‘Rolling back the state’: Mrs. Thatcher's criminological legacy

Abstract

Of late, there has been a growing interest in understanding the social, economic and cultural changes that have taken place since the 1950s and the experience of crime in the UK since the 1970s. Key amongst these texts have been those respectively by Garland and Young. My aim in this essay is to seek to understand the role of New Right government policies in bringing the UK to the point where it is now, and how these policies have shaped crime and some people's experiences of it since. This account stands in contrast to that offered by Garland which makes little reference to specific administrations or their policies. My aim is to show that changes in government policy can (and did) have quite dramatic effects on people's experiences of crime. This essay stands as a counter to one of Garland's central claims that structural patterns cannot be rendered visible in case studies.