to cross the cell from one end tothe other. All that is needed, is to place asupervisor in a central tower and to shut up ineach cell a lunatic, a patient, a condemned man, aworker or a pupil. By the effect of backlighting,one can observe from the tower, standing putprecisely against the light, the small captiveshadows in the cells of the periphery. They arelike so many cages, so many small theatres, inwhich each actor is alone, perfectly individua-lized and constantly visible. The panopticmechanism arranges spatial unities that make itpossible to see constantly and to recognize

immediately. In short, it reverses the principlesof the dungeon; or rather of its three functions ±to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide ± itpreserves only the ®rst and eliminates the othertwo. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisorcapture better than darkness, which ultimatelyprotected. Visibility is a trap.

In a chapter entitled `Panopticism', Foucaultargues that institutions other than prisonsbegin to use the same forms of power ±visibility and inspection ± to exercise controlin factories, schools, hospitals and so on. ThePanopticon `must not be understood as adream building; it is the diagram of a mech-anism of power reduced to its ideal form; itsfunctioning, abstracted from any obstacle,resistance or friction, must be represented asa pure architectural and optical system: it is infact a ®gure of political technology that mayand must be detached from any speci®c use'(Foucault, 1977, p. 205).

Despite using the Panopticon as a historicalmetaphor for the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, the application of the theoreticalprinciples of the disciplinary power of visi-bility and the idea that inspection or observa-tion affects behaviour which Foucaultdevelops have numerous contemporary reson-ances. In particular, the increasing use ofclosed circuit television (CCTV) in our cities,in both public and private spaces, hasprecisely the same disciplinary functions thatFoucault suggested lay at the heart of thePanopticon, and is linked to the idea of the`carceral society'.

Evaluation

What makes Foucault so interesting andchallenging is his almost poetic use oflanguage. Like a true poet or philosopher he

makes connections between seemingly uncon-nected events. Alternatively, what makes himfrustrating is his failure to cite sources, and hisendless willingness to push his materialsbeyond the point at which they can be sus-tained. Panopticism bene®ts and suffers fromthese strengths and weaknesses in almostequal measure. It should be remembered, forexample, that Bentham's design was neveraccepted, and the Panopticon never built. Onthe other hand, as a basis for analysing ourcontemporary preoccupation with securitysurveillance, panopticism offers many inter-esting insights.

David Wilson

Associated Concepts: carceral society, electronicmonitoring, penality, penology, surveillance

Key ReadingsBozovic, M. (ed.), (1995) The Panopticon Writings of

Jeremy Bentham. New York, Verso Press.Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of

the Prison. London, Allen Lane.

PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION

De®nition

The collection of information through activeparticipation in the social world that is understudy.


Pioneered by the Chicago School of Sociologyin the 1920s, the key aim of participantobservation is to view the social world, as faras possible, from the actor's own point ofview. Typically this involves becoming a partof the group under study, learning its cultureand observing its behaviour. The key aim is togain access to the meanings actors themselvesmake of their own personal and social situ-ations. It facilitates data collection on situa-tions as they occur rather than in arti®cialsituations (as in experimental research) orthrough constructs of reality provided by theresearcher (as in survey research). Thepromise is held that such observations canhelp to make sense of behaviour that mayappear to be irrational and paradoxical tothose òn the outside'. As a result, it is most

closely associated with interactionism andappreciative forms of criminology. The parti-cipant observer becomes immersed ìn the®eld' by emphasizing:

· the study of groups in their natural sur-roundings, with the minimum of distur-bance;

· empathy and understanding;

· the direct observation of interactions andin particular the meanings they have forparticipants; and

· descriptions in terms of the everydayunderstandings of actors in a situation.

Gold (1969) distinguished four forms ofsuch research: òbserver-as-participant',`participant-as-observer', `the complete obser-ver' and `the complete participant'. In fullparticipant observation, the researcher identi-®es an area worthy of study and enters the®eld without much preconception about whatis to be found. Typically the observer alsoconceals their identity as a researcher fromthose being studied.

In the 1960s and 1970s the development ofexplicitly anti-positivist approaches to thestudy of crime and deviance, for example inlabelling and new deviancy theory, providedthe political and theoretical inspiration forwhat was arguably the heyday of participantobservation research. Polsky's (1971) researchinto poolroom hustlers in New York andParker's (1974) study of a group of male `streetkids' in Liverpool came closest to Gold'snotion of `complete participant' in that theirposition as researcher and as participant wasoften indistinguishable. Both carried out theirresearch covertly, and in order to gain trustengaged in deviant activities themselves ± aposition that some ethnographers havedescribed as having `gone native'. However,each provided invaluable insights into thecomplexity of subcultural codes and beha-viour that previous researchers had beenunable to, or failed to, acknowledge. As aresult each was also able to offer a damningcritique of òrthodox' research masqueradingas `science'.

On the other hand, participant observationhas also been used to improve understandingsof the internal workings of the criminal justicesystem, as in Holdaway's (1983) study of theBritish police. This study was carried outcovertly and was able to reveal the extent towhich police work was framed by the every-day meanings and de®nitions that of®cersthemselves had constructed to make sense oftheir role and the people that they policed.

201PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION

Fully developed, covert participant observa-tion research is necessarily time-consuming,dif®cult, long-term, potentially risky and canin some circumstances raise serious ethicalquestions. It is probably no surprise, in acriminology that had by the 1990s becomedominated by technicist, evaluative andadministrative concerns, that such researchhas become increasingly rare. But it remainsone of the few means through which ahumanization of the subjects of criminologicalresearch can be achieved.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: appreciative criminology,Chicago School of Sociology, ethnography,interactionism, new deviancy theory

Key ReadingsAdler, P.A. (1993) Wheeling and Dealing: An

Ethnography of an Upper Level Drug Dealing andSmuggling Community. New York, ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Burgess, R.G. (1984) In the Field. London, UnwinHyman.

Gold, R. (1969) `Roles in sociological ®eld observa-tion', in G. McCall and J. Simmons (eds), Issues inParticipant Observation. London, Addison Wesley.

Holdaway, S. (1983) Inside the British Police. Oxford,Blackwell.

Parker, H. (1974) View from the Boys. Newton Abbot,David and Charles.

Polsky, N. (1971) Hustlers, Beats and Others.Harmondsworth, Penguin.

PATHOLOGY

De®nition

Within bio-medical discourse ± the study ofdisease; by extension and common usage ± theabnormal (that which is not normal), anunhealthy deviation from the norm, degen-erate. For those who follow individualisticexplanations of crime, pathology will belocated in the individual at the level of thegenes, hormones or psyche. For sociologists,the pathology might be located in the family,peer-group, area or social formation.


Durkheim (1895, 1964) devotes a chapter to the`Normal and the Pathological'. However, the

greater part of his discussion is given over tobio-medical analogy. Moreover the termmorbidity is sometimes used ± again empha-sizing the organicism of his argument.Famously, Durkheim used suicide to illustratethe utility of sociological method even in themost seemingly individual act. Similarly, heclaims ìf there is any fact whose pathologicalcharacter appears incontestable, that fact iscrime. All criminologists are agreed on thispoint. Although they explain this pathologydifferently.' He then proceeds to make his oft-quoted claim about crime being normal (evenamongst a `society of saints'). However, heallows some crime to be pathological. Heacknowledges that a person may commitcrime for individual pathological reasons andsociologically that a rate of crime may bepathologically higher than predicted for socialtypes and levels of society. This too he callsmorbidity or abnormal. However, contrary tothe general positivism of his arguments, herecognizes ± and foreshadows the labellingperspective ± `that, among these divergences,there are some with a criminal character. Whatconfers this character upon them is not theintrinsic quality of a given act but thatde®nition which the collective consciencelends them' (1895, 1964, p. 70).

It is a mark of the extent to which socio-logical criminology has advanced that Dur-kheim's claim that all criminologists agree onthe pathological character of crime strikes themodern reader as odd. Durkheim was able tooverturn the narrow bio-medical de®nition ofpathology and give it a sociological face.However, despite Durkheim's in¯uence`pathology' has not usually been the nomen-clature favoured by those who followed in hisfootsteps. It can be argued that it appears invarious disguises in the sociology of deviance,such as differential association, social disorga-nization and strain. It might also be argued thatsome positivistic readings of both Marxismand feminism see class society and patriarchyas pathological or responsible for the `patho-logies' of the working class or of men.

Evaluation

It can be argued that pathology no longer hasany place in sociology. However, as psycho-pathology, it has been elevated in criminaljustice discourse and popular cultural repre-sentation ± note the character of HannibalLecter in Silence of the Lambs ± to primeimportance once again as an explanation ofcrime. Sumner (1994) claims that the ®eld


of study that Durkheim opened up was killedoff in 1975. Sumner proposes replacingdeviance with censure as the ®eld of study.In this, the term pathology, including psycho-pathology, can be seen as the censure of thedifferent by those with the power to de®ne it.This can be seen in Durkheim's terms asfunctional, in labelling terms as misguided orcounterproductive or in Foucauldian terms asproductive. The disciplines of medicine andthe psy-sciences employ the nexus of power/knowledge to produce ± and offer to control ±pathology, as they have done with madness,crime and sexual dissidence.

Administrative criminology has sought toside-step the issue of pathology within theindividual or society but replaces it with thefear or risk of other's pathology, which is to bemanaged. In this way the gated communitymight be seen as a cordon sanitaire and securityguards as white blood corpuscles and T-cellsmobilizing to neutralize pathogens. `Steriliz-ing' urban spaces in the nineteenth centurywas the job of the `new police'. Now it falls tothe martian ray of CCTV. Staying with themedical metaphor, society seems uncertainwhether to swallow up (a cannibalisticresponse) or vomit out (a bulimic response)the pathologized òther' (Young, 1999).

Nic Groombridge

Associated Concepts: demonization, deviance,individual positivism, normalization, sexual-ity, social censure, sociological positivism

Key ReadingsDurkheim, E. (1895, 1964) The Rules of Sociological

Method. London, The Free Press of Glencoe.Lemert, E. (1967, 1972) `Forms and pathology of

drinking in three Polynesian societies', in Humandeviance, social problems and social control. Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice±Hall, pp. 218±33.

Sumner, C. (1994) The Sociology of Deviance: AnObituary. Buckingham, Open University Press.

Young, J. (1999) The Exclusive Society: Social Exclu-sion, Difference and Crime in Late Modernity.London, Sage.

PEACEMAKING CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

The study of the processes and ways ofrelating that leave people safer, more trusting

and less guarded with others. The science andart of weaving people, including those calledòffenders' and `victims' in conventional `war-making' criminology, into social networkssecure from violence. Peacemaking crimino-logy is the opposite of the prevailing `war-making' paradigm in criminology, which isthe science and art of identifying, isolating andsubduing offenders or would-be offenders.


Like all spiritual and religious and political orcultural traditions, all social science, includingcriminology, can be divided into two compet-ing paradigms on how to belong in socialorder. The war-making paradigm presup-poses that we are born ignorant and need tolearn to obey instruction from our properlyconstituted earthly superiors, from whosemight right is made. In this paradigm thekey dependent variables are negative ± suchas crime, violence, criminality, punishment,deterrence and risk. In the peacemakingparadigm, social relations become strongerand richer insofar as they are built on mutualrespect. Dependent variables in a peace-making paradigm are positive, such ascompassion, love, empathy, respect, dignity,mutuality and trust.

Within the peacemaking paradigm, punish-ment itself is presumed to be a social problemrather than a social solution. It is common tosee those identi®ed as doing peacemakingcriminology belonging to corollary groups.Some, for example, draw upon Gandhianprinciples of non-violence. Some, includingthose who note that `penal servitude' is theone kind of `slavery' explicitly allowed by theThirteenth Amendment to the United StatesConstitution, call themselves `penal abolition-ists'. Some advocate `restorative' or `transfor-mative', rather than `retributive justice'. Somecall for `compassion' in Buddhist terms, othersfor `love' and `mercy' in Judaeo-Christian-Muslim terms. Traditional ways of respondingto personal and structural violence, fromindigenous peoples around the world, areespecially prominent in peacemaking litera-ture and in criminal justice practice, as in theNew Zealand parliament's adoption of theMaori practice known worldwide today asfamily group conferencing, in Canadiansentencing circles, or in growing Anglo legalrecognition of, and admiration for, the Navajopeacemaking court in the United States.

Criminologists who are drawn to peace-making commonly report that their spirits are

203PEACEMAKING CRIMINOLOGY

lifted by studying what people value in othersand how to elicit what we like from eachother, in contrast to the despair and discour-agement that they had come to feel studyingwhat we want people not to do and how to getpeople to stop doing things. It feels better tolearn how to get what we do want and valuewith others than to learn how to crush humanmiscreants.

Whether secular or deist, peacemakingcriminology is explicitly concerned with thespiritual attitude we bring to bear in our socialrelations, while war-making criminology tendsto embrace Enlightenment dualism betweenspiritual value and social fact-making. Muchpeacemaking criminology is critical of valueneutrality in retributive criminology. Indeed,one theory of the causes of violence andpunitiveness, notably as stated by renegadeGerman psychoanalyst Alice Miller, is that allviolence and punishment presuppose personaldissociation of one's feelings from one's action.When you pull the switch to punish atransgressor, your feeling for the transgressor'ssuffering is cut off by messages from authority®gures as to what you ought to do to theoffender for some higher good. In peace-making criminology, there is no higher goodthan empathy, or, as some like US war resisterA.J. Muste and criminologist Richard Quinneyhave put it, `peace is the way'. In radicalfeminist terms, in peacemaking criminologypower over others is violence itself, and thebuilding of safe community lies in powersharing and in participatory democracy.

Evaluation

The three main criticisms of peacemakingcriminology are that it is not a theory, that it isimpractical and that it is privileged.

Peacemaking criminology is not a theory.Like retribution, peacemaking is more anattitude or de®nition of the situation. Onthe other hand, peacemaking criminologyincludes theories of how peace is made.

Practicality is a paradigmatic matter. Peace-making criminology is not prophecy. Peace-making theory only purports to predictwhether people will be safer or more at riskas a result of this or that intervention, notwhether people will actually do what makesthem safer. There is in peacemaking crimino-logy a rich body of empirically testedpropositions as to what brings people togetheror separates them.

The realist criticism is that peacemakingcriminology is concocted by people who do

not understand just how bad oppression is,the urgency of supporting those who eventake up arms to resist and subdue theiroppressors, nor the progress that has beenmade through militant class struggle. Otherthan prisoners, it is by and large true thatpeacemaking criminologists and their criticsare privileged. This issue recurs in alltheological and political debate over whetherto be hard-hearted or to let our hearts bleed.

Some texts have taken to calling `peace-making criminology' a `school'. In recenthistory, `peacemaking' became an operativeword in criminological circles when the titleof an edited book ± Criminology as Peacemaking± caught on after its publication in 1991.Criminologists who say they are doing `peace-making' encompass a wide range of crimin-ological individualists, which surely includesthose who would be loath to accept thede®nition of `peacemaking' set forth here. Inpeacemaking criminology, as in everyday life,it pays not to take for granted that one knowsany criminologist by the label `peacemaking'alone.

Hal Pepinsky

Associated Concepts: abolition, anarchist crimi-nology, human rights, labelling, restorativejustice, social reaction

Key ReadingsAnderson, K. and Quinney, R. (eds) (2000) Erich

Fromm and Critical Criminology: Beyond the PunitiveSociety. Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press.

Consedine, J. (1999) Restorative Justice: Healing theEffects of Crime. Lyttleton, NZ, Ploughshares Press.

Fuller, J.R. (1998) Criminal Justice: A PeacemakingPerspective. Boston, MA, Allyn and Bacon.

Miller, A. (1990) For Your Own Good: Hidden Crueltyin Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. NewYork, Noonday Press.

Morris, R.M. (1993) Penal Abolition: The PracticalChoice. Toronto, Canadian Scholars' Press.

Pepinsky, H.E. and Quinney, R. (eds) (1991)Criminology as Peacemaking. Bloomington, IN,Indiana University Press.

PENALITY

De®nition

A term introduced from the French peÂnaliteÂand owing its current salience primarily to the


in¯uence of Foucault. It designates not onlythe institutions and agencies composing thepenal system but also their surroundingeconomic, political, intellectual and culturalconditions.


The use of the term penality often intends tostrike a conscious difference from the tradi-tional concerns either of normative penaltheory on the one hand or the instrumentaland pragmatic preoccupations of conventionalpenology on the other. Whereas the former isdevoted to discussion of the proper aims ofpenal action (their basis in legal theory, theirmoral implications, their coherence) and thelatter has historically been taken up withameliorating penal institutions and re®ningtheir effectiveness, `penality' denotes anattempt to historicize penal questions and tosituate them in terms of their sociological andpolitical connections and surrounding condi-tions. Thus, in an important early instance ofthe English-language use of the term, Garlandand Young argued that conventional penologyhad become `marginal to any attempt actuallyto explain the nature of the penal system'(1983, p. 5). In place of such descriptive,meliorist and politically compromised exer-cises, Garland and Young proposed a moreintellectually ambitious enterprise whichwould reconceive the penal realm as a`speci®c institutional site . . . traversed by aseries of different social relations' (p. 21).

Although the translation of Foucault's Dis-cipline and Punish was the single event thatgave most impetus to such attempts atreconsideration, the social analysis of penalityin fact has much longer and more extensiveintellectual antecedents. These ¯ow in partfrom the legacies of Durkheim, whose socialtheory reserved an important place for punish-ment among the ritual af®rmations of socialsolidarity. Durkheim's in¯uence is also visible,if sometimes more remotely, in the work ofanthropologists such as Mary Douglas and ofhistorical sociologists such as Kai Erikson.Such studies made available an awareness thatpractices for the maintenance and applicationof conduct norms and rules and for theimposition of sanctions, censures and blamewere culturally and historically variable andspeci®c. They thereby also facilitated a recog-nition that the penal arrangements so familiarto the citizens of contemporary Westernsocieties might similarly be subjected to amore sceptical and critical appraisal.

A comparable shock of `defamiliarization'resulted from the appearance of a number of`revisionist' histories of penal systems andinstitutions, especially prisons. The founda-tional text here is unquestionably Rusche andKirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structure(®rst published in 1939 and in¯uentiallyrepublished in 1968). Rusche and Kirchhei-mer's basic contention, ¯ying in the face ofmuch philosophical effort to distil the properor intrinsic nature of punishment, was that`there is no such thing as punishment, butonly concrete systems of punishment'. Thisthesis might be taken as a motto for therevisionist historians. Whatever their differ-ences (for example the explicitness of theirdebt to Marxist theory or to speci®c varietiesthereof ) the latter had in common a concern tolocate the development of the `modern' formof penitentiary imprisonment, around the turnof the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tothe emergence of industrial capitalism, andthe deployment of penal power by the state tothe management of the con¯ictual socialrelations over which it presided (see Garland,1990, chapters 4 and 5).

In this context, the primary distinctivenessand originality of Foucault's contribution laynot so much in his view of the broad outlinesof chronology, nor even in any particular newempirical discovery, but rather in his anato-mization of the styles and techniques of penaldiscipline characteristic of modernity. Fou-cault saw the prison not as sui generis butrather as standing within a continuum ofdisciplinary institutions (schools, hospitals,workhouses, barracks) whose common aspectwas the minute regulation of daily conductand whose object lay not merely in the sup-pression or subjugation of the unruly butrather in the positive production of `docile yetcapable bodies'. In Foucault's account, theemergence of modern penality is unintelligiblewithout reference to the new varieties ofspecialist knowledge (such as psychology,psychiatry, social statistics and epidemiology)that provided its classi®cations, and whichguided, supported and authorized its strate-gies of intervention ± its `discursive practices'(see Garland, 1990, chapter 6; Howe, 1993,chapter 3).

In subsequent work elements of each ofthese conceptual resources have been revisedand put to diverse uses. For example, DavidGarland in Punishment and Welfare (Gower,1985) traces the emergence of a form ofpenality characteristic of twentieth-centurywelfare states and especially the developmentof hybrid forms of `welfare sanction'. Pat

205PENALITY

Carlen in Women's Imprisonment (Routledgeand Kegan Paul, 1983) identi®es the modes ofdiscipline speci®c to the carceral control ofwomen. Jonathan Simon in Poor Discipline(Chicago, 1993) follows the rise, decline andre-engineering of parole and the supervisionof offenders. Adrian Howe (1993) proposes athoroughgoing feminist re-evaluation of pen-ality in terms of the multiple modes ofdiscipline governing the lives of girls andwomen. Garland (1990) offers an ambitioussynthesis which accommodates not only thelongstanding preoccupations with the powersof the state and the Foucauldian concern withthe `micro-physics' of penal practice but also awider interest in the place of the penal inmodern culture, especially in its expressiveand emotive aspects.

Evaluation

In view of the complexity and scale of contem-porary penal systems, their endless change-ability (yet the obdurate and intractable natureof many of their central problems) and theintense political controversy and sensitivitythat surround them, the social analysis ofpenality has become a necessary and highlyactive ®eld of criminological enquiry. Theemergence of new modes and techniques, forexample around the assessment and calcula-tion of risk, in conjunction with someostensibly very old themes in populist politicalrhetoric, together with the grossly unequalweight of penal action that falls on speci®csections of the population ± especially alongthe fault-line of race (Wacquant, 2000) ±makes for a penal landscape that demands acontinuous effort of understanding and criticalevaluation.

Richard Sparks

Associated Concepts: carceral society, govern-mentality, penology, risk, social control

Key ReadingsFoucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish. London,

Allen Lane.Garland, D. (1990) Punishment and Modern Society.

Oxford, Oxford University Press.Garland, D. and Young, P. (eds) (1983) The Power to

Punish. Aldershot, Gower.Howe, A. (1993) Punish and Critique: Towards a

Feminist Analysis of Penality. London, Routledge.Rusche, G. and Kirchheimer, O. (1968) Punishment

and Social Structure. New York, Russell andRussell.

Wacquant, L. (2000) `The fourth peculiar institution:the prison as surrogate ghetto', TheoreticalCriminology, 4 (3), pp. 377±90.

PENOLOGY

De®nition

A term which (although arguably in lesscommon usage now than formerly) covers theapplication of clinical, managerial or socialscienti®c methods or expertise to the dis-ciplined study and evaluation of penal insti-tutions, especially prisons.


In its older and narrower sense `penology'designates the attempt to reform or rationalizepenal conditions and regimes so as to maxi-mize their corrective effectiveness. In recenttimes (roughly since the middle of thetwentieth century), its sense broadens toinclude any form of systematic enquiry intothe characteristics of penal systems ± includ-ing, at its radical edge, arguments for theirabolition.

It is conventional, and probably appropri-ate, to date the inception of modern penolo-gical thinking from the reform projectsundertaken by John Howard, Jeremy Benthamand others from the later eighteenth centuryonwards. Mention of these two very differentthinkers, the former an impassioned advocateof Christian charity and the latter a utilitarianrationalist, betrays a duality that has sincerecurred many times in the historical devel-opment of penology between motivationsgrounded in humanitarian magnanimity orthe desire for the religious reformation of theoffender and those directed more instrumen-tally at the re®nement of techniques ofbehavioural control. To the extent that theseambiguities attended the birth of penology itis unsurprising that the subsequent activitiesof penologists have often produced ambig-uous, hybrid and sometimes perverse orcontradictory results, as historians of thesubject have often demonstrated (see, forexample, Ignatieff, 1978; McGowen, 1995).Suf®ce here only to note that the particularhistories of prison architecture and disciplin-ary regimes, as well as the minutiae ofmedico-psychiatric services, religious observ-ance, diet and other aspects of the material


infrastructure and social relations of penalinstitutions are largely unintelligible withoutreference to the intellectual inputs of thevarious penologies that have successivelyinformed them. In that penology has beenthroughout most of its history a reform-minded subject with practical goals, it hasbeen characterized by the repeated inventive-ness (and as often the repeated failures) ofprojects for the improvement, if not indeed theutopian perfectibility, of prisons and otherpenal arrangements.

For much of the twentieth century twomajor foci of penological effort are apparent.The ®rst is the monitoring of variations insentencing and of the manipulation of penalregimes (both in prisons and in non-custodialsettings) for evidence of their impact onoffending and re-offending, whether ongrounds of rehabilitation, deterrence or inca-pacitation. In the hands of its more sophisti-cated practitioners (for example NorvalMorris, Michael Tonry or Franklin Zimringand Gordon Hawkins for the United States;Nigel Walker or Anthony Bottoms for theUnited Kingdom), this concern necessarilyshades into legal theory and the philosophy ofpunishment. If penology has a disciplinaryidentity which is distinguishable from thesenormative and theoretical matters it lies in itsrigorous application of empirical procedures.For a representative survey of work in thesetraditions see von Hirsch and Ashworth(1998).

The second major focus of enquiry is thesystematic study of penal institutions them-selves ± their social organization, routines andcharacteristic relationships; the experience ofcon®nement and of custodial or supervisorywork; the recurrent problems of imprisonment(riots, violence, suicide and self-harm); and,more especially in the last three decades,questions of discriminatory or disparate treat-ment on grounds of race, gender and age.Such work arguably enjoyed a heyday in themiddle decades of the twentieth century whenthe prison aroused the fascination ®rst offunctionalist (Clemmer's `prison community',Sykes's `society of captives') and later ofsymbolic interactionist (Goffman's `total insti-tutions') sociologies (see Sparks et al., 1996,chapter 2 for a short survey).

The subsequent relative decline both oftherapeutic penology and of prison sociology,especially in the United States, would seem to¯ow in large part from a diminished con-®dence, increasingly evident from the 1970sonwards, in the capacities of penal interven-tions to reduce reoffending (the so-called `loss

of the rehabilitative ideal', or in its moreextreme formulation the `nothing works'position). For many observers this coincideswith a shift, again most pronounced in theUnited States, towards primarily incapacita-tive rationales for punishing or, more criticallyunderstood, a move towards a `warehousing'approach to imprisonment. These develop-ments are summed-up by Garland (1990) asconstituting a `crisis of penal modernism'. Theirony for penology is that whereas the latterdevelopments tend to increase the scale ofimprisonment this is met by a reducedintensity of scholarly interest in what goeson in prisons, or more generally in the livesand fates of offenders beyond a merelysupervisory concern with risk managementand case-processing (for an account of theoutworkings of this view see Simon, 2000).

Evaluation

Penology has not, however, come to a fullstop. For its more practically oriented practi-tioners there is now a sense that `nothingworks' always was an over-reaction and aresurgent interest (albeit in more modest butmore technically sophisticated vein) in `whatworks?'. For others there is also the soberingawareness that however much penologistshave historically claimed to stand on theprogressive side of every engagement, thesubject cannot evade complicity in or respon-sibility for the disciplinary apparatuseserected in its name and especially theirregressive consequences for stigmatized anddispossessed people.

Richard Sparks

Associated Concepts: deterrence, incapacitation,incarceration, penality, rehabilitation

Key ReadingsGarland, D. (1990) Punishment and Modern Society.

Oxford, Oxford University Press.von Hirsch, A. and Ashworth, A. (eds) (1998)

Principled Sentencing: Readings on Theory andPolicy, 2nd edn. Oxford, Hart Publishing.

Ignatieff, M. (1978) A Just Measure of Pain.Harmondsworth, Penguin.

McGowen, R. (1995) `The well-ordered prison:England, 1780±1865', in N. Morris and D. Roth-man (eds), The Oxford History of the Prison. Oxford,Oxford University Press.

Simon, J. (2000) `The `̀ society of captives'' in the eraof hyper-incarceration', Theoretical Criminology,4 (3), pp. 285±308.

207PENOLOGY

Sparks, J.R., Bottoms, A.E. and Hay, W.T. (1996)Prisons and the Problem of Order. Oxford, OxfordUniversity Press.

PERSONAL SAFETY

De®nition

The daily, often taken for granted, routines,that human beings engage in as a way offeeling safer at home, on the street and in theworkplace.


The concept is primarily associated with theradical feminist response to the fear of crimedebate. Radical feminists argue that thatdebate constructs a passive image of (female)victims of crime and renders their fearsirrational by pursuing an understanding ofcriminal victimization which focuses on thethreat posed by random violence from astranger. The radical feminist response to thefear of crime, however, focuses attention onthe threat of danger from people (men) thatare known and consequently is concerned tounderstand how women (and men) managedanger in their routine everyday lives. Hencea concern with the active construction ofstrategies for the management of personalsafety. It is a concept that emphasizes theactive participation by individuals in theireveryday lives rather than presuming thathuman beings are passive recipients of eventsthat just happen to them. Work informed bythis concept has demonstrated that men andwomen work with different languages ofpersonal safety. For example, women's strate-gies are much more likely to be informed bythe threat of sexual danger, whilst men'sstrategies are much more likely to be informedby the threat of physical danger, though thesubsequent experience of vulnerability can befelt in very similar ways. In addition, age andsexuality also appear to contribute to indivi-dual personal safety strategies.

Evaluation

This concept constituted an important inter-jection into the fear of crime debate and hascontributed to a more careful and consideredapproach to understanding the way in which

crime routinely impacts upon the everydaylife of individuals. It challenges the image ofthe individual paralysed by the fear of crimeand encourages an understanding of the waysin which people manage what they know mayor may not happen to them. In particular it hascontributed to an appreciation of understand-ing women as experts in their own safety andto the dif®culties of separating the public fromthe private: the fear of the unknown from thefear of the known.

As a concept it has become absorbed by thecrime prevention literature in which setting ithas lost some of its feminist resonance.Nevertheless, as an idea, it does encouragepractitioners to work with an active ratherthan a passive image of the human being.

Sandra Walklate

Associated Concepts: community safety, crimeprevention, fear of crime, left realism, radicalfeminism, victimology

Key ReadingsGoodey, J. (1997) `Boys don't cry; masculinities, fear

of crime, and fearlessness', British Journal ofCriminology, 37 (3), pp. 401±18.

Stanko, E. (1990) Everyday Violence: How Women andMen Experience Sexual and Physical Danger.London, Pandora.

Stanko, E. (1997) `Safety talk: conceptualizingwomen's risk assessment as a `̀ technology of thesoul''', Theoretical Criminology, 1 (4), pp. 479±99.

Walklate, S. (1998) Èxcavating the fear of crime:fear, anxiety or trust?', Theoretical Criminology,2 (4), pp. 403±18.

PERSONALITY THEORY

De®nition

Personality theory is a central feature ofmainstream psychology. The term personalityis generally taken to refer to a relatively stableset of distinguishing psychological charac-teristics. It is the combination of such featuresthat de®nes a particular type of personality.Personality theory is therefore concerned withunderstanding the constituents of personality,its development and, ultimately, its measure-ment.



The core of personality theory lies in attempt-ing to understand the behavioural variancethat can be ascribed to factors internal to theperson, as opposed to the effects of theenvironment. Thus, personality can bethought of as the stable structure and patternof an individual's thoughts and feelingswhich, in turn, are related to distinctivestyles of behaviour. Personality theoristsmight look for basic dimensions, or types, ofpersonality that can be ascribed to distinctivepsychological factors such as beliefs or emo-tions. The idea of types of personality is notnew: Hippocrates, for example, described fourbasic types of temperament as Sanguine(Optimistic), Melancholic (Depressed), Chole-ric (Irritable) and Phlegmatic (Calm).

If, as personality theory suggests, there areparticular personality types, then what are theconstituents of the type? Some personalitytheorists argue that traits are the buildingblocks of a personality type. A consistentgrouping of particular traits, is then said toconstitute a type. For example, a personalitytest might show that an individual scoreshighly on the traits of competence, self-discipline, dutifulness and reliability. Thisgrouping of traits might then be said tode®ne a conscientious type of personality.

The distinction between a type and a traitcan be thought of as the distinction between acategory and a dimension. Gordon Allport(1897±1967) summed it up in a comment that aperson can be said to have a trait but to ®t atype.

As in any broad theoretical approach,personality theorists differ in their viewsabout the distinctions between traits, thenature of types, and the complex biologicaland psychological processes that must beinvolved. From the standpoint of criminology,it is the personality theory of Hans Eysenck(1916±97) that is of greatest interest.

Eysenck's theory is, in essence, a controltheory, beginning from the perspective thateveryone has the potential to behave in acriminal manner: the issue is why doeseveryone not commit crimes? In other words,what are the forces that control the commonpropensity to crime? Eysenck (1959) de®nedtwo personality types, extroversion (E) andneuroticism (N); later work (Eysenck andEysenck, 1968) described a third dimension,psychoticism (P). Each of these basic types isconceived as a continuum, with most peoplefalling in the middle range, and, it follows,with comparatively few people at the

extremes of each scale. Extroversion runsfrom high (extrovert) to low (introvert);similarly neuroticism runs from high (neuro-tic) to low (stable); as also does psychoticism.

Eysenck's theory of personality proposesthat, principally through our genetic endow-ment, we are born with cortical and autonomicnervous systems that directly affect our abilityto learn from, or more properly to condition to,environmental stimuli. Biologically, the extro-vert is cortically under-aroused and so seeksstimulation to maintain cortical arousal at anoptimal level. The extrovert will display traitssuch as being impulsive, seeking excitementand social contact, and being assertive. Theintrovert is cortically over-aroused and tries toavoid stimulation to keep arousal down to acomfortable level: introverts are characterizedby a quiet, reserved demeanour. In terms ofconditioning, that is learning by Pavlovianconditioning or association rather than oper-ant conditioning, the theory maintains thatextroverts condition less ef®ciently thanintroverts.

Neuroticism, sometimes called emotional-ity, is said to be related to the functioning ofthe autonomic nervous system (ANS). Indivi-duals at the high extreme of this continuumare characterized by a very labile ANS, whichcauses strong reactions to any unpleasant orpainful stimuli: high N individuals displaymoody, anxious behaviour. Low N indivi-duals have a very stable ANS and so displaycalm, even-tempered behaviour even whenunder stress. As with E, N is also linked withconditionability: high N leads to poor con-ditioning because of the vitiating effects ofanxiety; low N leads to ef®cient conditioning.Each individual will manifest both E and Nand, as conditionability is related to levels of Eand N, it follows that stable introverts (LowN±Low E) will condition best; stable extro-verts (Low N±High E) and neurotic introverts(High N±Low E) will be at some mid point;while neurotic extroverts (High N±High E)will condition least well.

The third personality dimension, psychoti-cism (P), is less well formulated than E and N:while maintaining a genetic basis for P, itsbiological basis has not been described indetail. P consists of traits such as a preferencefor solitude, a lack of feeling for others,sensation-seeking, toughmindedness andaggression.

The relationship between personality andcrime has been further described and re®ned(for example Eysenck, 1977; Eysenck andGudjonsson, 1989). But the principal assump-tion informing the theory remains that

209PERSONALITY THEORY

children learn to control antisocial behaviourthrough the development of a `conscience':this conscience, Eysenck maintains, is a set ofconditioned emotional responses to environ-mental events associated with the anti-socialbehaviour. For example, the child who mis-behaves receives a parental reprimand, thefear this brings is associated with the anti-social act, and over time this conditioningdetermines the child's level of socialization.The speed and ef®ciency of social conditioningwill mainly depend upon the individual'spersonality in terms of E and N. As the HighE±High N combination leads to poor con-ditionability then such individuals will beleast likely to learn social control and there-fore, it is predicted, will be over-representedin offender populations. Conversely, Low E±Low N would lead to effective socialization, sothat these individuals would be predicted tobe under-represented in offender groups. Theremaining two combinations, High E±Low Nand Low E±High N, fall at some intermediatelevel and so would be expected in bothoffender and non-offender groups. The thirdpersonality dimension, P, is also argued to bestrongly related to offending, particularly withcrimes that involve hostility towards otherpeople.

Evaluation

Eysenck's theory of crime (or more properlyanti-social behaviour) has generated a great dealof empirical research. The broad position isthat there is unanimous support for thecontention that offenders will score highly onP; the majority of studies show that offendersamples score highly on N; and the evidence ismixed for E. In seeking to account for thediscrepant ®ndings for E, Eysenck suggestedthat E might be split into two components,Sociability and Impulsiveness, with only thelatter related to offending. A study by Eysenckand McGurk (1980) con®rmed that an offendersample scored higher than a non-offendersample on Impulsiveness, with no differencebetween the two samples on a measure ofSociability.

Evidence in support of the theory ispresented in a study by McGurk andMcDougall (1981), which conducted a clusteranalysis of the P, E and N scores of 100delinquents and 100 non-delinquent collegepupils. The analysis showed four personalityclusters in each group: both groups containedLow E±High N and High E±Low N clusters,but the clusters predicted to be related to

criminal behaviour ± High E±High N andHigh P±High E±High N ± were, indeed,found only in the delinquent sample. The LowE±Low N group, which the theory wouldpredict to be highly socialized, was found onlyin the non-delinquent group. However, not allstudies using cluster analysis have producedsuch clear ®ndings.

The weight of empirical evidence lendssome support to Eysenck's thesis that there isa relationship between personality (as hede®nes it) and crime. A number of reserva-tions, as Eysenck acknowledges, need to bemade. The theory does not explain all crimeand, with its concentration on the high andlow extremes of the personality types, isclearly not applicable to all offenders. Further,one of the theoretical bases of the theory, thelink between classical conditioning and socia-lization, remains to be established satisfac-torily. Still further, the theory demandsacceptance of a trait theory of personalitywhich is only one of a number of ways ofconceptualizing personality, and one that hascome under ®erce attack from proponents ofother theoretical approaches to understandinghuman behaviour.

Clive Hollin

Associated Concepts: biological criminology, con-ditioning, extroversion/introversion, socialcontrol theory

Key ReadingsEysenck, H.J. (1959) Manual of the Maudsley

Personality Inventory. London, University ofLondon Press.

Eysenck, H.J. (1977) Crime and Personality, 3rd edn.London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Eysenck, H.J. and Eysenck, S.B.G. (1968) À factorialstudy of psychoticism as a dimension ofpersonality', Multivariate Behavioural Research(Special Issue), pp. 15±31.

Eysenck, H.J. and Gudjonsson, G.H. (1989) TheCauses and Cures of Criminality. London, PlenumPress.

Eysenck, S.B.G. and McGurk, B.J. (1980) Ìmpulsive-ness and venturesomeness in a detention centrepopulation', Psychological Reports, 47, pp. 1299±1306.

McGurk, B.J. and McDougall, C. (1981) À newapproach to Eysenck's theory of criminality',Personality and Individual Differences, 2, pp. 338±40.


POLICING

See `Broken windows'; Community policing;Problem oriented policing; Self-policing;Social control; Surveillance; Transnationalpolicing; Zero tolerance

POLITICAL CRIME

De®nition

Political crime has been de®ned in a numberof different ways but, apart from a broadde®nition which sees all crime as political,most seek to make a distinction betweenpolitical crime and ordinary crime eitherbecause of the different motivations or ideologyof the individuals involved or the differentcontext in which the crime takes place.


All crime is political in the sense that it is aviolation of the criminal law, which itselfderives from a political process and defendssome value system. Two early materialistproponents of this position, who have beenmuch neglected by criminologists, wereGodwin and De Sade (Jenkins, 1984).Godwin rejected all claims that could bemade in favour of the state and criminal lawand De Sade argued that the criminal law wasdeveloped to safeguard property, much ofwhich the powerful had acquired themselvesthrough violence and theft. Property wassimply theft. Radical criminology also con-sidered that crime was political in the sensethat the processes of `crime-creation are boundup in the ®nal analysis with the material basisof contemporary capitalism and its structuresof law'. Most writers, however, make adistinction between political crime and ordin-ary crimes because there are importantdifferences in form, context and motivation.

There are a number of de®nitions thatemphasize the conviction or motivation of theactor. Schafer (1971, 1974), for example,distinguished between the convictional andthe conventional criminal. The former com-mits crime because he or she is convincedabout the truth or justi®cation of their ownaltruistic beliefs. Hagan (1997) de®nes politicalcrime as criminal activity which is committedfor ideological purposes rather than by private

greed or passion. He provides a list ofdifferent types of motivation and examplesof individuals who expressed these: socio-political (Robin Hood), religious (MartinLuther), moral or ethical (anti-abortion acti-vists), science (Copernicus or Galileo), politicalcauses (Nathan Hale, Benedict Arnold). ForHagan, political crime can take two forms:crime by the government or crime against thegovernment. But some argue (for example,Turk, 1982) that political crime should not alsoinclude crimes committed by the state.

Closely related to the debate about thede®nition of political crime is the question ofhow those who commit these types of offenceshould be treated when punished. The acti-vities of both the Fenians and the Suffragettes,who both broke the law for political objectives,led to considerable discussion in the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuries overwhether the political offender should havespecial status in prison. Anglo-American law,in general, has, since the early twentiethcentury consistently refused to allow a dis-tinction between political and ordinary crim-inals (Radzinowicz and Hood, 1981).

One exception was the granting of specialstatus category to prisoners in NorthernIreland under emergency legislation in 1972.When the government tried to abolish it, IRAprisoners went on hunger strike in 1980/81.The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom,Mrs Thatcher, expressed the government'sposition in the now famous aphorism: Àcrime, is a crime, is a crime'. In short, nocrimes can have political origins and nocriminal would be recognized as a politicalcriminal. Notwithstanding this position, sub-sequently an of®cial government inquiry intothe emergency legislation acknowledged adistinction that most people made in NorthernIreland between political criminals and whatwere euphemistically described as òrdinarydecent criminals'.

Evaluation

The concept of political crime, howeverde®ned, is a key notion in criminology. AsSchafer (1974, pp. 8, 22) has pointed out, it is`pivotal to the understanding of criminologyand the whole normative system of society'. Ithas been a relatively neglected concept. Fewcriminology textbooks discuss it or providehistorical or contemporary examples. Yet theconcept challenges a number of taken-for-granted assumptions about crime and itscauses. To begin with, it challenges de®nitions

211POLITICAL CRIME

of crime that assume crime to be a relativelyunproblematic concept possessing some onto-logical reality. Events or activities that arede®ned as criminal are only one set of a rangeof harms captured in the criminal law. Anotion of political crime draws attention to thepolitics involved in deciding what should orshould not be embraced by the criminal law.Secondly, the concept draws attention to thefact that crime and criminal behaviour are notalways negative phenomena. Many peoplecommit crimes for altruistic purposes, just aspeople give blood, and as a direct result oftheir activities many progressive reforms havebeen introduced. Thirdly, when de®ned interms of illegal activities of states or govern-ments, it forces a comparison between theextent of harm from political criminals andordinary decent criminals. In many regions ofthe world the harm produced through statecrime is far greater than through ordinarycrime. One problem, however, with theconcept when de®ned in terms of motivationis its relativity. A political criminal today maybe a government minister tomorrow.

Paddy Hillyard

Associated Concepts: crime, emergencylegislation, genocide, human rights, newcriminology, primitive rebellion, radicalcriminologies, the state, state crime

Key ReadingsHagan, F.E. (1997) Political Crime: Ideology and

Criminology. Boston, MA, Allyn and Bacon.Jenkins, P. (1984) `Varieties of Enlightenment

criminology: Beccaria, Godwin, de Sade', BritishJournal of Criminology, 24 (2), pp. 112±30.

Radzinowicz, L. and Hood, R. (1981) `The status ofpolitical prisoners in England: the struggle forrecognition', The Virginia Law Review, 65 (8), pp.1421±81.

Schafer, S. (1971) `The concept of the politicalcriminal', Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology andPolice Science, 62 (3), pp. 380±7.

Schafer, S. (1974) The Political Criminal: The Problemsof Morality and Crime. New York, The Free Press.

Turk, A. (1982) Political Criminality. London, Sage.

POPULAR JUSTICE

See Informal justice

POSITIVISM

De®nition

A theoretical approach that emerged in theearly nineteenth century which argues thatsocial relations and events (including crime)can be studied scienti®cally using methodsderived from the natural sciences. Its aim is tosearch for, explain and predict future patternsof social behaviour. In criminology it straddlesbiological, psychological and sociological dis-ciplines in an attempt to identify key causes ofcrime ± whether genetic, psychological, socialor economic ± which are thought to lie largelyoutside of each individual's control.


The key characteristic of positivism is theapplication of the methods of the naturalsciences to the study of social behaviour. It hasgenerally involved the search for cause andeffect relations that can be measured in asimilar way to which natural scientists observeand analyse relations between objects in thephysical world. Positivism does not concernitself with the abstract and the unproven, butwith the tangible and quanti®able. Throughgaining òbjective' knowledge about howbehaviour is determined by physiological,psychological and environmental conditions,it is assumed that most social problems can beunderstood and treated through the `positiveapplication of science'.

Whilst it is dif®cult to identify the precisemoment when a positivist criminologyemerged, one of the ®rst attempts to applypositivist principles to crime emerged throughthe work of French and Belgian statisticians inthe 1820s. Adolphe Quetelet, for example,found that crime and crime rates, rather thanbeing random and unpredictable, wereremarkably constant. He inferred that crimeseemed to obey the same law-like irregula-rities as physical phenomena. However, it iswidely assumed that a modern scienti®ccriminology began with the advent of acriminal anthropology associated with thework of the Italian physician Cesare Lombrosoin the 1870s. By studying the body shapes ofexecuted criminals, Lombroso attempted toprove scienti®cally that those who broke thelaw were physically different from those whodid not. Such notions were in direct contrast tothe prevailing judicial doctrine which wasgrounded in principles of neo-classicism and


which maintained that, with few exceptions,behaviour was a matter of free will andindividual choice. People broke laws becausethey anticipated that the bene®ts wouldoutweigh any loss. They acted largely out ofhedonism, choosing behaviour that waspleasurable and avoiding that which wouldgive pain. For much of the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries this meant that nodefences of criminal acts could be entertained.The arrival of Lombroso's theory remained asigni®cant challenge to the judicial orthodoxy.For if criminality was determined by factorsother than rational choice, then surely it madelittle sense to punish offenders. Rather theircondition should be treated.

By the early 1920s the development of acriminological science ± positivism ± was tobecome in¯uential, not only in physiology, butalso in medicine, psychiatry, psychology andsociology. Offending came to be thought of asbeing determined by biological and/or cul-tural antecedents. It was no longer viewed assimply self-determining. By searching for thespeci®c causes (or aetiology) of criminalbehaviour, positive criminology assumes thatcriminality has a peculiar set characteristics.Accordingly, most research of this type hastried to isolate key differences betweencriminals and non-criminals. Some theoristshave focused on biological and psychologicalfactors, thus locating the sources of crimeprimarily within the individual and bringingto the fore questions of individual pathologyand abnormality. This approach is central toindividual positivism. In contrast, sociologicalpositivism argues that the key causativefactors lie in the social contexts external tothe individual. Here crime is more a matter ofsocial pathology.

Evaluation

Many of the basic principles of positivismcame to be questioned during the 1960s. Inparticular positivism was criticized for:

· Denying the role of human consciousnessand meaning in social activity.

· Assuming that there is an underlyingconsensus in society, of which crime is akey violation.

· Presenting an over-determined view ofhuman action.

· Equating crime with under-socialization orsocial dis-organization rather than accept-ing the validity of different forms ofsocialization and of social organization.

· Ignoring the presence and relevance ofcompeting value systems, cultural diver-sity or structural con¯ict.

Nevertheless, positivism maintains a strongpresence in contemporary criminological stu-dies. Since the 1970s work has continued inexamining the role genetic structures play indetermining patterns of individual behaviour(including crime). Evidence from the Cam-bridge Study in Delinquent Developmentsuggests that crime runs in particular families.Poor parenting, low intelligence, hyperactivityand anti-social behaviour have been cited askey predictors of future criminality. Similarly,research of long-term trends in crime hasconcluded that property crime increases attimes of economic depression whilst personalcrime increases at times of economic boom.Positivism also retains popular and politicalappeal (in both its individual and sociologicalvariants) because of a general reluctance ofgovernments to accept that crime lies beyondtheir control. However, it also remains thesubject of controversy. Some would argue thatthe use of the scienti®c method remainssuperior to conjecture or polemic, but suchmethodology carries no automatic guaranteeof uncovering the `truth'. Inaccurate assump-tions, misinterpretations, misapplication of®ndings and inadequate measures for testingcan all conspire to produce not only mislead-ing but dangerous conclusions. Assumptionsare likely to be made about exactly whichfactors, from a myriad of the potentiallyrelevant, are worthy of study. In this, theselection of particular variables will dependon a priori assumptions the scientist holdsabout the nature of human behaviour. Positi-vist modes of study tend to discover variouscorrelations between crime and extraneousconditions but can rarely if ever claim tohave speci®ed direct causes. Above all, theconcept of crime is accepted uncritically.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: biological criminology,causation, determinism, dispositional theories,genetics, individual positivism, rehabilitation,sociological positivism, somatotyping

Key ReadingsFerri, E. (1901) Criminal Sociology. Boston, MA, Little,

Brown.Lombroso, C. (1876) L'Uomo Delinquente. Milan,

Hoepli.

213POSITIVISM

Lombroso, C. (1913) Crime: Its Causes and Remedies.Boston, MA, Little, Brown.

Quetelet, A. (1842) A Treatise on Man. Edinburgh,Chambers.

POST-COLONIAL CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

At its most simple, the term `post-colonial'refers to the historical period after colonialismand is linked to anti-colonization and de-colonization. A much broader conceptualiza-tion of the term would include the analysis ofthe on-going relationship between the colonialand post-colonial and the signalling of newways of thinking which have emanated fromheterogeneous sources. In this sense the post-colonial is both a condition and a space.Although at the time of writing there is nofully ¯edged post-colonial criminology, thereis a convincing case for such an emergent ®eldof study.


The concept post-colonial is most fully devel-oped in the humanities and it refers to theinterdisciplinary work of a body of scholarssuch as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak andHomi Bhabha, who are involved in a politicalproject of both remembering and promotingnew forms of literature from those countriescolonized by European imperial powers,particularly England. These new and not sonew literatures have the vital role of challen-ging and disrupting the Western sense ofwhere the `centre of important things' lies.They also analyse what was left behind interms of the cultural residues of race andempire. Hybridity, subaltern, interstices,otherness, alterity, double awareness, in-betweenness, rootedness and diaspora areamong the key words that mark out thecomplexities of post-colonial analysis. Thepost-colonial is vitally important for under-standing the shifting cultural relationshipsbetween different parts of a thoroughlyglobalized world. As a mode of critique andchallenge, it provincializes much of whatpasses for general theory and points to itsEurocentricism.

So what work would a post-colonialcriminology do? Its initial work would consistof:

· analysing criminology's historical compli-city in techniques of colonial governance;

· exposing its practices of interiorizationand exteriorization;

· revealing the racialized subjects andcategories constructed within and throughcriminological discourses;

· centring what has been denied, ignoredand marginalized;

· working within or in relation to non-European/non-Western criminological`writings from elsewhere';

· identifying and inscribing what has beensilenced by `the canon' and `foundinggestures' of Western criminology;

· reinterpreting the `classics' of Westerncriminology through application of post-colonialism's key concepts and methodol-ogies;

· acknowledging that the point of departurefor understanding Western criminal jus-tice practices might be èlsewhere';

· producing alternative conceptualizationsof `self-evident' issues;

· deploying strategic essentialism to gener-ate new oppositions;

· formulating discourses of resistance toneo-colonial criminological practices.

Evaluation

Post-colonialization would involve the re-thinking and re-writing of criminology's pastand present with the overall intention of de-colonizing the disciplinary space. Thisinvolves interrogating Western criminologynot only from the outside but from within. Inthe case of `British' criminology this wouldinvolve problematizing its unacknowledgedcore English identity and reference points.Reading a contemporary post-colonial crimi-nology one would, for example, be consciousof the plurality of cultural meanings attachedto words such as `crime', `criminal', `state',`law and order', `culture' and `justice'.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: constitutive criminology,postmodernism, post-structuralism

Key ReadingsChambers, I. and Curtis, L. (eds) (1996) The Post-

Colonial Question: Common Skies and DividedHorizons. London, Routledge.

Gilroy, P. (1986) There Ain't No Black in the UnionJack. London, Hutchinson.

Hall, S., Critcher, C. Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. and


Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, theState, and Law and Order. London, Macmillan.

Shohat, E. (1992) `Notes on the `̀ post-colonial''',Social Text, 31/32, pp. 99±113.

Spivak, G. (1993) Outside in the Teaching Machine.London, Routledge.

Sumner, C. (1986) Crime, Justice and Underdevelop-ment. Aldershot, Gower.

POSTMODERN FEMINISM

De®nition

A strand of feminism informed by post-modernism, post-colonialism and post-structuralism which rejects the notion of theessentialist `woman', arguing the term isculturally constructed in relation and opposi-tion to `man' and can be deconstructed andreconstructed due to its ¯uidity.


In¯uenced by poststructuralist theorists suchas Derrida and Foucault, postmodern femin-ists reject not only the notion of `woman' butalso patriarchy and women's subordination.Also referred to as `post-feminism', this termis misleading, however, as it is often used bythe media to de®ne a period of time whenfeminism is no longer deemed relevant.

Postmodern feminism rejects binary oppo-sites, for example male/female, objectivity/subjectivity, arguing concepts are culturallyconstructed in relation to one another and aretherefore unstable. The production of knowl-edge is questioned, and claims to objectivityand the notion of a universal `truth' arerejected. Postmodern feminists have criticizedstandpoint theorists, claiming neither womennor men can ever have total knowledge as allknowledge is partial and situated, andalthough all standpoints are con¯icting, noneis privileged (Haraway, 1991).

Criticisms of postmodern feminism comemost strongly from radical feminists whoargue that destroying the concept `woman'will result in less collective activism. There isalso concern that postmodern feminism is tooàcademic' and will further widen the gapbetween feminist activists and academicsresulting in a form of elitist feminism. It is

also accused of dressing up in philosophical(male?) language what feminism has beensaying for years, for example the questioningof `malestream' knowledge and claims toobjectivity originated from other strands offeminism in the early 1980s. These criticisms,along with the rejection of the existence ofpatriarchy have led some feminists to classifypostmodern feminism as part of the growingbacklash against feminism.

Evaluation

Few feminist criminologists accept postmo-dern feminism as being useful in its entirety,although it is also worth noting that intellec-tual autobiographies are increasingly offeredin acknowledgement that a researcher's workto some degree re¯ects who and what theyare. The notion that `woman' is culturallycreated through power and language drawsparallels with feminist objections to howwomen are portrayed in court in sexualassault cases. However, the in¯uence thatpostmodern feminism had in recognizing thisis debatable.

While postmodern feminism has beenuseful in terms of theory, it has limited usein view of the key aims of second-wavefeminism, and although epistemologicaldebates have been widely accepted it remainsthe case that few feminists are able to accept afeminism without sisterhood; a feminismwithout `women'. Until criminology is readyto depart from `modernity' and embrace `thepostmodern', there is little future for apostmodern feminism within criminology, orvice versa.

Nicole Westmarland

Associated Concepts: deconstruction, post-colonialism, postmodernism, post-structural-ism, radical feminism

Key ReadingsBarrett, M. (2000) `Postfeminism', in G. Browning, A.

Halcli and F. Webster (eds), UnderstandingContemporary Society: Theories of the Present.London, Sage.

Brooks, A. (1997) Postfeminisms ± Feminism, CulturalTheory and Cultural Forms. London, Routledge.

Haraway, D.S. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women:The Reinvention of Nature. London, Free Associa-tion Books.

Riley, D. (1988) Am I That Name? Feminism and theCategory of `Women' in History. New York,Macmillan.

215POSTMODERN FEMINISM

Smart, C. (1990) `Feminist approaches to crimino-logy, or postmodern woman meets atavistic man',in A. Morris and L. Gelsthorpe (eds), FeministPerspectives in Criminology. Milton Keynes, OpenUniversity Press.

Young, A. (1996) Imagining Crime. London, Sage.

POSTMODERNISM

De®nition

Postmodern theory in criminology arose in theearly 1990s out of the disenchantment withmodernist and Enlightenment thought. Itprivileges non-linear developments, orderlydisorder, extreme sensitivity to initial condi-tions, disproportionate effects, fractal geome-try, chance factors, contingency, irony, localknowledge, the decentred subject and theeffects of language in the constitution of thesubject. It situates its critique and suggestionsfor reconstruction, or transpraxis, in politicaleconomy.


Postmodern thought can be traced to Frenchtheorists in the 1970s and 1980s. Severaltheorists formed the kernel of the ®rst wave:Baudrillard, Cixous, Deleuze, Derrida, Fou-cault, Guattari, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lyotard,Moi. Many were in¯uenced by Nietzsche andmore recently Jacques Lacan, a revisionistFreudian who integrated the works of Benve-niste, Jakobson, Kojeve, de Saussure, Straussand topology theory. He was to give Freud'searly work a linguistic spin (the ùnconsciousstructured like a language'). Second wavetheorists have emerged in the late 1980s and1990s who have applied this body of theory tolaw, criminology, cultural and media studies,the clinical and literary criticism.

Postmodern thought differs from modernistthought along several dimensions (Milovano-vic, 1997).

· Society and social structure. Modernistthought, such as typi®ed by the works ofDurkheim, Parsons and Luhmann, privi-leges order, stability, linear developments,equilibrium and homeostatic analysis.Postmodern analysis privileges order anddisorder (orderly disorder), far-from-equi-librium conditions, non-linear change,chance, indeterminacy, contingency and

irony. Rather than rigid structures such asbureaucracies, postmodern analysis privi-leges `dissipative structures', which arevery sensitive and responsive to theirenvironment.

· Social roles. Modernist thinkers often relyon a Parsonian notion of the personwhereby s/he is seen as a role player onvarious stages, reading speci®c scripts.Through socialization one is cast intovarious roles. For postmodernists, rolesare unstable constructions; a person isalways a role-maker.

· Subjectivity/agency. Modernists celebratethe notion of the individual (the centredsubject) best typi®ed in Cogito, ergo sum.This is the conscious, determining, re¯ec-tive, rational and unitary person, epiti-mized in the notion of the juridic subject,the `reasonable man in law'. Postmoder-nists offer the idea of the decentredsubject, a person who is less in control,more located in various languages andwhat they allow.

· Discourse. Modernist thought assumeslanguage is neutral; it is but an instrumentfor use in verbalizing a person's desire.Postmodernists argue that discourses arerather linguistic coordinate systems, andlanguage is always already populatedwith voices. It is never a neutral medium.

· Knowledge. Modernist thought privilegesglobal knowledge and foundational truthsthat can be arrived at through thescienti®c method. Postmodernists seeknowledge as always partial, fractured,fragmented and contingent. They focus onPathos (suffering, struggle, overcoming)over Logos (logic and rationality).

· Space/time. Modernist thought situatesitself in Newtonian physics of space andtime and in Euclidean geometry. Privi-leged is linearity, stasis, determinism andstability. Postmodernists privilege quan-tum mechanics, non-Euclidean geometry,topology theory, fractal geometry,`striated space,' irreversibility of timeamong others.

· Causality. Modernist thought privilegesdeterminism, linear causality and theinherent potential for discovering alllaws of nature. Postmodernists, however,say `God plays dice'. Quantum and chaostheories indicate the centrality of chanceand indeterminacy as well as dispropor-tionate effects.

· Social change. Modernists assume lineardevelopment in historical change, whetherHegelian (Absolute Spirit), Marxian (dia-


lectical materialism), Weberian (rationali-zation), or Durkheimian (a Darwiniandriven division of labour). Postmodernistsidentify non-linear change, orderly dis-order, continuity and discontinuity exist-ing side by side, singularities which aremoments in which accurate understand-ing breaks down, and disproportionateeffects (small changes may have large,unanticipated results).

The emerging perspective has severalprominent threads, some of which have beenintegrated, some not.

· Discourse analysis. The most signi®cantform has been Lacanian psychoanalyticsemiotics. It assumes the interconnected-ness of the subject and discourse. Thesubject of desire ®nds her/his coordinatesof being in various discourses which`speak the subject'. Lacan has offered thenotion of the decentred subject in a staticform (Schema L) and in more dynamicforms (Graphs of Desire, Schema R,Schema I, Borromean Knots). In crimino-logy, discourse analysis is important forrealizing how various social realities getconstructed and how some become morestable and privileged. In postmodernsociety a new reality has been constructedthrough the media, the `hyper-real', whichhas become the coordinate for socialaction.

· Chaos theory. Chaos theory has offeredseveral novel conceptualizations thatchallenge modernist ideological construc-tions. They offer the notion of attractors(points toward which dynamic systemstend), iteration (continuous feedbackloops which lead to disproportionateeffects), sensitive dependence on initialconditions (small changes may, afteriteration, produce disproportionate andunexpected results), fractal geometry (in-between dimensions exist beyond theinteger space that is privileged in moder-nist thought), far-from-equilibrium condi-tions (dynamic states that refuse closure),and dissipative structures (`structures'that are extremely sensitive to initialconditions, which take on only tentative,contingent stable forms and are always inprocess of becoming). Criminologicaltheory has seen several recent approachesapplying these conceptualizations (see thecollection of essays in Milovanovic, 1997).

· Catastrophe theory. This approach, pio-neered by Thom (1975), argues for

discontinuities appearing in otherwisecontinuous systems. It provides a topol-ogy of various generic forms of cata-strophe, depending on the number ofvariables that are relevant. It identi®esbimodal behaviour in each at the `fold'region, which represents discontinuouschange. For an application to explaining`seductive' forms of crime (èdgework')see Milovanovic (1996); and to insights ondeveloping alternative con¯ict resolutions,Milovanovic (1999).

· Topology theory. Perhaps least understood,topology is referred to as a `rubber math'.Only recently, perhaps through Lacan'sextensive use, is it beginning to emerge insituating behaviour on more complex,interacting planes for expository pur-poses. It is more useful as a discoveryprinciple in indicating some insight oncomplex dynamics. For an application inexplaining non-material forms of crimesee Milovanovic (1996) and for generaltheorizing in criminology, Arrigo (1998).

Two approaches have been at the cuttingedge in integrating various of these threadsinto criminology:

· Constitutive criminology. Constitutivetheory argues for the interconnectednessof phenomena and co-production in themanifestation of phenomena. It offersthe notion of COREL sets in indicatinghistorical speci®cities of con®gurations ofcoupled iterative loops that have oftenunexpected effects. Thus alternativenotions of `cause', `harms', `reduction'and `repression' have been conceptualized.

· Postmodern feminism. Several theoristshave spearheaded postmodern analysisin criminology and law. They have offeredan èthical feminism' as opposed to a hatepolitics, `contingent universalities' andnew understandings of the subject inlaw, textual constructions of the femaleoffender, and concepts for a social justice.

Evaluation

Postmodern criminology began to bloomin the late 1990s. Early forms (prior to 1990)were heavily criticized for their nihilism,fatalism and relativism, best identi®ed inbattle cries for `reversal of hierarchies' andànti-foundationalism'. This is called the `nihil-istic form of postmodernism'. More matureforms are àf®rmative postmodernism', which

217POSTMODERNISM

is rooted not in reaction-negation dynamicsbut in a Nietzschean call for the af®rmative.This is called transpraxis; in other words, notjust reaction and criticism (negation) of whatis, but also visions for a possible better societymust be offered simultaneously. At theminimum, postmodernist thought has broughtmuch debate in criminology in re-thinkingcausation, subjectivity, responsibility andforms of organization. The work that isappearing is beginning to integrate the variousdimensions of postmodern analysis and toapply it to dif®cult issues in criminology.More recently, critical race theory has begunto utilize and develop the conceptual toolsprovided by postmodern theorizing.

Dragan Milovanovic

Associated Concepts: chaos theory, constitutivecriminology, deconstruction, discourse anal-ysis, integrative criminology, postmodernfeminism, post-structuralism, praxis, psycho-analytic criminology

Key ReadingsArrigo, B. (1998) `Theories of crime and crimes of

theories: on the topological construction ofcriminological reality', Theory and Psychology,8 (2), pp. 219±53.

Henry, S. and Milovanovic, D. (1996) ConstitutiveCriminology. London, Sage.

Milovanovic, D. (1996) `Postmodern criminology',Justice Quarterly, 13 (4), pp. 567±609.

Milovanovic, D. (1997) Chaos, Criminology and SocialJustice. New York, Praeger.

Milovanovic, D. (1999) `Catastrophe theory, dis-course, and con¯ict resolution', in B. Arrigo (ed.),Social Justice/Criminal Justice. Belmont, CA,Wadsworth.

Thom, R. (1975) Structural Stability and Morphogen-esis. Reading, MA, Benjamin.

POST-STRUCTURALISM

De®nition

Post-structuralism refers to a variety oftheoretical perspectives that succeeded struc-turalism in France. Indebted to Nietzsche'scritique of reason and rationality, post-struc-turalists look for the tensions and contra-dictions and the irrational in discursiveformations. In criminology, post-structuralismremains most closely associated with the workof Michel Foucault.


Structuralism originated in the linguisticstudies of language undertaken by Ferdinandde Saussure (1857±1913). It was subsequentlytaken up by LeÂvi-Strauss, Lacan and Althusserwho applied structural-linguistic concepts tothe humanities and social sciences in anattempt to construct a more coherent modeof analysis. Structuralists favoured holisticforms of analysis that characterized phenom-ena in terms of parts and wholes, de®ningstructure as the interrelation of parts of acommon system. Revealing the underlyingcodes, rules and functions that organizedphenomena into a social system was thepurpose of structuralist analysis. Structuralistsbelieved in objectivity, logic, unity, coherence,self-suf®ciency, rigour and truth, and claimsocial scienti®c status for their theorizing. Indoing so they rejected humanist approachessuch as phenomenology and existentialism,with their stress on the subject and subjectiv-ity. Meanings are constituted not by conscioussubjects but by relations among the parts of asystem. Criminology has always been home tostructuralist approaches such as structuralfunctionalism and structural Marxism. Both ofthese share a belief in their social scienti®cability to identify underlying causes thatgenerate particular patterns of criminal beha-viour and emphasize materiality and theprimacy of structure over agency. AlthoughFrench structuralist debates had little impacton criminology, Althusser's writings on scien-ti®c Marxism, with its emphasis on structuralcausality, and his reading of ideology didresonate within left-wing criminology in theUK in the late 1970s.

Post-structuralism is both a reaction againstand complication of structuralist insights andcan be found in the work of writers such asDerrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Kristeva. Post-structuralists question the assumption thatsystems are self-suf®cient structures and thattheorists can somehow position themselvesoutside and independently of that which theyare analysing. For post-structuralists there isno òutside' position (whether in language orpolitics) from which to critique. The world,rather than existing independently of the wayswe talk about it, is constructed in discourse.Post-structuralists also challenge the structur-alist claim to scienti®c status, preferring toview science as a discourse that is constitutedthrough and embodies social relations ofpower that underpin its claims to truth. It isworth noting that the post-structuralists arealso dismissive of structuralism's claims to


clarity, opting for a mode of address andargumentation marked by density, impene-trability, ambiguity and incoherence. Post-structuralism not only re-centres the subjectbut constructs a subject that is fragmentaryand contradictory. Consequently, it alsostresses the importance of differences overunity. As a result of post-structuralism's anti-essentialism, considerably more attention waspaid to theorizing subjectivity, agency andpower. Post-structuralism has had a majorin¯uence on feminist and postmodernisttheorizing.

Derrida developed deconstruction as amethod of destabilizing and decentringmodern philosophy's claims to truth. Decon-struction involves looking at a system,examines how it was built, identi®es thekeystones and the de®ning angles whichsupport the structure. By moving the compo-nent pieces around, one can free oneself fromthe authority and logics of the system. In itsanalysis of texts, deconstruction identi®es thekey processes of signi®cation, looking for theincoherences, instabilities and ambivalenceswithin texts, locating the traces of oppositionalelements and reversing the normal patterns ofinterpretation. Deconstruction is radicallydisruptive because it ®rst of all reverses andthen seeks to replace `natural' oppositionssuch as nature/culture, male/female andobject/subject. For Derrida these oppositionsare restrictive substitutes for thinking.

Post-structuralism impacted on criminologyvia Michel Foucault's anti-realist and anti-essentialist Discipline and Punish. In this bookhe presents not a history but an àrchaeology'or `genealogy' of the transformation of thenotion of punishment and the birth of theprison. Foucault's intention is to lay to restthose congratulatory histories of the modernprison which tell a story of progress, reformand enlightenment. For Foucault, what issigni®cant in the transformation of a mode ofpunishment that depended on the in¯iction ofbodily pain and public theatrical spectacle toone organized around incarceration, regula-tion, surveillance and reformation of the mindis not whether it is better or more humane buthow it represents the re-organization ofdisciplinary knowledge/power. For Foucault,the techniques and rationales embedded inBentham's proposed `Panopticon' ± surveil-lance, classi®cation, examination ± were theembodiment of this shift to a new modality ofcontrol. The prison was but one representativeinstitution of the carceral society wheredisciplinary power/knowledge is exercisedwithin a multitude of institutional practices.

Foucault's analysis of the prison also providesus with an answer to the question of why thenew model prison failed to reform offenders.Discussions that focus on the `success' or`failure' of the prison are inappropriate. Theprison cannot fail because ìt is not intended toeliminate offences, but rather to distinguishthem, to distribute them, to use them'.

Evaluation

A post-structuralist Foucauldian perspectiveon the constitution of power/knowledge hasprovided criminologists with a vital set ofconceptual tools for analysing of®cial texts in awide range of criminal justice settings and forundertaking histories of the present. The workof feminists writers such as Vikki Bell (onincest), Carol Smart (on law) and AlisonYoung (on postmodern criminology) signi®esthe intellectual power of post-structuralistideas.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: deconstruction, discourseanalysis, essentialism, panopticism, post-modern feminism, postmodernism, socialcontrol

Key ReadingsBell, V. (1993) Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault

and the Law. London, Routledge.Berman, A. (1996) From the New Criticism to

Deconstruction: The Reception of Structuralism andPost Structuralism. Urbana, IL, University ofIllinois Press.

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish. Harmonds-worth, Penguin.

Smart, C. (1995) Law, Crime and Sexuality. London,Sage.

Young, A. (1995) Imagining Crime. London, Sage.

PRAXIS

De®nition

Praxis refers to the link between theory andpractice, and the struggle that exists in allintellectual movements to transform existing(oppressive or marginalizing) societal condi-tions into meaningful re¯ection, action andchange. Praxis is a complicated and intricatephenomenon because it entails a re-constitu-tion of culture, institutions, relationships and

219PRAXIS

social interaction, such that a more humane,emancipatory climate of pro-social civic lifeprevails. Moments of praxis, then, redirect ourentire way of being from the alienatingconstraints of identity politics to the unifyingdynamics of a pluralistic society. Self-determi-nation, intentionality, sociality and creativityare cornerstones of praxis and the new socialorder it endorses.


The notion of praxis has its roots in the workof Karl Marx. Marxism is a dialectical andhistorical theory of human progress, thatresponds to the economic and social problemsassociated with (advanced state-regulated)capitalism. For Marx (1868) praxis was thatmoment in which `the free development ofeach [was] the free development of all'.According to Marxist thought, praxis is apolitical and economic effort designed tochange the conditions that give rise topsychological alienation and social oppres-sion. Indeed, during the period in which KarlMarx lived and wrote, people were alienatedfrom their labour, from their fellow workers,and from themselves. Under such conditions,change was necessary and inevitable. Thesource of this change was a blend of scholarlyenquiry and political action; namely, praxis.

Others have contemporized Marx's notionson praxis and applied his insights in differentsocial science contexts. For example, thedialogical and liberation pedagogy of PauloFreire (1985, p. 50) calls for conscientization. Thepurpose of conscientization is for theoppressed to èxercise the right to participateconsciously in the socio-historical transforma-tion of their society'. Freire was particularlyinterested in how the oppressed (such as thepoor, the illiterate, the disenfranchised) couldfunction as cultural revolutionaries. The key totransformation is re¯ection and dialogue inwhich the subjugated speak `true words' aboutthemselves, about the conditions in which theylive, and about the necessary and inevitableprocess by which change (an alternative,emancipatory reality) can materialize.

Feminists, especially Marxist and socialistfeminists, have appropriated Marx's notion ofpraxis. Both claim that the conditions in whichwomen ®nd themselves are related to the stateof malestream praxis and the culture ofpatriarchy and capitalism. Women's liberationis rooted in transforming the sexual division oflabour, reconstituting society's notions of mas-culinity, femininity, competition, hierarchy

and production. Feminist praxis entails endor-sing such interventions as consciousness-raising, connectivity, the primacy of relation-ships, and the personal is political.

Postmodernists have further re®ned theMarxist notion of praxis by utilizing theconcept of `transpraxis.' Transpraxis retainsthe Marxist conviction that theory and practiceneed to be linked to produce change; however,it also addresses the role of language in suchtransformations. Transpraxis involves thedialectics of linguistic struggle in which thenew, reconstituted order does not re-createconditions of alienation and oppression.Transpraxis is a deliberate and af®rmativeattempt not to reverse hierarchies but, instead,to af®rm those who victimize, marginalize andcriminalize while renouncing their victimiz-ing, marginalizing and criminalizing practices.Transpraxis is an effort to validate the act ofresistance. The key to transpraxis is speech,words, grammar and how we talk about (andthen act upon) emancipation.

Evaluation

Praxis (or transpraxis) symbolizes efforts toalter and improve the conditions in whichpeople live, work and engage others. Criticaland radical criminology have been moreclosely linked with the Marxist notion ofpraxis. Socialist feminist criminologists havesimilarly relied upon the Marxist concept,infusing it with a sensitivity to gender politics.Postmodern criminologists (particularly con-stitutive criminologists) have appropriated theidea of transpraxis in their explanation ofcrime, criminals and criminal behaviour.

Bruce Arrigo

Associated Concepts: constitutive criminology,critical criminology, feminist criminologies,Marxist criminologies, political crime, post-modernism

Key ReadingsEisenstein, Z. (ed.) (1979) Capitalist Patriarchy and the

Case for Socialist Feminism. New York, MonthlyReview Press.

Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York,Herder and Herder.

Freire, P. (1985) The Politics of Education. SouthHadley, MA, Bergin and Garvey.



Marx, K. (1868) Capital, 3 vols. New York, Interna-tional Press.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1845±6) The GermanIdeology. New York, International Publishers.

PREDICTION STUDIES

De®nition

The aim of prediction studies is to ®nd thevariables (risk factors) that most accuratelypredict the likelihood of offending (or moreusually) reoffending. It is held that knowledgeof accurate predictors of offending is impor-tant theoretically and practically valuable, as,for example, in informing parole decisions.


Prediction studies are characterized by twoelements: ®rst, the de®nition of the criterion ofconcern; secondly, identi®cation of the pre-dictors (or risk factors) for the speci®edcriterion. For example, prediction studiesmay be concerned with the speci®c criterionof violent offending by males. The aim of theresearch would therefore be to ®nd the speci®cpredictors of male violent offending. There aretwo types of predictors: static predictors arerisk factors that cannot change, such ascriminal history, family background andemployment record; dynamic predictors arerisk factors that can change, such as level ofdrinking, employment or relationships.

There are also two main styles of conduct-ing prediction studies. Actuarial predictionseeks to analyse statistically data gatheredacross a range of potential predictors toidentify which predictors perform best inpredicting the given criterion. Clinical predic-tion relies on individuals, teams, or caseconferences to make predictions as to thelikelihood of future offending. The generallyaccepted position, dating from Meehl's (1954)seminal text, is that statistical prediction issuperior to clinical prediction.

Attempts at predicting risk can have variousoutcomes, each of which has very differentimplications for those involved. Strong pre-dictors for a given criterion will produce highlevels of true positive and true negative out-comes. In other words, the predictors willcorrectly predict either the occurrence orabsence of the criterion. These `true' outcomes,positive and negative, are known as `hits'. A

false positive outcome arises when the presenceof the predictors indicates the outcome willoccur but it does not arise; while a falsenegative refers to the situation when, in theabsence of predictors, the criterion of riskactually does occur. `False' outcomes aregenerally called `misses'.

The ®rst attempts at prediction of reoffend-ing were made by criminologists in the 1920s(e.g., Burgess, 1928). These mainly relied onmeasurement of a range of potential static riskfactors for reoffending, typically informationgleaned from demographic and criminologicalrecords, followed by statistical calculations todetermine the factors that best predicted theoutcome (that is, recidivism). This traditionhas continued into more recent times with thedevelopment of several actuarial predictioninstruments based on static factors for usewith general offender populations.

Examples of actuarial scales used to predictoffending include the California Base Expec-tancy Scale, the Salient Factor Scale, and theOffender Group Reconviction Scale. TheSalient Factor Scale, developed and re®nedin studies conducted within the US ParoleCommission, is an actuarial scale that containsonly static risk factors. It is a six-item checklistthat produces a score from 0 to 10 points: thehigher the score, the lower the likelihood ofreconviction, with bands of scores used tocategorize risk. Hoffman (1994) has reported along-term follow-up of the Salient Factor Scoreon three samples of prisoners released fromprison and concludes that the scale hasretained its predictive accuracy over the 17-year period in which the various samples ofoffenders were released.

While prediction scales based on staticfactors can be accurate, by de®nition theycannot give any indication of a change in risk.However, the new generation of `risk±need'scales are designed to include dynamic as wellas static risk factors. For example, the Level ofSupervision Inventory-Revised (LSI-R) is com-pleted through ®le review and interview, andassesses a range of risk factors, including`static' factors such as previous convictions,and `dynamic' factors such as drink problemsand employment. The pattern of scoresidenti®es speci®c areas of offender need(informing service providers), while the totalscore can be translated into a risk band forfuture offending (Andrews and Bonta, 1995).The empirical evidence supporting the LSI-Ras a measure of risk and needs is strong:Gendreau et al. (1996) conclude their review ofpredictors of adult recidivism with the viewthat the LSI-R is the current measure of choice.

221PREDICTION STUDIES

Evaluation

It is plain that in risk assessment the stakes canbe high for all concerned: in working withoffenders, assessment of risk can in¯uencesentencing decisions, type of disposal, appro-priate level of security, parole, breach ofprobation order, and level and intensity ofinterventions. Research aiming to produce avalid and reliable method to estimate thelikelihood of an individual reoffendingdepends on measurement of two variables.The ®rst necessity is for accurate measurementof offending; the second is for accuratemeasurement of the predictors of risk, what-ever they may be, for type of offence underconsideration. It is plain that there is con-siderable room for error of measurement withthese variables. It follows that any scalesproduced should be suf®ciently tried andtested to be as robust as possible.

Clive Hollin

Associated Concepts: evaluation research, risk

Key ReadingsAndrews, D.A. and Bonta, J. (1995) LSI-R: The Level

of Supervision Inventory-Revised. Toronto, Multi-Health Systems.

Burgess, E.W. (1928) `Factors determining success orfailure on parole', in A.A. Bruce, A.J. Harno, E.W.Burgess and J. Landesco (eds), The Workings of theIndeterminate Sentence Law and the Parole System inIllinois. Spring®eld, IL, Illinois State Board ofParole.

Gendreau, P., Little, T. and Goggin, C. (1996) Àmeta-analysis of predictors of adult offenderrecidivism: what works', Criminology, 34, pp.401±33.

Hoffman, P.B. (1994) `Twenty years of operationaluse of a risk prediction instrument: the UnitedStates parole commission's salient factor score',Journal of Criminal Justice, 22, pp. 477±94.

Meehl, P.E. (1954) Clinical Versus Statistical Predic-tions: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of theEvidence. Minneapolis, MN, University of Minne-sota Press.

PRIMARY DEVIATION

See Labelling; Social reaction

PRIMITIVE REBELLION

De®nition

In Eric Hobsbawm's original (1959) formula-tion, primitive rebellion is de®ned as a form ofsocial movement or social agitation that is`pre-political' in the sense that the protago-nists `have not yet found, or only begun to®nd, a speci®c language in which to expresstheir aspirations about the world'.


Primitive rebellion as used by Hobsbawmreferred to `pre-political' social agitation in thenineteenth and twentieth centuries, particu-larly millenarianism, labour sects, the citymob, Ma®a and the `social bandit'. It is inrelation to social banditry, and his relatednotion of `social crime', that this work onprimitive rebellion has produced the mostimpact on criminology. Hobsbawn himselfrestricted social banditry to peasant societies,on the grounds that it was a backward-lookingprotest, ®ghting for a traditional vision of ajust world, having next to no organization andbeing `totally unadaptable' to modern socialmovements. In his later treatment of socialbanditry (Hobsbawm, 1969) he developed thisview to stress that social banditry may operateas a surrogate for a social movement throughits symbolic representation of peasant dis-contents. In this way, many `less than ideal'bandits have been raised to the status of socialbandit, simply because they provided the poorwith the only available overt symbols ofresistance.

The notion of primitive rebellion provedattractive to con¯ict and class oriented radicalcriminologists of the 1960s and 1970s, parti-cularly those sharing Hobsbawm's Marxistleanings. Thus, Australian work focusing onthe `Kelly Outbreak' of the 1880s developedthe nexus between crime and class strugglesover land, locating the critical feature of socialbanditry in the social support that the ruralpoor provided bandits ± food, shelter, andinformation, but also non-cooperation withauthorities. Such work also con®rmed Hobs-bawm's views that when organized politicalmovements emerged to take up the cause ofthe downtrodden, social bandits would bedeprived of their conditions of existence(O'Malley, 1979).

Bringing together rebellion and political`primitivism', not only in the form of social


banditry but also in the category of the urban`mob', provided a foundation for criminolo-gists and historians seeking to understandcrime among the poor and minorities. Suchwork focused on social crime in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries, including poaching,smuggling, luddism, haystack burning andother crimes interpreted as upholding the old`moral economy' and traditional rights of thepoor. It sought to give voice to poor criminalswhose offences were related to resistingegregious exploitation associated with earlycapitalist development. Much of this workechoed Hobsbawm's caution that such crim-inals would not simply appear as heroic andattractive, but often bloody, reactionary andbarbarous. Even so, the characterization ofcontemporary urban street crime as primitiverebellion and `social crime' by some criminol-ogists in the 1970s, led others to become highlycritical of tendencies to `romanticize' hood-lums and thugs.

Nevertheless, an attempt recently has beenmade to revive this line of analysis. Citing theemergence of new, urban `dangerous classes',their exclusion from capitalist relations, andtheir participation in alternative economies,Lea (1999) suggests that Hobsbawm's notionsof primitive rebellion and social crime mayonce again enter criminological currency.

Evaluation

Primitive rebellion sensitized a generation ofsocial historians and critical criminologists tothe nexus between popular crime and politics,by broadening the notion of politics to includethe expressions of the inchoate and ignorant,and by linking these to `criminal' acts ofresistance where criminal law operated as ameans of oppression. Equally important, itprovided an important stimulus for develop-ing a critical historiography within crimino-logy. The historical analyses associated withE.P. Thompson and his colleagues, that owedmuch to Hobsbawm's pioneering work,remain one of the most lasting, scholarly andelegant contributions to criminology. Suchwork added considerable sophistication to aradical criminological theory that had becomeprone to rather literal and unsubtle translationof Marxist theory. However, the concept ofprimitive rebellion has occupied a limited anddiminishing place in criminology in the pasttwo decades, and it seems unlikely to recoverthe high pro®le it held during the 1970s. Itsdecline is probably linked to the crystallizationof anti-romanticism into left realism during

the 1980s. Additionally, the current theoreticalenvironment has rather turned its back onclass oriented accounts and related forms ofradical theory ± in particular Marxist theory.Nevertheless, especially if Hobsbawm's owncautions about romanticism are heeded,primitive rebellion still seems to promisemuch for analysis of the inchoate politics ofsome forms of contemporary crime among theunderclass and the excluded. Its implicationsfor feminist criminology have yet to beexplored.

Pat O'Malley

Associated Concepts: critical criminology, leftidealism, Marxist criminologies, moral econ-omy, political crime

Key ReadingsHay, D., Thompson, E. and Linebaugh, P. (eds)

(1975) Albion's Fatal Tree. Crime and Society inEighteenth Century England. London, Allen Lane.

Hobsbawm, E. (1959) Primitive Rebels: Studies inArchaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and20th Centuries. Manchester, Manchester Univer-sity Press.

Hobsbawm, E. (1969) Bandits. Harmondsworth,Penguin.

Lea, J. (1999) `Social crime revisited', TheoreticalCriminology, 3, pp. 307±26.

O'Malley, P. (1979) `Class con¯ict, land and socialbanditry. Bushranging in nineteenth centuryAustralia', Social Problems, 26, pp. 271±83.

Thompson, E. (1977) Whigs and Hunters. The Originsof the Black Act. London, Allen Lane.

PRIVATIZATION

See Managerialism

PROBATION

De®nition

Supervision of offenders in conditions offreedom by designated of®cers of the court(sometimes called probation of®cers or com-munity corrections of®cers). Nowadaysregarded as an àlternative to prison',though, historically, has been viewed as anàlternative to punishment'.

223PROBATION


Probation emerged towards the end of thenineteenth century as a reaction againstthe austere uniformity of penal institutions.Rooted in humanitarian concerns for the poorand a growing awareness of the contami-nating in¯uence of imprisonment, probationrepresented the move towards the individua-lization of sentencing ± the tailoring ofpunishment to the needs of the individualoffender. The underlying assumption was thatthe criminal would bene®t from developing aclose relationship of trust with a law-abidingcitizen who would use their experience,wisdom and professional training to reclaimand rehabilitate them. The role of the proba-tion of®cer was to offer advice and guidanceon social problems such as employment,money and accommodation, as well ascounselling for personal and relationshipproblems. Some jurisdictions (including Eng-land and Wales) even expected the probationof®cer to `befriend' the offender.

According to Hamai et al. (1995) the conceptof probation appears to imply four keyelements in most countries where it exists:selection (following an assessment that theoffender is `suitable'), a conditional suspen-sion of punishment (or, more commonly,nowadays, of imprisonment), personal super-vision and, ®nally, guidance and/or treat-ment. Beyond that basic de®nition, probationmay mean many different things dependingon the social and economic framework withinwhich it has to function.

Offendersareselectedforprobationthroughaprocessofassessmentbyaprobationof®cerwhoadvises, or writes a report for, the sentencingcourt. Probation orders require the offender tomaintain contact with their supervising of®cerandtotell theirsupervisoraboutchangesintheircircumstances. Failure to comply with theseconditions constitutes a breach of the probationorder and the offender can be re-sentenced,usually to a period of imprisonment.

Evaluation

Historically, probation has been orientatedtowards the welfare of the offender andprobation of®cers have been required toundergo training as social workers. With thedemise of the rehabilitative ideal in the 1960sand 1970s, however, traditional approaches toprobation were discredited (Brownlee, 1998;Worrall, 1997). Critics with socialist views onwelfare provision argued that traditional

probation was patronizing and coercive;pragmatists argued that it simply did not`work'; those of a conservative persuasionargued that it was too lenient and should bereplaced by more punitive sentences. As aresult, probation supervision has been increas-ingly `strengthened' by the addition of variousconditions, mainly relating to where anoffender is required to live, with whom s/hemay associate and what `programmes' s/he isrequired to undertake.

The nature of probation intervention hasalso changed. Personal counselling, based onpsychotherapeutic approaches, has beenreplaced by cognitive-behavioural pro-grammes, based on social learning theory.Rather than attempting to change the wholepersonality or circumstances of an offender,cognitive-behavioural programmes focus onspeci®c unacceptable behaviours and seek tomodify these by correcting distortions in theway offenders think about their crime. Offen-ders are required to accept full responsibilityfor their actions (instead of blaming the victimor their circumstances), empathize with thevictim of their offences and expand theirrepertoire of responses to those situationsthat have previously triggered a criminalresponse. Programmes cover a range of speci®cproblem behaviours such as anger manage-ment, drunken driving and sex offending.

These programmes collectively form the`What Works?' agenda. The etymology of thisphrase lies in a famously pessimistic remarkmade in 1974 by the criminologist RobertMartinson to the effect that `nothing works' inpenal interventions. The disillusion whichfollowed this conclusion (supported byresearch ®ndings at the time) led to a loss ofcon®dence in probation which lasted until theearly 1990s when the `discovery' of cognitive-behavioural programmes (initially in NorthAmerica) gave rise to a series of conferencesentitled `What Works?' (McGuire, 1995). Thephrase caught the imagination of politiciansand professionals and now dominates proba-tion intervention in the English-speakingworld. Evaluation research gives cause forcautious optimism in respect of the effective-ness of such programmes in reducing reof-fending (Vennard and Hedderman, 1998) butcritics have argued that enthusiasm for thecognitive-behavioural approach should notresult in the neglect of other provision suchas basic literacy skills and social skills. Norshould the wider social problems that maylead people into crime be overlooked.

Anne Worrall


Associated Concepts: community corrections,community sentences, evaluation research,rehabilitation, social learning theory

Key ReadingsBrownlee, I. (1998) Community Punishment: A Critical

Introduction. Harlow, Addison Wesley Longman.Hamai, K., Ville, R., Harris, R., Hough, M. and

Zvekic, U. (1995) Probation Round the World: AComparative Study. London, Routledge.

McGuire, J. (1995) What Works? Reducing Reoffending.Chichester, John Wiley.

Ruggiero, V., Ryan, M. and Sim, J. (eds) (1995)Western European Penal Systems: A Critical Anat-omy. London, Sage.

Vennard, J. and Hedderman, C. (1998) Èffectiveinterventions with offenders', in P. Goldblatt andC. Lewis (eds), Reducing Offending: An Assessmentof Research Evidence on ways of Dealing withOffending Behaviour. Research Study 187.London, Home Of®ce.

Worrall, A. (1997) Punishment in the Community: TheFuture of Criminal Justice. Harlow, AddisonWesley Longman.

PROBLEM ORIENTED POLICING

De®nition

Problem oriented policing is a deceptivelysimple and sensible idea. It requires policeforces to analyse the problems that they areroutinely called upon to deal with and todevise more effective ways to respond tothem.


Problem oriented policing was ®rst developedby Herman Goldstein in the late 1970s andrepresents an attempt to persuade the policethat it is in their interests to adopt a differentoperational philosophy. He is critical of thetraditional incident-driven policing strategies,where the organization responds to individualcalls for assistance as they happen andattempts to cope with the demand. Of®cersor their colleagues repeatedly revisit the samelocalities and social settings to deal with therepetitive, all too predictable, behaviour ofindividuals and groups. This is demoralizingfor of®cers, a waste of organizationalresources and unsatisfactory for members ofthe public. Goldstein is also critical of policework, which concentrates on law enforcement

and crime control. The majority of incidentswith which police of®cers have to deal arenon-criminal in nature and police methodsshould re¯ect this fact. The prioritization ofthe law enforcement function disproportio-nately in¯uences the operational practices,structure, training and recruitment policies ofpolice forces. It can also compound rather thanresolve problems because it leads policeof®cers to think that the solution to theproblems they face is more legal powers. ForGoldstein, police forces need to accept thatgood police work requires the development ofthe most effective means for dealing with amultitude of troublesome situations. Equallycrucially, these means will very often, but notalways, require the invocation of criminal law.

The reactive, law enforcement based modelof police work should be replaced by proactive`bottom-up' approaches which emphasizegetting to grips with the underlying conditionsthat create the problems police of®cers have todeal with. They can do this because many ofthe incidents that take up police time arerecurring rather than random in nature. Policeforces should analyse patterns of crimeincident clusters to identify underlyingcauses and problems and formulate appro-priate responses. To do so requires disaggre-gating vague and overly general categoriessuch as `crime', `disorder', `violence' and so oninto particular problems. It is not good enoughto break them down into `robbery', `theft',àssault', for example, because these conceptsare framed by the criminal law. There shouldbe as detailed a breakdown of problems aspossible from the outset and the identi®cationof key characteristics (location, time, partici-pants' behaviour and so on). In addition,information should be gathered from a rangeof police and non-police sources. Only then canspeci®c plans and imaginative strategies bedeveloped to reduce or eradicate these recur-ring problems. In this way police of®cers willconcentrate not on organizational matters butthe ends of their police work and the quality ofthe police product. Problem-solving policing ismore rewarding for of®cers and enables theorganization to manage the demands madeupon it more effectively because police work isgeared towards resolving the root causes ofrelated problems.

Evaluation

In many respects problem oriented policingmakes common sense, and yet for police forcesto embrace this model requires them to engage

225PROBLEM ORIENTED POLICING

in a fundamental re-examination of what theydo and why and how they do it. It requirespolice of®cers, at all levels of the organization,to focus on the substantive outcomes of policework and stop thinking of themselves as lawenforcement of®cers. Forces have to committhemselves to address complex and sensitiveproblems and harms that are normally over-looked or ignored by of®cers. It also demandsthat of®cers are trained in problem-solvingtechniques and empowered to work with andbe accountable to local communities. Forcesmust also develop reliable incident data in aform that is open to external evaluation andpublic discussion.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: `broken windows', com-munity policing, geographies of crime, situa-tional crime prevention

Key ReadingsBrodeur, P. (1998) How To Recognize Good Policing:

Problems and Issues. London, Sage.Eck, E. and Spelman, W. (1987) Problem Solving:

Problem Oriented Policing in Newport News.Washington DC, US Department of Justice,National Institute of Justice.

Goldstein, H. (1977) Policing a Free Society. Cam-bridge, MA, Ballinger.

Goldstein, H. (1979) Ìmproving policing: a problem-oriented approach', Crime and Delinquency, 25, pp.236±58.

Goldstein, H. (1990) Problem-Oriented Policing. NewYork, McGraw±Hill.

Leigh, A., Read, T. and Tilley, N. (1998) Brit Pop II:Problem Oriented Policing in Practice. London,Home Of®ce, Police Research Series, Paper 93.

PROPORTIONALITY

See Discrimination; Disparity; Disproportion-ality; Due process; Just deserts

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRIMINOLOGY

De®nition

This neologism is misleading if it is taken todesignate a discrete sub-genre of criminologi-cal scholarship. No such entity as psycho-analytic criminology in this sense exists.

However, it is possible to talk of the vicissi-tudes of relationships between psychoanalysisand criminology over the past century.


We can make a start by reversing the twoterms that together compose the neologism.Criminological psychoanalysis? Psychoanaly-sis has always been criminological. In makingthis claim, I have in mind the dynamic roleaccorded to criminal wishes and fantasieswithin the broad spectrum of psychoanalytictheories of mental processes. For instance, thepsychoanalytic terms pertaining to neurosisconvey a primitive and talionic penal codewithin the unconscious. Psychoanalytic theorymakes no qualitative distinction betweennormal and pathological and its account ofthe character of human subjectivity attributessigni®cance to the traces of unconscioustaboos and violent wishes and fantasies thatpersist throughout life. These are seen inphenomena such as the dream, parapraxesand the losing of objects. There is a conceptionof human nature or identity within everycriminological theory or philosophy of pun-ishment, however implicit. Psychoanalysischallenges these in various ways.

Relationships between psychoanalysis andcriminology are not reducible to the study ofthe emotional aspect of offending behaviourand of punishing. Psychoanalysis presentscriminology with a number of epistemologicalquestions. Clearly the psychoanalytic appre-ciation of methodological rigour is quitedifferent to that favoured by empiricalcriminology. A psychoanalyst would contendthat the happy analysis of an isolated dreamfragment can reveal far more than a large-scale survey on delinquency. Further, psycho-analysis problematizes the relationshipbetween fantasy and reality.

Freud's brief insight `Criminals from a senseof guilt' of 1916 presented his re¯ection on thedynamic role of mental con¯ict in the originsof criminality. This piece suggested a whollynew approach in criminology and penology.How far has this been developed? Writingabout France, Laurent Mucchielli (1993)argued that the history of connections betweenpsychoanalysis and criminology has beenmarked by suspicion. Yet for a time aspectsof psychoanalytic thought exercised a majorin¯uence within British criminology. What canbe made of this difference?

Over the past century, psychoanalysts havebeen prominent among those arguing for the


reform of criminal law and penal policy; forexample, British psychoanalysts gave testi-mony to the Royal Commission on CapitalPunishment of 1952. These activities wereinformed by a literature on the unconsciousmotivations of legal punishment, which fore-grounded the aggression and ambivalence ofsubjective investments in punitive practices. Ageneral statement of this view is of the orderof: `punishment of the criminal is punishmentof something which the individual feels to bepresent in themself.'

Psychoanalysis accords a central place togender and sexuality in its exploration ofpsyche. From the early days, analysts pointedup the signi®cance of troubles with masculi-nity to the origins of men's criminality. Arecent example of this kind of scholarship canbe seen in Tony Jefferson's (1996) use ofKleinian concepts such as projection to thinkabout the case of Mike Tyson in terms of therelationship between the constitution of blackmasculine subjectivity and the crime of whichthe boxer was convicted.

An understanding of the contemporary asthe locus of a `risk society' or àctuarial society'has recently attained prominence in theoreticalcriminology. An alternative way of looking atthis question of our actuality employs the ideaof an affective society. Such a picture is offeredby Hollway and Jefferson (1997), who employa psychoanalytic conception of anxiety to thinkabout the fear of crime, and by Mark Watson(1999), in his essay on the paranoiac structureof police discourse. Key respects in which thesubject of a society construed as affectivediffers from the subject of a risk society includethe retrospective temporal orientation of theformer and his/her emotional and uncon-scious re¯exivity, which predominates overthe cognitive and rational.

Evaluation

Psychoanalytic thought exercised a consider-able in¯uence upon the British criminology ofthe inter-war and postwar periods (Valier,1998). In the sphere of penal practice, proba-tion became reconceived as a process ofemotional re-education, and the role of theprobation of®cer therein that of a caseworker.From the 1970s, radical, con¯ict and feministcriminologies with a commitment to politicalcritique denounced the psychoanalytic studyof the criminal as positivistic, normative andbiologically deterministic. The rejection of therehabilitative ethos in penality under the aegisof the slogan `nothing works' also contributed

to a fall from favour for psychoanalyticthought in criminology. The extent to whichpsychoanalysts had engaged from the outsetupon a complex and sometimes heated debateconcerning the ethics of their practice and theef®cacy of their techniques was overlooked, aswas the profound disagreement betweendifferent genres of psychoanalysis.

Over the past century there have been manycontentious debates among psychoanalysts.The expulsion of various individuals fromparticular circles of af®liation and professionalbodies, as well as the emergence of rivalschools of thought and of clinical practice, isone lasting manifestation of the degree ofdivergence. In addition to division pertainingto institutional structures and doctrinal pre-ferences, a proliferation of different cultures ofpsychoanalysis in¯uenced by local socio-political contexts has been marked.

The most intentionally provocative and self-consciously political culture of psychoanalysisemerged in France with the impetus of the`return to Freud' undertaken by JacquesLacan. Lacan repeatedly differentiated hiswork from the genre of American ego-psychology, which emphasized adaptation todominant socio-cultural structures and mores.In his address to the second internationalcongress on criminology of 1950, he assertedthat `the denunciation of the morbid Universeof the misdeed cannot have for its corollary,nor for its aim, the ideal of an adaptation to areality without con¯icts' (Lacan, 1984, p. 24).Lacan emphasized the emotional ambivalenceoccasioned by the dialectical negativity bywhich the ego is formed through an identi®ca-tion with the other. Two of his earliest worksdiscussed the cases of certain criminal women.Lacan's doctoral thesis of 1932 described thecase of AimeÂe, who had attempted to stab afamous actress. Lacan rejected organic expla-nations of psychosis and saw her act asspringing from con¯icts within her person-ality. Her delusional system had turned thesecon¯icts into external persecutors. The wishbehind the delusions was one of unconsciousself-punishment. This was followed by apaper on the Papin sisters, two maids whohad murdered their employers in 1933.Lacan's re¯ection on these criminal caseswas crucial to the elaboration of his conceptsof the imaginary and the mirror phase, thelatter theorizing the alienation that resides atthe heart of all human subjects and initiates inan act of self-misrecognition.

Lacanian thought has now exercised con-siderable in¯uence in areas such as literaryand cultural criticism. There is a rich literature

227PSYCHOANALYTIC CRIMINOLOGY

extant which employs psychoanalytic thoughtin the analysis of the plethora of visual andliterary representations of crime and punish-ment with which we are daily confronted.

The psychoanalytic understanding of thecriminal cannot be simply condemned as acorrectionalist, normalizing discourse. A morenuanced account of the kinds of psycho-analysis taken up by criminology, and of thechanges to classical technique thought neces-sary to the treatment of criminals, as well as anengagement with the extensive critical litera-ture on many aspects of psychoanalysis, areprerequisites to any assessment of relation-ships between psychoanalysis and crimino-logy. Further, the comfortable assimilation ofpsychoanalytic thought into criminologicaltheory is both unlikely and undesirable. Forthis eventuality to take place, a considerabledomestication of psychoanalysis would haveto occur.

Claire Valier

Associated Concepts: hegemonic masculinity,masculinities, postmodernism, risk, sexuality

Key ReadingsHollway, W. and Jefferson, T. (1997) `The risk society

in an age of anxiety: situating the fear of crime',British Journal of Sociology, 48 (2), pp. 255±66.

Jefferson, T. (1996) `From `̀ little fairy boy'' to `̀ thecompleat destroyer'': subjectivity and transforma-tion in the biography of Mike Tyson', in M. Macan Ghaill (ed.), Understanding Masculinities: SocialRelations and Cultural Arenas. Buckingham, OpenUniversity Press.

Lacan, J. (1984) `Psychanalyse et criminologie.ReÂsumeÂ', Ornicar, 31, pp. 23±7.

Mucchielli, L. (1993) `Le sens du crime: histoire desr(apports) de la psychanalyse aÁ la criminologie',in L. Mucchielli (ed.), Histoire De La CriminologieFrancËaise. Paris, L'Harmattan.

Valier, C. (1998) `Psychoanalysis and crime inBritain during the inter-war years'. The BritishCriminology Conferences, Selected Proceedings.Electronic journal at the website of the BritishSociety of Criminology: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ss/bsc/bccsp/vol01/VOL01_12.HT

Watson, M. (1999) `Policing the affective society:beyond governmentality in the theory of socialcontrol', Social and Legal Studies, 8 (2), pp. 227±52.

PUNISHMENT

See Capital punishment; Penality; Penology


Q

QUEER THEORY

De®nition

Queer theory or, in activist parlance, simply`queer', is a short-hand for gay, lesbian,bisexual and transgendered experienceapplied to literature, politics, the arts andsocial sciences; and presents a challenge toboth homophobic heterosexism and to af®r-mative homophilic theories of homosexuality.Applied to crime and criminal justice itexposes the heterosexism of criminal justicepractice and of much criminological theoryand the homoeroticism of its focus on thebodies of young men. The early fusion ofcriminology and sexology also placed thewoman criminal both outside the law and alsooutside the heterosexual norm.


To be or to render odd. Queer theoryperversely both resists and invites a varietyof de®nitions. De®nitions vary depending onwhether given by activists or academics. Partof the argument is in respect of identitypolitics ± the possibility or desirability of a gayor lesbian movement, culture, sensibility,standpoint or perspective ± and part con-cerned with the debate about modernism andpostmodernism. Healy's summation that`Queer was lesbian and gay politics catchingup with postmodernism' (1996, p. 175)addresses both aspects. The academic rootsof queer theory lie in the humanities, butSeidman (1996) convincingly argues for therelevance to sociology and Groombridge(1999) argues for its signi®cance to crimino-logy and to the sociology of deviance. Anactivist queer politics addressing discrimina-

tion on grounds of sexuality or reactions toAIDS may employ direct action which mayoffend public sensibilities and break the law.Metaphorically it may seek to bash the gay-bashers through `camp' and `drag'.

Its activist roots noted the white, middle-class, Western orientation of gay and lesbianpolitics and lifestyles which appeared toexclude other identities much as women ofcolour and lesbians had noted the exclusionaryappeal of feminism to `sisterhood'. Moreover,academic commentators, drawing on Foucault,noted the disciplinary features of, eventransgressive, identities and lifestyles. Psychol-ogy, sexology and criminology had for a longtime insisted ± sometimes by silence ± on thenormality of heterosexuality and the pathologyof other sexualities. Gay activism and humanrights campaigners were able to secure somerights for gays and lesbians but throughinsisting on a foundational gay identity (ofchoice or disposition). Queer theory threatensthe stability of both a foundational gay andstraight identity by insisting on the ¯uidity andperformativity of identity. The ¯uidity of queertheory ± like much postmodernism ± threatensto violate the modernist theories of normativeheterosexuality and of an oppositional homo-sexuality.

Thus whilst an empirically minded andsympathetic researcher might seek to under-stand homosexuality, a gay or lesbian onemight want to document and understandhomophobia. A polemical inversion might callhomophobia deviant or seek its criminaliza-tion. This can be seen in the pressure in somejurisdictions to accept or widen the ambit of`hate crime' legislation. A gay standpointmight want to take such empirical work andcampaign around it in the way that radicalfeminism sought to do with research bywomen on women and for women. Cam-paigns against homophobic violence, the use

of the `gay-panic defence' and for equal agesof consent can be seen in this light. The logic ofqueer theory, however, is that you need not behomosexual in practice or identity to be queer.Whilst this makes political mobilization moredif®cult it should also be remembered thatyou don't have to be gay to suffer homo-phobia. `Doing' masculinity often involves therejection of the feminine and the queer. Thusmany men operate under the fear of beingthought queer as the fewer openly gay menoperate under the fear of being bashed. Thepolitical task facing all men is to remove thedistal fear of being called a `poof' or `faggot'and the proximate fear of being bashed likeone. Whilst gay liberation speci®cally aimed toimprove the lot of gay men and lesbians, queertheory opens up the possibility of a widerliberation.

Evaluation

Whilst the queer take on sexualities (hetero,homo, bi and transgendered) could be socio-logically and criminologically productive (asargued above), there is little evidence outsideof socio-legal studies that queer theory hasmade the progress in the social sciences that ithas in the humanities. Moreover, given thedisputes over de®nition and applicability(whether being gay is essential or merelyhelps), it seems likely that further progresswill be uneven. However, homosexuality hashaunted criminology from the pathologizingpositivism of Lombroso to the appreciativeethnographies of the sociology of deviance. Aradical victimology and increasingly criminaljustice practice recognize attacks on the `gaycommunity' but still require the `victim' toòut' themselves to receive due recognition.Given the limited extent to which criminology

has embraced feminism it seems that anyserious consideration of sexualities as impor-tant to criminology ± whether purely empiri-cal, standpoint or queer ± may take decades.However, without such consideration, evenapparently simple issues ± like what do wemean by the expressions `going straight' and`bent copper' ± will elude criminology. Queertheory seeks to ®nd the odd within the normalor render the normal odd ± as in the mentionof `straight' and `bent' above. It is this sort ofsub(per)version that will render it unpalatableto the criminological mainstream. Moreover,queer practice and culture ± camp to kitsch ±long predates the turn to theory and may, likesome feminisms, wish to keep its distancefrom criminology.

Nic Groombridge

Associated Concepts: deviance, hate crime,hegemonic masculinity, masculinities, normal-ization, pathology, postmodernism, sexuality

Key ReadingsGroombridge, N. (1999) `Perverse criminologies: the

closet of Doctor Lombroso', Social and LegalStudies, 8 (4), pp. 531±48.

Hart, L. (1994) Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and theMark of Aggression. London, Routledge.

Healy, M. (1996) Gay Skins: Class, Masculinity andQueer Appropriation. London, Cassell.

Seidman, S. (ed.) (1996) Ìntroduction', Queer Theory/Sociology. Oxford, Blackwell.

Stychin, C. (1995) Law's Desire: Sexuality and theLimits of Justice. London, Routledge.

Tomsen, S. (1997) `Was Lombroso a queer? Crimino-logy, criminal justice and the heterosexualimaginary', in G. Mason and S. Tomsen (eds),Homophobic Violence. Sydney, The FederationPress, Australian Institute of Criminology.


R

RACIALIZATION

De®nition

The process by which a particular group, or itscharacteristics or actions, is identi®ed as acollectivity by its real or imagined phenotypi-cal characteristics, or `race'. More broadly, theways in which social structures and ideologiesbecome imbued with `racial' meanings.


The concept of racialization emerges fromhistorical work which shows that the idea of`race' is a social construction that emerged at aparticular time in European history and, sincethen, has been used to refer to divisions of theworld's population in terms of supposedly®xed biological characteristics. In contrast,racialization draws attention to the ways inwhich ideas about `race' have been and areconstructed, maintained and used as a basis forexclusionary practices. In its more generalsense, the concept of racialization refers to cul-tural or political processes or situations where`race' is invoked as an explanation or a means ofunderstanding. Thus, suggestions of distinctlyÌrish', Ìtalian' or `Jewish' forms of criminalactivity and association could be understood asinstances of racialization. A more speci®c usageanalyses the ideological processes throughwhich `race' is given signi®cance.

Examples of racialization in criminologyinclude:

· The role of the media and authorities,such as the police, in de®ning street crimeor `mugging' ± as well as `steaming' and`wilding' ± as activities characteristic ofyoung black men.

· The police's continuing use of racializedstatistics on street crime to mount mediacampaigns against any diminution in theirpowers, such as stop and search.

· Analysis of discourses of `race', crime andnation in which criminality is seen as dis-tinguishing black people of African andCaribbean origins as òther' and as stand-ing outside the boundaries of `Britishness'.

· Accounts of `black crime' and publicdisorders that rely on `culturalist' expla-nations such as a matriarchy, a lack of afather/authority ®gure, or most crudely, asimple disrespect for English traditions ofcivility.

· Racialization within ®elds of social policy± including education, employment andcrime ± that have variously served toconstruct the `problem of black youth'.

· The connections between `race' and placethat underlie police racializations of par-ticular communities and areas (or `sym-bolic locations').

· Racialization and criminalization astwinned processes in the development ofdisciplinary strategies of governance andpolicing.

· The stigmatization of particular black sub-cultural styles.

· The identi®cation and construction ofparticular groups, activities and commod-ities, for example connections betweencrack-cocaine and `yardies' or `posses'.

· Media and police constructions of adistinctively Àsian' criminality.

· Racialization within organizations andoccupational cultures.

· The racialization of `whiteness' throughideas of a white criminal underclass, or`white trash'.

· The demonization of Ìslamic terrorists'.

· Racialization as a process of visualization,through which the beating of Rodney

King by Los Angeles police of®cers, forexample, could be rede®ned as a situationwhere he was seen as endangering thepolice.

Evaluation

Unlike the term race relations, racializationalways highlights the constructed nature of`race'. It shifts the focus of attention away fromblack people to questions about how racializa-tion structures and de®nes social relations.Connections between `race' and, among manyother things, locality, masculinity and sexu-ality could all be developed further. The con-tingent and constructed nature of `race' impliesthat other constructions are possible, thoughthe extent to which some associations endureindicates how deeply rooted racialization is.The multiplicity of racial constructions trans-versing across biology, culture, politics andnationality indicates how ¯exibly racializationcan operate.

Karim Murji

Associated Concepts: criminalization, demoni-zation, essentialism, institutional racism,social constructionism, stereotyping, stigma

Key ReadingsButler, J. (1993) Èndangered/endangering: sche-

matic racism and white paranoia', in R. Gooding-Williams (ed.), Reading Rodney King/Reading UrbanUprising. New York, Routledge.

Gilroy, P. (1987) There Ain't No Black in the UnionJack. London, Hutchinson.

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. andRoberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, TheState and Law and Order. London, Macmillan.

Keith, M. (1993) Race, Riots and Policing: Lore andDisorder in a Multi-racist Society. London, UCLPress.

Solomos, J. (1988) Black Youth, Racism and the State.Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Webster, C. (1997) `The construction of British`̀ Asian'' criminality', International Journal of theSociology of Law, 25, pp. 65±86.

RADICAL CRIMINOLOGIES

De®nition

There is no one radical criminology. The termis used to delineate a series of distinct

theoretical positions whose main commoncharacteristic is one of anti-positivism. Ratherthan viewing crime as determined by indivi-dual or social pathology, radical criminologiesassume humans are active agents in the con-struction of their own biographies. They aremore concerned with discovering the meaningof criminal behaviour than trying to isolatespeci®c causes.

Within the broad classi®cation of `radicalcriminology' there is a diverse range of theor-ies that contest the behavioural questionsposed by positivist criminologies. Crime is tobe found less in particular individual charac-teristics and environmental conditions andmore in relations of power and selectiveprocesses of criminalization. In labelling thisis expressed in terms of a `society' that createsrules. Within Marxism and critical crimino-logy it is expressed in terms of à capitaliststate' that has the power to criminalize thosebehaviours which are deemed `threatening'. Insome feminist perspectives it is expressed inthe social construction of `hegemonic mascu-linities' within patriarchal societies. All suchnotions have shifted the criminological agendaaway from popular ideas about causation.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: critical criminology, fem-inist criminologies, interactionism, labelling,Marxist criminologies, new criminology, newdeviancy theory

RADICAL FEMINISM

De®nition

Radical feminism offers a systematic analysisof the nature of women's oppression, includ-ing the ways it is sustained through law andcriminal justice processes. Its aim is not only tounderstand male dominance and control ofwomen and children, but also to end it. Itde®nes what have been named variously as`violence against women', `sexual violence'and `gender violence' as key elements in thepower relations of patriarchy: that is, themaintenance of male power and control overwomen and children. Sexual violence hasbecome a central concept in radical feministtheory and women throughout the world haveorganized in a variety of ways to highlight,respond to and campaign against it.



· Its central foci are male supremacy, menand masculinity as structured through thepower relations of patriarchy: a universalsocial formation, characteristic of almostall known societies. Its analysis locateswomen's oppression in patriarchy: asystematic expression of male dominationand control over women which permeatesall social and political and economicinstitutions. Patriarchal oppression is con-ceptualized as fundamental and perva-sive. Crossing public and private spheres,it impacts at the level of the state, law,culture and religion and reaches into theintimacy of the home, family and sexu-ality.

· Often conceptualized solely in terms ofgender relations, radical feminism recog-nizes that, based on a familial model ofpower, patriarchy is also de®ned bygenerational gender power relations. Inthe traditional notion of `rule by thefather', its gender dimension facilitatesunderstanding of the power of men overwomen, and its generational element,power hierarchies between men, betweenwomen and over children. The genera-tional dimension of patriarchy furtherprovides a framework for understandingdifference and change through time, atboth societal and individual levels. Thisaccords dynamism to the concept ofpatriarchy, enabling analysis of continu-ity, difference and change through timeand between and within societies.

· Radical feminism is a women-centredtheoretical perspective and political prac-tice constructed by and for women,inspired by the 1970s Women's LiberationMovement. As a politics of resistance,radical feminism, through the notion of`praxis', insists theory and activism areinseparable. As well as theorizing sexualviolence (MacKinnon, 1987; Kelly, 1988), ithas also been at the forefront of activismas demonstrated in England by Women'sAid, the Rape Crisis Federation and cam-paigning groups like Justice for Women.

· Radical feminism is broad based. Within itexists a range of concerns and controver-sies adding to its richness. For example,while most radical feminist analysis holdsa social constructionist position in relationto human nature, there are traces ofbiologistic arguments in early accounts(for example, Firestone's (1970) The Dia-lectic of Sex and Brownmiller's (1975)

Against Our Will). The diversity of radicalfeminism is also illustrated in its range ofconcerns, which include sexuality, health,education, language and the facilitation ofautonomous women's spaces, women-centred culture and women's commu-nities in rural and city areas.

· Through its focus on the victimization ofwomen and children, radical feminismhas signi®cantly impacted on criminology± by exposing the extent of victimizationand by improving the treatment of femalesurvivors of violent relationships and rapeby police and criminal justice processes. Ithas also informed criminology and jur-isprudence through its analysis of law as apatriarchal institution re¯ecting andreproducing male dominance. Man-madelaw is exposed as shaped by male normsand interests and structured around thesituations and circumstances they, ratherthan women, commonly encounter.Through its failure to effectively sanctionmale sexual violence or provide protectionfor women and children, the law acts as aform of male control. MacKinnon (1987)developed the analysis beyond the sub-stance of law to include also its style,form, ritual and language. The law createsan illusion of fairness and impartiality tomask its inherently masculinist nature.

Evaluation

For complicated reasons, ultimately linked toits critique of male power, there are dif®cultiesin the representation of radical feminism. As apolitics of resistance, it is virtually unrecog-nizable in academic accounts, where it is oftenpresented as an American phenomenon, littlechanged since the 1970s. Its critique of hetero-sexuality as an institution predicated uponpatriarchal gender power relations, enforcedby sexual violence and the stigmatization ofalternatives to sexual relationships with men(Rich, 1980), has also led to its being de®nedprimarily in terms of lesbian separatism.

It is frequently claimed that radical femin-ism is based on an ahistorical and universalistmodel of patriarchy. While this may be true ofsome early US radical feminist theory, recentwritings are more nuanced to re¯ect differ-ence, change and historical speci®city (Rad-ford et al., 2000).

Of speci®c relevance to criminology, radicalfeminism has been criticized for constructingwomen as `victims'. This is misplaced. Radicalfeminism rejects the concept of `victim' for

233RADICAL FEMINISM

that of `survivor', while not denying thereality of victimization (Kelly, 1988). Morerecent writings recognize both concepts asproblematic at the level of identity, as both arede®ned by unchosen experiences of violence.Radical feminism accords agency to womenand men. At the individual level it recognizesthat men are responsible for their own actionsand the diversity of resistance, coping andsurvival strategies adopted by women. Thepresence of a vital radical feminist activismagainst male violence further points to thepower of women's agency.

A more dif®cult question relates to radicalfeminist strategies relating to law as a site(albeit one of many) of struggle for change.Radical feminism identi®es law and criminaljustice as patriarchal institutions, complicit inoppression of women and children, andidenti®es sexual violence as a de®ningcharacteristic of patriarchal societies. Yet itcampaigns for changes in law within apatriarchal social order. This may appearcontradictory. However, radical feminismholds that law is too signi®cant an institutionto neglect. For example, tens of thousands ofindividual women by necessity resort to thelaw annually, to make best use of the limitedprotection it offers. Politically, strugglethrough law in campaigns for gender justicecan play a signi®cant awareness-raising role,at times securing some bene®cial change.Nevertheless, radical feminism is not unawareof the limits or ironies of reformism. Whereassociological theory has perceived irresolvabletensions between working for long-termstructural change and short-term reform,more creative approaches to this dilemmahave been explored by radical feminism.Consequently, rather than adopt simplisticreformism, radical feminist strategies havemore in common with a transformativeapproach to law, that is, one that involvesthe transformation of male categories andconcepts to address women's experiences.

Radical feminist interventions in relation toviolence against women are de®nitively one ofthe more successful areas of feminist practice:

At the very least, their efforts have providedsupport for tens of thousands of womenthroughout the world and brought this issueinto the public arena from which it cannot now beremoved. This has provided a vehicle for changewithin institutions of the state as well as withinwider society. Perceptions, discourses and reac-tions have all been challenged. (Dobash andDobash, 1992, p. 298)

Nevertheless, the achievements of radicalfeminism do not represent a non-controversialmodel of linear development or progress.Patriarchy has not been overthrown, violenceagainst women has not been eliminated. Lawand criminal justice systems still fail effec-tively to sanction or prosecute this violence oraccord effective protection to women andchildren victimized. The radical feministproject is not yet concluded.

Jill Radford

Associated Concepts: family crime, hegemonicmasculinity, liberal feminism, violence

Key ReadingsDobash, R.E. and Dobash, R.P. (1992) Rethinking

Violence Against Women. London, Sage.Hester, M., Kelly, L. and Radford, J. (eds) (1996)

Women, Violence and Male Power. Buckingham,Open University Press.

Kelly, L. (1988) Surviving Sexual Violence. Cam-bridge, Polity Press.

MacKinnon, C. (1987) Feminism Unmodi®ed: Dis-courses on Life and Law. Cambridge, MA, HarvardUniversity Press.

Radford, J., Friedberg, M. and Harne, L. (eds) (2000)Women, Violence and Strategies for Action: FeministResearch, Policy and Practice. Buckingham, OpenUniversity Press.

Rich, A. (1980) `Compulsory heterosexuality andlesbian existence', Signs, 5 (4), pp. 631±60.

RADICAL NON-INTERVENTION

De®nition

A criminal justice strategy which advocates aminimalist approach to instances of law-breaking in order to reduce the range anddepth of state intervention. The least amountof criminal justice processing as possible isviewed not only as humanitarian, but aseffective in preventing the development ofcriminal careers. Tolerance is preferred tomoral indignation.


The phrase `radical non-intervention' iswidely attributed to Edwin Schur. It is thelogical policy implication of a labellingapproach to understanding crime anddeviance. If, as labelling theorists suggested,


social reaction does not prevent offending butestablishes deviant identities and careers thenthe reach of reaction should be reduced. Ifstate intervention causes crime and is asigni®cant agency in the creation of thecrime problem, then steps must be taken tolimit its powers. In particular, Schur (1965)argued that a range of `victimless crimes'should be removed from the remit of criminallaw. Drug use, gambling, juvenile statusoffences (truancy, promiscuity), pornographyand so on, it is argued, may be undesirable,but tackling them with the full weight of thelaw is not only expensive, but also generallyineffective. Criminalizing drug users, forinstance, not only creates new classes ofcriminals, but may also drive them tocommit further offences to support theirhabits, encourages the development of orga-nized crime and law enforcement corruptionand redirects resources away from health andtreatment programmes. In short, the removalof many troubling behaviours from criminallaw sanction has the potential to be a highlyeffective measure of crime reduction.

Radical non-intervention (and the labellingapproach in general) grew in popularityduring the 1960s and was in part a re¯ectionof an emergent distrust of institutional inter-vention that developed throughout thatdecade. It has had a profound impact onsocial policy (Empey, 1982). A series ofmeasures ± decriminalization, diversion anddeinstitutionalization ± designed to limit theextent of the state's intrusion into offenders'lives, have been implemented to varyingdegrees and with varying success in mostWestern criminal justice systems.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: decriminalization, diver-sion, labelling, tolerance, victimless crime

Key ReadingsEmpey, La Mar T. (1982) American Delinquency: Its

Meaning and Construction, 2nd edn. Chicago,Dorsey Press.

Schur, E.M. (1965) Crime Without Victims. Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice±Hall.

Schur, E.M. (1974) Radical Non-Intervention: Rethink-ing the Delinquency Problem. Englewood Cliffs, NJ,Prentice±Hall.

RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY

De®nition

The starting point of rational choice theory isthat offenders seek advantage to themselvesby their criminal behaviour. This entailsmaking decisions among alternatives. Thesedecisions are rational within the constraints oftime, ability and the availability of relevantinformation.


Rational choice theory is the perspective onoffender behaviour which underpins situa-tional crime prevention. Ronald V. Clarke isthe leading proponent both of the theory andthe situational prevention approach withwhich it is consistent. Demonstration thatcrime is distributed as if offenders wererational (Mayhew et al., 1976) predated fullpresentation of the theory (Cornish andClarke, 1986) by almost a decade. The Clarkeand Cornish view dealt both with a person'sinitial decision to become involved in crime,and the decisions leading up to a crime, thegeneral decision to commit it having beenmade. The theory has been used more in itssecond area of application, with the `choice-structuring' properties of pre-crime situationsbeing the topic of most research in thistradition. Ways of thinking about choice-structuring properties focus increasingly onòffending scripts'.

Rational choice theory has many similaritieswith routine activity theory. The latter focuseson the necessary conditions for a crime tooccur, namely the convergence in time andplace of a motivated offender and a suitablevictim in the absence of a capable guardian(Felson, 1997). The two perspectives hold incommon a focus on the crime event. They areboth concerned with how the press ofcircumstances shapes individual acts (rationalchoice) or acts of a particular class (routineactivities). Rational choice theory appears tomake no differential predictions that wouldallow a critical test against routine activity.Routine activity theory supposes that, in theaggregate, trends will look as if there were(limited) rationality at the individual level.What rational choice theory adds is twofold.First, a more precise exploration of whatcounts in people's heads as capable guardian-ship and victim suitability. And second,offender-speci®c departures from presumptive

235RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY

rationality, and thereby a theoretical platformfor offender pro®ling.

Since Ron Clarke and Marcus Felson arenow frequent collaborators, we may see thetheories being consolidated. Indeed, the pro-cess has already begun and their collaborationis increasingly concerned with ethical issues incrime control (Clarke and Felson, 1993). Themore explicit application of rational choicetheory to the practice of offender pro®lingwould almost certainly prove fruitful.

Evaluation

Rational choice theory frees us from consider-ing pathologies of offender motivation. Itshould ®nd favour with many of thoseopposed to the demonizing of offenders as`different'. It enables rationality to be appliedto the design, distribution and maintenance ofproducts and services to limit their vulner-ability to crime (the essence of situationalprevention), because the behaviour of rationaloffenders is predictable by other rationalpeople in possession of the same information.One effect has been research in whichoffenders are questioned about their precau-tions and methods while offending, researchwhich has proved remarkably fruitful.

It has been suggested (Trasler, 1993) thatrational choice theory is more applicable tocrime for gain than to èxpressive' crime.Arguably the theory is also liable to criticismon grounds of circularity, in that the choice-structuring properties nominated by offendersare deemed rational in the absence of preciseawareness of situations in which there mayhave been less risky and more pro®tablealternatives to hand. Thus, from a distanceand without any counter-evidence, rationalityis inferred wrongly. No such attack has yetbeen mounted in print.

Ken Pease

Associated Concepts: administrative crimino-logy, neo-conservative criminology, opportu-nity theory, routine activity theory, situationalcrime prevention

Key ReadingsClarke, R.V. and Felson, M. (eds) (1993) Routine

Activity and Rational Choice. London, Transaction.Cornish, D. (1994) `The procedural analysis of

offending and its relevance to situational preven-tion', in R.V. Clarke (ed.), Crime Prevention Studies3, Monsey, NY, Criminal Justice Press.

Cornish, D. and Clarke, R.V. (eds) (1986) The

Reasoning Criminal: Rational Choice Perspectives onOffending. New York, Springer-Verlag.

Felson, M. (1997) Crime and Everyday Life, 2nd edn.Thousand Oaks, CA, Pine Forge Press.

Mayhew, P.M., Clarke, R.V., Sturman, A. andHough, J.M. (eds) (1976) Crime as Opportunity.Home Of®ce Research Study No. 34. London,HMSO.

Trasler, G. (1993) `Conscience, opportunity, rationalchoice and crime', in R.V. Clarke and M. Felson(eds), Advances in Criminological Theory. NewBrunswick, NJ, Transaction.

REALIST CRIMINOLOGIES

De®nition

In contemporary criminology realist theoriz-ing is most closely associated with therejection of utopian solutions to crime andthe advocacy of pragmatic policies to pursuecrime reduction. It originally surfaced as aright-wing critique of sociological positivismand radical criminologies in the USA in themid-1970s which maintained that it wasfruitless to search for the causes of crime andthat sole attention be returned to designingeffective measures of crime control. A left-wing variant subsequently developed inBritain in the mid 1980s in order to formulatesocial democratic policies that would bothtake crime seriously and implement accoun-table programmes of crime control. Realistcriminologies, of whatever ideological persua-sion, are primarily concerned with developingresponses to a perceived intensity in thepublic's fear of crime, notably of street crime,violence and burglary.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: administrative crimino-logy, crime prevention, deterrence, fear ofcrime, left idealism, left realism, neo-conser-vative criminology, relative deprivation

RECIDIVISM

De®nition

Recidivism is concerned with the reconvictionrates of offenders released from custody.


Recidivist rates are generally used to testwhether a term of imprisonment can reducefuture re-offending; whether different pro-grammes undertaken within prison contributetowards re-offending; or whether other formsof community-based punishment are moreeffective at reducing further re-offending.


The most typical form of recidivist ratemeasures the proportion of offenders whohave been re-convicted within a two-yearperiod following release. However, this mea-sure has to be used with some caution, as forexample, it will re¯ect only those offences thathave been reported, recorded and successfullyprosecuted. Figures from a variety of criminaljustice systems demonstrate that being sent toprison is likely to be related to future re-offending. For example, Prison Statistics ±England and Wales, 1997 (Home Of®ce, 1998, p.156), reveals that of all the prisoners who weredischarged in 1994, 56 per cent were re-convicted within two years. This ®gure can befurther broken down to demonstrate thatwomen showed the lowest rate of re-convic-tion, with 46 per cent re-convicted within twoyears, whereas young offenders had thehighest rates of re-conviction, with 75 percent re-convicted within a two-year period.

The high rates of re-conviction of youngoffenders sent to prison were given formalrecognition by a government Green Paper inEngland and Wales ± Punishment, Custody andthe Community, which stated that with regardto young offenders even a short period ofcustody was likely to con®rm them as`criminals', particularly if they acquired newcriminal skills from more sophisticated offen-ders. They see themselves labeled as criminalsand are likely to behave accordingly (HomeOf®ce, 1988, para. 2.15).

Recidivist rates have thus also been used toaf®rm Robert Martinson's originally ratherpessimistic analysis of the effectiveness oftreatment programmes for the rehabilitation ofoffenders. Despite Martinson himself re-asses-sing his evidence more favourably, theanalysis gave rise to the infamous view that`nothing works' in terms of treatment pro-grammes within prisons.

None the less, whilst it is clear that prisonsstigmatize rather than re-socialize offenders,attempts have also to be made to preventprison further de-socializing offenders, andtherefore to provide opportunities in prisonfor education, work and to accept self-

responsibility. As a consequence, promptedby research in Canada into the impact of`cognitive skills' training on recidivist rates, anew debate has begun to consider `whatworks' in a penal setting (Correctional Serviceof Canada, 1996). Research into `what works'in reducing further offending would suggestthat the following principles apply.

· That the greater the seriousness of theoffending and risk of re-offending themore intensive and extensive any treat-ment programme should be.

· That any programme should target theneeds of offenders which are directlyrelated to their offending.

· That programmes that encourage theparticipation of the offenders are moreeffective.

· That once a programme has been started itshould be completed as planned, and theresults evaluated.

This has meant that speci®c programmeshave been introduced into a variety of penalsettings to help offenders overcome problemswith, for example, drugs and alcohol, or toimprove their educational or social skills.These interventions can be taken further, andare sometimes targeted at speci®c types ofoffenders, and in England and Wales, forexample, a speci®c programme has beenintroduced to deal with sex offenders (HomeOf®ce, 1996). Great claims are made for someof these programmes, and a Home Of®ceresearch study, entitled Reducing Reoffending,suggests that `larger percentage point reduc-tions in recidivism (typically around 20 percent of points lower than control groups) havebeen reported' (Goldblatt and Lewis, 1998).However, of late, concerns have beenexpressed as to whether forcing prisoners toengage in treatment programmes presentsother ethical problems.

More promisingly, research into the ef®cacyof HMP Grendon in England, which acceptsonly volunteers and operates as a therapeuticcommunity, has also recently indicated suc-cess in relation to recidivist rates (Marshall,1997). This research suggests that reconvictionrates for those prisoners who stayed at HMPGrendon for at least 18 months were lower byas much as one-®fth to one-quarter, based on aprediction of the likely number of futureoffences which would have been committedby the group under consideration had they notgone to HMP Grendon. This predictive use ofrecidivist rates is becoming increasinglycommon.

237RECIDIVISM

Whilst most ®gures demonstrate that goingto prison is likely to be related to futureoffending, they also demonstrate that non-custodial sanctions ± whilst substantiallycheaper ± are not much better at reducingthe likelihood of future re-offending (cf.Kershaw et al., 1999). What this suggests isthat sentencing decisions, whether that deci-sion is to incarcerate or punish in thecommunity, have little to do with those factorsthat in¯uence offending behaviour.

Evaluation

Recidivism is clearly related to being sent toprison. Except in certain circumstances prisonstigmatizes rather than rehabilitates, and assuch any sentencing decision should be basedon factors other than the possible bene®cialconsequences of a period of imprisonment.Some positive interventions can be offered toprisoners who have been incarcerated. Thekey word here is òffered', and ethicalconsiderations such as the desirability offorcing prisoners to engage in treatment by,for example, making treatment a condition ofearly release, which have rarely featured in the`What Works?' debate, should be more clearlyacknowledged.

David Wilson

Associated Concepts: evaluation research, incar-ceration, prediction studies, rehabilitation,reparation

Key ReadingsCorrectional Service of Canada (1996) The Impact of

Cognitive Skills Training on Post Release Supervisionamong Canadian Federal Offenders. Ottawa, Correc-tional Service of Canada.

Goldblatt, P. and Lewis, C. (eds) (1998) ReducingReoffending. London, Home Of®ce Research StudyNo. 187.

Home Of®ce (1988) Punishment, Custody and theCommunity. London, HMSO, cm 424.

Home Of®ce (1998) Prison Statistics ± England andWales, 1997. London, HMSO, cm 4017.

Kershaw, C., Goodman, J. and White, S. (1999)Reconviction of Offenders Sentenced or Released fromPrison in 1995. Home Of®ce Research FindingsNo. 101. London, HMSO.

Marshall, P. (1997) A Reconviction Study of HMPGrendon Therapeutic Community. Home Of®ceResearch Findings No. 53. London, HMSO.

REDRESS

De®nition

According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary,`redress' can mean: to put right or in goodorder again, to remedy or remove trouble ofany kind, to set right, repair, rectify somethingsuffered or complained of like a wrong, tocorrect, amend, reform or do away with a bador faulty state of things, to repair an action, toatone a misdeed or offence, to save, deliverfrom misery, to restore or bring back a personto a proper state, to happiness or prosperity, tothe right course, to set a person right byobtaining or (more rarely) giving satisfactionor compensation for the wrong or losssustained, teaching, instructing and redressingthe erroneous by reason (Sixth Edition, 1976,p. 937).


This seemingly òbsolete' concept carries anelaborate set of different meanings which iswhy the notion of `redress' provides such auseful alternative to the key concepts of both`punishment' and `crime'. Traditional crimin-ological discourse and, more speci®cally,deterrence theory support the myth of adirect causal relationship between crime andpunishment. The complex notion of `redress'offers a perspective in which problematicevents, normally calling forth punitive inter-vention by the criminal justice system, are notautomatically subsumed under universalisticcategories, but rather established through aprocess of understanding and creativeresponse. As such, the notion of `redress' canbe seen as part of a more comprehensive`replacement discourse' `that begins thedeconstruction of crime and crime control,the correction of corrections and the ultimatecriminal justice policy that denies itself '(Henry and Milovanovic, 1994, p. 130).

Evaluation

Advantages of the notion of `redress' are,brie¯y:

· It includes almost every conceivablereaction to an event ± individual, collec-tive ± which causes material or immaterialharm.


· It implies that response is mandatory,without pre-de®ning the event as a crime,an illness, or whatever.

· It invites analysis of the event beforedeciding or choosing a proper response.

· As a concept with ancient origins, itinvokes the consideration of historicaland anthropological forms of disputesettlement and con¯ict resolution forpossible clues to rational forms ofresponse.

To claim redress is merely to assert that anundesirable event has taken place and thatsomething needs to be done about it. It carriesno implications concerning what sort ofreaction would be appropriate; nor does itde®ne re¯exively the nature of the initialevent. Since it invites an open discussionabout how an unfortunate event should beviewed and what the appropriate responseought to be, it can be viewed as a rationalresponse par excellence. It puts forth the claimfor a procedure rather than for a speci®cresult. Punitive claims already implied inde®ning an event as a `crime' are opened up torational debate. Thus, to advocate `redress' isto call for `real dialogue' (Christie, 1982) atevery level of `crime' control proceedings.

In this way, the notion of `redress' is putforth in order to reconceptualize the familiarconcepts of `crime' and `punishment' andgenerate a critical and constructive alternativeto the politics of crime, punishment and penalreform. It is an approach which is ambitiousand modest at the same time. The politics of`redress' tries to combine principles ofgeneralizability and universality with thoseof contextuality, solidarity and care ± not as ablueprint, but as a perspective and a commit-ment, enabling criminology to liberate itselffrom the punitive logic of exclusion.

Willem de Haan

Associated Concepts: abolitionism, constitutivecriminology, peacemaking criminology,restorative justice, shaming

Key ReadingsChristie, N. (1982) Limits to Pain. Oxford, Martin

Robertson.de Haan, W. (1990) The Politics of Redress. Crime,

Punishment and Penal Abolition. London, UnwinHyman.

Henry, S. and Milovanovic, D. (1994) `The constitu-tion of constitutive criminology: a postmodernapproach to criminological theory', in D. Nelken

(ed.), The Futures of Criminology. London, Sage,pp. 110±33.

Van Swaaningen, R. (1997) Critical Criminology.Visions from Europe. London, Sage.

REFLEXIVITY

De®nition

The process of monitoring and re¯ecting on allaspects of a research project from theformulation of research ideas through to thepublication of ®ndings and, where this occurs,their utilization. Sometimes the product ofsuch monitoring and re¯ection is a re¯exiveaccount which is published as part of theresearch report.


Although important in all areas of socialresearch, re¯exivity has an especial role inethnography in which the investigator is closeto the subjects and to the data. What is more,the whole process of formulating ideas,collecting observations, analysing and reachingconclusions is part of the role of the investigatorvis-aÁ-vis those who are the objects of enquiry. Itis for this reason that ethnographers seere¯exivity as part of research in its own rightand not as a collection of afterthoughts on howa project has been accomplished.

At one level, a re¯exive account will bedescriptive in terms of providing an accountof, for example, how interviews were carriedout, what methods of recording data wereused and so on. However, at another ± muchmore important ± level a re¯exive accountshould be evaluative in terms of providingsome assessment of the likely validity of theconclusions that have been reached. Thismight, for example, involve a considerationof whether respondents selected for intervieware typical of the group about which conclu-sions are to be made; whether there is apossibility that responses to questions werethe outcome of exaggeration or even down-right falsi®cation; and whether the method ofrecording data resulted in only a partial oreven distorted, account of reality. These arewhat are known as `threats to validity'. Aresearcher may not be able to anticipate andrule these out. However, s/he should beaware of them and provide some assessmentof their potential effects on the validity of

239REFLEXIVITY

conclusions. At a minimum, the expectation isthat the researcher will provide suf®cientdetail about the research process ± and deci-sions taken within it ± to allow the reader tomake some judgement by him/herself.

Ethnographic research on criminal subcul-tures has produced some classic and colourfulre¯exive accounts of `how it was done'. Theseinclude William Foote Whyte's account ofStreet Corner Society, Clifford Shaw's lifehistory of The Jack Roller and Karl Klockars'interviews with The Professional Fence. To takethe latter as one example, Klockars describeshow he used different data sources ± such asletters, newspaper articles, bills, sales receiptsand stock certi®cates ± with which to trian-gulate his conclusions and thereby improvetheir validity.

On occasions re¯exivity involves not justmonitoring and assessing validity (to whatextent are conclusions credible and plausible?)but also questions of ethics (has anyone beenharmed by the research?) and questions ofpolitics (whose side am I on, if any?). Validity,ethics and politics can impact one on another.For example, a decision not to publish inter-view material collected from corrupt police-men, for fear of exposing them, will not resultin a full and valid account of the realities ofpolice subcultures. Therefore, re¯exivity ofteninvolves the researcher in reaching a personalstandpoint in relation to trade-offs that oftenhave to be made between validity, politics andethics.

Evaluation

Re¯exivity is concerned with the socialproduction of knowledge. It involves re¯ect-ing on the various social roles, interactionsand processes which resulted in the kinds ofobservations and conclusions that emerged. Itis possible to consider re¯exivity in a sensewider than that of monitoring and assessingthe validity of a particular research project.This wider perspective involves viewingcritical re¯ection as a form of research in itsown right, and as part of the school of criticalthinking and theorizing in the social sciencesin general. A critical research agenda couldinclude a consideration of why particular (say,punitive) law and order discourses take theform that they do and come to be accepted as`truth' when they do. What is more, it couldconsider the role of criminological research inthe production and dissemination of such`truths'. This would involve re¯ecting on thecriminological enterprise as a whole and

asking the questions what gets studied,when, by whom, what gets published, andwith what effect?

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: appreciative criminology,Chicago School of Sociology, critical research,ethnography, participant observation, triangu-lation

Key ReadingsHughes, G. (2000) `The politics of criminological

research', in V. Jupp, P. Davies and P. Francis(eds), Doing Criminological Research. London, Sage.

Jupp, V.R. (1996) Methods of Criminological Research.London, Routledge.

Klockars, C.B. (1974) The Professional Fence. London,Tavistock.


Whyte, W.F. (1943) Street Corner Society (2nd edn1955). Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

REGULATION

See Governmentality

REGULATORY AGENCIES

De®nition

The determination of bodies of law and theestablishment of some agency, usually a stateagency, for enforcing and overseeing compli-ance with such laws.


While social scienti®c concern with regulationis long-standing ± the ®rst regulatory agency(the British factory inspectorate) was docu-mented by Marx in Capital ± this becameprominent in the USA in the so-calledProgressive Era of 1900±16, and then againduring the New Deal of the 1930s, as part of ageneral concern with the activities of `bigbusiness'. Bernstein's (1955) path-breakingwork on regulation constituted a searingcritique of the contemporary state of regula-tory enforcement, and set out a `CaptureTheory' of regulation, positing that regulatory


agencies are not able to maintain themselvesas representatives of `public interest'; even ifthis is why they are formed, an inevitable life-cycle of enthusiasm, the provocation ofreaction from the regulated, and the demiseof original agency zeal, ensure that theinterests of some generalized public becomesubsumed to the demands of a regulatedindustry (Bernstein, 1955). Such a view ofregulation continues to have some force. Forsome (instrumental) Marxists, a regulatoryagency is subordinated to a state which isitself simply an instrument of capital or aruling class; for some neo-liberal thinkers,regulatory agencies are inevitably captured byorganized interests to distort `free' markets.The common feature of these (different)perspectives is that regulatory agencies oper-ate in a biased fashion. Capture Theory hasbeen challenged by other Marxists and somecritical criminologists who argue that regula-tion is the outcome of class con¯ict andcompromise; the role of regulatory agencies isthus to mediate con¯icts between competingclass interests as part of the process ofmaintaining hegemonic domination.

In the 1970s, studies of the enforcement ofnew social regulation ± for example, aroundoccupational safety and health and environ-mental legislation ± began to emerge invarious nation-states, though particularly inthe USA. Simultaneously, the new socialregulation also prompted (largely neo-liberal)critics to call for the removal of these laws andthe bodies designed to enforce them. Theselatter deregulatory arguments have assumedincreasing importance across advanced capi-talist economies ± albeit variably ± in the pastquarter of a century. The dominant strand inregulatory concern within and around crimi-nology has contributed to this `debate'between regulation and deregulation, focusingin particular upon the issue of enforcement;that is, how do and how should regulatoryagencies enforce law?

The distinction between compliance-oriented and punitive modes of enforcementis a key one within the literature on regulatoryenforcement. While the aim of the latter is saidto be to apply a punishment for breaking a ruleand doing harm, the goal of a compliancestrategy is to prevent a harm rather than punishan evil. Enforcers advise, educate, bargain,negotiate and compromise with the regulated.Whilst there are, of course, important nationaldifferences in enforcement strategies, and inenforcement strategies across different spheresof business activity (for example, ®nancialregulation has generally been stricter than that

pertaining to occupational health and safety), itis fair to say that compliance-oriented enforce-ment techniques dominate (Pearce and Tombs,1998, pp. 229±45). There now exist a mass ofstudies ± mostly nationally based, though withsome useful cross-national comparative studiesalso ± regarding the practices of a whole rangeof regulatory bodies. In general, non-enforce-ment is the most frequently found character-istic. Enforcement activity tends to focus uponthe smallest and weakest individuals andorganizations, and sanctions following regula-tory activity are light (Snider, 1993, pp. 120±4).Hutter has recently pointed to a body ofevidence from Australia, Britain, the Nether-lands, Sweden, and the USA, indicating thatregulators increasingly favour compliance-based methods, an emerging preferencewhich extends to ®nancial regulation andcertain areas of `conventional' policing(Hutter, 1997, p. 243).

Evaluation

Much work on regulation not only documentsa compliance-oriented approach as that whichregulators adopt, but tends to endorse (someversion of ) this as the most appropriateenforcement approach (Pearce and Tombs,1998, pp. 223±46). This endorsement is basedupon a combination of a recognition of thepower of business vis-aÁ-vis regulators, andthus a concern not to provoke counter-productive tendencies through punitive enfor-cement, and also the claim that businessoffences call for different forms of regulationthan other kinds of law breaking, a viewreducible to the claim that business crime isnot real crime, differing substantially from`conventional' crime.

Linked to such claims are argumentsaround the potential of (enforced) self-regula-tion, a form of enforcement where the onus forcompliance with the law is placed upon theregulated themselves, but distinct from dereg-ulation, the latter term usually referring to theremoval of laws designed to regulate thecorporation. Increasingly allied to argumentsaround enforced self-regulation are claimsregarding the utility of `goal-oriented' (re¯ex-ive) over prescriptive (command and control)legislation. While the latter is said to specifythe means of securing compliance, the formerentails an agency negotiating `the substantiveregulatory goal with industry, leaving theindustry discretion and responsibility of howto achieve this goal' (Ayres and Braithwaite,1992, p. 38).

241REGULATORY AGENCIES

Regulation raises an enormous range ofcomplex issues which go to the core of debatesabout the nature and role of law, corporations,contemporary economies and states. Currentdebates around the need or otherwise forinternational regulatory structures seem tobecome more pressing given the increasingmomentum of claims regarding the demiseof the nation-state, the internationalization ofbusiness activity, and the proliferation ofsocial harms associated with these processes.


Associated Concepts: criminalization, corporatecrime, deterrence, extraterritorial law enforce-ment, self-policing, social harm, the state,transnational policing, white collar crime

Key ReadingsAyres, I. and Braithwaite, J. (1992) Responsive

Regulation. Transcending the Deregulation Debate.Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Baldwin, R., Scott, C. and Hood, R. (eds) (1998) AReader on Regulation. Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress.

Bernstein, B.H. (1955) Regulating Business by Inde-pendent Commission. Princeton, NJ, PrincetonUniversity Press.

Hutter, B. (1997) Compliance: Regulation and theEnvironment. Oxford, The Clarendon Press.

Pearce, F. and Tombs, S. (1998) Toxic Capitalism:Corporate Crime and the Chemical Industry. Alder-shot, Dartmouth.

Snider, L. (1993) Bad Business. Corporate Crime inCanada. Toronto, University of Toronto Press.

REHABILITATION

De®nition

The rehabilitation model takes the stance thatcrime is best prevented by addressing directlythe factors ± economic, social, or personal ±believed to be the cause of crime. The treat-ment model is a special case of the rehabilita-tion model in that it seeks to work directlywith the individual offender in order to bringabout a reduction in offending.


The basis of the rehabilitation model is that ifthe factors that bring about crime can beaddressed then it is possible to reduce crime.

For example, it is clear from the researchliterature that there is an association betweenunemployment and crime. A rehabilitativesolution would therefore attempt to enhancethe prospects of offenders gaining employ-ment. This aim might be achieved throughlegislation, or through working with employ-ers, or through working with offenders to givethem skills suited to the job market. Similarly,poor educational achievement is anotherfactor associated with crime. A rehabilitativesolution might be to improve school condi-tions and so raise educational standards, or tohave educational schemes speci®cally aimedat offenders. As Cullen and Gilbert (1982)note, the rehabilitative ideal stands directlyopposed to ever-escalating levels of punish-ment as a response to crime. The ethos ofrehabilitation holds that not all members ofsociety are equal and that when crime arisesfrom that inequality the constructive responseis to redress that inequality. Some agencieswithin the criminal justice system, such as theprobation service, have historically had therehabilitative ideal as their driving force. Inother cases it is voluntary agencies, such as theNational Association for the Care and Reset-tlement of Offenders (NACRO), that seek toput rehabilitation into effect.

The treatment model is a special case of therehabilitative model in that is has as its focusthe individual offender. Historically, thedevelopment of psychological theories ofcriminal behaviour led to attempts to turntheory into practice. As new treatmentmethods followed theoretical advances, so arange of therapeutic approaches began to beapplied to work with offenders. The earliesttreatments aimed at offenders worked withina psychoanalytic tradition. For example,August Aichhorn (1925/1955) articulated apsychoanalytic formulation within whichdelinquent behaviour was seen as the productof a failure in psychological development;from this position Aichhorn developed ther-apeutic methods to work with young offen-ders. From the 1930s through to the 1970s,treatment with offenders was dominated bypsychodynamic theory and practice, withcounselling and group therapy being particu-larly popular. Educational programmes werealso widespread during that period: a trendthat is still evident today. While treatmentwithin a psychodynamic tradition continues,the decades since the 1970s have seen a rise intreatment programmes based on behaviouraland cognitive-behavioural theory.

Jeffery (1960) notes, there are three assump-tions inherent within a rehabilitation, and


particularly a treatment, philosophy: determin-ism, differentiation and pathology. Each of theseassumptions sets advocates of rehabilitation inpotential con¯ict with a criminal justicesystem that is built on principles of individualresponsibility.

First, determinism maintains that factorsoutside of the individual's control ± biological,psychological, social, or a combination of allthree ± bring about the individual's beha-viour. Secondly, the logical conclusion from adeterministic position is that criminals must,in some way, be different from non-criminals.The origin of this differentiation may bebiological, psychological, or social, but itremains the case that criminals are differentfrom those who are not criminals. Thirdly, thenotion of pathology, the logical step fromdifferentiation, is that the difference betweencriminals and non-criminals is one of abnorm-ality. The cause of the abnormality may beindividual to the offender (biological orpsychological) or social through learningfrom an abnormal environment.

As a net result, we arrive at a position inwhich the offender is portrayed as a victim ofcircumstance, with some level of individual orsocial `wrongness' or abnormality as the rootcause of their behaviour. There are caseswhere the legal system makes due allowances,as for example with mentally disorderedoffenders, but in the main determinism,differentiation and pathology stand in directcon¯ict with a justice system based on thenotions of free will and individual agency inmaking choices. A deterministic position, inwhich the individual is compelled to offend byforces beyond their control, is not in accordwith the classical concept of rational hedonismas the basis for dispensing justice.

During the 1970s and 1980s the rehabilita-tive ideal fell heavily from favour as thenotion that `nothing works' gathered momen-tum. However, the 1990s saw a remarkableresurrection of rehabilitation, certainly inCanada and Britain and also in parts of theUSA. The return to grace of rehabilitationwithin the criminal justice system can bedirectly traced to the impact of a string ofmeta-analytic studies of the effects of offendertreatment (see for example Redondo et al.,1999). The message that emerged from thesestudies was that treatment with offenders canhave a small but signi®cant effect in terms ofreducing re-offending. Further, when certaintreatment factors are combined, the meta-analyses suggest that this small effect can beampli®ed. This research gave rise to the move-ment known as `What Works?' (McGuire,

1995). Current concern is with the design,implementation and evaluation of `highimpact' treatment characteristics of pro-grammes for offenders. While practical suc-cess might be achievable, there remains theissue of rethinking the conceptual assump-tions of determinism, differentiation andpathology (Hollin, 1999).

Clive Hollin

Associated Concepts: behaviour modi®cation,conditioning, determinism, pathology, positi-vism, probation, social learning theory

Key ReadingsAichhorn, A. (1955) Wayward Youth (trans.). New

York, Meridian Books. (Originally published1925.)

Cullen, F. and Gilbert, K. (1982) Reaf®rmingRehabilitation. Cincinnati, OH, Anderson Publish-ing.

Hollin, C.R. (1999) `Treatment programmes foroffenders: meta-analysis, `̀ what works'', andbeyond', International Journal of Psychiatry andLaw, 22, pp. 361±72.

Jeffery, C.R. (1960) `The historical development ofcriminology', in H. Mannheim (ed.), Pioneers inCriminology. London, Stevens.

McGuire, J. (ed.) (1995) What Works?: ReducingReoffending. Chichester, Wiley.

Redondo, S., SaÂnchez-Meca, J. and Garrido, V. (1999)`The in¯uence of treatment programmes on therecidivism of juvenile and adult offenders: aEuropean meta-analytic review', Psychology,Crime and Law, 5, pp. 251±78.

REINTEGRATIVE SHAMING

See Shaming

RELATIVE DEPRIVATION

De®nition

A concept, latterly most associated with leftrealism, by which it is maintained that it is notnecessarily absolute deprivation or povertythat causes crime but discontent arising fromperceptions of disadvantage and injustice.

243RELATIVE DEPRIVATION


First coined by Sam Stouffer and his associatesin their wartime study The American Soldier(1949), relative deprivation was rigorouslyformulated by W.G. Runciman in 1966. Its usein criminology was not until the 1980s, bytheorists such as S. Stack, John Braithwaiteand particularly the left realists, for whom it isa key concept. Its attraction as an explanatoryvariable in the postwar period lies in the riseof crime in the majority of industrial societiesdespite the increase in living standards: that is,where material deprivation in an absolutesense declined and the old equation of `themore poverty the more crime' was clearlyfalsi®ed.

Relative deprivation occurs where indivi-duals or groups subjectively perceive them-selves as unfairly disadvantaged over othersperceived as having similar attributes anddeserving similar rewards (their referencegroups). It is in contrast with absolute depri-vation, where biological health is impaired orwhere relative levels of wealth are comparedbased on objective differences ± although it isoften confused with the latter. Subjectiveexperiences of deprivation are essential and,indeed, relative deprivation is more likelywhen the differences between two groupsnarrow so that comparisons can more easilybe made, than where there are caste-likedifferences. The discontent arising fromrelative deprivation has been used to explainradical politics (whether of the left or theright), messianic religions, the rise of socialmovements, industrial disputes and the wholeplethora of crime and deviance.

The usual distinction made is that religiousfervour or demand for political change are acollective response to relative deprivationwhereas crime is an individualistic response.But this is certainly not true of many crimes ±for example, smuggling, poaching or terrorism± which have a collective nature and acommunal base and does not even allow forgang delinquency, which is clearly a collectiveresponse. The connection is, therefore, largelyunder-theorized ± a re¯ection of the separatedevelopment of the concept within theseemingly discrete disciplines of sociology ofreligion, political sociology and criminology.

The use of relative deprivation in crimino-logy is often con¯ated with Merton's anomietheory of crime and deviance and its devel-opment in subcultural theory by Cloward andOhlin. There are discernible, although largelyunexplored, parallels. Anomie theory involvesa disparity between culturally induced aspira-

tions (for example, success in terms of theAmerican Dream) and the opportunities torealize them. The parallel is clear: this is asubjective process wherein discontent istransmuted into crime. Furthermore, Merton,in his classic 1938 article Social Structure andAnomie, clearly understands the relativenature of discontent by explicitly criticizingtheories that link absolute deprivation tocrime by pointing to poor countries with lowcrime rates in contrast to the wealthy USAwith a comparatively high rate. But there areclear differences. In particular, Mertoniananomie involves an inability to realize cultu-rally induced notions of success. It does notinvolve comparisons between groups butindividuals measuring themselves against ageneral goal. The fact that Merton, the majortheorist of reference groups, did not fuse thiswith his theory of anomie is, as Runcimannotes, very strange but probably re¯ects theparticular American concern with `winners'and `losers' and the individualism of thatculture. The empirical implications of thisdifference in emphasis are, however, signi®-cant: anomie theory would naturally predictthe vast majority of crime to occur at thebottom of society amongst the `losers', butrelative deprivation theory does not necessa-rily have this overwhelming class focus.Discontent can be felt anywhere in the classstructure where people perceive their rewardsas unfair compared to those with similarattributes. Thus crime would be more wide-spread, although it would be conceded thatdiscontent would be greatest amongst thesocially excluded.

Evaluation

The future integration of anomie and relativedeprivation theory offers great promise in thatrelative deprivation offers a much morewidespread notion of discontent. Its emphasison subjectivity insures against the tendencywithin anomie theory of merely measuringobjective differences in equality (so called`strain' theory). Anomie theory, on its part,offers a wider structural perspective in termsof the crucial role of differential opportunitystructures and ®rmly locates the dynamic ofdeprivation within capitalist society as awhole.

Jock Young

Associated Concepts: anomie, left realism, straintheory, subculture


Key ReadingsBox, S. (1987) Recession, Crime and Punishment.

London, Macmillan.Lea, J. and Young, J. (1993) What is to be Done About

Law and Order? London, Pluto.Runciman, W.G. (1966) Relative Deprivation and Social

Justice. London, Routledge.Stouffer, S.A. (1949) The American Soldier. Princeton,

Princeton University Press.Young, J. (1999) The Exclusive Society. London, Sage.

REPARATION

De®nition

Actions that aim to repair the damage causedby crime. These can include restitution to thevictim.


Although the terms `reparation' and `restitu-tion' are often used interchangeably, adistinction can be drawn between them.Restitution implies the restoration of goodsor monetary compensation for loss or injury tothe victim. Reparation has the wider aims ofrecognition of the social rights of victims andrepairing the social damage caused by crime,in which restitution may play a part.

Principles of reparation and restitutionemphasize the right of victims to obtainredress for the loss or harm they havesuffered. Modern Western criminal justicesystems, by contrast, give primacy to the pun-ishment of offenders in the general interest,re¯ecting principles of retribution (the offen-der should pay a debt to society) or theprevention of future crime. The rights ofvictims to seek redress have become, at best,marginal in the course of what Christie (1977)famously described as the `theft' by the stateof con¯icts between victims and offenders.

More recognition of the rights of victims hasbeen a feature of criminal justice systems inrecent decades, largely as a result of thegrowth of social movements to promotevictims' interests. One manifestation of thishas been a widening of the powers of courts toorder offenders to make some form of resti-tution (compensation orders) to the victim,either in addition to punishment or as analternative to it. One of several problems withthese schemes (Ashworth, 1986) is that com-pensation of this type is analogous to civil

damages and thus lacks penal value: that is,payment of compensation does not necessarilymeet other penal aims (such as the preventionof future crime). Moreover, the use of suchorders by the criminal courts means thatcompensation for individual victims becomesdependent upon the particular offender beingcaught and convicted and being willing andable to pay. State compensation schemes,which have been established in several juris-dictions, may give better assurance of com-pensation to victims (although eligibility andlevels of payment are often restricted), but,since they require nothing from the offender,they cannot meet either the traditional aims ofpunishment or the broader aims of restoration.Advocates of the restitution and reparationprinciple often argue that state compensationprovision is necessary as a back-up, but thatrestitution should come from the offenderwherever possible

The idea of reparation (and restitution in itswider sense) implies more than the provisionof compensation for victims. Repairing thesocial damage of crime requires that offendersshould acknowledge the wrongfulness of theiractions. Part of this involves making amendsto the victim (through monetary compensationor, especially in the case of poor offenders, theperformance of some service) and/or thecommunity (for example, through communityservice, especially when there is no identi®-able victim). It also entails the active participa-tion of both victim and offender in the process,giving both a chance to explain their positionand to resolve their own con¯ict. Since formalcourt procedures do not allow these voices fullexpression, particularly that of the victim,informal justice procedures, particularly med-iation, are seen as appropriate. The purpose isto address the full impact of crime on thevictim (for example, increased fear) and toidentify a way in which the offender can dosomething positive for them. Realization of theharm caused and the making of positiveamends may also facilitate the social re-integration of the offender.

Evaluation

Principles of reparation and restitution haveassumed greater importance in recent years, asshown by the growth of state-sponsoredcompensation, compensation ordered by crim-inal courts and of victim±offender mediationschemes at pre-prosecution, pre-sentence andpost-sentence stages of the criminal justiceprocess. However, traditional principles of

245REPARATION

punishment remain dominant. From somecritical penological perspectives (notably abo-litionism but also other communitarian the-ories such as `re-integrative shaming'), it isseen as desirable that reparation, rather thanpunishment, should become the organizingprinciple of justice: reparative or restorativejustice. Other commentators, whilst recogniz-ing the importance of addressing the rightsand needs of victims, have noted variousproblems with reparative justice. These focusupon the issue of whether reparation involvesadequate recognition of the harms to thewider community and whether it has ade-quate `penal value' to control crime.

Maggie Sumner

Associated Concepts: abolitionism, communitar-ianism, informal justice, redress, restorativejustice, shaming, victimology

Key ReadingsAshworth, A. (1986) `Punishment and compensa-

tion: victims, offenders and the state', OxfordJournal of Legal Studies, 6, pp. 86±122.

Barnett, R.E. (1977) `Restitution: a new paradigm incrime control', Ethics, 87, pp. 279±301.

Christie, N. (1977) `Con¯icts as property', BritishJournal of Criminology, 17 (1), pp. 1±15.

Hudson, J. and Galaway, B. (1980) Victims, Offendersand Alternative Sanctions. Lexington, MA, Lexing-ton Books.

Wright, M. (1991) Justice for Victims and Offenders.Buckingham, Open University Press.

Zedner, L. (1992) `Reparation and retribution: arethey reconcilable?', Modern Law Review, 37, pp.228±50.

REPEAT VICTIMIZATION

De®nition

Repeat victimization occurs when the samelocation, person, business, vehicle or house-hold suffers more than one crime event over aspeci®ed time period. The offence may be ofthe same or a contrasting type.


Crime is preventable insofar as it is predict-able in time and place. `Sting' operations bythe police engineer such predictability, forexample by setting up a shop and making it

known that it will deal in stolen goods, orleaving a frequently stolen vehicle type in ahigh crime area, modi®ed to trap a would-bethief inside. Such operations are liable to thecharge of entrapment (literally, in the lattercase). A less contentious approach involvestargeting people and places at high risk ofcrime. Recent crime victimization is a goodpredictor of future victimization, almostcertainly the best such predictor availablewithout any additional analysis being neces-sary (Pease, 1998). An of®cer attending a crimescene needs no extra information to alert himor her to the elevated risk of future victimiza-tion. Targeting prior victims for crime pre-vention help is an attractive option, for severalreasons:

· It requires no analysis; it is light onresources.

· It combines crime prevention help andvictim support, since both are required bythe same people at the same time.

· The deployment of help can be time-limited, since repeat crime against thesame target tends to happen quickly.

· There is emerging evidence that proli®coffenders are disproportionately respon-sible for repeat offending against the sametarget, so incapacitation of those in¯ictingrepeat victimization may be especiallyproductive in crime reduction.

There are two basic reasons for repetition ofcrime against the same target. These areknown formally as risk heterogeneity andevent dependence, and colloquially as ¯ag andboost accounts. Examples will be taken fromthe offence of burglary. Risk heterogeneityoccurs because the same attributes that ¯ag aplace or person as a good target at time 1,continue to do so at time 2. Thus lace curtainsand porcelain ladies in crinolines as windowornaments alert the passer-by to the likely ageof the householder, and her possible vulner-ability to burglary by deception. It will ¯ag thesame message to every passer-by. Eventdependence occurs when experience duringthe ®rst offence boosts the attractions ofcoming back and doing it again. This may bebecause much cash is found, and may well befound again. It may be because electronicgoods will be replaced by insurers, and thereplacement goods may be stolen. Being new,they will fetch a higher price. Researchevidence, notably offender accounts, suggestthat both ¯ag and boost accounts are relevantto repeat victimization (Ashton et al., 1998;Lauritsen and Davis Quinet, 1995).


An important virtue of the concept andassociated research programme is that it picksapart the crude notion of crime incidence,de®ned as the number of crime events perpopulation at risk. Incidence can be seen to bea function of crime prevalence (the number ofthose victimized within a population at risk)and crime concentration (the number ofvictimizations per victim). Thus, in a popula-tion of 100 homes, a total of 20 burglaries maybe suffered. Thus, 0.20 is the burglaryincidence. This may be a result of 20 homesbeing burgled once (i.e. a prevalence of 0.20and a concentration of 1) or of one home beingburgled 20 times (i.e. a prevalence of 0.01 anda concentration of 20), or any intermediatepattern. Research carried out within a repeatvictimization framework shows that the extentto which areas differ in crime rate is to asurprisingly large extent a function of areadifferences in crime concentration (Trickett etal., 1992). Only when one can unpick thecontribution of prevalence and concentrationto an area's crime problem can a solution beintelligently formulated.

The prevention of repeat victimization hasbeen the means whereby some successfulcrime reduction programmes have achievedtheir effect (Chenery et al., 1997; Forrester etal., 1988). No doubt the mechanisms involvedare complex and varied, but repeat victimiza-tion does have the central advantage ofdirecting crime prevention effort to indivi-duals at high risk of crime, in areas with highrates of crime. The ®rst part of the advantageis something which hot spot analysis lacks.The emerging link between proli®c offendersand repeat victimization affords a means oftargeting proli®c offenders through the kindsof crime which they are likely to commit, andavoiding personal surveillance, with all itscivil rights ambiguities.

Evaluation

Recent work is developing a more subtle view,invoking the notion of `virtual repeats'whereby repetition is not against physicallythe same object or person, but againstfunctionally identical objects, such as thesame model of Ferrari or homes with thesame ¯oor plan. In this way, repeat victimiza-tion is set to merge with the study of offendertargeting practices, along the dimension ofsimilarity.

Ken Pease

Associated Concepts: community crime preven-tion, crime prevention, defensible space,geographies of crime, situational crime pre-vention, social crime prevention, victim sur-veys, victimology

Key ReadingsAshton J., Senior, B., Brown, I. and Pease, K. (1998)

`Repeat victimization: offender accounts', Interna-tional Journal of Risk, Security and Crime Prevention,3, pp. 269±80.

Chenery S., Holt, J. and Pease, K. (1997) Biting BackII: Reducing Repeat Victimization in Hudders®eld.Crime Detection and Prevention Paper 82.London, Home Of®ce.

Forrester D., Chatterton, M. and Pease, K. (1988) TheKirkholt Burglary Prevention Project, Rochdale.Crime Prevention Unit Paper 13. London, HomeOf®ce.

Lauritsen, J.L. and Davis Quinet, K.F. (1995) `Repeatvictimization among adolescents and youngadults', Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 11,pp. 143±66.

Pease, K. (1998) Repeat Victimization: Taking Stock.Crime Detection and Prevention Paper 90.London, Home Of®ce.

Trickett, A., Osborn, D., Seymour, J. and Pease, K.(1992) `What is different about high crime areas?',British Journal of Criminology, 32, pp. 81±9.

REPLACEMENT DISCOURSE

See Constitutive criminology

RESTITUTION

See Reparation

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

De®nition

The idea has connotations traditionally ofreturning things to the state às they were'. Itis a capacious concept which generally standsfor the repair of harms and of ruptures tosocial bonds resulting from crime; it focuseson the relationships between crime victims,offenders and the community.

247RESTORATIVE JUSTICE


The last decades of the twentieth centurywitnessed the contemporary `re-surfacing' ofappeals to traditional non-statist, communitar-ian modes of justice, ironically alongside thesimultaneous renaissance of incapacitationand a retributive model of justice. Accordingto the idea of restorative justice, justice isprimarily a process of reconciling con¯ictinginterests and healing rifts in communitiesresulting from harms committed. The restora-tive justice movement is a body of work whichhas gained much momentum in societies thathave managed in part to `re-discover', tovarying degrees, the systems of justice oftheir indigenous peoples, such as Canada andNew Zealand (see Braithwaite, 1989). Andsocial theologians have also sought to recoverwhat may be a rich but largely suppressedtradition of communally based restorativejustice when crime is understood as aninterpersonal harm rather than as a violationof an abstract legal rule (Zehr, 1990). Theseharms are viewed as creating obligations andliabilities which have to be put right by theparties concerned themselves, with the stateand its agents only minimally involved. Zehrargues that justice (now generally interpretednarrowly as due process, fairness or imparti-ality in modern Western legalism) needs to bere-entwined with conceptions of respect, love,peace and community.

There is also a much wider àbolitionist'body of literature on restorative justice(Christie, 1977; de Haan, 1990), which hascriticized the workings of the formal criminaljustice system across a whole gamut of fronts.Abolitionists are keen to remind us that theevents and behaviours that are criminalizedmake up only a minute part of the events andbehaviours that can be so de®ned. Theysuggest that crime is not the object but theproduct of crime control philosophies andinstitutions. More particularly, social pro-blems, con¯icts and troubles are an inevitablepart of everyday life and therefore cannot, orrather should not, be delegated to profes-sionals and specialists claiming to provide`solutions'. When professionals and stateagencies intervene, the essence of socialproblems and con¯icts are `stolen' and re-presented in forms that only perpetuate theproblems and con¯icts. Traditional state-based, adversarial justice thus makes boththe victim and the offender passive spectators,at formal and legalistic court proceedings. It issuggested that the abolition of the `crimecontrol industry' would also revitalize the

social fabric by allowing other forms of con-¯ict resolution, peacemaking and communitysafety to be imagined and properly resourced.

Supporters of the restorative justice move-ment argue that it is not a soft option foroffenders. Instead, they point to the stress onpersonal responsibility for harms done, fromwhich offenders cannot hide. The emphasis onusing the techniques of reintegrative shaming,mediation and reparation in turn are meant towork on the conscience of the harm-doerin ways that formal legal procedures do not. Inaccord with the general drift of communitar-ian thought, Braithwaite, as the most famoustheoretician and proponent of reintegrativeshaming, does not ¯inch from arguing thatsociety's response to crime must be moralizing(but not rejecting). Examples are offered ofcommunity conferences (or Family GroupConferences) for young offenders in NewZealand which are `based' on Maori traditionsconducive to reintegrative shaming, involvingkin and signi®cant others of both the victimand the offender. In acting as a form of`communion', it is further contended that suchconferences are de-professionalizing, empow-ering of women, oriented to ¯exible commu-nity problem-solving and for the most part,narrowing the nets of social control.

Evaluation

Great claims have been made for reintegrativeshaming and family group conferences asconcrete examples of the workings of restora-tive justice. However, it is wise to remaincircumspect about their potential for creatingthe conditions for a radical, non-discrimina-tory approach to justice. Signi®cant questionsalso remain about the theory and practice ofreintegrative shaming as a form of restorativejustice. For example, it has as yet to be shownthat reintegrative shaming will not be mobi-lized against the most vulnerable sections ofthe society and indeed be employed for trivialoffenders without any reduction in the use oftraditional custodial sentences. Furthermore,the lack of accountability and the absence ofprotection for the offender in terms of appealsto legality and due process remain major areasof concern associated with most forms ofrestorative justice. In terms of criminal justicesystem practice, restorative justice is viewed asa set of alternatives within the system to formaljustice, for example siphoning off less seriouscases and providing opportunities for victimsand offenders to meet and perhaps makeamends (Daly and Immerigeon, 1998). For the


most part, practices are contained by formalcriminal justice. There is also the question ofthe extent to which restorative justice initia-tives, administered in a governmental context± and subject to bureau-professional capture ±may extend the net of social control deeper intothe community. At the same time, it isquestionable whether any of the above criti-cisms negate the progressive potentialities ofrestorative justice per se. Rather, such criticismsdemonstrate in part both the pitfalls of poorimplementation and the subversion of restora-tive justice's principles in speci®c `projects'. Amore general dif®culty with restorative justiceconcerns its assumption ± alongside retributi-vism ± that individuals are autonomous,rational individuals able to make free moralchoices for which they may be held to account.However, restorative justice continues toprovide an alternative to punishment, vio-lence, exclusion and coercive power to effectchange in our lives and our social institutions(Sullivan et al., 1998).

Gordon Hughes

Associated Concepts: abolitionism, communitar-ianism, community justice, peacemakingcriminology, redress, reparation, shaming

Key ReadingsBraithwaite, J. (1989) Crime, Shame and Reintegration.

Oxford, Oxford University Press.Christie, N. (1977) `Con¯icts as property', British

Journal of Criminology, 17, pp. 1±15.Daly, K. and Immerigeon, R. (1998) `The past,

present, and future of restorative justice: somecritical re¯ections', Contemporary Justice Review, 1,pp. 21±45.

de Haan, W. (1990) The Politics of Redress. London,Unwin Hyman.

Sullivan, D., Tifft, L. and Cordella, P. (1998) `Thephenomenon of restorative justice', ContemporaryJustice Review, 1, pp. 7±20.

Zehr, H. (1990) Changing Lenses: A New Focus forCrime and Justice. Waterloo, ON, Herald Press.

RETRIBUTION

De®nition

Punishment in¯icted upon offenders in con-sequence of their wrong-doing. Retributivismis the view that the moral justi®cation forpunishment is that the offender deserves it.


The term `retribution' originally referred to therepayment of a debt (Walker, 1991), an ideawhich is easily seen in the very old notion ofàn eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth', lextalionis (the law of the scale). The principle isthat it is morally right and good that offendersshould suffer: punishment is deserved andshould also be proportionate to the amount ofharm done. The offender òwes a debt', notjust to the victim (where restitution might beappropriate) but to the wider society.

Strict retributivists hold that society has amoral obligation to punish wrong-doers. Bychoosing to break the law individuals aredeemed to have disturbed a moral equilibriumwhich must then be restored through legaldenunciation and/or punishment. Individualsmust be treated as rational moral agents and soheld responsible for their actions (as inclassicism). According to the philosopherImmanuel Kant, offenders therefore have aright to punishment as a mark of respect for theirhuman autonomy and membership of society. Itfollows that (i) only offenders can be punishedand (ii) all offenders must be punished.

The punishment should `®t the crime', beingproportionate to the harm done rather thanbeing tailored to the individual offender, forexample to the likelihood of re-offending. Insentencing practice, retribution appears as a`tariff system', a more or less ®xed scale ofpenalties for particular offences.

Punishment is therefore justi®ed by refer-ence to past action and, for the strictretributivist, it is a natural consequence ofhuman law-breaking (hence retributivism isreferred to as a deontological theory: punish-ment follows from the nature of the humanaction to which it is related). Punishment isseen as morally right in itself, regardless ofany other effects it may or may not have.Retributivism thus stands in contrast toconsequentialist justi®cations for punishment(rehabilitation, deterrence, incapacitation)which focus upon the future effects thatmight be achieved (being concerned withoutcomes, such theories are described asteleological).

Evaluation

Retribution remains an important principle incontemporary penal practice. However, thereare a number of problems associated with it.First, the moral philosophical basis for theclaim that offenders deserve punishment

249RETRIBUTION

(rather than, for example, mercy or forgive-ness) has been found wanting (e.g. Honderich,1989; Walker, 1991). Retributivism can appearas no more than a primitive demand forvengeance. A related criticism is that retribu-tivism requires that punishment be in¯ictedeven where no positive good will be achieved,for example, in the case of a remorsefuloffender who is unlikely to commit furthercrime. The in¯iction of punishment ongrounds of the harm done, regardless of thecircumstances of the individual offender, maybe not only pointless but also lead to socialinjustice. It is also dif®cult to translate theprinciple of proportionality, the idea thatpunishment should re¯ect the degree ofharm done, into practice. Two problemsarise. The ®rst is how to determine in absoluteterms what quantum or amount of punishmentis proportionate to a particular offence (theproblem of cardinal proportionality): there is avast range of offences to which the èye for aneye' principle is not very easily applied. Asecond problem, that of ordinal proportionality,is how different offences and the penaltiesattached to them are to be ranked (whether,for example, a rape merits more or less pun-ishment than a muti-million pound fraud).

Although strict retributivism is largelydiscredited on these grounds, the 1970s sawa resurgence in the form of `just deserts'theory. This was in response to the allegedfailings of the then dominant principle ofrehabilitation. Right-wing critics of rehabilita-tion saw it as a `soft option' and called formore traditional punitive responses. Liberaland more radical critics saw it as leading toinjustice in the form of disparities in senten-cing, as well as the use of long and indeter-minate sentences, in the name of preventingfuture crime. They advocated a `justice model'(as opposed to a treatment model) of senten-cing, drawing upon retributivism.

In contrast to pure retributivists, `justdeserts' theorists argued that there is nomoral obligation to punish offenders: whetherthe power to punish is exercised in aparticular case can be decided on consequen-tialist grounds. However, punishment can begiven only when it is deserved: people shouldbe punished for what they have done and notwhat they might do, for past rather than futurecrimes (von Hirsch, 1985). The desert principleacts as a limit on the distribution of punish-ment. Similarly, the principle of proportion-ality provides a ceiling on the amount ofpunishment. The severity of the punishmentdoes not always have to match the gravity ofthe offence: something less (though nothing

more) is permissible. Arguments in whichdesert and proportionality are employed aslimiting principles are sometimes referred toas `negative retributivism'.

A number of jurisdictions, in¯uenced by thejust deserts movement, have introducedsystems of mandatory or presumptive sen-tences either through legislation or in the formof guidelines for sentencers. Whilst these mayhave led to increased consistency, the dif®cul-ties of determining levels of proportionalityhave often led to greater severity of punish-ment, contrary to the implicit aims of the neo-retributivist `just deserts' advocates (Hudson,1987).

More fundamental criticisms of retributiv-ism, even in its modi®ed form, concern thecontinued focus on the punishment of the indi-vidual offender, without questioning the natureof criminal justice and its relationship to socialjustice (e.g. Braithwaite and Pettit, 1990;Hudson, 1987).

Maggie Sumner

Associated Concepts: classicism, deterrence,incapacitation, just deserts, proportionality,rehabilitation

Key ReadingsBraithwaite, J. and Pettit, P. (1990) Not Just Deserts: A

Republican Theory of Criminal Justice. Oxford, TheClarendon Press.

von Hirsch, A. (1985) Past and Future Crimes.Manchester, Manchester University Press.

Honderich, T. (1989) Punishment: The SupposedJusti®cations. Cambridge, Polity Press.

Hudson, B. (1987) Justice through Punishment: ACritique of the Justice Model of Corrections. London,Macmillan.

Walker, N. (1991) Why Punish? Theories of PunishmentReassessed. London, Opus.

RIGHT REALISM

See Administrative criminology; Neo-conser-vative criminology; Rational choice theory

RISK

De®nition

In criminology, risk refers to the probability ofharm, the role of its calculation or assessment


in making decisions about whether to performcriminal actions, and its role in criminal justicedecision-making.


Risk has a foundational role in moderncriminology, in classical criminology's focuson the calculation of probable gains and lossesin projected offending, and ± as well ± muchcurrent research focuses on crime as risk-taking, especially where taking risks is asource of excitement that brings people intotrouble with criminal justice. Today, riskincreasingly refers to governing crime throughof®cial discourses and techniques of riskmanagement, especially àctuarial justice'(Feeley and Simon, 1994), a term that refersto the displacement of individually basedjustice by decision-making based on thestatistical probability of re-offending.

However, actuarial justice is only one riskmanagerial response to crime. For example,English `Sex Offender Orders', under theCrime and Disorder Act 1998, allow forrestraints on former offenders on the basis of`reasonable' fears that they represent risks tothe community. Such judgements are madeby police, using traditional means of discre-tionary assessment rather than statisticaldata or processes. Similarly, requiring com-munity noti®cation about resident formersex offenders is the focus of `Megan's Laws'in the USA, even though it is not clear thisleads to risk reduction (Simon, 1998). Asthese examples also suggest, risk refers notonly to statistical probabilities of harm butalso to other forms of estimating probability,and to harm's moral magnitude: `high risk'may refer to intolerable risk of incalculableor uncalculated probability (Beck, 1992).Thus, much `risk' legislation of this sortarises out of community pressure ratherthan sound foundations in actuarial evi-dence. `Risk talk' has also entered otherareas of criminal justice without necessarilyimplying statistical risk assessment. Deci-sion-making about risk in areas such asinmate security, pre-sentencing reports andprison parole decisions usually re¯ectsexpert evaluation of individual cases, ratherthan actuarial classi®cation. In all theseinstances, the spread of risk appears as amatter of governmental fashion and popularconsciousness that extends well beyondactuarialism's power to predict (Beck, 1992).But they also indicate that discourses andpractices of risk are multiple, not just

statistical, and are mobilized in differentways in different parts of criminal justice(O'Malley, 1998).

Crime risk thinking reaches well beyondcriminal justice. Under the banner of govern-ing crime risks, streetscapes, house design,`gated communities' and the planning andoperation of shopping centres are beingorganized around crime prevention. In thegovernment of illicit drug use, criminal justicemay be deliberately marginalized in favour ofpreventative, risk-reducing programmes suchas needle exchanges and safe injecting facil-ities, and police may be instructed not toenforce the law against drug users. Indeed, forsome writers the development of a `risksociety' implies a new governmental principlein which the place of criminal justice, notmerely its organization, changes dramatically(Simon, 1987).

Many fears have been raised about thespread of risk frameworks in criminal justice.First, is the potential for net-widening, asùnacceptable risks' become subjects of justice.Secondly are fears concerning the margin-alization of individualized justice, abandoningthe proportionality of offence and punish-ment, and diminishing judicial discretion.Such fears generate considerable resistance torisk-based justice, particularly by the judi-ciary. More generally, however, the develop-ment of risk technologies and practices maycreate a society that is increasingly insecure:fear of crime may be exaggerated by highpro®le crime prevention initiatives, socialisolation and divisiveness may spread withthe rise of `gated communities', and fears of`Big Brother' surveillance are increased asinvasive technologies preventatively governcrime ìn the community' (Ericson andHaggerty, 1997).

These observations raise the issue of apolitics of risk. Some argue that the emergenceof risk in government re¯ects the rise of neo-liberalism (O'Malley, 1992). Such politics haveshaped the character of risk, making citizensand communities (neighbourhoods, women,home-owners, etc.) more `responsible' formanaging their own crime exposure ± forexample, by forming `partnerships' withpolice and avoiding high-risk situations. Like-wise, they foster a rational-choice `risk-taking'image of offenders, who calculate the risksand bene®ts of their offending and therebybecome more criminally `responsible' thanunder therapeutic regimes of rehabilitation.Risk, in this view, is being politicallyreshaped, rather than actuarialized, in currentpolitics of crime risks.

251RISK

Evaluation

There is no doubt that crime risk discoursesare becoming more prevalent. The theoreticaland political implications of theses changesare considerable. Like all models, however, itis prone to exaggeration. While many illustra-tions are provided, there is no systematicevidence of risk's relative increase or dom-inance. Certainly, outside certain US jurisdic-tions, actuarial sentencing has remainedmarginal. Little research has been carried outon the variety of risk discourses and techni-ques, leading to some misleading character-izations of risk-oriented justice as àctuarial'.There is also a tendency to ignore thecontinuity of long-established risk techniques(e.g. in parole decisions), perhaps givingexaggerated impressions of risk's `rise'. Expla-nations of risk's ascendancy are also impres-sionistic rather than solidly grounded. Mostaccounts rely on largely speculative andpoorly evidenced accounts that link risk-based justice with mega-crises of modernity(Ericson and Haggerty, 1997) or with the riseof postmodernity (Feeley and Simon, 1994), orsimplistically reduce a wide diversity ofchanges to a single effect of neo-liberalism(O'Malley, 1992). At present, despite theapparent importance of justice through risk,we have no more than descriptive accounts,possibly selective, conceptually varied, and ofdebatable generality.

Pat O'Malley

Associated Concepts: actuarialism, defensiblespace, fear of crime, hedonism, net widening,opportunity theory, rational choice theory,situational crime prevention, surveillance

Key ReadingsBeck, U. (1992) Risk Society. London, Sage.Ericson, R. and Haggerty, K. (1997) Policing the Risk

Society. Toronto, Toronto University Press.Feeley, M. and Simon, J. (1994) Àctuarial justice.

The emerging new criminal law', in D. Nelken(ed.), The Futures of Criminology. London, Sage.

O'Malley, P. (1992) `Risk, power and crime preven-tion', Economy and Society, 21, pp. 252±75.

O'Malley, P. (ed.) (1998) Crime and the Risk Society.Aldershot, Dartmouth.

Simon, J. (1987) `The emergence of the risk society',Socialist Register, 95, pp. 61±89.

Simon, J. (1998) `Managing the monstrous: sexoffenders and the new penology', Psychology,Public Policy and the Law, 4, pp. 452±67.

ROUTINE ACTIVITY THEORY

De®nition

According to Marcus Felson, mainstreamcriminology has devoted the majority of itsattention to `the criminal', investigating whycertain individuals are more criminallyinclined than others. As a consequence ofthis ®xation, criminology has given very littlethought to either the context or nature ofcriminal acts or the role of victims as activeparticipants in crime production and preven-tion. His writings represent one of the mostsigni®cant attempts to redress this imbalance,and he does so from a rational choiceperspective. Crime, for Felson, is ®rst andforemost a physical act and the product of therecurrent, routine activities and structuring ofeveryday life. This means that the potential forcrime is inevitable and constant. A utilitarianmotivation to commit crime is taken as given.It also means that criminologists can con-tribute in a practical manner to criminal justicepolicy debates by shifting the focus fromdetection and punishment of the criminal toreduction and prevention of the criminalevent.


The original formulation of routine activitiespostulated that the volume and distribution of`predatory crime', that is those direct contactcrimes in which one or more individualsattacks the person or property of another, areclosely related to three variables. First,motivated offenders, usually young males,must be in attendance. Secondly, `suitabletargets', in the form of person or property,must be available. Routine activity theoryprefers to use the term `target' instead of`victim' because it emphasizes that themajority of criminality is geared towardsacquisition of property. Suitability is charac-terized by four attributes (VIVA):

· Value calculated from the offender'sperspective,

· Inertia ± the physical aspects of the personor property that hinder or interrupt itssuitability as a target

· Visibility, which marks out the person orproperty for attack

· Accessibility which increases the risk ofattack.


The third variable is the absence of `capableguardians' against crime. According to Felson,individuals looking after a household, familymembers, colleagues in the workplace, friendsor indeed strangers on the street, are morelikely to act as `capable guardians' than policeof®cers.

It is the physical coming together of thesethree variables that produces the opportunityfor a predatory crime to occur. To put itsuccinctly, a predatory crime is most likely tooccur when an offender meets in time andspace with a viable target in the absence of acapable guardian. Crucially, the convergencetranspires because of the routine practicesof everyday life. Hence, criminal acts areintimately related to and feed off normalbehaviours associated with work, school,transportation, recreation, shopping, produc-tion of consumer goods and so on. Changes inroutine activities and the rhythms of life haveplaced more people in particular places atspeci®c moments, which increases their acces-sibility as realistic targets of crime. People arealso more likely to be away from their homes,thus reducing their ability to act as capableguardians of their property and opening upnew opportunities for crime through the everincreasing number of portable possessions.For Felson, contemporary society invites highcrime rates by generating a huge number ofillegal opportunities.

Routine activity theory was subsequentlydeveloped by Felson and applied to four othertypes of crime: exploitative (robbery, rape);mutualistic (gambling, prostitution, sellingand buying illegal drugs); competitive (®ght-ing) and individualistic (individual drug use,suicide). In so doing he identi®ed a fourthelement that allows a criminal event to happen± the absence of an ìntimate handler', asigni®cant other who can impose informalsocial control on the offender. A potentialoffender must break free of the ìntimatehandler' then ®nd a target for crime, unmo-nitored by a `capable guardian'.

More recently Felson in conjunction withRon Clarke has claimed that the principlesunderpinning routine activity can providecriminology with a new general opportunity-based theory of crime that forces criminolo-gists to move away from using vaguecriminological concepts to formulating preciseresearch questions.

Evaluation

Routine activity theorizing has opened up animportant debate about the context withinwhich crime takes place. The crime preventionimplications focus on changing routine activ-ities and practices to frustrate potentialoffenders and prevent easy victimization.Thus, it underpins situational crime preven-tion and personal risk assessment strategiessuch as defensible space and target hardeningand arguments for increasing the presence of`capable guardians' and èyes on the street'.Critics argue that it overlooks the offender andcannot answer the question why someindividuals are more motivated to commitcriminal acts than others. It also carries with ita tendency to blame the victim. Also, in itsoriginal focus on `predatory crime', it repro-duced stereotypical representation of theproblem of crime. Although it makes increas-ing claims to be enriching criminologicaltheory, its primary concern remains producingpractices that help policy-makers.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: defensible space, opportu-nity theory, rational choice theory, situationalcrime prevention, surveillance

Key ReadingsBirkbeck, C. and La Free, G. (1993) `The situational

analysis of crime and deviance', Annual Review ofCriminology, 19, pp. 113±37.

Cohen, L.E. and Felson, M. (1979) `Social change andcrime rate trends; a routine activity approach',American Sociological Review, 44, pp. 588±608.

Felson, M. (1986) `Routine activities, social controls,rational decisions and criminal outcomes', in D.Cornish and R.V. Clarke (eds), The ReasoningCriminal. New York, Springer-Verlag.

Felson, M. (1987) `Routine activities and crimeprevention in the developing metropolis', Crimi-nology, 25, pp. 911±31.

Felson, M. (1998) Crime and Everyday Life, 2nd edn.Thousand Oaks, CA, Pine Forge Press.

Felson, M. (2000) `The routine activity approach as ageneral social theory', in S. S. Simpson (ed.), OfCrime and Criminality: The Use of Theory inEveryday Life. Thousand Oaks, CA, Pine ForgePress.

253ROUTINE ACTIVITY THEORY

S

SAMPLING

De®nition

The process of selecting a sub-set of cases froma wider population with a view to makinginferences from the sample to the widerpopulation.


The cases sampled from a population arelargely determined by the focus of research,and can include documents, interactions,institutions, communities and societies. How-ever, in social surveys the basic sampling unitis usually the individual (for example,offender, victim, police of®cer, magistrate).The term population is used in the statistical,rather than geographical, sense and refers tothe total category or group of cases aboutwhich the researcher wishes to reach conclu-sions. However, the statistical population inwhich the researcher is interested maycorrespond with a geographical area, forexample, àll victims of house burglary livingin London, 1990±2000', but that is not arequirement.

The basis of making inferences fromsamples to populations is sampling theory,which is a set of assumptions and mathema-tical deductions. One key assumption is thatsamples are selected from the population atrandom. This means that every case in thepopulation must have an equal and non-zerochance of being selected as part of the sample.In order to carry out random sampling it isnecessary to have a sampling frame, which is alisting of all cases in the population (forexample, a list provided by the police of all

victims of house burglary in London, 1990±2000). It is rarely, if ever, possible to producecompletely accurate estimates of populationvalues, perhaps due to errors in the process ofsampling. Fortunately, provided the samplehas been selected using random techniques, itis possible to estimate sampling error (whichprovides a calculable margin of error).

In many instances it is not desirable orfeasible to collect ®ndings from randomsamples. For example, tracing each memberof a sample can be a costly and time-consuming business. Therefore where resultsare required quickly and cheaply, researchersoften use quota sampling, whereby thepopulation to be studied is divided intocategories that are relevant to the topic ofinvestigation (for example, categorized bygender, age and ethnicity). Interviewers aregiven quotas of types of people to interview.The quotas are often proportionate to thesigni®cance of the categories in the populationas a whole, and the interviews usually takeplace after stopping people in public areas.Quota sampling is typically used to obtain acheap and quick estimate of public opinion ona recent issue or event (for example, theintroduction of a new policing strategy).

For some topics of study a sampling frameis not available and therefore random sam-pling is not feasible. In such instancesresearchers may turn to `volunteer sampling',whereby respondents volunteer to be part of astudy, or `snowball sampling', whereby theresearcher makes an initial contact with oneperson and then is introduced to others in`chain-letter' style. Both types of sample havebeen used in research involving drug-takers.

Quota, volunteer and snowball samplesshare the feature of not having been selectedby random procedures. This means that, incontrast with random samples, it is notpossible to estimate sampling errors.

Evaluation

Where researchers are interested in reachingconclusions about reasonably sized popula-tions it is fairly rare to investigate every casein that population (which is known as acensus). The advantages of sampling over acensus are that it is cheaper, quicker and thereis potential for greater ef®ciency per unit ofanalysis. However, such advantages need tobe balanced against the desirability of derivingaccurate estimates of population values fromsamples. A key factor in this is the degree towhich samples are representative of thepopulations from which they are drawn,especially in relation to the central topic ofthe research.

Although sampling is typically associatedwith quantitative, especially social survey,approaches to criminological research, somequalitative approaches employ what is oftentermed `theoretical sampling'. Theoreticalsampling is much less technical and muchmore ¯exible than statistical sampling. Itinvolves selecting groups or cases as theresearch develops in order to discover mean-ingful categories and to develop theory. Forthis reason, theoretical sampling is oftenclosely associated with the development ofgrounded theory. Groups or cases may beselected so as to maximize or minimize theirdifferences on some features whilst seeking tomake comparisons between them on otherfeatures. For example, `rookie' and òld stager'police of®cers may be selected and comparedwith regard to their attitudes towards youngoffenders. The research may progress bymaking further selections in terms of malerookie police of®cers. When new ideas andtheoretical revisions are no longer emerging,the point of theoretical saturation has beenreached and the process of theoretical sam-pling is terminated.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: comparative method, eth-nography, longitudinal study, social survey,victim surveys

Key ReadingsArber, S. (1993) `Designing samples', in N. Gilbert

(ed.), Researching Social Life. London, Sage.Sapsford, R. (1999) Survey Research. London, Sage.Scho®eld, W. (1996) `Survey sampling', in R.

Sapsford and V. Jupp (eds), Data Collection andAnalysis. London, Sage.

SCAPEGOATING

De®nition

To cast blame or guilt on to an innocentperson, group or object.


The biblical scapegoat was an animal ontowhich the sins of the people were transferredand erased through the expulsion of the goat.In anthropology the role of the scapegoat hasusually been analysed as a puri®cation ritualor ceremonial process through which evil isdealt with. In racial and ethnic studies,particular groups ± such as blacks and Jews± have commonly been seen as beingscapegoated for wider social and economicproblems such as unemployment. Theseexamples indicate that blame or guilt forsocial problems is attached to groups that mayhave little or no responsibility for an event; infact, a strict de®nition of scapegoating wouldrequire that the scapegoated should be inno-cent of any responsibility for events. This issimilar to the process of `victim blaming'.Scapegoating processes include the identi®ca-tion of relatively powerless individuals orgroups who can easily be blamed for a con-dition and ampli®cation by the media throughrepresenting particular groups as a threat,probably in a stereotypical way. The objects orvictims of scapegoating are thought to bechosen because they are identi®ably `differ-ent', for example due to external markers suchas skin colour or some bodily sign, whichconnects scapegoating to both racializationand stigmatization. However, not all instancesof scapegoating involve visibly differentindividuals or groups, or the powerless. Thepowerful can also be scapegoated, for instancewhen army commanders and politicians areheld responsible for particular defeats or,more generally, for national decline.

Scapegoating is said to be a product of auniversal societal requirement for some òther'or òut group' that serves the needs of groupsto foster and maintain integration. Scapegoat-ing is a social process that can be observedhistorically and cross-culturally, which hasbeen taken to indicate that it is an expressionof a deep human need to transgress and toreaf®rm boundaries to maintain group soli-darity. Indeed, for Erikson (1966) deviantshave a maintenance function, so groups needto induce and sustain deviant behaviour in

255SCAPEGOATING

order to help them maintain and restore socialequilibrium. Strategic scapegoating describesthe use of tactics to de¯ect blame by anindividual or group fearing exposure. Scape-goating is therefore a diversionary processthat serves to demonize particular groups andmay result in a moral panic. In this view,scapegoating is a form of mysti®cation thatobscures the real or essential problem. Never-theless, no uniform motivations of scapegoa-ters have been identi®ed. Their actions couldbe seen as rational or irrational. Explanationssuggested are that scapegoaters act out offrustration, aggression, or to displace certainfeelings (the frustration±aggression hypoth-esis), or projection and psychic discomfort (areaction to, or denial of, tension), or a generalhostility to others. The latter has beenassociated with the idea of the authoritarianpersonality (Douglas, 1995).

Scapegoating entails the drawing of aboundary between good and evil. It is some-thing that is usually seen as pre-criminologicalsuperstition. However, Tannenbaum (1938)argued that criminological theories havepersistently reproduced this distinction, sothat terms such as normal and abnormal standin exactly the same relation as good and evil.Instead of `demonic possession', classicalcriminology employed the idea of rationalchoice to do evil; positivism differentiated theabnormal through various bodily manifesta-tions as predictors or determinants of crimin-ality; while functionalists see the criminal associally maladjusted. Each involves the dra-matization and symbolization of differenceand, in the process, the deviant is tagged orstigmatized.

Evaluation

The idea that a group or individual is ascapegoat for some wider ill is in common use.The term is frequently and loosely used so thatits many applications defy an overall de®nitionof its usages. This wide utilization makes itdif®cult to evaluate or assess its veracity,particularly since there is room for debate onhow far the scapegoated are ìnnocent' ortotally blameless, whether scapegoating can beexplained in functionalist terms of servinggroup needs, and whether expurgation orpuri®cation actually occurs. Individuals,groups and both animate and inanimateobjects (animals, ®nancial markets), as well asnation-states, have been regarded, and some-times de®ned themselves as, scapegoats. Forinstance, in the Balkans war the Bosnian

government asserted that it was made ascapegoat to justify US military action. Similarclaims have been made by Iraq following theGulf War. At another level, the blaming ofindividuals and/or paediatricians and socialworkers for being perpetrators of or uncover-ing child abuse has been seen as a mode ofscapegoating for a society that could not acceptsuch transgressions of family norms, or toaccept that there might be widespread abuse insociety.

The idea of scapegoating as a mode ofboundary maintenance is basically functional-ist. This is problematic when boundaries havebeen transgressed, or at least become blurred.The objects of scapegoating may also be muchmore able to challenge images and representa-tions and this too indicates that understandingand accounting for scapegoating is a far fromstraightforward process.

Karim Murji

Associated Concepts: demonization, folk devil,labelling, moral panic, stigma, stereotyping

Key ReadingsDouglas, T. (1995) Scapegoat. London, Routledge.Erikson, K.T. (1966) Wayward Puritans. New York,

Wiley.Jenkins, P. (1992) Intimate Enemies. New York,

Aldine de Gruyter.Tannenbaum, F. (1938) Crime and the Community.

New York, Colombia University Press.

SECONDARY DEVIATION

See Labelling; Social reaction

SELF-POLICING

De®nition

A criminal justice concept that draws attentionto the capacity of members of the communityto make decisions about the appropriate leveland means of control response withoutnecessarily invoking criminal law agents.


There is a real sense in which society is self-policing. Formal policing measures are most


often the result of calls for action from mem-bers of the public. Crime surveys tend to showthat about one-half of the most common typesof crime are not reported to the police. Thissuggests that members of the public judge thatformal invocation of the law enforcementmachinery is not necessary, even though theinstance in question is understood to be acrime or otherwise somehow answerable topolice action. Even quite serious issues can benegotiated without recourse to the criminallaw. Extended family, religious organizations,friendship and neighbourhood networks canall be drafted in to control forms of rule-breaking, disorder and con¯ict that otherwisemight become the object of the criminal justiceprocess.

Evaluation

There are several limitations to the notion ofsociety as self-policing that are worth noting.First, although crime surveys do indicate thata large proportion of scenarios that peopleregard as in some sense criminal are notreported to the police, an unquanti®edproportion of them may be due to pessimismabout the effectiveness of formal criminaljustice responses. In such instances, it is not somuch self-policing, as it is non-policing.Secondly, perhaps one-quarter of indictablecrimes are discovered by the police them-selves; proactive policing, particularly in suchareas as drink driving, illicit drug markets andother forms of vice, shows that a signi®cantproportion of policing activity comes about asa result of priorities set by control agencies.This raises knotty questions about the relation-ship between policing and society that thenotion of self-policing cannot wholly clarify.This leads to a third dif®culty with the idea ofsociety as self-policing: some police and/orcontrol functions are tangential to the aware-ness of most citizens. The activities of theSerious Fraud Of®ce might be an examplehere, but policing (in the sense of maintainingpeace, order and good government) alsoextends to the activities of inspectorates forpollution, ®re, health and safety as well asmany of the tasks undertaken by the uni-formed public police. Of course, the publicmay make reactive demands of such govern-mental services in some fraught circum-stances, but the routine activity of suchagencies largely lies outside of commonperceptions of policing (as simply crimecontrol) and yet it has become an indispen-sable aspect of social ordering and the

maintenance of the `health of the socialbody'. Fourthly, the idea of society as self-policing may lend legitimacy in someinstances of the social reaction to allegedcriminal wrong-doing, which would be bettercharacterized as vigilantism.

James Sheptycki

Associated Concepts: community policing, crim-inal justice, informal justice, redress, socialcontrol, social justice

Key ReadingsAshworth, A. (1994) The Criminal Process: An

Evaluative Study. Oxford, The Clarendon Press.Brown, R.M. (1969) `The American vigilante tradi-

tion', in H.G. Graham and T.R. Gurr (eds), TheHistory of Violence in America. New York, BantamBooks.

SELF-REPORTS

De®nition

The self-report method is a means of collectinginformation about aspects of an individual'spersonal experience ± such as involvement inoffending ± using a structured interview. Themethod can generate both statistical andqualitative data, but has most commonlybeen used to quantify rates of self-reportedcrime and drug use.


Self-report methods have been used toinvestigate forms of behaviour as varied asalcohol and drug use (both legal and illegal),tobacco smoking, sexual experiences, diet andother aspects of physical health. Respondentsare asked to describe an aspect of theirbehaviour or life experience, and often togive views and opinions about a particulartopic, either in a face-to-face interview, bycompleting a questionnaire or, increasingly,using a computer. Of most relevance tocriminology are the self-report offending sur-veys that have a history in criminology datingback to the 1940s (Coleman and Moynihan,1996). The method has been used to estimaterates of offending in the general population,among university students, `persistent offen-ders' and those in prison or on probationorders. Recently, in the UK, self-report

257SELF-REPORTS

offending surveys have been suggested forevaluating crime reduction strategies, as analternative to re-conviction studies. Themethod has also been used for comparativeanalysis of crime and deviance.

Surveys using this method have contributedto knowledge about deviance, often producinga picture that contradicts `conventionalwisdom'. For example, self-report studiesindicate that drug use and crimes includingtheft, violence and fraud are much morewidespread among the general populationthan commonly imagined, most of which goesundetected. Self-report offending survey ratesamong males in one cohort study exceed 95per cent by the time of early middle age, manymore than the one in three who were con-victed in court of a non-motoring offence(Farrington, 1997). Self-report offending sur-veys conducted in the USA, UK and con-tinental Europe also suggest that gender,ethnic and class differences in offending aremuch smaller than the picture painted byarrest and imprisonment statistics. Despitemethodological weaknesses (see below), this®nding lends weight to the evidence thatsuggests that selective enforcement and dis-crimination in criminal justice processingexplain the disproportionate rates of impri-sonment among particular ethnic groups.

The self-report method offers the possibilityof attempting to explain offending from theoffender's perspective and to discover thepersonal and social factors that can be identi-®ed as the `correlates' of offending. This lendsitself to `control theories' of offending, focus-ing on aspects of the life of the àdmittedoffender', their social bonds to family andfriends, school and work experiences, andattitudes towards life in general. The statisticalcorrelations that emerge from self-reportstudies cannot be taken as causative, however,because so little light is shed on the mechan-isms and processes required to explaindeviance and the process by which labels areattributed and acquired.

A method that relies on the honesty ofinterviewees to disclose dishonest and violentacts is obviously vulnerable to a challenge toits validity. How can we be sure that respon-dents are not lying, or (more charitably)saying what they think the interview wantsto hear? Attempts to test the extent to whichself-report studies generate valid and mean-ingful information about crime and deviancehave included the use of polygraph (`liedetector') tests, the use of questions designedto identify exaggeration or embellishment(such as questions about ®ctitious drugs),

and back-checking what interviewees havesaid against police records. (In some studies,this back-checking has been done without theinterviewee's consent, raising ethical con-cerns.) In general, surveys have tended toshow greater levels of concealment than exag-geration and given that the extent of self-reported offending is often much higher thanmany people assume, it seems reasonable toaccept that they are a useful alternativemeasure of people's unrecorded delinquentbehaviour. The method has been shown tobe reliable using various tools such as `test±retest' and through the use of repeatedmeasurement.

Self-report offending and drug surveysuncover a very large number of people whohave committed unlawful acts, some of whichwould result in harsh penalties in the eventthat they were caught, prosecuted and con-victed. However, self-report surveys capture agreat deal of less serious offences, laying themethod open to the charge that it placesexcessive emphasis on trivial offences. Carehas to be taken to identify the minority of moreserious offenders among the great number ofpeople (the majority of the population) whoadmit to committing minor offences.

Self-report studies have been limited by amore or less exclusive focus on descriptivequanti®cation of offending rates. They canalso be criticized for seeking to explainpatterns at the population level, rather thanshedding much light on what happens inindividual lives or on the dynamics of com-munities. To overcome these limitations, somesurveys have combined self-report offendingand victimization into one questionnaire(Anderson et al., 1994). Others have conductedfollow-up qualitative interviews to illustratethe dynamics of offending and desistance(Graham and Bowling, 1995).

Evaluation

In sum, the self-report method provides ahelpful, but limited, alternative to recordedcrime statistics and victimization surveys. It is,arguably, the only way to estimate the extentof `primary deviance' in the general popula-tion (Box, 1981). Certainly, self-report studiesuncover forms of behaviour that can bequanti®ed using no other means ± including`victimless' deviant acts (such as drug use),those that have a low likelihood of detection(such as handling stolen goods and fraud),and undetected offences in general. Themethod has tended to focus on the crimes of


the powerless, whereas it could have a widerapplication in estimating the extent of corpo-rate and white collar crime.

Ben Bowling

Associated Concepts: hidden crime, labelling,of®cial criminal statistics, social reaction,social survey, victim surveys, victimology

Key ReadingsAnderson, S., Kinsey, R., Loader, I. and Smith, C.

(1994) Cautionary Tales: Young People, Crime andPolicing in Edinburgh. Aldershot, Avebury.

Box, S. (1981) Deviance, Reality and Society, 2nd edn.London, Holt Rinehart and Winston.

Coleman, C. and Moynihan, J. (1996) UnderstandingCrime Data. Buckingham, Open University Press.

Farrington, D. (1997) `Human development andcriminal careers', in M. Maguire, R. Morgan andR. Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Crimino-logy. Oxford, The Clarendon Press.

Graham, J. and Bowling, B. (1995) Young People andCrime. Home Of®ce Research Study No. 145.London, HMSO.

Ramsay, M. and Spiller, J. (1997) Drug MisuseDeclared in 1996. Key Results from the British CrimeSurvey. Home Of®ce Research Findings No. 56.London, HMSO.

SERIAL KILLING

De®nition

Stranger perpetrated murders ± usually bymen ± which often appear motiveless and arecharacterized by gratuitous violence. Thoughrare, serial killing stands at the apogee of apopular fascination with crime, fuelling both arobust mythology and demands for retribu-tion to be at the heart of criminal justice,particularly in the USA ± the `natural' habitatof such criminals.


Criminologists are in broad agreement that theserial killer is different from the `normal'single incident murderer and other types ofmultiple killer, for example the `mass murderer'and the `spree murderer'. The serial killer is saidto exhibit some or all of the followingde®nitional characteristics. First, the killings

are repetitive or `serial' and, because themurder is in itself the motive, they willcontinue until the serial killer is caught.Secondly, the majority of serial killers like towork on their own and this is why they are sodif®cult to track down. There are, of course,well-known `killer couples', `partnerships' and`groupings', but they run a greater risk ofdetection. Thirdly, there is little personalconnection between the perpetrator and thevictim. These are classic stranger perpetratedmurders and a signi®cant number are `motive-less'. There is nothing personal in the choice ofvictim, other than s/he may belong to aparticular cultural/social grouping. Fourthly,very few display a clearly de®ned or rationalmotive. It may not become apparent until akiller is arrested that a series of unsolvedmurders/attempted murders may be related.Fifthly, increased spatial mobility and socialfragmentation enable a serial killer to extendand intensify his killing capacity. And becausethe communication ¯ows between differentpolice forces are haphazard and uncoordi-nated, serial killers can escape detection.Sixthly, there is often a high degree ofgratuitous violence. Experts argue that this isbecause of the motivation for the crime. Thekilling is not the means to another end but anend in itself. Finally, because the majority ofserial killers are men, we need to consider thecomplex relationship between particularforms of masculinity and violent criminality.

Studies suggest that there are four mainmotivational typologies:

· Visionaries: Included in this typologywould be those killers who claim to bereacting to or directed by `voices' and alteregos, where the ìnstructions' receivedjustify and legitimize the murders.

· Missionaries: Included in this category are`clean-up' killers, who are quite willing toaccept responsibility for `cleansing'society of its ùndesirable' or ùn®t'elements. Any `group' could become atarget for the `missionary' killer. However,the majority of targets are chosen from`deviant' groupings such as prostitutes,homosexuals or drug addicts. The killercan justify her/his actions on the groundsthat s/he is acting on behalf of decentpeople. In doing so, s/he can utilize aclassic `technique of neutralization'.

· Hedonists: A broad category whichincludes the types of killer for whom`pleasure' is the `reward' of murder. Thiscategory includes lust killers, fantasykillers and thrill killers.

259SERIAL KILLING

· Power seekers: Domination is the strongmotive force but these killers are aware oftheir behaviour and can describe theirmotivational state.

In response to the inadequacy of traditionaltechniques of murder investigation, the FBIbegan to develop a system of analysingevidence, both tangible and intuitive, collectedby law enforcement of®cers from the scene ofthe crime. A `psychological pro®le' is builtthrough a contextual analysis of (a) victimtraits, (b) witness reports, and (c) the methodof killing. A detailed list of physical andpsychological characteristics is built up until aportrait of the killer and her/his behaviouralpatterns appears. Included in the list wouldbe: age, sex, marital status, occupation, race,criminal record, class, sexual preferences etc.A considerable amount of intuitive guessworkis involved, but this does not seem to damagethe investigative procedure because, as DavidCanter argues (1992), a criminal leavesevidence of his personality through hiscriminal actions. An individual's behaviour,according to Canter, exhibits characteristicsunique to that person, as well as patternswhich are typical of the subgroup to which s/he belongs. Law enforcement agenciesthroughout the world have realized that theyalso need to develop sophisticated informa-tion collection systems which can coordinate,analyse and review reports from differentagencies and identify early serial killingpatterns. These developments have allowedlaw enforcement agencies to compile person-ality pro®les, which enhance the early identi-®cation of a potential or èmergent' serialkiller. Psychologists and psychiatrists workingin this ®eld argue that there are signi®cantlevels of childhood violence, abuse andneglect present in the backgrounds of someof the most notorious serial killers that mayprovide a clue to their subsequent actions.Such connections lend weight to their argu-ments that efforts and resources should befocused on the early identi®cation of violentbehaviour that could escalate into murderousthoughts and deeds. This will necessitatemonitoring the child-rearing practices offamilies for signs of maladjusted relationshipsand pathological dynamics.

Others argue that there are very clear linksbetween alcohol dependency and violence,and pornography and violence, and that theiravailability should be proscribed and policedmore rigorously. Yet others point to testimonyfrom serial killers that it was ®ctional rep-resentations of violence that `triggered' their

actions. Psychologists argue that in order tokill, a person must dehumanize their victim,reducing the victim to the status of an object.Constant exposure to graphic, highly glamor-ized violence desensitizes viewers and readersto the human pain and suffering and paves theway for certain individuals to view murder asa `normal' course of action. For certain serialkillers, it is clear that they view themselves asàctors' in a Hollywood ®lm scripted byQuentin Tarantino or Oliver Stone. Again,such connections have brought forth a chorusof demands for tighter regulation and controlof the entertainment industry.

Evaluation

The mythological status of the threat posed bythe serial killer to American society has led tocivil liberties objections being neutralized. Inthe twenty-®rst century, it seems as if therewill be only one answer to the followingquestion. Which are more important, the civilliberties of law-abiding innocent citizens orthose of a potential killer?

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: masculinities, neutral-ization (techniques of ), personality theory,victimology

Key ReadingsCanter, D. (1992) Criminal Psychology. London,

Routledge.Egger, S.A. (1998) The Killers Among Us. New York,

Prentice±Hall.Fox, J.A. and Levin, J. (1994) Overkill: Mass Murder

and Serial Killing Exposed. New York, PlenumPress.

Holmes, R.M. (1987) Serial Murder. Beverly Hills,CA, Sage.

Leyton, E. (1988) Hunting Humans. New York,Pocket Books.

Seltzer, M. (1998) Serial Killers: Death and Life inAmerican Wound Culture. New York, Routledge.

SEXUALITY

De®nition

Literally being sexual, possessing the capacityfor sex or sexual feelings. However, withinlesbian and gay movements sexuality hasbecome a cornerstone of identity and politicalcampaigning around it. Some gay activists


welcome `gay gene' research as af®rming the`normality' of all sexualities; for most, sexu-ality has been seen as de®ning of one'sidentity and self-hood. That is, gay liberationcould be achieved by gay identi®cation.`Coming out' came to be seen as revealing a`true' self to oneself, family, friends and widersociety. Both identity politics and popularprejudice might concentrate on homosexualityand bisexuality ± in often opposing ways ±but heterosexuality needs to be consideredtoo. Katz (1995) argues for the invention of`heterosexuality' by the discipline of sexology,which also discursively produced `homosexu-ality'. Smart (1996) argues that probably onlythe male heterosexual was conceived aspossessing a sexuality. In criminology, gen-erally sexuality is normatively and implicitlyheterosexual and often only explicitly pos-sessed by the young or black. Sexuality isoften seen as pathological.


Typically, sociology has ignored sex andsexuality, leaving the debate and discourse toa variety of sexologies which derive theirmethods and concerns primarily from medi-cine and psychoanalysis. Early criminologyshared practitioners with medicine so somemention of sexuality as pathology can befound in early works. For instance, Lombrosofavoured light punishments for thosedeprived of heterosexual outlets, but long-term incarceration for the congenital homo-sexual. The effect of this would be to deprivethe offender of `homosexual outlets'. More-over much homosexual ± and some hetero-sexual ± activity is illegal and therefore fallswithin the ambit of criminology. The con¯a-tion is evident in the UK Wolfenden Commit-tee's remit to study both homosexuality andprostitution.

The 1970s onward have shown small butsteady advances by feminism into sociologyand eventually criminology. This has raisedthe interest in and knowledge of gender as anissue in studies of crime and criminal justice.With that recognition has grown an interest inmasculinities ± the acceptance that whilst theproblem may still be men, men still hadproblems. However, this emphasis on genderhas continued to obscure the cross-cuttingissues raised by sexuality. There are sexist gaymen but the main complaint of women and offeminism has been against heterosexual men ±their sexual, domestic and economic violence.However, much of that feminism assumed a

uni®ed `sisterhood' which simply aggregatedthe problems faced by educated, middle-classwhite wives with those of lesbians, women ofcolour and so forth.

Apart from early criminology's assumptionof the pathology of homosexuality (main-tained by psychology until the 1970s), issuesof sexuality have been downplayed as purelypersonal or left to other disciplines. However,under the banner of the sociology of deviancea number of sensitive studies have beencarried out. Humphreys' (1970) study of menwho have sex with men in public toilets foundthat many men lived ostensibly heterosexuallives, and Reiss (1961/1968) explored theextent to which young `delinquents' wereprepared to receive oral sex from gay menwithout peer group damage to their hetero-sexual identity.

Evaluation

In as much as criminology is concerned aboutorder it should be concerned with issues ofsexuality. Plummer argues that a `centralproblem for sociologists is that of order andcontrol, and sexuality is sometimes seen asplaying an important part in this order. Eitherit is argued that through sexuality our socialorder is channelled, or it is argued thatthrough social order our sexuality is chan-nelled' (1975/1980). Yet, other than the`commonsense' criminology that sees homo-sexuality as `symptomatic of treason andpolitical deviancy' (Collier, 1995, pp. 97±8),sexuality has been treated poorly in crimino-logy. However, just as gender has begun tomake an impression within criminology, it isargued that sexuality must too. Empirically ithas already begun (and largely remained)outside the discipline with activists contestinghomophobic violence and policing priorities.Left realist victimology should be able to takethis on board without adopting a speci®callygay standpoint or perspective. It remains to beseen whether a full blown ± possibly queer ±consideration of sexuality is possible withincriminology. Much of the work on maleheterosexuality has been carried out byfeminists ± as a problem to be explained ±and is now carried forward under the bannerof the `masculinities' literature. Much of thatliterature fails to acknowledge the work oflesbian feminists or gay men's attempts toexplain heterosexuality.

Nic Groombridge

261SEXUALITY

Associated Concepts: feminist criminologies,hegemonic masculinity, masculinities, patho-logy, queer theory, victimology

Key ReadingsCollier, R. (1995) Masculinity, Law and the Family.

London: Routledge.Humphreys, L. (1970) Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex

in Public Places. London, Duckworth.Katz, J.N. (1995) The Invention of Heterosexuality. New

York, Dutton.Plummer, K. (1975/1980) `Sexual stigma: an inter-

actionist account', in R. Bocock, P. Hamilton, K.Thompson and A. Walton (eds), An Introduction toSociology. London, Fontana.

Reiss, Albert J. Jr (1961/1968) `The social integrationof queers and peers', in E. Rubington and M.S.Weinburg (eds), Deviance: The Interactionist Per-spective. London, Macmillan.

Smart, C. (1996) `Collusion, collaboration andconfession: on moving beyond the heterosexualitydebate', in D. Richardson (ed.), Theorizing Hetero-sexuality. Buckingham, Open University Press.

SHAMING

De®nition

The mode of punishment stigmatizing deviantindividuals or groups which turns them intoidenti®able outcasts, either on a temporary orpermanent basis. Shaming may take bothdisintegrative and reintegrative forms.


There is a long tradition of the use of shamingas one component of stigmatizing punish-ments in pre-industrial and traditional com-munities. However, processes of shaming alsocontinue into modern times. Doubtless, every-one has encountered some form of shaming atsome point in their lives, especially in themicro-interactions between people in bothformal and non-formal settings, such as inschool or in the family. But shaming has notbeen generally recognized as a legitimate andexplicit criminal justice strategy in mostmodern systems of justice and punishment.There are, of course, some notable exceptionsto this tendency. In particular we may note thecultural embeddedness and acceptance of thelegitimacy of shaming in Japan, where there iswidespread use of shaming techniques foroffenders in its system of criminal justice.

Furthermore, shaming was crucial to thepunishment by public disgrace in `communitycourts' of the Soviet Union and Maoist China.And, of course, there has also been a recentgrowth and rebirth of the appeal to publicshaming in the contemporary campaigns andmovements to `name and shame' offenders inmany contemporary Western countries. In theUSA, for example, current shaming techniquesinclude the forced carrying of sandwichboards announcing Ì am a criminal': athrowback to kinds of public shaming thatwere standard practice in the North AmericanEnglish colonies of the seventeenth century.We should note then the danger of shaming inpractice degenerating into vindictiveness. Thelatter development appears in part to bein¯uenced by the conservative communitarianimpulse over `community' justice and punish-ment and the emotive politics of popularpunitiveness, as well as being indicative of thelack of trust in the workings of the formalcriminal justice system.

The recognition of the importance ofshaming to modern criminological thinkingand its potentially positive role in the work-ings of social control has largely been theresult of John Braithwaite's (1989, 1993)important work. He has noted that shamingmay take both disintegrative and reintegrativeforms. The former stigmatizes people andturns them into outcasts (as in the examples ofpunitive exclusion through imprisonment andthe use of banishment in pre-modern socie-ties). Disintegrative shaming is the norm inmodern Western states, as a result of whichthere is labelling and stigma and the creationof a class of outcasts. By way of contrast,reintegrative shaming offers gestures of re-acceptance.

According to Braithwaite, reintegrativeshaming is a form of disapproval dispensedwithin an ongoing relationship with theoffender based on respect. It is a shamingthat focuses on the evil of the deed rather thanon the offender as an irredeemably evilperson. In turn, degradation ceremonies arefollowed by ceremonies to decertify deviance,where forgiveness, apology and repentanceare culturally important (Braithwaite, 1993, p.1). Reintegrative shaming also expressessociety's disapproval of the act by bringingthe wrong-doer, the victim and close associ-ates of each party together in a group setting.It is argued that much of its preventive successlies in its work on the offender's conscience.However, such preventive processes will onlywork in situations where loss of respect countsheavily. Braithwaite thus acknowledges that it


is `communitarianism that makes shamingpossible' (Braithwaite, 1993, p. 2). Unlikemodern Western systems of justice andpunishment, which isolate and stigmatize theguilty through exclusionary disposal (such ascustody), reintegrative shaming therefore aimsto accept the guilty back into the communityand so help prevent future offending througha process of active re-integration.

There are obvious risks with this strategy, ofwhich Braithwaite is well aware. As he notes,shaming can become the principal weapon ofthe tyranny of the majority over vulnerableminorities (Braithwaite, 1989, p. 158). Thisconcern has led Braithwaite to argue that thesecuring of liberty must lie at the centre ofwhat he terms civic republican justice. Despiteclaims that shaming is unlikely to work in thecomplex, anonymous societies of the modernera, Braithwaite has made a strong argumentfor its continuing salience as a crime preven-tion approach today. Indeed, it may be arguedthat today's proliferation of roles makes us allmore vulnerable to shame in a way that ispeculiar and speci®c to a world of such pro-liferation of roles. According to proponents ofreintegrative shaming, this mode of restorativejustice is far from being reactionary andtargeted at the most vulnerable minorities.Instead, it is viewed as a crucial communitar-ian resource in mobilizing against thoseoffenders who brutalize (such as abusers) andexploit (such as corporations) as well asrestraining those who would wish to trampleon the rights of citizens who wish to be (harm-lessly) deviant. However, the extent to whichreintegrative shaming is employed routinelyagainst powerful individuals and agencies, notleast shaming intolerable criminal justicepractices, needs to be given critical attention.

Evaluation

Signi®cant and worrying questions remainwith the theory and practice of shaming,whether disintegrative or reintegrative. It hasas yet to be proven that shaming will not beused and mobilized against the most vulner-able, deviant sections of the population withlittle concern for their legal and human rights.Given the previous history of other commu-nity justice-based initiatives, it is also quitepossible that (reintegrative) shaming will beused chie¯y for trivial offences and youngoffenders without any reduction in the use oftraditional, disintegrative custodial sentences.Indeed, critical authors, such as Blagg (1997),have noted that the `product' of reintegrative

shaming being franchised in Australia is beingtargeted at Aboriginal people, and mayintensify rather than reduce police controlsover this already victimized population. Moregeneral criticisms may be made of the notionthat shaming is a universal trait in all humancultures. If shaming is a forced and ingenuineprocess imposed on the offender, its reinte-grative ef®cacy may be open to question andinstead result in the more traditional conse-quence of stigmatizing criminalization.

Gordon Hughes

Associated Concepts: communitarianism, com-munity justice, restorative justice, stigma

Key ReadingsBlagg, H. (1997) À just measure of shame:

aboriginal youth and conferencing in Australia',British Journal of Criminology, 37 (4), pp. 481±501.

Braithwaite, J. (1989) Crime, Shame and Reintegration.Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Braithwaite, J. (1993) `Shame and modernity', BritishJournal of Criminology, 33 (1), pp. 1±18.

SITUATIONAL CRIME PREVENTION

De®nition

Crime prevention as a whole can be de®ned asreducing the risk of occurrence and thepotential seriousness of criminal events, byintervening in their causes. Situational crimeprevention (SCP) intervenes in those causeswhich the offender encounters, or seeks out, inthe immediate circumstances of the criminalevent.


SCP methods aim to reduce a wide range ofcrimes. They commonly involve the design ofproducts, services, environments or systems tomake them crime-resistant ± a strategyimplemented alone or in combination withcertain social activities, such as surveillanceand response to crimes by people in variousroles: householder, passer-by, employee orsecurity personnel, and the more strategicmanagers of places. The methods range fromsupplying toughened drinking glasses toreduce injury from ®ghts in bars, to establish-ing rules for acceptable behaviour in shoppingcentres and football matches; from traf®c

263SITUATIONAL CRIME PREVENTION

enforcement cameras to anti-climb paint; fromencryption of ®nancial data to CCTV in banks;from better laid-out housing estates to hard-to-forge holographic labels to discouragecounterfeit vodka; from airport metal detec-tors and security guards to Farm Watch andsimilar community-based schemes.

SCP does not rely on past improvements insociety, treatment regimes for offenders orearly interventions in children's socializationto reduce current criminality; nor on the sheeraversive intensity of sanctions anticipated atsome remote point in the future to deter orincapacitate present offending. It does notdirectly aim to change offenders' propensitiesor motives for crime at all. It takes these asgiven and, proceeding from an analysis of thecircumstances engendering particular crimes,it introduces speci®c changes to in¯uence theoffender's decision or ability to commit thesecrimes at given places and times. Theseinterventions usually act on the here-and-now of the immediate crime situation, remov-ing or altering some of its components orpreventing them coming together. The genericcomponents of the crime situation include ahuman, material or informational target ofcrime; a target enclosure, such as a safe or abuilding; a wider environment, such as ahousing estate or town centre; and people orinstitutions playing two opposing roles ±preventers, who make crime less likely, andpromoters, who carelessly or deliberatelymake it more likely. The interventions maysometimes act on prior `scenes' (Cornish, 1994),in which offenders prepare, or become primedfor, crime (such as acquiring weapons, gettingdrunk or engaging in disputes over parking).Interventions may be implemented indirectly± for example, helping people protect theirown homes, or naming and shaming manu-facturers of insecure vehicles so they aremotivated to make them harder to steal.

SCP methods are widely adopted in society,shading into common-sense `routine precau-tions' (Clarke, 1997). But only in the past 20years has the òf®cial' world of governmentand police taken them seriously. In the USA,the approach developed through the CrimePrevention through Environmental Designmovement (National Crime Prevention Coun-cil, 1997). In the UK, a programme of practicalresearch directed by Ron Clarke at the HomeOf®ce inspired the search for a more theore-tical foundation built around the concept ofcrime as opportunity. This was based (at a timeof `nothing works') on dissatisfaction with thelimited effectiveness of crime preventionthrough conventional means, particularly

attempts to change the disposition of theoffender; and growing academic awareness ofthe general limits of `personality' in explainingbehaviour. Two main theoretical approachesnow underlie SCP. Both take offender charac-teristics, including motivation, as given.

The rational choice perspective sees thefundamental causal mechanism of SCP asmaking the commission of speci®c sets ofcrimes more risky (deterrence), requiring ofmore effort and less rewarding (discourage-ment), or less comfortable (removing excuses)(adapted from Clarke, 1997). For SCP to work ±at least in the short term ± deterrence anddiscouragement need only be perceived barriers.

Routine activity theory (Felson, 1983) takes awider causal view. Here, criminal events stemfrom the conjunction of a likely (motivated)offender, a suitable target and the absence ofcapable guardians. SCP is about changing thelast two. A related approach, which attemptsto understand and predict what brings theseingredients together in terms of spatialarrangements, patterns of travel etc., isenvironmental criminology (Brantingham andBrantingham, 1995).

Evaluation

The main practical criticism of SCP centres ondisplacement, that is where an offender,blocked by an SCP measure, seeks a similartarget at another time or place, changesmethods or changes target altogether. Clarke(1997) has, however, shown displacement tobe limited in effect and sometimes evenreversed (diffusion of bene®t, where cautiousoffenders avoid more than just the of®ciallyprotected site); but the possibility of displace-ment can never be ruled out in any speci®ccircumstances.

Aesthetic criticisms centre on fears of `fort-ress society', and ethical ones on loss of privacyor freedom. According to advocates of SCP,both can be minimized through good design ofproducts, environments and procedures toreconcile security with these potentially con-¯icting requirements. Some practitioners ± andcriminologists ± whose primary interest is inoffenders and their motives ®nd SCP trivial;some situationalists in their turn regardoffender-oriented approaches as over-optimis-tic or misguided. Having `two cultures of pre-vention' blocks practical and theoreticalprogress.

Theoretical criticisms highlight the limits tooffenders' rationality ± but these are neitherfatal to SCP, nor contested by its protagonists.


More recently (e.g. Ekblom, 2000) there havebeen attempts to integrate SCP with a widerunderstanding of offenders ± their criminalpredispositions, immediate motives to offendand resources for offending (tools, weapons,knowledge and skill). From this perspective,the concept of opportunity for crime is notsimply a property of the crime situation, but isconjointly dependent on the offender'sresources to exploit it and cope with therisks (an open window three ¯oors up is onlyan opportunity to someone with agility,courage and maybe a ladder).

Paul Ekblom

Associated Concepts: carceral society, commu-nity safety, crime prevention, defensible space,geographies of crime, rational choice theory,routine activity theory, surveillance

Key ReadingsBrantingham, P. and Brantingham, P. (1995) `Crim-

inality of place: crime generators and crimeattractors', European Journal on Criminal Policyand Research, 3 (3), pp. 5±26.

Clarke, R.V.G. (1997) Situational Crime Prevention:Successful Case Studies, 2nd edn. Albany, NY,Harrow and Heston.

Cornish, D. (1994) `The procedural analysis ofoffending and its relevance for situational preven-tion', in R. Clarke (ed.), Crime Prevention Studies, 3.Monsey, NY, Criminal Justice Press, pp. 151±96.

Ekblom, P. (2000) `The conjunction of criminalopportunity ± a tool for clear, ``joined-up''thinking about community safety and crimereduction', in K. Pease, S. Ballintyne and V.McLaren (eds), Key Issues in Crime Prevention,Crime Reduction and Community Safety. London,Institute for Public Policy Research.

Felson, M. (1983) `Linking criminal choices, routineactivities, informal control, and criminal out-comes', in D. Cornish and R. Clarke (eds), TheReasoning Criminal. New York, Springer-Verlag.

National Crime Prevention Council (1997) DesigningSafer Communities: A Crime Prevention throughEnvironmental Design Handbook. Washington, DC,NCPC.

SOCIAL CENSURE

De®nition

To censure is to blame, criticize, express dis-approval, or condemn. A social censure is a

category expressing cultural disapproval, or asign of blame.


The process of blaming and stigmatizingothers in general is of core interest tocriminology, but the social patterns of censureare of particular concern to sociologists.Psychologists are interested in the censoriouspersonality or the roots of individual pre-judice; sociologists in the political uses andsocial functions of scapegoating.

The concept of social censure refers to thosecensures which are common within a cultureand which re¯ect the dominant or keyrelationships or structures of the society.Censures mostly reinforce the establishedorder and its institutions ± for example, thesocial censure of bastardy reinforces thenormative reverence for procreation withinmarriage. Some can be seen as master-censures in that they are so deep-rootedwithin the culture and its forms of thoughtthat they permeate many other forms ofcensure. However, some are counter-censures,expressing the opposition or criticism ofsubordinate social groups to the socialsystem or its institutions.

The concept of social censure differs fromthat of the label because the latter belongs to atheoretical standpoint, which emphasizesconscious blaming practices using ideas as akind of stick to beat people with. This is aliberal `voluntarist' approach which supposesall is rational choice ± and that categories ofblame are not generated by the social structurenor creep quietly into our unconscious mindsloaded with ideological or cultural baggage.Censure theory, as developed by Sumner(1990, 1994, 1997), is lodged within a theore-tical analysis that emphasizes that feelings ofdisapproval are as much unconscious andemotional as they are conscious and rational,that social structures by their very natureimply, and predispose us to, certain categoriesof blame, and that social censures come to usalready steeped and rooted within the struc-tures and events of social history and thuscoated with acquired meanings and implica-tions.

The concept draws upon the idea of a voteof censure in Parliament or Congress to implythat even everyday social censures have apolitical, organized, dimension ± somethingwhich re¯ects the fact that most practices andinstitutions in modern `disciplinary' societiesare deeply permeated, and even structured, by

265SOCIAL CENSURE

normative judgements and judgemental orinspectorial practices and that the interests ofthe state have been inserted into most dimen-sions of private morality (Foucault, 1967,1975). Governance cannot evade moral pro-priety and custom has long lost its virginity tostate interference. Public and private worldswere linked up by the seventeenth-centuryEuropean city-states concerned with theconservation of healthy populations (seeShakespeare's Measure for Measure) but theywere fully merged in the formation of thewelfare state and have never been de-coupled.This linkage was a vital part of the imperialistexpansion into and creation of the `ThirdWorld', leading later critics to observe that thecultural colonization of the mind was the mostdebilitating aspect of being colonized.

In European and New World societies of thetwentieth century, the dominant social cen-sures were probably those of property crimeand communism, both censures of activitiesdirected at the fundamental structures ofprivate property. These were, arguably, clo-sely followed by the social censures of women,homosexuals and immigrants, groups whoseexistence and self-expression constantly chal-lenged the established order of white, patri-archal, power in the home and the localcommunity.

Designed as a replacement for the conceptof social deviance, which is itself a socialcensure favoured by sociologists in thetwentieth century, the concept of socialcensure signi®es the way that notions of thedisapproved or immoral have over timeacquired surplus associated meanings, suchas stereotypes, which specify likely offenders,appropriate emotional responses to the act,contexts of commission and possible conse-quences. It thus designates cultural packagesof blame which, insofar as they re¯ect social-structural needs, partisan interests, belief-systems and traditional assumptions, amountto ideological formations that target groups oracts or styles perceived by the dominant cul-ture to be its enemies. As such, their functionis usually to denounce and regulate ratherthan to explain or understand. They demar-cate the regulator from the offender, thenormal from the abnormal, the healthy fromthe unhealthy, and the good from the bad.

Since social censures are cultural, or evenideological formations tied to a will to punishor to social control, they are not goodfoundations for open-minded or scienti®canalysis. Social scientists do not begin withthe idea that, for example, terrorism is aneutral, descriptive category; they take it as an

object whose signi®cance needs to be exploredfor its variety of meanings, functions and rolesfor different groups at different historicalmoments. Censures are objects of study nottools of enquiry. Social research using theconcept of social censure has found it valuablein analysing culturally and politically loadeddata and attempting to distinguish socialattributions from ontological realities.

Colin Sumner

Associated Concepts: deviance, labelling, racia-lization, stereotyping

Key ReadingsFoucault, M. (1967) Madness and Civilization: A

History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. London,Tavistock.

Foucault, M. (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison. London, Allen Lane.

Sumner, C.S. (ed.) (1990) Censure, Politics andCriminal Justice. Milton Keynes, Open UniversityPress.

Sumner, C.S. (1990) `Foucault, gender and thecensure of deviance', in L. Gelsthorpe and A.Morris (eds), Feminist Perspectives in Criminology.Milton Keynes, Open University Press.

Sumner, C.S. (1994) The Sociology of Deviance: AnObituary. Buckingham, Open University Press.

Sumner, C.S. (ed.) (1997) Violence, Censure andCulture. London, Taylor and Francis.

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM

De®nition

A perspective that explores the assumptionsembedded in the labelling of people andplaces and emphasizes the importance ofsocial expectations in the analysis of taken-for-granted or apparently natural social pro-cesses.


A naturalistic or realist perspective in thesocial sciences treats social problems asthough they are given: phenomena aboutwhose existence we can all agree. The socialconstructionist perspective insists on thenecessity of taking a step back from thisview and asks instead, who says this is a socialproblem ± and what sort of social problem dothey think it is? This perspective draws on a


very different sociological inheritance, onethat treats society as a matrix of meaning. Itaccords a central role to processes of con-structing, producing and circulating mean-ings. Within this perspective, we cannot graspreality (or empirical phenomena) in a directand unmediated way. Reality is alwaysmediated by meaning. Indeed, some of itsproponents argue that what we experience is`the social construction of reality' (Berger andLuckman, 1966). How something (or someone)is named, identi®ed and placed within a `map'of the social order has profound consequencesfor how we act towards it (or them). Therecannot be `social problems' that are not theproducts of processes of social construction ±naming, labelling, de®ning and mapping theminto a place ± through which we can `makesense' of them.

The crux of this argument was establishedby Howard Becker (1963) in relation to deviantbehaviour. Realist explanations attempt toaccount for deviance by identifying differ-ences between those who behave `normally'and those who behave in an àbnormal' way.Becker pointed to a number of problems withthis approach. First, it assumed the accurateand unproblematic knowledge of who wasnormal and who was deviant. But, saidBecker, the distinction is socially constructed.It involves the exercise of judgement by socialactors, located in social institutions, applyingsocial norms. Secondly, deviance is context-speci®c rather than universal. Behaviour thatis viewed or classi®ed as deviant variesbetween and even within societies, and shiftsover time. As a result, Becker argued, it isanalytically and methodologically incorrect topursue the explanation of deviance in terms ofdiscovering the `deviant characteristics' of the`deviant' person, when deviance is a productof a process of labelling some behaviours asdeviant and others not. In short, deviance issocially constructed.

This basic social constructionist view hasbeen subjected to a wide range of criticisms,some of which have attempted to refute itsclaims, while others have tried to develop andenhance the approach. Many of these devel-opments centre on three key issues: the socialcontext of social constructions; the con¯ictualor contested character of social constructions;and the unstable or changeable character ofsocial constructions. In particular, attempts atdeveloping social constructionism havehinged around issues of power (Bacchi, 1999,pp. 50±64). This interest in social construction-ism and its potential development is part ofwider shifts in the social sciences in which a

cluster of concerns with culture/meaning/language have come to occupy a more centralplace (Clarke, 1999). Social constructionism isone tributary that ¯ows into this widermovement, intersecting with questions ofideology, discourse and the articulation ofpower in a range of ways (Burr, 1996; Saraga,1998).

Evaluation

The social constructionist perspective has beensubject to criticisms that challenge its value forthe study of crime in particular and socialproblems in general. Social constructionism issometimes seen as trivializing the reality ofsocial problems ± implying that such issuesare merely social constructions. It may be thatthe emphasis on language, meaning, imageryand so on involved in social constructionistanalyses foregrounds what we are used toseeing as peripheral or epiphenomenal mat-ters (compared with the gritty stuff of `reallife'). But if we can only apprehend and act on`real life' through language, then socialconstructions matter profoundly. Construc-tions, ideologies and discourses becomeinstitutionalized. They become the `taken-for-granted' wisdom about the way of the worldand what can be done in it. They de®ne thethinkable (and attempt to dismiss alternativesas unthinkable, utopian, politically motivatedand the like). In the process, dominantconstructions become `solidi®ed' ± apparentlyimmovable and irresistible ways of thinkingand acting that sustain existing patterns ofsocial arrangements. They are supported byknowledges and become embedded in institu-tional arrangements and embodied in socialpractices that attempt to realize their `truthclaims' in practice. These solidi®cations ±patterns of institutionalized habit and repeti-tion ± are not insubstantial and nor are they`just words'. A social constructionist perspec-tive, however, insists that such solidity is stilla social accomplishment ± it is not natural, it isnot universal, and it is not eternal. Socialconstructionism insists, abstractly, that allsocial practices have the potential to bedeconstructed and reconstructed ± howeverinert and immovable they may appear. Whatthe perspective reveals is how the density andsolidity of social reality has been constructedand how many layers of habit, everydaywisdom, institutionalized norms, and forms ofsocial power have been built up to keep thingsthat way. But such conditions are always inneed of being reproduced ± they do not carry

267SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM

on without the expenditure of social energy.They may, then, be reproduced differentlythrough con¯ict, contestations and challenge.

John Clarke

Associated Concepts: crime, deconstruction,deviance, discourse analysis, interactionism,labelling, left realism, social reaction

Key ReadingsBacchi, C. (1999) Women, Policy and Politics: The

Construction of Policy Problems. London, Sage.Becker, H. (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of

Deviance. New York, The Free Press.Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1966) The Social

Construction of Reality. New York, Doubleday.Burr, V. (1996) An Introduction to Social Construction-

ism. London, Routledge.Clarke, J. (1999) `Coming to terms with culture', in

H. Dean and R. Woods (eds), Social Policy Review10. London, Social Policy Association.

Saraga, E. (ed.) (1998) Embodying the Social: Con-structions of Difference. London, Routledge/OpenUniversity.

SOCIAL CONTROL

De®nition

A poorly de®ned concept which has been usedto describe all means through which con-formity might be achieved ± from infantsocialization to incarceration. It has beenemployed in various guises within interac-tionism, labelling, control theory, feminism,critical criminology and post-structuralism.


The precise parameters of `social control'escape any straightforward demarcation. Thestandard de®nition simply describes all themeans and processes through which socialconformity is achieved, ranging from primarysocialization, through informal mechanisms(such as peer group pressure) to formalmethods associated with the police and thelegal system. Within interactionism the keyconcern is with how cooperation and socialintegration are achieved, usually withoutrecourse to a coercive and authoritarian dis-cipline. Interactionists broadly conclude thatthe key to the maintenance of social orderlies in the realm of informal and primary

socialization processes through which coresocial values are transmitted and internalized.This benign reading of `social control' as afunctional and political necessity was mir-rored in traditional positivist criminology.Within such readings it is widely assumedthat a consensus exists in society, that primarysocialization is largely successful in achievinga widespread and uncontested conformity andthat external agencies are only called upon to`mop-up' those deviants who have suffered afailure or lack of adequate socialization.

In the late 1960s an alternative view of socialcontrol came to the fore. Generated by theprotest movements in America (civil rights,Vietnam, Counterculture) and the emergingutopian and personal politics of the New Leftin Britain, arguments concerning the essentialconsensual nature of society became harder tosustain and social control came to be seen asorganized repression. In particular, the label-ling perspective argued that social control wasnot simply a reactive and reparative exercise,but an active force in the identi®cation andcreation of the deviant. In effect, labellingchallenged notions of `social control' as `doinggood' and replaced them with notions of`doing bad'.

Such a premise became particularly in¯u-ential in critical readings of a wide range ofpurportedly reformist and welfare-relatedpractices. The coercive ± but often hidden ±aspects of control entailed in the professionalpractices of youth training, social work, law,probation, medicine, schooling and psychiatrywere highlighted and analysed as part of aburgeoning social control culture. An image ofsociety as moving incessantly towards moresophisticated means of repressive control wascreated. The intrusion of the state into theprivate and familiar, the capacity for beha-viour to be continually subjected to surveil-lance, monitoring and regulation and thespectre of mind control constructed a power-ful portrayal of a one-dimensional society inwhich `social control has become Kafka-land'(Cohen, 1985, p. 6).

Whilst moving the concept of social controlfrom its benign underpinnings, this newinterpretation maintained that social control,whether weak or strong, informal or formal,remained all-pervasive. But the key neglectedissues remained of how and why such controloperated differently in different social con-texts. It was also often in danger of caricatur-ing all police, social workers and teachers asagents of repression. Lacking any precisede®nition and consistent use, the conceptwas aptly described by Cohen (1985, p. 2) as


`Mickey Mouse' and by Lowman et al. (1987,p. 4) as à skeleton key opening so many doorsthat its analytic power has been drained . . . aspectral category which becomes all things toall theorists'.

It was only following the work of Foucaultthat the term `social control' was resurrectedin the 1980s as a means through whichanalytical justice could be done to the complexand contradictory means by which order isachieved in democratic societies. Foucault'srecognition of processes of diffuse societalpower (or the `microphysics of power')signi®cantly broadened the concept of socialcontrol to include not only institutionalpractices, but the realms of discursive con-struction, ideology and the production ofmeaning. For example, Foucault refers to acontinuous disciplinary discourse, in which noone source is given privileged attention, whichinformed and was intertwined with all formsof social control in the late eighteenth century.Thus the reform of prisoners, con®nement ofthe insane and supervision of industrialworkers as well as the training and educationof children, all formed part of an emergingcarceral society, in which it was not onlydeviance or crime that was controlled, but alsoevery irregularity or the least departure fromthe norm. This power emanates not simplyfrom the state or a mode of production but, forFoucault, from forms of knowledge thatinform all social relations. It is because ofthis broad canvas that Foucault's workremains in¯uential in historical and contem-porary readings of social control. It allows fora greater sensitivity to the interrelations ofsocial structure with processes of power,knowledge and governance. It is more attunedto processes of domination and enablement; ofconstraint and resistance. As a result termssuch as `regulation', `knowledge', `normal-ization', `governmentality' and `discipline'have come to hold a central place in a`revisionist' literature of social control.

Of note is Cohen's (1979, 1985) `dispersal ofdiscipline' thesis which contends that ascontrol mechanisms are dispersed from cus-tody into the community they penetratedeeper into the social fabric. A blurring ofboundaries between the deviant and non-deviant, the public and the private occurs. A`punitive archipelago' is expanded as newresources, technology and professional inter-ests are applied to an increasing number of`clients' and `customers'. Entrepreneurs aredrawn into the control enterprise in search ofpro®ts. Communities are mobilized to act asvoluntary control agents in their own right.

But throughout, the growing invisibility anddiversi®cation of the state's role does notmean it has withered away. The prisonremains at the core of the system.

Lowman et al. (1987, p. 9) argue that thesedevelopments can best be captured in theconcept of transcarceration. They argue that asthe old institutions of control remain and thenew are created, we are now confronted witha `peno-judicial, mental health, welfare andtutelage complex . . . for delinquents, deviantsand dependants this means that their careersare likely to be characterized by institutionalmobility as they are pushed from one sectionof the help±control complex to another. Forcontrol agents, this means that control willessentially have no locus and the controlmandate will increasingly entail the `̀ ®ttingtogether'' of subsystems.' This formulation ofcontrol continues to acknowledge its versati-lity: in®ltrating many levels of discourse andàrenas of action' and serving and constitutinga diversity of interests. Of particular note ishow, by the 1990s, much of this control hadbecome privatized ± that is, removed fromdirect state control and activated by commu-nities, voluntary agencies and private securitycompanies. It is in this context that Cohen(1994, p. 74) begins talking of social control asa commodity: as something to be purchasedand sold.

David Wilson

Associated Concepts: carceral society, govern-mentality, labelling, net widening, socialcontrol theory, social reaction, the state,transcarceration

Key ReadingsCohen, S. (1979) `The punitive city: notes on the

dispersal of social control', Contemporary Crises,3 (4), pp. 341±63.


Cohen, S. (1989) `The critical discourse on `̀ socialcontrol'': notes on the concept as a hammer',International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 17, pp.347±57.

Cohen, S. (1994) `Social control and the politics ofreconstruction', in D. Nelken (ed.), The Futures ofCriminology. London, Sage.

Cohen, S. and Scull, A. (eds) (1983) Social Control andthe State: Historical and Comparative Essays. Oxford,Martin Robertson.

Lowman, J., Menzies, R.J. and Palys, T.S. (eds) (1987)Transcarceration: Essays in the Sociology of SocialControl. Aldershot, Gower.

269SOCIAL CONTROL

SOCIAL CONTROL THEORY

De®nition

A sociological approach to understanding thecauses of conformity that focuses on the abilityof society and its institutions (parents, peers,schools, spouses and jobs) to restrain humanbehaviour. From this theoretical perspective,human nature is assumed to be essentiallyanti-social ± a view borrowed directly fromThomas Hobbes's (1985 [1651], p. 188) descrip-tion of life in a world without externallyimposed control as a `war of every managainst every man'. Thus, the central questionis, `What is it about society that restrainsindividuals from deviance?' The basic premiseis that conformity results when societal ties arestrong.


Social control theory includes a number ofrelated sociological explanations that var-iously explain how social institutions restrainindividuals to societal norms. While humanbehaviour is the result of both motivations andrestraints, social control theorists ®nd it morefruitful to focus on variations in restraints toexplain orderly behaviour. Thus, variousapproaches to social control theory all explainwhy individuals conform to societal normsrather than why they deviate.

Early social control theorists speculated thatjuvenile delinquency (the primary area ofstudy) was caused mainly by a weak ego orpoor self-concept. Reiss's (1951) theory ofpersonal and social controls described howweak egos of juvenile delinquents lacked therequisite personal controls to produce con-forming behaviour. Similarly, Briar and Pilia-vin (1965) believed that adolescents who fearedgetting caught for delinquent activities were themost likely to conform to society's rulesbecause it could damage their self-image. Apositive attitude purportedly helped the ado-lescent to resist negative in¯uences, especiallydelinquent peers. Similarly, Reckless (1967)argued that a good self-concept helped boys toinsulate themselves from negative in¯uenceswhile growing up in criminogenic areas.Certain internal (e.g., positive self-concept)and external (e.g., positive peer support) factorsor `containments' helped to insulate youthsfrom delinquency-promoting situations.

Other control perspectives explain con-formity by variations in basic `ties' or

`commitments' to the conventional socialorder. Nye (1958) identi®ed four types ofsocial control: (1) direct control, based on thethreat of punishments and rewards to gaincompliance to societal norms; (2) indirectcontrol, based on affectional attachments toconventional persons; (3) internalized control,based on the development of the individualpersonality, self-concept, or conscience; and(4) control over opportunities for deviant andconventional activities.

Among the various social control perspec-tives, however, Hirschi's (1969) `social bond'version is probably the most widely knownand cited. It is relatively explicit, welldeveloped and amenable to empirical tests.The social bonds have four components(attachment, involvement, belief and commit-ment), which are positively related to con-formity (and to each other) and are thought tohave independent effects on delinquency.

Àttachment' refers to the affective ties thatadolescents form with signi®cant others ±especially parents, peers and school. Thecentral principle is that adolescents who areonly weakly attached to others are alsoinsensitive to their opinions, thereby `freeing'the child to deviate in response to situationaldemands and peer pressures. Thus, attach-ment is essentially a social-psychologicalconcept, involving the motivational value ofsocial approval. Ìnvolvement' refers to theidea that juveniles may get so caught up inconventional activities that they do not havethe time for delinquent behaviours. `Commit-ment' is synonymous to the idea of `stakes inconformity' in that deviation jeopardizeschances for success. For example, thoseadolescents committed to a college educationare less likely to commit delinquency becausesuch behaviours (if caught and punished) canjeopardize chances for future success andaccomplishments. `Belief' refers to respect forsociety's laws. If children have been socializedto respect the law, they should be less inclinedto commit legal violations of the law.

Hirschi's (1969) concepts of attachment andbelief correspond conceptually to Nye's con-cepts of indirect and internalized controls,except that Hirschi locates the conscience inthe social bond to others rather than making itpart of the individual personality. Also, Nye'sconcept of direct control and Hirschi's conceptof involvement have some conceptual overlap,but they are clearly not identical. The premisebehind involvement is time (ìdle hands arethe devil's workshop'), while direct controlsare more indicative of physical restriction,surveillance, monitoring and punishment of


behaviours. Both Nye and Hirschi argued thatthe utility of direct monitoring and super-vision by parents is probably limited, sinceadolescents are relatively autonomous fromtheir parents. The inference is that the majorcontrolling mechanisms will be throughattachments or indirect controls.

Evaluation

On the one hand, much of Hirschi's theory hasbeen corroborated by empirical research,indicating that delinquents often feel detachedfrom typical societal bonds. Indeed, researchgenerally supports Hirschi's basic propositionthat weak school and parental attachmentsincrease the probability of delinquency. Onthe other hand, various measures of belief andespecially involvement (e.g., sports activities,hobbies, extracurricular school activities) haverevealed few statistically reliable associationswith delinquency. In addition, evidencesuggests that strong attachments to delinquentpeers actually increase deviance rather thanhaving a bene®cial effect, as suggested byHirschi. Research also has indicated that directparental controls should not be dismissed astheoretically and empirically irrelevant, assuggested by both Nye and Hirschi. Empiricalevidence indicates that direct parental controls(such as monitoring, rewards, punishments)are just as effective as indirect controls orattachments in controlling delinquency.

Furthermore, Agnew (1985) suggests thatthe temporal ordering of the variables inHirschi's model should be reversed. Ratherthan weak social bonds being a cause of delin-quency (as suggested by Hirschi), Agnew'sresearch indicates that delinquent behaviourmay actually lead to weakened social bonds.While plausible, this criticism can be levelledagainst virtually all theories tested by meansof empirical research that is cross-sectional(rather than longitudinal) in design.

Generally, however, social control theory isprobably more incomplete than it is incorrect;thus, researchers have sought to extend,clarify and re®ne its basic tenets. Most of thisresearch has led to modi®cations in theoperational measures and conceptual quali®-cations in the empirical interpretation of theperspective rather than to an outright rejectionor overhaul of the entire theory. For example,researchers have interpreted the actual mea-surement of parental attachments in a varietyof ways, including indicators of affection andlove, interest and concern, support, encour-agement, desire for physical closeness and

positive communication. Although all are cor-related with delinquency to about the samedegree, they may re¯ect different dimensionsof parental attachment.

Furthermore, there is a lack of conceptualdevelopment by social control theorists aboutthe interactive effects of various variables.Indeed, there is a tendency to predict theimpact of one measure of social control quiteindependently from other variables, implyinga simple additive model. For example, what isthe probability of delinquency under thecondition that attachment to both parents isstrong, while simultaneously the adolescent isstrongly attached to delinquent peers? Simi-larly, what is the conjunctive impact of bothdirect (monitoring) and indirect (attachment)parental controls on delinquency? A childmay place little value on parental approval butconform to parental expectations out of abelief that they monitor his or her behavioursclosely and will punish any deviation. On theother hand, some children may behave solelybecause they desire parental acceptance.Generally, explications of social controltheory have failed to predict behavioural out-comes beyond the bivariate level. Becauselittle theoretical and empirical attention hasbeen directed toward the examination of sucheffects, many questions remain unresolved.

In sum, empirical research has generallysupported the core concepts of Hirschi'sversion of social control theory. While somecritics question its validity, few would ques-tion that it has been the most in¯uential theoryof delinquency over the past 30 years.

Joseph Rankin and Roger Kern

Associated Concepts: conditioning, containmenttheory, cross-sectional design, delinquency,longitudinal study, neutralization (techniquesof )

Key ReadingsAgnew, R. (1985) `Social control theory and

delinquency: a longitudinal test', Criminology, 23,pp. 47±61.

Briar, S. and Piliavin, I. (1965) `Delinquency:situational inducements and commitment toconformity', Social Problems, 13, pp. 35±45.

Hirschi, T. (1969) Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley,CA, University of California Press.

Hobbes, T. (1985 [1651]) Leviathan. New York, VikingPenguin.

Nye, F.I. (1958) Family Relationships and DelinquentBehavior. New York, John Wiley.

271SOCIAL CONTROL THEORY

Reckless, W. (1967) The Crime Problem. New York,Appleton±Century±Crofts.

Reiss, A.J. (1951) `Delinquency as the failure ofpersonal and social controls', American SociologicalReview, 16, pp. 196±207.

SOCIAL CRIME PREVENTION

De®nition

Measures to prevent crime which are aimed atthe social causes of crime rather than thoseconcerned with the mechanical reduction ofopportunities (situational crime prevention) orwith deterrence (the criminal justice system).


The distinction between social and situationalrevolves around the focus on causes (Craw-ford, 1998). Both situational crime preventionand deterrence explicitly disavow causality(hence their designation as administrativecriminology). The difference does not hingeon the social ± for situational crime preventioncan have social aspects, for example, theincrease in the facilitation of surveillance inneighbourhood watch and in environmentaldesign of housing estates. The emphasis onsocial causes, therefore, relates social crimeprevention to any causal theory of crime (forexample, whether strain, relative deprivation,control, labelling or criminal careers arehighlighted as causative factors). In commonwith crime prevention strategies in general, itis aimed at intervention before the offence hasoccurred rather than after (for example, in thearrest and punishment of offenders and victimsupport). Interest in both situational and socialcrime prevention has risen concomitantly withthe postwar rise in crime in industrial societiesand the recognition of the strained resourcesand limits of ef®cacy of the criminal justicesystem. In general, situational crime preven-tion has been predominant in neo-liberalpolitical contexts and social crime preventionin those that have a stronger social democraticsetting (see Hughes, 1998). Social crime pre-vention is seen as being expedited by multi-agency initiatives outside of the criminaljustice system ± the precise forms of inter-vention and the major institutions involveddepending on whether causality is locatedprimarily in employment, the family, educa-tion or community. Both situational and social

crime prevention form part of most commu-nity safety programmes, although ElliottCurrie (1988) makes the useful distinctionbetween those projects that view crime as anoutside threat to the community (in whichsituational crime prevention is paramount)and those where crime is sees as a product ofthe institutions and structure of the commu-nity (in which social crime prevention is seenas appropriate).

Social crime prevention is viewed by leftrealists as the key platform for tackling crime(Currie, 1998; Young, 1991), although bothsituational crime prevention and the criminaljustice system are accorded supporting roles.

Jock Young

Associated Concepts: communitarianism, com-munity crime prevention, community safety,crime prevention, left realism, situationalcrime prevention

Key ReadingsCrawford, A. (1998) Crime Prevention and Community

Safety. London, Longman.Currie, E. (1988) `Two visions of community crime

prevention', in T. Hope and M. Shaw (eds),Communities and Crime Reduction. London, HMSO.

Currie, E. (1998) Crime and Punishment in America.New York, Metropolitan Books.

Hughes, G. (1998) Understanding Crime Prevention.Buckingham, Open University Press.

Walklate, S. (1996) `Community and crime preven-tion', in E. McLaughlin and J. Muncie (eds),Controlling Crime. London, Sage.

Young, J. (1991) `Left realism and the priorities ofcrime control', in K. Stenson and D. Cowell (eds),The Politics of Crime Control. London, Sage.

SOCIAL DEFENCE THEORY

De®nition

A penal philosophy developed in the earlytwentieth century that adhered to the `protec-tion of society' by the neutralization andresocialization of the offender, whereby ®xedpenalties were set aside for individualizedpunishment.


The development of a `social defence theory'has been accredited to the Belgian jurist


Adolphe Prins following the publication of hisbook La DeÂfense sociale in 1910 (see Ancel,1965). As a penological concept, however, itsorigins are to be found in the early nineteenthcentury. In 1831, the Italian jurist Carmignaniargued that the rigid administration of crimesand punishments should be replaced with anew penal theory based on the concepts of`social offence' and `social defence' (seePasquino, 1980). Its origins are clearly Eur-opean, notably Italian, German, French andBelgian. Carmignani's vision of a socialdefence doctrine gathered momentum andacceptance during the positivist revolt of thelate nineteenth century. Radzinowiczdescribes the place of social defence withinpositivist ideology:

It was not the business of the criminal justicesystem to assess and to measure the moral guilt ofan offender but only to determine whether he wasnot the perpetrator of an act de®ned as an offenceand then to apply to him one of the measures of`social defence' so as to restrain him from com-mitting further crimes. (Radzinowicz, 1961, p. 17)

Social defence is a phrase that has beensubject to widespread interpretation anddistortion (Ancel, 1962). During the latenineteenth and early twentieth centuriessome social theorists and penal philosophersin Europe, such as Tarde and Signorel, arguedthat social defence was the repression of crimeby the criminal law and the administration of`stern' punishment, thus re¯ecting classicistdoctrine or principles of the ancien reÂgime.However, the positivists of this era adopted analternative interpretation that was morewidely adopted into criminal science rhetoric.For them, social defence centred on theprotection of society from dangerous andhabitual criminals (see Ancel, 1965). EnricoFerri used the term `social defence' to describethe purpose and justi®cation of punishment asan indeterminate treatment re¯ecting theneeds of the individual rather than moralculpability and retribution.

The Italian positivist school at the end of thenineteenth century referred to the failures ofsocial defence, as expressed by the repressivecriminal law and deterrent-based punish-ments of the nineteenth century. In its place,they argued that a doctrine of social defenceshould no longer focus on individual andmoral responsibility but be replaced withpreventative measures that would address thecriminal's `dangerous condition' (Ancel, 1962,p. 498). Pratt (1997) argues that a `newpenality' emerged in Europe in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, onethat classi®ed criminals into categories(insane, habitual, degenerate, weak-mindedetc.) and subsequently tailored punishment onan individual basis. For Pratt `the individua-lization of punishment' served a broadersocial purpose. He argues, `[the penal process]would now be a form of social defence,providing insurance against the risks that thehabitual criminals presented, alongside theother strategies that the emerging welfare statehad introduced to protect its citizens from riskand ensure their security' (Pratt, 1997, p. 47).

As a concept, social defence in the ®rst halfof the twentieth century received muchcriticism because of its suppression of theindividual in favour of social protection, or asRadzinowicz (1999, p. 38) has argued `socialdefence [sliding] into social aggression'.Individual freedoms were viewed as subsidi-ary to those justi®ed measures that aimed toprotect the moral and legal fabric of society.Social defence has also been interpreted as aform of social hygiene. The InternationalUnion of Penal Law founded in 1889 com-prised an alliance of European penal refor-mists. It adopted an interventionist approachto penology and interpreted social defence tomean `social hygiene', involving the `mop-ping-up of the social breeding grounds ofcrime' (Pasquino, 1980).

Marc Ancel (1965) describes the moreextreme applications of social defenceexpressed through repressive governmentalregimes such as those of Communist Russia,Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, where socialdefence was viewed as a form of `communityprotection' and completely eroded humanrights and civil liberties.

Evaluation

The earliest usage of social defence is, there-fore, founded on broad and changing inter-pretations. Its `modern' de®nition andapplication are, however, applied with greaterconsistency. The United Nations resurrectedthe term in 1948 as `the prevention of crimeand the treatment of offenders'. This de®nitionhas focused on positivist explanations ofcriminality and penal solutions that serve toprotect society whilst addressing the crimino-genic characteristics of the offender. Nowa-days, social defence theory is rarely usedwithin criminal justice rhetoric. However, itsunderlying principles of protecting societythrough individualized punishment, for exam-ple, indeterminate sentences, preventative

273SOCIAL DEFENCE THEORY

detention, dangerousness legislation, have re-emerged in late modernity as important facetsof penal and criminal justice policy and realistcriminological thinking.

Reece Walters

Associated Concepts: crime control model, crimeprevention, deterrence, positivism, risk

Key ReadingsAncel, M. (1962) `Social defence', The Law Quarterly

Review, 78, pp. 497±503.Ancel, M. (1965) `Social defence', in A Modern

Approach to Criminal Problems. London, Routledgeand Kegan Paul.

Pasquino, P. (1980) `Criminology: the birth of aspecial saviour. Transformations in penal theoryand new sources of right in the late nineteenthcentury', Ideology and Consciousness, 7, pp. 1±17.

Pratt, J. (1997) Governing the Dangerous. Dangerous-ness, Law and Social Change. Sydney, The Federa-tion Press.

Radzinowicz, L. (1961) In Search of Criminology.London, Heinemann.

Radzinowicz, L. (1999) Adventures in Criminology.London, Routledge.

SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION

See Chicago School of Sociology; Geographiesof crime; Social ecology

SOCIAL ECOLOGY

De®nition

Social ecology explanations of crime are avariant of sociological positivism. They implythat crime is not caused by aberrant indivi-duals but by the `pathological' conditions ofparticular areas or communities. They drawupon modes of analysis developed withinhuman geography and biology to argue thatone outcome of the structuring of space is apatterned distribution of crime.


Crime is always subject to uneven geographi-cal distribution. Urban areas appear to havehigher recorded crime rates than rural areas

and within cities there are presumed to be`criminal areas' or `hot spots' of crime. Toexplain these patterns of crime distributionanalogies have been made between the ecologyof plant life and human organization. Cities areviewed as akin to living and growing organ-isms, with individuals growing together overtime and declining when superseded by otherindividuals with different forms of socialorganization. In the 1920s and 1930s sociolo-gists at the University of Chicago embarked ona systematic study of all aspects of their localurban environment. Park, a newspaper repor-ter turned sociologist, and Burgess, hiscollaborator, were particularly in¯uential.They noted that, like any ecological system,the development and organization of the cityof Chicago was not random but patterned, andcould be understood in terms of such socialprocesses as invasion, con¯ict, accommodationand assimilation. They likened the city to aliving and growing organism and viewed thefunctions of various areas of the city asfundamental to the survival of the whole. Thecity's characteristics, social change and dis-tribution of people were studied by use ofBurgess's concentric zone theory. The city wasdivided into ®ve areas: zone 1, the centralbusiness district; zone 2, a transition frombusiness to residences; zone 3, working-classhomes; zone 4, middle-class homes; zone 5,commuter suburbs. Zone 2 ± the zone intransition ± was a particular focus of study.Here the expansion of the business sectorcontinually meant that residents were dis-placed. It became the least desirable livingarea. It was characterized by deterioratinghousing stock, poverty, pawn shops, cheaptheatres, restaurants, casual workers, newimmigrants and a breakdown in the usualmethods of social control. It was hypothesizedthat it was in zone 2 that crime and vice would¯ourish. Shaw (1929) and Shaw and McKay(1942) set out to test this hypothesis by usingjuvenile and adult court and prison statistics tomap the spatial distribution of the residencesof delinquent youths and criminals throughoutthe city. They were eventually to conclude thatas this particular zone maintained a regularcrime rate even when its populations comple-tely changed, then there must be somethingabout particular places that sustains crime.

Evaluation

Such early social ecology theory has subse-quently been critiqued for its denial of humanchoice; its reliance on of®cial de®nitions and


statistics as `true' indices of crime; and itsinability to account for contra evidence, suchas high rates of crime in stable communities orlow rates in areas of high social disorganiza-tion. Nevertheless, the approach experiencedsomething of a revival in England in the 1970sand in the USA in the 1980s. These haveadded spatial analysis, victimization data andaccounts of political economy to the originalformulation. For example, Morris (1957) foundthat the areas of peak crime rates in Croydon,South London were two of the inter-warcouncil housing estates and two older resi-dential areas noted for slum housing andphysical deterioration. From this he arguedthat the political decision by local authoritiesto concentrate certain of their tenants in lessdesirable housing was central to the creationof distinct `criminal areas'.

Later studies widened the focus further toinclude not only the study of differentialaccess to housing space and of the effects onpeople compelled to live in low-grade housingin `rough' areas, but also the relevance ofsocial class and differential access to power forunderstanding the continuing `competitivestruggle for space'. New versions of spatialanalysis (Bottoms and Wiles, 1992; Branting-ham and Brantingham, 1984) have succeedednot only in substantiating that crime isspatially as well as socially de®ned, but thatit is a natural and normal expression of socialinteraction given the organization of particularlocalized communities. In particular, it is howindividuals recognize the role of space in theirown biographies and how space mediates therelationship between individual and environ-ment that creates different opportunities forcrime.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: Chicago School of Socio-logy, defensible space, geographies of crime,sociological positivism

Key ReadingsBottoms, A. and Wiles, P. (1992) Èxplanations of

crime and place', in D.J. Evans, N.R. Fyle and D.T.Herbert (eds), Crime, Policing and Place. London,Routledge.

Brantingham, P.J. and Brantingham, P.L. (1984)Patterns of Crime. New York, Macmillan.

Morris, T. (1957) The Criminal Area: A Study in SocialEcology. London, Routledge.

Park, R.E. (1936) `Human ecology', American Journalof Sociology, 42 (1), p. 15.

Shaw, C.R. (1929) Delinquency Areas. Chicago,University of Chicago Press.

Shaw, C.R. and McKay, H.D. (1942) JuvenileDelinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago, Universityof Chicago Press.

SOCIAL EXCLUSION

De®nition

Social exclusion refers to the dynamic, multi-dimensional process of being shut out, fully orpartially, from the various social, economic,political or cultural systems which serve toassist the integration of a person in society.When combined, acute forms of exclusion arecreated that ®nd a spatial and concentratedexpression in particular localities and com-munities.


Social exclusion can be best thought of as adynamic and ¯uid process rather than as astatic and clearly de®ned condition. It refers tomarginalization, social isolation and disloca-tion, disaf®liation and vulnerability. Morethan simply the circumstances of the poorestindividuals, social exclusion describes apattern of profound changes in social arrange-ments and the ever-increasing growth ininequalities and insecurities produced bythose changes. Thus the concept of socialexclusion has to be understood within thecontext of the transition from modernity tolate modernity. It covers not only theunemployed and economically inactive butalso the `working poor' and those sections ofthe economically active increasingly affectedby the `structural insecurity' generated by thenew `¯exible' labour market. It is an extendedconcept that includes situations of distress,discrimination and disadvantage that arelargely, although not exclusively, socio-eco-nomic in nature. Social exclusion occursprimarily on three levels: the economic andmaterial exclusion of individuals deniedaccess to paid, full-time employment; theisolation from relationships produced bysocial and spatial segregation, and the ever-increasing exclusionary policies and practicesof the criminal justice system.

During the 1960s and 1970s the culturalrevolution of individualism and the economic

275SOCIAL EXCLUSION

crisis and subsequent restructuring of thelabour market signalled the beginning of thetransition from modernity to late modernity.Three discernible and interrelated trendsindicative of this shift are of particularrelevance. First is the economic crisis of the1970s and the `hollowing out' and the `rollingback' of the state. The more important aspectsof this transformation have involved theabandonment of attempts to provide thesocial `rights' of citizenship, including fullemployment, and a signi®cant reduction in`welfare' assistance. Thus the in¯uence of neo-liberalism and its conception of freedom as theabsence of state control and intervention haschanged the relationship between citizens andthe state. Subsequently a deconstruction of theprevious consensus on social and politicalvalues has taken place.

Secondly, the transition to late modernityhas also led to radical changes in the mode ofproduction and in the organization of theworkforce. The full employment of modernityhas been replaced by the structural unemploy-ment, the casual/part-time (under-) employ-ment and the insecure employment of latemodernity. The most signi®cant products ofthese changes are unpredictability, uncer-tainty, precariousness and insecurity. Whatwe have witnessed is a tripartite division ofsociety made up of a securely employed orwealthy minority, an increasingly squeezedmiddle of insecurely employed, and the part-time/casually employed and unemployedpoor. Thus work is a much-decreased meansby which risk is managed, identities areformed and maintained and citizenship andparticipation achieved.

Thirdly, profound changes in the meaningsof inclusion and citizenship have occurred.Social citizenship and identity are increasinglyconstructed around levels of consumption andlifestyle choice as opposed to work and one'srelationship with the state. The state nowargues that the inclusion of individuals is notits proper role and instead it is the responsi-bility of the individual to gain inclusion viachoices made in the market place. However,given structural unemployment and jobinsecurity, a section of the population remainsconstantly surplus to the requirements ofadvanced capitalism. The resulting lack ofaccess to material resources via paid workcombined with the reduction in state welfaremeans that the market and lifestyle choices ofan increasing number of individuals andfamilies are severely constrained.

In relation to crime, social exclusion is aninevitable by-product of the activities and

operations of an increasingly punitive criminaljustice system. Prison is the de®nitive form ofexclusion and the imprisoned are a distinctlyexcluded population. Fear of crime hasproduced perceptions of the late modern cityas an uneven patchwork of safe and unsafe,high- and low-risk areas and has resulted insocial and spatial segregation. In public placesa whole series of exclusionary technologiesand practices have been generated anddesigned to provide consumer security andcrime prevention. In the interests of increasingconsumption levels, business is increasinglyexcluding non-consumers, particularly youthwho are perceived as a threat to the ef®cient¯ow and activity of legitimate consumers. Theprivatization of public space, and the creationof `mass private property', is set to continue,and with it the exclusion of youth and othermarginalized groups from the very locationsin which their market and lifestyle choices aremade. Finally, the new `social' crime preven-tion policies of government are themselvesexclusionary in that they entail a process ofcategorization, a separating out of the popula-tion according to actuarially based calcula-tions of risk.

Evaluation

Social exclusion is increasingly coming toreplace the more pejorative concept of ùnder-class' in debates about the poor. Socialexclusion, unlike underclass, implies that theprocess of exclusion is the result of society-wide forces beyond the control of theindividual who is in some way responsiblefor his/her own exclusion.

Critics of the concept argue that it glossesover inherent divisions within capitalistsocieties. In referring to the shift frommodernity to late modernity, critics claimthat the concept implies some `golden age'where social consensus and growing equalitywere achieved and, therefore, the term fails toacknowledge the ongoing poverty- and class-based divisions in society. Finally, socialexclusion may have become the preferredterm in political debate because it candepoliticize poverty in relation to incomedistribution. Political leaders can speak ofsocial exclusion while denying the existence ofpoverty. Thus social exclusion can have twoforms, a weak and a strong: `Weaker' versionsseek solutions in altering the characteristics ofthe excluded. `Stronger' versions emphasizethe uneven patterns of resource and incomedistribution and the role of the excluders and


aim to address these patterns and therebyreduce the power of the excluders.

Trevor Bradley

Associated Concepts: left realism, risk, socialcrime prevention, underclass

Key ReadingsByrne, D. (1999) Social Exclusion. Buckingham, Open

University Press.Donnison, D. (1998) Policies for a Just Society.

London, Macmillan.Finer, C. and Nellis, M. (eds) (1997) Special Edition:

`Broadening perspectives on social policy: crimeand social exclusion', Social Policy and Adminis-tration, 31 (5).

Jordan, B. (1996) A Theory of Poverty and SocialExclusion. Cambridge, Polity Press.

Madanipour, A., Cars, G. and Allen, J. (eds) (1998)Social Exclusion in European Cities. London, JessicaKingsley.


SOCIAL HARM

De®nition

Injury or damage in¯icted on society or socialinstitutions either intentionally or unintention-ally.


The concept of social harm is closely asso-ciated with notions of crime and immoralitybut is not reducible to them. While manysocially harmful acts are immoral and criminalthere are some actions which may be con-sidered to be socially harmful but are neithercriminal nor immoral.

Edwin Sutherland in Ìs ``White CollarCrime'' Crime?' (1945) claimed that thede®ning features of a criminal act were thatthere was a `legal description of an act associally injurious and a legal provision of apenalty for the act'. By employing thisde®nition of crime Sutherland sought toshow that illegal actions committed by cor-porations and persons of high social status inbreach of civil or administrative law werequalitatively little different from those actionscommitted by individuals of low social statusin breach of criminal laws.

Sutherland's position was criticized by PaulTappan on the grounds that regulatoryoffences are inherently different from criminaloffences, that they are mala prohibita ratherthan mala in se ± that is, acts that are ìllegalbut not immoral' rather than acts that are`wrong in themselves'. According to this viewcriminologists needed to restrict their focus tothe criminal law or risk undermining theiracademic objectivity by de®ning anythingthey disapproved of as criminal.

Sutherland countered Tappan's argumentby showing how these `technical violations'were in fact distributed along a continuumwith mala prohibita at one extreme and mala inse at the other. Furthermore, he showed howsuch regulatory laws were adaptations ofcommon law prohibitions against theft andassault and thus not qualitatively differentfrom criminal sanctions.

The extent to which the state ought toenforce morality and thus attempt to preventsocially harmful actions was the subject of adebate between Patrick Devlin and H.L.A.Hart. Lord Devlin claimed that the law existsfor the protection of society and the indivi-duals within it from harm. `Society' consists ofnot just the individuals who make it up, butalso of a shared moral code without whichsociety cannot exist. Any attack on this moralcode threatens the viability of society and thestate is therefore justi®ed in defending societyby using criminal sanctions. For Devlin `Thesuppression of vice is as much the law's busi-ness as the suppression of subversive activ-ities; it is no more possible to de®ne a sphereof private morality than it is to de®ne one ofprivate subversive activity'.

Hart countered Devlin's position by arguingthat although society could not exist withoutsome shared morality, a deviation from a partof that moral code was in no way tantamountto a destruction of society. There was noreason to assume that a person who rejectedpart of the shared morality would in any othermanner be `hostile to society'.

The debate between Devlin and Hart high-lights the dif®culty in drawing boundariesbetween the individual and society. Whilesocial harm is by de®nition an injury to societyand may therefore become encompassedwithin the criminal law, harms that affectonly individuals are seen as being moreappropriately dealt with in civil litigation astorts. However, the boundary between theindividual and society is not easily drawn.There is a very real sense in which `no man isan island' and any injury in¯icted on anindividual has a wider impact on the society

277SOCIAL HARM

to which this individual belongs. As KeithBottomley (1979, p. 35) observed,

Whether we look at socially injurious acts fromthe point of view of the victim (if any), theintentions of the actor, or in the light of the natureof the harm done, it seems clear that there is nohard and fast distinction between torts, crimesand non-criminal harm. In practice there is a veryblurred demarcation line between those acts oromissions which are the concern of the civil lawand of the criminal law ± or no law at all.

Evaluation

The relationship between social harm, crimeand immorality is a complex one. Not all thatis socially harmful falls within the domain ofcriminal or civil law. Inadequate health care,unemployment, overcrowded housing andinsuf®cient educational opportunities are allsocially harmful but attempting to alleviatesuch social problems by the use of criminalsanctions would be fraught with dif®cultiesboth practical and ethical. Natural disasterssuch as earthquakes and volcanic eruptionsare undoubtedly socially harmful butobviously fall outside of the scope of thecriminal law, while actions that are racist orsexist may or may not, depending onparticular jurisdictions. Similarly, activitiesthat result in unforeseen and unpredictableharm to society cannot be condemned asimmoral. There is little doubt that themanufacturing and distribution of CFCs hasled to widespread social harm through thedepletion of the ozone layer and the resultanthealth defects which this has caused, but theseadverse consequences were not at the timepredictable and it therefore may not beappropriate to attribute moral turpitude.

Conversely, unjust laws may be deemedsocially harmful, such as the àpartheid' lawsof South Africa. Victimless crimes such assome sexual acts between consenting adults,drug taking and prostitution are also oftencited in this context. Civil disobedience,including law-breaking, when opposing suchlaws has been justi®ed on the grounds that thelaw-breaking is less socially harmful than thelaw that is opposed. Criminal acts do nottherefore always necessarily cause harm tosociety. There is no clear unequivocal stan-dard for determining whether a particularaction is socially bene®cial or harmful. Suchjudgements are informed by political andethical theories concerning what constitutes`the good life' for both individuals and society.

But a concept of social harm does hold someadvantages over that of crime to the extentthat it enables the criminological gaze to gobeyond legal and state de®nitions of injuriouspractices (Tifft, 1995) and to recognize certainlegal behaviours as harms in themselves.

Mark Thornton

Associated Concepts: constitutive criminology,corporate crime, crime, deviance, naturaljustice, political crime, proportionality,redress, state crime

Key ReadingsBottomley, K. (1979) Criminology in Focus. Oxford,

Martin Robertson.Devlin, P. (1968) The Enforcement of Morals. London,

Oxford University Press.Hart, H.L.A. (1963) Law, Liberty, and Morality.

London, Oxford University Press.Sutherland, E. (1945) Ìs ``white collar crime''

crime?', American Sociological Review, 10, pp.132±9.

Tappan, P. (1947) `Who is the criminal?', AmericanSociological Review, 12, pp. 96±102.

Tifft, L. (1995) `Social harm de®nitions of crime',Critical Criminologist, 7 (1), pp. 9±12.

SOCIAL JUSTICE

De®nition

Fair distribution of opportunities, rewards andresponsibilities in society. Principles andinstitutions for the distribution of meaningfulsocial goods ± income, shelter, food, health,education, freedom to pursue individualgoals.


Theories of social justice focus on two mainquestions. First, how rules for a fair distribu-tion of meaningful social goods can be deter-mined; secondly, how much or how littleinequality is permissible in a socially justsociety.

Over the past few decades, the mostin¯uential theory of social justice has beenJohn Rawls's (1972) notion of justice as fairness.He draws upon social contract theory and theKantian philosophical tradition of justice asimpartiality, stating that for people to deviserules that are fair to all, they must be unaware


of their own position in society. A rich person,or someone who con®dently expects tobecome rich, for example, would favourrules that advantage the rich, such as lowtaxation and low public spending, whereassomeone who is poor or expects to be poorwould probably favour high taxation and highpublic expenditure. Only someone unaware oftheir own position or expectations wouldcome up with levels of taxation and spendingfair to all. Rawls therefore says that rules andinstitutions of a just society can only bearrived at by people acting in an òriginal'(pre-social) position, or from behind a `veil ofignorance' in which they are unaware of theirown actual or potential social position. Herealizes, of course, that people deciding actualrules for actual societies are not in thisposition; he is suggesting that fair distributioncan only be arrived at by procedures designedto secure impartiality as far as possible.

Rawls's answer to the question of degrees ofinequality is his difference principle: social andeconomic inequalities are just to the extent thatthey bene®t everyone. This principle allowssome inequality, but protects the least well-off,and because of this protection his theory isoften classi®ed as welfare-liberalism.

Rawls tries to strike a balance betweenequality and freedom; alternative theoriesprioritize one or the other. Marxist theoriesprioritize equality, whereas libertarian andneo-liberal theories prioritize freedom. Liber-tarians argue that governments should notinvolve themselves in the distribution of socialgoods. A just distribution, for libertarians andneo-liberals, arises from individual decisionsto give or exchange goods which they legallyhold. Any state interference with distribution,beyond establishing property laws, is unwar-ranted interference with individual freedom.

A variant of welfare-liberalism is putforward by Michael Walzer (1983). Walzerargues that Rawls was mistaken in trying tosuggest one principle of distribution for allsocial goods. For Walzer, the principle ofdistribution and the amount of inequality inits distribution that is socially just, arise fromthe nature of the good in question. Withmedical care, for example, distribution shouldbe on the basis of need, and there should be noinequality of access; for education, the princi-ple should be that each should have as mucheducation as s/he desires and can derivebene®t from. For Walzer, the key issue isdomination: the distribution of no one goodshould dominate the distribution of others. Incapitalist society, the distribution of moneycan dominate the distribution of other goods;

in communist societies the dominant goodmay be political in¯uence.

Evaluation

Social justice is relevant to criminology inseveral ways. Rawls's justice as fairness isre¯ected in contemporary just desert theoriesof punishment, and a major point of conten-tion between desert theorists and their criticshas been the extent to which criminal justiceshould take account of social injustice. It isalso suggested that high levels of socialinjustice bring into doubt the legitimacy oflaw and criminal justice.

High rates of social inequality are associatedwith high crime rates and high imprisonmentrates, and criminologists have criticized reli-ance on penal policy rather than social policyto combat crime in the UK and USA (Young,1999). Some criminologists explicitly advocatesocial justice as a value-base for criminology,and have argued that penal, crime preventionand community safety policies need to bemindful of the rights and opportunities ofthose at whom they are targeted (Arrigo, 1999;Van Swaaningen, 1997).

Barbara Hudson

Associated Concepts: criminal justice, humanrights, just deserts, natural justice, socialexclusion

Key ReadingsArrigo, B. (ed.) (1999) Social Justice/Criminal Justice.

Belmont, CA, Wadsworth.Bouchier, D. and Kelly, P. (eds) (1998) Social Justice:

From Hume to Walzer. London, Routledge.Rawls, J. (1972) A Theory of Justice. Oxford, Oxford

University Press.Van Swaaningen, R. (1997) Critical Criminology:

Visions from Europe. London, Sage.Walzer, M. (1983) Spheres of Justice: A Defense of

Pluralism and Equality. New York, Basic Books.Young, J. (1999) The Exclusive Society. London, Sage.

SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY

De®nition

A theory of learning that maintains that tounderstand behaviour it is necessary toaccount for the reciprocal relationshipbetween the person and their environment.

279SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY

Its de®ning characteristic as a learning theoryis the role it gives to cognitive variables.


As originally formulated, behavioural theoryconcentrated on the relationship between theenvironment and observable behaviour. Thecontribution of social learning theorists was toattempt to incorporate more explicitly the roleof cognition into an account of humanbehaviour (Bandura, 1977, 1986). The begin-nings of the departure from mainstreambehavioural thinking came with research thatfocused on the phenomenon of learning byobservation. Traditionally, the accepted posi-tion within learning theory was that behaviourdeveloped through the individual's experi-ence of the rewarding or punishing conse-quences, contingent on their actions, that weredelivered by the environment. Social learningtheorists departed from this position in that,while continuing to acknowledge the role ofexternal reinforcement, they suggested thatlearning could also take place purely at acognitive level. Thus, behaviour could beacquired simply through observing modelsin the social world. Bandura suggested thatthere are three potent sources of modelledbehaviour: these models are family members,members of one's peer group, and symbolicmodels as, for example, in the popular media.

Further, Bandura advanced the concept of`motivation' to supersede reinforcement. Insocial learning theory terms motivation is heldto take three forms: external reinforcement, inthe traditional sense that the term is used inbehavioural theory; vicarious reinforcement,where actions are based on observing whathappens to other people who behave in aparticular way; and actions that produce self-reinforcement, as in a sense of personal pride orachievement. As social learning theory stimu-lated interest in the role of cognition within anoverarching behavioural framework, the termcognitive-behavioural became more widelyused.

One of the consequences of the rise ofsocial learning theory was an upsurge ininterest in cognition and cognitive processes.The notion of social information processingseeks to develop an understanding of thecognitive processes when we interact withother people. The basis of this approach isthat when we interact socially, there is a ¯owof verbal and non-verbal informationbetween those involved. This ¯ow of infor-mation communicates details of emotional

state, level of interest in the other person,and so on. The social tasks facing thoseengaged in an interaction are ®rst to besensitive to this social information, then todecode or understand the information, and®nally to use this information to inform theirown behaviour. It is argued that biases atany of these cognitive stages can result insocially dysfunctional behaviour, particularlyaggressive behaviour (Akhtar and Bradley,1991).

Social learning theory has been applied tothe study of criminal behaviour by psychol-ogists (e.g., Nietzel, 1979); and interventionsbased on the principles of social learninghave also been developed for use withoffenders (e.g., Hollin, 1990). These interven-tions might include working with offendersto help improve levels of social ability, aswith social skills training and social problem-solving skills training; or to challengeoffenders' thinking by, for example, increas-ing awareness of the effects of victimization,or beliefs about, say, sexual acts with youngchildren.

Criminologists have also attempted todevelop a mainstream theory of crime usingdifferential association theory, reinforcementtheory, and social learning theory (e.g., Akers,1990). In a social learning theory account, theacquisition of criminal behaviour (that is,attitudes and skills as proposed by differentialassociation theory) is via direct reinforcementfrom the environment, as in operant terms, orthrough modelling and imitation. The modelsfor all behaviour, including criminal behav-iour, are to be found directly in the behaviourof friends and family and more abstractly incultural forces such as visual images and thewritten word. (This is close to Sutherland'sdifferential association theory articulatedbefore the theoretical advances of sociallearning theory.) In terms of its maintenanceand in line with traditional learning theory,criminal behaviour is reinforced by theexternal rewards that it produces: theserewards include tangible, often ®nancial,gain, along with social rewards such as peergroup status. However, social learning theorywould add personal, internal rewards asfactors that maintain criminal behaviour:these rewards might be the excitement ofstealing a car and joyriding; or a sense ofpersonal pride in avoiding detection for atheft.

Further, the meaning (or de®nitions indifferential association terms) of criminalbehaviour for the offender should be takeninto account as they give some level of


understanding of criminal behaviour for theindividual concerned. Thus, the offender'sde®nition of their actions may be positive, sothat offending is seen as desirable: forexample, sex offenders against children maysay that their actions are desirable because inreality children enjoy sex and early sexualencounters act for the child's bene®t in laterlife. Alternatively, the offender's de®nition oftheir actions may be neutralizing, negating theimpact of what society sees as intolerablebehaviours: for example, burglars may saythat stealing from people's homes is defensiblebecause their victims are insured and so noreal loss is caused.

Evaluation

The criticism of social learning theory, or moreaccurately the application of social learningtheory, is that it focused on the individual andtheir close social world, but has failed to takeinto account large-scale sociological factors.The development of a theoretical model totake such broad factors into account is aproject waiting to happen.

Clive Hollin

Associated Concepts: behaviour modi®cation,conditioning, differential association, differen-tial reinforcement

Key ReadingsAkhtar, N. and Bradley, E. J. (1991) `Social

information processing de®cits of aggressivechildren: present ®ndings and implication forsocial skills training', Clinical Psychology Review,11, pp. 621±44.

Akers, R.L. (1990) `Rational choice, deterrence, andsocial learning theory in criminology: the path nottaken', Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 81,pp. 653±76.

Bandura, A. (1977) Social Learning Theory. Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice±Hall.

Bandura, A. (1986) Social Foundations of Thought andAction: A Social Cognitive Theory. EnglewoodCliffs, NJ, Prentice±Hall.

Hollin, C.R. (1990) Cognitive-Behavioral Interventionswith Young Offenders. Elmsford, NY, PergamonPress.

Nietzel, M.T. (1979) Crime and its Modi®cation: ASocial Learning Perspective. Oxford, PergamonPress.

SOCIAL REACTION

De®nition

The social process characterizing media,public, political and criminal justice responsesto crime and deviancy. These responses oftenstereotype, stigmatize, label, criminalize,scapegoat and/or amplify the behaviours ofcertain individuals and groups.


Historically, some authors referred to socialreaction (or societal reaction) as a theoreticalperspective, using it interchangeably withinteractionist, labelling and transactional per-spectives. However, social reaction is moreusefully viewed as a theoretical conceptcentral to these perspectives, and to a broaderunderstanding of the nature and impact ofsocietal responses to crime and deviance.

The theoretical legacy of social reaction andthe labelling perspective derived from it lies inthe work of symbolic interactionists, notablyCharles Horton Cooley and George HerbertMead. In the tradition of Mead, Tannenbaum(1938) acknowledged that crime and deviancewere created through processes of socialinteraction, especially through societalresponses like tagging, de®nition, identi®ca-tion and segregation. This culminated in aperson becoming what they were described as,separating the `criminal' from the group in aprocess that Tannenbaum called the `dramati-zation of evil'. However, it was Lemert's (1951)theory of sociopathic behaviour which under-took a systematic analysis of societal responsesto deviation. His basic premise was that socialcontrol created deviance. Distinguishingbetween original causes and effective causes,he argued that there were many original causesof initial or `primary' deviance, but thatimportantly this deviance was of little conse-quence to one's self-concept. Societal reaction,however, was seen as the effective cause of`secondary' deviance, whereby an individualused their deviant behaviour or status todefend, attack or adjust to the problemscreated by societal responses to primarydeviance. Lemert suggested that responses todeviation ranged from strong approval toindifference to strong disapproval, but thatsociopathic behaviour was that which waseffectively disapproved. Furthermore, one'sdeviant identity was shaped by the level ofdeviation engaged in, its social visibility, and

281SOCIAL REACTION

the exposure, nature and strength of societalreaction. Recognizing both formal and infor-mal responses to crime and deviance, heargued that formal agents of social controlextended and formalized informal responses.

The 1960s witnessed further development ofthese ideas by Kitsuse (1962), Becker (1963)and Erikson (1966). In what came to be knownas the labelling perspective, the concept ofsocial reaction was pivotal. Following theirtheoretical predecessors, proponents of thisperspective focused on the social processes bywhich persons and behaviour come to bede®ned as deviant, and on who has the powerto confer such a label. As the most famousadvocate of labelling suggested, `social groupscreate deviance by making the rules whoseinfraction constitutes deviance, and by apply-ing those rules to particular people andlabelling them as outsiders. From this pointof view, deviance is not a quality of the act theperson commits, but rather a consequence ofthe application by others of rules andsanctions to an `̀ offender''' (Becker, 1963, p.9). Thus, nothing was inherently criminal andsocial reaction created deviance.

While interactionism and labelling are thekey theoretical perspectives associated withsocial reaction, there are also a number of inter-related theoretical concepts crucial to illustrat-ing the nature and impact of societal responsesto crime and deviance. As Lemert suggested`[m]ythologies, stigma, stereotypes, patterns ofexploitation, accommodation, segregation, andmethods of control spring up and crystallize inthe interaction between the deviants and therest of society' (1951, p. 55). Indeed, the crux ofsocial reaction is that behaviour that issubjectively stigmatized, stereotyped, labelledand criminalized, may create moral panics and`folk devils' (Cohen, 1972), facilitate `criminalcareers' and self-ful®lling prophecies ofdeviance ampli®cation and scapegoating.

Up until this point, social reaction has beenexamined as an àctive' concept. However, insome instances social reaction may also beìnactive' or lacking, for example, in terms ofthe lack of negative societal responses to whitecollar and corporate crime, as compared to`conventional' crime.

Evaluation

Together with interactionist and labellingperspectives, and related theoretical concepts,social reaction shifted the focus of sociologicalenquiry from causes and explanations of crimeand deviance to societal responses. In doing so

it presented crime and deviance as socialconstructs. Furthermore, it examined theunintended consequences of media, public,political, and criminal justice responses tocrime and deviance, providing impetus fornon-interventionist criminal justice strategies.Overall, social reaction has proved a valuabletheoretical concept for explaining processes ofmarginalization, especially where gender,ethnicity, mental illness and youth are con-cerned. Indeed, in the case of young people,social reaction has highlighted the continuedassociation between `youth' and `crime',which has contributed to the criminalizationof youth and non-criminal behaviour, andperceptions of youth as òther'.

Many of the criticisms of labelling apply tosocial reaction, including that it does notexplain the causes of primary deviance(although advocates argue they did not seekto explain them). Furthermore, the extent towhich social reaction to crime and deviance iswholly subjective is questionable, for example,in the case of societal responses to murder.Finally, the extent to which social reactioncauses deviance is surely unmeasurable, andthus unknowable.

Anna Duncan

Associated Concepts: criminal careers, crimina-lization, deviancy ampli®cation, folk devil,interactionism, labelling, moral panic, scape-goating, social constructionism, stereotyping,stigma


Deviance. New York, The Free Press.Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics. New

York, St Martins Press.Erikson, K. (1966) Wayward Puritans: A Study in the

Sociology of Deviance. New York, Macmillan.Kitsuse, J. (1962) `Societal reaction to deviant

behaviour', Social Problems, 9, pp. 247±56.Lemert, E. (1951) Social Pathology: A Systematic

Approach to the Theory of Sociopathic Behavior.New York, McGraw±Hill.

Tannenbaum, F. (1938) Crime and the Community.New York, Columbia University Press.

SOCIAL SURVEY

De®nition

A research design which, ®rst, collects andassembles a structured set of data about a


large number of cases (or units of analysis)and, secondly, involves a form of statisticalanalysis that seeks to describe the charac-teristics of the set of cases and sometimes alsoseeks to provide explanations of such charac-teristics.


Surveys can embrace a wide range of activitiesinvolving a wide range of types of cases.However, the case or unit analysis aboutwhich data are collected is often the indivi-dual, although that is not an essential require-ment. For example, it is possible to surveypolice±public interactions to describe them interms of, say, `friendliness' or `hostility';incidents may be surveyed to count howmany of them are recorded as crimes; andnewspaper articles may be analysed to counthow many argue for `justice through punish-ment'.

All of the cases in a given population maybe surveyed, in which instance it is usual touse the term census. For example, the BritishCensus has taken place every ten years since1801 and provides a count of the population ofEngland and Wales on one particular day anddescribes the population in terms of basiccharacteristics. Most developed countriescarry out a census. For example, the Censusof Population of the United States has beenheld every ten years since 1790. It is muchmore common to study only a sample of thepopulation. This is done on the grounds ofcost and time and also because the principlesof statistical inference can permit accurateestimates of the population to be obtained(with calculable margins of error) fromrelatively small samples. It is because mostsurveys involve some form of selection thatthe term social survey is often taken as beingsynonymous with a sample survey rather thancensus. What is more, as indicated above,although a wide range of units may besurveyed the most common is the individual.

As a result, in the narrow sense, socialsurveys are often taken to refer to the selectionof individuals drawn from some widerpopulation with the aim of making inferencesfrom the sample to the wider population. Insuch instances data are collected either byinterview, usually structured interview, or byrespondents completing a questionnaire bythemselves.

There are two broad strategies for selectingindividuals to be members of samples. The®rst is known as random or probability

sampling, whereby everyone in the designatedpopulation is given an equal chance ofselection. The other is known as purposiveor non-probability sampling whereby indivi-duals are deliberately selected for inclusion ina sample because they have some distinctivefeatures which are relevant to the research (forexample, some specialist knowledge, particu-lar background attributes or willingness toparticipate). Both random and purposivesamples can have variations in terms ofdesign, for example to make them more orless representative of the wider population. Inorder to make reasonably precise and calcul-able estimates about characteristics of apopulation it is advisable to select random,but more importantly, representative samples.

Data may be collected from samples ofindividuals at one particular point in time, inwhich case it is common to refer to one-shot orcross-sectional designs. A crime survey thatinvolves interviewing a sample of the popula-tion of a town during, say, January in order toestimate the total amount of victimizationduring that month is a cross-sectional survey.Sometimes researchers are interested in trendsand patterns over time and may interview anequivalent but different selection of peopleeach January over a 10-year period. This isknown as a time series design. The BritishCrime Survey is an example of a time seriessurvey (Mayhew, 2000). Where the samegroup of people are interviewed at differentperiods of time, perhaps to study theirpersonal development, it is common to referto them as longitudinal studies or cohortstudies. Longitudinal studies have been usedto follow up a cohort of individuals into earlyadulthood to see which ones engage incriminal careers, and why. An example is theCambridge Study of Delinquency Develop-ment (West, 1982).

Evaluation

Social surveys are valuable instruments ofcriminological research because they providemeans of collecting a good deal of informationabout a lot of cases over a relatively shortperiod of time (with the exception of long-itudinal surveys) and at a reasonable cost perunit of analysis. They are means by which themain features of populations can be described,usually statistically, by studying relativelysmall samples. What is more, forms of statis-tical analysis ± especially those based oncorrelations ± allow the researcher to searchfor patterns in the populations and to seek to

283SOCIAL SURVEY

explain one set of characteristics in terms ofanother set. For example, a researcher maymove beyond estimating the number ofvictims of crime towards explaining victimiza-tion in terms such as age, gender, ethnicityand lifestyle.

It is, however, necessary to recognize thelimitations of social surveying. There aremany potential sources of bias, for example,in the ways in which interviewers askquestions and the ways in which respondentsinterpret them and answer them. The ques-tionnaires or interview schedules may forceanswers that do not truly re¯ect the ways inwhich individuals wish to respond, andsamples may be so unrepresentative as tomake inferences drawn from them worthless.Such matters can be addressed in carefulplanning and research design. However, morefundamental issues have been levelled atsurveys. One is that by their very nature (forexample, collecting data from large numbersof cases) they are shallow and super®cial anddo not allow researchers to capture the depthof meaning which criminological understand-ing requires. Typically, such an argumentcomes from those who advocate an apprecia-tive criminology. Other viewpoints are thatsocial surveys have certain in-built quantita-tive and positivist assumptions and also tendto be favoured research instruments of theòf®cial' criminology of government depart-ments and other state institutions such as thepolice and prison services. As such, they donot address fundamental issues of criminaljustice such as inequality, power and oppres-sion. Typically, such an argument comes fromthose who advocate a critical criminology.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: appreciative criminology,cross-sectional design, longitudinal study,sampling, structured interviews, time seriesdesign, victim surveys

Key ReadingsJupp, V., Davies, P. and Francis, P. (eds) (2000)

Doing Criminological Research. London, Sage.Mayhew, P. (2000) `Researching crime and victimi-

zation: the BCS', in P. Davies, P. Francis and V.Jupp (eds), Victimization: Theory, Research andPolicy. London, Macmillan.

Sapsford, R. (1999) Survey Research. London, Sage.de Vaus, D.A. (1995) Surveys in Social Research, 4th

edn. London, UCL Press, and Sydney, Allen andUnwin.

West, D.J. (1982) Delinquency: Its Roots, Careers andProspects. London, Heinemann.

SOCIO-BIOLOGY

See Biological criminology

SOCIOLOGICAL POSITIVISM

De®nition

Sociological positivism stresses the impor-tance of social factors ± such as anomie, socialdisorganization and economic recession ± ascauses of crime. The broad aim is to accountfor the distribution of varying amounts ofcrime within given populations.


A sociological form of positivism was ®rstdeveloped by philosophers such as Comte andSaint-Simon in the early nineteenth century.Comte's insistence that society both predatesand shapes the individual psychologicallyprovided the foundation for sociologicalcriminology. This mode of analysis can betraced back to the work of the Frenchstatistician Guerry and the Belgian mathema-tician Quetelet, in the 1830s. They analysedof®cial statistics on variables such as suicides,educational levels, crime rates and age and sexof offenders, within given geographic areas forspeci®c time periods. Two general patternsemerged: types and the amount of crimevaried from region to region, but withinspeci®c areas there was little variation fromyear to year. Because of this regularity it wasproposed that criminal behaviour must begenerated by something other than individualmotivation. Quetelet (1842) found that thefactors most strongly tied to criminal propen-sity were gender, age, occupation and religion.Fluctuations in crime rates were explainedwith reference to changes in the social,political and economic structures of particularsocieties, while crime itself was viewed as aconstant and inevitable feature of socialorganization.

At the turn of the century its most in¯u-ential advocate was Emile Durkheim (1895).He argued that in any given social context, the


predictability of crime rates must mean theyare social facts, and thus a normal phenom-enon. Crime is rarely abnormal ± it occurs inall societies, it is tied to the facts of collectivelife and its volume tends to increase associeties evolve from mechanical to morecomplex organic forms of organization.Above all, crime and punishment perform auseful function for society because theymaintain social solidarity, through establish-ing moral boundaries and strengthening theshared consensus of a community's beliefsand values. Crime, then, is positive ± anintegrative element in any healthy society. Inother words, Durkheim reasoned that societieswithout crime must be extremely repressiveand incapable of adapting to social change.

One of the most in¯uential forms of socio-logical positivism was developed by theChicago School in the 1920s. Their early workargued that crime rates were determined bycertain economic, environmental and spatialconditions. They noted that rates of truancy,delinquency and adult crime tended to varyinversely in proportion to their distance fromthe city centre. The closer to the city, the higherthe rate of crime. These rates re¯ected differ-ences in the physical make-up of differentcommunities. High crime rates occurred inareas characterized by deterioration anddeclining populations. Moreover, relativelyhigh rates of crime persisted in certain areaseven when the composition of their populationhad changed signi®cantly.

These observations suggested that it was thenature of neighbourhoods, and not the natureof the individuals who lived there, thatdetermined levels of criminality. As a result,this line of reasoning has also been termedènvironmental determinism'. The concentra-tion of crime and delinquency in particularareas was also viewed as indicative ofprocesses of social disorganization. As industryand commerce invaded, and transient popula-tions entered such areas, community ties weredestroyed and resistance to deviance lowered.

Evaluation

Sociological positivism views the individual asa body that is acted upon, and whose behav-iour is determined, by external forces. Little orno role is given to the processes of choice,voluntarism or self-volition. While Durkheimargued that crime is a normal social fact, healso acknowledged that in given contexts itsrate might be abnormal. Thus crime is alsoregarded in terms of some form of pathology:

if not the abnormality of individuals, thendysfunctions in social systems. The study ofcrime remains in the tradition of scientism,essentialism and positivistic method: that is, itcan be measured and evaluated by means ofstatistical methods and empirical data. It alsoassumes that there must be somethingdistinguishable about crime that differentiatesit from normal behaviour. A consensus, or inDurkheim's terms, a `collective conscience'exists which marks out the criminal from thenon-criminal. The role of social con¯ictbetween individuals and among competinggroups is downplayed. Compared to indivi-dual positivism, sociological theories appearless interested in crime as a particular patternof behaviour and more in probabilistic accountsof variations in crime rates given particularsocial, geographical and economic circum-stances. They focus on general patterns ofcriminality rather than on individual motiva-tions. Nevertheless, the concern remains toisolate key causal variables, such as socialdisorganization and criminal area, and to inferthat such conditions determine rates of crimin-ality. Crime remains a violation of a socialorder that is considered to be based on aconsensus of legal and moral codes. Littleroom is given for the contrary positions thatcrime may be a freely chosen course of actionand that it may be due to different forms ofsocialization, rather than lack of socialization.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: anomie, Chicago School ofSociology, geographies of crime, positivism,social ecology

Key ReadingsDurkheim, E. (1895/1964) Rules of Sociological

Method. New York, The Free Press.Quetelet, A. (1842) A Treatise on Man. Edinburgh,

Chambers.Shaw, C.R. (1929) Delinquency Areas. Chicago,

University of Chicago Press.

SOMATOTYPING

De®nition

A means of measuring variations in bodytypes through which certain physiologicalfeatures have been claimed to be causative ofcrime and delinquency.

285SOMATOTYPING


The classifying of criminal types by physiolo-gical characteristics was the hallmark of earlybiological criminology, in particular the workof Lombroso, Goring and Hooton. TheHarvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton, forexample, studied over 17,000 criminals andnon-criminals and reported that criminalstended, amongst many other characteristics,to have sloping foreheads, thin lips, long necksand sloping shoulders (Hooton, 1939). Hemaintained that tall thin men tended tocommit fraud, short heavy men to commitsex crimes and men of moderate physique tohave no crime speciality.

Despite the obvious over-generalized natureof the conclusions to such research, work intobody types continued in the mid-twentiethcentury. The German psychiatrist ErnstKretschmer (1925) identi®ed three majortypes: thin (asthenic), heavy (pyknic) andmuscular (athletic). The American psycholo-gist William Sheldon (1949) expanded on thismodel by correlating body build with beha-vioural tendencies. His analysis of somatotyp-ing suggested that the shape of the bodycorrelated with individual temperament andmental well-being. A person's somatotype ismade up of three components: endomorphy,ectomorphy and mesomorphy.

· Mesomorphs have well-developed musclesand athletic appearance. Body shape ishard and round. Personality is strong,active, aggressive and sometimes violent.

· Ectomorphs have small skeletons and weakmuscles. Body shape is fragile and thin.Personality is introverted, hypersensitiveand intellectual.

· Endomorphs have heavy builds and areslow moving. Body shape is soft andround. Personality is extrovert, friendlyand sociable.

Analysing and comparing 200 boys in areformatory in Boston with 4,000 students,Sheldon concluded that most delinquentstended towards mesomorphy. Ectomorphshad the lowest criminal tendencies. Glueckand Glueck (1950), using large samples ofdelinquent and non-delinquent boys, foundsimilarly that there were twice as manymesomorphs among delinquents than couldhave occurred by chance. Sixty per cent ofdelinquents were mesomorphic, while only 14per cent were ectomorphic, compared with 40per cent of non-delinquents. The Glueckscontended that strength and agility might

enable boys to ®ll a delinquent role. Endo-morphs were too clumsy, and ectomorphs toofragile, to be successful delinquents. Onreviewing a number of such studies, Wilsonand Herrnstein (1985, p. 89) feel con®dent toconclude that criminals do differ in physiquefrom the population at large. Physique,however, does not cause crime, but it doescorrelate with temperaments that are impul-sive and given to uninhibited self-grati®cation.

However as is common with such studies, itis not causes that are revealed but correlations.Being athletic in stature may be correlatedwith delinquency, but this does not mean thateither is the cause of the other. Both areprobably in¯uenced by other factors, includ-ing the adequacy of nutrition, extent ofmanual labour and social class position.Similarly, what Hooton and Sheldon weremeasuring were not the characteristics of thecriminal per se but of the identi®ed andprocessed criminal, who is most likely to beof working-class origin. Above all, any associ-ation between body type and crime remains inneed of explanation. Are mesomorphs biolo-gically predisposed to crime or is theircriminality simply more socially visible?Such questions continue to plague physio-logical research, but it is clear that itsassumptions continue to impact on popularconceptions of crime. Research undertaken inthe 1970s showed that members of the publicand the police readily and consistently put thesame faces to particular crimes even when theindividuals involved had not been convictedof any crime at all.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: biological criminology,causation, correlational analysis, determinism,genetics, individual positivism

Key ReadingsGlueck, S. and Glueck, E. (1950) Unravelling Juvenile

Delinquency. New York, Harper and Row.Hooton, E. (1939) Crime and the Man. Cambridge,

MA, Harvard University Press.Kretschmer, E. (1925) Physique and Character. New

York, Harcourt Brace.Sheldon, W. (1949) Varieties of Delinquent Youth. New

York, Harper.Wilson, J.Q. and Herrnstein, R.J. (1985) Crime and

Human Nature. New York, Simon and Schuster.


THE STATE

De®nition

The state is a set of historically variable, macroinstitutions and organizations charged withthe maintenance of order over a given terrain.This heterogeneity within the state form ± itstraversing of public/private boundaries ±implies disunity as well as unity, con¯ict andconsensus within and between state organs.States display a balance between the use ofcoercive and consensual means to maintainsocial order. In that states attempt to provide afocus for leadership in society, they are alwaysimplicated in articulating the parameters ofthe general social interest. Thus state institu-tions are involved in constructing and main-taining, not always successfully, a popularlegitimacy for the state form itself.


The relationship between state institutions,crime, deviance and social order has been thesubject of ®erce dispute within criminology.Whether the state merely responds to pro-blems of crime and disorder or is active intheir precipitation is one such contention.Furthermore, in its dealings with `the problemof crime' the state has been conceived of inrelatively neutral terms in that institutionsintervene to preserve a notion of order basedon a given social consensus. On the otherhand, the state has been drawn in more partialterms in that its actions, interventions andlegal prescriptions can only be understood asserving to promote particular interests withinsocieties based on division, inequality andcon¯ict.

The early attempts at establishing a scien-ti®c positivistic criminology in the late nine-teenth century framed its terms of referenceand objects of enquiry in such a way as tomake it compatible with penal administration,structures of law and political ideology. Inorder to make itself a policy-relevant disci-pline, criminology for much of its growth anddevelopment did not problematize stateprocesses and instead searched for the causesof criminality as located within individual andenvironmental processes.

It was with the turbulent changes associatedwith developments in industrialism, urbaniza-tion and technological advances that the statebegan to emerge as an object of social scienti®canalysis. Writing at the end of the nineteenth

century, Emile Durkheim was concerned withthe seemingly fragmentary, amoral and unciv-ilizing effects of these rapid social andeconomic changes that undermined traditionalsources of control and social bonding foundwithin families and community structures. Hesaw the increases in crime and con¯ict asinevitable features of a fragmenting socialorder. The decline of traditional forms ofsolidarity had encouraged normlessness,which for Durkheim would be best counteredby a state that operated on and through the`public interest' to foster unity and consensusvia a combination of law, punishment andcommunity organizations. The modern stateaccording to Durkheim, through law andpunishment based on restitution, re¯ectedpopular sentiment and morality, which dic-tated what was to be punished, and at whatlevel of severity.

This view of the state as standing abovesocial antagonisms and re¯ecting the greater`social good' was developed in the writings ofthe `Chicago School' in the 1920s and byParsons' structural functionalism which domi-nated social science in the 1950s. Essentially,the state was depicted in conservative and/orpluralist terms: a preserver of an alreadyexisting moral order, divorced from particularpowerful social interests. State institutionswere seen as disinterested referees in times ofsocial con¯ict whose policies re¯ected the`general interest'. Thus laws and policies wereenacted on this basis. Max Weber's conceptionof the state extended these formulations,depicting it as imbued with a rational,bureaucratic set of procedures while holdinga monopoly of the legitimate use of physicalforce.

These liberal, essentially benevolent, viewsof the state were challenged in the 1960s withthe new control culture theories emerging outof the labelling perspective. Although writerswithin this perspective such as Becker did notprovide a clear conceptualization of the statethey did focus attention on the agents of socialcontrol whose actions, through the applicationof labels, constructed `crime' and `deviance' inthe interests of the control culture. Thus thenotion of agents of social control acting in the`public interest' was challenged. Questionsremained, however: in whose speci®c interestswere deviant labels applied and why werethey applied to particular groups at particulartimes? These questions led to a shift towards amore radical analysis ± a Marxist account ±which linked crime and the state to thedynamics of the political economy of capital-ism.

287THE STATE

Marxist accounts sought to conceptualizethe state in more substantive and speci®cterms. Quinney straightforwardly argued thatthe state and rule of law served to secure theinterests of the dominant class. This instru-mentalist view developed out of the writingsof Marx and Engels who depicted the state asan arena for the material and ideologicalorganization and continued dominance of theruling class. Ralph Miliband continued thisperspective through his examination of theformal and informal connections betweenthose in positions of power within the stateand ruling class fractions. For others in theMarxist tradition this was a crude model ofstate processes tainted with a `functionalist'gloss. Poulantzas was particularly critical ofMiliband's functionalism and pointed to theshift towards a more authoritarian state formthat was emerging in Western Europe in the1970s. This he termed àuthoritarian statism'.Althusser, another structural Marxist, alsoexpanded the analysis by focusing on thedifferent sites where the authority of capitalistsocial relations were maintained and repro-duced. These he termed ìdeological stateapparatuses' (family, school and media) and`repressive state apparatuses' (police, courts,prisons and army).

Other neo-Marxist studies followed.Thompson, Hay and Linebaugh's work onthe eighteenth-century state as a socialrelationship pointed to its position both as asite of class struggle and its role in the forma-tion and reproduction of the new bourgeoissocial order. Hall et al. (1978) developed amodel of the capitalist state derived from thework of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.Here the state is conceived of as a historicallyspeci®c set of institutional arrangementswhose ìndependent' stance becomes unten-able in times of crisis and whose leadership orhegemony is a matter of struggle within andoutside of state institutions. The work focuseson the structural economic crisis of Britishcapitalism which underpinned the social,political, cultural and moral crisis of authoritysignalled by youth rebellion, industrial mili-tancy, anti-racist and anti-sexist movements,student protest and the rise of permissivenessin the 1960s and1970s. In times of crisis the`spontaneous consent' for state rule becomesexhausted and the more coercive character ofstate rule becomes visible. In this context, thestate: ìs progressively drawn . . . down intothe arena of struggle and direction, andexhibits more plainly than it does in itsroutine manifestations what it is and what itmust do to provide the cement which holds a

ruptured social formation together' (Hall et al.,1978, p. 217).

This line of thinking led to an analysis of theideological aspects of state power: howpopular consent for state coercion was pro-duced and struggled over; how the hegemonyof ruling economic and political alliances wasestablished through negotiation and compro-mise; and how, ultimately, in times of econ-omic crisis, the popular masses come tosupport processes of criminalization in theconstruction of social consensus. Hall termedthis àuthoritarian populism'. Thus stateinstitutions are very much at the centre ofsocial struggles and through the process ofcriminalization construct discourses of censureand moral culpability ± particularly aimed atthe powerless ± in the attempt to order andlead the society in a particular direction. Thisprocess reinforces the interests of the powerful,the majority of whose own crimes and illegalactivities are not subject to scrutiny, sanction-ing or punishment. Importantly, when theconsensus fragments, coercion will be mobil-ized to restore order. However, unlike earlierMarxist formulations the state does not always`win' this struggle in every instance. Instead,the state was itself characterized as an arena ofstruggle where de®nitions prescribing what iscriminal and the responses to crime could bechallenged, resisted and occasionally over-turned, as in the case of feminist strugglesaround the law on rape and marriage.

Feminist perspectives that emerged in the1970s and 1980s questioned the view thatdepicted state institutions in class terms andas always repressive in their actions. Feministwriters pointed to what the state omitted to doas much as what it did. Thus it was not somuch a case of over-regulation but the under-regulation of crimes against women ± forexample, in areas of domestic and sexualviolence. The state was reconceptualized as agendered set of apparatuses, serving the aimsof a patriarchal order. It is not only that stateinstitutions are overwhelmingly staffed bymen but that masculinist ideologies inform thepolicy and decision-making process. Thisanalysis has focused on the differential treat-ment of women within state criminal proce-dures and how regimes of control are as muchabout the penalization of behaviours that stepoutside of ascribed feminine boundaries asabout the control of crime (Hester et al., 1996).This work also emphasized engaging with thestate in order to generate social change forwomen. This perspective was particularlyevident in the work of a number of Australianfeminists, such as Sophie Watson.


More recently, under the impact of privati-zation and managerialist discourses somewriters have identi®ed a fragmentation of thestate both in practical and theoretical terms.Thus policies of decentralization, partnershipand the growth of private policing in themeparks and retail centres has led some to arguethat the state monopoly on policing and justiceis being eroded. Corporations and otherprivate interests are increasingly de®ningand responding to problems of order withoutany recourse to the public interest. Followingthe work of Michel Foucault, this has led to amove away from the state as a privilegedcentre of power relations. This perspective isparticularly critical of Marxist theorists andwhat is regarded as their homogeneous andeconomically reductionist views of stateinstitutions. Much of this work has focusedon `neo-liberalism' as a form of rule thattraverses and empowers a range of non-stateagencies that `seek to employ forms of exper-tise in order to govern society at a distance,without recourse to any forms of directrepression or intervention' (Barry et al., 1996,p. 14). Thus a range of expertise is at work inthe assessment and containment of risks fromcrime which moves beyond so-called moder-nist views of the state as a clearly de®ned setof institutional mechanisms with preciseboundaries. The state's decline in power andin¯uence has been depicted in terms such asthe `lean' state, the `hollowed out' state andthe `stretched' state.

Other writers, particularly in the Marxistand neo-Marxist traditions, continue todevelop and re®ne a concept of the state thatdoes not presuppose fragmentation, ideologi-cal coherence, institutional unity or function-ality. These writers include: Jessop (1990),with his emphasis on contingency and contra-diction inherent in state practices; Clarke andNewman (1997), on the state as a managerialset of institutions; and Coleman and Sim's(1998) analysis of the dialectical inter-relation-ship between òld' forms of state power (e.g.,the police) and `new' forms of state control(e.g., CCTV cameras). Writers working aroundthe human rights group Statewatch haveargued that the state is becoming increasinglyauthoritarian and increasingly international-ized through the interpersonal and ideologicalconnections of those working within differentnation-states. Consequently, Europe is witnes-sing the emergence of a pan-European, mini-mally accountable state designed to managean increasingly unmanageable detritus com-prising conventional criminals, asylum see-kers, drug users, single parents (particularly

women) and the homeless. At the same time,crimes committed by the powerful includingthe state's own servants remain effectivelybeyond scrutiny and punishment. In differentways such writers have helped maintain acritical focus on the processes of state forma-tion (its shifting boundaries, central±localrelations) and the exercise of state power inthe arena of crime control (its targets,legitimating discourses and impact on socialdivisions and inequality).

Roy Coleman and Joe Sim

Associated Concepts: authoritarian populism,critical criminology, hegemony, radical crim-inologies, radical feminism, social control,state crime

Key ReadingsBarry, A., Osborne, T. and Rose, N. (eds) (1996)

Foucault and Political Reason. London, UCL Press.Clarke, J. and Newman, J. (1997) The Managerial

State. London, Sage.Coleman, R. and Sim, J. (1998) `From the dockyards

to the Disney store: surveillance, risk and securityin Liverpool city centre', International Review ofLaw, Computers and Technology, 12 (1), pp. 27±45.

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J. andRoberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis. London,Macmillan.

Hester, M., Kelly, L. and Radford, J. (1996)Ìntroduction', in M. Hester, L. Kelly and J.Radford (eds), Women, Violence and Male Power.Buckingham, Open University Press.

Jessop, B. (1990) State Theory. Cambridge, PolityPress.

STATE CRIME

De®nition

State crime covers forms of criminality that arecommitted by states and governments in orderto further a variety of domestic and foreignpolicies.


State crime is one of the most serious forms ofcriminality for the following reasons. First, themonopoly of violence enjoyed by the statemeans that it has the potential to in¯ictmassive violations of human rights on itsown citizens and foreign nationals. Secondly,the state is the primary source of laws and this

289STATE CRIME

provides it with the ability to de®ne what iscriminal. Thirdly, the state's control of theinstitutions and personnel of the criminaljustice system enables it to target and neutral-ize its economic, social or political enemies.Finally, the state is in the strategic position toconceal its criminality. To date, state crime hasbeen broken down into four categories:

1 Acts of political criminality, for example,corruption, intimidation, manipulating theelectoral process and censorship.

2 Criminality associated with the securityand police forces, for example, war-making, genocide, ethnic cleansing, tor-ture, disappearance, terrorism, assassina-tion.

3 Criminality associated with economicactivities, monopolization practices, viola-tions of health and safety regulations,illegal collaboration with multinationalcorporations.

4 Criminality at the social and culturallevels, which includes the material immi-seration of sections of the community,institutional racism, cultural vandalism.

Although there are national and internationallaws and conventions which regulate the stateand protect citizens, the principle of nationalsovereignty makes it extremely dif®cult forthese protections to be accessed.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: political crime, the state,war crimes

Key ReadingsFredrichs, D.O. (ed.) (1998) State Crime, vols 1 and 2.

Aldershot, Gower.

STATUS FRUSTRATION

De®nition

The concept of status frustration is used toexplain crime and delinquency by straintheorists. Individuals who cannot achievetheir status goals through legitimate channelsbecome frustrated, and they may (a) try toachieve their status goals through illegitimateor criminal channels, (b) vent their frustrationat others, (c) make themselves feel betterthrough illicit drug use, or (d) focus onalternative status goals that they can achieve,with these goals sometimes involving crime.


Some strain theorists, such as Robert Merton(1938) and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin(1960), argue that people in the USA are mostconcerned with their monetary status. That is,they desire a lot of money. They are encour-aged to desire money by the people aroundthem and the larger culture, and they areregularly exposed to all the wonderful thingsthat money can buy. Many people, however,are unable to achieve monetary successthrough legitimate channels ± like getting agood education and then a good job. This isespecially true of lower-class individuals,although many higher-class individuals mayalso have trouble achieving their monetarygoals. Such people become frustrated and mayturn to crimes such as theft, prostitution anddrug selling in order to achieve their monetarygoals.

Other theorists, such as Albert Cohen (1955),argue that individuals have a more generaldesire for middle-class status. They not onlywant money, but also want to be viewed andtreated with respect by others. Once again,lower-class individuals often have dif®cultyachieving this goal through legitimate chan-nels. Unlike money, middle-class status is notsomething that one can easily obtain throughcrime. Some lower-class individuals, however,respond to their status frustration by settingup an alternative status system in which theycan successfully compete. Their hostilitytoward the middle-class, among other things,may lead them to set up a status system thatvalues behaviours like ®ghting and theft incertain conditions.

Still other theorists, like James Messersch-midt (1993), focus on the desire of males for`masculine status'. While there are differentviews of what it means to `be a man', mostsuch views emphasize traits like indepen-dence, dominance, toughness, competitivenessand heterosexuality. Certain people ± espe-cially juveniles, lower-class individuals, andmembers of minority groups ± may havetrouble exhibiting these traits through legit-imate channels. They may engage in crime todemonstrate their dominance and toughnessand to coerce others into giving them therespect they feel they deserve as real men.

Finally, several theorists argue that manyadolescents desire adult status ± particularlythe autonomy or freedom associated withbeing adult. Delinquency may be a means toassert or achieve autonomy (for example,sexual intercourse, under-age drinking, steal-ing to gain ®nancial independence from


parents) or to vent frustration against thosewho deny autonomy.

Evaluation

The effect of status frustration on crime anddelinquency has not been well tested,although several observational studies suggestthat the above types of status frustration docontribute to crime. And limited survey datasuggest that individuals high in statusfrustration may be more likely to engage incrime, although status frustration does notlead to crime in most cases.

Robert Agnew

Associated Concepts: anomie, masculinities,strain theory, subculture


theory of crime and delinquency', Criminology, 30,pp. 47±87.

Cloward, R.A. and Ohlin, L. (1960) Delinquency andOpportunity New York, The Free Press.

Cohen, A.K. (1955) Delinquent Boys. New York, TheFree Press.


Messerschmidt, J.W. (1993) Masculinities and Crime.Lanham, MD: Rowman and Little®eld.

STEREOTYPING

De®nition

The process of applying condensed images toa group or category of people. These imagesrepresent over-simpli®ed and over-general-ized abstractions regarding such people, theirvalues, behaviour and lifestyle. Stereotypingnot only involves categorizing and classifyingpeople but also acting towards them inparticular ways.


As a theoretical concept stereotyping has adisciplinary base in both social psychologyand sociology. Social psychologists focus onstereotyping as part of unconscious andconscious thought processes and explore itslink with perception (how individuals give

coherence and unity to sensory inputs, such asobserving the actions of others) and also withprejudice (negative attitudes towards a groupof persons based not on individual qualitiesbut on traits assumed to be uniformly sharedby all members of the group). In addition toexploring the negative aspects of stereotyping,especially in its connection with prejudice,they also examine its positive functions as ameans by which individuals can bring order toa potentially complex ± even chaotic ± socialenvironment, thereby facilitating ease ofcommunication and interaction.

Sociologists have located stereotypingwithin interactionist, labelling and newdeviancy approaches. All of these share aconcern with examining the ways in whichrounded images are applied so as to de®nesome people as `deviant' or òther' and othersas `normal'. They emphasize the tendency forstereotypes to be structural, that is embeddedin key criminal justice agencies and also in theeveryday practices of their personnel.Although stereotypes are expressed in inter-actions between individuals, they are notidiosyncratic nor applied randomly: ratherthey exhibit patterns and regularity in theways in which they are generated and applied.A sociological approach seeks to explore therelationship between such patterns and theexercise of power by one group of people overanother. In this respect, sociologists tend tofocus on the process of negative stereotypingby one group and its effect on another group.

The concept `stereotype' is relatively impre-cise and there can be variations in the ways inwhich it is applied. In some cases it isrestricted to negative, unfavourable imagerywhereas for others it can embrace positiveportrayals of categories of people. Stereotypesmay be viewed as relatively ®xed, rigid andenduring or subject to manipulation andchange. There are also differences as towhether stereotypes necessarily involvebiased and inaccurate as opposed to valid ±although simpli®ed ± portrayals. Finally,stereotypes are sometimes conceptualized asrepresenting a universally shared set ofbeliefs: alternatively they are viewed asmeans by which one group characterizes andacts towards another group with adverseconsequences for the latter. This formulationlinks the process of stereotyping to theexercise of power.

There are overlaps between the concept`stereotype' and others used within an inter-actionist perspective such as `label', `symbolicrepresentation' and `folk devil'. The notion offolk devil was central to Cohen's (1973)

291STEREOTYPING

analysis of violence at an English seasideresort and the creation of rounded images of`Mods' and `Rockers'. This analysis generateda wider thesis that society goes throughperiodic moral panics during which `folkdevils' are constructed and portrayed as theessence of `what is wrong with society'.

The media play an important role in theformation and transmission of stereotypes. Indoing so they are often in¯uenced by primaryde®ners such as the police, who give informa-tion to the press and provide initial stereo-types. Such stereotypes are fed into the publicdomain and also back into formal andinformal police culture.

The use of stereotypes by police in theirinteractions with others can generate actionsthat ®t the stereotype. In this way they canbecome ampli®ed and self-ful®lling. Some-times this is known as deviancy ampli®cation.

Evaluation

Along with other concepts deriving from aninteractionist perspective, stereotyping hascontributed to criminology in terms of high-lighting the social construction of crime andthe process of criminalization as opposed toexplanations cast in causal terms. However, itruns the risk of contributing to explanationsthat suggest crime and criminality are theoutcome of stereotyping by the media andpolice, rather than a reality for those who arevictims.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: deviance, deviancy ampli-®cation, folk devil, interactionism, labelling,moral panic, racialization, scapegoating, socialconstructionism, social reaction, stigma


London, Paladin.

STIGMA

De®nition

A sign of disgrace imposed upon certainidenti®ed individuals as a means of markingthem out as different, deviant or criminal.


The term stigma derives from the practice inancient Greece of marking the body ofindividuals with cuts or brands to signifythem as morally inferior, blemished orpolluted and to be avoided, especially inpublic places. Goffman (1963) distinguishesbetween three types of stigma: physicaldeformity, blemishes of character (dishonesty,criminality, radical politics, unemployment,mental disability and so on) and the `tribal'stigma of race, nation and religion. In hissociological and interactionist analysis stigmais derived less from a particular attribute(stigmata) and more through a social processin which particular attributes are discreditedat particular times and in particular places. Itis described as a discrepancy between virtualand actual social identity. The normal and thestigmatized are not persons but ratherperspectives. Stigma is a relational phenom-enon. For example, having a universitydegree may be a sign of success in onesocial context but a sign of oddity in others.In some contexts killing is heroism, in othersit is murder. The meaning of stigma alsovaries across gender and class. Sexual pro-miscuity may be condemned for women(sluts) but may be a source of esteem formen (studs). Goffman observed that there isno possibility of objectively de®ning stigma.There is no clear and universal distinctionbetween the normal and the deviant. Inpluralistic and heterogeneous societies wecontinually move from one to the other.Stigma is a `two-role social process in whichevery individual participates in both roles, atleast in some connections and in some phasesof life' (Goffman, 1963, p. 138).

However, he also noted that certainpeople, such as in-group deviants, thoseengaged in a collective denial of social order,minorities and the lower classes, are alllikely to ®nd themselves functioning as stig-matized individuals at some time. This isbecause the actual identity of such groups ismore likely to confront a virtual middle-classideal. Difference is translated into undesir-ability or inferiority. The stigmatized are castas not quite human. Reactions against suchcastings are likely to be viewed as con®rm-ing the original defect. The stigmatized indi-vidual may attempt to correct the condition,but it can also affect self-esteem, self-conceptand future behaviour. The stigmatized maycome to resist their classi®ers as unjustlyexercising their power to deny them theirfull humanity.


It is in these senses that the concept hasbeen most widely employed in criminology. InBecker (1963) and Lemert's (1967) labellinganalysis the stigma process cements ratherthan prevents the onset of deviant careers.Applied to prisoners and inmates of mentalhospitals, the stereotyping of them as `spoiled'precludes their ability to return to a main-stream life. Further deviance is entertainedwhen opportunities are foreclosed by persis-tent readings of character as negative and byrelated feelings of estrangement, self-doubt orresistance. Schwartz and Skolnick's (1964)study on legal stigma found consistent dis-crimination by employers when consideringjob applications from unskilled workers with acriminal record. However, stigma also variesaccording to social status. Examining thesubsequent careers of doctors who had beenaccused of malpractice this research foundalmost no subsequent negative effect. As aresult, only a partial and distinct population ofdeviants emerges: a direct result of the stigmaof imprisonment and of collective intoleranceto the relatively powerless. Stigma, too, canalso be used for wider political purposesthrough which moral entrepreneurs engage inmoral crusades (or `stigma contests') tomanipulate public opinion against speci®cgroups, such as youth subcultures, asylumseekers, working mothers, teenage mothers,drug users and so on (Schur, 1980).

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: deviance, deviancy ampli-®cation, labelling, moral panic, radical non-intervention, recidivism, scapegoating, socialcensure

Key ReadingsBecker, H. (1963) Outsiders. New York, The Free

Press.Goffman, E. (1963) Stigma. Englewood Cliffs, NJ,

Prentice±Hall.Lemert, E. (1967) Human Deviance, Social Problems

and Social Control. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice±Hall.

Schur, E. (1980) The Politics of Deviance: StigmaContests and the Uses of Power. Englewood Cliffs,NJ, Prentice±Hall.

Schwartz, R. and Skolnick, J. (1964) `Two studies oflegal stigma', in H. Becker (ed.), The Other Side.New York, The Free Press.

STRAIN THEORY

De®nition

Strain theory argues that people are morelikely to engage in crime when they cannot getwhat they want through legitimate channels.They become frustrated or angry, and theymay (a) try to get what they want throughillegitimate or criminal channels, (b) strike outat others in their anger, or (c) make themselvesfeel better through illicit drug use. Straintheories describe the types of strain that con-tribute to crime, and the factors that in¯uencewhether one responds to strain with crime.


Robert Merton (1938) developed the ®rstmajor strain theory of crime. He argued thatpeople in the USA are encouraged to pursuethe goal of monetary success, but that lower-class individuals are often prevented fromachieving such success through legitimatechannels ± like getting a good education andthen a good job. The inability to achieveeconomic success creates much frustration,and individuals sometimes respond to thisfrustration by engaging in crime. Mostnotably, they may try to achieve economicsuccess through illegitimate channels, liketheft, prostitution and drug selling. Someindividuals may also deal with their frustra-tion through drug use.

Albert Cohen (1955) and Richard Clowardand Lloyd Ohlin (1960) drew on Merton'sstrain theory to explain the origin of juvenilegangs in the lower-class. Cohen argues thatlower-class boys desire middle-class status,which includes both money and respect fromothers. Many lower-class boys, however, areunable to achieve such status through legit-imate channels. For example, they have notbeen taught the skills and attitudes necessaryto perform well in school. As a consequence,they cannot live up to the expectations of theirmiddle-class teachers or compete effectivelyagainst middle-class students. If these strainedboys are in contact with one another, they maycope with their frustration by setting up analternative status system in which they cansuccessfully compete. Their hostility towardthe middle class, among other things, leadsthem to set up a status system that valuescriminal acts like ®ghting and theft. Thus, thegang is born.

293STRAIN THEORY

Cloward and Ohlin, like Merton, argue thatmost lower-class boys want to achievemonetary success. They realize that they willnot be able to achieve such success throughlegitimate channels and so are ripe fordelinquency. But, like Cohen, Cloward andOhlin argue that juveniles are unlikely toviolate the law unless they receive supportfrom others. They then discuss the conditionsthat in¯uence whether strained individualswill form delinquent gangs. Among otherthings, strained individuals must blame theirstrain on the larger social system and be incontact with one another. The gangs that arisesupport and help justify the juvenile's crime.

The strain theorists mentioned above focuson the inability to achieve the goal ofmonetary success or middle-class status.More recent strain theorists, such as DavidGreenberg (1977) and Delbert Elliott andassociates (1979), have expanded straintheory by arguing that juveniles may pursuea variety of goals in addition to money. Suchgoals include autonomy from adults, positiverelations with family members, and popular-ity with peers. Further, they note that middle-class as well as lower-class juveniles may havetrouble achieving certain of these goals. Theythus provide an explanation for middle-classdelinquency.

Most recently, Robert Agnew (1992) hasfurther expanded strain theory. Like hispredecessors, Agnew argues that strain mayresult from the failure to achieve a range ofgoals, including ®nancial goals, autonomy andstatus goals ± especially the desire of certainmales to be viewed and treated like `real men'.Agnew, however, goes on to argue that thefailure to achieve positively valued goals is onlyone type of strain. Strain may also result fromthe loss of positive stimuli (for example, thedeath of a relative or friend, the break-up with aromantic partner, moving to a new community)and from the presentation of negative stimuli(for example, physical assaults, verbal insults,unreasonable demands). Agnew also discussesthe factors that in¯uence whether peoplerespond to strain with crime. A criminalresponse is said to be more likely whenindividuals blame their strain on the deliberateactions of others, have poor coping skills andresources, have little social support fromconventional others, are in situations wherethe costs of crime are low and the rewards arehigh, and are disposed to crime. The disposi-tion to crime is in¯uenced by the individuals'traits (such as, impulsivity, irritability), level ofsocial control, and extent to which they havebeen taught to engage in crime.

Evaluation

The effect of goal blockage on strain has notbeen well examined. Researchers typicallyexamine whether juveniles expect to achievetheir educational and occupational aspirations(or ideal goals). Researchers ignore themonetary and other goals emphasized bystrain theorists. And the inability to achieveone's aspirations or ideal goals is unlikely toresult in much strain, since ideal goals havesomething of the utopian in them and areprobably not taken seriously in most cases. Itis not surprising, then, that studies indicatethat the failure to achieve one's ideal educa-tional or occupational goals is not related todelinquency. Limited data, however, suggestthat crime is more common among peoplewho are dissatis®ed with their monetarysituation ± with such dissatisfaction beinghigher among people who are lower-class andwho state that they want à lot of money'.There are also some data to suggest that thefailure to achieve autonomy and `masculinity'goals may contribute to crime.

Data also indicate that the other two types ofstrain ± the loss of positive stimuli and thepresentation of negative stimuli ± may con-tribute to crime. In particular, crime anddelinquency are associated with child abuseand neglect, criminal victimization, physicalpunishment by parents, negative relations withpeers, neighbourhood problems, homelessnessand a wide range of stressful life events ± likethe divorce/separation of a parent, parentalunemployment and changing schools. Further,there is some, limited, evidence that at leastcertain of these types of strain affect crime,partly through their effect on the individual'slevel of anger/frustration.

At the same time, strain theory does sufferfrom certain problems. While some types ofstrain are related to crime, other types are not.Strain theory does not currently offer a goodexplanation as to why only some types ofstrain contribute to crime. Also, studiesexamining the factors that in¯uence the effectof strain on crime have produced mixedresults. So we currently do not have a goodidea of why some people are more likely torespond to strain with crime than others. Sostrain theory may be described as a promisingtheory in need of further work.

Robert Agnew

Associated Concepts: anomie, status frustration,subculture



theory of crime and delinquency', Criminology, 30,pp. 47±87.

Cloward, R.A. and Ohlin, L. (1960) Delinquency andOpportunity New York, The Free Press.

Cohen, A.K. (1955) Delinquent Boys. New York, TheFree Press.

Elliott, D.S., Ageton, S.S. and Canter, R. (1979) Ànintegrated theoretical perspective on delinquentbehavior', Journal of Research in Crime andDelinquency, 16, pp. 3±27.

Greenberg, D.F. (1977) `Delinquency and the agestructure of society', Contemporary Crises, 1,pp. 189±223.


STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS

De®nition

Research interviews in which questions areasked in accordance with precisely de®nedinstructions and the answers are recorded inpre-determined categories. Such interviewsare usually facilitated by a formal interviewschedule for the collection and analysis ofdata. Structured interviews are in contrast toother forms of interviewing which give muchgreater freedom to the respondent to answerin his or her own terms, such as life histories,oral histories and conversational analysis.


Structured interviews are used to collectobservations from respondents in ± usuallylarge-scale ± social surveys. The same ques-tions are asked of every respondent, in thesame way. The range of answers is usuallypre-set and may even be pre-coded. Theinterviewer should be able to categorize theresponses to any questions into a set ofmutually exclusive and exhaustive categories.As far as possible, the context in which theinterview is carried out, and the procedureswhich are followed, should be standardized.In some cases the role of the interviewer isreduced to a minimum by respondents inter-acting with a laptop computer. An example ofa structured interview is a battery of questionsthat collectively measure or `scale' the atti-tudes of respondents, such as attitudes

towards the police or attitudes towardsrehabilitation as opposed to punishment. Anumber of established techniques exist tomeasure attitudes, such as the Thurstone scale,the Likert scale and the Guttman scale.

The principle underlying structured inter-views is that different individuals should bepresented with èquivalence of stimulus',thereby facilitating comparability of responsesacross the sample in the belief that theprocedures of the research have not affectedthe responses. The aim is to keep what isknown as procedural reactivity to a minimum.In addition, structured interviews seek toreduce personal reactivity in the form ofinterview bias. The latter can occur whenresponses are affected by the attitudes or thebehaviour of the interviewer as expressed inthe ways in which he or she asks questions,probes or interprets answers.

Evaluation

Despite these advantages, structured inter-views can have weaknesses. For example, theycan be too shallow, especially where theresearcher is seeking to examine the varietyand depth of meanings or attitudes whichrespondents hold. For this reason some arguethat structured interviews are only appropri-ate to the collection of responses on factualmatters. A further problem is that structuredinterviews can result in data degradation, thatis, the irretrievable loss of data as a result ofreducing the breadth of responses to a fewcategories. What is more, the imposition ofstructure may produce distortion of the waysin which respondents would want to respond,for example because the range of categoriesoffered is inappropriate or not suf®cientlyexhaustive. One way of trying to overcomethis is by exploratory in-depth research, forexample by using in-depth interviews or focusgroups to uncover a range of issues and ofresponses that are valid in so far as they aregrounded in the frames of reference of thesubjects themselves rather than those of theresearchers. Such exploratory research withsmall, but representative groups can provide abasis for the design of valid and meaningfulquestions for use in structured interviews withlarge samples. Even after this has been done,structured questionnaires or interview sche-dules should be `tested' for their appropriate-ness in pilot surveys.

Victor Jupp

295STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS

Associated Concepts: conversational analysis,focus groups, self-reports, social survey

Key ReadingsMay, T. (1997) Social Research: Issues, Method and

Process. Buckingham, Open University Press.Oppenheim, A.N. (1973) Questionnaire Design and

Attitude Measurement. London, Heinemann.Wilson, M. (1996) Àsking questions', in R. Sapsford

and V. Jupp (eds), Data Collection and Analysis.London, Sage.

SUBCULTURE

De®nition

First used by anthropologists, the concept ofsubculture was applied to the study of delin-quency in the mid 1950s. It was used tounderstand social deviance, and delinquencyin particular, by referring to distinctive sets ofvalues that set the delinquent apart frommainstream or dominant culture. It madesense of the apparently senseless by arguingthat delinquency was a solution to the struc-tural and cultural problems facing margin-alized groups.


American in origin, a theory of youth sub-culture gained criminological prominencethrough Albert Cohen's (1955) research intothe culture of the gang in Chicago. Cohenviewed the gang as a subculture with a valuesystem different from that of mainstreamAmerican culture, distinguishable throughspecial vocabulary, shared internal beliefsand specialized ways of dressing and acting.He attempted to account for the working-classgang in terms of a lower-class adaptation to adominant and discriminatory middle-classsociety. According to Cohen, subcultures ofdelinquency are characterized by working-class membership, masculinity, group loyalty,short-term hedonism, non-utilitarianism and alack of specialism in delinquent acts. Hedeveloped the notion of status frustration toexplain how the subculture acts as a means forworking-class boys to ®nd a solution to a lackof status in middle-class life. The developmentof specialized vocabulary, internal beliefs andinnovative ways of dressing and acting, heargued, represented an inversion of dominant

values. Status frustration becomes visible innegative forms of behaviour whereby thedominant goals of ambition and achievement,deferred grati®cation and respect for propertyare rejected and reversed. By a process ofreaction formation, dominant values areinverted to offer a collective solution torestricted opportunity in which `the delin-quent conduct is right by the standards of hissubculture precisely because it is wrong by thenorms of the larger culture' (Cohen, 1955,p. 28).

Similarly Cloward and Ohlin (1961)explained working-class deviancy as a collec-tive, rather than an individual solution. In thisversion, however, the problem for the delin-quent is to achieve a high status position interms of lower-class, rather than middle-class,criteria. They distinguished three types ofdelinquent subculture relative to the differ-ential availability of legitimate and illegitimatemeans to gain material and status success. Acriminal subculture develops mainly in lower-class neighbourhoods where the successfulcriminal is not only visible to young people,but is willing to associate with them. Deniedaccess to conventional role models of success,these youths access criminal success modelsinstead. However, in more disorganizedneighbourhoods when access to a criminalsubculture is denied, a con¯ict subculture ismore likely to arise in which the lack oflegitimate and illegitimate opportunities formaterial success is solved by achieving statusthrough ®ghting and violence. A retreatistsubculture arises where neither of these optionsis available and the gang resorts to hustlingand drug usage.

Evaluation

These formative subcultural theories werein¯uential because they showed that delin-quency resulted not from psychologicallydamaged individuals but through a series ofcollective, local and cultural solutions to theblocked opportunities and inequalities of theAmerican class structure. Such theory under-pinned a variety of crime prevention pro-grammes in the USA in the 1960s. The mostfamous was Mobilization for Youth, which wasdesigned to open up new opportunities forworking-class youth through educational andemployment support. However, subculturaltheory in general came to be critiqued becauseof its almost sole concern to explain high ratesof delinquency within the male lower classes.Criminal law and statistical representations of


offending rates were taken as given. Subse-quent studies, based in particular on self-reports, found that most people, irrespectiveof gender and class position, commit acts forwhich they could be adjudicated criminal ordelinquent. In ignoring both the ubiquity ofcrime, and its white collar variants, it conveysthe impression that lawlessness is exclusivelya lower-class and male phenomenon. Thedegree to which behaviour is determined bystructure and class position and the sharpseparation of delinquent and non-delinquentvalues on which these studies were based hasalso been heavily criticized.

For example David Matza's (1964) researchfound that individual members of a gang wereonly partially committed to subculturalnorms. Rather than forming a subculture thatstands in antithesis to the dominant order, heargued that the delinquent drifts in and out ofdeviant activity. This is made possible becausethere is no consensus in society ± no set ofbasic and core values ± but rather a pluralityin which the conventional and the delinquentcontinually overlap and interrelate. Instead ofdelinquent acts being conceived as a directexpression of delinquent norms and thussystem-determined, Matza was more con-cerned to illustrate how their diversity wasdependent on particular individuals andsituations. He insisted that pluralism ratherthan consensus and interaction rather thandeterminism provided more adequate meansof studying deviant behaviour.

Downes's (1966) research in Britain alsofound little evidence of Cohen's `statusfrustration' among the working-class boys ofEast London, either in school or work. Ratherthey dissociated themselves from the labourmarket and de¯ected their interests, achieve-ments and aspirations into leisure pursuits. Assuch, leisure, rather than delinquency, pro-vided working-class youths with a collectivesolution to their problems. The connectionbetween leisure and delinquency onlybecomes apparent if leisure aspirations alsoremain unful®lled. Some working-class youthsreached a `delinquent solution' by `pushingthe legitimate values of teenage culture to theirlogical conclusion' (Downes, 1966, p. 134).Neither did this research ®nd any evidence ofstructured gangs in Britain. Whilst de®nitionsof the `gang' are often loose and variable, theterm implies some form of identi®able leader-ship, membership criteria and organizationalstructure. Contemporary and classic subcul-tural studies of white, black, Chinese andPuerto Rican gangs in America paint a pictureof neighbourhood groups, organized largely

along racial lines, with a strong sense of localterritory, mutual obligations and, latterly,direct involvement in extortion, traf®ckingand the drugs trade. However, in the Britishversion of subcultural theory, criminal activityis not a key concern. Rather it is argued thatleisure and delinquency combine to providethe conditions in which aspects of subculturalbehaviour can become criminalized. Indeed, inBritain, Downes's study was in¯uential invarious respects. Not only did it shift thedebate away from discourses of crime anddelinquency and towards discourses of leisureand entertainment as a means of securing`cultural space', but it also recognized howsubcultural experiences and opportunitieswere structured by class-based material andeconomic conditions.

These twin concerns were elaborated byvarious subcultural studies published by `theBirmingham School' at the Centre for Con-temporary Cultural Studies in the UK duringthe 1970s. On the one hand, the meaning ofsubcultural style was examined throughvarious ethnographic and semiological ana-lyses; on the other, the political implications ofdeviancy were explored through investiga-tions of the structural and class position ofvarious subcultures and their propensity tocreate `moral panics' (Hall and Jefferson,1976). By drawing on the work of the Marxistauthor Gramsci, subcultures were located notjust in relation to their parent cultures, but inrelation to structures of class con¯ict. TheBritish working class, it was argued, hasdeveloped its own historical cultures and therelations between these and the dominantculture are always negotiable. Working-classculture is always in a position to win `space',for the hegemony of the dominant culture isnever completed. It is always in the process ofbeing contested and fought for. Subculturescontest this space through their `focal con-cerns' and in the moments of originalitycreated by the formation of deviant subcul-tural styles. Above all, subcultures wereviewed as symbolic representations of socialcontradictions and as offering a symboliccritique of the established order: they wereviewed as oppositional rather than simplydeviant formations.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: anomie, delinquency,differential association, neutralization (tech-niques of ), new deviancy theory, statusfrustration, strain theory

297SUBCULTURE

Key ReadingsCampbell, A. and Muncer, S. (1989) `Them and Us: a

comparison of the cultural context of Americangangs and British subcultures', Deviant Behaviour,10, pp. 271±88.

Cloward, R. and Ohlin, L. (1961) Delinquency andOpportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs.London, Routledge.

Cohen, A. (1955) Delinquent Boys: The Culture of theGang. New York, The Free Press.

Downes, D. (1966) The Delinquent Solution. London,Routledge.

Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds) (1976) Resistancethrough Rituals. London, Hutchinson.

Matza, D. (1964) Delinquency and Drift. New York,Wiley.

SURVEILLANCE

De®nition

The ability to monitor public behaviour for thepurposes of crime and population control.Associated, in the main, with measures toreduce the opportunities for crime within therubric of situational crime prevention.


In 1778 Jeremy Bentham coined the term`Panopticon' to describe a prison design whichallowed for uninterrupted inspection, obser-vation and surveillance of prisoners. Heenvisaged the replacement of the old darkand dank prison by a light, visible archi-tectural form in which inmates would beseparated off from each other and placed per-manently in full view of a central but unseenobserver. Prisoners would never know whenthey were being observed but would be forcedto behave at all times as if they were. A state ofconscious and permanent visibility wouldassure the automatic functioning of self-control and self-discipline. In this way,Bentham was ®rst and foremost championinga new conception of surveillance. He dreamedof entire cities being reorganized alongpanoptic lines. He believed that the principleof continual surveillance would be applicableto any establishment where a number ofpersons were meant to be kept under restric-tion, no matter how different or how oppositetheir purpose. In other words, the notion ofperpetual surveillance could be applied not

just to prisons but to workhouses, factories,asylums, hospitals and schools. Although thepanoptic prison was never built, as Foucault(1977) pointed out, many of the emergenturban institutional arrangements of the earlynineteenth century began to work on theprinciple that populations could be orderedthrough surveillance.

By the late twentieth century a range ofsurveillance techniques, such as CCTV andbiometric scanning devices (smart cards,®ngerprinting, iris scans, hand geometryscans, voice recognition, DNA testing anddigitized facial recognition) were rapidlybeing removed from the realm of science®ction. The potential for national and interna-tional systems of intimate monitoring toclassify individuals into appropriate spacesand times where they `belong' was rapidlybeing realized. Retina scanning of prisoninmates is in operation in Cook County,Illinois. Frequent travellers between Canadaand Montana use automated voice recognitionto enable speedier clearance through bordercontrols. A national DNA database operates inthe UK for tracking criminals. CommercialDNA databases are raising the prospect ofgene tests to underpin surveillance systems inthe health insurance industry, excluding thoserecorded as àbnormal' or `high-risk'. By themid 1990s the UK had the highest penetrationof CCTV cameras in the world. Pictorial data-bases of such groups as hooligans, politicaldemonstrators, bank robbers, suspected illegalimmigrants and environmental campaignershave been established.

All these developments have potentiallyenormous consequences for population con-trol and urban regulation in the twenty-®rstcentury. Bentham's original conception of thePanopticon was of the use of architecture tocontrol prison populations. Modern forms ofsocial panopticism extrapolate from theùnseen eye' of the penal realm and applyits logic to entire populations. Control isaccomplished by unobtrusive but pervasivemeans through which notions of public orprivate space become increasingly blurred.The information collected by the new tech-nologies of surveillance allows for thesystematic categorization of whole popula-tions. Gandy (1993) refers to this as a`panoptic sort': a process whereby individualsin their daily lives as citizens, employees andconsumers are continually identi®ed, classi-®ed and assessed and the information thenused to coordinate and control their access togoods and services. In an age of electronicnetworks, virtual memory and remote access


to information and data, the disciplinarysurveillance of the Panopticon identi®ed byBentham and Foucault is increasingly beingdispersed beyond architectural boundariesand walls. Observation is no longer limitedto what the eye can see. As Gandy (1993, p.15) argued, this is not just a vision of thefuture. Rather the `panoptic sort' has beeninstitutionalized: Ìt is standard operatingprocedure. It is expected. It has its place. Itsoperation is required by law. And where it isnot, people call out for its installation. Itswork is never done. Each use generates newuses. Each application justi®es another.' It hasbecome a system of power on which thesurvival of corporate capital exists. It end-lessly seeks for the norm and disregardsthose who are classi®ed as àbnormal'. Itselectively allocates privilege on the basis ofinformation stored, perpetuating inequalityand a mistrust which leads to further sur-veillance: èach cycle pushes us further fromthe democratic ideal' (Gandy, 1993, p. 230).

A similar vision is offered by Bogard's(1996) notion of a `telematic society'. ForBogard the surveillance capacities of latemodern societies are characterized by:

· The application of military initiated simu-lation technologies and command andcontrol communications.

· The comodi®cation of spaces of cities andspaces of information.

· Globalization, whereby corporate stateinterests depend on global words ofdigitally interconnected control systems.

Surveillance and simulation have becomeincreasingly interwoven. Telematic technolo-gies, such as virtual reality and image data-bases, continually produce electronic datawhich is then taken to be `reality' by dominantinstitutions. The key to understanding modernsocial control, Bogard argues, lies not simplyin the extension of surveillance but in thegeneration of simulated notions of order/disorder. Social relations are reduced to a`space between keyboard and the screen'.People are known and situated only as theyare reproduced in the hyper-real spacegenerated by electronic data banks, electroniccommunities or genetic algorithms. It issurveillance without limits.

These visions of a dystopian future (andpresent) rely on a reading of Foucault whichpromises the `disciplinary society'. But Fou-cault's work can also be read as allowing forresistance. Strategies of power and knowledgeare never pre-determined but always con-

tested and contingent and may enable as wellas constrain. Lyon (1994), for example,considers that modern surveillance bringsreal bene®ts as well as real harms. By linkingthe expansion of surveillance to a simulta-neous growth in citizenship, he argues that itis the very improvements in civic and politicalentitlement which have generated demand fora greater documentary identi®cation, which inturn depends on a growing sophistication inmethods of recording and surveillance. As aresult he identi®es no single omnipotent BigBrother, but a variety of dispersed `littlebrothers'. Panoptic power is partial, contin-gent and unevenly developed. The sheervolume of new data becoming available isalways likely to create contradictory andcontingent simulations of people and places.Its meaning becomes ever less veri®able andforever open to contestation.

These macro political economic visions alsoneed to be balanced with ®ner-grainedanalyses of how surveillance impacts differ-ently on different populations, at differenttimes and in different places. Selective sur-veillance has clearly played a role in further-ing processes of spatial segregation and socialpolarization. There are obviously differentrisks involved in the entrenchment of `suspectpopulations' in outcast under-protected ghet-tos and of ìnnocent populations' in over-protected consumerist citadels and residentialenclaves. A measured response to modernregulation and surveillance probably requiresneither outright acceptance nor paranoia.Subtle distinctions need to be made to unravelthe complexities involved in addressingwhether the future holds a nightmare visionof zones of exclusion and zones of safety orwhether surveillance can allow us to re-imagine the urban as rejuvenated, repopulatedand more secure.

John Muncie

Associated Concepts: defensible space, govern-mentality, panopticism, risk, situational crimeprevention, social control

Key ReadingsBogard, W. (1996) The Simulation of Surveillance:

Control in Telematic Societies. Cambridge, Cam-bridge University Press.

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish. London,Allen Lane.

Gandy, O. (1993) The Panoptic Sort. Boulder, CO,Westview Press.

299SURVEILLANCE

Lyon, F. (1994) The Electronic Eye: The Rise ofSurveillance Society. Cambridge, Polity Press.

Norris, C., Moran, J. and Armstrong, G. (eds) (1999)Surveillance, Closed Circuit Television and SocialControl. Aldershot, Ashgate.

SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM

See Interactionism


T

TARGET HARDENING

See Defensible space; Repeat victimization;Situational crime prevention; Surveillance

TIME SERIES DESIGN

De®nition

A research design in which measurements ofthe same variables are taken at different pointsin time, often with a view to studying socialtrends. For this reason such designs aresometimes also known as trend designs andare distinguishable from òne shot' cross-sectional designs in which measurements aretaken only once.


Time series designs can be used in conjunctionwith of®cial data, for example by plottingcrime rates for the same area but for differentpoints in time (monthly, quarterly, annually).This acts as a basis for making statementsabout trends in levels of crime. When this isdone it is known as univariate time seriesanalysis. It is possible to plot the trends fordifferent variables at one and the same timewith a view to making inferences about theirrelationship. This is known as multivariateanalysis and involves comparing one variablewith another or others in the context ofbelieving that there are strong theoreticalreasons for the variables concerned beingcausally connected. It is possible, for example,to map unemployment rates against crimerates for England and Wales, 1990±2000 to

consider whether changes in one rate coincidewith changes in the other. Although suchanalysis may provide evidence of association,that is, that changes in crime rates arecorrelated with changes in unemploymentrates, it does not by itself provide a suf®cientbasis for making inferences about causality(that is, that changes in crime rates are causedby changes in unemployment rates). It wouldbe necessary, for example, to have evidencethat changes in one variable consistentlypreceded change(s) in the others.

The term `time series' is sometimes alsoused to refer to a form of survey design inwhich equivalent samples of the populationare taken at different points in time and datacollected about them, usually by interviewingsample members. The samples are equivalentbecause they are collected by the sameprinciples and using the same criteria butthat does not mean that the same individualsare selected (although in statistical terms thatis a theoretical possibility). The British CrimeSurvey (BCS), carried out under the auspicesof the Home Of®ce, is an example of a timeseries sample survey. The ®rst BCS wascarried out in 1982 and has been repeated atregular (usually 4-year) intervals. Althoughthere are variations, at each point in timesample members are asked if they haverecently been a victim of crime, and if so, tospecify the type of crime; and also asked toindicate whether the crime was reported to thepolice. Adjustments are made to the numberof crimes reported by sample members tofacilitate comparisons with crime of®ciallyrecorded in the publication Criminal Statistics.In this way an estimate of the `dark ®gure' ofunrecorded crime is obtained.

The BCS also provides evidence of trends incrime levels, and because of recognizedde®ciencies in of®cial recorded data it isusually viewed as the more reliable indicator.

Evaluation

Time series designs are predominantly descrip-tive rather than explanatory. For example,victim surveys such as the BCS are descriptivestudies which measure crime at particularpoints in time, and look for trends, but makeno great claims to provide explanations. There isthe potential, as with all trend designs, totheorize about why changes in trends haveoccurred, but surveys do not by themselvesprovide suf®cient evidence as to causality.

The value of time series surveys is that theycan be used to map changes and trends insociety (or a sub-section of it). However, asindicated earlier, they are based on equivalent,not identical, samples, in terms of includingthe same individuals. Therefore they shouldnot be used as a basis for making inferencesabout individual development (for example,development of criminal careers). For this,some variant of a longitudinal cohort survey isrequired.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: causation, cohort studies,cross-sectional design, longitudinal study,multivariate analysis, of®cial criminal statis-tics, victim surveys

Key ReadingsJupp, V.R. (1996) Methods of Criminological Research.

London, Routledge.Magnusson, D. and Bergman, L.R. (1990) Data

Quality in Longitudinal Research. Cambridge, Cam-bridge University Press.

TOLERANCE

De®nition

As a criminal justice concept, tolerance is a formof partial non-intervention. It is based on theacknowledgement that (1) a dominantly mor-alistic approach is unsuited to actually solvesocial problems; (2) not all (legal) norms can beupheld and enforced; and (3) in many casessubtle problem-management or non-interven-tion is socially less damaging than repression.


Four centuries before the emergence of thelabelling approach in criminology, the idea

that deviance is partly created by the socialreactions to it and that a tolerant attitude is amore pragmatic way to control deviance wasalready in existence (Gijswijt-Hofstra, 1989).The cradle of this idea of tolerance is oftensought in the Reformation and the Dutchrevolt against the Spanish occupation and theInquisition in the sixteenth century. In this era,tolerance is a philosophical argument in theplea for freedom of religion and a politicalargument against the intolerant Spanish ruler.Already in 1525, when Erasmus was asked toadvise on how the religious peace could bebest guaranteed, he argued that both Protes-tant and Roman Catholic services should beallowed, because tolerance would be the bestruler. Spinoza has contributed largely to thetheoretical development of tolerance, in hisbook Tractatus theologico-politicus of 1670, byseparating philosophy from religion. In Brit-ain, John Locke defended a political concept of`tolerance'. In his Epistola de tolerantia of 1689,he calls `tolerance' the starting point of everyreasonable morality.

David Downes (1988) has used the term`tolerance' to describe the cultural phenomenathat have accompanied a period of decarcera-tion, that is, in the Netherlands from 1950 to1975. Downes focuses in this respect ontolerant outcomes, rather than on an inherent,principled tolerance. Tolerance in social con-trol is rooted in the Eliasian civilizationprocess. If the citizen is expected to controlhimself, external control becomes less neces-sary. Tolerance implies both a moral appealfor self-control and a pragmatic modus vivendito keep things as quiet as possible by notprovoking unnecessary unrest in society. Inline with Herbert Marcuse's model of repres-sive tolerance ± people are given a wide rangeof ìnnocent' freedoms in order to avoidprotest against more structural con®nements± Nils Christie (1993, pp. 41±6) has describedthe Dutch mode of social control as tolerancefrom above; that is, a tolerance that depends onthe de®nitory power of a changing group ofdominant professionals. In this sense, toler-ance does not imply a real acceptance ofdifference on an equal basis, but implies akind of moral superiority of those who cantolerate deviations from their own normalstandard. It is quite nice to be tolerant, but it ismuch less enviable to be tolerated.

A policy of tolerance does not imply thatauthorities think of certain practices as beingwithout problems. It shows a realist appraisalof the modest possibilities of social engineer-ing through penal means, as well as anawareness of the counter-effects of penal


intervention as an effective form of control. Atolerant penal approach (1) is a product ofpragmatic considerations of control ± oftencombined with an ideology of benevolenceand humanism ± and (2) goes together with atight net of other forms of social control ± likehealth care, social work and so on. Anexample of how tolerance functions as acriminal justice concept is the decriminaliza-tion of so-called victimless offences withoutactually taking these formally out of thecriminal code. Law and morality are treatedas separate ®elds. In Dutch legal practice,limited penal intervention is pursued in caseswhere no individual victim makes a claim forstate intervention ± such as (soft) drug-taking,abortion, euthanasia, pornography, prostitu-tion and so on. These morally loaded issuesare subjects of eternal public debate, whichensures that the policy of tolerance (gedoogbe-leid in Dutch) adopted in these ®elds is carriedby a rather wide consensus in society(Blankenburg and Bruinsma, 1991). Themajor advantage of a policy of tolerance isthe practicability by which law and practicecan be attuned. The dangers are, ®rst, that lawderails into an opaque political instrumentruled by administrative opportunism, andsecondly, that it becomes a synonym forindifference.

ReneÂ van Swaaningen

Associated Concepts: decriminalization, label-ling, radical non-intervention, restorative jus-tice, shaming

Key ReadingsBlankenburg, E. and Bruinsma, F. (1991) Dutch Legal

Culture. Deventer, Kluwer.Christie, N. (1993) Crime Control as Industry: Towards

Gulags Western Style? London, Routledge.Downes, D. (1988) Contrasts in Tolerance: Post-War

Penal Policy in the Netherlands and England andWales. Oxford, The Clarendon Press.

Gijswijt-Hofstra, M. (ed.) (1989) Een Schijn vanVerdraagzaamheid. Afwijking en tolerantie in Neder-land van de zestiende eeuw tot heden. Hilversum,Verloren.

Marcuse, H. (1971) `Repressive tolerance', in R.P.Wolff, B. Moore and H. Marcuse (eds), A Critiqueof Pure Tolerance. Boston, MA, Beacon.

Schur, E. (1965) Radical Non-Intervention; Rethinkingthe Delinquency Problem. Englewood Cliffs, NJ,Prentice±Hall.

TORTURE

De®nition

Torture is the in¯iction of severe physicaland/or mental pain or suffering as punish-ment and/or as a means of persuasion andconfession. It is the ultimate form of indivi-dualized terror and is universally prohibitedby international human rights conventions.However, its use remains commonplace and,as a consequence of the lucrative globalmarket in ìnternal security' and `law enforce-ment' technologies, it is undergoing constantre®nement.


The 1948 United Nations Declaration ofHuman Rights proclaims unambiguouslythat no one should be subject to torture. It isone of the few human rights that may not bederogated ± there can be no excuse for torturenor mitigating circumstances which can becited. Despite the fact that a variety of UnitedNations, regional and national conventionsand statutes have reiterated that torture isillegal, human rights groups report that its useremains widespread across every continent.

Research suggests that torture is practised bystate security and policing institutions for avariety of logistical reasons: to elicit informa-tion; to prepare enemies for public trials; toterminate the political effectiveness of thevictim; and to create a `culture of terror'permeating every milieu of society. In this lastscenario, torture is being utilized intentionallyas a mode of social control and governance.And because torture is being used to intimi-date and silence the general population anddeter opposition, innocent surrogate victimsare as effective as political activists. In parts ofthe world where states are at war or in con¯ictwith sections of their own citizenry, criminaljustice and military agencies have beentransformed into bureaucratic instruments ofterror, complete with networks of clandestinetorture and death centres with routine operat-ing procedures and professionals whosespecialist knowledge and methods areemployed to keep people alive for as long asis deemed either useful or necessary.

Research into the `world of the torturer'indicates that, although popularly depicted aspsychopaths, more often than not torturers arestate employees who undergo specialist train-ing and group socialization and who, by and

303TORTURE

large, regard their work with a degree ofprofessional detachment. In essence, torturebecomes a form of state sanctioned routineactivity. The making of a torturer wouldappear to have less to do with ìndividualpsychology' and more to do with the socialand political order in which the torture islicensed to take place. A number of studiesmake it clear there is no one `type of person'who is more likely to become a torturer. If theappropriate learning procedures are appliedin the right context, a signi®cant number ofindividuals have the potential to be torturers.

Because of the existence of various humanrights conventions and the campaigns ofpressure groups, torture is constantly being`modernized' and sanitized by the state. Forexample, evidence from Israel suggests thatthere is a very thin dividing line betweenpsychological modes of torture and sophisti-cated ìnterrogation' techniques which have astheir intention breaking the will of a detainee.This is posing a problem for human rightscampaigners because the stereotypical repre-sentations of torture they have been workingwith may no longer apply.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: human rights, state crime

Key ReadingsBasoglu, M. (ed.) (1999) Torture and its Consequences.

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.Cassese, A. (1996) Inhuman States: Imprisonment,

Detention and Torture in Europe Today. Cambridge,Polity Press.

Conroy, J. (2000) Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People:The Dynamics of Torture. New York, Alfred A.Knopf.

Duner, B. (ed.) (1998) An End to Torture: Strategies forits Eradication. New York, St Martin's Press.

Feitlowitz, M. (1999) A Lexicon of Terror: Argentinaand the Legacies of Torture. Oxford, OxfordUniversity Press.

TRANSCARCERATION

De®nition

The movement of offenders between differentinstitutional sites, state agencies and correc-tional programmes, so that the network ofsocial control is expanded rather thanreduced.


The concept of transcarceration provides animportant reworking of the decarcerationthesis, as it argues that the `clients' ofinstitutions are not returning to the commu-nity, rather they are experiencing an institu-tionally mobile career (Lowman et al., 1987).For instance, offenders can move betweenlocal prisons, half-way houses, shelteredaccommodation, or in some cases to highsecurity prisons or large mental hospitals.Their institutional location depends not somuch on their actual behaviour but onwhether it is de®ned as ill or criminal. Themove from understanding drug addiction assickness to crime provides a good example ofhow constructions of deviant behaviour canshift from medical to penal responses, and the`War on Drugs' is one of the main reasons forthe recent increases in US prison populations.

The intellectual origins of transcarcerationlie in Cohen's (1985) application to thecommunity corrections movement of Fou-cault's (1977) account of incarceration. Heargues that the movement represents anextension of the disciplinary project identi®edby Foucault. Whilst social control had initiallyfocused on the concentration and segregationof deviant populations into specially designedinstitutions, like prisons and asylums in thenineteenth century, the community correc-tions movement represents the dispersal ofdiscipline and surveillance deeper into civilsociety. The overall effect is that more peopleare caught in the web of control and that theboundaries between liberty and con®nementhave become so blurred that it is dif®cult toidentify the differences between the prisonand the community.

The concept of transcarceration builds onthese insights to account for the expansion,rather than decline, of prison populations ascommunity sanctions have proliferated. It alsointimates that deviant destinations are not justrestricted to the realm of criminal justice butcan also encompass mental health and socialwelfare systems. For instance, the criminaliza-tion of homelessness and mental illness areexamples of how social policy has beenreplaced by penal regulation in recent years.Yet in order to account for these processes, thedispersal of discipline thesis needs to becomplemented by an analysis that directsattention to the ways in which particulargroups become ideologically vili®ed and thetargets of repression. It is no coincidence thattranscarceration, as a theoretical concept, roseto prominence in the 1980s, when the New


Right came to power and mounted attacks onhealth, education and welfare spending whilstinstigating authoritarian, punitive campaignsagainst populations marginalized from eco-nomic well-being. The important point is thatthe prison remains the focal point andorganizing principle of this project.

Eamonn Carrabine

Associated Concepts: carceral society, commu-nity corrections, decarceration, incarceration,social control

Key ReadingsCohen, S. (1985) Visions of Social Control. Cambridge,

Polity Press.Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of

the Prison. Harmondsworth, Penguin.Lowman, J., Menzies, R. and Palys, T. (eds) (1987)

Transcarceration: Essays in the Sociology of SocialControl. Aldershot, Gower.

TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZEDCRIME

De®nition

Transnational organized crime (TOC) refers tocertain types of criminal activity that trans-gress national boundaries. TOC is usuallyassociated with illicit markets, for example inweapons, drugs, products made from endan-gered species and so forth. Smuggling of licitgoods so as to avoid import duties may alsocome under the concept. This may include thesmuggling of tobacco, alcohol and luxurygoods such as jewellery, coins, art, antiquesand other high-value items, whether stolen orlegally acquired. Fraud may be perpetratedtransnationally, but corruption and whitecollar type crime are seldom presented underthis rubric. Immigration controls create marketopportunities for criminal entrepreneurs; thesex industry and other low paid and low skilloccupations which provide employmentopportunities in the `developed world' forworkers from less developed countries areexploited in this manner. Moral campaignershave also tried to raise the pro®le of atransnational trade in human organs, as wellas children and babies sold for adoption, asissues related to TOC.


Transnational organized crime is often said tobe the product of criminal networks orcriminal organizations that consciouslyemploy national jurisdictional boundaries soas to avoid criminal law enforcement efforts. Itis uncertain to what extent these criminalenterprises arise because of the presumedweakened ability of criminal justice agents toact transnationally, and to what extent theyarise simply because illicit transnational tradeis pro®table in its own right. It seems likelythat pro®tability provides the basis forcriminal markets in the ®rst instance, andthat some criminal entrepreneurs then use thepotential of jurisdictional fragmentation toinsulate themselves from arrest and protecttheir accumulated capital from asset forfeiture(via the process of money laundering).

Evaluation

There is no accurate or independent measureof the extent of TOC. Pronouncements aboutthe `threat' posed by its manifestations arebased on control agency estimates, whichimply the same caveats (with due alteration ofdetail) that are placed on police statisticsrelating to more conventional types of crime.The concept undoubtedly refers to negativefeatures of the global free-market economy,which may in fact be more amenable to controlthrough economic regulation than by criminallaw enforcement. However, there are addi-tional issues which complicate criminologicalunderstanding of TOC. The TOC conceptcame into use after the end of the Cold War.According to some, the `threats to interna-tional security in the 1990s are less direct andapocalyptic than they were during the ColdWar . . . one of the most serious of thesethreats is that posed by transnational orga-nized crime' (Williams and Savona, 1995, p.vii). The control of TOC by police agencies (theFBI in America, the RCMP in Canada, theNCIS in the United Kingdom, Europol inEurope, etc.), has become entwined with thecontrol efforts of Secret Service-type institu-tions (the CIA and the NSA in America, MI5and MI6 in the UK, the DST and the RG inFrance, etc.). The CIA has been implicated indrug and weapons smuggling uncovered as aresult of investigations that followed the Iran±Contra scandal, and in 1985 the French SecretService planted a bomb on the Greenpeaceship Rainbow Warrior, sinking the vessel in

305TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME

Auckland Harbour, causing the death of oneperson. There are also documented cases oftransnational actions by ordinary policeagencies that involve illegalities.

While the TOC concept draws attention tocriminal activity that is dif®cult for traditionalpolice agencies to address, by virtue of theirembeddedness in nation-states (which raisesquestions about extraterritorial law enforce-ment), it also tends to elide the possibility ofstate agents themselves committing criminalacts. TOC discourse has also largely beenframed in such a way that crime perpetratedby multinational corporations (for exampledespoliation of the environment) is left out ofthe picture. Some criminologists argue that`state crimes' and other `crimes of the power-ful' require a degree of organization thatmakes the TOC label an apt one, but theseconcerns have largely been left to one side bylaw enforcement practitioners.

Despite the conceptual dif®culties posed foracademic criminology, transnational orga-nized crime, and the illicit markets associatedwith it, has been placed high on the agenda ofthe United Nations. It is evident that theinternational community will, over the fore-seeable future, continue to build up systemsof transnational police cooperation in responseto it.

James Sheptycki

Associated Concepts: extraterritorial law enfor-cement, governmentality, organized crime,state crime, transnational policing

Key ReadingsBeare, M.E. and Naylor, T. (1999) Major Issues

Relating to Organized Crime within the Context ofEconomic Relationships. York, ON, NathansonCentre for the Study of Organized Crime andCorruption, presented to the Law Commission ofCanada.

Block, A. (1994) Space, Time and Organized Crime, 2ndedn. New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction.

Naylor, T. (1999) Patriots and Pro®teers: On EconomicWarfare, Embargo Busting and State-SponsoredCrime. Toronto, University of Toronto Press.

Pearce, F. and Woodiwiss, M. (1993) Global CrimeConnections; Dynamics and Control. London, Mac-millan.

Williams, P. and Savona, E.U. (1995) `The UnitedNations and transnational organized crime',Transnational Organized Crime Special Issue, 1 (3),(London, Frank Cass).

TRANSNATIONAL POLICING

De®nition

Policing activity involving systems of coopera-tion that cross national boundaries. Suchactivity need not be restricted to law enforce-ment, but may be extended to take in thewhole range of police functions includingcrime prevention activity, social service provi-sion, training, risk assessment and manage-ment, and state security.


Policing is a modern institution which grewup during the period of state-building, at ®rstin Europe and then, through the processes ofcolonialism, elsewhere. As such, policing is anexpression of sovereignty understood as agovernmental activity intended to secure thepeace, prosperity and good order of territo-rially bounded states. Since policing has beenconceived of as an activity that is geographi-cally circumscribed, dif®culties arise whensuch action extends across national borders.Transnationalization of policing is profoundlyeffected by the doctrine of sovereignty, whichsuggests that jurisdiction for criminal lawenforcement is strictly territorial. Transna-tional policing therefore involves and requiresreciprocal arrangements for the exchange ofcriminal intelligence, police expertise, evi-dence and so on so that jurisdictionalboundaries are not an impediment to thepolicing function. Jurisdictional fragmentationcharacterizes the legal landscape for transna-tional policing and concomitant worries aboutjurisdiction shopping raise questions about`due process' constraints on transnationalpolicing activity.

Interpol is the most famous instance ofinstitutionalized reciprocity between policeorganizations across national boundaries. TheInterpol system provides a channel of com-munication between police forces, but strictlyspeaking it is not òperational': the `man fromInterpol' never arrested anyone. Interpol'sprimary role is the exchange of messagesbetween police forces and judicial authoritiesof its member countries. This is facilitated bythe system of `coloured notices': red noticesare in effect international arrest warrants, bluenotices are requests for information on aspeci®c individual, green notices containinformation on suspected criminals intendedfor circulation, yellow notices contain details


of missing persons, and black notices concernthe ®nding of unidenti®ed bodies. Addition-ally, there is circulation of information aboutstolen goods and noti®cations regarding themodus operandi of criminals and criminalgroups. Interpol has developed databanksrelating to drugs importation and manufac-ture and has developed systems of crimeanalysis to mine this data, which signal thepriorities for international law enforcement.The organization also holds conferences on arange of matters such as counterfeiting, fraud,drug smuggling and money laundering. It isthus through the circulation of information,and by shaping the interpretation of thatinformation, that Interpol in¯uences thenature of transnational policing.

At ®rst sight it seems that this organizationwould be the obvious choice to develop as theinstitution for coordinating transnational poli-cing in Europe as well as more globally. Itprovides an established international infra-structure and communication network andhas an accumulation of relevant expertise. Yetit has been displaced as the transnationalpolicing institution in Europe by the develop-ment of Europol. One reason for this is theuncertainties caused by the unusual legalposition of the organization. Importantly,Interpol was not established by any interna-tional treaty but rather was developed bypolice agencies themselves. At present there isno method of making Interpol democraticallyaccountable, the organization publishes no®nancial records (despite, ultimately, beingfunded by taxpayers' money), and there isonly limited provision in respect of dataprotection (despite the organization's accu-mulation of large amounts of data). There arealso lingering doubts about the organization'sef®ciency and concerns about its lack ofsecurity.

The idea of Europol was ®rst put forwardby Helmut Kohl in 1991. Then Chancellor ofWest Germany, Kohl envisaged an agencyakin to the Federal Bureau of Investigation inthe USA. However, while the FBI could befostered in the context of the US federalsystem (in order to overcome the logisticalproblems of policing inter-state crimes), in theEuropean context the lack of harmonybetween national criminal justice systemsand the concurrent effects of the doctrine ofsovereignty have, thus far, limited the devel-opment of the new institution. The conse-quence is that Europol has evolved to beprimarily concerned with the acquisition,analysis and dissemination of criminal intelli-gence pertaining to transnational crimes. The

agency was ®rst put under way in January1994, with a brief to support member states ofthe European Union in drug-related lawenforcement, including money laundering. InJuly 1999 Europol took up its activities underthe Europol Convention with speci®c compe-tence over a range of criminal activities. Theseinclude: illegal immigration and `humansmuggling' ± especial mention is made ofchild pornography and the sex industry in thisregard ± traf®cking in stolen vehicles andnuclear materials, the counterfeiting of cur-rency ± especially the new Euro ± moneylaundering and terrorism. Like Interpol,Europol of®cers have no powers of arrest,but instead depend on domestic police actingwithin their respective national jurisdictions toundertake this aspect of police operations. Thedifference between Europol and Interpol is notso much in the way that the agencies areorganized (both are essentially institutionsthat process knowledge about criminals andcriminal activity), but rather in their legalconstitution. Europol has recognition underthe Treaty of European Union. Further, underthe terms of the Europol Convention, theCouncil of Ministers is accorded executive, butnot legislative, authority while two otherinstitutions, the European Commission andthe European Parliament, are also accordedformal, although limited, oversight. Whilemechanisms of accountability for Europolcan be characterized as meagre (Anderson etal., 1995, p. 253), there is not the degree ofambiguity that surrounds Interpol.

The role of the `liaison of®cer', an of®cerseconded to another force in something akin toa `diplomatic capacity', has been developedinternationally since the 1970s. These of®cersalso facilitate the smooth transnational ¯ow ofpolice information, but, in comparison withthe Europol and Interpol frameworks, thisinformation exchange is much less formal and,hence, it is much less visible. The developmentof training schools and the exporting ofpolicing expertise should also be considereda transnational activity, but very little sys-tematic attention has been given to theseprogrammes to date. Increasing attention isbeing paid to the transnational activities ofprivate security providers.

Evaluation

Overall, outside of academic circles debatesabout the accountability of transnationalpolicing enterprises have been muted. Whileacademic criminology has maintained an

307TRANSNATIONAL POLICING

interest in comparative police systems formany years, the study of transnational policeactivity is quite new. As such, evaluationstudies have not yet produced a measure ofef®cacy or effectiveness and the doubts thathave been raised about the accountability ofthe transnational police enterprise have yet tobe comprehensively articulated.

James Sheptycki

Associated Concepts: extraterritorial law enfor-cement, transnational organized crime

Key ReadingsAnderson, M., de Boer, M., Cullen, P., Gilmore,

W.C., Raab, C. and Walker, N. (1995) Policing theEuropean Union. Oxford, The Clarendon Press.

Sheptycki, J.W.E. (1995) `Transnational policing andthe makings of a postmodern state', British Journalof Criminology, 35 (4), pp. 613±35.

Sheptycki, J.W.E. (1997) `Transnationalism, crimecontrol and the European state system: a reviewof the scholarly literature', International CriminalJustice Review, 7, pp. 130±40.

Sheptycki, J.W.E. (1998) `The global cops cometh',British Journal of Sociology, 49 (1), pp. 57±74.

Sheptycki, J.W.E. (1998) `Policing, postmodernismand transnationalization', British Journal of Crimi-nology, 38 (3), pp. 485±503.

TREATMENT MODEL

See Rehabilitation

TRIANGULATION

De®nition

The use of different methods of research,sources of data or types of data to address thesame research question.


The term triangulation was ®rst propoundedin the context of social research by Campbelland Fiske in 1959 but became much morewidely known after the publication in 1966 ofUnobtrusive Measures: Non-reactive Research inthe Social Sciences by Eugene Webb and others.The concept emanates from an analogy with

navigation and with surveying, whereby one`®xes' a position in relation to two or morelandmarks or objects. The rationale is that theposition will be more accurate and precisethan it would be if located in relation to onlyone landmark or object. When transferred tothe context of social research, the argument isthat if the same conclusions can be reached byusing different methods of research there canbe a stronger belief in the validity of theseconclusions than if they were founded on theuse of only one method. There is, therefore, astrong link between triangulation and validity,which is the extent to which conclusions arebelieved to be plausible and credible. At theheart of this argument is the viewpoint thatdifferent methods of research have differentstrengths and weaknesses and that triangula-tion ± in theory at least ± can serve to `trade-off' the weaknesses of one method against thestrengths of another. In this way the conver-gence of methods or of data produces `value-added' in terms of validity.

There is a much less bold and precise claimfor triangulation, namely that the use ofdifferent methods can assist in examiningdifferent aspects or dimensions of the sameproblem. For example, victim surveys whichuse structured questionnaires are able tomeasure the extent of victimization in acommunity but they would need to besupplemented with in-depth semi-structuredinterviews with individuals (such as narrativeinterviews) in order to gain some appreciativeunderstanding of the experience of victimiza-tion for those individuals. Similarly, quasi-experimental methods can be used to assessthe ef®ciency of criminal justice policies butwould need to be combined with qualitativemethods such as observation or interviews tounderstand the social processes by whichpolicies do or do not work.

It is common to distinguish different typesof triangulation. Data triangulation refers tothe collection of different types of data on thesame topic, for example statistical indicators offear of crime complemented with appreciative,qualitative accounts collected from indivi-duals. These different types of data may becollected at different phases in the ®eldwork,for instance, qualitative data collected in focusgroups or by in-depth interviews may be usedto uncover the dimensions of the concept `fearof crime' (such as psychological dimensionsand social dimensions or fear of differenttypes of crime such as personal crimes andproperty crimes). This is known as the processof elaborating a concept into dimensions. Suchqualitative work can act as a precursor to the


development of formal questions structuredaround such dimensions which, when com-bined together, produce a statistical scale orindex of `fear of crime'.

Investigator triangulation refers to thecollection of data by more than one researcher.This is especially useful in ethnographicstudies of institutions, communities or socialgroupings which are fragmented and whereentry into one part of the social ®eld precludesentry to another (for example in prisonresearch, which requires participation in bothinmate and prison of®cer subcultures).

Method triangulation involves the collectionof data by different methods so as to counter-balance the different threats to validity whicheach entails. For example, of®cial statistics oncrimes recorded by the police play animportant part in criminological research.They are detailed, readily available and thereare no ®eldwork costs to collect them.However, other de®ciencies are well known.In order to counteract some of these de®cien-cies, especially those relating to under-report-ing, victim surveys are used. A sample of thegeneral population is selected and individualsare asked whether they have recently been avictim of crime and whether they reported thecrime to the police. The results of such surveysgive some measure of the extent of unreportedcrime (and of crimes of different kinds).

Evaluation

The previous example illustrates one way inwhich a convergence of methods can make acontribution to the validity of measurements

of crime. However, not all combinations ofmethods work in this way. Different methodsof research, for example qualitative ethno-graphic methods in contrast to highly statis-tical social surveys, are often founded ondifferent assumptions about the nature of thesocial world and the nature of explanation. Insuch cases it is not possible to think in terms ofcontrasting methods being combined in asimple additive way which provides `value-added' in terms of validity.

The notion of triangulation is very plausiblein principle but in practice it is necessary to beexplicit about the ways in which different dataand methods can support each other, espe-cially in relation to improvements in validity.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: appreciative criminology,self-reports, structured interviews, victimsurveys

Key ReadingsCampbell, D.T. and Fiske, D.W. (1959) `Convergent

and discriminant validation by the multitrait-multimethod matrix', Psychological Bulletin, 56,pp. 81±105.

Denzin, N. (1970) The Research Act. London, Butter-worths.

Jupp, V.R., Davies, P. and Francis, P. (2000) DoingCriminological Research. London, Sage.

Webb, E.J., Campbell, D.T., Schwarz, R.D. andSechrest, L. (1966) Unobtrusive Measures: Non-Reactive Research in the Social Sciences. Chicago,Rand McNally.

309TRIANGULATION

U

UNDERCLASS

De®nition

In its contemporary guise, underclass refersnot to the especially poor but to the cluster ofpathological and destabilizing cultural atti-tudes and lack of moral values associated witha particular section of the poor ± the `feckless',`the undeserving', `the disreputable', `thedepraved' and `the criminal'.


The idea of an ùnderclass' has been around invarious popular discursive forms, for exam-ple, the dangerous classes, since the lateeighteenth century. However, during the1980s and 1990s in the USA and UK the termwas `rediscovered' and popularized by neo-conservative commentators, such as CharlesMurray. His central argument is that postwarliberal and social democratic social andcriminal justice policies have produced agrowing population of work-age, healthypeople who inhabit a `different world' todecent, respectable citizens. The pathologicalcore values and attitudes of this emergentunderclass are contaminating not only theirown children but spreading through neigh-bourhoods. For Murray the three intercon-nected de®ning features of the underclass areillegitimacy, criminality and refusal to partici-pate in the formal labour market. The massiveincrease in illegitimacy, which is concentratedin the poorest neighbourhoods, is having adevastating impact on child-rearing practicesand social controls, especially on malechildren. Crime is also disproportionately

located in underclass neighbourhoodsbecause, at a very early age, young males arebeing socialized to view criminal activity as anormal activity. The presence of high levels ofcriminal victimization also has a demoralizingimpact on these neighbourhoods. Equallyalarming, as far as Murray is concerned, isthe drop out in underclass neighbourhoods ofa large number of young males from thelabour market. For Murray, young males areèssentially barbarians' who need the disci-plines and routines associated with the workethic to make the transition to responsibleadulthood. In the absence of this they ®ndother ways of proving their masculinity,impressing young women and survivingeconomically, for example, violence andcriminality. These three de®ning featuresproduce pathological neighbourhoods inwhich children are encultured into an anti-social set of norms and have young singlemothers and violence obsessed young malesas their role models. In a subsequent elabora-tion of his thesis, Murray re-named theunderclass `the new rabble', arguing that wecould identify them through high levels ofillegitimacy, child neglect and abuse, drug useand crime and welfare fraud.

In terms of solutions to this predicament,Murray argues that a radical departure fromthe status quo is needed if we are to reversethe drift into the ùnderclassization' ofsigni®cant sections of the lower class. Notsurprisingly, he blames postwar welfarepolicies for creating and perpetuating thisunderclass and advocates policy initiativesthat change incentives. Policy needs todistinguish between respectable and disrepu-table and he supports a punitive approach tosingle mothers, draconian cuts in welfaresupport and the stigmatization of illegitimacy.Murray has also allied himself with rightrealist prison-centred law and order policies to

restore lawfulness and take criminal youngmales off the streets. As far as he is concerned,crime levels are low when criminals realizethat crime does not pay.

Evaluation

Murray has been heavily criticized for indivi-dualizing and racializing the problem ofpoverty, pathologizing the poor, absolvingthe state of welfare responsibilities anddemonizing young single mothers. However,despite the intensity of the criticism, it isimportant to note that many of his core ideashave found `softer' moral expression in`workfare' policies in the USA and `socialexclusion' policies in the UK. They alsocontinue to echo in the UK in New Labour'shighly moralistic `tough on crime' discourseson anti-social behaviour, incivility and publicdisorder.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: `broken windows', demo-nization, neo-conservative criminology, racia-lization, social exclusion

Key ReadingsLevitas, R. (1998) The Inclusive Society? Social

Exclusion and New Labour. London, Macmillan.Murray, C. (1989) Ùnderclass; a disaster in the

making', Sunday Times, 26 November, pp. 26±45.Murray, C. (1994) Ùnderclass: the crisis deepens',

Sunday Times, 22 May, pp. 10±11.Murray, C. (ed.) (1997) Does Prison Work? London,

Institute of Economic Affairs.Murray, C. (2000) The British underclass', Sunday

Times, 13 February, News Review section, pp. 1±2.Young, J. (1999) The Exclusive Society. London, Sage.

UTILITARIANISM

See Classicism; Deterrence; Rational choice

311UTILITARIANISM

V

VICTIM SURVEYS

De®nition

In differing ways, surveys of victims are con-cerned with crime measurement and reasonsfor the under-reporting of crime; the correlatesof victimization; the risk of victimization; thefear of crime and its relationship to theprobability of victimization; the experience ofcrime from the viewpoint of victims; and thetreatment of victims in the criminal justicesystem.


In part, victim surveys developed as a result ofrecognized de®ciencies of of®cial crime statis-tics as valid measures of the extent of crime insociety. For example, crimes recorded by thepolice rely to a great extent on members of thepublic reporting such crimes. There areseveral reasons for not reporting crime, forexample the sensitivity of the criminal act,triviality of offence or distrust of the police.Victim surveys collect data on the occurrenceof criminal acts irrespective of whether suchacts have been reported to the police and,thereby, gain some measure of the extent ofthe `dark ®gure' of unreported crime. Afurther impetus came from a direct concernfor the victim within criminology and alsowithin criminal justice policy. This coincidedwith the formation of victim support schemesand the publication of victims' charters.

Four broad patterns in victim surveys arediscernible. These are local cross-sectionalsample surveys; àppreciative' surveys;national trend sample surveys; and cross-national surveys. In local cross-sectionalstudies a representative sample of the

population of a particular area or district isselected and sample members are asked ifthey have been the victim of a crime within aspeci®ed period of time and also whetherthey reported such crimes to the police.Sometimes they are asked about their experi-ences of, and relationships with the police inthat particular area. In the United Kingdomsuch surveys are exempli®ed by researchassociated with left realist criminology(which, in general terms, is concerned withfacing up to the reality of crime from a socialdemocratic standpoint). Realist surveys payparticular attention to the experiences ofvulnerable groups within a particular locality.There is the opportunity for such cross-sectional surveys to be repeated, as with the®rst and the second Islington Crime Survey inLondon, thereby facilitating some comparisonover time (see, for example, Crawford et al.,1990; Jones et al., 1986).

Typically, appreciative studies are lessconcerned with seeking precision in estimatesof victimization in the community and morewith the qualitative descriptions of theexperience of crime from the victim's pointof view. They may also seek to examinevictims' experiences of being processed withinthe criminal justice system, for example by thepolice and by courts. Research design istypically based on purposive rather thanrandom sampling. Appreciative victim studiesare likely to be associated with victim supportgroups and feminist approaches within crimi-nology (especially in relation to women asvictims of sexual crimes). In some cases suchstudies are closely related to social andpolitical action to reduce victimization ofvulnerable groups and to improve the treat-ment of victims in the criminal justice system.

Large-scale national trend victim surveyswere given impetus by their use in the UnitedStates in the 1960s, speci®cally in relation to

President Johnson's war against crime asexpressed in the Commission on Law Enforce-ment and Administration of Justice, estab-lished in 1965. There was recognition of theneed to supplement of®cial crime statisticswith data collected at ®rst hand from victims.After a number of pilot studies, the NationalCrime Survey was carried out in 1972. Itcomprised three parts: commercial surveys,city surveys and a large-scale National CrimePanel survey. This last is the only remainingpart of the US National Crime Survey.

In the UK national trend studies are typi®edby the British Crime Survey (BCS), sponsoredby the Home Of®ce. The BCS is an example ofwhat is known as administrative criminologybecause of its close association with govern-ment and with of®cial policy-making. The ®rstsurvey was conducted in 1982 and subsequentsurveys have been carried out at regularintervals. Different independent samples areselected at each sweep and therefore a panelelement is missing. For example, in 1994 asample for England and Wales of 15,000 adultsover 16 years of age was chosen. Respondentswere interviewed and asked about theirexperience of crimes committed against themas individuals and against their householdsince the beginning of the previous year(Mayhew et al., 1994). The BCS facilitates anexamination of trends in the extent of crime,the risk of crime and the fear of crime(Mayhew and Hough, 1991). This examinationis for the country as a whole or for sub-categories and local areas. The lack of a panelelement does not permit such analysis forparticular individuals. A major ¯aw with theBCS is that it is believed that it does notcapture suf®ciently the extent of sensitivecrimes, especially sexual crimes and domesticviolence. A Computer Assisted PersonalInterviewing (CAPI) system of self-completionwas introduced in 1998 to alleviate this.

A fourth type of study is concerned withcross-national comparisons of rates of victimi-zation. For example, the International CrimeSurvey (ICS) is a large-scale survey ofexperiences of crime in 17 countries. Astandardized interview schedule, translatedinto different languages, is administered torespondents by telephone using a method ofrandom dialling of private phone numbers(van Dijk et al., 1990). The survey provides avaluable source of data in victimizationamong different groups and areas withincountries and between countries. It does not,however, consider the experiences of victimsin relation to the economic and socialconditions of each country nor to the varying

institutional arrangements for dealing withcrime and with victims in particular.

Evaluation

Victim surveys have played an important rolein criminology and in policy-making espe-cially, in providing better estimates of theextent of crime than those provided by of®cialcriminal statistics and by giving insights intovictims' experiences of crime and of thecriminal justice system. However, they dohave de®ciencies, for example in not beingable to provide estimates of `victimless' crimessuch as drug-taking, in not addressing crimesaffecting large populations, such as masspollution, and in not providing measures ofcrimes, for example fraud, of which indivi-duals are not aware.

Victor Jupp

Associated Concepts: appreciative criminology,cross-sectional design, hidden crime, leftrealism, of®cial criminal statistics, self-reports,victimology

Key ReadingsCrawford, A., Jones, T., Woodhouse, T. and Young,

J. (1990) Second Islington Crime Survey. London,Centre for Criminology, Middlesex Polytechnic.

van Dijk, J.J.M., Mayhew, P. and Killias, M. (1990)Experiences of Crime Across the World: Key Findingsof the 1989 International Crime Survey. Deventer,Gower.

Jones, J., Maclean, B. and Young, J. (1986) TheIslington Crime Survey. Aldershot, Gower.

Mayhew, P. and Hough, M. (1991) `The BritishCrime Survey: the ®rst ten years', in G. Kaiser, H.Kury, and H.-J. Albrecht (eds), Victims andCriminal Justice. Freiburg, Max-Planck Institutefor Foreign and Penal Law.

Mayhew, P., Mirrlees-Black, C. and Aye Maung, N.(1994) Trends in Crime: Findings from the 1994British Crime Survey. Home Of®ce Research andStatistics Department, Research Findings No. 14.London, HMSO.

O'Brien, R. (1985) Crime and Victimization Data.London, Sage.

VICTIMIZATION

See Victimology; Repeat victimization; Victimsurveys; Victimless crime; Violence

313VICTIMIZATION

VICTIMLESS CRIME

De®nition

A victimless crime is a form of behaviour thatis illegal but is consensual in nature and lacksa complaining participant.


In conventional forms of crime it is possiblefor the police and courts to establish the harmthat has been done and the respective status,identity and roles of perpetrator, victim andcomplainant. However, victimless crimes or`crimes without victims' or `public moralitycrimes' normally involve participants in illegalbut consensual activities. Because no criminalvictimization is occurring the participantshave no reason to complain to the police.Classic victimless crimes include the use ofillegal drugs, gambling, homosexuality andprostitution. The notion that these activitiesare victimless is used to further campaigns forlegalization and decriminalization.

This concept has been criticized on thegrounds that it works with simplistic notionsof `consensus', `harm' and `victimization'.Many feminist criminologists, for example,argue that prostitution is not a victimlesscrime for the majority of the women involved.They are forced to engage in prostitutionbecause of economic circumstances or becauseof the coercion of individual men or criminalgangs. The women run the risk of physicaland sexual violence at the hands of clients andare open to blackmail by police of®cers. Thereis also the distinct possibility that if they doreport a crime to the police they will not betaken seriously. Society is also affected by thecrime because it reinforces stereotypicalrepresentations of women. Similar criticismshave also been made of those who argue thatillegal drug-taking is a victimless crime. Alldrugs are addictive and drug addiction affectsthe health of individuals and their families. Ata macro level, the production of illicit drugsdiverts scarce resources from more productiveactivities and fuels organized criminal activity.Thus, many criminologists would argue thatcloser inspection indicates that there is nosuch thing as a victimless crime and that thevery use of the term constitutes a process ofdenial and revictimization.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: decriminalization, denial,tolerance, victimology

Key ReadingsGus®eld, J. (1986) Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics

and the American Temperance Movement, 2nd edn.Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press.

Schur, E.M. (1965) Crimes Without Victims: DeviantBehavior and Public Policy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ,Prentice±Hall.

Schur, E.M. and Bedau, H.A. (1974) VictimlessCrimes: Two Sides of a Controversy. EnglewoodCliffs, NJ, Prentice±Hall.

VICTIMOLOGY

De®nition

There is some dispute as to who ®rst coinedthe term `victimology' but what is not indispute is that its usage ®rst appeared in thelate 1940s. As a term it was originally used todesignate an area of study concerned toaddress the relationship between the victimand the offender, though since the late 1970s ithas been used to delineate a more generalconcern with the victim of crime. Oftenreferred to as a sub-discipline of criminology,it has paralleled the development of its parentdiscipline in demonstrating an early concernwith victim typologies and the responsibilityof the victim for the creation of a criminalevent to a more recent focus on the structuraldimensions of criminal victimization.


There are different theoretical and conceptualstrands within the sub-discipline of victimol-ogy re¯ecting different de®nitions of whoconstitutes the victim of crime (from thevictim of street crime to the victim of statecrime). Understanding the nature and impactof criminal victimization has been one of thekey concerns of victimology. This concern hasmanifested itself in different ways. Earlyvictimologists endeavoured to understandvictimization through the construction of`victim typologies', that is, by looking for away to identify different types of victims. Forexample, von Hentig (1948) constructed atypology based on an understanding of`victim proneness', that is, some people weremore prone to victimization than others;whilst Mendelsohn's (1956) typology was


more concerned with `victim culpability', thatis, the extent to which the victim could be heldresponsible for the events that had occurred.This latter concept has been particularlyin¯uential in articulating one way of under-standing the process of victimization: thenotion of victim precipitation. The use of thisconcept as a way of explaining cases of rapeled those associated with the feminist move-ment to see victimology as shorthand forvictim blaming.

Later victimologists looked to less indivi-dual and more structural understandings ofthe process of victimization by understandingthe impact of patterns of lifestyle on patternsof criminal victimization ± the lifestyleexposure model (Hindelang et al., 1978). Thisconcept has underpinned much of the thinkingassociated with, and has contributed to thedevelopment of, the criminal victimizationsurvey. Hence the inclusion of questionsconcerning routine patterns of behavioursuch as use of public transport or drinkinghabits. This understanding of victimization,however, whilst structural in its approach,remained focused on understanding patternsof criminal victimization largely associatedwith crime as it is conventionally understood,that is, street crime and household crime. Inorder to incorporate an understanding of otherforms of victimization, for example, that whichoccurs behind closed doors (child abuse,domestic violence), Mawby and Walklate(1994) articulate a view of victimization asstructural powerlessness. This view of victi-mization recognizes that the impact of criminalvictimization is mediated and rendered morecomplex by factors such as age, sex and race.

Evaluation

Whilst it can be seen that, at an analytical level,victimization can be understood as an indivi-dual or a collective attribute of powerlessness,experientially there are different ways inwhich individuals might respond to suchpowerlessness. The uneasy relationship thatexists between victimology and feminismarticulates some of the tensions betweenanalysis and experience. Feminism's prefer-ence for the term survivor rather than victim isnot just a matter of semantics; though it is thecase that the genealogy of the term victimconnotes the sacri®ciant, who was more oftenthan not female. Indeed when the word is itselfgendered, as in French, it is denoted as female.Feminists, recognizing the power of linguistics,object to the term victim because of its

emphasis on passivity and powerlessness andprefer instead to focus on ways in whichwomen actively resist the oppression of theirpersonal and structural locations. However,whilst these terms are presented as opposi-tional, in experiential terms such oppositionsare much more dif®cult to identify. It ispossible to think in terms of both active andpassive victims and active and passive survi-vors in relation to experience. This is more thanan argument of semantics. Understandingvictimization as a process in which individualsexpress different feelings at different pointsand make choices about what to do or not to doas a consequence, is as important as under-standing victimization as a structural location.Both differently inform policy responses andthe appropriateness of support services.

Sandra Walklate

Associated Concepts: family crime, fear of crime,left realism, repeat victimization, victimsurveys, victimless crime, violence

Key ReadingsDavies, P., Francis, P. and Jupp, V. (2000) Victimiza-

tion: Theory, Research and Policy. London, Macmil-lan.

Hentig, H. von (1948) The Criminal and his Victim.New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.

Hindelang, M.J., Gottfredson, M.R. and Garofalo, J.(1978) Victims of Personal Crime: An EmpiricalFoundation for a Theory of Personal Victimization.Cambridge, MA, Ballinger.

Karmen, A. (1990) Crime Victims: An Introduction toVictimology. Paci®c Grove, CA, Brooks Cole.

Mawby, R. and Walklate, S. (1994) Critical Victimol-ogy. London, Sage.

Mendelsohn, B. (1956) Ùne nouvelle brouche de lascience bio-psycho-sociale: victimologie', RevueInternationale de Criminologie et de police technique.pp. 10±31.

VIGILANTISM

See Informal justice

VIOLENCE

De®nition

Our thinking about what constitutes `violence'is distorted by the traditional way violence is

315

treated as a phenomenon in law and incriminology. Framed by criminal statute,legal de®nitions of violence emphasize theoutcome ± how badly the person was hurt ±injury, proof of identity of the particularassailant and so forth ± and the intention, mensrea of the violent act. Its impact and themotivation of the offender are in¯uential inde®ning its seriousness. When a court of lawconsiders a case of criminal assault, most of usassume that these are the most serious formsof violence. However, crime surveys showquite clearly that most violence is kept awayfrom the purview of the criminal justicesystem. Research shows that individualslargely manage the violence of others withoutthe aid of so-called expert systems, such as thecriminal justice system. Those who are itsvictims are most likely to seek advice fromfamily and friends ®rst when searching forways of minimizing the impact of violence.Feminist researchers, and those studying otherforms of hatred such as racist or sexualizedhatreds, also consistently demonstrate thatmany very serious acts of violence fail to bereported to the police.


Violence is `rarely' random or without apurposeful target (Stanko, 1998). Violencetypically (although not exclusively) takesplace between those who are familiar witheach other. Harris and Grace's (1999) report onrape found that so-called stranger rapes onlyconstituted 12 per cent of rape complaints inthe 1990s, as opposed to 30 per cent in 1985.Whether the very low conviction rate (only 6per cent in the 1990s) for rape in the criminaljustice system in England and Wales is linkedto judges' and juries' dif®culty in under-standing sexual violence between those whoare known to each other is dif®cult to say.However, this study leads one to ask howfamiliarity and sexual violence might posedif®culties to criminal justice decision-makerswho might link rape to the actions of strangers.Thus, even if violent acts are reported to thepolice, considerations other than the serious-ness of the act may also in¯uence whether lawmediates an act of violence.

The complexities of the way violence dove-tails with social relations continue to show usthat the criminal law is a blunt instrumentwhen it comes to intervening into violence andthreat. In order to think about minimizing itsimpact, violence must ®rst be understood aspart of the wider social foundations of

everyday life. Its use has meaning to victimsand to offenders in terms of people'sgrounded social knowledge about the waythe social world `works' to maintain personaland institutional power. This understanding isused by those who threaten and hurt ± eitheras individuals acting alone, on behalf of acollective group or on behalf of the state.Violence and its threat can be mobilized onbehalf of institutions or the state to keepparticular people ìn line'. The brutality of apolice of®cer or a prison of®cer, for instance,has additional impact on people's livesbecause the individual meting out violence isauthorized to do so. Even if unauthorized, it isup to the victim of the violence to demonstratethat such brutality was òutside' the of®cialremit of the person who committed the act onbehalf of the state. Victims of violence alsounderstand that its use is woven into the basicfabric of social relations. Depending on thecircumstances (or lack) of intervention,together with the meanings individuals giveto such threats and acts, violence may betreated as acceptable, unacceptable, lawful orunlawful.

Perhaps a more adequate description ofviolence would include the following. Itinvolves any form of behaviour by an indi-vidual that intentionally threatens or doescause physical, sexual or psychological harmto others or to her/himself. It is not aphenomenon framed only through/by crim-inal statute. It is framed through and by theperceptions of and actions of those directlyinvolved as well (Cretney and Davis, 1995). Itis then re-framed through and by institution-ally based decision-makers, witnesses andcommentators (Harris and Grace, 1999;Hoyle, 1999; Stanko, 1985). How authoritiesand individuals label acts as violence andassess its impact depends on the situationalcontexts within which violence occurs. Theinstitutional circumstances, which intersectboth, affect this process of labelling acts àsviolence'. How the parties involved andinstitutional decision-makers make judge-ments about violence has consequences. AsStanko (1990) argued, many of our experiencesof threat and physical harm are consideredordinary and routine parts of everyday life.

The way in which people de®ne violenceand institutional responses to it remainshighly contested ground. Work on bullying,sexual harassment, racist abuse and so forthspeci®es a whole range of interactions andactions, implicit and explicit verbal abuse thatpeople interpret as threatening and hurtful.The wide range of types of threatening


behaviour may include name calling, stalking,vandalism and other forms of intrusivebehaviour that make people feel uncomforta-ble and unsafe, that is, feeling under intimida-tion of violence. Such a continuum of harm notonly contains elements of physical, sexual andpsychological damage. People's wider socialcontexts exacerbate or minimize the psycho-logical and social consequences of violence.Such differential damage is evidence thatindividual violent behaviour has varyingimpacts on people. People's vulnerability toviolence and its effects are rooted in indivi-dual and social resources. For instance, sexualabuse and threat, by all research ®ndings,impact women's lives more than men's lives.The consistent evidence of higher levels ofsexual harassment, abuse and threat womenexperience, feminists argue, underpin gen-dered discrimination. Similarly, higher levelsof racist abuse reported by minority groupsdemonstrate the way in which inequalitiesfounded in the hierarchies of `raced' socialprivilege impinge on many people's everydaylives. Such abuse based on and in racializedknowledge of the way threats intimidatedifferent people who have differential socialcapital (so to speak), holds a unique but oftenhidden place in the way people understandtheir social worlds. This is one way to linkviolence to other structures of social exclusion.One interesting observation from research onviolence is that actual physical harm is notnecessary to demand and to receive compli-ance from people. Threats `work' becausepeople do not wish to experience physicalharm. Debate about how social differences aremaintained through violence and intimidationcan be found in the scholarly discussions ofgender, race, age, religious and ethnic socialexclusion, poverty and social assistance,employment discrimination, homelessnessand so forth. These are often linked to thenaming of violence and fear of violence as aserious problem for many categories of peoplesimply because of who they are.

In this way, debates about forms of violenceoften challenge institutions to recognize theirrole in the perpetuation of violence and how itcreates and maintains social disadvantagein contemporary society. To a large extent,violence as a phenomenon has been mademore visible through these challenges to insti-tutional practices. For example, the debateabout the high levels of violence met byHealth Service staff is as much about thepotential for experiencing physical harm as itis about being expected to work underconditions that are dangerous. In a similar

vein, the debate about bullying at school ispresented as a problem of the workingconditions for teaching staff as well as forthe education of students. Alongside thisimpediment to learning that bullying posesare the detrimental consequences of suchintimidation to the health and developmentof children. But what is important here is howmany forms of violence that were once treatedas part and parcel of everyday life are nowelevated to social problems. The harassment ofwomen, for instance, was considered a routinepart of being female. However, when it wasproblematized as a condition of being female,the consequences of such harassment forwomen's feelings of safety become theevidence of gender discrimination.

Evaluation

What continues to hamper our understandingabout violence is the persistence of a frame-work that has long outlived its usefulness, butnot its popularity. Violent offenders are stillimagined as people òut-of-control', psycholo-gically disturbed, distant and different fromthe rest of us law-abiding folk. An emphasis isplaced on people's psychological motivationfor committing acts of violence. The result oflooking to biology or psychology to explainany violent act overlooks many commonfeatures of violence. Because most violentacts are committed by men against other men,such violence is explained as part of men'snature. When violence occurs between womenand men, this violence is assumed to ¯owfrom men's right to control women. And whenwomen commit violence, they are oftentreated as if they have stepped beyond therespectable boundaries of non-violent femi-ninity. The common explanations aboutviolence dominate popular culture andmedia representation.

The use of violence, how victims, offendersand institutions de®ne it, and its publicimagery show the complex set of socialrelations embedded in hierarchies of thedistribution of power in society. Its impact isnot only limited to the personal consequencesfor individuals linked to their own health andwell-being. Its impacts are ®rmly rooted insocial structures and social privileges ofindividuals and social groups. Those whoassess the impact of violence on behalf ofinstitutions and in particular on behalf of thecriminal justice apparatus display their knowl-edge of such social relations when decidingwhen, how and why intervening in violence is

317

important for the health and well-being of thenation as a whole.

Elizabeth Stanko

Associated Concepts: crime, family crime, hatecrime, hegemonic masculinity, masculinities,personal safety, social harm, victimization

Key ReadingsCretney, A. and Davis, G. (1995) Criminalizing

Assault. London, Routledge.Harris, J. and Grace, S. (1999) A Question of Evidence:

Investigating and Prosecuting Rape in the 1990s.Home Of®ce Research Study No. 196. London,HMSO.

Hoyle, C. (1999) Negotiating Domestic Violence.Oxford, The Clarendon Press.

Stanko, E.A. (1985) Intimate Intrusions. London,Routledge.

Stanko, E.A. (1990) Everyday Violence. London,Pandora.

Stanko, E.A. (1998) Taking Stock: What Do We Knowabout Violence in the UK? ESRC Violence ResearchProgramme, Royal Holloway, University ofLondon, Egham, Surrey, TW20 OEX.


W

WAR CRIMES

De®nition

War crimes are acts that retain their essentialcriminal nature even though they are com-mitted by individuals in time of war and/orunder of®cial military orders.


By the outbreak of the First World War, Euro-pean nation-states had accepted that certainbreaches of the laws of war were crimes. TheInternational Military Tribunal at Nuremberg(1945±6) opted for a criminal justice, ratherthan political or military, approach to producethe basic de®nition of what constituted a warcrime. This, according to the Tribunal, com-prised: the murder, ill-treatment or torture, ordeportation to slave labour or for any otherpurpose, of civilians of or in occupied territory;the murder, ill-treatment or torture of prisonersof war; the killing of hostages; the plunder ofproperty; the wanton destruction of humansettlements; and devastation not warranted bymilitary necessity. Members of the armedforces and civilians who violate these laws areguilty of committing war crimes and can beindividually judged and, where appropriate,punished by international or national courtsand military tribunals. This is the case whetheror not such war crimes have been ordered by apolitical leader or by commanding of®cers.Individuals accused of war crimes cannotabsolve themselves of criminal responsibilityby citing an of®cial position or that they obeyedsuperior orders ± that is, the crime ofobedience. Conversely, commanding of®cersare responsible for violations carried out bytheir troops unless they self-evidently

attempted to suppress them. The 1949 GenevaConventions codi®ed the set of war crimessettled on by the Nuremberg trial andsubsequent protocols have expanded theprotection available to combatants and civi-lians in times of war. For human rights cam-paigners, the crucial issue is not the existence ofa body of laws covering war crimes but thewillingness to enforce them. Although nation-states have the legal right to prosecute warcriminals, the dominant pattern is eitherimpunity or administrative punishment.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: crimes against humanity,genocide, obedience (crimes of ), state crime,torture

Key ReadingsGutman, R. and Reiff, D. (eds) (1999) Crimes of War:

What the Public Should Know. New York, W.W.Norton.

Neier, A. (1998) War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide,Terror, and the Struggle for Justice. New York,Times Books.

Ratner, S.R. and Abrams, J.S. (1997) Accountability forHuman Rights Atrocities in International Law:Beyond the Nuremberg Legacy. Oxford, OxfordUniversity Press.

Roberts, A. and Guelff, R. (2000) Documents on theLaws of War. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Robertson, G. (2000) Crimes Against Humanity.Harmondsworth, Penguin.

WHITE COLLAR CRIME

De®nition

A heterogeneous group of offences committedby people of relatively high status or enjoying

relatively high levels of trust, and madepossible by their legitimate employment.Such crimes typically include fraud, embez-zlement, tax violations and other accountingoffences, and various forms of workplace theftand ®ddling in which the organization, itscustomers or other organizations are thevictims.


In developing the concept of `white collarcrime' ± à crime committed by a person ofrespectability and high social status in thecourse of his [sic] occupation' (Sutherland,1945, 1949) ± Sutherland challenged thestereotypical view of the criminal as typicallyof lower class, arguing that the powerfulroutinely commit crimes. Some individualwhite collar offenders avoid criminal prosecu-tion because of the class bias of the courts, butmore generally they are aided by the power oftheir class to in¯uence the implementationand administration of the law. Thus the crimesof the upper and lower classes differ mainly inthe implementation of the criminal laws thatapply to them. Given that ùpper-class'criminals often operate undetected, that ifdetected they may not be prosecuted, and thatif prosecuted they may not be convicted,Sutherland argued that the criminally con-victed are far from the closest approximationto the population of violators.

Sutherland produced a more encompassingand abstract version of `crime', de®nedthrough the `legal description of an act associally injurious and legal provision of apenalty for the act' (1949, p. 46). Whileretaining reference to law, he seeks toencompass acts beyond those proscribed bycriminal law; the content of laws and thenature of legal distinctions are social products,and `crimes' are illegalities which are contin-gently differentiated from other illegalities byvirtue of the speci®c administrative proce-dures to which they are subject. Sutherland'sarguments regarding the nature and signi®-cance of `white collar' crime were part of amuch broader theoretical project which soughtto rede®ne the scope and substance ofcriminology, organized around the explana-tory concept of differential association,through which he sought (highly imperfectly)to provide an explanation for lower-class andupper-class crime.

In his article `Who is the criminal?' (1947),Paul Tappan developed a systematic criticism

of Sutherland's work, focusing ®rst onSutherland's sociological de®nition of crime,and seeking to provide a `rigorous' (legalistic)de®nition, organizing this around intention,the criminal law and successful prosecutionfollowing due process. In Tappan's view, it isillegitimate to describe people as criminalwhen they have not been successfully prose-cuted for a crime; this is to engage innormative reasoning, or moralizing. Ironically,Tappan went on to argue that much of whatSutherland wants to label crime constitutes`normal business practice', and in so doingargues that those offences typically committedby business people are inherently differentfrom criminal offences, a view held by manyacademics who comment upon white collarand corporate crime (Pearce and Tombs, 1998).

Evaluation

These ± and other ± aspects of the disputebetween Sutherland and Tappan haveendured and remain pertinent for contempor-ary attempts to de®ne and understand whitecollar crime. These disputes entail disagree-ments about values, politics, theory, episte-mology and methodology.

Amongst recent debates around white collarcrime, perhaps the most signi®cant has beenthat which distinguishes between occupa-tional and organizational crimes. Thus, oneview is that the term white collar crime shouldbe restricted to the study of crimes by theindividually rich or powerful which arecommitted in the furtherance of their owninterests, often against corporations or orga-nizations with, for or within which they areworking. These occur when individuals orgroups of individuals make illegal use of theiroccupational position for personal advantageand victimize consumers or their ownorganization, for example, either directlythrough theft or indirectly by damaging itsreputation. Such acts or omissions are distinctfrom organizational illegalities or corporatecrimes, designed to further organizationalends.

This indicates that opportunity structuresare important in understanding the incidenceof white collar crime. Some criminologistshave begun to shift from a focus upon thestatus of the offender to the nature of thecrime; Shapiro (1990), for example, focusesupon the (differential) levels of opportunityand temptation to commit crime in differentsocial situations, her central concern being the


way that trust is differentially distributedthroughout occupational hierarchies.

For others, white collar crime is an illusoryconcept. Thus, for example, Hirschi andGottfredson have argued that as with conven-tional crime, the white collar offender seekspersonal bene®t (short-term grati®cation), andthat the setting of the offence or the status ofthe offender is simply not relevant to the causeof crime and criminality.

White collar crime, then, is certainly acontested concept. In that the term empha-sizes the social characteristics of individualoffenders, it invariably leads us into inade-quate attempts to characterize certain formsof criminality in terms of respectability,status, trust, and so on. Moreover, it sub-sumes within one category what are aheterogeneous group of phenomena withdifferent rationales, methods, effects, like-lihood of detection, and so on. Indeed, whileSutherland `named' white collar crime, hisown, fundamental concern was with what isnow commonly known as corporate crime.The value of retaining a focus on white collarcrime is perhaps that this topic ìllustratesthe possibility of divergence between legal,social and political de®nitions of criminality[and] . . . in so doing it reminds us of

the arti®ciality of all de®nitions of crime'(Nelken, 1994, p. 84).


Associated Concepts: anomie, crime, corporatecrime, criminalization, critical criminology,deviance, differential association, governmen-tality, social control theory, social harm

Key ReadingsFriedrichs, D. (1996) Trusted Criminals. White Collar

Crime in Contemporary Society. Belmont, CA,Wadsworth.

Nelken, D. (1994) `White collar crime', in D. Nelken(ed.), White Collar Crime. Aldershot, Dartmouth.

Pearce, F. and Tombs, S. (1998) Toxic Capitalism.Aldershot, Dartmouth.

Shapiro, S. (1990) `Collaring the crime, not thecriminal: reconsidering the concept of white collarcrime', American Sociological Review, 55, pp. 346±65.

Sutherland, E.H. (1945) Ìs `̀ white collar crime''crime?' American Sociological Review, 10, pp. 32±9.

Sutherland, E.H. (1949) White Collar Crime. The UncutVersion. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.

Tappan, P. (1947) `Who is the criminal?', AmericanSociological Review, 12, pp. 96±102.

321WHITE COLLAR CRIME

Z

ZERO TOLERANCE

De®nition

Zero tolerance policing is a high pro®le, pro-active maximum enforcement street policingstrategy that requires police of®cers to pursueeven the most minor offences with the samevigour as more serious forms of criminality.This policing style is intended to send a signalto criminals and law-abiding citizens that thepolice have the capacity and motivation totackle the spectrum of anti-social and pettycriminal behaviours that make a city orneighbourhood feel and look unsafe.


During the late 1990s the term zero tolerancepolicing was the subject of considerable mediaattention, with proponents of this particularpolicing style elevating it to the status of amiracle treatment for crime. It can be de®nedin a number of ways but primarily involvesstrict, aggressive enforcement of laws irre-spective of the circumstances on the groundsthat eradicating minor crime can contribute toa notable reduction in serious crime. Zerotolerance policing is most closely associated inthe public imagination with the innovativepolicing strategies developed by WilliamBratton in the aftermath of his appointmentas commissioner of the New York PoliceDepartment by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in1994. Prior to taking control of the NYPD,Bratton, a strong supporter of `broken win-dows' theory as developed by George Kellingand James Q. Wilson, had already tested zerotolerance policing tactics on the New YorkTransit system and as commissioner of theBoston Police. Bratton promised New Yorkers

that the NYPD `were going to ®x brokenwindows and prevent anyone from breakingthem again'. In order to heighten theirvisibility, New York's police of®cers wereput back on the beat and encouraged to lookfor the signs of crime and take an interven-tionist stance. They were directed to focus onlow-level infringements of the law, publicnuisance violations and incidents of incivilitysuch as pan handling, fare dodging, publicdrinking, jay walking and the activities ofgraf®ti artists and squeegee merchants, on thegrounds that these are the forms of behaviourthat make citizens feel unsafe in public places.Suspects were stopped, frisked and ques-tioned about a range of criminal activityoccurring in a given neighbourhood to accessinformation about more serious forms of crimeand deter offenders. Of®cers on the beat werealso encouraged to arrest suspects and processthem through the criminal justice system andto break away from the idea that certain formsof crime were the preserve of specialistsquads. Organizational re-engineering of theNYPD also accompanied zero tolerance poli-cing. William Bratton decentralized the man-agement structure by pushing authority andresponsibility down to precinct commandersand introduced new technologies, such asCOMPSTAT, to monitor and map crimeevents and make commanders focus onemergent patterns and results. This technol-ogy also allowed the NYPD to update theirdata base on the city's population and crime¯ows across and within neighbourhoods.

Evaluation

This policing strategy scooped up honoursboth within the USA and internationallybecause it was represented as being respon-sible for a dramatic decrease in the crime rate

± particularly the murder rate ± across NewYork boroughs and reclaiming the mainthoroughfares and parks of `Gotham City'from the criminal and disorderly elements. Acentral attraction for police chiefs in variousparts of the world was that zero tolerancepolicing provided badly needed proof thatorder maintenance policing was central toeffective crime control and to garneringsupport amongst both the general public andrank and ®le of®cers. However, critics of zerotolerance policing insisted that as a result ofthe relentless PR activities of Bratton andGiuliani zero tolerance policing had beengiven more credit than it deserved forreductions in serious crime. There is evidencethat the crime rate was falling in New Yorkbefore zero tolerance policing was introducedand that the downward trend in the murderrate across the USA was related to the waningof the crack epidemic of the early 1990s andbroader demographic shifts. There was alsomounting evidence that the strategy was:promoting an aggressive attitude amongstpolice of®cers; encouraging discriminatoryand insensitive policing; resulting in theharassment and criminalization of powerlessgroups who were already disproportionatelyrepresented in the criminal justice system; anden¯aming racial divisions. The zero tolerancepolicing philosophy came into disrepute as aresult of a sharp rise in complaints and publicprotests about the torture of Abner Louima, aHaitian security guard, by of®cers from the70th precinct in Brooklyn in August 1997 andthe murder of Amadou Diallo, an unarmedWest African street vendor, in February 1999by the NYPD's renowned Street Crimes Unit.The police brutality associated with theseincidents provided evidence that `letting the

cops off the leash' had given licence to certainof®cers to over-ride civil liberties and humanrights. In the aftermath of these cases, WilliamBratton and senior police of®cers in othercountries who were converts to his aggressivepolicing philosophy became considerablymore cautious in their use of the term `zerotolerance policing', preferring to emphasizethe value of community and problem orientedpolicing strategies and policing by consent.

Eugene McLaughlin

Associated Concepts: `broken windows', com-munity policing, problem oriented policing

Key ReadingsBratton, W.J. and Dennis, N. (eds) (1997) Zero

Tolerance: Policing a Free Society. London, IEAPublications.

Bratton, W.J. and Knoblach, P. (1998) Turnaround:How America's Top Cop Reversed the CrimeEpidemic. New York, Random Books.

Chua-Eoan, H. (2000) `Black and blue: cops, brutal-ity and race', Time, 6 March, pp. 24±8.

Human Rights Watch (1998) Shielded from Justice:Police Brutality and Accountability in the UnitedStates. New York, Human Rights Watch.

Kelling, G. and Coles, C. (1996) Fixing BrokenWindows. New York, The Free Press.

Silverman, E.B. (1999) NYPD Battles Crime. Boston,MA, Northeastern University Press.

ZONAL THEORY

See Chicago School of Sociology; Socialecology

323ZONAL THEORY

SUBJECT INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate main article.

abolition, 1±2

abolitionism, 1, 2±4, 8, 40, 70, 79, 246, 248action research, 4±5, 73actuarialism, 5±6, 7, 169, 251administrative criminology, 6±7, 64, 71, 137, 169±70,

313adoption studies, 20, 127, 131, 149aetiology see causationage, 68, 69, 138, 162, 208agency, 70, 216, 218, 219analytic induction, 46anarchist criminology, 7±8animal abuse, 8±10

anomie, 10±12, 128±9, 244anti-racism, 4, 5anti-semitism, 136apartheid, 97, 181, 278appreciative criminology, 12±13, 110, 155, 201, 284,

312atavism, 19, 130atomism, 87attachment, 270, 271authoritarian populism, 14±15, 141, 176, 288

behaviour modi®cation, 17±18, 224, 242behaviour therapy, 17behaviourism/behavioural theory see

behaviour modi®cation; conditioning;differential association; social learningtheory

belief, as component of social bonding, 270bifurcation, 18±19biological criminology, 19±21, 33, 127, 130±1,

149±50, 213, 286biopiracy, 172black people see race; racial discrimination;

racialization; racism`Bloody Code' of crime control, 62body types, 286boot camps, 103Bosnia, 132British Crime Survey, 195, 283, 301±2, 313`broken windows', 22±3

bullying, 317

Cambodia, 132

Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development,166±7, 213, 283

capital punishment, 24±5, 67, 146capitalism, 71, 170, 171, 172, 220, 287capture theory, 241carceral society, 25±6, 200, 219, 269carnival (of crime), 26±7, 77catastrophe theory, 217cathexis, 173causation, 27±8, 70, 114, 164, 167, 184, 272, 281

and correlation, 58and integrative criminology, 153and positivism, 213and postmodernisn, 216and time series surveys, 301, 302

census, 283Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 14, 75,

297chaos theory, 28±30, 217Chicago School of Sociology, 13, 30±2, 91±2, 110,

201, 285, 287and community crime prevention, 38, 39zonal theory, 31, 74, 133, 274

child abuse see family crime; violencechildren, animal abuse by, 9citizenship, 276Civil Rights Act (1963), 98class and class relations, 79, 138, 148, 154, 162, 173,

202, 275, 286and criminalization, 68and critical criminology, 70, 71and feminist criminology, 120and left realism, 163, 164and Marxist theory, 48, 49, 140, 141, 148, 170±1,

188, 241, 297classicism, 32±4, 62, 105, 126, 256cognitive-behavioural therapy see behaviour

modi®cation; social learning theorycohort studies, 34±5, 166, 167, 283collectivism, 7commitment, as component of social bonding, 270communitarianism, 35±7, 40, 182, 246, 248, 263community corrections, 37±8

community crime prevention, 38±40, 63, 64, 177community justice, 40±1, 151community policing, 22±3, 41±2

community safety, 42±3, 272community sentences, 44±5comparative method, 45±6compensation, state, 245complexity theory see chaos theoryComprehensive Crime Control Act (1982), 115computer technology see cybercrime; Internetconditioning, 46±8, 93, 209, 210con¯ict theory, 48±9, 60, 227conformity see social control theoryconscience, 210, 270conscientization, 220consensus position on crime, 59consensus theory, 48conspiracy, criminal, 114±15conspiracy theory, 85constitutive criminology, 50±1, 217containment theory, 52±3content analysis, 46, 53±4, 104control theory see social control theoryconversational analysis, 54±5, 94±5corporate crime, 56±7, 61, 87, 198, 282correctionalist theory, 6correlational analysis, 57±8, 286crime, 49, 59±61, 128, 284±5crime control model, 61±2, 67, 102, 105crime mapping see geographies of crimecrime prevention, 1±2, 6±7, 42±3, 63±4, 246

community, 38±40, 63, 64, 177multi-agency, 63, 177±8situational see situational crime preventionsocial, 63, 164, 177, 272

crimes against humanity, 64±5criminal careers, 65±6criminal conspiracy, 114±15criminal justice, 66±7Criminal Justice Act (1991), 18, 19criminalization, 49, 68±9, 71, 84, 145, 231, 232,

288critical criminology, 49, 70±2, 125, 161, 187, 188, 220,

223, 232, 284and corporate crime, 56and criminalization, 68, 69

critical feminist criminology, 120Critical Legal Studies Movement, 81critical research, 72±3cross-sectional design, 74±5, 283, 312crowd reaction, 174±5cultural criminology, 75±7cultural studies, 75culture con¯ict theory, 48curfew schemes, 107cybercrime, 77±8, 142

dangerousness, 3±4death penalty, 24±5, 67, 146deaths, in custody, 3, 162decarceration, 1, 44, 79±80, 102, 185, 304decategorization, 1

deconstruction, 51, 80±1decriminalization, 1, 57, 81±2, 235, 303defensible space, 82±3, 253delegalization, 1, 102, 151delinquency, 84±5, 102±3, 166±7, 186, 296±7

Chicago School theories of, 31±2and containment theory, 52±3and social control theory, 270, 271and status frustration, 290±1, 293and strain theory, 293±4

demonization, 85±6denial, 86±7depenalization, 1deprofessionalization, 1, 102, 151desire, 10, 173determinism, 12, 28, 87, 154, 216, 243, 285deterrence, 25, 64, 88, 164, 264deviance, 12±13, 89±90, 128, 159±60, 187, 202, 267

new deviancy theory, 12, 110, 124, 188±90, 291and social reaction, 187, 281±2, 302

deviancy ampli®cation, 90±1, 124±5, 156, 176, 282,292

differance, 81difference principle, 279differential association, 32, 91±3, 202, 280differential reinforcement, 93±4, 280disassociation see neutralization, techniques of;

subculturediscipline, dispersal of, 269, 304discourse, 216discourse analysis, 94±5, 104, 125, 217discretion, 95±6discriminant function analysis, 180discrimination, 67, 71, 96, 97±100, 101

racial, 24±5, 67, 97, 98sex, 97, 98, 165and sexuality, 97, 229

disparity, 99±100, 101displacement see rational choice theory; repeat

victimization; situational crime prevention;surveillance

dispositional theories, 100disproportionality, 100±1dispute settlement see informal justice; restorative

justicediversion, 1, 102±3, 184, 185, 235documentary analysis, 53, 103±4, 125domestic violence see family crime; violencedoubling, 86drift see subculturedrug use, 191±2, 251, 293, 314due process model, 67, 104±5, 157

East Timor, 132edgework see carnival (of crime); cultural

criminology; postmodernismelectronic monitoring, 44, 45, 107±8emergency legislation, 108±9, 211empiricism, 120

325SUBJECT INDEX

employment, 276in criminal justice professions, 98, 101

enfranchizement, 165England and Wales, criminal statistics, 194, 195±6enterprise crime, 198environment, 21, 33, 47, 285environmental criminologies see Chicago School of

Sociology; geographies of crime; socialecology

environmental protection, 57equality, 165, 279essentialism, 109ethnic cleansing see genocideethnography, 12±13, 46, 54, 75, 110±11, 125, 155, 188,

189, 239, 240, 309ethnomethodology, 55eugenics see geneticsEuropean Convention on Human Rights, 145,

181European Court of Human Rights, 145Europol, 307evaluation research, 111±12experiments, 112±14extradition, 115, 116extraterritorial law enforcement, 114±16extroversion/introversion, 116, 137, 209

family crime, 9, 117±18family group conferencing, 40, 203, 248fear of crime, 118±19, 164, 208, 236, 312feminism, 2, 118, 173, 182, 202, 219, 232, 261, 288

liberal, 120, 165±6Marxist, 220postmodern, 215, 217radical, 208, 215, 229, 232±4socialist, 164, 220and victimology, 315

feminist criminologies, 119±20, 227feminist research, 121±3focus groups, 123±4folk devil, 76, 85, 103, 124±5, 140, 143, 177, 282,

291±2free will, 12, 32, 48, 87, 126±7, 154, 213, 243freedom, 279functionalism, 127±9, 176, 218, 256, 287, 288

in neo-conservative criminology, 183, 184

gang culture, 293±4, 296, 297gated communities see defensible spacegender/gender relations, 33, 61, 71, 119±20, 137,

138±9, 162, 163, 164, 173, 233, 261and criminal justice system, 67, 144and criminalization, 68, 144in new criminology, 188in psychoanalytic criminology, 227

genetic materials, ownership of, 172genetics, 19±21, 127, 130±1, 149±50, 213genocide, 65, 131±2, 193, 194Geographic Information Systems (GIS), 133

geographies of crime, 132±3governmentality, 134±5, 269grounded theory, 255group con¯ict theory, 48

harm, social, 59±61, 70, 277±8hate crime, 61, 136, 229hedonism, 10, 26±7, 33, 136±8hegemonic masculinity, 138±9, 173, 232hegemony, 15, 140±1heterosexism, 71heterosexuality, 69, 138, 139, 229, 261hidden crime, 141±3historical methods, 143±4, 223Holocaust, 132, 193homophobia, 136, 229±30homosexuality, 138, 229±30, 260±1hostage incidents, 115human ecology, theory of, 30±1, 32human rights, 57, 70, 71±2, 79, 98, 108, 144±5, 181,

186, 187, 303±4hypothesis testing, 45±6

idealism, left, 8, 69, 161±3imaginary, 227incapacitation, 64, 146±7, 207, 248incarceration, 147±9individual positivism, 149±50individualism, 11, 33informal justice, 40±1, 150±1information and communication technologies (ICTs)

see cybercrime; Internetinstitutional racism, 151±2instrumentalism

Marxist, 241penal, 2

integrative criminology, 153±4intellectual property, 172interactionism, 124, 125, 155±6, 187, 188, 189, 201

and appreciative criminology, 12, 13, 155as challenge to positivism, 155, 156and con¯ict theory, 49and dispositional theories, 100and essentialism, 109and ethnography, 13, 110, 155and social control, 268and social reaction, 281, 282and stereotyping, 291

International Crime Survey (ICS), 313International Criminal Court (ICC), 132International Union of Penal Law, 273Internet, 77±8, 142, 190Interpol, 306±7introversion/extroversion, 116, 137, 209invisible (hidden) crime, 141±3involvement, as component of social bonding, 270

Joyce v Public Prosecutions, 115just deserts, 18, 19, 100, 102, 157±8, 250, 279

326 SUBJECT INDEX

justice see actuarialism; crime control model;criminal justice; due process model; informaljustice; just deserts; natural justice; popularjustice; restorative justice; social justice

Justice for Women, 233

Kerner Commission on Urban Disorders, 68Khmer Rouge, 132knowledge, 216

power-knowledge axis, 71, 73, 148, 191, 219, 269

labelling, 13, 68, 88, 100, 110, 124, 125, 155, 159±60,188, 232, 262, 287, 291, 293

and decriminalization, 82and deviancy ampli®cation, 91, 156and dispositional theories, 100and essentialism, 109and left realism, 164and new deviancy theory, 188, 189and social constructionism, 266±7and social control, 268and social reaction, 281, 282

labour, social division of, 10, 11, 173learning by association, 47, 209left idealism, 8, 69, 161±3left realism, 69, 70, 71, 119, 161, 162, 163±4, 171, 176,

223, 243, 244, 261, 272, 312Level of Supervision Inventory-Revised (LSI-R),

221±2liberal feminism, 120, 165±6localized policing, 41±2logistic regression, 180longitudinal study, 166±7, 283

Ma®a, 199Malicious Trespass Act (1827), 84managerialism, 7, 82, 103, 169±70, 177, 178, 289marginalization see social exclusionMarxism, 187, 188, 202, 223, 232, 279, 287±8, 289

and class relations, 49, 70, 79, 140, 202instrumental, 241and left idealism, 161and notion of praxis, 220structural, 218

Marxist criminologies, 140, 170±2, 188Marxist feminism, 220masculinities, 138, 172±4, 261masculinity, 121, 172±3, 227

hegemonic, 2, 138±9, 173, 232mass media, 76, 91, 124, 125, 175, 176, 177, 292

and newsmaking criminology, 190mediation see reparation; restorative justicemirror phase, 227modernism, 216, 229modernist criminology, 138, 153±4modernity, 10, 11Mods and Rockers, 91, 124, 125, 175, 176, 292moral culture, 183, 184moral discourse, 2

moral economy, 174±5, 223moral panic, 76, 91, 125, 143, 175±7, 282, 292moral position on crime, 59motivation, 280mugging, 125, 140, 170, 176multi-agency crime prevention, 63, 177±8multiple regression, 180multivariate analysis, 178±80, 301Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act (1965),

24

National Deviancy Conference (NDC), 70, 187nationality principle, 115natural justice, 158, 181±2neo-classicism, 212±13neo-colonialism, 70, 71neo-conservative criminology, 69, 169, 182±4neo-liberalism, 2, 241, 251, 252, 276, 289neo-Marxism, 161net widening, 1, 45, 69, 184±5, 251neuroticism, 116, 209neutralization, techniques of, 86, 186, 191new criminology, 49, 70, 187±8new deviancy theory, 12, 110, 124, 188±90, 291New Labour, 162, 169new penology, 5New Public Managerialism (NPM), 169New Right, 14±15, 161, 162newsmaking criminology, 76, 190non-intervention, radical, 234±5normalization, 191±2, 269Northern Ireland, 108, 140, 162, 211numbing, psychic, 86Nuremburg Tribunal, 193, 319

obedience, crimes of, 193±4objectivity, in feminist research, 122of®cial criminal statistics, 194±6Omnibus Diplomatic Security and Anti-Terrorism

Act (1986), 115opportunity, 265opportunity reduction, 6±7, 17, 63opportunity theory, 11, 197±8, 253organized crime, 198±9

transnational, 305±6

panel studies, 166, 167panopticism, 26, 148, 200±1, 219, 298, 299parole, 105participant observation, 31, 110, 155, 201±2partnership strategies, 42passive personality principle, 114path analysis, 58pathology, 12, 202±3, 243, 285patriarchy, 69, 70, 71, 121, 173, 202, 215, 220, 232±4,

288peacemaking criminology, 8, 203±4penal system, 1, 2±3penality, 204±6

327SUBJECT INDEX

penology, 5, 205, 206±7

personal safety, 208

personality theory, 116, 208±10

piracy, 115

bio-, 172pleasure, pursuit of see hedonism

policing see `broken windows'; community policing;

problem oriented policing; self policing; social

control; surveillance; transnational policing;

zero tolerance

political crime, 211±12

popular culture, 76

popular justice see informal justice

population studies, 74±5

populism, authoritarian, 14±15, 141, 176, 288

positivism, 12, 33, 88, 126, 164, 167, 212±13, 232, 256,

268

and biological criminology, 19, 130, 213and con¯ict theory, 48

and content analysis, 53, 54

and dispositional theories, 100

individual, 149±50, 213

and interactionism, 155, 156

legal, 182and social defence theory, 273

sociological, 213, 236, 274, 284±5

post-colonial criminology, 214

post-colonialism, 215

postmodern feminism, 215, 217

postmodernism, 60±1, 75, 80, 120, 138, 153±4, 162,216±18, 219, 220, 229

post-structuralism, 162, 174, 215, 218±19

power, 219, 267

patriarchal, 69, 70, 71, 121, 173, 202, 215, 220,

232±4, 288

structures of, 48, 50, 60±1, 71, 73, 95, 139, 156,161±2, 170, 275

power-knowledge axis, 71, 73, 148, 191, 219, 269

praxis, 219±20, 233

prediction studies, 221±2

prejudice, 97±8

primary deviation see labelling; social reaction

primitive rebellion, 222±3

private property, 7, 8, 266

privatization see managerialism

probation, 5±6, 44, 184, 185, 223±4, 227

problem oriented policing, 42, 225±6

proportionality see discrimination; disparity;

disproportionality; due process; just desertsprostitution, 128, 314

protective principle, 115

psychoanalytic criminology, 226±8, 242

psychogenic school, 150

psychopathology, 116

psychoticism, 116, 209punishment see penality; penology

queer theory, 229±30

race, 68, 69, 71, 138, 139, 162, 173, 176Race Relations Acts, 98racial discrimination, 24±5, 67racialization, 231±2racism, 4, 5, 61, 71, 136, 317

individual, 151institutional, 71, 151±2

radical criminologies, 6, 70, 187, 211, 220, 222, 223,227, 232, 236

radical feminism, 208, 215, 229, 232±4radical non-intervention, 234±5rape, 3, 65, 173, 316Rape Crisis Federation, 233rational action, 32rational choice theory, 88, 92, 100, 137, 138, 198,

235±6, 264realism

left see left realismlegal, 182right see administrative criminology; neo-

conservative criminologyrealist criminologies, 236recidivism, 108, 221, 236±8redress, 238±9, 245re¯exivity, 73, 110, 121, 239±40regulation see governmentalityregulatory agencies, 240±2rehabilitation, 64, 146, 157, 227, 237, 242±3, 250reintegrative shaming see shamingrelative deprivation, 164, 243±4relativism, 182reparation, 245±6, 248repeat victimization, 246±7replacement discourse see constitutive criminologyrestitution see reparationrestorative justice, 40, 41, 151, 246, 247±9retribution, 245, 248, 249±50right realism see administrative criminology; neo-

conservative criminologyrights, 181±2

human, 57, 70, 71±2, 79, 98, 108, 144±5, 181, 186,187, 303±4

risk, 5±6, 6, 7, 119, 134, 137, 206, 221±2, 250±2routine activity theory, 88, 197, 198, 235, 252±3,

264Rwanda, 132, 193

safetycommunity, 42±3personal, 208

Salient Factor Scale, 221sampling, 254±5, 283scapegoating, 85, 86, 90, 125, 140, 255±6, 265secondary deviation see labelling; social reactionsectarianism, 136self-interest, 33self-policing, 256±7self-reports, 142, 257±9the self, 155

328 SUBJECT INDEX

sentences/sentencing, 66±7, 100±1, 207community, 44±5determinacy of, 157disparity of, 99, 157, 250indeterminate, 157just deserts in, 18, 19, 100, 102, 157±8, 250, 279

sentencing circles, 40, 203serial killing, 3, 259±60sex discrimination, 97, 98, 165sex-roles, 173sexism, 71sexual harassment, 61, 317sexual violence see violence, against womensexuality, 68, 69, 97, 138, 139, 162, 173, 208, 227,

229±30, 260±1shaming, 40, 147, 246, 248, 262±3situational crime prevention, 7, 17, 63, 64, 83, 94, 119,

133, 137, 164, 198, 235, 253, 263±5, 272, 298skills training, 17social banditry, 222social bond perspective, 270±1social censure, 90, 265±6social change, 216±17social class see class and class relationssocial constructionism, 164, 189, 266±8social contract theory, 62, 278social control, 1, 147, 153, 160, 175±6, 185, 189, 268±9social control theory, 52, 53, 154, 270±1social crime, 144, 222, 223social crime prevention, 63, 164, 177, 272social defence theory, 272±4social disorganization see Chicago School of

Sociology; geographies of crimesocial ecology, 31, 133, 154, 274±5social exclusion (marginalization), 68, 69, 71, 176,

275±7social harm, 59±61, 70, 277±8social information processing, 280social justice, 278±9social learning theory, 92±3, 154, 224, 279±81social reaction, 68, 82, 91, 159±60, 175±7, 187, 189,

235, 281±2, 302social surveys, 74±5, 254±5, 257±9, 282±4socialist feminism, 164, 220socialization, 210, 216, 268socio-biology see biological criminologysociological positivism, 213, 236, 274, 284±5sociopathic behaviour, theory of, 281somatotyping, 285±6space/time, 216spatial analysis, 275speciesism, 9standpoint theory, 120, 215state, 15, 161±2, 170±1, 268, 287±9

authoritarian, 14sovereignty of, 114, 306

state crime, 61, 145, 186, 212, 289±90, 306state intervention, 234±5, 276state security principle, 115

statistics, of®cial criminal, 194±6status frustration, 290±1, 293, 296stereotyping, 110, 125, 159, 165, 282, 291±2stigma, 102, 160, 176, 231, 256, 265, 292±3stimulus control, 17stop and search powers, 98, 101strain theory, 10, 11, 202, 244, 290, 293±4structural relations, 70±1structuralism, 218±19structured interviews, 257, 295subculture, 75±6, 154, 164, 186, 244, 296±7subjectivity, 216, 219

and feminist research, 122substantive justice, 105surveillance, 26, 83, 251, 268, 298±9symbolic interactionism see interactionism

target hardening see defensible space; situationalcrime prevention; surveillance

territorial principle, 114territoriality, 83Thatcherism, 15, 141theoretical sampling, 45time series design, 75, 283, 301±2token economies, 17tolerance, 90, 302±3topology theory, 217torture, 65, 145, 193, 303±4traditionalism, 182±3transcarceration, 269, 304±5transnational organized crime, 305±6transnational policing, 306±8transpraxis, 218, 220treatment model see rehabilitationtriangulation, 308±9twin studies, 20, 127, 131, 149

underclass, 68, 69, 276, 310±11unemployment, 67, 79, 242, 276United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, 145,

181, 303United States

criminal statistics, 194, 195National Crime Survey, 313zero tolerance policing, 322±3

US v Alvarez-Machain, 116utilitarianism see classicism; deterrence;

incapacitation; rational choice theory

Vagrancy Act (1824), 84victim blaming, 255, 315victim surveys, 142, 309, 312±13

British Crime Survey, 195, 283, 301±2, 313victimization see repeat victimization; victim

surveys; victimless crimes; victimology;violence

victimless crime, 235, 278, 303, 314victimology, 314±15victims, 51

329SUBJECT INDEX

vigilantism see informal justiceviolence, 315±18

against women, 3±4, 117, 118, 120, 162, 173, 208,232, 233, 234, 288, 317

voluntarism, 33

war crimes, 65, 131, 145, 193, 194, 319war-making criminology, 203, 204welfare-liberalism, 279white collar crime, 56, 61, 87, 144, 282, 319±21witchcraft, 85, 86

women see feminism; feminist criminologies;feminist research; gender/gender relations; sexdiscrimination; violence against women

Women's Aid, 233

youth cultures, 124, 125, 175, 176Yugoslavia, former, 132, 193

zero tolerance, 69, 183, 322±3zonal theory see Chicago School of Sociology; social

ecology

330 SUBJECT INDEX

NAME INDEX

Adams, C.J., 9Adler, M.J., 59Adorno, T., 193Ageton, S., 154Agnew, R., 11, 186, 271, 290±1, 293±4Ahrendt, H., 193Aichhorn, A., 242Akers, R., 93Akhtar, N., 280Allport, G., 209Alper, J.S., 87Althusser, L., 218, 288American Friends Service Committee, 157Amnesty International, 108Ancel, M., 273Anderson, M., 307Anderson, N., 13, 31Andrews, D.A., 221Aristotle, 181Arnold, D., 175Arnold, J., 41Arrigo, B., 28, 80±1, 217, 219±20, 279Ascione, F.R., 9Ashton, J., 19, 246Ashworth, A., 99, 207, 245Atkinson, J.M., 55Austin, J., 185Ayres, I., 241

Babich, B., 28Bacchi, C., 267Bakhtin, M., 26Bakunin, M., 7Bandura, A., 280Bankowski, Z., 170Banks, O., 165Banton, M., 98Barak, G., 76, 153±4, 190Barr, R., 83Barrett, M., 24Barry, A., 289Baudrillard, J., 216Bauman, Z., 194Beccaria, C., 33, 59, 88, 105, 137Beck, U., 251Becker, H., 13, 159, 188, 267, 282, 287, 293Beirne, P., 8±10Bell, D., 127

Bell, N. and Bell, R., 137Bell, V., 219Ben-Yehuda, N., 85, 176Bennett, T., 178Bentham, J., 26, 33, 59, 88, 137, 159, 200, 206, 219Benveniste, E., 216Berger, P., 267Bernstein, B.H., 240, 241Bhabha, H., 214Bianchi, H., 3Blagg, H., 263Blankenburg, E., 303Bogard, W., 299Bohstedt, J., 175Bonger, W., 171Bonta, J., 221Booth, C., 133Bottomley, K., 278Bottoms, A., 38, 126, 197, 275Bowling, B., 97±9, 100±1, 257±9Box, S., 68, 171, 258Bradley, E.J., 280Bradley, T., 275±7Braithwaite, J., 241, 244, 248, 250, 262±3Brantingham, P.J. and Brantingham, P.L., 275Bratton, W., 322, 323Briar, S., 270Brown, J., 97, 98Brownlee, I., 224Brownmiller, S., 233Bruinsma, F., 303Bulger, J., 19Burgess, E., 31, 133, 221, 274Burgess, R., 93Burr, V., 267Byrne, J.M., 44

Campbell, D.T., 308Canter, D., 260Carlen, P., 206Carmichael, S., 151±2Carmignani, P., 273Carrabine, E., 146±9, 304±5Carson, W.G., 172Carter, R., 37Cavadino, M., 18Cazaux, G., 8±10Chadwick, K., 14±15, 68±73

Chambliss, W., 49, 171Chenery, S., 247Chesney-Lind, M., 120, 165, 166Christiansen, K.O., 20Christie, N., 2, 3, 40, 62, 239, 245, 248, 302Ciba Foundation, 20Cixous, H., 215Clarke, J., 158, 266±8, 289Clarke, R.V., 6, 83, 197, 198, 235, 236, 253, 264Clemmer, D., 207Clinard, M., 56Clinton, B., 25Cloward, R., 11, 244, 290, 293, 294, 296Cohen, A., 128, 137, 290, 293, 294, 296, 297Cohen, L.E., 197Cohen, P., 127Cohen, S., 1, 38, 45, 70, 72, 76, 79, 80, 85, 86±7, 91,

102, 103, 109, 124, 125, 145, 148, 162±3, 175±6,185, 186, 268, 269, 282, 291±2, 304

Cole, C.M., 22Coleman, C., 195, 257Coleman, J.W., 186Coleman, R., 161±3, 287±9Collier, R., 174, 261Comte, A., 284Connell, B., 138±9Connell, R.W., 173Cooley, C.H., 281Cornish, D., 198, 235, 264Cowell, D., 62Crawford, A., 39, 64, 272, 312Cressey, D., 92Cretney, A., 316Crow, I., 4±5Cullen, F., 242±3Currie, E., 36, 68, 146, 147, 163, 272

Dale, J., 165Daly, K., 119±20, 166, 248Damiens, 25Darwin, C., 19Davidson, J., 34±5Davies, A., 3, 4Davis, G., 316Davis, K., 128Deleuze, G., 216, 218Democritus, 87Derrida, J., 80±1, 215, 216, 218, 219Devlin, P., 277Diallo, A., 323Dignan, J., 18van Dijk, J.J.M., 313Dinitz, S., 52Dobash, R.E. and Dobash, R.P., 234Docker, J., 26Donovan, J., 9Donzinger, S., 25Douglas, M., 86, 205Douglas, T., 256

Downes, D., 297, 302Drew, P., 55Duelli Klein, R., 121Dugdale, R., 149Duncan, A., 281±2Durkheim, E., 10±11, 59, 128, 202, 203, 205, 284±5,

287

Edley, N., 139Eisenstein, Z., 166Ekblom, P., 263±5, 265Elliott, D., 154, 294Empey, La Mar T., 235Emsley, C., 143±4, 174±5Engels, F., 288Erasmus, 302Ericson, R., 251, 252Erikson, K., 85, 159, 205, 255, 282Etzioni, A., 35±6Evans, D., 108Eysenck, H., 116, 137, 138, 150, 209±10

Faith, K., 165, 166Farrell, M., 108Farrington, D., 64, 150, 167, 258Feeley, M., 5, 146±7, 251, 252Feest, J., 192Felson, M., 197, 235, 236, 253, 264Ferrell, J., 7, 75±7Ferrero, W., 32Ferri, E., 34, 273Finnis, J., 182Firestone, S., 233Fiske, D.W., 308Flax, J., 215Forrester, D., 247Foster, P., 165Foucault, M., 25±6, 71, 95, 148, 200±1, 205, 215, 216,

218, 219, 266, 269, 289, 298, 299, 304Freire, P., 220Freud, S., 116, 139, 173, 216

Gabrielli, W., 20Gallagher, N., 191Galton, Sir F., 130Gandy, O., 298, 299Garland, D., 39, 62, 103, 135, 148, 205, 206, 207Gelsthorpe, L., 61±2, 99±100, 104±5Gendreau, P., 221Giddens, A., 126Gijswijt-Hofstra, M., 302Gilbert, K., 242±3Gill, P., 198±9Gilling, D., 43Giuliani, R., 322, 323Glaser, B., 110Glueck, S. and Glueck, E., 286Godwin, H., 211Goffman, E., 207, 292

332 NAME INDEX

Gold, R., 201Goldblatt, P., 237Goldman, E., 7Goldstein, A.P., 18Goldstein, H., 225Goode, E., 85, 176Gordon, L., 118Goring, C., 149, 286Gottfredson, S., 321Grace, S., 316Graham, J., 178Gramsci, A., 15, 138, 140±1, 288, 297Greek, C., 190Greenberg, D., 65±6, 294Greenwood, P., 146Gresswell, D.M., 94Groombridge, N., 191±2, 202±3, 229±30, 260±1Guattari, F., 216Gudjonsson, S.B.G., 209Guerry, A.M., 133, 284

de Haan, W., 2, 3, 82, 238±9, 248Habermas, J., 2, 182, 184Hagan, F.E., 211Hagan, J., 61Haggerty, K., 251, 252Hale, C., 68Hall, S., 14±15, 125, 140, 141, 170, 176, 288, 297Hamai, F., 37Hamai, K., 224Hamilton, C.V., 151±2Hamilton, V.L., 193Haraway, D., 215Harris, J., 316Harrison, M., 175Hart, H.L.A., 126, 182, 277Harvey, L., 73Hay, D., 288Hayward, K., 30±2Healy, M., 229Hebdige, D., 75Hedderman, C., 224Heidensohn, F., 165±6Henry, S., 30, 50±1, 59±61, 154, 190, 238Hentig, H. von, 314Heritage, J., 55Herrnstein, R.J., 20, 21, 127, 154, 286Hillyard, P., 108±9, 211±12Hindelang, M.J., 315Hippocrates, 209Hirsch, A. von, 157, 207, 250Hirschi, T., 321Hirschi, T., 53, 270±1Hobbes, T., 10, 270Hobbs, D., 199Hobsbawm, E., 143, 222±3Hoffman, P.B., 221Holdaway, S., 201Holland, J., 121±2

Hollin, C., 17±18, 46±8, 87, 91±4, 116, 197±8, 208±10,221±2, 242±3, 279±81

Hollway, W., 227Holsti, O.R., 53Home Of®ce, 19, 237Honderich, T., 87, 250Hood, R., 24, 25, 100±1, 211Hooton, E., 286Hope, T., 39, 43Horkheimer, M., 184Hotaling, G.T., 117Hough, M., 313Howard, J., 206Howard, M., 19Howe, A., 205, 206Hoyle, C., 316Hudson, B., 66±7, 73, 99, 158, 181±2, 250, 278±9Hughes, G., 35±43, 62, 62±3, 110±11, 177±8, 247±9,

262±3, 272Huizinga, D., 154Hulsman, L., 2, 3, 82Humphreys, L., 261Hutchings, B., 20Hutter, B., 241

Ignatieff, M., 148, 206Immerigeon, R., 248Irigaray, L., 215, 216

Jacobs, J., 82Jamieson, R., 86±7, 193±4Jefferson, T., 138±41, 172±4, 227, 297Jeffery, C.R., 21, 93, 242±3Jeffery, R., 153Jenkins, P., 211Jensen, G., 53Jessop, B., 289Jones, J., 312Jongman, A.J., 145Jordan, B., 36, 41Jung, C., 116Jupp, V., 12±13, 45±6, 53±4, 74±5, 103±4, 110±11,

123±4, 124±5, 141±3, 155±6, 188±90, 239±40,254±5, 282±4, 291±2, 295, 301±2, 312±13

Kambanda, J., 132Kant, I., 249Katz, J., 26, 137, 138, 186, 261Kelling, G., 22±3, 182, 322Kelly, L., 5, 121, 233, 234Kelman, H.C., 193±4Kendall, P., 123Kern, R., 52±3, 270±1Kershaw, C., 238King, R., 231±2Kirchheimer, O., 148, 205Kirchoff, G., 46Kitsuse, J., 159, 282Klein, D., 121

333NAME INDEX

Klein, M., 102Klockar, K., 240Kohl, H., 307Kretschmer, E., 286Krisberg, B., 185Kristeva, J., 215, 216, 218Kropotkin, P., 7±8

Lacan, J., 216, 217, 218, 227Laclau, E., 15Lanier, M., 61Lauritsen, J.L., 246Lawrence, S., 136, 152Lea, J., 163, 171, 223Lee, M., 79±82, 102±3Lemert, E., 159, 281±2, 293Lemkin, R., 131Lenin, V.I., 140Lerman, P., 185Leucippus, 87Levi-Strauss, C., 218Lewin, K., 4Lewis, C., 237Lifton, R.J., 86Linebaugh, P., 288Loader, B.D., 77Locke, J., 302Lockwood, R., 9Lombroso, C., 33, 130, 212±13, 286Lowman, J., 269, 304Luckmann, T., 267Lyman, S., 86Lyng, S., 27Lyon, D., 95Lyon, F., 299Lyotard, J.-F., 216

McDougall, C., 210McGowen, R., 206McGuire, J., 224, 243McGurk, B.J., 210MacInnes, J., 174McKay, H., 31±2, 91, 133, 274MacKinnon, C., 122, 233McLaughlin, E., 5±8, 22±3, 41±2, 64±5, 88, 95±6, 109,

118±19, 127±9, 130±3, 136, 151±2, 169±70, 186,214, 218±19, 225±6, 252±3, 259±60, 289±90,303±4, 310±11, 314, 319, 322±3

Maclean, B., 164McMahon, M., 185Magarey, S., 84Maguire, M., 195Manning, P.K., 75Manson, C., 4Marcuse, H., 302Markusen, E., 86Marshall, P., 34, 237Martin, G., 17Martinson, R., 111, 224, 237

Marx, K., 10, 68, 126, 170, 171, 220, 240, 288Mathiesen, T., 1, 3, 79Matza, D., 12, 86, 186, 297Mauer, M., 147Mawby, R., 46, 315May, C., 107May, T., 37Mayhew, H., 133, 159Mayhew, P., 235, 283, 313Mead, G.H., 155, 188, 281Mednick, S., 20, 127, 149Meehl, P.E., 221Mendelsohn, B., 314Merton, R., 10, 11, 123, 128±9, 244, 290, 293Messerschmidt, J., 139, 173, 290Michael, J., 59Mies, M., 5Milgram, S., 193Miliband, R., 288Mill, J.S., 165Miller, W., 137Milovanovic, D., 28±30, 50±1, 60, 154, 216±18,

238Mooney, J., 164Morris, A., 102, 157Morris, T., 275Morrison, W., 10±12Mortimer, E., 107Mouffe, C., 141Moynihan, J., 195, 257Mucchielli, L., 226Mulcahy, A., 192Muncie, J., 19±21, 48±9, 82±5, 90±1, 99±100, 117±18,

149±50, 157±60, 184±5, 187±8, 194±6, 201±2,212±13, 232, 234±6, 274±5, 284±6, 292±3, 296±9

Murji, K., 85±6, 175±7, 231±2, 255±6Murray, C., 20, 146, 310±11Muste, A.J., 204

Naylor, R.T., 198, 199Nelken, D., 56, 321Nellis, M., 40, 41Neuman, W., 73Newburn, T., 191, 192Newman, J., 289Newman, O., 82±3Ni Aolain, F., 108Nietzel, M.T., 280Nietzsche, F., 10, 28, 218Nye, F.I., 270±1

Ohlin, L., 11, 244, 290, 293, 294, 296O'Malley, P., 64, 134±5, 136±8, 222±3, 250±2

Packer, H., 62, 67, 105Parenti, C., 69Park, R., 30±1, 133, 274Parker, H., 12, 191±2, 201Parsons, T., 55, 127, 287

334 NAME INDEX

Pasquino, P., 273Pavlov, I., 47Pear, J., 17Pearce, F., 241, 320Pease, K., 43, 63, 83, 235±6, 246±7Pepinsky, H., 28, 203±4Petersilia, J., 44Pettit, P., 250Piliavin, I., 270Pitts, J., 18Polsky, N., 201Potter, H., 24Potter, J., 94, 95Poulantzas, N., 14, 288Pratt, J., 273Presdee, M., 26±7, 77±8Prins, A., 273Proudhon, P.J., 7

Quetelet, A., 133, 195, 212, 284Quinet, D., 246Quinney, R., 29, 49, 60, 154, 288

Radford, J., 121±3, 232±4Radzinowicz, L., 211, 273Ramazanoglu, G., 121±2Rankin, J., 52±3, 270±1Rawls, J., 278±9Reckless, W., 52±3, 270Rector, R.R., 25Redondo, S., 243Regan, T., 9Reiss, A.J. Jr, 261, 270Rich, A., 233RudeÂ, G., 143Runciman, W.G., 244Rusche, G., 148, 205Russell, B., 87Russell, K., 101

Sacks, H., 55Said, E., 214Sanders, A., 67Sanders, C.R., 75Sapsford, R., 27±8, 57±8, 112±14, 178±80Saraga, E., 117±18, 267de Saussure, F., 216, 218Savona, E.U., 305Scarman, Lord, 152Schafer, S., 211Scheff, T., 194Schehr, R., 28, 30Schur, E., 234±5, 293Schwartz, R., 293Schwendinger, H. and Schwendinger, J., 60, 145Scott, J., 104Scott, M., 86Scraton, P., 14±15, 68±73Scull, A., 80

Seidman, S., 229Sellin, T., 48, 60Shapiro, S., 320Shaw, C.R., 13, 31±2, 91, 110, 133, 240, 274Shaw, M.N., 114, 115, 116Sheldon, B., 17Sheldon, W., 149, 286Sheptycki, J., 114±16, 170±2, 256±7, 305±8Shiner, M., 191, 192Silverman, D., 54, 95Sim, J., 2±4, 161±3, 287±9Simon, J., 5, 134, 147, 206, 207, 251, 252Simpson, O.J., 154Singer, P., 9Skinner, B.F., 47, 87, 93Skolnick, J., 293Slapper, G., 56Smart, C., 215, 219, 261Smith, A., 174Smith, D., 198±9Snider, L., 57, 241Sparks, R., 204±7Spinoza, 302Spitzer, S., 68Spivak, G., 214Stack, S., 244Stanko, E., 315±18Stanley, L., 73Stenson, K., 62Stephens, D., 166Stirner, M., 7Stouffer, S., 244Straus, M.A., 117Strauss, A.L., 110Sullivan, D., 249Sumner, C., 89±90, 162, 202±3, 265±6Sumner, M., 245±6, 249±50Sutherland, E., 32, 56, 91, 92±3, 277, 280, 320Sykes, G.M., 86, 186, 207

Tannenbaum, F., 159, 256, 281Tappan, P., 60, 277, 320Taylor, I., 171, 187, 188Taylor, L., 103Ten Have, P., 55Thatcher, M., 141, 211Thom, R., 217Thomas, D., 77Thompson, E.P., 143, 174±5, 223, 288Thornton, M., 277±8Thrasher, F.M., 13Tifft, L., 61, 278Tilley, N., 111, 112Tilly, C., 199Tombs, S., 56±7, 240±2, 319±21Tonry, M., 64, 99, 101Trasler, G., 236Trickett, A., 247Turk, A., 49, 211

335NAME INDEX

Tyson, M., 227Tzannetakis, T., 182±4

Valier, C., 226±8, 227Van Den Haag, E., 197Van Dijk, J.J.M., 46Van Swaaningen, R., 1±2, 3, 161, 162, 279, 302±3Vass, A., 80Vennard, J., 224Volavka, J., 20Vold, G., 48

Waddington, P.A.J., 176Walker, M.A., 195, 196Walker, N., 249, 250Walklate, S., 139, 208, 314±15Walters, R., 272±4Walton, P., 187Walzer, M., 279Wasik, M., 105Watney, S., 177Watson, J.B., 47Watson, M., 227Watson, S., 288Weber, M., 155, 287Wells, T., 24

West, D.J., 167, 283Westmarland, L., 32±4, 126±7, 144±5Westmarland, N., 215Wetherell, M., 139Whit®eld, D., 107±8Whyte, D., 56±7, 240±2, 319±21Whyte, W.F., 240Wiles, P., 43, 126, 197, 275Wilkins, L., 37, 90Williams, P., 305Wilson, D., 18±19, 24±6, 200±1, 236±8, 268±9Wilson, J.Q., 6, 21, 22±3, 127, 154, 182, 183, 286,

322Wollstonecraft, M., 165Worrall, A., 38, 44±5, 54±5, 94±5, 223±4Wright Mills, C., 72, 73

Yeager, P., 56Young, A., 215, 219Young, J., 6, 91, 147, 161, 163±4, 171, 187, 243±4, 272,

279Young, P., 205Young, R., 67Young, T.R., 28

Zehr, H., 248

336 NAME INDEX