Crime,Media,Culture: An International Journal

This paper outlines the origins of feminist criminology, tracing them to the 1960s, especially the social and cultural shifts of that period and the student movement, noting that approaches such as new deviancy theory did not provide any answers to the questions raised by pioneers in the field. The history of feminist perspectives is summarised and claims are asserted that these are the most successful developments in criminology of the second half of the 20th century. A number of cautions and criticisms are suggested, followed by several outstanding examples of recent scholarship and finally some ideas of blue sky thinking and proposals of areas which may be developed further in the future.

This paper analyses the fate of social democratic sensibility in thinking about crime and criminal justice that prevailed for most of the 20th century, until a profound rupture in culture, political economy, crime and criminal justice. The paper proposes an ideal-type of social democratic criminology, and contrasts it with the law-and-order perspective that displaced it after the 1970s. The sources and consequences of this seismic shift are analysed and evaluated. Finally, following the fracturing of the last forty years’ neoliberal hegemony in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, it considers the prospects of a revival of the social democratic perspective in criminological thinking.

A variety of opinions and observations about public sociology are reviewed in this paper, which then examines how criminology (as a branch of sociology) has reacted to the call to ‘go public’. Dilemmas, potential strengths and manifest weaknesses are brought to light. These, it will be argued, are mostly due to the peculiar disciplinary position of criminology, an area of enquiry which, by claiming improbable independence from sociology, is forced to neglect those very sociological concepts that would indeed make it more ‘public’.

The move to gated communities has been linked to both rising affluence and anxiety. These attempts to withdraw from the perceived dangers of urban areas are also predicated on the pursuit of a neighbourhood ideal, and freedom from danger is usually central to this ideal. This paper critically reconsiders these propositions by examining news reports and media narratives surrounding the nature of homicidal violence occurring within such developments. We have analysed fifty news reports from the last decade that address murder committed inside gated communities. In our analysis of these reports we suggest that attempts to neutralise danger in high crime societies are by no means guaranteed—even via the most strenuous efforts at deploying walls, gates and guards. Building on the arguments of Low (2003) and Zedner (2003), we suggest that demands for security are not only unending but that an outward-facing orientation that positions risk outside gated neighbourhoods is a denial of the continued danger of intimate and other forms of violence within communities and households behind gates. In this context the move to enclosure is more than a pragmatic attempt to defend against threat; it appears to reflect the impotence of efforts associated with addressing deep ontological insecurities. Studies continue to record high levels of fear in gated developments, and highly gendered risks of violence continue to be a part of the social reality of the segregated neighbourhood.

In this paper I take the question, who is the victim of crime, posed by Quinney in 1972, and examine the different ways in which victimology has endeavoured to answer this question since that time. In order to do this I trace the coexistence of three interrelated narratives on criminal victimisation—the academic, the cultural and the political—and suggest there are remarkable similarities between the victims we ‘see’ and the victims we fail to ‘see’ in each of these narratives, as there was in 1972. In tracing the provocative influence of the questions raised by Quinney’s work over the last forty years, I suggest that his latter preoccupation with photography and the questions that he remains interested in to date afford a window of opportunity for the further development of a cultural victimology, but only if, as victimologists, we are prepared to embrace the principle of bearing witness.

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

Criminology is ideally placed to examine the late-capitalist subjectivities now appearing before us in stark relief as the current economic crises deepen. However, to do so it must come of age as a producer discipline, exporting and exchanging its empirical findings and theoretical formulations with its former parent disciplines on equal terms. Only then can it equip itself to analyse the reality of a present and a future characterised by inevitable socioeconomic turmoil, and thus make a full and active contribution to intellectual and political life. To do this effectively criminology must first throw off the repressive control of post-war catastrophism, which, ironically, fixed criminology’s gaze on systems of social control and neglected that which elicits the perceived need for control.

Adopting the perspective of cultural criminology, this paper asserts that the century-old opposition between the adolescent/youth stage and adulthood is now being challenged by a late-modern capitalist culture functioning artificially to extend the former. Using examples from across the cultural script, the paper introduces the concept of ‘life stage dissolution’ (and its attendant bi-directional processes of ‘adultification’ and ‘infantilisation’) to suggest it is becoming more difficult for young people to differentiate and disassociate themselves from the generation immediately ahead of them, and indeed vice versa. The result is a sort of generational mulch where shared and interchangeable cultural experiences are now the norm. The second half of the paper provides some preliminary and deliberately provocative remarks about the implications of life stage dissolution for criminology and criminal justice. This will include an analysis of emerging processes that I have termed ‘pantomime justice’, a useful way of understanding how crime stories today often seem to unfold as a conjoined adult-child experience in contemporary society.