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Reconnecting the King with his head: The fall and resurrection of the state in
criminological theory
Simon Hallsworth and John Lea
Crime Media Culture 2012 8: 185
DOI: 10.1177/1741659012444430

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CMC8210.1177/1741659012444430Hallsworth and LeaCrime Media Culture

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Crime Media Culture

8(2) 185­–195
Reconnecting the King with his © The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1741659012444430
the state in criminological theory cmc.sagepub.com

Simon Hallsworth
London Metropolitan University, UK

John Lea
University of Brighton, UK

Abstract
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.

Keywords
globalization, governmentality, neoliberalism, social control, state

Whatever happened to the state in criminological theory? Up to the 1980s, state analysis was
considered integral to the study of crime and social control, a legacy both of Marxism and the
ascendency of the New Left within academia during the 1960s. Such analysis, exemplified in
books such as Policing the Crisis (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts, 1978), were also
theoretically rich, drawing upon the insights of theorists such as Poulantzas and Gramsci to forge
an interpretation of the changing nature of the state in the postwar period. Then the state literally
vanished as an object of criminological enquiry and, with the exception of Marxist-inspired critical

Corresponding author:
Simon Hallsworth, London Metropolitan University, London, UK.
Email: s.hallsworth@londonmet.ac.uk

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186 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 8(2)

traditions, criminologists either forgot to talk about it, or relegated it to the margins of their
enquiries, viewing it either as irrelevant to study or as a debilitated relic of a bygone age.
In this article we problematise this shift: the rise of and retreat from the state. To accomplish
this, we present a story in four stages. We begin in the context of the post Second World War,
welfare state settlement, an era when the state was considered a benign actor and one which
criminologists could unproblematically work with and for. We then trace the rise of a new critically
informed approach to the welfare state as it began to enter a period of crisis from the 1970s
onward. Here the state began to be perceived less as a benevolent actor and more as an authori-
tarian formation. With particular reference to the work of Hall and his colleagues we examine the
development of this, the authoritarian state thesis, and consider its various offspring. We then
consider a range of forces that have collectively worked to marginalise the analysis of the state
within criminology. These include the triumph of neoliberalism, the decline of Marxism, the recep-
tion of Foucault’s work and the impact of globalisation theory on criminological thought. Finally,
we profile an emerging body of critical work that not only attests to the continued significance of
the state but also casts considerable doubt on many of the criticisms that have been made justify-
ing its marginalisation. In the context of a criminological tradition that still remains in hock to
Foucault’s injunction that analysis would proceed better by metaphorically cutting off the King’s
head, we will suggest that these developments invite us to rethink this approach. In the context
of societies where the state never disappeared and 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 and the Welfare State

Criminology was never by nature an outlaw science, it was from the beginning a research tradition
dedicated to the task of helping the state identify and respond to the problems posed by criminal-
ity, where the criminals in question were typically of the ‘usual suspect’ variety: young, working
class and male. Confronting the ignorance of public opinion from below and political populism
from above, criminologists, or more accurately the various psychologists and legal theorists who
worked within the domain of penal policy-making, sought to provide expert opinion on crime and
about criminals in the context of a political field where their expertise mattered and where, as a
restricted policy elite, their views counted (Ryan 2003).
Within the developing welfare state this elite, by and large, conceived crime as a social problem
that had social causes that benevolent interventions could engineer away. Working broadly within
a positivistic tradition, crime was conceived as a residual problem that an expanding welfare state,
committed to full employment and organised around Keynesian principles, could address. Crime
was low on the political agenda and its regulation was seen as a largely apolitical technical issue
(Downes and Morgan, 1994). While prisons existed, they were by and large viewed as relics of a
bygone era soon to be rendered obsolete by new cadres of experts committed to the benevolent
progress model of social change (Cohen, 1985).
Within the order of ‘penal welfarism’, as Garland would term this complex (Garland, 2001), the
state was not itself an object of enquiry. Criminology was a discourse of the state and the crimi-
nologist someone who unproblematically worked to ensure that the social response to crime
proceeded benevolently. Such optimism, however, would be short-lived as the welfare settlement

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began to fracture and crime rates began their seemingly inexorable rise upwards. While the crime
experts employed within bodies such as the Home Office remained, over time they would begin to
play a far less prominent part in the business of crime control. Partly, they were crippled by what
Jock Young identified as an ‘aetiological crisis’ gathering pace from the 1960s in which mainstream
criminology found itself unable to reconcile rising crime rates with continued economic expansion
and overall reductions of poverty (Young, 1987). Meanwhile new players began to enter the field.
Of particular relevance were new cadres of law-and-order politicians who had little faith in the
expertise of restricted elites and who, in societies where crime control was becoming ever more
politicised, began to initiate a punitive turn in penal policy in which, from being considered the
solution to the problems posed by crime, penal welfarism itself came to be viewed as part of the
problem (Garland, 2001). Against a backdrop characterised by a wider crisis of the welfare state,
intensifying class conflict and a new more authoritarian law-and-order climate, the emerging state
form itself would become the subject of analysis by a new, critically informed and sociologically
grounded group of social scientists, not least among which were the new class of criminologists
who attended the new National Deviancy conferences of the 1970s. These sociologists by no
means saw themselves as servants of the state, nor did they view the state as a benevolent actor.

The Authoritarian State and its Offspring

It is in the work of Stuart Hall and his colleagues in the Birmingham School that we witness the
first comprehensive attempt to problematise the state, a theme they substantively developed in
their seminal work, Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978). Though formally an analysis of the social
response to a street crime wave, the book may be more accurately understood as an attempt to
grasp the cultural dynamics of the British state as it began to mutate in a more authoritarian direc-
tion as the welfare state settlement of the postwar years began to fracture in the 1970s. As this
text was pivotal to the development of critical criminology, a brief consideration of its central
argument is justified.
By the end of the 1970s the British state was confronting what Hall et al., drawing upon
Gramsci, defined as an ‘organic crisis’ (Gramsci, 1971). In effect, it could no longer reproduce the
conditions necessary to sustain the circuit of capital and thus capitalist accumulation. The postwar
boom economy had tilted towards recession and industrial decline, one consequence of which
would be Britain’s diminished status as a world power. In the face of burgeoning economic crisis
that would herald mass industrial unrest, three-day weeks and eventually the destruction of vast
sectors of its primary manufacturing industry, the hegemonic consensus that had been estab-
lished in the welfare state began to fracture. The recognition of workers’ organisations, extension
of workers’ rights, corporatist trends, the formation of an inclusive welfare state—the very terms
by which the postwar hegemony had been achieved—began to fall apart. A state crisis was pro-
voked in a context where capitalism’s failure as an economic system was in danger of being
openly revealed.
It was during this period of crisis where the existing hegemonic project was failing that the
beginning of a new one began to be forged. The medium of transformation and the subject mat-
ter of Policing the Crisis was itself the social response to what was presented through the media
at the time as an unprecedented crisis of law and order posed by a new category of deviant, the
black street ‘mugger’. Drawing upon Stan Cohen’s work but resituating his analysis within a

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Marxist political economy, Hall et al. argued that the sensational media reporting of black street
theft derived, not from any noticeable rise in street crime, but rather from a moral panic. The tim-
ing of the moral panic was, Hall et al. affirmed, by no means accidental: this was a panic with a
purpose. What it would facilitate was a way of resolving the organic crisis of the state by helping
forge a new hegemonic equilibrium.
It would function this way because in the media identification of the ‘black mugger’ a conveni-
ent scapegoat was devised upon which the collective fury of British society could be harnessed
and projected. Different classes may well be opposed but street crime provided a point of negative
identification around which a class consensus could be constructed and through it a disunited
society would become unified in their fear and hatred. Moreover, this unified public would also
come to accept the state-driven authoritarian ‘solution’ to the crisis as morally just and justified.
This would resolve itself into the derogation of ever more coercive powers to the repressive appa-
ratus of the state.
Through this scapegoating process a crisis that had its genesis in the economic base was suc-
cessfully displaced to the ideological superstructure where it became reconstructed as a crisis over
law and order. In this act of ideological displacement the conditions were created for what would
become a new hegemonic equilibrium, and so a new authoritarian state was born in what Stuart
Hall would go on to define as the forward ‘drift into a law and order society’.
The repression of mugging would subsequently become a blueprint for what, under Thatcher,
would became a neoliberal state formation in which the politics of law and order would assume
ever greater salience, where greater powers were devolved to the police, while institutional safe-
guards, such as civil liberties, were dramatically curtailed. Only, where Poulantzas had read this
form of ‘exceptional state’ construction as a process characterised by ‘authoritarian statism’
(Poulantzas, 1975), Hall argued instead that the assault on rights and liberties within the context
of a nominally democratic open society could better be read as ‘authoritarian populism’. This term
would then come to dominate his analysis of Thatcherism and its success throughout the 1980s
(Hall, 1988).
Developing further the account developed in Policing the Crisis, Hall argued that the success of
Thatcherism ultimately lay in its ability to garner support from the very working class who had the
most to lose from the retrenchment of the welfare state and the attack on the trade unions her
government was otherwise pursuing. Thatcherism was successful because through the appeal of
its authoritarian populism it was able to condense a wide range of popular discontents provoked
by the reality of Britain’s stark and visible decline in the postwar era. These were then successfully
articulated around a right-wing agenda which promised to ‘save’ the nation through a series of
‘get tough’ ‘solutions’. These would include crushing the unions and embracing a hard-line law-
and-order rhetoric directed at various ‘enemies within’ (as Thatcher would memorably character-
ise her mission). By embracing the public with an appeal to its innate conservatism, and by
promising to renew British society through a rampant neonationalist project predicated on the
protection of British sovereignty, Thatcherism (understood as a new power bloc seeking hegem-
ony) came to assume intellectual dominance and moral authority in Britain. Its power base lay
both in the control that the Thatcher Government was able to command through its control of
state power, and also through the control it was able to exercise through ‘the trenches and forti-
fication systems of civil society’ to mediate and cement its ideological appeal.

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Both the arguments posed in Policing the Crisis and the centrality of authoritarian populism
were subsequently challenged within the Marxist camp. Jessop, Bonnett, Bromley and Ling (1984)
challenged Hall’s assumption that the 1980s marked a watershed in the process of state change
and transformation by arguing instead that processes of continuity in the postwar period were
more dominant than the rupture and break Hall claimed to have found. Jessop also challenged the
degree to which authoritarian populism resonated with the wider public, who by no means
bought into (for example) the attempt to cut welfare spending. It was more the failure of Labour
to effectively confront Thatcher and articulate a compelling vision, Jessop argued, that best
explained Thatcher’s electoral success, than a populist appeal to their worst prejudice.
After Hall and his colleagues’ intervention, critical criminology by and large came to accept the
vision of the authoritarian state as this had been articulated in Policing the Crisis. In Phil Scraton’s
edited collection (Scraton, 1988), the British state is predominantly presented as a coercive forma-
tion which mobilises the mechanisms of the criminal justice system for the purpose of class, gen-
der and ethnic repression against what Hillyard (1993) would subsequently come to term various
‘suspect communities’. From an analysis of state transformation the focus of critical criminology
began to shift towards charting the way the criminalisation process was being enacted against
various deviant groups by the state apparatus and registering the harms it occasioned along the
way. The state in the process came to be seen as little more than a perennial authoritarian forma-
tion that was inherently violent. Critical criminology registered the effects of this violence and
sought to celebrate all forms of resistance against it.
The endgame of this line of analysis would resolve itself into several tendencies, both support-
ive and critical. The analysis of resistance would become the focus of various ‘underdog’ forms of
sociology. Youth subculture, in particular, became the favoured object of analysis. Its stylistic
innovations were celebrated and subsequently explained as indicative of a culture of resistance.
This form of analysis would result in one of the other great achievements of the Birmingham
School, Resistance through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson, 1976), the themes of which are still repro-
duced today in cultural criminology (Ferrell, 2004; Ferrell and Sanders, 1995). The authoritarian
state thesis also provoked renewed interest in the study of state crime, where the state was now
treated as no more than a criminal actor in its own right. The work of Tony Ward and Penny Green
today exemplify this tradition (Green and Ward, 2004). Finally, having challenged the legitimacy
of criminal law and beyond that the repressive apparatus of the state, critical criminologists have
sought to discover alternative approaches by and through which social harms could be addressed
and resolved without recourse to state repression. Abolitionism, in this sense, emerged as a
replacement discourse to criminal justice for critical criminology (de Haan, 1990; Hulsman, 1986).
There remained however another critical response to the authoritarian state thesis, Left Realism.
Its proponents also came from the critical criminological tradition, only their relationship to the
state would differ significantly from that of a critical tradition that had forsaken any and all
attempts to do business with it and who condemned those who did as literally feeding from the
state’s ‘trough’ (Scraton, 1988). In retrospect, Left Realism may be seen as the last attempt on the
part of a liberal left to reason with the state. Arguing that crime was far more than a discursive
construction of the powerful, Left Realists sought to humanise the business of crime control by
problematising the question ‘what is to be done about law and order’ (Lea and Young, 1984).
Their solution: a radical democratic politics of law and order grounded on the assumption that the
state and its relationship to crime could be and needed to be changed. While New Labour under

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190 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 8(2)

Blair would embrace the need to ‘get real’ about crime, the punitive neoliberal response that
would follow bore very little relevance to the socialist agenda that Left Realists advocated. Left
Realists were quickly consigned to the margins.

The Criminological Retreat from the State

The expulsion of liberal criminology from the policy-making apparatus of the state was reflected
in the rise of a ‘crime science’ wholly divorced from social science (Clarke, 2010). This, in turn, was
a consequence of the triumph of neoliberalism and the crisis of the welfare state. It reflected the
material reality of political regimes that were seeking to inflict privatisation across the public sector
and which spoke openly about the need to cut back on welfare and ‘roll back the state’.
But at the same time within critical criminology the study of the state began to wither. The
theoretical landscape was also changing, and in ways that would further marginalise the state and
its analysis. Of these, four bear consideration.

The Retreat from Class and Capital

First, there was a general disenchantment with Marxism and its key assumptions, part of what
Ellen Meiksins Wood (1986) termed ‘a retreat from class’. Various proponents of ‘post Marxism’
attacked its status as a master narrative. The ascendancy of identity politics along with forms of
poststructural theory also helped intensify a retreat from the study of social class. In the UK this
process of disenchantment was reflected in developments ranging from the collapse of the maga-
zine Marxism Today to the defeat of the trade unions by the Thatcher governments. On a larger
scale the tendency was reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of free
market capitalism under American hegemony. While a Marxist-inspired critical criminology contin-
ued, it remained at the margins of the discipline.
The retreat from class was part of a general retreat from capitalism as the key driver of social
development. Emphasis shifted from late capitalism (Mandel, 1975) to late modernity (see
Garland, 2001; Young, 1999, 2007) which, while providing perceptive analysis of the anomie,
fragmentation and uncertainty of contemporary society, tended to underemphasise the rooted-
ness of these developments in the concrete dynamics of capitalist development. The result was a
lack of focus on neoliberalism as a distinct articulation of state strategy. In his materialist contribu-
tion to the rehabilitation of the state as an instrument for the control and oppression of the poor,
Loïc Wacquant (2009: 303) emphasises that:

it is not the generic ‘risks and anxieties’ of ‘the open, porous, mobile society of strangers that
is late modernity’ that have fostered retaliation against lower-class categories … but the spe-
cific social insecurity generated by the fragmentation of wage labour.

The Foucault Effect

The second major transition that would help stimulate the movement away from the state was the
reception of Foucault’s work and the huge influence the ‘Foucault effect’ had on theory and prac-
tice. Though by no means hostile to a Marxist tradition in which he was also a major force,
Foucault’s work challenged many Marxist assumptions about the centrality of the state. It was a

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Hallsworth and Lea 191

challenge played out on many fronts. His analysis of the disciplines, understood as grounded upon
generative power, was developed as a direct challenge to a Marxist tradition which he saw as
overemphasising state power as a negative expression of force and coercion (Foucault, 1979). In
place of a focus on the state understood as a juridical regime, Foucault stressed the importance of
governmentality and governance. This, understood as ‘the conduct of conduct’, was a process
occurring on a plurality of levels, micro and macro, and by a variety of agencies besides the state,
including families, communities, a wide variety of non-state actors and private entities (Johnston
and Shearing, 2003; Singh, 2005). The state was relegated to the status of simply one of a num-
ber of actors in this process whose role could be easily overemphasised. This theoretical sidelining
was subsequently embraced by Foucault’s followers, who had little trouble in further marginalis-
ing the state in their own analysis where its death was described variously as the ‘rolling back’ of
the state, the retreat of its functions from ‘rowing’ to ‘steering’ (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992) and
the ‘death of the social’ (Rose, 1996).
In criminology many of these tendencies were reflected in the study of the increasing role of
non-state organisations in crime prevention, management of prisons, supervision of offenders
and in the role of private policing. Thus in major texts in critical criminology over the last twenty
years—e.g. Cohen (1985), Garland (2001) and Zedner (2009)—Foucault’s legacy can clearly be
seen in the diminished role of the state in such analysis. Garland recognises the centrality of the
state but his key emphasis points to a more nebulous ‘culture of control’ (Garland, 2001). Zedner
refers to the emergence of a ‘security society’ (Zedner, 2009). Meanwhile Johnston and Shearing
(2003) take the marginalisation of the state to its logical conclusion in their work on ‘nodal secu-
rity’. The state remains only in the distance as the ultimate repository of legitimate coercion and
legal title to property rather than as the central agency of social control.

Globalisation and the ‘Withering of the State’

The third tendency that would conspire to marginalise the state was the growing body of litera-
ture on globalisation where this was theorised as a force that was fatally weakening the coordina-
tion powers of nation-states, not only over their economies but also over such matters as cultural
values and population movements. With new global flows in capital, technology, culture, informa-
tion and people, the image of the nation-state as a self-contained socioeconomic and political
structure appeared to belong to a stage in modernity that was fast disappearing. Franko Aas
summarises well the underlying thinking:

The various global flows, modalities, and ‘scapes’ challenge the idea that we are dealing with
homogenous, territorially delineated units of research indeed if we ever have been. They chal-
lenge ‘the assumptions about the nation state as a container of progress (Sasson 2007). (Franko
Aas, 2010: 431)1

For criminologists interested in issues of transnational global security and international organised
crime, the effect has been to marginalise the state as a debilitated relic, desperately aspiring to
exercise sovereignty in a world where the porosity of the border renders such attempts meaning-
less. This view now prevails in studies of transnational policing and international security as well
as in the developing field of cybercrime and eco-crime. In what, for many, appears a de-bordering
world, the traditional distinctions between internal and external security that once defined the

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192 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 8(2)

modus operandi of the national state have become all but obsolete; likewise, traditional concep-
tual distinctions between crime, warfare and punishment. Bodies involved in the social control of
global risks have also hybridised in the face of these globalising forces, again reinforcing the idea
that the state as conventionally imagined is no longer an appropriate vehicle through which to
assess these tectonic shifts.
As a thesis about the ‘withering away of the state’, globalisation can muster some powerful
arguments, specifically in relation to the state’s incapacity to regulate these new global flows. Such
stark limits can be seen in the state’s inability to regulate the huge wealth hidden in offshore tax
havens (Sheptycki, 2000); in the inability of western states to curb the supply and consumption of
illegal drugs—despite their formal commitment to build ‘drug-free societies’; and their inability to
successfully draw to a conclusion foreign policy adventures in states such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
If we consider the progressive privatisation of crime control functions away from the state and
into a burgeoning private sector, coupled with the introduction of market solutions into policy
arenas like health and security, once considered the prerogative of the state, then these forces all
work to suggest that the nation-state can no longer be considered the central provider of security
and social control. Cumulatively what these trends have worked to enforce is a climate where the
state is typically examined in terms of what it has lost and can no longer do rather than in terms
of what it now does.

The Return of the State

The problem is that the state never went away. Nor did it stand still. Indeed, many of the develop-
ments which were seen as heralding its demise were only possible through the decisive exercise of
state power. What appeared as decline and debilitation was in fact part of the process of mutation
and rearticulation (Crawford, 2006; Hallsworth and Lea, 2011; Lea 2002). Furthermore, it is no
exaggeration to assert that the global economic crisis unfolding since 2007 has decisively settled
the issue of the continued centrality of the state as an instrument of both economic and social
policy and a decisive actor in the international system. What concerns us here is how this has been
reflected in the way various tendencies in criminology have sought to refocus on the state. In what
follows we conclude by looking at three adaptive responses to the state as these have been under-
taken respectively by liberal criminologists, administrative criminologists and critical criminologists.

Seeking Readmittance: The Case of the Evicted Liberal Elite

Many criminologists have continued to resent their eviction from the corridors of power conse-
quent on the decline of liberal criminology as a state discourse and its displacement by ‘crime
science’ and other fashions. There is currently an attempt to demonstrate continued relevance so
that liberal criminology too might be readmitted to the corridors of power. This, in our opinion, is
the significance of the agenda of public criminology. While some, like Elliot Currie (2007), see
public criminology as implying a radical, possibly oppositional political mobilising role, writers such
as Loader and Sparks (2011) envisage the re-creation of a public sphere within which criminology
will be able to influence policy.
Such a view can be admired for its integrity; however, as Loïc Wacquant has wryly commented,
Loader and Sparks’s text is:

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Hallsworth and Lea 193

missing a meaty chapter on the neoliberal institutional ecology within which criminological knowl-
edge is now being produced, validated and appropriated (or ignored). (Wacquant, 2011: 442)

In a similar way Roger Matthews (2009) offers a ‘re-fashioned realist criminology’ underpinned by
the philosophy of critical realism and with a focus on ‘policy relevance’. He is well aware that
‘what we are seeing is the growth of an interventionist state’ (2009: 350) and sees one of the aims
of critical realism as understanding why certain control strategies are introduced by the state.
Nevertheless, in the stress on policy relevance the burden appears to fall almost entirely on crimi-
nology to develop ‘theoretically informed interventions employing an appropriate methodology’
(2009: 343). Policy relevance, it seems legitimate to assume, is something to be determined by the
state. Yet it is difficult to see how realism can be critical without a clearer focus on the fact that
‘relevance’ is itself heavily influenced by prevailing power relations and in the present context. A
critical realism must be oriented to a critique precisely of those power relations and the strategies
of the neoliberal state within which they are embodied, rather than seeing them as either benevo-
lent or, at least, non-repressive (see Matthews, 2005; O’Malley, 2000).

Reconnecting the King with his Head: The Return of Critical

Theory
In conclusion, there is considerable cause for optimism regarding the renewal of critical theory in
criminology. For a growing constituency of radical criminologists, reflecting wider developments,
the issue is no longer the importance of the state as such but the dynamics and contours of new
forms of social and penal control being developed by the neoliberal state. The worst economic
and social crisis since the Second World War has reinforced this shift of focus and underlined once
and for all the centrality of the state in the management of economic crisis and its consequences.
The effect in radical criminology has been that a number of debates in existence for some time—
the rise of risk management, urban security and surveillance, varieties of the ‘punitive turn’ in
penal systems—achieve a new salience as aspects of what Wacquant (2010) has usefully termed
‘neoliberal state-crafting’.
A growing number of scholars are exploring aspects of the emerging authoritarian consensus
built around the punitiveness infusing the established penal and welfare systems of Europe and
the US (Bell, 2011; Wacquant, 2009). But most important, there is a growing awareness of the
emergence of new varieties of coercion, focused on marginalised populations, within the inter-
stices of liberal democracy (see, for example, de Giorgi 2006, 2010; Hallsworth and Lea, 2011).
The latter has led to a useful debate, for example, with Wacquant over the relative importance of
the penal system in relation to a spectrum of other agencies, both public and private, through
which the new control mechanisms of the neoliberal state are being established (Lea and
Hallsworth, 2012; Meyer, 2010).
The centrality of the state has been reconfirmed and the task of critical criminology in relation
to the state is now clearer than it has been for some time: to document and understand the new
forms of regulation and coercion that are emerging in the fields of penality, security and crime
control. This project, we conclude, is integral to any attempt to (re)develop ‘new deviancy’ for new,
new times.

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194 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 8(2)

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

Note
1. It should be noted that here that Franko Aas is summarising the debate. As she subsequently makes
clear, far from globalisation withering the state, such developments have created the preconditions for a
significant coercive reasserton of state power and authority, a view commensurate with our own.

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Author biographies
Simon Hallsworth is Professor of Sociology at University Campus Ipswich, United Kingdom,
where he is also Head of the School of Applied Social Sciences. He is author of Street Crime (2005)
and was co-editor of The New Punitiveness: Trends, Theories, Perspectives (2005). He has written
on penal change and development and is engaged in research conducted into violent street
worlds and street organizations.

John Lea is Visiting Professor of Criminology at the University of Brighton, United Kingdom. He is
author (with Jock Young) of What Is to Be Done about Law and Order? (1984) and has published
on issues concerning crime and criminal justice in postmodern society and racism in criminal
justice agencies. His most recent book is Crime and Modernity (Sage, 2002).

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