NCJ Number
191597
Editor(s)
Kevin Stenson,
Robert R. Sullivan
Date Published
2001
Length
240 pages
Annotation
This book focuses on the problem of crime and criminal justice arrangements in contemporary Anglo-Saxon societies.
Abstract
Chapter one analyzes the retreat from liberal approaches to crime control fashionable in the period between 1945 and the late 1970's, and the changes from social to advanced liberal modes associated with the rise of New Right intellectuals in the 1980's and 1990's. In chapter two it is argued that through the various phases of development, liberal states from the 18th century have practiced what is described as “schizophrenic” forms of criminal justice, stating that there is one form of law for the rich and another for the poor. Chapter three states that risk may be found in just about every aspect of the correctional apparatus. The three main action purposes to which calculation of risk may be directed are risk control, risk management, and risk reduction. Chapter four notes the growing centrality of crime, and surrounding fears, as a political issue in Western liberal democracies and emphasizes the uneasy tension between three broad strategies of crime control: punitive sovereignty, target hardening, and community security. In chapter five, the focus is the subtleties that emerge when crime prevention and related policing and criminal justice programs are examined for their risk/neo-liberal nexus. Chapter six presents two broad theoretical models that highlight the link between neo-liberalism and the new public managerialism (NPM). They are the social democratic model, with emphasis on local autonomy and the symbolic role of the police; and the governmentality model, which highlights changes in the organization of policing with emphasis on partnership between agencies. Chapter seven states that much of the current discussion of penal practices in the United States presumes that political support for harsh, cruel measures reflects a belief by citizens that crime is out of control and the government is to blame. In chapter eight the changing patterns of penality in the United Kingdom in the 1980's and 1990's are traced. Chapter nine argues that mass media representations of crime are central to the competing accounts of changing patterns, trends, and rates of crime and fear of crime since the Second World War. Index