Affairs of the Heart: Hate Crime and the Politics of Crime Control

How well does theory travel? The article examines this question by exploring how David Garland's work on crime control in Britain and the United States might be used to shed light on crime control in South Africa. I argue that theory travels badly when what is transferred is not the hard work of genealogical method but the shiny concepts that are the product of somebody else's labour. Entire countries and regions appear to have come off an assembly line, each made from the same parts, each more or less resembling the next. Theory travels well when it transmits imaginative resources that inspire one's own genealogical explorations, thus giving due weight to the historical antecedents of contemporary practices.

Through the rapid modern growth of private security as a form of “internal” policing, and the preference of many large organizations for handling problems “internally” which might previously have b...

Reviewed by: Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and the Public by David Churchill, and: Crime, Violence, and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild William Meier (bio) Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and the Public, by David Churchill; pp. xv + 290. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, £63.00, $85.00. Crime, Violence, and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild; pp. xii + 289. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017, £85.00, $130.00. The volumes reviewed here testify to the enduring impact of E. P. Thompson, Douglas Hay, Bruce Lenman, V. A. C. Gatrell, and other social historians of crime whose pioneering scholarship explored plebeian experiences of, and resistance to, the centralization of the state’s law-and-order institutions between the late-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Their work modeled ways of reading against the grain of official sources to recover alternative histories, and collectively they poured the foundation for the accepted narrative of British criminal justice history: that, by mid-Victorian times, political economy had triumphed over moral economy and the professionalized policeman state had overtaken older forms of crime control. Not so fast, says David Churchill, who, in Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and the Public, rejects this “state monopolization thesis” and asks us to consider a longer timeline for the modernization of British criminal justice (3). Focusing on relations between police and public in Victorian Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool, Churchill proposes instead that Victorian criminal justice resembled a “mixed economy” that empowered citizens to prevent property crime (241). Indeed, Churchill sees more continuity than change from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth. Far from being sidelined by the professional police, ordinary people continued to do much of the work of the criminal justice system: they discovered and reported crimes, confronted and apprehended wrongdoers, recovered stolen property, and concluded private, out-of-court settlements with offenders. Such popular initiative was vital, according to Churchill, to compensate for the deficiencies of the new blue-coated Bobbies. Dogged by poor recruitment and underfunding, professional police wielded little preventive impact on crime and resembled instead the old night-watch, acting as “generalists” who maintained urban order through such tedious tasks as curbing children’s games and street-corner gambling, shooing away beggars and street sellers, and removing orange peels from pavements (60). [End Page 683] Churchill succeeds in showing the unevenness of the Victorian state’s grip on crime control, and his impressive research in provincial archives provides welcome attention beyond London. But his micro-level evidence of everyday crime-fighting is insufficient to displace the consensus narrative about the centralization of state power over criminal justice: if judge, jailer, and constable did not quite monopolize the market, they were certainly the dominant firms. What truly blunts his analysis, though, is his view of the criminal justice system through the lens of the corporate, market-driven language of contemporary social science. Churchill’s method to “re-forge dialogue between history and criminology” misfires (7). Instead of dialogue, he makes nineteenth-century facts fit twenty-first-century jargon. For example, what Churchill calls a “‘preventative mentality’—a cautionary, consequentialist approach towards the security of one’s belongings” (138) that “sought to ‘responsibilize’ the civilian public in the governance of crime” simply meant that people locked up their belongings (144). Such abstractions wash out the finer details that a true social history would reveal. One wonders whether what he calls the “vernacular culture of criminal justice” was nothing more than locking one’s doors, securing one’s purse, and yelling, “Stop thief!” (258). The book is not, as Churchill claims, a “social history of the response to crime in the Victorian city.” His characters are one-dimensional and his categories of the social and the public are undifferentiated masses, a “largely anonymous multitude,” in his own words (257). For instance, Churchill notes in passing that police considered Irish immigrant quarters to be rough areas, but he makes no attempt to analyze how the Irish community in Britain related...

Beyond Mass Incarceration?

Objective: to define the key trends in the development of criminology and criminal justice under significant broadening of digitalization and using modern technologies.Methods: the priority of analytical method combined with descriptive method provided an optimal set of tools for searching and revealing the main digital trends in the development of criminology and criminal justice in the 21st century.Results: the growing dependence was revealed between criminal-legal science and digital technologies, which leads to the change in essence and types of contemporary criminality, models of criminals’ behavior, methods and mechanism of crime control and prevention in the light of requirements of criminal policy and justice. The dual role of the global digitalization trend is highlighted, the achievements of which are used both by the agencies of criminal justice system (in particular, for crime control, management and prevention) and criminals when implementing their criminal intents. It was determined that the essential transformation of criminology and criminal justice is largely caused by a dramatic development of digitalization in the 21st century, as well as by the modern technologies created on its basis, which appear to be more effective than the standard methods of traditional criminology, including quantitative and qualitative estimations, observation, interviews, polls, etc.Scientific novelty: new spheres of criminal-legal knowledge are introduced, as well as the corresponding disciplines formed exclusively under the influence of digitalization, such as cyber criminology and cyber victimology; algorithmic (computational) criminology, based on actuarial justice and the theory of risks, is highlighted as the most recent trend in criminological science.Practical significance: the account of trends and positive experience gained in the sphere of digitalization determines the successful solution of the tasks associated with crime counteraction, transformation of approaches to the content, goals and methodology of applied criminology and criminal justice. The global megatrend of digitalization essentially changes the appearance of the criminal-legal science, sets the new theoretical and applied directions of its development. Timely upgrade and adaptation of knowledge, skills and capabilities in compliance with the achievements of digitalization will allow criminology and criminal justice to correspond to the tasks of the new millennium.

Neoliberalism, Crime and Criminal Justice

Resisting the Politics of Punishment: Political Culture and the Evolution of Canadian Criminal Justice Policy

In 1972, nearly $1.9 billion was spent by the federal government on the criminal justice system. This included amounts spent for police protection, courts, corrections, and law enforcement assistance. By 1977, this amount had risen to $3.6 billion. Indeed, in the United States a national war on crime had been declared. And consistently one-half of these billions of dollars of federal expenditures were in defense of the streets. Police protection allocations from the federal criminal justice budget remained between 47% and 51% during the period 1972-77, though the total federal criminal justice budget jumped by 90%, almost doubling what was being spent on the federal level to combat crime. These figures understate the extent to which the federal government sent armies of warriors on to the domestic battlefields in the ghettos, inner-city housing projects, and declining residential and commercial neighborhoods across the country. Likewise, the figures do not account for the expenses of all of the lieutenants of morals and generals of peace in the wealthy suburbs, rolling farmlands, and urban oases which were financed through state or local funds, and supplemented by federal grants made to states under the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. But the startling size of the allocation of federal money for crime control is indicative of a national commitment to reduce visible street criminal offenses. There is no doubt that the U.S. government financed an all-out war in the 1970s, even though escalation slowed toward the end of the decade. If there is now in the 1980s a lull on the battlefield -- some contend that though the war is not won, one major victory has been scored by a perceptible decline in crime rates for some offenses -- then it is appropriate to pause and reflect. Is the emphasis on crime control through increased police manpower or new prison construction disproportionate to more recent emphasis on crime prevention? Is the war best fought on an institutionalized level (i.e., in the courts, the prisons and jail houses, and with the weaponry of duly appointed law enforcement officials) or perhaps on a grass-roots community level? In reviewing a number of innovative strategies for reducing crime that make creative use of community resources, that actively involve citizen participation, and that do or can be expected to impact upon the lives of low-income and minority people, one arrives at the following thesis: The share of federal support for criminal justice going to minority people and their communities, and to the programs that they can believe in and relate to, is not proportionate to the originality and promise of the nontraditional programs funded. Admittedly, there have been vast sums of money entering minority and other low-income communities by way of federal anticrime spending. But the dollar amounts for these often ingenious and novel approaches to crime prevention are a trickle compared to the outlays made for the traditional catch-them/lock-them-up methods of crime control. The thesis is not based on a cynical preconception that the law enforcement establishment never allowed or would have allowed substantial infringement upon its traditional domain by increased community involvement in anticrime activities. It is based in part on some incomplete data on expenditures by activity in the criminal justice program. But it is also based in part on the evidence the the alternative strategies have been viewed as experiments, new ideas requiring time for refinement and development, and therefore as being inadequate as wholesale replacements for the old-time religion. It is useful to examine the evidence closely.

Revisiting packer’s models: Examining Nigeria's criminal justice system in the COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 era

A number of disciplines have been deeply affected in recent years by constructionism, an approach that analyzes the processes by which social information is produced, disseminated, “verified,” and “disconfirmed.” Criminal justice too has developed a constructionist tradition, albeit mainly through attracting scholars from other fields into its terrain. This article traces the accumulation of the constructionist tradition within criminal justice by examining work in four areas: social histories of criminal justice practice and theory; critical criminology; research on the victimization of females; and feminist theory about the contribution of criminal justice to understandings of gender. If the constructionist approach continues to develop within criminal justice, it may lay the basis for a sociology of knowledge in the field.

Most of the studies on crime show that no society is immune from crime and organized crime. Large or small, complex or simple, developed or underdeveloped, every society faces the task of controlling crime and organized crime. Furthermore, recent events reveal that the so‐called ‘'domestic crime'’ has become more globalized, or internationalized. Unless dramatic changes take place, collectively, e.g., by the United Nations, no single nation can expect to control or regulate illegal activities. In particular, crime prevention and criminal justice has been a long standing agenda item of the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council; the two principal legislative bodies governing the United Nations program of work in the criminal justice field. The Council is, after the Assembly itself, the major legislative and policy‐making organ of the United Nations. The field of criminal justice is an important component of social and economic affair, the Economic and Social Council determines policy and initiates activities. Within the United Nations system, the most direct responsibility for international efforts toward crime prevention and control is borne by the recently created Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (which has replaced the expert subsidiary body of the Economic and Social Council, namely, the Committee on Crime Prevention and Control) and the Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Branch. The establishment of the Commission, by the Economic and Social Council in February 1992, ushered in a new era in United Nations involvement in crime prevention and criminal justice. The commitment of the Member States to the prevention of crime and the promotion of justice through strengthened international cooperation has been clearly spelled out in numerous General Assembly and Economic and Social Council resolutions. Those resolutions are indicative of the Member States’ heightened awareness and concern that crime, in its internationalized form, has to be tackled by a multilateral approach including international cooperative measures, and that interdependent efforts are urgently required. The Commission provides a means by which Governments can be directly involved in the determination and supervision of the program of work of the United Nations in crime prevention and can clearly manifest their political will. Its establishment was the result of a long process of review of the functioning and program of work of the United Nations in crime prevention and criminal justice, and was seen as an indispensable condition of a structural reorganization of United Nations activities in this field. For further information on CRIME PREVENTION AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE, and THE UNITED NATIONS COMMISSION ON CRIME PREVENTION AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE, see UN Newsletter, Numbers 22/23, July, l993. Further information on Operational Activities of the Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Branch since the First Session of the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in April 1992 (on Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe Western Europe and North America and Global aspects, see the same documents, pp. 22–26 for more detail.

This article identifies and discusses examples of populist calls against punishment and for leniency—a phenomenon here termed ‘populist leniency’. A penal moderate might find such populist opposition to punishment superficially appealing. However, drawing from Packer’s classic models of the criminal process, it is argued that both populist leniency and penal populism express ‘Crime Control’ values, the view that the proper role of the criminal process (and criminal justice) is to protect ‘law-abiding citizens’ from dangerous others. Since ‘Crime Control’ does not advocate any net reduction in penal power (and if anything, quite the opposite), the article asks whether Packer’s other model, ‘Due Process’, presents a more attractive potential resource for penal moderates, since this model offers a sceptical view of criminal justice, protecting individuals from unconstrained official power.

From Social Welfare to Social Control: Federal War in American Cities, 1968-1988 Elizabeth Hinton The first historical account of federal crime control policy, “From Social Welfare to Social Control” contextualizes the mass incarceration of marginalized Americans by illuminating the process that gave rise to the modern carceral state in the decades after the Civil Rights Movement. The dissertation examines the development of the national law enforcement program during its initial two decades, from the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which established the block grant system and a massive federal investment into penal and juridical agencies, to the Omnibus Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which set sentencing guidelines that ensured historic incarceration rates. During this critical period, Presidential Administrations, State Departments, and Congress refocused the domestic agenda from social programs to crime and punishment. To challenge our understanding of the liberal welfare state and the rise of modern conservatism, “From Social Welfare to Social Control” emphasizes the bipartisan dimensions of punitive policy and situates crime control as the dominant federal response to the social and demographic transformations brought about by mass protest and the decline of domestic manufacturing. The federal government’s decision to manage the material consequences of rising unemployment, subpar school systems, and poverty in American cities as they manifested through crime reinforced violence within the communities national law enforcement legislation targeted with billions of dollars in grant funds from 1968 onwards. By highlighting the role of race-neutral language in federal policy following civil rights legislation, the study also exposes the way structural racism endured after racism in the public sphere was no longer acceptable. Tracking the discretionary portion of the law enforcement budget that Congress permitted the White House to spend autonomously illustrates the way racism grounded color-blind crime control programs over time. With novel use of discretionary aid, White House Officials enlarged the federal government’s influence over local authorities while still operating through the new states’ rights paradigm the Safe Streets Act created via block grants. On the ground, federal law enforcement assistance heightened patrol forces in black urban neighborhoods and social institutions, causing disproportionate arrest rates and the unprecedented entrance of young Americans from areas of segregated poverty into state and federal penitentiaries. At the close of the first twenty years of the national law enforcement program, the number of inmates in American prisons had more than tripled. Ultimately, the dissertation questions the way the federal government helped to facilitate the process through which the state apparatus of punishment—including law enforcement, criminal justice, border management, and prison systems—quickly developed into its own viable industry in the context of urban deindustrialization and disinvestment. In contributing to debates about the persistence of poverty in the United States and drawing our attention to the federal government’s role in sustaining punitive policy that first emerged in the 1960s, “From Social Welfare to Social Control” provides critical insight to one of the most important questions facing our society: why, in the land of the free, are more than one in a hundred American citizens in prison or jail?

This paper aims to develop Foucault's concepts to articulate some recently transforming characteristics of crime control, such as crime risk management, the deployment of new penology, harsh criminal justice policies and dramatically increasing prisoners. The direction of contemporary crime control has shifted into an economic discourse emphasizing a criminal as a rational, an economic and a situational man, and established an actuarial language as mechanisms of appraising and arranging dangerous groups rather than intervening in the lives of individuals. The acceleration of demands for rationality, accountability, and managerialism has become crystallized. The analysis of 'disciplinary techniques', 'exercise of power' and 'governmentality' from Foucault provides insightful explanation about the intertwining relationship of penal-government complex in shaping crime control issues and policies. The framework of new criminology assumes that crime is ordinary and predictable. Various possibilities and opportunities for illegal activities actually occur in the economic and social realms of everyday lives. This paper attempts to construct a triangle figure of crime control for further understanding the strategies and techniques that are currently emerging in the field of crime control. Furthermore, the paper argues how much extent the Taiwanese penal development can be traced to the context of the contemporary crime control strategies. It hopes to offer explicit perspectives and interpretations for the development of contemporary crime control and punishment.

This book offers a comprehensive and engaging introduction to the criminal justice system of England and Wales. Starting with an overview of the main theories of the causes of crime, this book explores and discusses the operation of the main criminal justice agencies including the police, probation and prison services and the legal and youth justice systems. The fourth edition has been revised, updated, expanded and features a new expert co-author. This book offers a lively and critical discussion of some of the main themes in criminal justice, from policy-making and crime control, to diversity and discrimination, to the global dimensions of criminal justice, including organised crime and the role performed by transnational policing organisations to combat it. Key updates to this new edition include: increased discussion of the measurement, prevention and detection of crime; a revised chapter on the police which discusses the principle of policing by consent, police methods, power and governance, and the abuse of power; further discussion of pressing contemporary issues in criminal justice, such as privatisation, multi-agency working, community-based criminal justice policy and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the delivery of criminal justice policy; a revised chapter that deals in detail with new and emerging forms of criminality and the response of the UK and global criminal justice system to these developments. This accessible text is essential reading for students taking introductory courses in criminology and criminal justice. A wide range of useful features include review questions, lists of further reading, timelines of key events and a glossary of key terms.