The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. (2023)

Notes on Contributors
The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

Alison Liebling, Shadd Maruna, and Lesley McAra
p. xxi Notes on Contributors

Alison Liebling, Shadd Maruna and Lesley Mcara
Katherine M. Auty is Senior Research Associate at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.
Andy Aydın-Aitchison is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Edinburgh School of Law.
Nick Blagden is Professor in Criminological Psychology at the University of Derby, former Head of the
Sexual Offences Crime and Misconduct Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University, and co-founder and
trustee of the Safer Living Foundation.
Mary Bosworth is Professor of Criminology and Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford.
Ben Bowling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s
College London.
Ben Bradford is Professor of Global City Policing and Director of the Centre for Global City Policing at the
Department of Security and Crime Science, University College London.
Avi Brisman is a Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, an Adjunct
Professor in the School of Justice at Queensland University of Technology (Australia), and an Honorary
Professor at Newcastle School of Law and Justice and a University Fellow at the Centre of Law and Social
Justice at the University of Newcastle (Australia).
Mirza Buljubašić is Postdoctoral Research Associate at Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and
Law Enforcement (NSCR) and Senior Assistant at the Faculty of Criminal Justice, Criminology and Security
Studies, University of Sarajevo.
Michele Burman is Professor of Criminology in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the
University of Glasgow.
Paolo Campana is Associate Professor in Criminology and Complex Networks at the Institute of
Criminology, University of Cambridge.
Victoria Canning is Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Bristol.
Ryan Casey is Interdisciplinary Research Fellow in Digital Society & Economy at the University of Glasgow.
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Neil Chakraborti is Professor in Criminology and Director of the Centre for Hate Studies at the School of
Criminology, University of Leicester. He is also Director of the Institute of Policy at the University of
Leicester.
Amy Clarke is a Research Fellow for the Centre for Hate Studies at the School of Criminology, University of
Leicester.
Ben Collier is Lecturer in Digital Methods at the University of Edinburgh.
p. xxii ↵ Adam Crawford is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Leeds and
Professor of Policing and Social Justice at the University of York. He is also Co-Director of the ESRC
Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre.
Ben Crewe is Deputy Director of the Prisons Research Centre and Professor of Penology & Criminal Justice
at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.
Danica Darley is completing a PhD at the University of Sheffield and conducts research with and about
children in care and the youth justice system.
Bill Davies is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University.
Susan Donkin is Research Fellow in European Urban Security at the University of Leeds.
Ron Dudai is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University.
Rod Earle is Senior Lecturer in the School of Health, Wellbeing and Social Care at The Open University.
Manuel Eisner is Wolfson Professor of Criminology and Director of the Institute of Criminology, University
of Cambridge.
Katja Franko is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oslo.
Alistair Fraser is Professor of Criminology in the Scottish Centre of Crime & Justice Research, University of
Glasgow.
Pete Fussey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex.
David Gadd is Professor of Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester.
David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York
University.
Loraine Gelsthorpe is Professor Emerita of the Institute of Criminology; Deputy Director of the Centre for
Community, Gender & Social Justice; and a Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.
Evi Girling is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Keele University.
Hannah Graham is Senior Lecturer in Criminology and an Associate Director of the Scottish Centre for
Crime and Justice Research at the University of Stirling.
Chris Greer is Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) and Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex.
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Adrian Grounds is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.
Keith Hayward is Professor of Criminology at the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Paddy Hillyard is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Queen’s University, Belfast.
p. xxiii ↵ Dick Hobbs is Emeritus Professor, University of Essex.
Barbora Holá is Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law
Enforcement (NSCR) and Associate Professor at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
David Honeywell is Lecturer in Criminology at Arden University.
Mike Hough is Emeritus Professor in the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London.
Alice Hutchings is Professor of Emergent Harms at the Department of Computer Science & Technology,
University of Cambridge, Director of the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, and Fellow of King’s College,
Cambridge.
Martin Innes is lead Co-Director of the Security, Crime and Intelligence Innovation Institute <https://
www.cardiff.ac.uk/security-crime-intelligence-innovation-institute> and a Professor in the School of Social
Sciences, Cardiff University.
Yvonne Jewkes is Professor of Criminology at the University of Bath.
Darrick Jolliffe is Professor of Criminology at The School of Law and Criminology, University of Greenwich.
Trevor Jones is Professor of Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University.
Nicola Lacey is Professor of Law, Gender, and Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political
Science.
Cheryl Lawther is Reader in Law at Queen’s University Belfast.
Michael Levi is Professor of Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University.
Alison Liebling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and Director of the Prisons Research
Centre at the University of Cambridge.
Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the
University of Melbourne.
Nicholas Lord is Professor of Criminology at the University of Manchester.
Shadd Maruna is Professor of Criminology at Queen’s University Belfast and President of the American
Society of Criminology.
Ben Matthews is Lecturer in Social Statistics and Demography at the University of Stirling.
Lesley McAra is Professor of Penology in the Law School at the University of Edinburgh and Co-Director of
the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime.
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Kieran McEvoy is Professor of Law and Transitional Justice and Theme Leader (Rights and Justice) at the
Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Justice and Security at Queen’s University Belfast.
Eugene McLaughlin is Professor of Criminology in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City,
University of London.
p. xxiv ↵ Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology & Social Work at the University of Glasgow where he
works in Sociology and in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.
Susan McVie is Professor of Quantitative Criminology in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh.
Tim Newburn is Professor of Criminology and Social Policy at the London School of Economics and
Political Science.
Ailbhe O’Loughlin is Senior Lecturer in Law at York Law School, University of York.
Nicola Padfield is Emeritus Professor of Criminal and Penal Justice at the University of Cambridge and a
Life and Honorary Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.
Alpa Parmar is Assistant Professor in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the Faculty of Law, and a Fellow
at Clare College, University of Cambridge.
Jill Peay is Emeritus Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Coretta Phillips is Professor of Criminology and Social Policy at the London School of Economics and
Political Science.
Jo Phoenix is Professor of Criminology at the University of Reading.
Gosia Polanska was Postdoctoral Research Associate at Keele University.
Lidia Puigvert is Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona.
Robert Reiner is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at The London School of Economics and Political
Science.
Julian V. Roberts is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford, and Executive Director
of the Sentencing Academy.
Gwen Robinson is Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Sheffield.
Paul Rock is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Meredith Rossner is Professor of Criminology at the Australian National University.
Bethany E. Schmidt is Assistant Professor of Penology at the University of Cambridge.
Ed Schreeche-Powell is a Lecturer in Criminology at The University of Greenwich and Associate Lecturer in

Social and Forensic Psychology at The Open University.
Toby Seddon is Professor of Social Science and Head of the UCL Social Research Institute at University
College London.
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Joe Sim is Emeritus Professor of Criminology, Liverpool John Moores University and a Trustee of the
charity INQUEST.
Oliver Smith is Associate Professor (Reader) in Criminology at the University of Plymouth.
Nigel South is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, and Honorary
Visiting Professor in the Institute for Social Justice and Crime at the University of Suffolk.
p. xxv ↵ Richard Sparks is Professor of Criminology in the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh.
Alex Stevens is Professor in Criminal Justice at the University of Kent.
Cyrus Tata is Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at the Law School, University of Strathclyde, Scotland.
Steve Tombs is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at The Open University.
Maria Ttofi is Associate Professor in Psychological Criminology at the Institute of Criminology, University
of Cambridge.
Beth Weaver is Professor of Criminal and Social Justice and an Associate Director of the Scottish Centre for
Crime and Justice Research at the University of Strathclyde.
Christine A. Weirich is Research Fellow with the ESRC Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre
and is based at the University of Leeds.
Belinda Winder is Professor of Forensic Psychology and Research Director of the Centre of Crime,
Offending, Prevention and Engagement (COPE) at Nottingham Trent University. She is a co-founder of the
Safer Living Foundation charity.
Lucia Zedner is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College and Professor of Criminal Justice at the
University of Oxford, as well as Conjoint Professor at the University of New South Wales Sydney.
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Guide to the Online Resources

p. xxvi Guide to the Online Resources

The online resources that accompany this book provide students and lecturers with ready-to-use teaching
and learning materials. These resources are free of charge and are designed to enhance the learning
experience.
www.oup.com/he/liebling-maruna7e <http://www.oup.com/he/liebling-maruna7e>
Student Resources
Selected Chapters from Previous Editions <http://

www.oup.com/he/liebling-maruna7e/prevedchapters>
In-depth material on topics from previous editions of the text, including the development of criminology
as a discipline, and key issues, such as punishment and control, and crime reduction, are provided in
electronic format for additional reading.
Please note that these chapters are only available directly through the hyperlink above.
Useful Websites <https://learninglink.oup.com/access/

liebling-maruna7e-student-resources#tag_useful-websites>
Links to useful websites for each chapter point you in the direction of important research, statistical data,
and classic texts, keeping you informed of the developments in criminology both past and present as well
as providing a starting point for additional research and reading.
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Guide to the Online Resources
Essay Questions <https://learninglink.oup.com/access/

liebling-maruna7e-student-resources#tag_essay-questions>
Written by the contributors, the essay questions that accompany each chapter encourage you to fully
consider the key criminological issues. These essay questions help you to reflect on your reading and
provide an opportunity to assess your understanding of each topic.
Guidance on Answering Essay Questions <https://

iws.oupsupport.com/ebook/access/content/liebling-maruna7e-
student-resources/liebling-maruna7e-guidance-on-answering-
essay-questions?options=showName>
Guidance on approaching essay questions and structuring your answers is available from the Handbook
editors, to help you demonstrate your knowledge and critical understanding of criminology.
p. xxvii Lecturer Resources
Figures from the Text

Figures from the text are available to download in high resolution format, for use in teaching material, or
p. xxviiiassignments and exams. ↵
Page 2 of 2
Introduction: The renewed vision

p. 1 Introduction: The renewed vision

https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0044
Published in print: 21 September 2023
Published online: August 2023
Abstract
This chapter reviews developments in the field of criminology in the context of the fundamental shifts that have occurred over
the past seven years in almost every aspect of society, caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the global economic down-turn,
rising geo-political tensions, and the impact of activist movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. It argues that these
shifts highlight the continued relevance of British criminology as currently practised, with its expanding knowledge-base,
inter-disciplinary insight, and diverse array of methodological tools, all contributing to a better understanding of the
conditions necessary to support just social orders. The chapter pays tribute to the previous editorial team and to those that
criminology has lost since the last edition. The changing of the generations is reflected in this volume: it constitutes a living
archive—a marked step in the life narrative of the field and a celebration of its growing strengths and popularity as a subject.
Keywords: theory, teaching, new generations, legacy, crime, social justice, universities, criminological imagination,
intellectual currents
The three of us are deeply honoured to open this seventh edition of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology, our
second volume since taking over the reins from founding editors Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, and Robert
Reiner in 2015. Their path-breaking and dedicated editorship lasted 18 years, with editions appearing in
1994 (the first), 1997 (the second), 2002 (the third), 2007 (the fourth), and 2012 (the fifth). By the time we
took up editorship, nervously aware of the responsibilities and privilege of inheriting such a successful
franchise, the Handbook was well established as a constitutive and agenda-setting ‘state-of-the art’
collection and an indispensable archive of the evolving state of criminology. Our plan in the last edition
was to maintain the standing of the book, whilst widening its scope and diversifying its authorship. We did
this by slightly shortening, but increasing the number of, contributions and encouraging co-authorship,
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especially with younger scholars. We were delighted with the volume’s reception when it was published in
2017 as the sixth edition and enjoyed thinking together about the state of our field as well as working with
a wide range of talented authors doing outstanding work.
For this edition, we continue this trend with further diversification of subject matter and authors. It
remains the case that nearly every invitation we made has been accepted, contributions have all been
produced to time (almost) despite our new conditions, and our deliberations with authors about content
have been productive and professional. Perhaps the hardest aspect of putting together this new edition has
been trying to capture the immense changes in the field and in the wider world that have occurred since
the last edition went to press. As an antidote to the kind of ‘vertigo’ Jock Young once described, we felt the
need to renew and restate our vision of what criminology is and what it could do whilst also trying to come
to terms with the new world we are living in.
From its early immigrant origins our field has always blended empirical science with social and legal
philosophy in order to explore, interrogate, or refine the concepts of crime and justice. Questions of
citizenship, belonging, and borderlands are built into our history. The introduction of criminology in the
UK largely resulted from the pioneering efforts of three post-Second World War émigrés—Hermann
Mannheim, Max Grunhut, and Leon Radzinowicz—around the middle of the twentieth century (see
Garland 2002). It is striking that at times of global upheaval, and movement of people across borders, the
intellectual life sometimes breathes with new energy and determination as a result of its relevance (see
Cumhaill and Wiseman 2022).
p. 2 The New World We Live In
The period since 2015 has felt particularly tumultuous with fundamental shifts across nearly every aspect
of social life in the UK and beyond. Most of these changes have had substantial impacts on the core subject
matter of criminology. This is, as a result, much more than an updated edition.
Most obviously, a global pandemic beginning in spring 2020 brought public life to a virtual standstill,
shutting down criminal justice functions from courts to therapeutic communities, at least temporarily.
Universities closed their doors too, although they swiftly adapted to online delivery before most staff were
prepared for this. Prisons, remarkably, largely avoided closures despite being known as places of severe
contagion risk. Indeed, prisons in England and Wales saw hardly any of the urgent decarceration strategies
seen in other parts of the world, although Scotland and Northern Ireland fared somewhat better in that
regard (see Maruna, McNaull, & O’Neill 2022). Like National Health Service (NHS) staff, those remaining
working in prisons during this fraught time were celebrated as heroes, yet (like in the NHS), their visible
working conditions were exposed as utterly unacceptable.
The pandemic gave unprecedented powers to government control in every walk of life including the
imposition of full community lockdowns, consisting of previously unthinkable restrictions on movement
and contact with families and friends. Questions of compliance, state authority, and the proper limits of
the law were played out on motorways, in neighbourhoods, and in homes across the world. The policing of
parties and gatherings played a key role in bringing down Boris Johnson’s controversial reign as Prime
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Minister. Protracted debates about ‘Partygate’ and the ‘Barnard Castle scandal’ undermined the early
spirit of unity brought on by the pandemic and created a sense that there was one set of rules for the
general public and very different rules for the people in charge who created those rules.
Socially, the pandemic seemed to strengthen both localism and globalism. Isolating at home, many of us
re-discovered the importance of strong communities. Community members would look out for vulnerable
or elderly neighbours, offering to do their shopping if needed, and many of us applauded the NHS from
safe social distances on our doorsteps. Yet, confined to our living spaces, we also entered a brave, new
world of video conferencing where suddenly we found ourselves giving lectures or sitting in meetings in
far flung places as if we were in the same room (except when accidentally ‘on mute’). From a
criminological perspective, the lockdown led to significant decreases in many forms of crime, like house
burglary, but created opportunities for others, like cyber crimes (see Collier and Hutchings, this volume),
and recorded incidents of domestic violence visibly increased (see Gadd, this volume, Walklate, Godfrey, &
Richardson 2022). The pandemic and the subsequent lockdown also had a measurable impact on mental
health, well-being, and child development (e.g., increased rates of self-harm, anxiety, depression, PTSD,
especially among young people) in ways that are likely to have longer term criminogenic effects (see
McAra, this volume). Politically, Covid-19 further polarized a population, already divided over issues like
Brexit, into new camps based on concern for public health and the economy. Covid also fuelled a pandemic
of conspiracy theories and anti-science populism, stoking fears of vaccines and undermining medical
advice.
The cost-of-living crisis, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, has intensified already existing social
p. 3 inequalities. At the time of writing, the Conservative Government is ↵ proposing substantial tax cuts
for the UK’s richest taxpayers, yet households are having to choose between heating and eating in ways
that have not been seen in decades. The realities of Brexit have begun to emerge since the publication of
the last volume, and many of the grimmer predictions about the impact on the movement of people and
goods have materialized, threatening peace and stability in Northern Ireland and further exacerbating the
inflation crisis. Continuing austerity measures have devastated the public sector with declining
workforces, deteriorating wages, high attrition rates, and widespread dissatisfaction amongst nurses,
teachers, dockworkers, train drivers, and other professions deemed ‘essential’ during the pandemic.
Prisons, probation, and the police have all faced staggering staff shortages, impacting on the functioning
of the justice system. In universities, wages have stagnated and pensions have been cut dramatically,
leading to years of industrial actions, burnout, and a decrease in the sort of professional good will
necessary to sustain (largely unpaid) systems of peer review and external examination. Almost all of the
critical issues facing higher education discussed in our 6th edition introduction have intensified, including
the threats faced by those working in the humanities and social sciences.
The last seven years have seen the exponential rise of the international movement, known broadly as Black
Lives Matter (BLM), given increased momentum in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police
officers in May 2020 in Minneapolis. With slogans such as, ‘abolish the police’, the movement has sparked
a conversation about the role and purpose of policing in contemporary societies that has reverberated
across the world. In the UK, the Metropolitan Police Service has come under sustained scrutiny since the
last edition, most dramatically in the policing of the vigil following the murder of Sarah Everard by the Met
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police officer Wayne Couzens. Under the Conservatives, policing has become increasingly politicized with
ministerial and media hysteria about police officers ‘taking the knee’ in support of BLM or dancing at gay
pride parades as if such gestures undermined crime fighting capacity. In a related development, the
#MeToo movement has led to radical changes in gender politics. A pushback inspired by social media,
#MeToo has drawn attention to the widespread culture of sexual harassment and sexual violence in
workplaces, schools, universities and throughout society and has raised questions about due process for
the accused (see Grounds, Ttofi, and Puigvert, this volume). Debates about climate justice have also
intensified as scientific predictions of climate catastrophes, ranging from wildfires to flooding, have
become daily realities around the globe (see Brisman and South, this volume). Disruptive activism by
environmental groups like Extinction Rebellion has increased in an effort to call attention to state crimes
linked to environmental devastation such as the burning of the Amazon Rainforest (see Canning, Hilliard,
and Tombs, this volume). University campuses have, predictably, become key sites for working through
some of these conflicts, occasionally including the forcible removal of statues or changing the names of
campus buildings. ‘Decolonizing’ the university has become a rallying cry, including a rapidly growing
movement to ‘decolonize criminology’ (Moosavi 2019) and decentre the influence of white, Northern,
male authors from the curriculum.
As such, we are editing this Handbook in a time of profound change and ontological insecurity with the
post-war European ‘project’ largely under threat, or losing its claim to legitimacy. British politics have
seen a dramatic shift to the political right, but unlike a similar period of conservative leadership in the
1980s, the Government has been anything but stable. Since the last edition, the United Kingdom has had
five different prime ministers (all Conservatives), eight different justice secretaries, and ten different
prisons ministers. Little wonder this period has been experienced by so many as chaotic and
p. 4 ↵ fraught. A similar sense of political precarity and turmoil can be found across the globe with the rise
of openly authoritarian regimes in several of the world’s largest countries. Russia’s protracted war in the
Ukraine, and the violent attack on the US Capital on 6 January 2021 all threatened the very foundations of
democracy and the rule of law. In short, if criminology’s main focus, or raison d’etre, is understanding the
relationship between law-breaking, law-making, social order and justice, then there has never been a
greater need of it. Several of the chapters to follow in the Handbook address the scope of criminology.
Loader and colleagues (this volume) for instance, argue that ‘shifting lenses from the sometimes limiting
purview of the fear of crime towards ideas of harm, safety, and security that are at once broader and less
prescriptive, yet more embedded and grounded in the context of everyday experience, is part of what is
involved in developing a contemporary, responsive, and relevant criminological field’. These are precisely
the words we would use to describe our aspirations as editors of this new edition.
British Criminology’s Role in Fraught Times
While the social, economic, and political contexts just described have had profound effects on universities
as places of education and research, they also demonstrate the increasing relevance of social science
research—and especially of criminology. We can see why students continue to be drawn to the field.
Criminology’s expanding subject matter includes questions of citizenship and democratic living; the
nature and consequences of crime control and penal practice; the genesis and outcomes of poverty, trauma
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and other social and environmental harms; atrocity crimes, migration and transitional justice.
Criminology, at its best, pays systematic attention to the nature, causes, and trajectories of crime, fear,
and violence. Longitudinal studies, however expensive, remain a state-of-the-art methodology for
achieving the kinds of understanding we need. Criminology also addresses changing responses to crime,
which so often cause harm in their own right. Our vision of the field holds these topic areas in productive
tension, seeking to explain, and where possible, find ways of reducing, new and old forms of harm.
Our discipline’s collective knowledge base, inter-disciplinary insights and our diverse array of
methodological tools, seek to contribute to better understanding of the conditions necessary to support
more just social orders. Sometimes, criminological research even contributes directly to such related
improvements to practice. What other social science could claim the sort of impact evident in Phil
Scraton’s (2013) research on the Hillsborough tragedy, for instance? Or trigger a change in the age of
1
criminal responsibility for children in Scotland? Or a transformation in the design of a prison for women
2
in Ireland, to take some recent examples? This real-world relevance suggests that criminology remains a
p. 5 live, urgent, and engaged field of study, with all the risks and ↵ complexities inherent in doing that sort
of applied work (see, e.g., Jewkes’s 2022 use of the term ‘dirty work’ as she questions whether helping to
design new prisons with no bars on windows counts as a success or contributes to the legitimation of new
prison building). Criminology’s proximity to state power poses both opportunities and risks.
None of this is to assert that criminology is a settled field. The past seven years have seen further
diversification and transformation in some of the basic assumptions and ideas at work within the
discipline. A key example is the major advances made in green criminology—with its interrogation of the
symbiotic harms contributing to the climate crisis and the destruction of planetary health, and
explorations of the contexts and action needed to enable human and non-human species to flourish (see
Brisman and South, this volume). A further example is in the contribution of zemiology to contemporary
knowledge production, including its substantive development of taxonomies of social harms (see Canning
et al., this volume).
The past seven years have also seen a re-emergence of some of the longstanding intellectual battlegrounds
in our discipline. Is it still meaningful to talk about a ‘British Criminology’ (a question we have grappled
with in both the 6th and 7th editions of the handbook), particularly since many of the contemporary
developments to which our discipline is responding (both in the UK and beyond), are transnational or
global in orientation? There have been legitimate challenges to the hegemony of scholarship from the
global north. Criminology has seen impressive growth in southern criminological scholarship, calls to
embrace the epistemic disruption of decoloniality (replacing false universalism with what de Sousa Santis
(2014) has called ‘border’ or ‘intercultural’ thinking’), and greater critical acknowledgment of the role of
empire and coloniality in early and later histories of global north criminology (see also Chakraborti and
Clarke, this volume, Brisman and South, this volume). We welcome the publication of the Palgrave
Handbook of Criminology and the Global South (Carrington et al. 2018) and we look forward to a reshaping
of the field of criminology in the light of these and other developments.
There has been an associated rise in activist scholarship, in particular from early career researchers and
academics, reflecting some of the deep dissatisfactions with power structures both within the discipline, or
academy, and beyond. One key example is the emergence of the Black Criminology Network, founded in
Page 5 of 13
2020 by a doctoral researcher at Birmingham City University and an associate lecturer at the University of
Northampton. The network aims to be a global hub for students and academics of Black heritage, providing
mentoring and support, as well as running a series of skills workshops and seminars. A reinvigorated
activism has also found expression in feminist criminology with the rise of so-called ‘fourth wave
feminism’, premised on the sharing of lived experience, intersectionality and the use of internet tools to
drive a praxis predicated on empowerment and transformational justice. Here there have been fierce
debates around what role (if any) criminal justice and other state sponsored institutions should play in
tackling gender-based violence and inequalities, the extent to which trans and gender diverse experiences
are respected or have voice, and the emergence of queer criminology as a framework for new forms of
knowledge production and action (see Copson and Boukli 2022, Burman and Gelsthorpe, this volume,
Phoenix, this volume). This scholarship differs from the critical criminology of the 1960s and 1970s with
its focus on state and structural injustices, by paying closer attention to matters of gender, identity and
diversity.
It is clear that nurturing the next generation of scholars requires more transparent opportunity structures
p. 6 and more diverse role models within higher education. The ↵ salience of criminolgy as an academic
field—its knowledge-base and innovatory practice in terms of theory and method—constitute powerful
reasons for investment by universities. There has been continued expansion of criminology as both an
undergraduate and taught postgraduate subject, with 814 undergraduate degree programmes on offer
across 132 universities, and 239 masters programmes across 89 universities (WhatUni 2022). This has been
mirrored in increased sales for the Handbook as a core text, especially for postgraduate education. The
demand for professional education is increasing, as seen, for example, in the continuing provision of two
Master of Studies Programmes at Cambridge, albeit with a move towards on-line delivery in some cases.
Criminological practice and teaching is diversifying, whilst senior leadership in most institutions of higher
3
education remains overwhelmingly white and male. The landscape is turbulent, presenting both risks and
opportunities for criminologists and our field as a whole.
Doing criminology in a changing climate

The ways in which we do criminology have had to adapt to these new challenges.
The creativity and resilience of researchers were particularly tested by the impacts of the Covid-19
pandemic, with successive lockdowns necessitating major changes to the conduct of empirical research.
Many sites (for example, prisons and other residential settings) could not be visited in-person. Most
fieldwork was either suspended or moved on-line; ethical issues became correspondingly more complex.
Access to administrative data (for example, on criminal convictions) became more difficult, as staff
shortages and redeployment to tackle the impacts of the pandemic, meant that criminal justice agencies
had limited capacity to deal with researcher requests. The intensification of inequalities that the pandemic
brought and the ways in which it exposed a justice gap (with regard to disproportionate policing, rights
violation in prisons, for example), have become a focus of research in their own right (see McVie 2020,
Maruna et al. 2022). They also highlight ongoing sensitivities in undertaking research with potentially
traumatised populations (both those who come into conflict with the law as well as those within
institutions of criminal justice trying to adapt rapidly to a situation of great uncertainty).
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On the other hand, we celebrate the rise of mixed methodological approaches, participatory action
research, and other more inclusive or democratic approaches to knowledge creation (see Liebling et al.,
this volume; Loader et al., this volume). Sometimes this encompasses forms of data collection involving
the arts, or more deliberative approaches to analysis, such as citizens’ assemblies. In particular, there has
been renewed emphasis on ‘lived experience’ not only in terms of those who come into conflict with the
law, but also in terms of practitioners and policy makers (see Earle et al., this volume; Weaver et al., this
volume). Such research methods require slow forms of scholarship—in particular, time to build
relationships and mutual understanding, to gain trust. The curation of the participatory research
p. 7 experience ↵ raises questions for academics around ways of undertaking research which promote
‘generative justice’: a form of praxis aimed at increasing social solidarity in communities with experience
of crime or punishment (see Maruna 2016); and about our responsibilities when projects come to an end. It
also demands particular qualities of researchers in terms of active listening, and operating with a sense of
humility, whilst also striving to build a credible knowledge base. There is a relationship between
criminology’s mission and the methodologies employed. Loader and colleagues talk about ‘the intimate
relation between enquiries into public safety (however conceptualized) and the quality and future
possibilities of a shared democratic life’, arguing that ‘the modes of inquiry that seem most compelling
nowadays need to be more oriented towards dialogue, creativity, and co-production than those that were
applied (including by us) in the past’ (this volume).
Alongside these creative and person-centred efforts in the field, there has been a simultaneous expansion
in big data analytics—both as a mode and a site of criminological enquiry: themes which run through a
number of chapters in the Handbook (see especially Bradford and Fussey, Crawford et al., Jones et al., this
volume). Whilst technological advances both in terms of data capture, linkage and analysis enable
researchers to draw on new forms of data—such as social media scraping—this development raises new
ethical challenges for criminology as well. Researchers need to be mindful of issues related to consent,
privacy, surveillance and data ownership. Big data analysis requires computing infrastructure—which is
both expensive to run and energy intensive. Skills in data handling and coding are a necessary prerequisite,
with implications for researcher training. One concern is that many universities and bodies holding data,
such as the police, are increasingly relying on business developers and data scientists to address
operational questions, or drive research agendas. These researchers have tremendous technical skills, but
they may not be familiar with criminological theory, data collection methodologies, or the realities on the
ground in these justice contexts. Such a technologically driven development risks a future of theory-free
data harvesting and false interpretations based on partial understandings of complex real-world processes
like ‘recidivism’.
Losses and Acknowledgments
Since our last edition, British criminology has lost some of its trailblazers and much-loved characters,
including Jackie Tombs and Roger Matthews, with the latter dying after contracting Covid-19 in April
2020. In books like Realist Criminology and What Is To Be Done about Crime and Punishment?, Matthews came
to represent the hugely influential tradition of ‘left realism’. Through her leadership roles in the Central
Page 7 of 13
Research Unit of the then Scottish Office, and the early days of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice
Research, Tombs played a key role in ensuring that research evidence infused policy debates in Scotland
(long before ‘evidence-based policy’ became a UK mantra) and in building criminological capacity.
Globally, too, criminology has lost some of the most transformative figures in the history of the field, like
David Matza, Nils Christie, Elmar Weitekamp, Joan Petersilia, Nicole Hahn Rafter, Hans Toch, Jim B.
Jacobs, M. Kay Harris, Charles Tittle, Ed Latessa, Bob Bursik, Ray Paternoster, Travis Hirschi, and David
Bayley. Although associated with universities overseas, several of these scholars made an outsize impact
on the development of criminology in the UK. (Indeed, one of our struggles with the concept of
p. 8 ↵ ‘British’ criminology is how to categorize the work of scholars like Christie, Matza, and Rafter with
their evident global influence).
However, no one on that list has shaped British criminology like Donald West (9 June 1924–31 January
2020) or Roger Hood (12 June 1936–17 November 2020). Both West and Hood directed major centres of
Criminology, in Cambridge and Oxford, respectively, with Hood serving for nearly three decades. Both
were highly influential in legal reform, lived to a ripe age (95 and 84 respectively), and were still active in
their research areas as long as they could work and travel. Perhaps there is some relationship between
these facts. In any case, we wish to celebrate and record their contributions here.
Donald West, a psychiatrist, joined the newly established Institute of Criminology in Cambridge in 1960 as
assistant director of research, and spent the rest of his career there, as lecturer, reader, and then professor
of clinical criminology. He was director of the Institute from 1981 to his formal retirement in 1984. He
became a Fellow of Darwin College and was promoted to a personal professorship in Clinical Criminology,
while also providing an outpatient clinic at Addenbrooke’s Hospital as an (unpaid) honorary consultant
psychiatrist. He started the best known of his contributions to criminological research, the Cambridge
longitudinal study in delinquent development, in 1961. He was joined in 1969 by David Farrington, and
their project became one of the major, continuing, prospective longitudinal studies internationally in the
field of developmental criminology (see Chapter 5 in this volume). The study commenced as a prospective
survey of 411 London boys, aged 8, who have since been interviewed at intervals throughout their lives
(including most recently in their late 60s). Their children, and grandchildren, have also been interviewed
in more recent years, enabling a rich range of findings about antecedents and causes of criminality and
desistance. Major books arising from the study include Who becomes Delinquent (1973), The Delinquent Way
of Life (1977), and Delinquency, Its Roots, Careers and Prospects (1982). West also served as a founding
member of the parole board. His work (including his book Homosexuality, published in 1955) contributed to
the decriminalization of homosexuality. He was pioneering, courageous, and left behind many close
friends.
Roger Hood’s career-length research on the death penalty, likewise, was instrumental in the abolitionist
campaign. During his degree in Sociology at LSE, he attended an optional course given by Hermann
Mannheim, the ‘grand old man’ of criminology, who asked for help preparing a paper about the Homicide
Bill, which eliminated the death penalty for so-called crimes of passion. ‘Mannheim was so pleased with it
that he asked me if I would be his research assistant,’ Hood recalled (The Times obituary 2020). In 1967 he
joined the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, with a fellowship at Clare Hall. His work
on the history of criminal law with Sir Leon Radzinowicz, the ‘old fox’ of British criminology (Zapatero,
Page 8 of 13
obituary 2020), is masterful (see A History of the English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750). He
also published Borstal Reassessed and Key Issues in Criminology (1970, with the ‘older’ Richard Sparks)
during this period. In 1973 he became the founding director of the Centre for Criminology at the University
of Oxford with a fellowship at All Souls College, a position he held until 2003. All who knew him remember
with considerable fondness his supportive, exacting, generous, and gentle style. A new Death Penalty
Research Centre, established in his honour, and led by his young colleagues, was launched the day before
his memorial service in 2021. His book, The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective (1989), remains one of
p. 9 the best-known on the subject. He will ↵ be remembered as a ‘champion of justice’ (Garrett 2020) and
as a wise advisor and friend to younger colleagues.
As third generation criminology scholars, we are aware of the privilege of having studied under the
original giants, and of the historically extraordinary nature of a person-and legal-centred discipline. The
people who established our field were intellectual and political activists as well as outstanding scholars.
The humanitarian preoccupations of our field remain central.
So where do we go from here? The new edition of the Handbook illustrates a changing of the guard, an
opening up of the discipline, and an effort to build a bridge between the old and the new. We retain our
commitment to the best scholarship, whilst recognizing that the boundaries of our discipline, and its
locations, are becoming harder to maintain.
What Is New in the New Edition?
The Handbook has a new look, a new structure, and every chapter has been updated and revised for the
contemporary context. In addition, we specifically commissioned a series of new chapters to better capture
the changing zeitgeist in British criminology, including types of crime or approaches to criminology that
have emerged in the past few decades. As part of our refresh, we have invited a number of new authors to
cover a range of traditional topics that have appeared in previous editions of the Handbook. These include
Nicky Padfield and Cyrus Tata on penal decision-making; Manuel Eisner on comparative criminology;
Darrick Jolliffe and Katherine Auty on developmental and life course criminology; and Beth Weaver,
Hannah Graham, and Shadd Maruna on desistance from crime.
We have expanded our coverage of types of crime with four newly commissioned chapters. First, a chapter
on sex offending (by psychologists Neil Blagden and Belinda Winders), which contains important insights
about compassion and trauma-informed therapeutic approaches to dealing with those who come to the
attention of the criminal justice system for sexual assault, and offences against children. Secondly, a
chapter on hate crime (by Neil Chakraborti and Amy Clarke) which explores the processes (social, political,
and economic) which sustain power dynamics between dominant and subordinate groups predicated on
prejudice and hostility, the nature of the harms caused and the ways in which hate crime might be best
responded to. Thirdly, Ben Collier and Alice Hutchins examine the challenges posed by the rapidly
exploding and technically complex field of cybercrime for the first time, describing the ecology and
subcultures of online offending, the harms and methods involved, and the labours of increasing types of
diverse personnel working in enforcement and control. Cybercrime now justifiably constitutes a sub-field
in its own right. Finally we commissioned a new chapter by Andy Aydın-Aitchison, Mirza Buljubašić, and
Page 9 of 13
Barbora Holá on atrocity crimes. This chapter develops and encourages criminology’s engagement with
the forms of mass violence associated with war, armed conflict, and political repression as well as with
efforts to pursue, or describe and define, justice for victims. Importantly, the themes of trauma and the
harms of injustice are also addressed in another newly commissioned chapter on ‘victimology’ in an age of
#MeToo by Adrian Grounds, Maria Ttofi, and Lidia Puigvert. Their account of voice and power shows that
understanding suffering is a concept that ‘merits more attention in criminology’.
p. 10 ↵ Paolo Campana applies network thinking to criminology, including in the analysis of violence and
organized crime. The transmission of risky phenomena across communities with diverse social structures
has been vividly illustrated as we witness infections exploiting webs of social relations to increase their
spread across individuals and places. He argues that relations matter in explaining phenomena of interest
to criminologists and that these can have an effect over and above individual characteristics. Pathogens
have well ‘understood’ the power of relations underpinning human networks. Criminology has much to
learn from the analysis of social structures and connections in understanding the formation and operation
of gangs, patterns of victimization and the broader structure of violence.
The Oxford Handbook has never before had a chapter on penal abolitionism’s role in British criminology,
although, as Sim (this issue) points out in this fascinating chapter, abolitionism has a long tradition in
Britain. Support for abolitionism and sustained decarceration has grown demonstrably in recent years,
spurred on by the parallel push to ‘abolish the police’ inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and the
extreme threats faced by those in prison during the Covid-19 pandemic. For the first time ever, the
Handbook also includes a chapter on the concept of ‘convict criminology’ or criminological research that
centres lived experience and is produced mainly by those with first-hand experience of the justice system.
Convict criminology has been around in US criminology since the late 1990s, but the idea has very much
come to the fore in Britain in the past few years. Rod Earle and colleagues provide one of the most
sophisticated, up-to-date discussions of the now ubiquitous new concept of ‘lived experience’ and its
implications for the study of criminology.
There is also extended coverage of security and place as a thematic. Ian Loader and colleagues, revisit their
work on crime and social change in middle England (Girling et al. 2000), in the context of a more recent
project in the same locale, with a meditation on the relationship between democratic politics and security.
The chapter highlights the importance of co-production in researcher-participant relationships, and the
need for deliberative methods to capture in more granular ways the lived experience of (in)security, and
the conditions necessary for social change. By contrast Ben Bradford and Pete Fussey explore the dynamics
of ‘informational capitalism’ and the digital society and the ways in which they have transformed crime,
security, surveillance and policing, within the context of ‘smart cities’. Here there is emphasis on the ways
in which new technologies can increase vulnerability to crime at the same time as enhancing social
control, with some efforts aimed at enhancing security, paradoxically increasing feelings of insecurity.
The Handbook is a living research project and its various editions function as an archive of some of the best
and most influential scholarship within British Criminology, however loosely defined and problematic that
term now feels. As ‘guardians’ of the Handbook, we are aware that our protégé is now a fully-fledged and
independent adult making its way in a treacherous—contested, uncertain, economically precarious—
Page 10 of 13
world. The unique strengths of criminology as a discipline give us a strong belief in the opportunity for
renewal. We hope this new edition provides some of the energy for a dialogue about what social order and
justice might look like by the time the eighth edition of the Handbook is in preparation.
p. 11 References
Carrington, K., Hogg, R., Scott, J., and Sozzo, M. (2018), The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South,
Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Carrington, K., Hogg, R., and Sozzo, M. (2018), ‘Southern Criminology’, The British Journal of Criminology, 56(5): 1–20.
Copson, L. and Boukli, A. (2022), ‘Queer Utopias and Queer Criminology’, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 20: 5.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895820932210 <https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895820932210>
Cumhaill, C. M. and Wiseman, R. (2022), Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life,
London: Chatto and Windus.
de Sousa Santis, B. (2014), Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide, NY: Routledge.
Garland, D. (2002), The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Garrett, B. (2020). https://wcsj.law.duke.edu/2020/11/remembering-roger-hood-a-champion-of-justice-and-

international-leader-in-criminology/ <https://wcsj.law.duke.edu/2020/11/remembering-roger-hood-a-champion-of-
justice-and-international-leader-in-criminology/>
Girling, E., Loader, I., and Sparks, R. (2000), Crime and Social Change in Middle England: Questions of Order in an English
Town, Adingdon: Routledge.
Hood, R. (1965), Borstal Reassessed, London: Heinemann.
Hood, R. (1990), The Death Penalty, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hood, R. and Sparks, R. (1970), Key Issues in Criminology, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Jewkes, Y. (2024, in press), Beneath the Yellow Wallpaper: A Memoir of Prison and Home London: Scribe.
Maruna, S. (2016), ‘Desistance and Restorative Justice: It’s Now or Never’, Restorative Justice, 4(3): 289–30.
Maruna, S., McNaull, G., and O’Neill, N. (2022). ‘The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Future of the Prison’, Crime & Justice,
51–103.
Matthews, R. (2014), Realist Criminology, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Matthews, R. (2016), What Is to Be Done about Crime and Punishment?, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
McVie, S. (2020), Data Report on the Police Use of Fixed Penalty Notices during the Coronavirus Regulations in Scotland.
https://www.understanding-inequalities.ac.uk/sites/default/files/
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Data%20report%20on%20Police%20Use%20of%20FPN%20190820.pdf <https://www.understanding-
inequalities.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Data%20report%20on%20Police%20Use%20of%20FPN%20190820.pdf>.
Moosavi, L. (2019), ‘Decolonising Criminology: Syed Hussein Alatas on Crimes of the Powerful’, Critical Criminology,
27(2): 229–242.
Radzinowicz, L. and Hood, R. (1991), A History of the English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750., Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Scraton, P. (2013), ‘The Legacy of Hillsborough: Liberating Truth, Challenging Power’, Race & Class’, 55(2): 1–27.
Universities UK and the National Union of Students (2019), ‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Attainment at UK
Universities’ #closingthegap, https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bame-
student-attainment.pdf <https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bame-student-
attainment.pdf>.
Walklate, S., Godfrey, B., and Richardson, J. (2022), ‘Changes and Continuities in Police Responses to Domestic Abuse
in England and Wales During the Covid-19 ‘Lockdown’, Policing and Society, 32(2): 221–233.
West, D. (1955), Homosexuality, London: Penguin.
West, D. (1982), Delinquency, Its Roots, Careers and Prospects, London: Heinemann.
West, D. and Farrington, D. (1973), Who Becomes Delinquent, London: Heinemann.
West, D. and Farrington, D. (1977), The Delinquent Way of Life, London: Heinemann.
WhatUni (2022), https://www.whatuni.com/ <https://www.whatuni.com/>.
Zapatero, L. A. (2020), ‘Obituary’. https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/content/roger-hood-obituary-luis-arroyo-

p. 12 zapatero <https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/content/roger-hood-obituary-luis-arroyo-zapatero>. ↵
Notes
1
Professors Lesley McAra and Susan McVie won the ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize in 2019 for their work on the
Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime (ESYTC) (https://www.law.ed.ac.uk/news-events/news/professors-
mcara-and-mcvie-win-esrc-celebrating-impact-prize <https://www.law.ed.ac.uk/news-events/news/professors-mcara-
and-mcvie-win-esrc-celebrating-impact-prize>).
2
Professor Yvonne Jewkes won the ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize in 2020 for her innovative research on prison
architecture and design (https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/professor-yvonne-jewkes-wins-esrc-celebrating-
impact-prize-2020-for-societal-impact <https://www.bath.ac.uk/announcements/professor-yvonne-jewkes-wins-esrc-
celebrating-impact-prize-2020-for-societal-impact>).
3
A recent report authored by Universities UK and the National Union of Students (2019), found that only 1 per cent of
university professors were black, with 11 per cent overall from global majority groups. Women currently make up only
28 per cent of the professoriate, despite forming 46 per cent of faculty staff. Efforts to build more inclusive
Page 12 of 13
environments have benefited from staff and student activism (see for example Race-ED and Gender-ED at the
University of Edinburgh), but staff surveys across the UK continue to report cultures of bullying, racial stereotyping,
experiences of micro-aggressions, in addition to inequalities of pay and promotion prospects.
© Oxford University Press 2023
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1. Sociological theories of crime

p. 15 1. Sociological theories of crime

Paul Rock
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0001
Abstract
This chapter describes how the sociology of crime originally stemmed from professional and political preoccupations with the
problems presented by the practical management of crime and punishment in the emerging British state of the early
nineteenth century but then evolved and expanded in a rather unsystematic fashion over some two centuries into a semi-
detached academic discipline that addresses the various ways in which social order, social control, and social representations
of rule-breaking are said to affect the aetiology of crime. It has never stopped swelling, fragmenting, and proliferating, partly
because of a tendency for new generations of scholars to forget the past (see Plummer 2011), and partly in response to the
emergence of new data, new methodologies (such as randomized control trials), new empirical areas (such as the global
South), and new theoretical possibilities and political preoccupations (such as violence against women and girls) and social
and ecological problems (such as climate change).
Keywords: history of criminology, social order, social control, social representations, the emergence of the state, new
bodies of knowledge, new institutions, universities, professionalization
Introduction: The Development of Criminology in Britain
Criminology emerged so fitfully, discontinuously, and indecisively in Britain that its history does not lend
itself easily to a coherent narrative (Rock 2011). Although it is now more than 50 years old, Hermann
Mannheim’s account of its loosely connected early stages remains as serviceable as any (1965: Vol. 1, 79).
First, he said, there were private individuals working alone, and he cited as examples John Howard and
Jeremy Bentham. One might also add that Howard, Bentham, and others were men working in a newly
established tradition of social, juridical, and political improvement, often lawyers by training and
Nonconformists or utilitarians by inclination, who believed in the possibility of reform through the
Page 1 of 47
application of reason to a welter of confusing and apparently illogical laws, institutions, and practices that
composed an English and Welsh ancien régime. Jeremy Bentham, said John Stuart Mill, ‘found the
philosophy of law a chaos, he left it a science …’ (1838, republished 1950, 75).
It was a group that was tenuously united at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
centuries by a copious correspondence; an independence of thought; an independence of wealth; the
holding of pivotal positions as magistrates, sheriffs, and Members of Parliament; and a common
membership of philanthropic societies and religious organizations (see Whitten 2002). They learned at
first or second hand about conditions in Britain and elsewhere, and they cultivated in their turn the
beginnings of a systematic, comparative, and investigative stance towards problems of crime, policing,
and punishment. John Howard’s The State of the Prisons of 1784, Colquhoun’s A Treatise on the Police of the
Metropolis of 1797, and Samuel Romilly’s Observations on the Criminal Law of England of 1811 are prime
examples of their method. But, being independent individuals, lying outside the universities, they did not
lay much of a foundation for an enduring tradition of research and teaching.
Second and third in Mannheim’s chronology was what he described as the work of public officials acting
first in a private and then in a public capacity, and he cited as examples A.M. Guerry and Cesare Lombroso
(1985). One might add that that second era was marked by the activity of embryonic criminologists who
made use of the copious data and institutions that the newly reformed, expanding, interventionist, and
p. 16 increasingly ↵ wealthy state of the nineteenth century—the state that the Enlightenment reformers
had built—furnished in the service of public administration. The very word ‘statistic’ refers to a fact
bearing on the condition of the state, and it first came into use in the late 1780s, to be joined by the word
‘statistician’ in 1825, and they heralded the arrival of a new kind of blue book knowledge. The first
population census in Britain was conducted in 1801; the new police, judicial, and penal authorities began to
produce their own statistical returns after the 1830s; and a great mass of numerical data began to flood
into the public realm. Chevalier remarked of that period in France that there was ‘a determination to obtain
figures for everything, to measure everything, to know everything, but to know it by numbers, [it was an]
encyclopedic hunger’ (1973: 43). The new statistics were eagerly explored by those who sought to discover
patterns, commonalities, and trends in the social world: Fletcher (1850), Guerry (1864), and Quetelet
(1848), above all, sought to devise a new social physics that could reveal law-like regularities of behaviour
in space and time. One of the three, the Belgian, Quetelet, boldly claimed in 1846, for instance, that ‘we can
count in advance how many individuals will soil their hands with the blood of their fellows, how many will
be swindlers, how many poisoners, almost as we can number in advance the births and deaths that will
take place’ (in Radzinowicz and Hood 1990: 51; and see Merry 2016).
A second concomitant of the emergence of the new penitentiaries, police forces, and asylums (see Scull
1979) was the creation of a new stratum of penal administrators who managed, diagnosed, and ministered
to their inmates, and claimed new mandates and fostered new intellectual disciplines to shore up their
infant and somewhat fragile professional authority. There was W. D. Morrison, a prison chaplain and
pioneering criminologist, the author of Crime and its Causes, published in 1891, and Juvenile Offenders,
published in 1896, and the editor of the criminology series in which Lombroso’s The Criminal Woman first
appeared in English translation in 1895. There was S. A. Strahan, a doctor and lawyer, a physician at the
Northampton County Asylum, and author of writings on ‘instinctive criminality’, criminal insanity,
Page 2 of 47
suicide, and morphine habituation. There was Henry Maudsley, the co-founder of the eponymous hospital,
who wrote about homicidal insanity, insanity, and criminal responsibility, and other matters in the first
stirrings of the new science (1888). These men established new professional associations to promote and
defend their expertise—for instance, the Association of Medical Officers of Asylums and Hospitals for the
Insane that was founded in 1841; and the Medico-Legal Association that was founded in 1901. And the new
associations founded new journals and new stocks of knowledge (the first issue of The Asylum Journal of
Mental Science appeared in 1853 and the first issue of the Transactions of the Medico-Legal Society appeared a
year after the Medico-Legal Association itself in 1902).
The very word ‘professional’ appeared for the first time in 1848, to be followed by ‘professionalism’ eight
years later, and these words signify the emergence of a new kind of expert. The new disciplines of criminal
anthropology, criminal psychiatry, criminology, and medico-legal science gave them a capacity to control
and speak about new problems, and it conferred a tenuous legitimacy, but they had few precedents to
follow, and it was to be medicine, the established science of bodily pathology, that became the principal
template for their fledgling science of social pathology. British criminology took much of its form at that
time, remaining for a long while a statistically driven, administratively bent form of knowledge copying
the precedent of applied medicine, practised in the service of the state (see Sim 1990: 9) and adopting the
language of diagnosis, prognosis, epidemiology, treatment, and rehabilitation. And, Garland would argue,
p. 17 it was a project that came to embody ensuing contradictions which have yet fully to be ↵ resolved: the
quest, on the one hand, for a criminology as the science of the causes of crime and, on the other, for a
discipline serving the practical administrative demands of the state (2002).
The penultimate phase was identified by Mannheim as work undertaken by university departments or
individual teachers. By the end of the nineteenth century, enough had been accomplished by the pioneers
to invite people to view a newly born criminology as a discrete discipline that could be detached from its
anchorage in the applied, working practices of state institutions to be pursued as an intellectual object in
its own right. The word ‘criminology’ was devised first in the 1850s and came into more general currency
in the 1890s when it began to be taught in universities in Italy, Austria, Germany, and France. It was to be
associated with a cluster of European thinkers, and particularly, and not always usefully, with Lombroso
and his followers (Lombroso tended to be too fanciful, too extravagant in his mannerisms, to warrant
serious consideration by the largely pragmatic and empirical scholars of the United Kingdom (see Kenny
1910: 220)). British criminology is not and never has been significantly Lombrosian in its affections, and
when criminology did come eventually and tentatively to establish itself in Britain in the early 1920s, it was
not as an offshoot of the new criminal anthropology (see Rock 2007). A university post in the discipline
was created first at Birmingham University in 1921 for Maurice Hamblin Smith, and he was a Freudian-
leaning psychologist (see Garland 1988: 8; Valiér 1995).
What came in time decisively to spur British criminology’s growth was the flight of intellectuals from Nazi
Europe in the 1930s (see Morris 1988: 24–6). Three legally trained emigré criminologists implanted the
discipline in three universities: Leon Radzinowicz at the University of Cambrige in 1941; Max Grünhut, first
at the London School of Economics in 1934, and thence in the University of Oxford in 1940, where he was
appointed to the university’s first lectureship in the field in 1947; and Hermann Mannheim at the London
School of Economics in 1935—and it was in that year of 1935, said Garland, that criminology was instituted
Page 3 of 47
as a professional academic discipline in Britain (1988: 1). So it was that virtually at a stroke, that the
criminology which had been maturing apart in western Europe, was imported into English universities, but
it did not receive a ready acceptance (see Hood 2004) nor was it inserted into an intellectual framework
that yielded easily.
Mannheim’s course on the Principles of Criminology at the LSE in the 1930s is indicative of what then
passed for criminology. It was eclectic, comprehensive and multi-disciplinary, embracing the study of
criminal statistics; criminal typologies; the physical anthropology of crime; biological theories, including
physical defects; psychological, psychoanalytic and psychiatric theories; social and economic factors; and
much else.
What followed was marked by the same stamp. Thus the editorial of the first issue of the new British Journal
of Delinquency, published in July 1950 with an editorial board consisting of Hermann Mannheim, Emanuel
Miller (a psychiatrist) and Edward Glover (a psychoanalyst), about to become the chief vehicle of the newly
institutionalized discipline, and later to be re-baptized the British Journal of Criminology, proclaimed:
it is perhaps unnecessary to add that the British Journal of Delinquency is not in the customary
sense a clinical journal. Clinical contributions will of course receive special consideration, but it is
hoped to publish articles, both theoretical and practical, from trained workers in the various
departments of criminology; namely, medical psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, organic
medicine, educational psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, psycho-biology and
statistics; also from social workers, probation officers, prison and other institutional personnel,
and from forensic specialists whose work brings them into intimate contact with problems of
delinquency.
p. 18 ↵ That was the vein in which British criminology long remained: catholic, multi-causal, averse to a
reliance on single theories and disciplines; grounded in medicine and medical metaphor; reformist,
applied, and tied to the penal politics of the day. But its very eclecticism brought it about that successive
generations of students were able routinely to receive instruction and conduct research across a very broad
terrain. Sociologists like Terence Morris and Roger Hood could study under Hermann Mannheim or Leon
Radzinowicz, and their students, like Bridget Hutter, David Downes, Stan Cohen, Paul Wiles, and Jock
Young, and their students’ students, like Dick Hobbs, Nigel Fielding, Ken Plummer, and Ian Taylor, could
advance, refine, extend, widen, and revise criminology along a great chain of begats—and there were other
centres and other lineages besides. When the great wave of university expansion was launched in England
and Wales in the 1960s, when the number of universities grew from 30 to 52 in twenty years, the number of
students from 130,000 to 600,000, and the number of academic staff from 19,000 to 46,000, criminology
could come freely into its own, blossoming with the rest of the academy, and colonizing departments of
psychology, law, social policy, and, above all, sociology. The 1970s were especially propitious: a survey
conducted in 1986 revealed that nearly 60 per cent of the criminologists teaching in British universities
had been appointed in that decade, and 30 per cent in the years between 1973 and 1976 alone (Rock 1988).
In that take-off phase, urged on by publishers, made discontinuous with the past by a thrusting generation
of newly appointed young Turks, criminology became striving, expansive, quarrelsome, factious, and
open, its practitioners jostling with one another for a place in the sun (see Taylor, Walton, and Young
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1973). Some established the National Deviancy Symposium in 1968 in open confrontation with what was
conceived to be the old orthodoxies represented by the Institute of Criminology at the University of
Cambridge and the Home Office Research Unit (S. Cohen 1971; Downes 1988). They splintered along the
theoretical and political faultlines of sociology proper, refracting the larger arguments of Marxist and
post-Marxist theory then in vogue through the new phenomenologies of social life, and feminism. And
then, after a while and inevitably—in the 1980s and beyond—most, but not all (see Hillyard et al. 2004;
Sumner 1994, 2004) were to become progressively reconciled to one another as new facts became available
through instruments such as crime surveys, battle fatigue set in, scholars mellowed with age, and the
pragmatics of having to work together continually in departments, committees, and journals began to
supersede the earlier, heady pleasures of intellectual struggle. Yet what the young Turks had succeeded in
constructing was an inchoate, exciting, and ambitious discipline that bore all the marks of its diverse
origins, earlier quarrels, and competing aspirations, a discipline that was never regulated or subject to the
imposition of professional entry requirements, one that could be memorably described by David Downes as
a ‘rendezvous’ subject that was shaped by the confluence of many ideas and schools around an empirical
area rather than a single orthodoxy.
Sociological Criminology
Sociological theories of crime are wide-reaching, extending, for example, from an examination of the
smallest detail of street encounters between adolescents and the police to comparative analyses of large
differences in rates of recorded crime between nations (see Lacey 2008) and over long swathes of time (see
Eisner 2003 and Spierenburg 2008), and it is sometimes difficult to determine where their boundaries
should be drawn. Two of the sociological criminologists most influential in the development of the
p. 19 discipline ↵ once defined it in very broad terms as ‘the body of knowledge regarding crime as a social
phenomenon. It includes within its scope the processes of making laws, of breaking laws, and of reacting
towards the breaking of laws’ (Sutherland and Cressey 1955: 3). There is as a result no one, royal way to lay
it out. In an empirically driven subdiscipline where formally different theories often contend with the same
problems in very much the same way, as useful a procedure as any is to identify and describe a number of
families of theories that share some big idea or ideas in common.
I shall, in particular, attend to the key themes of control, signification, and order. Crime is, after all,
centrally bound up with the state’s attempts to impose its will through law; with the meanings of those
attempts to lawbreaker, law-enforcer, observer, and victim (Condry 2010); and with concomitant patterns
of order and disorder. Criminologists differ about the weights and meanings that should be attached to
those attributes: some, and control theorists in particular, would wish to be what David Matza once called
‘correctionalist’, that is, to use knowledge about crime to suppress or change it. Others would look upon
the exercise of control even more critically. Some are more hostile to interpretive sociology than others
(see Clarke 1980). But they all feed off one another’s ideas even if their practices and politics diverge. The
ideas addressed here map the discipline’s more visible features, and I shall employ them to steer a more or
less straight route through Durkheimian and Mertonian theories of anomie; control theories; rational
choice theory; routine activities theory; the work of the ‘Chicago School’; studies of the relations between
control and space, including Newman’s ‘defensible space’, and more recent ideas of risk and the
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marshalling of dangerous populations; experimental criminology; radical criminology and Left Realism;
functionalist criminology; and ‘labelling theory’ and cultural and subcultural analyses of crime. I shall take
it that such a grand tour should encompass most of the major landmarks which criminologists would now
consider central to the foundations of their field.
What this chapter cannot do, of course, is provide substantial context, history, criticism, and detail. That
would be impossible in a relatively short piece, although the rest of this Handbook may be read as its frame.
Neither is this chapter concerned with theories of penology or governance. Like any scheme of
classification, it is further inevitable that it will face some problems of anomaly and overlap, not only
internally but also with other chapters. If the study of crime cannot be severed from the analysis of control,
the state, or gender, there will always be such problems at the margins. But the chapter should both
furnish the larger contours of an introductory map of contemporary sociological theories of crime and
serve as a complement to those other chapters.
Crime and Control
Anomie and the contradictions of social order

I shall begin by describing anomie theory, one of the earliest, most enduring and, for a while, hard-
researched of all the ideas of criminological theory, and one that still persists, albeit occasionally in
disguised form.
At heart, many theories, lay and scholarly, take it that crime is a consequence of defective social regulation.
People are said to deviate because the controls and authority of society are so weakened that they offer few
restraints or moral direction. The idea is a very old one, antedating the emergence of sociology itself, but
its formal birth into theory is linked indissolubly with anomie and the French sociologist, Émile Durkheim.
p. 20 ↵ Durkheim awarded two rather different meanings to anomie, or normlessness. In The Division of
Labour in Society, published in 1893, and in Suicide, published in 1897, he asserted that a French society
undergoing industrialization was in uneasy transition from one state of solidarity or social integration to
another. A society without an elaborate division of labour rested on what he called (perhaps misleadingly)
the mechanical solidarity of people who not only reacted much alike to problems, but also saw that
everyone about them reacted alike to those problems, thereby lending objectivity, scale, unanimity,
authority and solidity to moral response, and bringing a potential for massive disapproval and repression
to bear down on the deviant. Such a social order was conceived to lie in the simpler past of a less
differentiated pre-industrial society. The future of industrial society would be distinguished by a state of
organic solidarity, the solidarity appropriate to a complex division of labour. People would then be
allocated by merit and effort to very diverse positions, and they would not only recognize the legitimacy of
the manner in which rewards were distributed, but also acknowledge the indispensability of what each did
in his or her work for the other and for the common good. Organic solidarity would thus have co controls
peculiar to itself: ‘Sheerly economic regulation is not enough … there should be moral regulation, moral
rules which specify the rights and obligations of individuals in a given occupation in relation to those in
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other occupations’ (Giddens 1972: 11). People might no longer think wholly in unison, their moral response
might not be substantial and undivided, but they should be able to compose their differences peaceably by
means of a system of restitutive justice that made amends for losses suffered.
Durkheim’s distinction between the two forms of solidarity and their accompanying modes of control was
anthropologically suspect (see Llewellyn and Hoebel 1941), but it was in his analysis of the liminal state
between them that criminologists were most interested. In that transition, where capitalism was thought
to impose a ‘forced division of labour’, people acquiesced neither in the apportionment of rewards nor in
the moral authority of the economy or state. They were obliged to work and act in a society that not only
enjoyed a precarious legitimacy but also exercised an incomplete control over their desires. In such a
setting, it was held, ‘man’s nature [was to be] eternally dissatisfied, constantly to advance, without relief
or rest, towards an indefinite goal’ (Durkheim 1952: 256). Moral regulation was relatively deficient and
people were correspondingly free to deviate, perhaps in a manner defiant towards the existing political and
social order (Sherman 2010). That is the first meaning Durkheim gave to anomie. His second will be visited
below.
Given another, distinctively American, complexion by Robert Merton, anomie became a socially fostered
state of discontent and deregulation that generated crime and deviance as part of the routine functioning
of a society which promised much to everyone but actually denied them equal access to its attainment
(Merton 1938). People might have been motivated to achieve success in the United States, the society on
which Merton focused, but they confronted class, race, and other social barriers that manifestly
contradicted the myth of openness. It was not easy for a poor, inner-city adolescent to receive sponsorship
for jobs, achieve academic awards, or acquire capital. In a society where failure was interpreted as a sign of
personal rather than structural weakness, where failure tended to lead to individual guilt rather than to
political or collective anger (Newman 2006), the pressure to succeed could be so powerful that it impelled
people thus disadvantaged to bypass legitimate careers and take to illegitimate careers instead: ‘the
culture makes incompatible demands … In this setting, a cardinal American virtue—“ambition”—
promotes a cardinal American vice—“deviant behavior”’ (Merton 1957: 145).
p. 21 ↵ Merton’s anomie theory was to be modified progressively for some thirty years. In the work of
Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960), for example, it was elaborated to include illegitimate routes to
success. Their Delinquency and Opportunity (1960) described the consequences of young American men (in
the 1950s and 1960s the criminological gaze was almost wholly on the doings of young American men) not
only being pushed into crime by the difficulties of acquiring money and position in conventional ways, but
also being pulled by the lure of lucrative and unconventional criminal careers. There would be those who
were offered an unorthodox path in professional or organized crime, and they could become thieves,
robbers, or racketeers. There would be those for whom no path was available, and they could become
members of conflict gangs. And there were those who failed to attain admission to either a law-abiding or
a law-violating group, the ‘double failures’, who would, it was conjectured, give up, retreat and become
drug-users and hustlers. Each of those modes of adaptation was, in effect, a way of life, supported by a
system of meanings or a subculture, and Cloward and Ohlin provided one of the bridges between the
structural and the interpretive models of crime which will be discussed towards the end of this chapter.
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And then Irving Spergel went even further to add patterns of community organization to the model,
describing Racketville, Slumtown and Haulburg as the environments in which organized crime, conflict
gangs, and professional crime could flourish (1973).
In the work of Albert Cohen (1957), anomie was in effect to be synthesized with the Freudian idea of
‘reaction formation’ in an attempt to explain the manifestly expressive and ‘non-rational’ nature of much
delinquency. The prospect of failure was depicted as bringing about a major psychological rejection of
what had formerly been sought, so that the once-aspiring working-class adolescent emphatically and
expressively turned his back on the middle-class world that spurned him and adopted a style of behaviour
that was its systematic inversion. The practical and utilitarian in middle-class life was transformed into
non-utilitarian delinquency; respectability became malicious negativism; and the deferment of
gratification became short-run hedonism. Again, in the work of David Downes, conducted in London in the
early 1960s to explore how far beyond America anomie theory might be generalized, the ambitions of
English adolescents were found to be so modulated by the presence of relatively abundant, albeit low-paid,
jobs and what was then a stable and legitimated system of social stratification that working-class youth
did not seem to undergo a taxing guilt, shame, or frustration in their failure to accomplish middle-class
goals. They neither hankered after the middle-class world nor repudiated it. Rather, their response was
‘dissociation’. Where they did experience a strong dissatisfaction, however, was in their thwarted attempts
to enjoy leisure, and their delinquencies were principally hedonistic, focused on drinking, fighting, and
malicious damage to property, rather than instrumentally turned towards the accumulation of wealth. And
that theme—of the part played by the adolescent ‘manufacture of excitement’ and the courting of risk—
was to be echoed repeatedly in the empirical and theoretical work of criminologists thereafter. Making
‘something happen’ in a world without significant cultural or material resources could easily bring about a
drift into delinquency (see Matza 1964; Corrigan 1979; Cusson 1983; Katz 1988; Presdee 2000). Indeed, it
was to be distinctive of much delinquency. Ferrell, Hayward and Young, for example, talked about how
many young people ‘push themselves to ‘the edge’, and engage there in ‘edgework’, in search of an
‘adrenalin rush’, authentic identity, and existential certainty; they lose control to take control’ (2008, p.
72).
An incarnation of anomie theory is thus to be found in muted form in ‘Left Realism’ and its successor,
p. 22 ‘cultural criminology’, where the idea of structural tension is integrated ↵ with that of the social
meanings of the act to produce a conception of delinquency as a motivated, often hedonistic response to
the inequalities of capitalism. ‘The Mertonian notion of contradiction between culture and structure’,
wrote Jock Young, himself the father of ‘left realism’ turned father of ‘cultural criminology’, ‘has run
throughout all my work, from The Drugtakers onwards’ (2004: 553). I shall return to Left Realism below. It
is also found implicitly in an interesting book, written by epidemiologists and only sporadically related to
crime, which suggests that rates of mental illness and violence, including homicide, are tied to levels of
income inequality within societies (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). The more unequal a society, they argue,
the greater is its abundance of social problems, and the tempting conclusion is that the illegitimacy and
blockages inhering in social arrangements conduce to strain (which they call stress) and criminal violence.
Rosenfeld and Messner would add that societies whose key sectors were out of joint with one another can
be distinguished by what they call ‘institutional anomie’, a state of malintegration particularly acute when
the economy ‘dominates the institutional balance of power’ (2013: 61) and ‘non-economic functions and
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roles’ are comparatively eroded and devalued. Market achievements will trump other forms of success;
work can trump the demands of community, family, church and school; and structural restraints and
informal controls will be corroded.
Anomie and social disorganization

The second reading of anomie stemming from Durkheim touched on moral regulation that was not so
much flawed as in a critical or chronic state of near collapse. People, he argued, are not endowed at birth
with fixed appetites and ambitions. On the contrary, their purposes and aspirations are shaped in part by
the generalized opinions and reactions of others, by a collective conscience, that can appear through social
ritual and routine to be externally derived, solid, and objective. When society is disturbed by rapid change
or major disorder, however, that semblance of solidity, authority, and objectivity can itself founder, and
people may no longer find their ambitions subject to effective social discipline. It is hard to live outside the
reassuring structures of social life, and the condition of anomie was experienced as a ‘malady of infinite
aspiration’ that was accompanied by ‘weariness’, ‘disillusionment’, ‘disturbance, agitation and
discontent’. In extreme cases, Lukes observed, ‘this condition would lead a man to commit suicide and
homicide’ (1967: 139).
Durkheim conceived such anomic deregulation to be a matter of crisis, innately unstable and short-lived.
Disorganization could not be tolerated for very long before a society collapsed or order of a sort was
restored. Indeed, sociologists are generally ill-disposed towards the term, believing that it connotes a lack
of understanding and perception on the part of the observer (see Anderson 1976; Katz 1997; and Whyte
1942). It is indeed evident that informal control can survive even in the most adverse circumstances (see
Walklate and Evans 1999) and, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the Congo, Sierra Leone, or Uganda at their
most devastated, people seem able to sustain a measure of organization within disorganization. Yet, on
both the small and the large scale, there are also clear examples of people living in conditions where
informal control and cooperation are only vestigial; where formal control is either absent or erratic; where
others are, or are seen to be, predatory and dangerous; where life is unpredictable; and where, as cause and
consequence, there is little personal safety, much anxiety, and abundant crime. Take William Julius
Wilson’s description of life in the poorest areas of the American city: ‘broken families, antisocial
p. 23 behaviour, social networks that do not extend beyond the ghetto ↵ environment, and a lack of informal
social control over the behaviour and activities of children and adults in the neighbourhood’ (1996: xvi).
On some housing estates in Paris (Wacquant 2008), London (Genn 1988), Nottingham (Davies 1998), and
St Louis (Rainwater 1970), social groupings have been portrayed as so lacking in cohesion that they
enjoyed no shared trust, neighbour preyed on neighbour, and joint defensive action was virtually
impossible.
Rampant anomie has been well documented, especially by Erikson who described in a succession of studies
the radical disorganization and collapse of social order flowing from natural and not so natural disasters
(such as the breaking of a dam and the destruction of a community) (1979, 1991,1994). Consider Davis’s
half-prophetic description of MacArthur Park, one of the poorest areas of Los Angeles, as ‘feral’ and
dangerous, ‘a free-fire zone where crack dealers and street gangs settle their scores with shotguns and
Uzis’ (1992a: 6). Consider, too, Turnbull’s (1973) description of the condition of the Ik of northern Uganda,
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a tribe that had been moved to a mountainous area after their traditional hunting grounds had been
designated a national park. They could no longer live, collaborate, and work as they had done before;
familiar patterns of social organization had become obsolete; and they were portrayed as having become
beset by ‘acrimony, envy and suspicion’ (1973: 239), ‘excessive individualism, coupled with solitude and
boredom’ (ibid.: 238), and the victimization of the weak (ibid.: 252).
A number of criminologists and others have pointed to parts of the world, commonly called ‘failed states’,
whose political structures have been so radically weakened and disordered that it becomes difficult to talk
about legitimate governments operating effectively within secure national boundaries at all (see Bayart,
Ellis, and Hibou 1999). So it was that Kaplan wrote graphically about the road-warrior culture of Somalia,
the anarchic implosion of criminal violence in the Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone, which he depicted at the
time as a lawless state that had lost control over its cities at night, whose national army was a ‘rabble’, and
which was reverting to tribalism. The future for many, he melodramatically predicted, would be a
‘rundown, crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju warriors, influenced by the worst refuse of
Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds, and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerilla
conflicts’ (1994: 62–3). So, too, Martin van Creveld analysed what he called the ubiquitous growth of ‘low-
intensity conflict’ waged by guerrillas and terrorists who threatened the state’s conventional monopoly of
violence: ‘Should present trends continue, then the kind of war that is based on the division between
government, army, and people, seems to be on its way out … A degree of violent activity that even as late as
the 1960s would have been considered outrageous is now accepted as an inevitable hazard of modern
life’ (1991: 192, 194). If Kaplan and van Creveld are even partially gifted with foresight (and much of their
argument is quite stark), the trends they foretell will be of major consequence to criminology. Without a
viable state legislature, laws, and law enforcement, without adequate state control over the exercise of
violence, how can one manage to write intelligently about a discrete realm of crime at all? Crime, after all,
is contingent on a state’s ability clearly to define, ratify, and execute the law. When the police of a state are
massively and routinely corrupt (as they appear to be in Mexico); when, for example, the Colombian
president’s aeroplane was found to be carrying large quantities of cocaine (see the New York Times, 22
September 1996); when ISIS vied with a weak state and weak occupiers to impose control over large
reaches of Syria and Iraq; and when a President of Liberia was accused of cannibalism (The Times, 2
November 1999); it is not difficult to ask with Stan Cohen whether it is possible any longer to distinguish
p. 24 firmly between crime and politics. There has been, he asserted, ↵ a widespread decline of the myth that
the sovereign state can provide security, law, and order; a decline in the legitimacy of the state through
corruption scandals; a growth of international crime and a rise of criminal states such as Chechnya; and, in
Africa particularly, the emergence of barbarism, horror, and atrocity. In some settings, he remarked,
‘lawlessness and crime have so destroyed the social fabric that the state itself has withdrawn’ (1996: 9).
Control theory
A second, large, and linked cluster of theories centres loosely around the contention that almost all people
seek to commit crime because it is possible, profitable, useful, or enjoyable for them to do so, and that they
will almost certainly break the law if they can. Even if that contention, with its covert imagery of feral man
(and woman), is not strictly convincing, control theorists would argue that it directs enquiry in a helpful
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direction. They profess to be interested less in the fidelity of description than in its yield for policy
intervention and prediction in concrete situations. Theirs is a theory of practical rather than of empirical
truths, and the practical is thought to suggest that more will be learned by exploring a few, uncomplicated
factors that seem to prevent people from offending than by investigating all the complicated motives,
meanings, and antecedents that prompt them to transgress. Travis Hirschi put the issue baldly: ‘The
question “Why do they do it?” is simply not the question the theory is designed to answer. The question is,
“Why don’t we do it?”’(1969: 34). Such a doctrine is a recognizably close neighbour of anomie theories in
its focus on the defective regulation of potentially unbridled appetites (Newburn, for instance, asserted
that a number of participants in the 2011 London riots looted because ‘they could’ (2011: 13)); and, indeed,
it is occasionally very difficult to distinguish one set of ideas from the other. Earlier variants of control
theory, compiled in the 1960s and 1970s, proceeded by drafting lists of the constraints which could check
the would-be offender, an offender who, it was assumed for analytic purposes, could be much like you, me,
or anyone. Thus, arguing against subcultural theory, and grounded in a Freudian conception of human
impulses that required taming, Hirschi claimed that ‘delinquent acts result when the individual’s bond to
society is weak or broken’ (1969: 16).
Four chief elements were held by Hirschi to induce people to comply with rules: attachment, commitment,
involvement, and belief. Attachment reflected a person’s sensitivity to the opinions of others;
commitment flowed from an investment of time, energy, and reputation in conformity; involvement
stemmed from engrossment in conventional activity; and belief mirrored a person’s conviction that he or
she should obey legal rules. There is tautology and repetition in that formulation, but he nevertheless
usefully directed the criminological mind towards answering his one big question, ‘Why don’t we do it?’
Later, with Gottfredson, Hirschi elaborated control theory further by turning to self-control and
impulsivity. Crime, they claimed, flows from low self-control: it provides a direct and simple gratification
of desires that is attractive to those who cannot or will not postpone pleasure. In the main, it requires little
skill or planning. It can be intrinsically enjoyable because it involves the exercise of cunning, agility,
deception, or power. It requires a lack of sympathy for the victim. But it does not provide medium- or
long-term benefits equivalent to those that can flow from more orthodox careers. In short, it is, they say,
likely to be committed by those who are ‘impulsive, insensitive, physical … Risk-taking, short-sighted,
and non-verbal’ (1990: 90).
p. 25 ↵ David Matza almost certainly would not have called himself a control theorist, but in Delinquency and
Drift (1964) he effectively straddled theories of control, anomie, and signification, and he portrayed
delinquents and delinquency in a manner that control theorists would find acceptable. Delinquents are not
very different from us, he argued. Most of the time they are conventional enough in belief and conduct, and
it is difficult to predict who will conform and who will not. But there are occasions when the grip of control
loosens, adolescents fatalistically experience themselves (perhaps for opportunistic or rhetorical reasons)
as if they were propelled by social forces stronger than themselves, no longer responsible for their actions,
and they will then find themselves released to drift in and out of delinquency. What eases that process of
disengagement are widely circulating accounts or ‘techniques of neutralization’ (a hugely influential idea
that he had developed earlier with Gresham Sykes (Sykes and Matza 1957)) which enable people
methodically to counter the guilt and offset the censure they might experience when offending. Matza
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claimed that delinquents could be fortified in their resolve by condemning their condemners (by asserting
that police and judges were themselves corrupt and invalid critics, for instance); denying injury (by
asserting that no significant harm was done); denying the victim (by asserting that the victim was of no
consequence or deserved what happened); or by appealing to higher loyalties (a noble motive could be
cited for an ignoble deed).
Perhaps one of the most telling and economical contributions to control theory was supplied by Harriet
Wilson (1980). Examining ‘socially deprived’ families in Birmingham, England, she was to conclude that
what most sharply differentiated families with delinquent children from those with none was simply what
she called the exercise of ‘chaperonage’ (1980). Parents who acted as chaperons effectively prevented their
children from offending: they were so convinced that the neighbourhood in which they lived was
dangerous and contaminating that they sought to protect their children by keeping them indoors or under
close supervision, escorting them to school, and prohibiting them from playing with others defined as
undesirable (and see Reckless 1957).
Control theory has also been applied with effect to the problem of gender differences in offending. Apart
from age, no other demographic feature at present so powerfully discriminates between offenders and
non-offenders. At one time, however, scant criminological attention was paid to female crime because
there was so very little of it (see Innes 2003: 54). As Lemert once said, like Custer’s men, criminologists
rode to the sound of the guns, and there were few female guns to be heard. By contrast, what made male
offending appear so interesting was its sheer seriousness and scale.
Feminist criminologists and others tacitly adopting a control perspective retorted that that was precisely
what made women so important analytically (Heidensohn 1968), and they inverted the problem by asking
Travis Hirschi’s central question (without actually citing Hirschi himself) about why women did not
offend. There was the academically new and intriguing riddle of the conforming woman, and the riddle
was answered, in part, by reference to differentials in control. John Hagan and his colleagues put it that
deviation as a form of fun, exploit and excitement in public space was more commonly open to males than
to females because they are less frequently risk-averse and less frequently subject to intense, continual,
and diffuse family control in and around the private, domestic sphere. That control, by extension, not only
tended to remove girls from the purview of agents of formal social control, the criminal justice system, and
the possibility of public identification as criminal; it also worked more effectively because it rested on the
manipulation of emotional sanctions rather than the imposition of physical or custodial controls. Shaming
strategies and the withdrawal of affection are seemingly more potent than fines, probation, or prison.
p. 26 ↵ It followed that the more firmly structured and hierarchical the family, the sharper the distinction
drawn between male and female roles, the more women were confined to a private space, the greater
would be the disparity between rates of male and female offending (see Hagan et al. 1979, 1985, and 1988).
Pat Carlen gave that analysis another twist by noting that female criminals were most likely to emerge
when domestic family controls were eroded or removed altogether, when what she called the ‘gender deal’
was broken, young women left home or were taken into the care of the state, and were thereby exposed to
controls characteristically experienced by men (1988). The answer to the ‘crime problem’, Frances
Heidensohn once concluded, tongue in cheek, would have to lie in the feminization of control.
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Control theory is now in vogue, particularly in the United States, where it is linked with theories of the
‘life-course’ in the work of authors such as Sampson and Laub (1993), whose seminal Crime in the Making
of 1993 was to be succeeded by Laub and Sampson’s Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives of 2003. Both works
explored the genesis of, and desistance from, delinquency in the lives of men studied over decades: and
they devoted especial attention to the manner in which the social bonds of family, friends, employment,
and military service work as informal controls that filter influences emanating from the wider society.
Marriage, the onset of work, and military service, they argue, may offer critical turning points which
induce discontinuities in a life history; create new sets of social relations, dependencies, and
responsibilities; introduce new disciplines into social life; and invite stock-taking and reflection. Perhaps
they under-estimated the, often hidden, existence of domestic violence within marriage and the crimes
committed by those serving in the armed forces. Perhaps too they neglected the fashion in which
institutions attempt to deal with their own, apart from the public domain (see Henry 1983). But there is
merit in the life course model: involvement with the criminal justice system and imprisonment may well
interrupt or undermine participation in stabilizing social environments; stigmatize the offender and
prevent re-entry into the ‘straight’ world; encourage cynicism about criminal justice through a close
acquaintance with its game-like and seedier features; and introduce the offender to other lawbreakers who
help to amplify deviance through differential association. And, throughout, and following Matza, Katz, and
others, Laub and Sampson (2003) portray the process not as a grim and ineluctable progression into
criminality, but as a sequence of events and actions which is influenced always by the capacity of people to
interpret and choose how they will respond. The part played by human agency and contingency is
repeatedly underscored, leading them to observe how impossible it is to predict future criminality from
present circumstances.
Rational choice theory

An increasingly important, but not indispensable, foundation of control theories is ‘rational choice
theory’, a resuscitation of old utilitarian theories that preceded sociology and were once linked with Adam
Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Cesare Beccaria, and James Mill. Rational choice theory was reintroduced to
criminology through the medium of a revived economics of crime, and it brought with it the convenient
fiction of economic man (see Becker 1968), a fiction which has an immediate affinity with the criminal
man (or woman) of control theory. Economic man, deemed to be continually looking about him for
opportunities, making amoral and asocial choices to maximize his personal utility, may not be a wholly
credible being, but, it is argued, he does help to simplify model-making, strip away what rational choice
theorists conceive to be inessential theoretical and descriptive clutter, and aim directly at practically useful
policy questions (see Clarke and Cornish 1985). Economic man in his (or her) criminal guise does not have
p. 27 a past, ↵ complex motives, a rich social life, or, indeed, a recognizable social identity (a ‘disposition’ is
how Ron Clarke put it (1992)). He or she does not need to have any of those attributes. Indeed, he or she
may not even be perfectly rational, muddling through or ‘satisficing’, as we all do, on the basis of
imperfect information and in the presence of risks and uncertainty. He or she is very much like any one of
us or, better still, like some Everyman who stands abstractly and plainly for all of us. He or she needs no
such complexity, because what weighs in control theory is the piecemeal theoretical analysis of discrete
Page 13 of 47
episodes of disembodied offending behaviour conducted by people making decisions around the issues of
risk, effort, and reward (Clarke and Cornish 2000: 7) in the settings in which they take place (see
introduction to Clarke and Felson 1993).
In Ron Clarke’s particularly influential formulation, the rate of crime was held to vary in response to three
broad configurations of factors. The first revolved around increasing the effort Everyman (and
Everywoman) would have to expend in committing a crime, and that entailed what was called ‘target
hardening’ (by defending objects and people by shields and other devices); ‘access control’ (and that
involved making it difficult for predators to approach targets); deflecting offenders (by encouraging them,
for example, to act in a legitimate rather than an illegitimate manner through the provision of graffiti
boards, litter bins, and spittoons); and ‘controlling facilitators’ (through gun control or checks on the sales
of spray cans, for instance). The second factor revolved around increasing the risks of offending through
the screening of people (by means of border searches, for example); formal surveillance by police, security
guards, and others; surveillance by employees such as bus conductors, train guards, concierges, and
janitors; and ‘natural surveillance’ (aided by lowering or removing obstacles such as hedges and shrubs
around private dwellings (see Bennett and Wright 1984), installing closed circuit television cameras,
lighting the interiors of stores, and enhanced street lighting). The final grouping was ‘reducing the
rewards’ of crime, itself composed of ‘target removal’ (using electronic transactions and bus and ‘oyster’
1
cards to reduce the number of cash payments, and thus the accumulation of money in single places, for
instance); property identification; removal of inducements (by the rapid cleaning of graffiti or repair of
vandalized property); and rule-setting (through income tax returns, customs declarations, and the like)
(taken from Clarke 1992: 13). A pursuit of those common-sense, sometimes indistinguishable, but
nevertheless practical ideas allowed research officers at the Home Office in the 1970s and early 1980s to
undertake a succession of revealing case studies, discovering, for example, that compact, old school
buildings on small urban sites were a third as likely to be burgled as large, sprawling, modern buildings
with their many points of access and weak possibilities of surveillance (see Hope 1982); or that there was
some twenty times as much malicious damage on the upper than on the lower decks of ‘one man’, double-
decker buses whose drivers’ powers of surveillance were confined at the time to one level only (Mayhew et
al. 1976: 26).
None of those variables touched on conventional sociological questions about who offenders might be,
how they reason, and how they act (and for that rational choice theorists have been criticized (see Wright
and Decker 1997; Fukuyama 2004; and Haggerty, who remarked a little astringently that control theorists
are more akin to ‘Wal-Mart security consultants than research criminologists’ (2004: 218)). Control
theorists concentrated instead on the imagined impact of different forms of control on Everyman or
Everywoman abroad in space, and from that it was but a short step to extend control theory to an analysis
of the disciplines that are built into everyday social life, on the one hand, and into the social uses of space,
on the other.
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p. 28 Routine Activities Theory

Ron Clarke, the situational control theorist, and Marcus Felson, the theorist of the links between crime and
routine activities, agreed that they shared ideas in common (see Clarke and Felson 1993) as well as ideas
apart (thus it was claimed that situational control theory is microscopic, routine activities theory largely
macroscopic in its application (Clarke and Cornish undated: 25)). Clarke and his colleagues had asked what
prevented specific criminal incidents from occurring in specific situations. Felson asked how such
incidents originate or are checked in the routine activities of everyday social life (1994). Just as Clarke and
others had emphasized how, for explanatory purposes, it was convenient to assume that offenders were
little different from anyone else, so Felson and his colleagues put it that most criminals are unremarkable,
unskilled, petty, and non-violent people much like many of us. Just as control theorists made use of a tacit
version of original sin, so routine activities theory adopted a series of presuppositions about basic human
frailty, the importance of temptation and provocation, and the part played by idleness (‘We are all born
weak, but … we are taught self-control’, Felson asserted (1994: 20)).
The ‘routine activities’ criminologist would argue that the analysis of predatory crime does not necessarily
require weighty causes. Neither does it demand that the theorist commit the ‘like-causes-like’ fallacy
which tacitly insists that a ‘pathological’ phenomenon such as crime must be explained by a pathological
precondition such as alienation, poverty, family dysfunction, or class or racial oppression. Crime was taken
to be built into the very architecture of everyday life. More precisely, it was to be found in the convergence
in space and time of what were called motivated offenders, suitable targets, and capable guardians (see
Cohen and Felson 1979): being affected by such matters as the weight, value, quantity, and distribution of
stealable goods (the growth in the numbers of light, portable, high-cost goods such as tablets, lap-top
computers and mobile (or ‘cell’) telephones will encourage more theft, for instance); the impact of motor
cars (they aid rapid flight, permit the discreet transportation of objects, and give rise to a geographical
dispersal of the population which dilutes surveillance); habits of leisure (adolescents now have larger
swathes of empty time than did their predecessors, time in which they can get up to mischief); habits of
work (when all members of a household are in employment, there will be no capable guardians to protect a
home); habits of residence (single people are less effective guardians of property than are larger
households); the growth of technology (modern mobile telephones, for instance, amplify the public’s
ability to report and record crime); and so on. It is an uncomplicated theory but again, like its near
neighbour, control theory, it does ask empirically productive questions.
Crime, Control, and Space
The Chicago School

Routine activities theory and control theory both talk about the convergence of victims, offenders,
bystanders and police in space, and space has always been analytically to the fore in criminology. Indeed,
one of the earliest and most productive of its research traditions was the social ecology and urban mapping
practised by the sociology department of the University of Chicago in the 1920s and beyond (see Park 1925;
Thrasher 1927; and Landesco 1968).
Page 15 of 47
As cities grow, it was held, so there would be a progressive, ‘organic’ and largely spontaneous
p. 29 differentiation of space, population, and function that concentrated different ↵ groupings in different
areas. The main organizing structure was the zone, and the Chicago sociologists discerned five principal
concentric zones shaping the city: the central business district around the ‘Loop’ (as it was known in
Chicago) at the very core; the ‘zone in transition’ about that centre; an area of stable working-class
housing; middle-class housing; and outer suburbia.
The zone in transition was marked by the greatest volatility of its residents. It was an area of comparatively
cheap rents, weak social control, internal social differentiation, and rapid physical, demographic and
social change. It was to the zone in transition that new immigrants most frequently came, and it was there
that they settled into what were called ‘natural areas’, small, ‘spontaneously’ generated, communal
enclaves that were said to be relatively homogeneous in composition and culture. Chicago sociologists
plotted the incidence of social problems on to census maps of the city, and it was the zone in transition
that was found repeatedly to house the largest visible proportions of criminals, the poor, the illegitimate,
the illiterate, the mentally ill (see Faris and Dunham 1939), juvenile delinquents (Shaw and McKay 1969),
and prostitutes (Reckless 1933). It was, in effect, virtually coextensive with what was then described as
social pathology. Not only were formal social controls held to be at their weakest there (it was, as it were,
socially dislocated from the formal institutions and main body of American society (see Whyte 1942)) but
informal social controls were eroded by moral and social diversity, rapid population movement, and a lack
of strong and pervasive local institutions: ‘contacts are extended, heterogeneous groups mingle,
neighborhoods disappear, and people, deprived of local and family ties, are forced to live under … loose,
transient and impersonal relations’ (Wirth 1964: 236).
A number of the early Chicago sociologists united social ecology, the study of the patterns formed by
different groups living together in the same space, with the methods of social anthropology to explore the
traditions, customs, and practices of the residents of natural areas. They found that, while there may well
have been a measure of social and moral dislocation between the zone in transition and the wider society,
as well as within the zone itself, those natural areas could also manifest a remarkable inner cohesion and
persistence of culture and behaviour that were reproduced from generation to generation and from
immigrant group to immigrant group within the same terrain over time. Delinquency was, in effect, not
disorganized at all, but a stable attribute of social life, an example of continuity in change: ‘the traditions
of delinquency can be and are transmitted down through successive generations of boys, in much the same
way that language and other social forms are transmitted’ (Shaw and McKay 1969: 174). Cultural
transmission then came to be the focus of the work pursued by a small group of second-generation
Chicago sociologists. Sometimes under the name of ‘differential association’, it was studied as a normal
psychological process of learning motives, skills, and meanings in the company of others who bore
criminal traditions (see Sutherland and Cressey 1955).
That urban research was to prepare a diverse legacy for criminology: the spatial analysis of crime; the
study of subcultures (which I shall touch on below); the epidemiology of crime; crime as an interpretive
practice (which I shall also touch on); and much else. Let me turn first to some examples of spatial
analysis.
Page 16 of 47
Control and space: beyond the Chicago School

The Chicago sociologists’ preoccupation with the cultural and symbolic correlates of spatial congregations
of people was to be steadily elaborated. For instance, Wiles, Bottoms, and their colleagues, then working at
p. 30 the University of Sheffield, added two important ↵ observations. They argued first that, in a then more
tightly administered Britain, social segregation did not emerge, as it were, organically with unplanned city
growth (although Chicago itself was never quite as unplanned as some of the early social ecologists had
alleged (see Suttles 1972)), but with the intended and unintended consequences of policy decisions taken
by local government departments responsible for housing a large proportion of the population in
municipal rented accommodation. Housing allocation was an indirect and sometimes unintended
reflection of moral judgements about tenants that resulted, or were assumed to result, in the spatial
concentration of criminal populations (see Bottoms et al. 1989). Further, and partly in accord with that
argument, the reputations of natural areas themselves became a topic of criminological interest: how was
it, some criminologists asked, that the moral meanings attached to area of residence by insiders and
outsiders affected people’s reputations, choices, and action? One’s very address could become a moral fact
that affected not only how one would be treated by others in and about the criminal justice system (see
Damer 1974), but also how one would come to rate oneself as a potential deviant or conformist (see Gill
1977).
Secondly, it was argued, while the Chicago sociologists may have examined the geographical distribution
of offenders, it was instructive also to scrutinize how offending itself could be plotted, because the two
measures need not correspond (Baldwin and Bottoms 1976 and see Morris 1957). Offending has its maps.
Indeed, it appears to be densely concentrated, clustered around offenders’ homes, areas of work and
recreation, and the pathways in between (Brantingham and Brantingham 1981–2; Wikstrőm 2007). So it
was that, pursuing routine activities theory, Sherman and his colleagues surveyed all calls made to the
police in Minneapolis in one year; and they discovered that a few ‘hot spots’ had exceptional densities of
crime: only 3 per cent of all places produced 50 per cent of the calls; all robberies took place in only 2.2 per
cent of places, all rapes in 1.2 per cent of places, and all car thefts in 2.7 per cent of places (Sherman et al.
1989; see also Roncek and Maier 1991).
Defensible space
If offending has its maps, so does social control; and criminologists and others have become ever more
interested in the fashion in which space, behaviour, and control intersect. One forerunner was Jane Jacobs,
who speculated about the relations between city landscapes and informal controls, arguing, for example,
that dense, busy thoroughfares with their habitués have many more ‘eyes on the street’ and opportunities
for witness reporting and bystander intervention, than sterile pedestrian zones, ‘confused’ mixed space or
streets without stores and other lures (Jacobs 1965).
The idea of ‘defensible space’, in particular, has borrowed from anthropology and architecture, coupled
with the concept of surveillance, and put to work in analysing formal and informal responses to different
kinds of space. ‘Defensible space’ itself leans on the psychological notion of ‘territoriality’, the sense of
attachment and symbolic investment that people can acquire in a place or places. Territoriality is held by
Page 17 of 47
some to be a human universal, an imperative that leads people to wish to guard what is their own. Those
who have a stake in a physical area, it is said, will care for it, police it, and report strangers and others who
have no apparent good purpose to be there.
What is quite critical is how space is marked out and bounded. The prime author of the idea of defensible
space, Oscar Newman (1972), claimed that, other things being equal, what induces territorial sentiments is
a clear demarcation between private and public areas, even if the demarcations are only token. The private
p. 31 will be protected in ↵ ways that the public is not, and the fault of many domestic and institutional
buildings is that separations and segregations are not clearly enough incorporated in design. The
geographer, Alice Coleman, and others took it that improvements to the physical structures of built space
could then achieve a significant impact on crime: above all, she insisted on the importance of restricting
access to sites; reducing the interconnections or ‘walkways’ between buildings; and emphasizing the
distinction between public and private space and minimizing what Oscar Newman called ‘confused space’,
the space that was neither one thing nor the other (Coleman 1985, 1986). She has been roundly faulted,
both methodologically and analytically, for her neglect of dimensions other than the physical (see Hillier
1973, 1986), but she and Newman have succeeded in introducing an analytic focus on the interrelations
between space and informal control that was largely absent before. Only rarely have scholars such as
Campbell (1993), Duneier (2001), Power (1997), and Shapland and Vagg (1988) enquired into the informal
controlling practices of people as they observe, interpret, and respond to ambiguous, deviant, and non-
deviant conduct in the spaces around them.
Shapland and Vagg contended, for instance, that there is often a continuous, active, and informed process
of surveillance exercised by people on the ground; a process which is so discreet that it has escaped much
formal attention, and which meshes only haphazardly with the work of the police and other agencies. And
very similarly, Duneier laid bare the webs of informal control practised by homeless entrepreneurs selling
books and magazines from stalls on New York’s sidewalks. Far from posing a problem of deregulation,
they acted as palpable but subtle agents of order, looking after and protecting one another, and preserving
public stability.
Crime, power, and space

Surveillance has not always been construed as neutral or benign, and there have been debates about what
its newer forms might portend. Even its sponsors in government departments and criminal justice
agencies have spoken informally and privately about their anxiety that people are being encouraged to
become unduly fearful of crime and to retreat into private fastnesses. It began to be argued, especially by
those who followed Michel Foucault, that a ‘punitive city’ was in the making that, in Stan Cohen’s words,
there was ‘a deeper penetration of social control into the social body’ (1979a: 356) (and, Cohen would have
added privately, sociologists do not in the main look on social control with a favourable eye).
Some came to claim not only that there has been a move progressively to differentiate and elaborate the
distribution of controls in space, but also that there has been a proliferating surveillance of dangerous
areas, often conducted obliquely and with an increasingly advanced technology. Michel Foucault’s (1977)
dramatic simile of Jeremy Bentham’s model prison, the Panopticon, was to be put to massive use in
Page 18 of 47
criminology. Just as the Panopticon, or inspection house, was supposed to have permitted the unobserved
observation of many inmates around the bright, illuminated rim of a circular prison by the few guards in
its obscured centre, just as the uncertainty of unobserved observation worked to make the controlled
control themselves (see Semple 1993), so, Foucault and those who followed him wished to argue, modern
society is coming to exemplify the perfection of the automatic exercise of power through generalized
surveillance. The carceral society was a machine in which everyone was supposed to be caught (even, it
seems, the police, who may survey one another as well as the wider population (see The Times, 4 November
p. 32 1999)); relying as it does on diffuse control through ↵ unseen monitoring and the individualization and
‘interiorization’ of control (Gordon 1972)). Public space, it has been said, was becoming exposed to ever
more perfunctory, distant, and technologically driven policing by formal state agencies while control in
private and semi-private space (the space of the shopping malls, university campus, and theme park) was
itself becoming more dense, privatized, and widespread, placed in the hands of security guards and store
detectives, and reliant on electronic monitoring (Davis 1992b: 233; but see Welsh and Farrington 2002
which concluded that the introduction of CCTV appears to affect only the commission of motor thefts. All
other forms of crime were untouched).
A paradigmatic case study of oblique regulation was provided by Shearing and Stenning’s ethnography of
Disney World as a ‘private, quasi-feudal domain of control’ (1985: 347) that was comprehensively,
discreetly, and adeptly controlled by employees, extensive surveillance, the encouragement of self-
discipline, and the very configuration of physical space. The nature of crime and deviance itself can
undergo change in such a transformed environment: they are no longer always and everywhere so
markedly affronts to deep values but are, instead, very often breaches of what appear to be impersonal,
morally neutral, and technical controls (see Lianos and Douglas 2000: 270–1).
What also underlies much of that vision is a companion stress on the sociology of risk, a focus linked
importantly with the work of Ulrich Beck (although he had not himself written about crime (1992)). It has
been argued that people and groups are becoming significantly stratified by their exposure to risk and their
power to neutralize harm (but see O’Malley 2010, who argues that risk has always been with us. It is the
way in which it is regarded that has principally changed). The rich can afford private protection, the poor
cannot, and a new ecology emerges (Simon 1987). Phrased only slightly differently, and merged with the
newly burgeoning ideas about the pervasiveness of surveillance by machine and person (Gordon 1986–7
and Lyon 1994), those theories of risk suggest that controls are being applied by state and private
organizations, not on the basis of some moralistic conception of individual wrongdoing, but on a
foundation of the identification, classification, and management of groups categorized by their perceived
dangerousness (Feeley and Simon 1992; Simon and Feeley 1995; Simon 2007). Groups are becoming ever
more rigidly segregated in space, especially in countries like China and the United States: some being
confined to prison, semi-freedom under surveillance, or parole in the community; others (the more
affluent) retreating into their locked and gated communities, secure zones, private and ‘mass private’
spaces. There are new bifurcations of city space into a relatively uncontrolled ‘badlands’ occupied by the
poor and highly controlled ‘security bubbles’ inhabited by the rich. Geographical and social exclusion
thereby conspires to corral together populations of the unprotected, victimized, and victimizing—the
mentally disordered, the young, and the homeless—reinforcing both their vulnerability, stigmatization
and their propensities to offend (Carlen 1996; Hagan and McCarthy 1998).
Page 19 of 47
Radical Criminology
So far, control has been treated without much direct reference to the power, politics, and inequalities that
are its bedfellows. There was to be a relatively short-lived but active challenge to such quiescence from the
radical, new, or critical criminologies of the late 1960s and 1970s, criminologies that claimed their
p. 33 mandate in Marxism ( ↵ Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973), libertarianism (Douglas 1971), anarchism
(Kittrie 1971; Cohen 1985), or American populism (Quinney 1970), and whose ambitions pointed to the
need for political activism or praxis (Mathiesen 1974).
Crime control was said to be an oppressive and mystifying process that worked largely through legislation,
law-enforcement, and ideological stereotyping to preserve unequal class relations (Chambliss 1976; Box
1983). The radical political economy of crime sought chiefly to expose the hegemonic ideologies that
masked the ‘real’ nature of crime and repression in capitalist society. Most mundane offending, it was
argued, was actually less consequential than other social evils such as alienation, exploitation, pollution,
environmental damage or racism which received far too little attention (Scraton 1987). Much proletarian
crime should actually be redefined as a form of rebellion, redistributive class justice, or the possessive
individualism which resides at the heart of capitalist society. Criminal justice itself was engineered to
create visible crowds of working-class and black scapegoats who could deflect the public gaze away from
the more serious delicts of the rich and the more serious ills of a capitalism that was usually said to be in
terminal crisis. If the working class reacted in hostile fashion to the crime in their midst, then they were, in
effect, little more than the victims of a false consciousness which turned proletarian against proletarian,
black against black, inflated the importance of petty problems, and concealed the true nature of bourgeois
society. So construed, signification, the act of giving meaning, was either manipulative or misconceived, a
matter of giving and receiving incorrect and deformed interpretations of reality. Indeed, it was in the very
nature of subordination in a capitalist society that most people must be politically unenlightened about
power, crime control, and much else, and the task of the radical criminologist was to expose, denounce,
and demystify. It was concluded variously that crime was not a problem which the poor and their allies
should actually address (there were more important matters for Marxists to think about: Hirst 1975); that
the crime which should be analysed was the misconduct of the powerful (the wrong crimes and criminals
were being observed: Chapman 1967; Reiman 1990; Pearce and Tombs 1998); or that crime and its
problems would shrivel into insignificance as a criminogenic capitalism gave way to the tolerant diversity
of socialism (Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973). The crime and criminals that were thought chiefly to
warrant attention were the crimes of the powerful (Slapper and Tombs 1999) or those exceptional
examples of law-breaking that seemed to represent an incipient revolt against the state, and they
demanded cultivation as subjects of study, understanding, and possible politicization. Black prisoners, in
particular, were sometimes depicted, and could depict themselves, as prisoners of class or race wars
(Cleaver 1969). Prisons were the point of greatest state repression, and prison riots a possible spearhead of
revolution (Fitzgerald 1977).
In its early guise, radical criminology withered somewhat under a quadruple assault. In some places, and in
America especially (where it had never been firmly implanted), it ran foul of local and university politics,
and some criminology departments, such as that of the University of California at Berkeley, were closed
Page 20 of 47
down (see Crime and Social Justice Associates, 2014). More commonly, radical criminology did not lend
itself to the government-funded, policy-driven, ‘soft money’, empiricist research that had begun to
dominate schools of criminology in North America in the 1970s and 1980s (see Marshall 2002: 21)).
Second was the impact of the publication of mass victim surveys in the 1970s and 1980s which disclosed
both the extent of working-class victimization and the manner in which it stemmed from intra-class,
p. 34 rather than inter-class, criminality. It was evident ↵ that crime was a manifest problem for the working
class, adding immeasurably to their burdens, and difficult to dismiss as an ideological distraction (David
Downes 1966 called it a regressive tax on the poor). In the wake of the first British crime survey (Hough
and Mayhew 1983), two prominent radical criminologists came frankly to concede that they had believed
that ‘property offences [had been] directed solely against the bourgeoisie and that violence against the
person [had been] carried out by amateur Robin Hoods in the course of their righteous attempts to
redistribute wealth. All of this [was], alas, untrue’ (Lea and Young 1984: 262).
Third was the critique launched from within the left by a new generation of feminist scholars who asserted
that the victimization of women was no slight affair or ideological diversion, and that rape, sexual assault,
child abuse, and domestic violence should be taken very seriously indeed (Smart 1977). Not only had the
female criminal been neglected, they said, but so had the female victim, and it would not do to wait until
the revolution for matters to be put right. Once more, a number of radical criminologists gave ground.
There had been, Jones, Maclean, and Young observed, ‘a general tendency in radical thought to idealize
their historical subject (in this case the working class) and to play down intra-group conflict, blemishes
and social disorganization. But the power of the feminist case resulted in a sort of cognitive schizophrenia
amongst radicals’ (Jones et al. 1986: 3).
Next, there was a critique launched belatedly from non-feminist criminologists who resisted the
imperious claims of radical criminology to be the lone ‘fully social theory of crime’ (Downes and Rock
1979; Inciardi 1980). Marxist and radical theories of crime, they argued, lacked a comparative emphasis so
that all capitalist societies were treated essentially and misleadingly as if they were the same; and they
neglected crime in ‘non-capitalist’ and ‘pre-capitalist’ societies and crime in ‘socialist’ societies. There
was a naivety about the expectation that crime would wither away as the state itself disappeared after the
revolution. There was a trust in a socialist justice which could actually be very repressive indeed (socialist
legality, Stan Cohen mused, tends to mean a ‘model of social control in which offenders wearing
sandwich-boards listing their crimes before a crowd which shouts “Down with the counter-
revolutionaries!” and are then led away to be publicly shot’ (1979b: 44)). And there was an irresponsibility
about radical arguments, such as those of Thomas Mathiesen (1974), that ‘reformism’ would only
strengthen the grip of the capitalist system.
The radicals again gave ground and ‘Left Realism’ was to be the outcome, represented once again by Jock
Young, one of its revisionist parents, as a novel fusion of analyses of crime in the vein of anomie theory,
radical criminology and symbolic interactionism (Young 1997: 484). It was ‘realist’ because, newly
refusing to accept the so-called ‘left idealists’ dismissal of depictions of crime as an ideological trick, it
acknowledged the practical force of crime in society and its especially heavy impact on the poor, minority
ethnic people, and women. It was ‘left’ because it focused descriptively and politically on the structural
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inequalities of class, race, and gender. Its project was to examine patterns of crime and control as they
emerged out of what Young came to call the ‘square of crime’, a field of forces dominated by the state, the
victim, the offender, and the public.
Left Realism was to follow the earlier radical criminologists’ injunction to act, but action was now as much
in the service of more effective and practical policing and crime reduction strategies as in the cause of
radical social change. Left Realists joined the formerly disparaged ‘administrative criminologists’ working
in and for the (usually local) state to work on situationally based projects to prevent crime and the fear of
p. 35 crime ↵ (see Matthews and Young 1992). They designed new and confusing configurations of streets to
make it more difficult for ‘kerb-crawlers’ to cruise in search of prostitutes. They assisted in the
rehabilitation of dilapidated housing estates. Were it not for their theoretical preambles, it became difficult
to distinguish between their programmes, on the one hand, and those of the Home Office or other
government departments at the time, on the other.
If Left Realism was radical criminology’s praxis, its scholarship continued to develop in different
directions. Radical criminology never disappeared (see, for example, Hodgson 2020) but it diversified as a
number of its exponents began to turn towards studies of current (Cohen 1985; Simon 1993) and historical
forms of social control (see Scull 1979), initially under the influence of E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm
and then under that of Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Ulrich Beck. Others responded to the wider
theories that began to dominate sociology proper in the 1980s and 1990s, incorporating them to write
about crime, postmodernism (or late modernity), risk and globalization, and producing what were, in
effect, examples of the ‘fully social theory’ promised by the new criminologists back in 1973. Above all,
perhaps, that promise was to be realized by books published in 1999 by two of the original troika of new
criminologists: Ian Taylor’s Crime in Context and Jock Young’s The Exclusive Society; and one in 2007 by Jock
Young, The Vertigo of Late Modernity.
Crime in Context catalogues a series of crises flowing from transitions in the political and economic
structures of society, and the manner in which they impinged upon poverty, class, gender, race, and the
family to affect the national and transnational environments of crime and control. The Exclusive Society was
subtitled ‘Social Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity’, and its focus was more narrow,
concentrating upon the social and political consequences of what then seemed to be the inexorable and
vast increases in crime in the West. Crime was held by Young to be no longer dismissed as abnormal, the
property of a pathological few who could be restored therapeutically to the security of a moral community
at one with itself, but normal, the actions of a significant, obdurate minority of Others who were excluded
and demonized in a world newly insecure, fractured, and preoccupied with problems of risk and danger.
More recently, late modernity was portrayed in The Vertigo of Late Modernity as an epoch of flux, mobility
and shifting boundaries; where identities, careers and histories were unstable, marked by hybridization
and a constant traffic of ideas across the frontiers of groups; an epoch where reward appeared arbitrary
and chaotic, community was weakened, class identity and biographical narratives were fractured; and
where the prosperity of a seemingly contented middle class was dependent on the work of a largely
unacknowledged, undervalued, humiliated, and underpaid body of people labouring at home and overseas
to form a new ‘underclass’ which became publicly visible only through a stigmatizing process of ‘othering’
and demonization as deviant, shiftless and dependent. Crime itself was then presented, not so much as the
work of a reasoning criminal, but as an angry, expressive riposte launched by the impoverished,
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dishonoured, powerless, and dispossessed, and it worked through a reassertion of control, selfhood, and
violence, an ‘othering’, Jock Young said, of the ‘otherers’ who so devalued the poor. Crime’s new
companion, terrorism, was but a radical extension of such a project of existential affirmation. What
perhaps these accounts did not accommodate with any success, however, and following in the footsteps of
Lynn McDonald (1982) who had noted a similar claim made about an earlier time, was a steady,
concomitant decline in crime rates across the northern world which seemed to undermine what was then
being said (see Zimring 2007).
p. 36 Functionalist Criminology
Another, apparently dissimilar but substantially complementary, theory presented deviance and control as
forces that worked discreetly to maintain social order. Functionalism was a theory of social systems or
wholes, developed at the beginning of the twentieth century within a social anthropology grown tired of
speculative accounts of the origins and evolution of societies which lacked a written history to support
them, and dedicated to what was seen to be the scientific pursuit of intellectual problems. It was argued
that the business of a social science necessitated moving enquiry beyond the reach of common sense or lay
knowledge to an examination of the unintended, objective consequences of action that were visible only to
the trained eye.
There were three clear implications. First, what ordinary people thought they were doing could be very
different from what they actually achieved. The functionalist was preoccupied only with what were
thought to be objective outcomes, and people’s own accounts of action held little interest. Secondly, the
functionalist looked at the impact made by institution upon institution, structure upon structure, in
societies that were remarkable for their capacity to persist over time and beyond the lives of the individuals
who composed them. Thirdly, those consequences, viewed as a totality, constituted a system in which, it
was thought, not only did the parts affect one another and the whole, but also, the whole affected them in
return. To be sure, some institutions were relatively detached, but functionalists would have argued that
the alternative proposition—that social phenomena lack all influence upon one another, that there was no
functional reciprocity between them—was conceptually insupportable. Systemic interrelations were an
analytic a priori, a matter of self-evidence so compelling that Kingsley Davis could argue at one point that
‘we are all functionalists now’ (Davis 1959).
There have been very few dedicated functionalist criminologists (see Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990: 78).
Functionalists tend to deal with the workings of large systems rather than with their lesser attributes such
as crime. But crime and deviance did supply a particularly intriguing laboratory for thought experiments
about social order. It was easy enough to contend that religion or education shaped social cohesion, but
how much harder it would be to show that crime succeeded in doing so. After all, ‘everyone knew’ that
crime undermined social order. It followed that functionalists occasionally found it tempting to try to
confound common sense by showing that, to the contrary, the seemingly recalcitrant case of crime could
be shown scientifically to contribute to the functioning of the social system. From time to time, therefore,
they wrote about crime to demonstrate the potency of their theory. Only one functionalist, its grand
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master, Talcott Parsons, ever made the obvious, and therefore intellectually unsatisfying, point that crime
could be what was called ‘dysfunctional’ or injurious to the social system as it was then constituted
(Parsons 1951). Everyone else asserted that crime actually worked mysteriously to support it.
The result was to be a somewhat disparate collection of papers documenting the multiple functions of
deviance: Kingsley Davis showed that prostitution bolstered monogamy by providing an unemotional,
impersonal, and unthreatening release for the sexual energy of the promiscuous married male (Davis 1937)
(Mary McIntosh once wondered what the promiscuous married female was supposed to do about her
sexual energy); Ned Polsky made much the same claim for pornography (Polsky 1967); Daniel Bell showed
that racketeering provided ‘queer ladders of success’ and political and social stability for the workers
p. 37 labouring in the New York docks (1960); Émile Durkheim (1964) and ↵ George Herbert Mead (1918)
contended that the formal rituals of trial and punishment enhanced social solidarity and consolidated
moral boundaries; and, more complexly, Mary Douglas (1966), Kai Erikson (1966), Robert Scott (1972),
and others argued that deviance offered social systems a dialectical or educational tool for the clarification
and management of threats, ambiguities, and anomalies in classification systems. The list could be
extended, but all the arguments tended to one end: what appeared, on the surface, to undermine social
order accomplished the very reverse. A sociological counterpart of the invisible hand transmuted deviance
into a force for the cohesion and permanence of community.
Functionalism was to be discarded by many criminologists in time: it smacked too much of teleology (the
doctrine that effects can work retrospectively to act as the causes of events); it defied rigorous empirical
investigation (see Cotterrell 1999: 75); and, for some, more politically driven criminologists, it represented
a form of Panglossian conservatism that championed the status quo. But its ghost lingers on. Any who
would argue that, contrary to appearances, crime and deviance buttress social order; any who argue for the
study of seamless systems; any who argue that the sociologist should mistrust people’s own accounts of
their actions; any who insist that social science is the study of unintended consequences; must share
something of the functionalist’s standpoint. Anomie theories that represented crime as the system-
stabilizing, unintended consequence of strains in the social order are one quite explicit example (see
Merton 1995): deviance in that guise becomes the patterned adjustments that defuse an otherwise
disruptive conflict and reconcile people to disadvantage (although, as I have argued, the theories can also
envisage conditions in which crime becomes ‘system-threatening’). Anomie theories were, after all, the
direct offspring of functionalism, Merton himself being Parson’s heir. But less explicitly and rather
ironically, some versions of radical criminology provide another example. More than one criminologist has
argued that crime, deviance, and control were necessary for the survival of capitalism (Stinchcombe 1968).
Again, although they did not talk explicitly of ‘function’, the neo-Marxists, Hall et al. (1978), Pearce (1976),
and Reiman (1990), were recognizably functionalist in their treatment of the criminal justice system’s
production of visible and scapegoated roles for the proletarian criminal, roles that attracted public anxiety
and outrage, diverted anger away from the state, emasculated political opposition, and preserved
capitalism (Pearce and Tombs 1998). Consider, for example, Ferrell and Sanders’s observation that ‘the
simplistic criminogenic models at the core of … constructed moral panics … deflect attention from larger
and more complex political problems like economic and ethnic inequality, and the alienation of young
people and creative workers from confining institutions’ (1995: 10). What could be more transparently
functionalist than that?
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Signification
Labelling theory
Perhaps the only other outstanding big criminological idea is signification, the interpretive practice that
orders social life. There has been an enduring strain of analysis, linked most particularly to symbolic
interactionism, ethnomethodology and phenomenology, which insists that people do not, and cannot,
respond immediately, uncritically, and passively to the world ‘as it is’. Rather they respond to their ideas of
the world, and the business of sociology is to capture, understand, and reproduce those ideas; examine
p. 38 ↵ their interaction with one another; and analyse the processes and structures that generated them.
Sociology becomes the study of people, relations, and practices as symbolic and symbolizing processes.
Central to that idea is reflexivity, the capacity of consciousness to turn back on and translate itself into its
own object. People are able to think about themselves, define themselves in various ways, toy with
different identities, and project themselves imaginatively into any manner of contrived situation. They can
view themselves vicariously by inferring the reactions of ‘significant others’, and, in so ‘taking the role of
the other’, move symbolically to a distance outside themselves to inspect how they might appear.
Elaborating action through ‘significant gestures’, the symbolic projection of acts and identities into an
imagined future, they can anticipate the likely responses of others, and tailor their own prospective acts to
accommodate them (Mead 1934). In all this, social worlds are compacted symbolically into the phrasing of
action, and the chief medium that makes that possible is language.
Language is held to objectify, stabilize, universalize, and extend meaning. Used in the anticipation of an
act, it permits people to be both their own subject and object, speaker and thing spoken about, ‘I’ and ‘me’,
opening up the mind to reflective action. Conferring names, it enables people to impart moral and social
meanings to their own and others’ motives (Mills 1940; Sykes and Matza 1957; Scott and Lyman 1970),
intentions, and identities. It will matter a great deal if someone is defined as eccentric, erratic, or mad; a
drinker, a drunk, or an alcoholic; a lovelorn admirer or a stalker; a freedom fighter or a terrorist; a ‘bit of a
lad’ or a delinquent. Consequences flow from naming, consequences that affect not only how one regards
oneself and one’s position in the world, but also how one may be treated by others. Naming creates a self.
Transposed to the study of crime and deviance, symbolic interactionism and phenomenology gave
prominence to the processes by which deviant acts and identities are constructed, interpreted, judged, and
controlled (Katz 1988). A core pair of articles was Howard Becker’s ‘Becoming a Marihuana User’ and
‘Marihuana Use and Social Control’, both reprinted in Outsiders (1963), and both describing the patterned
sequence of steps that could shape the experience, moral character, and fate of one who began to smoke
marihuana. Becoming a marihuana user was a tentative process, developing stage by stage, which required
the user satisfactorily to learn, master, and interpret techniques, neutralize negative moral images of use
and users, and succeed in disguising signs of use in the presence of those who might disapprove. It became
paradigmatic.
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Deviance itself was to become more generally likened to a moral career consisting of interlocking phases,
each of which fed into and shaped the next; each of which presented different existential problems and
opportunities; each of which was populated by different constellations of significant others; and each of
which could distinctively mould the self of the deviant. The process was not inexorable but contingent. Not
every phase was inevitable or irreversible, and deviants could often choose to change direction (see
Luckenbill and Best 1981: 201).
What punctuates such a career is acts of naming, the deployment of language to confer and fix the
meanings of behaviour, and symbolic interactionism and phenomenology became known within
criminology as ‘labelling theory’. One of the most frequently cited of all passages in sociological
criminology was Becker’s dictum that ‘deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a
consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an “offender”. The deviant is one to
whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label’ (1963: 9).
p. 39 ↵ Labelling is contingent. Many deviant acts are not witnessed, most are not reported, and reporting
may not lead to action. People may well be able to resist or modify deviant designations when attempts are
made to apply them; after all, we are continually bombarded by attempts to identify us in different ways
and few succeed. But there are special occasions when the ability of the self to resist definition is
circumscribed; and most fateful of all may be an encounter with agents of the criminal justice system,
because they can work with the often seemingly irresistible power, force, and authority of the state. In
such meetings, criminals and deviants are obliged to confront not only their own and others’ possibly
defensive, fleeting, and insubstantial reactions to what they have done, their ‘primary deviation’, but also
contend publicly with the formal reactions of others, and their deviation can then become a response to
responses, ‘secondary deviation’: ‘When a person begins to employ his deviant behavior or a role based
upon it as a means of defense, attack, or adjustment to the overt and covert problems created by the
consequent societal reaction to him, his deviation is secondary’ (Lemert 1951: 76).
What is significant about secondary deviation is that it may become a synthesis of more than just the
meanings and activities of primary deviation. It may also incorporate the myths, professional knowledge,
stereotypes, experience, and working assumptions of the lay people, journalists, police officers, judges,
medical practitioners, prison officers, prisoners, policy-makers, and politicians who have dealings with
actual or alleged rule-breakers. Drug-users (Schur 1963), mental patients (Goffman 1968; Scheff 1966),
homosexuals (Hooker 1963), and others may be obliged to organize their significant gestures and
character around the public symbols and interpretations of their behaviour. Who they are and what they do
may then be explained as much by the symbolic incorporation of a public response as by any set of original
conditions, and control will be written into the very fabric of their identities.
Secondary deviation may also entail confrontations with new obstacles that foreclose future choice. Thus,
Gary Marx listed a number of the ironic consequences that can flow from forms of covert social control
such as undercover policing and the work of agents provocateurs: they include generating a market for
illegal goods; the provision of motives and meanings for illegal action; entrapping people in offences they
might not otherwise have committed; the supplying of false or misleading records; retaliatory action
against informers, and the like (Marx 1988: 126–7). Once a person has become publicly identified as a
deviant, moreover, it may become difficult for him or her to slip back into the conventional world. In the
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United States, for instance, ‘Megan’s Law’ made it mandatory in certain jurisdictions for the names of sex
offenders to be publicly advertised, possibly reducing risk to some but certainly making it possible to
freeze the criminal as a secondary deviant. Law officers, like Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, have
been known to shame prisoners by making them wear pink clothing or carry placards in public.
Quite deliberately in response to the problems of the outcast deviant is the increasing adoption of
strategies of restorative justice, based largely on the work of Braithwaite (1989) (and see Rossner et al.
2017), which attempt to unite the informal control of shaming by significant others with rituals of
reintegration that work against the alienating consequences of secondary deviation.
Borrowing its ideas from Durkheim and labelling theory and its procedures from a number of forms of
dispute resolution, but from Maori and Japanese practice in particular, shaming is for Braithwaite at its
most effective when it is practised by those whose opinions matter to the deviant—his or her ‘significant
others’ and members of his or her family above all; and it works to exclude and estrange the deviant
p. 40 further ↵ unless it is accompanied by rituals of reparation and restoration, effected, perhaps, by the
tendering and acceptance of a public apology. Reintegrative shaming is currently one of the ‘big ideas’
continually promising to underpin the ideas (if not always the practice) of criminal justice policy across the
Northern world, but also in South Africa and elsewhere, where it is seen to be a return to the procedures of
aboriginal justice. And it sits remarkably well with an interesting study of reoffending after prison that
argues that the critical variable in desistance from crime is the capacity of a former inmate to construct a
new narrative about his or her life which portrays a new self now going ‘straight’ (Maruna 2001).
A recent twist in the evolution of interactionist criminology has been the work of Randall Collins, a student
of Erving Goffman, who adapted it to analyse the detail of violent transactions. Violence, he observes, is
actually difficult to accomplish: most people—even soldiers and police who are professionally engaged to
deploy force—are reluctant to attack or harm others. A mixture of tension and fear holds them back. It is
the overwhelming headiness of what he calls a ‘forward panic’ that can overcome that mix, and it may in
part be facilitated by the obvious weakness of a potential victim who retreats or succumbs—making the
violent act easier to perform—in part by the egging-on of spectators. It is then that ‘the tension of the
struggle [can] turn[] into … hot rush and vicious overkill’ (2008: 135). Following Goffman, Collins
describes how victims themselves may enter into what he calls interaction ritual chains of ‘emotional
entrainment’, choreographed sequences in which their assailants are also embroiled, whereby both
become progressively swept up in one another’s actions and reactions, the offender overcoming his or her
inhibitions and the victim dominated, steered and incapacitated by the offender. Looking, say, at episodes
of domestic violence or crowd disturbance, he is then able to relate how, step by step, people may come
collaboratively and almost collusively to engage in violent acts.
Culture and subculture

Meanings and motives are not established and confirmed by the self in isolation. They are a social
accomplishment, and criminology has paid sustained attention to signification as a collaborative,
subcultural process. Subcultures themselves are taken to be exaggerations, accentuations, or editings of
cultural themes prevalent in the wider society. Any social group which has permanence, a common pursuit,
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and, perhaps, common problems is likely to engender, inherit, or modify a subculture; but the
criminologist’s particular interest is in those subcultures that condone, promote, or otherwise make
possible the commission of delinquent acts. A subculture was not conceived to be utterly distinct from the
beliefs held by people at large. Neither was it necessarily oppositional. It was a subculture, not a discrete
culture or a counterculture, and the analytic stress has tended to be on dependency, ‘hybridization’ and
synthesis rather than on conflict or symbolic autonomy.
The materials for subcultural theory are to be found across the broad range of criminology, and they could
be combined in various proportions. Anomie theory supplied the supposition that social inequalities
generate problems that may have delinquent solutions, and that those solutions, in their turn, could be
shared and transmitted by people thrown together by their common disadvantage. Albert Cohen, the man
who invented the phrase ‘delinquent subculture’, argued: ‘The crucial condition for the emergence of new
cultural forms is the existence, in effective interaction with one another, of a number of actors with similar
p. 41 problems of adjustment’ (1957: 59). The social anthropology of the ↵ Chicago School, channelled for a
while into differential association theory, supplied an emphasis upon the enduring, intelligible, and locally
adapted cultural traditions shared both by professional criminals and by boys living, working, and playing
together on the crowded streets of morally differentiated areas. Retaining the idea of a ‘subculture of
delinquency’, David Matza, Gresham Sykes, and a number of control theorists pointed to the manner in
which moral proscriptions could be neutralized by invoking commonly available and culturally
transmitted mitigating accounts. And symbolic interactionism supplied a focus on the negotiated,
collective, and processual character of meaning. In all this, an argument could run that young men (it was,
it will be recalled, almost always young men), growing up in the city, banded together in groups or ‘near-
groups’ (Yablonsky 1962) in the crowded and dangerous public life of the streets, encountering common
problems, exposed to common stereotypes and stigmas, subject to similar formal controls, flirting with
transgressive excitement, and setting themselves against common Others who might ‘disrespect’ or attack
them (Anderson 1990, 1999)—Others who are used dialectically to define who they are—are likely to
formulate joint interpretations that are sporadically favourable to delinquency. Subcultural theory and
research were to dominate explanations of delinquency until they exhausted themselves for a while in the
1960s, only to be revived in a new guise a decade later.
That new subcultural theory, propounded in the 1970s and 1980s, lent itself to amalgamation with radical
criminology, and particularly the criminology which was preoccupied with the reproduction of class
inequalities through the workings of ideology. In Britain, there was to be a renaissance of anomie-derived
subcultural theory as a group of sociologists centred around Stuart Hall at the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham gave special attention to the existential plight of young
working-class men about to enter the labour market. The prototype for that work was Phil Cohen’s
analysis of proletarian cultures in London: young men responded to the post-war decline of community,
loss of class cohesion, and economic insecurity by resurrecting in subcultural form an idealized and
exaggerated version of working-class masculinity that ‘express[ed] and resolve[d], albeit “magically”, the
contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture’ (1972: 23). Deviance became a
form of symbolic resistance to tensions perceived through the mists of false consciousness. It was doomed
to disappoint because it did not address the root causes of discontent, but it did offer a fleeting release.
There was a contradiction within that version of subcultural theory because it was not easy to reconcile a
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structural Marxism which depicted adolescent culture as illusory with a commitment to taking meaning
seriously (Willis 1977). But it was certainly a spirited and vivid revival of a theory that had gone into the
doldrums in the 1960s, and it continues to influence theorizing (see Ferrell 1993). Indeed, interestingly,
there was something of a rapprochement between critical cultural studies, symbolic interactionism (see
Becker and McCall 1990) and radical criminology, that led to the creation of the new theoretical hybrid to
which I have already alluded, cultural criminology (see Ferrell et al. 2004).
Cultural criminology re-emphasizes how transgression attains meaning in what is called a fluid,
pluralistic, contested, hedonistic, ‘edgy’, and ‘media-saturated world’. It proclaims, a little brashly
perhaps, that ‘Cultural criminology actively seeks to dissolve conventional understandings and accepted
boundaries, whether they confine specific criminological theories or the institutionalized discipline of
criminology itself …’ (Ferrell et al. 2008: 5–6). In its more recent variants, delinquency has become a
celebration of a kind of fetishized, hedonistic consumerism which has been transformed into an end in
itself (Hallsworth 2005).
p. 42 Narrative criminology
Criminology is ceaselessly mutating, and one of the new hybrids calls itself narrative criminology. asking
‘how narratives, particularly narratives of the self, influence criminal and other harmful action’ (Presser
2016: 137). Criminological narratives, said its champion, Lois Presser, are a record of facts to be analysed,
an interpretation of the world, and a way of constituting crime (2009). Their reintroduction may not have
turned criminology upside down but it has given a renewed focus to themes that stretch back to the oral
histories of Henry Mayhew and the Chicago School, the symbolic interactionism of Everett Hughes and
Erving Goffman, and the redemption narratives of Shadd Maruna (Sandberg and Ugelvik 2016). Maruna
himself called it ‘radical in its insights and implications’, but, he added, ‘The irony, of course, is that there
is nothing radical about narrative criminology at all’. The so-called narrative turn in criminology, like so
much scholarship, is perhaps vulnerable to the charge of chronocentrism, cleaving overwhelmingly, as it
does, to what has been written recently in the tacit belief that the new displaces the old (see Bucerius and
Haggerty 2018). It is, after all, and not always knowingly, composed in the vein of the pragmatism of
Charles Peirce who said that ‘my language is the sum total of myself’ (1934: 314); the symbolic
interactionism of Howard Becker (1970), who lauded the importance of the oral life-history as a document
of a self in change, and of Ken Plummer (1994) who wrote about the stories of sexual liberation that were
told in the 1960s and 1970s to confer new identities on gay men and women; the social psychology of Stan
Cohen and Laurie Taylor (1972) who wove together inmates’ strategies for dealing with long term-
imprisonment with the particularities of their offending careers, fears of deterioration and preoccupations
about embodied selves (fraudsters repeatedly petitioning for an appeal, armed robbers exercising to ward
off physical decline); the psychology of Dan Mcadams (1996) who talked at length about what he called the
storied self as actor, agent, and author; and much else.
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Criminology as an Eclectic Discipline
It would be misleading to conclude that criminology can be easily laid out as a succession of discrete
theories. On the contrary, it has continually borrowed ideas from other disciplines, and has compared,
contrasted, amalgamated, reworked, and experimented with them to furnish an eclectic field of thought
marked by an abundance of ad hoc overlaps, syntheses, and confusions. So it was that sociological
criminologists have confronted arguments born and applied in other disciplines and, from time to time,
they domesticated them to cultivate new intellectual hybrids. Stan Cohen (1972) and Jock Young (1971) did
so in the early 1970s when they married the symbolic interactionism of Edwin Lemert (1951) and Howard
Becker (1963) to the statistical and cybernetics theory of Leslie Wilkins (1964). Wilkins had argued that
deviant events fall at the poles of normal distribution curves, that knowledge about those events will be
distorted by the ensuing social distance that yawns between those events and their observers, and that
patterns of control and deviant responses are likely to become ever more exaggerated as they are affected
by those distortions. It was a concept of deviance amplification that had been anticipated in the sociology
of ‘pseudo-disasters’ (events that prove on inspection to have been solely the artefacts of reporting
p. 43 procedures, see Jacobs 1965; ↵ Johnson 1945; Medalia and Larsen 1958), and came in time to marry
well with interactionist ideas of secondary deviation, moral panic, and much else.
Such syntheses and experimentation will continue, but what is uncertain, and what has always been
uncertain, is how theorizing may be expected to evolve in the future. Other chapters in this volume
document new growths but it may be useful to flag something of what is afoot. Feminist criminology is one
approach that is clearly well established. Thirty years ago, Valverde could observe that ‘it is now no longer
true that women’s issues are being ignored, for there are whole shelves of work on women as victims of
male violence, women offenders and women police officers. the more extreme examples of sexism found
in criminological theory have been discredited—at least in the eyes of those who read feminist
works’ (1991: 241).
Race is coming strongly into view as a topic too long neglected in criminology. In what was tantamount to
a manifesto, an editorial in a special issue of Theoretical Criminology titled Race Matters in Criminology
(2020), announced that ‘We hope to demonstrate that—despite the seeming numbness felt about the
racialized nature of crime and criminal justice—there is still a critical need for refreshed intellectual
engagement which we make strides towards here’. And that is a gap that is beginning to be filled (see
Phillips and Webster 2013, Phillips 2014).
Evidence-based or experimental criminology is a semi-detached but lively wing of the discipline that has
been sustained by what has all the makings of a social movement, and it demands attention. Its principal
authors are Anthony Braga of Northeastern University; Lorraine Mazerolle of the University of
Queensland; Christopher Koper, Cynthia Lum and others pivoting around David Weisburd in the
Department for Evidence-Based Policing at George Mason University; and Barak Ariel, Geoffrey Barnes,
Peter Neyroud, Molly Slothower, and Heather Strang pivoting around Lawrence Sherman at the Centre for
Evidence-Based Policing at the University of Cambridge (Sherman 2003 and see Braga et al. 2014). It has
developed its own infrastructure of educational courses, such as the MSt of the Police Executive
Programme at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology which encourages police officers to think of
Page 30 of 47
themselves as ‘pracademics’ (see Braga 2016 and Sherman 2022) trained ‘in the study of crime and harm-
reduction issues, with a strong emphasis on evidence-based policy and practice’; journals (the Journal of
Experimental Criminology and the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing); dedicated conferences and
meetings such as the CEBCP [Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy <https://www.google.co.uk/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwiy_fKFoLvWAhVHI8AKHURsACkQFgg
oMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcebcp.org%2Fcebcp-
symposium-2017%2F&usg=AFQjCNEnVClmz5LdR34tCDrJk2tybT-INw>] Annual Symposium and the
International Conference on Evidence-Based Policing; and institutions, such as the Academy of
Experimental Criminology (which ‘recognizes scholars who have successfully led randomized, controlled,
field experiments in criminology’ and the Division of Experimental Criminology, lodged within the
American Society of Criminology). It awards its own honours and prizes: membership of George Mason
University’s ‘Evidence-Based Policing Hall of Fame’; the Joan McCord Award (for ‘significant
experimental research that … has important implications for policy and practice’) and The Stockholm Prize
in Criminology. And in all this it has developed a parallel, near-independent criminology with its own
traditions, milestones, practices, goals, and target audiences.
p. 44 ↵ Most criminology is evidence-based in its mapping of the empirical world, but these scholars intend
to convey something quite distinctive. Methodologically, they tend to equate the evidence-based with the
experimental (see Sampson 2010: 490). Conceptually, they may have absorbed and adapted a number of
the theories circulating in criminology at large: for instance, the control theories of Jackson Toby and
Gresham Sykes and David Matza; deterrence theory and the routine activities theory of Lawrence Cohen
and Marcus Felson, but theirs is a criminology that is inclined to be focused, practical and, lean, bending
itself to a single purpose. Their overwhelming object is to reduce crime by encouraging the police and
criminal justice agencies to adopt a special, scientific methodology (see Neyroud and Weisburd 2014;
Sherman and Murray 2015) that reflects a return to the medical roots of the discipline (Sherman 2015) and
the finding of inspiration in the pioneering epidemiology of John Snow, the surgeon who traced the source
of an outbreak of cholera in 1854 to a contaminated water pump in London (see Cameron and Jones 1983;
Snow 1965).
Theirs is a stance that could just as well have been called clinical criminology, deploying as it does a
medical language of harm (measured by the Cambridge Harm Index that is itself based on the number of
prison days an offence would receive at a minimum starting point for a previously unconvicted offender
(Sherman et al. 2016; Weinborn et al. 2017)); triage; ‘targeting, testing and tracking’ (Sherman 2013);
outcome and output; randomized control trials (the ‘gold standard’ of science) and systematic reviews—
such as those of the Campbell Collaboration (see Boruch 2005)—to scan and assess the adequacy of
research studies modelled on medicine’s Cochrane Reviews. It too is an epidemiology of place, focused on
its own counterparts to the Broad Street pump, the urban ‘hot spots’ and ‘micro-places’ where the vast
bulk of recorded crimes, committed by a hyperactive minority of offenders and endured by a concentrated
minority of victims, the ‘power few’ (Sherman 2007), are to be discovered in the cities of the North and
where patrol officers, acting, in effect, as law enforcement’s therapeutic agents, may be stationed to best
effect for specified lengths of time to administer appropriate doses of treatment (see Koper 1995).
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Some other newcomers

Apart from some sterling early exceptions, now largely forgotten, (for example, Pike (1873), Hall (1935)
and Asbury (1934, 1937, 1941)), there has been a marked neglect of a criminology of the past which is only
very recently being corrected by the formation of a British Society of Criminology Historical Criminology
Network in 2019, a group established with the aims of promoting historical scholarship; forging a closer
‘dialogue’ between historical researchers working on topics relevant to criminology; and encouraging the
use of historical resources in research and teaching in criminology ( see Churchill 2017, 2018a, and 2018b).
One of its first fruits has been David Churchill’s 2018 study of the history of policing in Leeds which
describes the unanticipated strength of the continuities between practices before and after the creation of
a uniformed force in 1836.
There has also been something of a companion neglect of the world outside Europe, North America and
Australasia. Perhaps it is not remarkable that American and European scholars should have concentrated
on the familiar, the intelligible and the accessible, but much has undoubtedly been overlooked in
consequence, leading to the formation of unhelpful assumptions about what can and should be treated as
p. 45 normal ↵ and typical in crime and formal control (see Moosavi 2018). Tim Newburn (2019) argued that,
under the influence of Raewyn Connell’s (1987) ‘seminal text’, Southern Theory (2007), criminology has
now come to promote what has been labelled ‘Southern criminology’, a criminology exemplified, say, by
the work of Xu, Jianhua (2009, 2013, 2019, 2020), which documents the very special world of crime and
criminal justice in China where the police strive to maintain the authority of the Party and the stability of
the state; where victims may be defined as trouble-makers whose protests undermine social harmony;
unregulated street traders are treated as untidy anomalies who lie outside proper social order (Jiang 2020);
criminal trials are calculated to guarantee convictions and uphold the hegemony of the Party and its
organs (Yu Mao (2017, 2020)); and organized crime is mediated by the ties of guanxi <https://
scholar.google.co.uk/scholar_url?url=https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/handle/
2066/175854/175854_a.pdf%3Fsequence%3D2%26isAllowed%3Dy&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZxGlYbbLKIGEmgGSwISoA
w&scisig=AAGBfm0dunB5AM8Ln4-VmDpD3rOfqQe0lQ&oi=scholarr>, or networks of reciprocity which bind
relations together (Peng 2017). We have learned that policing in Nepal is infused with a patriarchal
ideology that has transformed mediation in cases of domestic violence into a coercive procedure designed
to reunite victims with their husbands (Dahal 2019). We know that police practices in India and Pakistan,
awarded the euphemistic name of ‘encounters’, are in effect widely sanctioned extra-judicial executions
(Belur 2010). But there is much, much more to be done. Where is the criminology, the fully social theory’,
of Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Mao’s China (see Dikötter 2010) or of Myanmar in the twenty-first century?
Very few would have predicted the apparent, perhaps temporary, demise of Marxist radical criminology, a
brand of theorizing that once seemed so strong that it would sweep all before it, at least in large parts of
Europe, Canada, and Australasia. What has been called critical discourse analysis, a mode of theorizing
which seems now to be fashionable amongst research students, may serve as a possible heir-apparent. In
the words of Lincoln Dahlberg:
Page 32 of 47
Post-Marxist discourse theory embraces an ontology of radical contingency and from there
emphasizes the centrality of hegemonic politics in the (discursive) constitution of all social
systems. As such, discourse theory understands any capitalist system, and ‘the economy’ in
general, to be a discursive system governed by the political logic of hegemony rather than by an
apolitical economic logic. (2014: 1)
There has recently been quite a spate of critical discourse analyses of criminological topics, including, for
instance, ‘victimization, offending and resistance in Mexico’ (Sanchez 2020); ‘framings of media
representations of young offenders in Uruguay’ (Julios-Costa 2017–18); and ‘constructing women
perpetrators of international crimes’ (Ellison and Szablewska 2020). No doubt critical discourse analysis
will be regarded as a worthy successor to radical thought in general and radical criminology in particular.
Only future editions of this Handbook will tell.
Selected Further Reading

There is no substitute for the original works, some of the more important of which are Howard Becker’s Outsiders
(1963); John Braithwaite’s Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989); Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin’s Delinquency and
Opportunity (1960); David Matza’s Delinquency and Drift (1964); Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young’s The New
Criminology (1973); and Jock Young’s The Exclusive Society (1999). Among the secondary texts are David Downes and
Paul Rock’s Understanding Deviance (2003 and 2007), John Tierney’s Criminology: Theory and Context (1996 and 2005),
and Tim Newburn’s Criminology, Cullompton: Willan, 2017.
Online resources
Try the essay questions <https://iws.oupsupport.com/ebook/access/content/liebling-maruna7e-student-resources/

liebling-maruna7e-chapter-1-essay-questions?options=showName> for this chapter and visit useful websites <https://
iws.oupsupport.com/ebook/access/content/liebling-maruna7e-student-resources/liebling-maruna7e-chapter-1-useful-
websites?options=showName> for additional research and reading around this topic.
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Notes
1
Defined by London Transport as ‘a smart card that you add money to, so you can pay as you go’ (https://tfl.gov.uk/
fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets-and-oyster/pay-as-you-go/oyster-pay-as-you-go <https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/
how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets-and-oyster/pay-as-you-go/oyster-pay-as-you-go>).
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2. Criminalization: Historical, legal, and criminological perspectives

p. 53 2. Criminalization: Historical, legal, and criminological

perspectives
Nicola Lacey and Lucia Zedner
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0002
Abstract
This chapter examines the relationship between legal and criminological constructions of crime and explores how these have
changed over time. The chapter sets out the conceptual framework of criminalization within which the two dominant
constructions of crime—legal and criminological—are situated. It considers their respective contributions and the close
relationship between criminal law and criminal justice. Using the framework of criminalization, the chapter considers the
historical contingency of crime by examining its development over the past 300 years. It analyses the normative building
blocks of contemporary criminal law to explain how crime is constructed in England and Wales today and it explores some of
the most important recent developments in formal criminalization in England and Wales, not least the shifting boundaries and
striking expansion of criminal liability. Finally, it considers the valuable contributions made by criminology to understanding
the scope of, and limits on, criminalization.
Keywords: criminalization, criminal law, criminology, social construction, criminal process, legal history, legal principles,
regulation, penal populism
Introduction
Criminology and criminal law share crime as a common object of enquiry and intellectual challenge. Yet
the professional autonomy and technical nature of legal scholarship have historically created rigid
boundaries between the two disciplines. The status of criminology as a discrete discipline has always been
contested and criminological research is informed mainly by the methods and insights of the wider social
sciences. Despite their proximity, criminological interest in and interaction with criminal law is limited. It
Page 1 of 27
is still rare to find a criminology text that concerns itself with the scope and nature of criminal law, even
though criminal law texts now more readily engage with criminological questions and literature (see Wells
and Quick 2010; Bronitt and McSherry 2017; Farmer 2016).
In this chapter, we examine the relationship between legal and criminological constructions of crime and
explore how these have changed over time. In the first section, we sketch a conceptual framework—
criminalization—within which we situate the relationship between legal and criminological constructions
of crime (Lacey 1995, 2009). Criminalization keeps the close relationship between criminal law and
criminal justice practices in view, without losing sight of their specific contributions. In the second
section, we use the framework of criminalization to consider the way in which the boundaries of crime
have developed in England and Wales over the last 300 years, demonstrating their historical contingency.
The third section sketches law’s formal construction of crime in England and Wales today and teases out
its implicit normative vision of criminal law. In the fourth section, we consider some of the most
important developments in formal criminalization in England and Wales over recent decades. In the final
section, we consider the contribution of criminology to our understanding of the scope of, and limits on,
criminalization, and examine recent developments in criminal law theory which may allow closer
integration of criminological and criminal-legal perspectives.
p. 54 Criminal Law, Criminology, and Criminalization
1
The study of criminalization is divided broadly into two areas—the social and legal construction of crime.
Study of the social construction of crime divides into two broad fields—criminology and criminal justice—
brought together in this Handbook. Criminal law scholarship, by contrast, concerns itself with the formally
established norms according to which individuals or groups are adjudged guilty or innocent of criminal
offences. Criminal law sets substantive rules of conduct addressed to citizens and non-citizens alike
(Zedner 2013). It also sets out rules determining how liability should be attributed and how breaches of
criminal norms should be defined; rules which are addressed primarily to officials rather than to potential
offenders (Robinson 1997). Criminal lawyers have been less concerned with the development and scope of
these norms than with their conceptual structure, content, and judicial interpretation in particular cases.
Lawyers are also concerned with the framework of principles within which legislation is made and legal
judgments are reached (Horder 2019; Williams 1953, 1983). Rules of evidence and procedure are generally
dealt with in specialist courses, or criminal justice or legal methods courses rather than being fully
integrated in the study of criminal law. While the organization of research conforms less rigidly to this
division between criminal law and procedure, it nonetheless closely reflects the different areas of expertise
of scholars within their respective fields. Although a similar division characterized the English approach
for much of the twentieth century, criminal law treatise writers of the nineteenth century saw offence
definitions, procedure, and punishment as equally central to their terrain (Stephen 1893). From the
perspective of countries like France and Germany, where the language of droit pénal and Strafrecht make
clear the close relationship between criminal law and punishment, and where sentencing decisions are
closely integrated with decisions about criminal liability, the Anglo-American separation of criminal law
Page 2 of 27
from criminal procedure and sentencing appears extraordinary (Fletcher 1978). Interdisciplinary
scholarship (Duff et al. 2004b, 2005, 2007; Redmayne 2012) that explores the implications of policing and
criminal procedure for criminal law is much to be welcomed.
The contemporary division of labour between lawyers and criminologists is based on their respective
expertise and the distinctive roles of legal and social/psychological factors in the construction of crime
(Zedner 2004: Ch. 2). Yet, this division obscures the fact that the making, interpretation, and enforcement
of criminal law occurs in a social context and as a result of political processes (Reiner 2006, 2016, Hunter et
al. 2016). Moreover, the boundaries of criminalization are porous: criminal justice practices are affected by
political, economic, moral, psychiatric, religious, educational, and family structures (Wells and Quick
2010: Ch. 1). Nonetheless, legal rules set the formal boundaries by defining offences and constituting the
key institutions (the police, criminal process, courts, and trial) through which criminalization takes place.
Criminologists therefore need to understand how these legal boundaries are set, where they lie, and how
they shape criminalization by empowering criminal justice officials, but also by defining and limiting their
legal powers. Within this broad concept of criminalization, we need to make three distinctions.
p. 55 ↵ First, we can draw a distinction between criminalization as an outcome and criminalization as a

practice. Criminalization as an outcome refers to the consequences of legislative, judicial, prosecutorial, or
other processes; as in, ‘the new terrorism legislation has expanded the scope of criminalization’.
Criminalization as a practice refers to the creative, interpretive, or enforcement activities of actors such as
legislators, judges, police, lawyers, and the public. Official practices of criminalization are nested within
criminal justice institutions and shaped by the norms peculiar to particular roles and professions: they
coalesce over time to produce the outcomes to which criminalization in the first sense refers. Thinking
about criminalization as outcome and as practice cuts across the distinction between legal and social
constructions of crime: both outcomes and practices are shaped by law and by broader social dynamics. But
while the legal contribution to criminalization outcomes is made primarily by criminal law, practices of
criminalization are structured primarily by rules of criminal procedure, constitutional law, and by public
law rules defining the responsibilities and powers of criminal justice officials.
Second, we need to distinguish between formal and substantive criminalization outcomes—sometimes

referred to as ‘law in the books’ and ‘law in society’. When terrorism legislation expands the boundaries of
criminal law by creating a new offence proscribing acts preparatory to terrorist offences, this marks a shift
in formal criminalization. However, substantive criminalization remains unchanged until police,
prosecutors, and courts act on that new law. This distinction between formal and substantive
criminalization is more than a conceptual distinction. Heightened anxiety about terrorism might prompt
an increase in terrorist prosecutions and convictions irrespective of changes in law or levels of terrorist
activity. Conversely, the creation of new terrorism offences may not lead to greater substantive
criminalization in practice unless certain other conditions—notably an increase in the resources available
to enforcement agencies or a change in their incentives—are met. Formal criminalization sets parameters
within which, in principle, substantive criminalization proceeds; but substantive enforcement depends on
many factors beyond law, that influence which crimes are investigated and prosecuted and against whom.
Criminology comes in here to explain why criminalization occurs as it does. Factors such as penal politics,
media coverage, public opinion, and the extensive discretion exercised by criminal justice officials have a
Page 3 of 27
powerful impact on the scope of what is actually criminalized (Stuntz 2001), as is starkly reflected in racial
disproportionalities across the criminal process, and notably in policing, particularly the practice of stop
and search (Phillips et al., this volume).
Thirdly, the distinction between formal and substantive criminalization also applies to criminalization as a
social practice. Constitutionally, the various processes which combine to produce criminalization
outcomes—legislation, policing, prosecution, and trial—are the responsibility of different actors.
Legislators are not supposed to pre-empt prosecutorial, let alone judicial, decisions. Police and
prosecutors are supposed to exercise their distinctive enforcement roles within the contours of legal
norms (Welsh, Skinns, and Sanders 2021). While the distinction between judicial interpretation and
judicial creativity is contested, judges are not entitled to create new criminal offences. But when we move
from formal to substantive practices of criminalization, the boundaries between law-creation,
interpretation, and enforcement are fluid, with the reporting decisions of ordinary citizens influencing
when and how the criminal process is set in train. Practices like plea-bargaining accord prosecutors a
quasi-adjudicative role and give judges quasi-legislative power, shaping the outcome of the
criminalization process. Civil preventive orders like the former Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) or
p. 56 current orders such as the Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO) (Ashworth and Zedner 2021) and ↵ Serious
Crime Prevention Order permit judges to determine the individualized conditions of the order, breach of
which can result in a criminal sanction of up to five years’ imprisonment. In so doing, civil preventive
orders effectively delegate legislative power to criminalize to the civil court (Ashworth and Zedner 2014:
867; Campbell, Ashworth and Redmayne 2019: Ch. 13; Carvalho 2016). Moreover, criminal justice officials
on occasion exceed or abuse their legal powers, for example by using undue pressure to elicit confessions.
Where such abuses go undetected, substantive criminalization may stray far beyond the formal boundaries
of the criminal law, resulting in miscarriages of justice (Mullin 1990; Fassin 2018; Hoyle and Sato 2019).
Note that, unlike the distinction between criminalization as outcome and as practice, the distinction
between formal and substantive criminalization tracks that between legal and social constructions of
crime. Criminal law, the law of evidence and procedure, constitutional law, public law, and human rights
law combine to define the formal boundaries of criminalization, while substantive outcomes and practices
can only be understood by appreciating the interaction between legal and social processes. A focus on
formal criminalization would be unsatisfactory because it says nothing about the relationship between
legal and social constructions of crime. A historical grasp of how criminal law changes over time and space
(Lacey 2016; Farmer 2016; Ashworth and Zedner 2014), as well as of the changing balance between
different kinds of legal regulation and between legal and informal social modes of governance, are
essential to a full understanding of criminalization.
In what follows, we continue to draw distinctions between formal and substantive criminalization in the
sense of outcomes and practices, while considering the contribution of different scholarly approaches to
our understanding of legal constructions of crime and their significance for criminology. How is formal
criminalization organized? What is its content? How does it influence substantive criminalization? What
values does formal criminalization purport to embody or respect, and how far does either formal or
substantive criminalization do so? Are those values coherent or otherwise appealing? Do the answers to
these questions change over time, and if so, why?
Page 4 of 27
Criminalization in Historical Perspective
For answers to these questions, an obvious starting point is to seek an overall conception of what criminal
law ‘is’: a conception of the formal features of criminal law and of its substantive aims and functions.
There have been fundamental changes in the nature and intensity of law’s involvement in criminalization
over the course of modern English history, themselves premised on radical changes in the form and
content of criminal law, the structure of the criminal trial, and the composition of the agencies empowered
to interpret and enforce the law. History reveals that the categories of criminal offence are contingent
upon time and place, prevailing social mores, cultural sensibilities, and religious and moral precepts
(Lacey 1995; Farmer 1996a). Reiner notes the ‘huge cultural variation across space and time in what is
counted by the law as criminal’ (Reiner 2007: 25) and observes how many seventeenth-century offences
no longer exist today, including: witchcraft, failing to attend church, adultery, fornication, bridal
pregnancy, scolding, disrupting the Sabbath, and ‘wearing felt hats’ (ibid.; see also Reiner 2016).
Property-related offences predominated historically, as they do today, but before the establishment of the
p. 57 ↵ formal police in the early nineteenth century, ‘thief-taking’ was a private enterprise pursued for
profit and driven by a complex system of rewards and protection arrangements (McMullen 1996, Beattie
2001: Ch.5). Until the mid-eighteenth century, the office of constable was held voluntarily by members of
the community backed up by the ancient institutions of ‘hue and cry’ and the Posse Comitatus, an
arrangement that required able men to join in pursuit of a felon (Zedner 2006: 88). However, voluntary
systems of policing worked less well in the growing towns and cities whose larger populations were more
mobile and social relations weaker. Those unwilling to serve as constables often paid deputies instead,
creating a profitable market in private policing and protection. In the eighteenth century, the wealthy
formed mutually beneficial ‘prosecution associations’ to share the financial burden of bringing offenders
to trial by private prosecution (King 2000: 53–7). The protection ostensibly provided by the criminal law
was far from universally enjoyed since prosecution depended partially on financial means. The claim that
eighteenth century criminal law was a product of the English class system or a tool of ruling class
oppression (Hay 1975: 52) has, however, been challenged by evidence of widespread recourse to the
criminal law by non-elite groups including the labouring poor (Langbein 1983; King 2000). Blackstone, in
his influential Commentaries on the Laws of England (Blackstone 1765–9), was able vigorously to assert a
notion of crime as public wrong, organized in terms of groups of offences threatening distinctively public
or shared interests: offences against God and religion; offences against the state; offences against the
person; and offences against property.
Later in the eighteenth century, the growing pressures of industrialization and urbanization necessitated a
criminal law capable of effective deterrence. A growing sense of the ungovernability of urban society,
spawned by riots in London in the 1780s, resulted in propertied citizens forming ‘Voluntary Associations
for Defence’ which undertook to detect and apprehend criminals, as well as to prosecute (Radzinowicz
1956: 100). The development of new economic relations resulted in the rapid growth of capital sentences,
particularly for property crimes and offences involving the exploitation of trust, such as forgery.
Deterrence was important as there was no general police force under government control in London until
1829: formal police forces were established in the rest of the country even later.
Page 5 of 27
The form of the modern adversarial criminal trial emerged only during the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century. Lawyers came to dominate trials only gradually and felony defendants did not gain the
right to full legal representation until 1836. Prosecutions were initiated by private individuals, who might
or might not have legal representation at trial. Cases were selected for trial by a grand jury composed of
local landowners sitting as Justices of the Peace (the precursors to modern day magistrates). These Justices
also heard most criminal cases, with a mere dozen judges travelling the assize circuit on which judges
visited regional courts even in the later eighteenth century. Even assize hearings were relatively speedy
and non-technical affairs: it has been estimated that the average length of a criminal trial in the late
eighteenth century was between 20 and 30 minutes (Langbein 2003: 16–18, 21–5; Beattie 1986: 378; 2001:
260). Other than in very serious cases, such as homicide, the criminal trial up to the early nineteenth
2
century was a lay-dominated rather than a lawyer-dominated affair.
p. 58 ↵ The institutional conditions favourable to a gradual development, refinement, and systematic

application of general legal doctrines were gradually constructed over a period of almost 200 years. In the
mid-eighteenth century, the process of criminalization was in effect based on a presumption of guilt
which the trial gave the defendant an opportunity to rebut, generally on the basis of character evidence
(Langbein 2003: 263; see also King 2000; Beattie 1986, 1991; Emsley 2013). The law of evidence was
developed gradually over the next 150 years, and this, together with the development of systematic
reporting of criminal cases, a system of criminal appeals, legal education, and legal representation
fostered the formalization and professionalization of criminal law.
At the level of penal enforcement, the abolition of many of the capital statutes in the 1820s and the
expansion of the penitentiary system to accommodate long-term prisoners replaced an ancien régime
criminal law organized around draconian threats of death—tempered by extensive discretion and exercise
of mercy (King 2000)—with a system of calibrated and regularly administered penalties (Hay 1975; Wiener
1990). These changes can be ascribed partly to civilizing processes that fed a growing revulsion against
public execution and partly to the development of modern police and prisons that reduced the need for
spectacular deterrent penalties (Spierenburg 1984).
What explains these changes over time, and what can they tell the criminologist about the nature of
criminal law? Like any system of social norms, criminal law has to specify the practical conditions for its
own operation and to legitimate its activities in respect of those who are subject to them. Over the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fundamental social, political, and economic developments
underpinned significant changes in the relationship between legal and social constructions of crime. The
extension of the franchise gradually changed the legitimation conditions for criminal law, with the
decisive expansion of suffrage in the Reform Act of 1867 strengthening the popular mandate for formal
criminalization. The development of the police, and the emergence of medical science and psychology and
other forms of specialist knowledge and technology further changed the conditions in which criminal law
operated. At the same time, urbanization, greater mobility, and social anonymity deprived the criminal
justice system of reliable sources of local knowledge on which the eighteenth-century criminal process
had relied. In the hands of an increasingly ambitious state, the expansion of criminal law’s regulatory role
along with increasing social diversity and moral pluralism in the growing urban areas, further complicated
criminal law’s core tasks. Later in the nineteenth century, the emergence of new scientific notions of crime
Page 6 of 27
as atavism were reflected in laws instituting distinctive criminalization regimes for categories of offender
identified as the ‘habitual criminal’ and the ‘feeble-minded’ (Radzinowicz and Hood 1990), as well as in
intensely gender-specific understandings of criminality (Zedner 1991; Lacey 2008).
Blackstone’s notion of crime as public wrong had worked well enough for the eighteenth century. But as
the scope and regulatory functions of criminal law increased dramatically in the nineteenth, it no longer
accurately justified criminal law’s expanded terrain. Many continental European countries avoided such an
expansion through the creation of a separate legal edifice of regulatory law, as well as by constitutional
constraints on the content of criminal law, which were absent in England and Wales (Whitman 2003: Ch.
4). Here expansion of the criminal law entailed a fragmentation of its rationale and an intensified focus in
legal commentaries on criminal procedure as what defined crime as crime in law (Williams 1955: 123;
Farmer 1996b; 2016: Ch. 1).
p. 59 Normative accounts: Rationalizing and legitimating criminal through ‘general

principles’
In the previous section, we saw that whereas 300 hundred years ago English criminal law was more
narrowly focused on core wrongs, the impact of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and the growth of
government significantly increased criminal law’s regulatory role (Lacey 2016). Nineteenth century
reforms of policing, prosecution, trial, and the prison (Langbein 2003) led to the professionalization of law
enforcement and penal practice, a radical reduction in capital offences, and rapid expansion of the prison
system, in line with an emerging, rationalist, modern, and, potentially, liberal conception of criminal law
(Dubber 2005). While the criminal law was never fully codified, efforts to modernize it resulted in the
consolidating legislation of the mid-nineteenth century; for example, the Offences Against the Person Act
1861, which still defines crimes of violence today. But these legislative reforms left criminal law diverse,
extensive, and divided between a vaguely differentiated terrain of ‘real crime’ and ‘regulatory offences’.
Yet the impulse to rationalize criminal law, to make general statements about its aims, functions,
underlying values, and operation persisted. And in the first half of the twentieth century, they led to a
gradual construction of the so-called ‘general part’ of criminal law: the principles governing the
conditions of liability, such as fault and conduct requirements, across all offences (Kenny 1902;
Radzinowicz and Turner 1945), culminating in Glanville Williams’ magisterial Criminal Law: The General
Part, first published in 1953. These ‘general principles’ have little bearing on the substance of criminal
3
offences: the so-called ‘special part’ of criminal law that defines individual crimes.
In English texts today, two rather different visions of the defining features of criminal law still
predominate. These visions have competed for dominance since the expansion of formal criminalization
and the diversification of criminal law’s functions prompted by the growth of the regulatory state in the
nineteenth century (Horder 2019; Wells and Quick 2010). On one view, criminal law is concerned with
wrongdoing in a quasi-moral sense. Crime is conduct judged to be a sufficiently serious violation of core
4
social interests or shared values that it is appropriate for the state to proscribe and punish it. On another
Page 7 of 27
view, criminal law is better understood in more neutrally instrumental terms as a regulatory system:
5
attaching costs, through sanctions, to kinds of conduct which it is in the public interest to reduce. How are
these competing views to be reconciled as rationalizations of criminal law?
In the twentieth century, the most influential approaches attempted to incorporate both quasi-moral and
regulatory aspects of criminal law. Building on the liberal utilitarianism of J. S. Mill (1859), H. L. A. Hart
(1963, 1968) argued that, while the general justifying aim of criminal law is a utilitarian one of crime
reduction through deterrence, the state is only justified in criminalizing conduct for which an individual is
responsible and which is harmful to others. This is a less moralistic account of the nature of crime than the
p. 60 quasi-moral, retributive conception, yet it explains why criminal law is of ↵ special ethical
significance. It has difficulty, however, in generating an adequately clear concept of harm: for example,
does the offence felt by people who disapprove of public nudity count as ‘harm’ (Feinberg 1984–8,
Simester and von Hirsch 2011)? If not, should it be criminalized? If the concept of ‘harm’ is neither fixed
nor analytically robust, how are socio-cultural notions of harm constructed and how do they influence
legal constructions of harm (Harcourt 1999; Hillyard et al. 2004; Canning et al., this volume)?
In legal scholarship, the most common approach to making sense of these different aspects is to divide the
terrain of criminal law between the moral core of ‘real’ crime, such as theft, homicide, assault, and rape,
and quasi-criminal regulatory offences, such as health and safety, licensing, driving, tax, and pollution
offences (Quirk et al. 2010). This approach accepts that criminal law has not one, but two main rationales:
to define and punish wrongdoing and to regulate social life. However, this leaves many questions
unaddressed. How is the division between ‘quasi-moral’ and ‘regulatory’ crimes defined, and is the
boundary a clear one, in practice or law? How does it change over time? Under what conditions does a
bifurcated criminal law system emerge, and what broader governmental purposes does it serve? Having
been ignored in criminal law scholarship for much of the twentieth century, these questions have begun to
reassert themselves, in a welcome shift of attention back to the substance of criminal law (Williams 2018).
The historic shift to a formal conception of criminal law was itself a function of the modernization process
already described (Norrie 2014). Successive attempts to codify the law, alongside the modernization of the
trial process, produced a more sophisticated institutional basis for working out a conceptual framework
for offence definitions and legal argument (Williams 1953; Smith 1998). In a world in which the substance
of criminal law is fragmented, diverse, and hence hard to rationalize coherently, it has become tempting
for lawyers to regard the identity of criminal law as residing in formal features such as the presumption of
6
innocence, the principle of legality, and the requirements of conduct and responsibility that apply
irrespective of the content of offences. Formalizing the criminal law also helped to address the problems of
gathering and validating evidence in an increasingly centralized system in which it is no longer feasible to
rely on the local knowledge of jurors and justices of the peace concerning the character of defendants and
the integrity of witnesses (Lacey 2016).
Today, contemporary codes and commentaries on criminal law in both the common law and civil law
systems tend to be organized around a core framework that sets out the general conditions under which
criminal liability may be established. One striking development is the gradual formalization of principles
of criminal responsibility around mental concepts like intention, knowledge, belief, and recklessness,
replacing the overtly evaluative concepts such as malice and wilfulness, which had characterized the
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common law for centuries (Binder 2002; Horder 1997). This shift from older ideas of faulty character to a
more empirically based conception of responsibility was made possible by the growth of psychology and
psychiatry, premised on a certain understanding of the mind-body distinction and of mental capacity as a
discrete object of social knowledge (Loughnan 2020). But this legal development could not have occurred
had it not been accepted that the factual question of what is going on in someone’s mind can be an object
of investigation and proof in a criminal court (Smith 1981; Loughnan 2012). This in turn depended on
advances such as the professionalization of the trial process and the development of the law of evidence
already considered (Lacey 2001a, 2001b).
p. 61 ↵ Today, the foundations of criminal liability are generally thought to consist in four distinct elements
relating to capacity, to conduct, to responsibility or fault, and to defence. We address each of these in turn:
1. Capacity: Individuals may only be held criminally liable if they have sufficient mental capacity.
Defences such as insanity define certain kinds of people as lacking capacity under criminal law.
Since law operates in terms of general standards, the line between criminal capacity and criminal
incapacity is relatively crude. Almost every criminal law system exempts from criminal liability
people under a certain age, whatever their actual capacities, though the age at which the line
between capacity and incapacity is drawn varies significantly by country and over time. Yet again,
this underlines the interplay between legal and social constructions of crime. In England and Wales,
the abolition of the presumption of incapacity for 10–14 year olds by the Crime and Disorder Act
1998 reduced the age of criminal liability to 10, as compared to 13 in France and 15 in the Nordic
countries. Since it cannot plausibly be claimed that children mature at such widely differing rates in
neighbouring countries, capacity must be understood as a legal construct contingent on local
culture and politics.
2. Conduct: criminal law defines the conduct necessary for an offence: appropriating another person’s
property in the case of theft; causing a person’s death in the case of homicide; having sexual
intercourse with a person without their consent in the case of rape; driving with a certain level of
alcohol in one’s blood in the case of driving while intoxicated. Though there are exceptions in
English criminal law, it is generally asserted that the law does not criminalize mere thoughts,
status, or omissions (though see Ashworth 2013). To take some illustrative examples, if I simply
fantasize about committing a sophisticated fraud, without taking any steps towards it, I am guilty
of no crime. Similarly, my failure to rescue a drowning child will only attract criminal liability if my
relationship with the child or my professional responsibility imposes a special duty to act. This last
example is a further reminder of the contingency of legal constructions of crime on local values. By
contrast, in France, laws impose a relatively wide-ranging duty of rescue so that, unlike in England
and Wales, failing to rescue a drowning child could render me criminally liable.
3. Responsibility/fault: criminal liability is generally said to depend on a person with capacity being
responsible for or at fault in committing the conduct specified in the offence. To put it simply, we
do not hold people liable for accidents. Responsibility or fault conditions generally consist of
mental states or attitudes such as intention, recklessness, knowledge, belief, dishonesty, or
negligence. In the examples above, the relevant conditions are for theft ‘a dishonest intention
permanently to deprive’; for homicide ‘an intention to kill or cause serious bodily harm’ or ‘gross
negligence’; for rape ‘recklessness’ or ‘negligence’ as to the victim’s lack of consent. The fourth
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example—driving while intoxicated—is an exception to the general principle that fault must be
proven by the prosecution: this is a strict liability offence so only the driving and the blood alcohol
level need be established. Notwithstanding their supposedly ‘exceptional’ status, however, these
offences of strict liability substantially outnumber offences that require a mental element (mens
rea) in English criminal law today (though it is difficult to count). Ashworth and Blake estimated
(1996: 309) that, even of the more serious criminal offences, about half featured either ‘strict’ no-
fault liability or only a partial fault requirement, and 40 per cent include a reverse burden of proof,
placing the burden on the defendant to disprove liability. Most strict liability offences are said to be
p. 62 regulatory rather than condemnatory, whereas offences requiring proof of fault correspond to the
quasi-moral terrain of criminal law doctrine. However, as the example of driving while intoxicated
illustrates, the line between the two is neither clear nor static: 30 years ago drunk driving was
regarded as a regulatory offence; today it attracts strong condemnation. Changing moral and social
values influence the meaning, as well as the practice, of criminal law and, as we shall see, point to
the importance of criminological and sociological knowledge in understanding how and why crime
is defined as it is.
4. Defences: Even where a person with criminal capacity has committed the relevant conduct with the
requisite degree of fault, a range of defences may preclude or mitigate liability (Duff 2007: ch. 11). If
the defendant has committed theft while under a threat of violence, she may plead a defence of
duress. If a person kills, intentionally, to defend himself against an immediate attack, he may plead
self-defence. General defences apply not only to crimes requiring proof of responsibility but also to
strict liability offences. A person who drives while intoxicated under duress or threat, or in
circumstances of necessity, may escape liability. So if you threaten to shoot me if I fail to drive you
home, I may be acquitted even if I do so while intoxicated.
Defences are often grouped under the headings of exemptions, justifications, and excuses. Each relates to
the other three components of liability already mentioned, that is, capacity, conduct, and fault. The
defence of insanity recognizes that the defendant’s incapacity exempts her from criminal liability. If I kill
while suffering a mental illness, which causes me to misunderstand entirely the nature of my own action, I
am considered to lack capacity. Even before trial, I may be deemed unfit to plead; or I may be found not
guilty by reason of insanity. If I kill while defending myself from attack, I may plead self-defence to claim
that my conduct was, in the circumstances, justified and hence not criminal. And if I plead that I assaulted
someone because a third party had threatened me or my family with violence if I did not do so, my defence
of duress may excuse me because the conditions under which I formed the relevant fault condition mitigate
my guilt. The defences may thus be seen as fine-tuning liability to take account of excusatory and
justificatory factors.
This conceptual framework provides building blocks with which legislators and lawyers construct criminal
liability. As the reference to general principles suggests, it contains an implicit set of normative
assumptions about what makes the imposition of criminal liability justifiable. The law does not criminalize
mere thoughts and while it does not fully define the circumstances under which internal incapacity or
external circumstance deprived a defendant of a fair opportunity to conform to the law, the general
principle is that the court will not convict unless a defendant is responsible for their conduct. The criminal
Page 10 of 27
law is not merely an institutionalized system of coercion but a system that purports to address its subjects
as responsible for their conduct, which is structured around broadly liberal principles of justice (Ashworth
and Zedner 2008).
Acknowledging the individual as independent, rational, and free-willed requires that those who commit
wrongdoing are identified, held to account, and punished proportionately, though less serious offences
7
may result in absolute discharge on the grounds that ‘going to court has been punishment enough’. To do
otherwise would constitute a failure to acknowledge individuals as moral agents who can justly be held
responsible for their actions (von Hirsch 1993: 11). Individual autonomy and dignity are also protected,
p. 63 ↵ in theory at least, by procedural safeguards relating to investigation, prosecution, and the criminal
trial, by the principles of legality and the presumption of innocence, and the values and principles
pertaining to the criminal process (Campbell, Ashworth and Redmayne 2019: Ch. 2). These are intended to
safeguard individuals against unwarranted state interference and uphold fundamental human rights
enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights (Goss 2016). This paradigmatic liberal account of
criminal law emphasizes respect for the rights and dignity of the individual in the criminal process
(Roberts 2006; Lippke 2019). This said, as criminological research reveals, formal protections are often
ignored, subverted, or breached. A long held concern is that the liberal rhetoric of respect for the individual
masks and makes possible a legal process that has more to do with efficiency than procedural protections
(McBarnet 1981: 156).
The various assumptions underlying the conceptual framework within which criminal liability is
constructed provide insights into the processes of interpretation in the court room—a key site in the
process of criminalization. They also raise interesting questions about the coherence of the criminal
process. Are the assumptions of rationality, understanding, and self-control which lie at the heart of
criminal law’s conception of (normal) defendants the same as, or even consistent with, those that
underpin policing strategy, sentencing, probation or prison regimes? Are the assumptions of moral
autonomy, free will, and rationality consistent with criminological knowledge about factors closely
associated with offending such as drug and alcohol abuse, mental disorder, and the constraints on choice
imposed by social and economic deprivation (Delgado 1985; Peay and O’Loughlin, this volume; Rock, this
volume)?
The Shifting Boundaries of Contemporary Criminal Law
8
It is estimated that over 3,200 new offences were added to the statute books in the decade following 1997.
Some resulted from new legislation against particular areas of activity such as serious and organized
crime, immigration, and terrorism. About two-thirds were created by the growing number of regulatory
agencies, which have the power to introduce secondary legislation. In addition to powers already held by
local authorities and trading standards authorities, over 60 national regulatory bodies now have the power
to create criminal laws in support of their work. For example, in the year to May 2014 alone, 280 new
offences were created of which a quarter were created by the Department for Business, Innovation and
9
Skills. During the coronavirus pandemic, the Coronavirus Act 2020 created emergency powers that have
to be renewed by Parliament every six months. These enabled a striking further expansion of what is in
p. 64 effect criminal law ↵ via a wide range of delegated powers, significantly curtailing freedom of
Page 11 of 27
association and movement. Moreover, there have even been disturbing reports of the prosecution of non-
existent offences under the Coronavirus Act 2020, evidencing the importance of the distinction between
10
formal and substantive criminalization.
Untrammelled expansion of the criminal law is a cause for concern not least because it has the potential to
limit individual choice and expand the power of the state to exercise its most coercive powers over more
and more aspects of daily life. Recent developments have extended liability downwards (to regulatory
offences) (Williams 2018), back in time (inchoate offences, preparatory offences, possession, risk-
creation, and other precursor offences), and outwards (associative crimes—especially in respect of fraud,
organized crime, proscribed organizations, and terrorism) (Ramsay 2012; Ashworth and Zedner 2014;
Lacey 2016: Chs. 3 and 5). This expansion of criminal liability adds considerably to the discretionary
powers of prosecutors and the police; yet many new criminal offences, especially those created by
regulatory agencies, are rarely used. For example, although 89 new immigration offences were enacted
from 1999 to 2016—as compared to just 70 offences introduced between 1905 and 1998—the rate of
11
criminal prosecutions subsequently fell, though the rate of civil penalties issued rose significantly. Nor
has the general increase in criminal offences on the statute books since 1997 led to a corresponding
increase in prosecutions and convictions. Indeed, the numbers formally dealt with by the criminal process
in England and Wales have declined over recent decades. Prosecutions in magistrates’ courts fell steadily
12 13
from 2 million in 1997 to 1.38 million in 2018. The decline can be attributed partly to falling crime rates,
but it is also attributable to the fact that over the decade to 2019 government funding was cut by 21 per cent
14
in real terms and legal aid budgets were slashed by nearly 40 per cent.
In a particularly stark and troubling example, prosecution rates for rape have plummeted in recent years,
leading to fears that this most serious offence is, de facto, being decriminalized. The 2015 Angiolini review
on the prosecution of rape in London echoed an earlier report’s conclusion that notwithstanding ‘the
consistent approval of the policies applied to the investigation and prosecution of rape’, there was a
chronic ‘inability to implement those same policies comprehensively and successfully’ (Angiolini 2015:
15
10). This trend has continued to cause concern, and the continuing decline in prosecutions has led to
16
p. 65 criticism of the ‘de facto decriminalisation’ of rape. Prosecutions ↵ for indictable offences increased
17
for the first time in 10 years in 2019, but they fell sharply when the UK went into lockdown due to
COVID-19 in March 2020. By April 2020, prosecutions had fallen to a low of 21,300 compared to 114,000 in
18
April 2019. Overall, the total number of people found guilty in all courts fell 31 per cent from 2019 to
19
818,000 in 2020. And while prosecutions have since increased, especially for indictable offences, the
impact of the pandemic has been to create a very serious backlog of cases that has resulted in long delays to
20
trial and a significant increase of those held on remand awaiting trial.
The expansion of criminal law and of discretionary powers, together with the catastrophic impact of the
pandemic, has created a serious gap between formal and substantive criminalization. However, this is by
no means a result of the pandemic alone—for well over a decade, the criminal trial has come to be regarded
as unduly expensive, time-consuming, ineffective, inappropriate, or unnecessary as a means of dealing
with low-level offending (Ashworth and Zedner 2010: 23). This view has encouraged greater recourse to
mechanisms for diversion; fixed penalties (e.g. the Penalty Notice for Disorder or PND); and a growing
range of civil and hybrid civil–criminal measures that reduce reliance upon the criminal law (of which the
Page 12 of 27
ASBO—now replaced by a civil injunction under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014—
21
is the best known) (Ramsay 2012; Ashworth and Zedner 2014: Ch. 4). Criminalization becomes just one
tool in a growing array of administrative and regulatory measures (Ashworth and Zedner 2014: 396, 2021;
Horder 2014). It would be a mistake, however, to assume that these measures are necessarily less intrusive
or less burdensome than the criminal law. The Penalty Notice for Disorder imposes a fixed penalty that
may be significantly more onerous than a court fine (which must be set in accordance with the offender’s
means). Similarly, the civil injunction for anti-social behaviour may target low levels of nuisance well
below the normal threshold of the criminal law.
Whether the response to low-level or regulatory offences ought to lie with the criminal law or be replaced
by administrative measures or civil orders of the sort just described, is a matter of lively debate (Williams
2018; Dyson and Vogel 2018). On the one hand, it is suggested that where appropriate levels of punishment
or deterrence can be secured by lesser civil means these should be preferred over stigmatizing and
potentially overly punitive criminalization (Law Commission 2010). On the other hand, to the extent that
civil measures impose burdens equivalent to punishment, placing these measures within civil procedure
denies individuals the protections of the criminal process and may constitute an instance of under-
criminalization (Ashworth and Zedner 2010, 2014; Horder 2011). Yet, as Crawford observed, ‘[i]t is a
p. 66 supreme irony that whilst many of the ↵ new technologies of control have sought to circumvent
criminal procedures due to their apparent ineffectiveness, this has not diminished the appetite for more
22
criminal laws’ (2009: 826). It is also worth noting that the use of civil orders to categorize and target
those identified as presenting certain kinds of risk may plausibly be seen as marking a resurgence in new
forms of older understandings of criminalization as based on bad character (Lacey 2016; Solanke (ed.)
2021).
Two dominant and divergent trends thus characterize practices of criminalization over recent decades. On
the one hand, there has been recourse to diversion, through fixed penalties and civil–criminal preventive
measures, and downgrading, through greater use of summary trials, stronger incentives to plead guilty,
and an increase in offences of strict liability (mostly, though not all, carrying low penalties) (Crown
Prosecution Service 2015; Ward 2015). There has also been some moderation of the pace of formal
criminalizaion, with the final report of the Criminal Offences Gateway noting a significant decline in the
rate at which new criminal offences were being created:
In the 12 months ending May 2014, new criminal offences were contained in 42 pieces of
legislation; this compares to 60 pieces of legislation in the 12 months to May 2013. From the 42
pieces of legislation, 280 new criminal offences were created. This represents a 14.4% decrease in
the number of new offences created compared with the preceding 12 months (327) and is 60.7%
23
lower than the number created in the 12 months ending May 2010 (712).
Conversely, the policy focus on serious crime has remained one of severity, and while the prison
population has fallen somewhat in recent years, it remains at a high level. In August 2021, the combined
prison population of the three jurisdictions of the United Kingdom stood at over 87,000—and is predicted
24
to rise once again. Since the 1970s, there has been a well-documented growing public concern about the
scale and extent of crime—a concern which has survived the significant decline in serious crime since the
Page 13 of 27
mid 1990s. No surprise then that determining the proper limits of criminalization re-emerged as a matter
of academic and political interest to criminal lawyers anxious to restrain the tendency to ‘over-
criminalization’ in countries such as England and Wales and the United States (Husak 2008: Ch.1; Stuntz
2011). Although criminological accounts of the ‘new punitiveness’ prompted legal interest in the
appropriate boundaries of the criminal law (Duff et al. 2010), that interest has hardly been shared by
criminology. While lawyers are alert to the sociological drivers of over-criminalization, the criminological
focus has been on penal populism and punitiveness rather than on exploring the legitimate scope of
criminalization (Annison 2015; Theoretical Criminology Special Issue 2010). As a result, lawyers,
p. 67 philosophers, and political theorists seek to determine ↵ the proper limits of criminalization largely
unaided by criminology, despite the obvious contribution that criminology might make to a fully social and
political account of why and to what ends conduct is criminalized (Zedner 2011).
Limits on Criminalization: The Contribution of Criminology
The liberal account of crime as a means of holding individuals to account for wrongful conduct has come to
prevail as the dominant model of criminal law. Yet two dimensions of this influential approach have
arguably been relatively inhospitable to a close dialogue between criminal law and criminology. First, the
modern focus on the conceptual structure of the general part of criminal law implied a formal approach
somewhat distant from the substantive concerns of criminology with specific offences. As we have seen,
for lawyers, the construction of crime proceeds by reference to concepts of culpability, wrongfulness,
harm, and offence; by delineating the boundary between civil and criminal liability; by seeking to
determine which harms are too remote and which offences too trivial to merit criminalization (Simester
and von Hirsch 2011). But lawyerly attention to these normative questions risks overlooking practical,
structural, and policy considerations that criminologists are arguably better placed to address. Should
crimes be defined and enforced in response to the relative prevalence of conduct in a particular area or at a
given time and the level of public concern about it? What weight should be given to the enforceability of a
prohibition or the costs of enforcement? Should the financial burdens of policing an activity or the
intrusions entailed by enforcement measures be a factor in determining what is and what is not
criminalized? What role should public opinion play? Politicians often justify the enactment of new criminal
offences by reference to public opinion or popular demand. But it is questionable whether populism should
be seen as an appropriate exercise of the democratic mandate or rather as a result of a majoritarianism that
risks infringing minority interests and targeting marginalized communities rather than protecting the
public interest.
The formal conception of the general part of criminal law also raises a number of conceptual difficulties
from a criminological standpoint. For example, criticism of liberal accounts of criminal liability has come
from communitarian thinkers who argue that they are premised on an atomized view of the individual that
overplays autonomy and fails to recognize that we are social beings inseparable from our personal and
social relations (Lacey 1988: Ch. 8). Like criminologists, communitarian critics recognize individuals are
situated in social and relational contexts that shape their decisions and conduct, with profound
implications for their thinking about wrongdoing and for the assumptions about individual responsibility
upon which the criminal law is predicated. Significant efforts have been made to combine the insights of
Page 14 of 27
liberal and communitarian traditions (Duff 2001). These balance the liberal strengths of respect for human
agency and rights with an acknowledgement that the social antecedents and context of crime should
inform the definition of defences and of responsibility more generally (Duff 2001, 2007, 2018; Tonry 2014).
Another factor that has distanced legal scholarship from the concerns of criminology has been the revival
of a substantive legal moralism. This development, which accompanied the retributive renaissance of the
1970s, implied, albeit to varying degrees, a close relationship between criminal law and ‘pre-legal’
25
p. 68 concepts of wrong that relied upon an ↵ account of criminal acts as inherently morally wrongful. This
moralist account rendered the legal concept of crime relatively distant from the view of crime as a social
construct typical of the broadly sociological and political (Marxian, critical) criminology that has prevailed
for most of the twentieth century, driving criminal law and criminology even further apart.
One important criminological criticism of criminal lawyers’ thinking about crime in terms of pre-legal,
moral wrongs is Christie’s famous characterization of crimes as private disputes between victims and
offenders whose interests were ‘stolen’ by state criminalization (Christie 1977). Understanding crime not
as inherently morally wrongful or as an infraction of the law deserving of punishment but as a dispute to
be resolved by those party to it was one factor contributing to the development of Restorative Justice, an
alternative to the criminal justice paradigm, that proposes dialogue in place of prosecution, dispute
resolution in place of the trial, and ‘reintegrative shaming’ in place of punishment (Braithwaite 1989; see
Rossner, this volume). Such has been the power and influence of this advocacy that liberal legal theorists
have sought to determine how the claims of Restorative Justice might be reconciled with more
conventional accounts of crime and criminal justice (von Hirsch et al. 2003).
A more radical critique still comes from the attempt by some criminologists to move ‘beyond crime’ to
‘zemiology’ (Canning et al., this volume; Canning and Tombs 2021) on the grounds that crime is too
restrictive a concept to capture the full extent of harmful behaviour that causes most loss and suffering.
Hillyard and colleagues claim that criminal liability is attributed by questionable means and that focusing
on the liability of the individual fails to address serious social harms inflicted by groups, organizations,
and states (Hillyard et al. 2004). Significantly, this attack on the category of crime is motivated partly by
the observation that ‘criminology has largely failed to be self-reflective regarding the dominant, state
defined notion of “crime” … The issue of what crime is, is rarely stated, but rather simply
assumed’ (Hillyard and Tombs 2007: 11; see also Canning et al., this volume). Yet this insight might equally
suggest that criminology should make good this failure by engaging with the scope and nature of crime,
the principles upon which it is defined, and the legal structures within which it is inscribed (Zedner 2011;
Reiner 2016: Chs. 1 and 2).
Recent developments in criminal law theory, however, may open up new avenues for constructive
engagement between criminologists and theorists of criminal law. Theories of criminal law have inevitably
been closely tied to theories of the state; yet with the re-emergence of strong forms of legal moralism, the
state—so central to many of the critical forms of criminology such as those canvassed in this section—was
sidelined in criminal law theory. But in a recent so-called ‘political turn in criminal law’, theorists have
developed a range of accounts that place criminal law’s role vis à vis the modern state and the dominant
political order centre stage (Duff et al. 2004a; Brudner 2009; Duff 2018). These ‘political’ criminal law
theories take various forms: many engage particularly with the role of criminal law in maintaining civil
Page 15 of 27
order or in ‘public ordering’ (Duff 2018, Farmer 2016; Ristroph 2020); others emphasize the role of
political and economic interests in the trajectory of criminalization (Lacey 2016) or the assertion of state
p. 69 capacity to provide security or assuage insecurity (Ramsay 2012); yet others see the role of ↵ modern
criminal law as to sustain cooperation with public institutions (Chiao 2018), to assert secular political
order and promote peace and ‘harmony of mind’ (Zucca 2020); or to underwrite the state’s very right to
rule (Thorburn 2020). While not all these writers entirely abandon legal moralism (Duff, for example,
writes of ‘political’ legal moralism (Duff 2020a, 2020b, see Lacey 2020)—the core recognition of the way
in which criminal law’s substance is shaped by vectors of political power is considerably more hospitable
to the constructivist understandings of crime that are so central to modern criminology.
While legal moralist positions assert that there is a core of offences universally accepted as criminal
wrongs around which exists a penumbra of lesser, disputed categories, a constructivist approach
recognizes that even the most serious of offences are open to contextual interpretation. For example, the
core offence of murder poses interpretive difficulty in cases such as mercy killing or assisted dying. And
even the most serious offences may escape criminalization if they do not easily supply the paradigmatic
individual offender who can be held to account. Take two examples from either end of the scale of
criminalization as currently constructed: crimes of the state and of multi-national corporations often
appear to be above or too big for criminalization (Cohen 2001; Garrett 2016), while workplace injuries are
often dealt with as regulatory matters by Health and Safety authorities rather than prosecuting employers
and factory owners (Hawkins 2002). The ongoing inquiry into the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower exemplifies
the complexity involved in framing fatal failures across a range of corporate and individual actors as
26
crimes. Identifying the contextual and structural conditions which favour or impede criminalization is a
task that has long eluded criminal lawyers, but one which criminology is well equipped to tackle.
Although this chapter has as its focus legal constructions of crime, its argument shows that criminology
has much to contribute to the ongoing and often heated debates around criminalization. Criminology has a
vital role to play in ensuring that the normative questions with which criminal lawyers grapple are neither
framed nor answered as purely normative or legal issues. These questions cannot be divorced from the
political, economic, and social factors underpinning the ways that offences are identified as criminal
wrongs (rather than matters subject to other kinds of regulation) and criminal categories are defined,
framed, and structured.
To these questions one might add questions about the ways in which political processes, and not least
party political interests, influence the construction and application of legal categories. Consider too the
administrative pressures and constraints upon implementing laws, training criminal justice officials, and
influencing professional culture. These extra-legal factors play an important part in determining how
crime is actually policed and prosecuted through the criminal justice process. Criminological knowledge is
no less central to understanding how, in practice, legal categories are applied, to whom, in what
circumstances, and with what consequences. Criminology examines the relations of class, race, and
gender, the cultural assumptions and prejudices, and the political considerations that inform and
influence the practice of law and of criminalization (Phillips et al., this volume; Burman and Gelsthorpe,
this volume). It illuminates the ways in which long-term historical forces—such as the legacies of
colonialism—continue to shape the exercise of criminalizing power (Aliverti et al. 2021; Cuneen 2011),
Page 16 of 27
p. 70 ↵ as well as tracing the influence of contemporary political interests, not least in areas such as the
widespread criminalization of migration (Parmar 2018, 2020). It explains how and why the formal equality
and universality of the criminal law may be undermined by the partial, targeted, and often discriminatory
ways in which it is applied (Aliverti 2016). No less important is the larger Realpolitik of inter-governmental
and international politics that frames the construction and implementation of international criminal law,
(Lohne 2020) and of supranational offences like organized crime, the smuggling of peoples, arms and
drugs, and terrorism (Mitsilegas 2015). In this respect, important questions are emerging about whether
transnational frameworks of human rights act as effective constraints on state criminalization or rather
provide a further basis, in areas such as human trafficking, for expanding the terrain of criminal law (Pinto
2020).
Criminology is alert to the volatile and contradictory character of modern penal politics (O’Malley 1999;
Garland 2001). It has observed the normalization of crime as a fact of everyday life to be managed and
regulated. This routinization of crime licenses ‘defining deviance down’, the removal of lesser offences
from the criminal process to the less onerous channels of civil and administrative law, and resort to other
regulatory mechanisms, not least the ‘contractual governance’ of deviance (Crawford 2003; Chiao 2018).
But it is far from clear that these managerial, regulatory, and contractual developments have resulted in
less commitment to the control of crime through the criminal law. Indeed, as we have seen, the latter part
of the twentieth century witnessed an extraordinary and unprecedented programme of criminalization
encompassing serious offences in areas such as terrorism (Zedner 2014) and sexual conduct as well as the
proliferation of regulatory offences (Williams 2018). Criminalization has decelerated in the last decade but
arguably not in proportion to the marked decline in serious crime since the mid-1990s. Yet, the legal
construction of crime is one part of the picture of contemporary penal politics that criminology has yet to
engage with in any sustained fashion. It should by now be clear that criminalization is not just a matter of
legal principle but ‘a politically charged set of decisions that result in a complex set of individual laws by
which the state seeks to govern its subjects’ (Ashworth and Zedner 2008: 44). Recognizing that criminal
law is an engine of governance renders it impossible to separate its study not only from that of political
theory and political economy but also, and not least, from criminology. To bring criminal law and
criminology into closer dialogue will surely inform and enrich both disciplines.

The relationship between questions of criminal law and criminal justice is explored extensively in Farmer’s Making the
Modern Criminal Law: Criminalization and Civil Order (2016) and Lacey’s In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas,
Interests and Institutions (2016). For further discussion of legal constructions of crime, see Reiner’s Crime: The Mystery
of the Common-Sense Concept (2016).
On developments in the changing scope, exercise, and aims of criminal law and criminal justice see Ashworth and
Zedner’s Preventive Justice (2014, pb 2015) and Carvalho’s The Preventive Turn in Criminal Law (2016). For a legal-
philosophical treatment of criminalization see Duff and Green’s (eds), Philosophical Foundations of the Criminal Law,
(2011) and Simester and von Hirsch’s Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs: on the Principles of Criminalisation (2011). The
volumes arising from the Criminalization project involving criminal lawyers, philosophers, and criminologists led by
Duff, Farmer, Marshall, Renzo, and Tadros (eds)—Criminalization: The Boundaries of the Criminal Law; The Structures of
Page 17 of 27
p. 71 the Criminal Law; The ↵ Constitution of the Criminal Law; The Political Morality of the Criminal Law (2010, 2011,
2013, 2015), as well as Duff’s, The Realm of Criminal Law (2018)—have. done much to bridge the gulf between
disciplines described in this chapter. Finally, the ‘political turn’ in criminal law theory discussed in the final section, is
exemplified by Vincent Chiao’s Criminal Law in the Age of the Administrative State (2018).
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Chapter Acknowledgements
Our warm thanks go to Maria David for her exemplary research assistance.
Notes
1
Legal constructions of crime are, of course, also social phenomena.
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2
Lay magistrates’ courts, of course, continue to predominate in the criminal process to the present day, hearing about
95 per cent of cases: https://www.judiciary.uk/you-and-the-judiciary/going-to-court/magistrates-court/ <https://
www.judiciary.uk/you-and-the-judiciary/going-to-court/magistrates-court/> (accessed 7 August 2021). But magistrates
today operate within a clear legal framework and are advised by legally trained clerks.
3
It is significant that Williams never followed up his plan to publish a second volume on the ‘special part’. This implies
that it had become unnecessary to rationalize the substance of offences in criminal law in anything like the
substantive terms which had come naturally to Blackstone (1765–9) 200 years earlier, or indeed to James Fitzjames
Stephen (1893) sixty years before. Rather, it was the distinctive modus operandi of criminal law, with its edifice of
general principles, which supplied its rationale.
4
This view accords with a retributive approach to punishment and an emphasis on the expressive dimensions of
criminal justice (Duff 2001; Bennett 2012).
5
This second view sits naturally with a utilitarian view of punishment, justified by its beneficial consequences.
6
The principle of legality requires that there should be no penalty without law and that criminal law must be
announced clearly to citizens in advance of its imposition so that they have a fair opportunity to conform to it.
7
https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/sentencing-and-the-council/types-of-sentence/discharges/ <https://
www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/sentencing-and-the-council/types-of-sentence/discharges/> (accessed 25 August 2021).
8
1,169 in primary legislation and 1,854 in subordinate legislation. Halsbury’s Statutes of England and Wales has four
volumes devoted to criminal laws: strikingly, more than two and a half times as many pages were needed in
Halsbury’s Statutes to cover offences created in the 19 years between 1989 and 2008 than were needed to cover the
offences created in the preceding 637 years (The Law Commission 2010: 5).
9
Ministry of Justice New criminal offences England and Wales 1st June 2009–31st May 2014, available at: https://
www.gov.uk/government/statistics/new-criminal-offences-statistics-in-england-and-wales-may-2014 <https://
www.gov.uk/government/statistics/new-criminal-offences-statistics-in-england-and-wales-may-2014> (accessed 10
August 2021, p. 6). On the question of quantification, see Chalmers and Leverick 2015. Quite remarkably, the
government has since concluded that updates on this data are no longer required: ‘Statistics release cancelled …
Following the termination of the Criminal Offences Gateway there is no longer a business need to collect data on new
offences. As a result, this bulletin is no longer being produced.’ https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/
announcements/new-criminal-offences-statistics-in-england-and-wales-may-2015 <https://www.gov.uk/government/
statistics/announcements/new-criminal-offences-statistics-in-england-and-wales-may-2015> (accessed 25 August
2021).
10
https://insights.doughtystreet.co.uk/post/102g6tz/guide-to-coronavirus-offences-help-for-the-public-police-and-
lawyers <https://insights.doughtystreet.co.uk/post/102g6tz/guide-to-coronavirus-offences-help-for-the-public-police-
and-lawyers> (accessed 2 September 2021).
11
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/immigration-offences-trends-in-legislation-and-
criminal-and-civil-enforcement/ <https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/immigration-offences-
trends-in-legislation-and-criminal-and-civil-enforcement/> (accessed 20 October 2021).
Page 25 of 27
12
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2019/criminal-
justice-statistics-quarterly-december-2019-html <https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-
statistics-quarterly-december-2019/criminal-justice-statistics-quarterly-december-2019-html> (accessed 22 October
2021).
13
See ONS Statistical Bulletin Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2021 https://www.ons.gov.uk/
peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/crimeinenglandandwales/
yearendingmarch2021 <https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/
crimeinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2021> (accessed 24 October 2021).
14
House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution 22nd Report of Session 2019–21 HL Paper 257 COVID-19 and
the Courts (30 March 2021) 3, 9–10 https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5801/ldselect/ldconst/
257/257.pdf <https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5801/ldselect/ldconst/257/257.pdf> (accessed 22 October 2021).
15
See also: https://iadllaw.org/2020/03/attrition-and-rape-law-reform-in-the-united-kingdom-the-urgent-need-for-
reform-to-mitigate-rape-myth-bias/ <https://iadllaw.org/2020/03/attrition-and-rape-law-reform-in-the-united-
kingdom-the-urgent-need-for-reform-to-mitigate-rape-myth-bias/> (accessed 25 August 2021); https://
www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/prosecution-statistics-published-2020-21 <https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/prosecution-
statistics-published-2020-21> (accessed 25 August 2021).
16
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/17/why-have-prosecutions-fallen-so-dramatically-in-a-
decade <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/17/why-have-prosecutions-fallen-so-dramatically-in-a-
decade> See also the 2020/21 Annual Report of the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales https://
victimscommissioner.org.uk/document/annual-report-of-the-victims-commissioner-2021-to-2022/ <https://
victimscommissioner.org.uk/document/annual-report-of-the-victims-commissioner-2021-to-2022/> (accessed 22
October 2021).
17
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2019/criminal-
justice-statistics-quarterly-december-2019-html <https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-
statistics-quarterly-december-2019/criminal-justice-statistics-quarterly-december-2019-html>) (accessed 22 October
2021).
18
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2020 <https://
www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2020> (accessed 22 October
2021).
19
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2020 <https://
www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2020> 8 (accessed 18 October
2021).
20
House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution 22nd Report of Session 2019–21 HL Paper 257 COVID-19 and
the Courts (30 March 2021) 3 https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5801/ldselect/ldconst/257/257.pdf <https://
publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5801/ldselect/ldconst/257/257.pdf> (accessed 22 October 2021).
21
The focus on low-level offensive behaviour as an appropriate object of early intervention built on Wilson and
Kelling’s (controversial) broken windows thesis (1982): that broken window, litter and graffiti lead to increased crime
(Crawford 2009: 816).
Page 26 of 27
22
As detailed in fn 9, the Ministry of Justice has now abandoned its 2010 ‘Gateway’, which was designed to scrutinize
all new proposals for legislation containing criminal offences ‘to ensure that they are justified and proportionate’.
https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/analyses/no-118-uk-civil-liberties-six-months-on.pdf <https://
www.statewatch.org/media/documents/analyses/no-118-uk-civil-liberties-six-months-on.pdf> (accessed 18 October
2021, p. 17).
23
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/385537/new-
criminal-offences-june-2009-may-2014.pdf <https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/
uploads/attachment_data/file/385537/new-criminal-offences-june-2009-may-2014.pdf> (accessed 18 October 2021, p.
4).
24
In Otober 2021, the prison population in England and Wales stood at 78,789, in Scotland at 7,509, and in Northern
Ireland at 1,480 https://www.prisonstudies.org/map/europe <https://www.prisonstudies.org/map/europe> (accessed
18 October 2021). https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04334/ <https://
commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn04334/>.
25
The strong legal moralism of Michael S. Moore’s Placing Blame (1997) and RA Duff’s ‘thin, negative’ legal moralism
(The Realm of Criminal Law, 2018) serve as convenient markers of this spectrum of moralist approaches to criminal
law.
26
Following the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower, west London, on the night of 14 June 2017, which led to 72 deaths, the
Grenfell Tower Inquiry was set up in 2017 to examine the circumstances and causes of the fire. It is still ongoing:
https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/ <https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/> (accessed 10 August 2021).
Related Links
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Page 27 of 27
3. Towards a global comparative criminology

p. 75 3. Towards a global comparative criminology

Manuel Eisner
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0003
Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of the achievements and challenges of comparative criminology in the field. It elaborates on
the development of comparative criminology, which is the study of crime and crime control across two or more larger social
contexts to describe differences, testing theories, and drawing practically valuable inferences from comparisons. Due to the
data revolution in global criminology, it is becoming possible to broadly describe levels and trends in crime across most parts
of the world. Comparative research of criminal justice and penal institutions benefits from adopting a multi-layered ecological
framework to understand the effects of social contexts on crime. Overall, comparative criminology aims to become an
integrative framework for explaining crime globally along two dimensions.
Keywords: comparative criminology, global criminology, crime, criminal justice, penal institutions, social contexts
Introduction
This chapter presents an overview of the achievements of comparative criminology, and the challenges
that must be addressed for it to become more globally relevant. First, I outline the development of
comparative criminology, understood here as the study of crime and crime control across two or more
larger social contexts with the goal of describing differences, testing theories, and drawing practically
valuable inferences from the comparison between such contexts. Second, I examine what it is that
comparative studies compare, suggesting that comparative research can benefit from adopting a multi-
layered ecological framework to understand the effects of social contexts on crime.
The following sections review the current state of knowledge, limitations, and future prospects in four
major areas of comparative criminology: the description of crime levels through international and global
quantitative indicators; the macro-comparative analysis of crime across countries and over time; the
Page 1 of 29
extent to which general theories of crime can explain crime in different societies, and how social contexts
may influence psychological mechanisms associated with crime; and the significance of comparative
criminology for advancing crime prevention at a global level. Throughout, I will mainly focus on
comparative studies of crime and crime prevention rather than comparative analyses of criminal justice
and penal institutions.
The Development of Comparative Criminology
The idea that insight into social life can be gained through a comparative lens reaches back to the origins
of social science (Smelser 1976). Comparative analysis played a vital role, for example, in the work of
sociological classics such as Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), or Max
p. 76 Weber (1864–1920). Their strategy is still ↵ influential today: it entails developing a typology that
clusters human societies into a limited number of groups, and then analysing how differences in political,
social, or religious organization affect trust, morality, or crime. Durkheim (1957), for example, proposed a
dichotomy of traditional societies based on ‘mechanical solidarity’ and modern societies held together by
‘organic solidarity’. In this framework, mechanical solidarity creates cohesion through shared beliefs in a
sacred community and intolerance against deviants, while organic solidarity implies cohesion through
mutual interdependence and a strong sense of the moral autonomy of the individual. He predicted—
correctly, as it turns out—that societies held together by the glue of mechanical solidarity tend to have
higher rates of homicide related to honour and revenge, while more individualist societies free the
individual from the intensity of collective emotions, and therefore experience a decline in homicide (Eisner
2003).
Comparative thinking also played an important role in nascent European criminology in the nineteent
century. Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), for example, used some of the earliest national crime statistics to
compare the age distribution of offenders in France, Belgium, and England (Quetelet 1848). He discovered
that the shape of these distributions was highly similar in the three countries. The finding led Quetelet to
hypothesize that the variation in the propensity to commit crime by age, i.e. the so-called crime-age
curve, is a cross-cultural universal. This hypothesis is still part of current controversies on whether the
peak of delinquency in late adolescence is shaped by a universal human tendency towards increased risk-
taking during the transition from childhood to adulthood or whether cultural and social forces play a major
role (e.g., Steinberg 2008).
A few decades later, Enrico Ferri (1856–1929) compiled comparative statistics of European homicide in the
late nineteenth century as part of his project of an anthropological criminology of murder (Ferri 1895). His
maps of the social geography of homicide revealed a distinct geographic pattern, with much higher
homicide rates along the Mediterranean Sea and in Eastern Europe than in the more industrialized
societies of Northern Europe. The findings triggered a debate about the macro-causal forces that gave rise
to this moral landscape. Ferri attributed the patterns mainly to average temperamental tendencies of
different races, while others, such as the French criminologist Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904), contended that
lower violence signalled an earlier transition to modern society along with stronger national integration
(Tarde 1886).
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The term ‘comparative criminology’ was introduced much later. It was likely first coined at the 1955
United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders in Geneva (United
Nations 1956; Glueck 1964). The conference aimed to develop a global framework for prison reform, the
treatment of offenders, and crime prevention strategies. In the recommendations, the report laid out a
farsighted programme of research for comparative criminology. It remains relevant to date and deserves to
be cited in full:
Comparative, co-ordinated and interdisciplinary research should be carried out to determine the
relative effects of programmes in different countries. Through co-operation between researchers
from different countries it may be possible to develop a highly promising new field of comparative
criminology, based on research employing standard definitions and techniques. In this way,
uniformities and differences in causal influences, in predictive factors and in results of preventive
and treatment programmes can be determined and progress made toward a true science of
criminology. (United Nations 1956: 81)
Despite this ambitious vision, progress remained slow initially. However, pioneering work in the 1970s and
p. 77 1980s embarked on research that defines comparative criminology ↵ as a field to this day (see Newman
2000; Nelken 2017; Bennett 2004): Graeme Newman’s ‘Comparative Deviance: Perception and Law in Six
Cultures’ examined the perceived severity and wrongfulness of various types of deviant acts in six societies,
namely India, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Yugoslavia and the United States, finding surprisingly little variation
in how people in different cultures rank the severity of deviant acts (Newman 1974). In ‘Crime in Developing
Countries: A Comparative Perspective’, Marshall B. Clinard and Daniel Abbott (1973) transported Western
criminological theories such as differential association into the context of poor neighbourhoods in
Kampala, Uganda, finding that community cohesion and informal social control had preventive effects on
youth offending, similar to findings in disadvantaged US neighbourhoods. Tedd Gurr, Peter Grabosky and
Richard Hula pioneered comparative research on the history of crime, criminal justice and public order,
comparing trends of crime and social conflict in London, Stockholm, Sydney and Calcutta since the
nineteenth century (Gurr, Grabosky and Hula 1977). And in ‘Nations not Obsessed with Crime’, Freda Adler
(1983) made a unique contribution to the comparative study of low crime societies. She examined ten
countries in all major world regions that she saw as having lower crime rates than their neighbours in the
same region. She argued that pervasive informal social control and normative integration characterized
the ten societies that she had identified as having little crime.
Comparative criminology today

Today comparative criminology is a fast-growing and diverse perspective of our discipline (Nelken 2017;
LaFree 2021; Nivette 2021). The expanding availability of international data, lower barriers to cross-
national collaboration thanks to communication technologies, and the globalization of policy agendas
related to crime and human rights are among the factors contributing to this growth. Emerging specialist
literatures comprise comparative victimology (van Kesteren et al. 2014), comparative transnational crime
Page 3 of 29
research (Kyle and Koslowski 2011), comparative penology (Tonry 2017), comparative policing research
(Roché and Fleming 2022), comparative youth justice research (Muncie and Goldson 2006), comparative
life-course criminology (Segev 2020), and comparative white collar crime research (Kawasaki 2019).
Increasingly, scholars are reflecting on the relationship between comparative, transnational, and global
criminology. Comparative criminology traditionally is an approach that compares societies bounded by the
borders of the nation state. It tends to see the world through a lens that shows a conglomerate of 195
individual countries—each with a distinct justice system, a certain crime level, and aggregate
characteristics such as urbanization, income inequality or divorce rate. Transnational and global
criminology, in contrast, emphasize the processes that connect all parts of the world. They are concerned
with global governance and human rights, the international flow of drugs and guns, migration, global
harms such as climate change, transnational criminal networks, and the exchange of knowledge and ideas
across boundaries (Sheptycki 2011). The contributions in the edited volume by James Sheptycki and Ali
Wardak entitled Transnational and Comparative Criminology (2012) highlighted the need to develop a global
comparative criminology that integrates comparative and transnational perspectives.
Despite its growth, important imbalances permeate the field. Jianhong Liu, the leading pioneer of
comparative criminology in Asia, recently noted that ‘in general, comparative criminology is largely a
p. 78 Western enterprise’ (Liu 2018: 62). This is more than ↵ just an observation on the influence of Western
scholars in the field. It highlights a more fundamental Western-centric bias, perpetuated by differences in
academic influence, funding streams, self-referential citation circles, and the limited readiness of
English-speaking criminologists to acquire the language skills needed to obtain a deeper understanding of
societies not dominated by English (Carrington et al. 2019). As Lee and Laidler (2013: 142) note, much
comparative research has an in-built centre-periphery gradient, where ‘countries on the periphery were
referenced and comparatively understood in relation to the North’.
Various scholars are hence calling for a comparative criminology that moves beyond exporting and testing
theories and interventions developed in the West. Liu (2009), for example, works towards an ‘Asian
Criminology Paradigm’ with theoretical models and empirical research that better reflect the realities of
Asian societies. Similarly, Ouassini and Ouassini (2020: 520) have called for ‘an Arabic criminology, aiming
to produce new methodological and theoretical paradigms that are unique to the context of the Arab world,
including the region’s differences and similarities in politics and history; language; legal structures;
ethnic, religious and racial diversity; and distinctive cultural and institutional frameworks.’
What to Compare in Comparative Criminology?
The boundaries of what makes criminological research ‘comparative’ remain somewhat opaque. When
asked, criminologists would probably agree that a comparison of prison systems between two or more
countries is comparative (e.g., Crewe et al. 2022), or that a study that aims to understand why levels of
intimate partner violence differ between geopolitical regions is comparative. But how about a study that
compares police culture among several police forces in US cities or a study that compares the structure of
gangs in different neighbourhoods in London? Are they less comparative because the units of comparison
are at the subnational level rather than cross-national? And why should studies that present statistical
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models of cross-national variation in homicide rates be considered comparative? Do they truly contribute
to a comparative understanding of crime just by virtue of the fact that entire countries rather than
individuals are fed into the regression models? And, finally, what do cross-national comparisons
effectively compare—is it cultures, societies, legal systems, or state institutions (Karstedt 2001)?
There are no clear-cut answers to these questions. Yet there is little doubt that the nation state, imagined
as a self-contained unit, remains the predominant macro-level unit in comparative criminology (Howard
and Newman 2000; Bennett 2004; LaFree 2021). As several authors have noted, this continued gaze on
countries as the prime focus of interest is a major obstacle to theoretical development, empirical richness,
and the potential impact of comparative research (Nelken 2010; Sheptycki 2012). If comparative
criminology is about advancing our understanding of how social, cultural, economic or institutional
contexts shape ‘outcomes’ relevant for criminology, then we should stop assuming that the national state
is the only, or even the most important such context. Rather, it seems a more fruitful basis for comparative
research to explore how multiple layers of social contexts interact, and what cascading processes along
layers of an ecological system influence the proximal temptations and motivations implicated in crime
p. 79 (Bronfenbrenner 1979; Braithwaite 2022; Wikström 2004). These social contexts ↵ can be entire
cultural world regions, countries, cities, neighbourhoods, or any other kind of groups, systems or
networks that shape the ‘rules of the game’ and hence may affect what happens at a micro level (Messner
2014).
At times, researchers may be interested in comparing large supranational cultural spaces, and hence work
with labels such as ‘Confucian-influenced East Asian societies’ (Liu 2009), the ‘Arab world’ (Ouassini and
Ouassini 2020), or ‘Latin America’ (Bergman 2018). Other studies may aim to gain criminological insight
by comparing more specific social contexts and groups. Examples are studies that advance the
understanding of murder-suicides by comparing, rampage shooters in the US and volunteer suicide
bombers in the Middle East (Lankford and Hakim 2011); a comparison of organized illicit sand-mining
groups in Italy and India (Rege and Lavorgna 2017); or analyses of the processes that lead to mass
atrocities and genocides in different societies at specific historical junctures (Klusemann 2012).
What we choose for comparison determines what we find. Yet, undoubtedly Nelken’s observation is correct
when he notes that ‘the choice of what to compare is often a matter of convenience and ease of
access’ (Nelken 2017: 421). This is especially the case for small N comparative research, where practical
constraints such as language barriers, colleagues in other places with similar interests and access to the
field, and funding opportunities shape what is being compared. However, as the field advances we need to
move away from a model where comparison is based on convenience or what researchers in the Global
North happen to be interested in. Good comparative research requires justification, in light of theory; and
it needs a careful prior understanding of the history and characteristics of all examined contexts. The point
was recently made by Brangan (2020) in a review of the literature on Irish, American, Scottish and Nordic
penal ‘exceptionalisms’—i.e. the idea that the ‘penal regimes’ of some countries are somehow unusually
different from those of all others. She argues that the widely accepted contrast between ‘punitive’
Anglophone countries and ‘lenient’ Scandinavian countries is a problematic oversimplification as it
contrasts groups of countries that are highly diverse internally. Accordingly, she argues for a more
nuanced comparative approach that asks about differences in penal regimes between cultural and
geographic neighbours. Her recent work has therefore focused on comparing the functioning and
Page 5 of 29
development of penal regimes in Scotland and Ireland (Brangan 2022). This contrast, she argues, yields a
more fine-grained account of differences in penal policy-making, and is hence more informative with
respect to likely causal processes and policy implications.
Cross-National Comparative Crime Data
The past three decades have seen the rapid growth of large global criminological data and information
systems that are publicly available. They don’t replace in-depth primary research, but they can be a useful
source for examining a wide range of global and comparative research questions. In what follows, I give a
short overview of major cross-national data sources and discuss some challenges of cross-national
measurement of crime (Nivette 2021).
The oldest resource for comparative research are cross-national crime and justice indicators. In essence,
p. 80 these are tables that provide aggregate scores on characteristics ↵ such as police-recorded homicide,
the prison population, or the perceived level of corruption by country. For comparative crime statistics, the
United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) plays an essential role. In particular, UNODC has
substantially increased their capacity to set international standards for official crime statistics and crime
surveys, and to collect and disseminate cross-national data on crime, corruption, illicit drugs, firearms,
wildlife trafficking and features of criminal justice systems of UN member states (Harrendorf et al. 2010).
For cross-national homicide statistics, the UNODC Global Study on Homicide is the most comprehensive
and continuously updated database (UNODC 2019). It includes wide-ranging information on weapon use,
situational context, age and gender of victims and perpetrators as well as various data at the subnational
level of cities and regions.
More recently, global knowledge and data synthesis platforms have begun to complement crime and
justice indicators. Such platforms review relevant academic research and present information in a
systematic way on the basis of explicit data retrieval protocols. WHO, for example, coordinates the world’s
largest programme of information synthesis on global, regional, and national estimates on intimate
partner violence against women—a knowledge resource that also plays an essential role in supporting the
global agenda around ending violence against women (Sardinha et al. 2022). Also, WHO maintains a global
knowledge platform that synthesizes published scientific information on the causes, consequences and
prevention of violence in 197 countries and territories. Updated regularly, it helps researchers and
practitioners worldwide to access complex comparative information more easily.
A third group of resources are cross-national surveys based on large representative samples. Some are
specifically designed as criminological studies. The pioneering International Crime Victim Survey was
initiated in 1987. It comprises information on victimization, perceived harm, reporting to authorities, and
concern about crime in samples from around 140 surveys in almost 80 countries worldwide (van Kesteren
et al. 2014). The International Self-Report Delinquency Survey is now in its fourth wave and collects data on
adolescents’ (ages 13–17) experiences with crime and victimization in 50 countries worldwide, with the
goal of testing criminological theories and developing recommendations for prevention and intervention
(Enzmann et al. 2018). Other cross-national surveys pursue wider thematic goals. For example, the
Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS, Corsi et al. 2012) and the Multiple-Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS,
Page 6 of 29
Khan and Hancioglu 2019) are representative epidemiological surveys on the health and well-being of
women and children in low and middle income countries. Begun in the 1990s, the DHS and the MICS now
extend to over 120 countries. Of interest to criminologists, many surveys include modules on women’s
experiences of violent victimization, attitudes to violence, the prevalence of female genital mutilation,
methods of child discipline, and beliefs about corporal punishment (e.g., Yount et al. 2022).
A fourth type of global criminological data is event-based open-source databases (LaFree 2021). These
data, often retrieved from online sources, provide information about geo-coded characteristics of events
such as terrorist acts, mass shootings, or police violence. Important initiatives include the Global Terrorism
Database, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), and the Global Database of Events,
Language and Tone (GDELT) (Nivette 2021). The Global Terrorism Database, for example, was initiated by
criminologists at the University of Maryland and now comprises coded information on over 200,000
terrorist attacks worldwide since 1971, including data on the attack’s location, tactics and weapons,
targets, perpetrators, casualties, and consequences (LaFree and Dugan 2007).
p. 81 ↵ The growing volume of studies brings to light worldwide regional and national variation in the
burden of crime. This includes, for example, comparative data on homicide (UNODC), intimate partner
violence against women (Sardinha et al. 2022), violence against children (Nguyen et al. 2019), organized
crime, theft, and assault (van Dijk et al. 2021), corruption (Kaufmann et al. 2011), and terrorist events (Ding
et al. 2017). Some consistent patterns emerge from these data: for all types of crime they show large
variation between world regions and countries; there is a tendency for most indicators of crime and
violence to be highest in the Global South; and different types of crime tend to come together in the same
regions, countries, and subnational units—suggesting that similar processes are involved (Farrell 2015;
van Dijk et al. 2021).
Also, new types of data are beginning to alter the way we think about comparative research questions.
Traditionally, comparative research was divided between those researchers who explore the big-picture
‘universe’ by means of macro-level data, and those who investigate the ‘nuclear’ world of crime by means
of comparative surveys and case-wise data. This macro-micro divide is no longer necessary. Instead, we
are starting to have data that show spatial variation in crime levels along several magnitudes of spatial
resolution from entire continents to incident-related data at the level of street segments within a city
(UNODC 2019; Vilalta et al. 2022). This in turn means that we can start to think more creatively, and more
realistically, about the layers of the social world that we need to consider in comparative studies of crime
(Eisner and Malti 2015; Vilalta et al. 2022).
The example of homicide illustrates the interplay of levels of variation from the highest to the lowest levels
of spatial aggregation. At the level of the six UN macro-geographical regions, the Global Study on
Homicide shows substantial disparities in homicide rates (UNODC 2019). They range from a high of 17.2
per 100,000 in the Americas to a minimum of 2.3 per 100,000 in Asia (UNODC 2019). At a next level, we find
large differences between the subregions of a region, and between countries within the same subregion.
Within the Americas, for example, homicide rates range from a low of 2.0 in Canada to 44.7 in Jamaica,
with Mexico broadly in the middle with a national homicide rate of 28 per 100,000. But what do such
national homicide rates mean? Do they show that Mexico is more violent than Canada? The answer
depends on which region of Mexico one has in mind. Homicide rates in the 32 states of Mexico ranged from
Page 7 of 29
a low of 1.5 in Yucatan to 86.7 in Colima (INEGI 2021), meaning that there is more variation among the
states of Mexico than the variation found between all countries of the Americas. Zooming in further, one
can find still far larger variation across the 2,450 municipalities of the country, and an even stronger
tendency for homicide to concentrate in some geolocations in the city of Mexico (Vilalta et al. 2022).
Systematic reviews that compare findings from primary studies conducted in different parts of the world
play a growing role in comparative criminology. Example systematic reviews of intimate partner violence
or levels of child sexual abuse in different world regions (Sardinha et al. 2022). However, it is often difficult
to assess whether the differences in findings between studies reflect true disparities or whether they are
side-effects of methodological variation. Jackson (2018), for example, reviewed the global evidence on
perceived police legitimacy in population surveys. He noted that inconsistent findings across different
contexts can be due to a mix of true cross-cultural variation, lacking equivalence in how legitimacy is
measured, or differences in the analytic strategy chosen by researchers. He concluded that ‘studies in
countries across the world should gravitate toward a common method organised within a comprehensive
conceptual scheme. Only then can we start to properly build up a powerful comparative analysis of police–
citizen authority relations in countries across the world’ (Jackson 2018: 161).
p. 82 ↵ Comparative researchers across the field echo this call for greater comparability through validated
instruments and standardized data collection protocols. Unfortunately, a common method is not always
sufficient to obtain valid comparative data. Enzmann et al. (2018), for example, examined the validity of
self-report questionnaires for measuring delinquency across cultural contexts with data from surveys in
34 countries that participated in the third wave of the ISRD. They compared prevalence estimates obtained
by a direct self-report delinquency measure (i.e. where adolescents are asked to say whether they have
committed a crime) to results that came from an indirect method. This indirect method was designed to
minimize social desirability, i.e. the tendency for respondents not to report behaviours that may put them
in a bad light. The authors found major discrepancies between the two ways of measuring delinquency. The
discrepancies were largest in low and middle income countries, possibly because young people were more
concerned about admitting to norm-violating behaviour. The findings led the authors to conclude that
researchers ‘should not rely on self-report measures of delinquency as measures of the volume of crime in
comparative research which crosses the boundaries of major cultural and economic divides’ (Enzmann et
al. 2018: 29). Their conclusion may be overly pessimistic. It shows, however, that we are a long way from
fully understanding how we can collect valid comparative data.
Overall, the past three decades have seen exceptional progress with respect to globally comparative crime
data and our understanding of the limitations of these data. Also, researchers can now build on a widely
shared appreciation of issues such as cross-culturally valid psychometric instruments, questionnaire
translation, interviewer training, and ethical concerns (Harkness et al. 2003; Lynch 2006; Borsa et al.
2012). The coming years will see more high-quality indicators with a fuller geographic coverage and a
more fine-grained spatial resolution. At the same time, large N-comparisons based on standardized
metrics need to be complemented by in-depth, small N comparisons that are based on multiple sources of
information, resulting in a more robust basis for valid descriptions of similarities and differences (Garland
2017).
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Macro-Causal Analysis
Why do levels of crime vary between countries, and why do they change over time? Until recently, the
shortcomings of comparative crime data severely limited the ability of criminologists to explore such
questions, especially outside Europe and Northern America. However, the surge of more valid data for
large parts of the world has made it possible to examine the correlates of macro-level variation in crime
for a growing number of countries. Most of this research is designed as analyses that link macro-level
features such as inequality or urbanization to a macro-level outcome such as a crime rate. Adopting the
suggestion by Skocpol and Somers (1980), I call this approach ‘macro-causal analysis’. I broadly
distinguish two lines of research within the framework of macro-causal analysis: The first is comparative
analyses of crime trends; the second is cross-sectional analyses of country-level correlates of levels of
crime.
Comparative crime trends

As more data are becoming available for countries, cities, and regions, comparative crime trend analysis
has become a burgeoning field of criminology over the past 30 years (Eisner 2003; Lappi-Seppälä and Lehti
p. 83 2014; Nivette 2021). A comparative historical ↵ perspective on crime aims at understanding how
historical events and transformations—crises, wars, new technologies, revolutions—shape crime and its
manifestations over time and between societies.
Few examples illustrate the relevance of a comparative historical perspective better than the discussion
around the so-called ‘Crime Drop’. In 2000, Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman edited a volume called
‘The Crime Drop in America’ (Blumstein and Wallman 2000). The contributors analysed a phenomenon
that had surprised the entire criminological community, namely a sudden decline of just about all crime
indicators in the United States from around 1993. The drop was visible in victim surveys as well as in police
data, it affected property crimes as well as violent crime, and it happened, albeit with some differences in
timing and speed, across most of the United States. The contributors proposed various explanations, all of
which highlighted features unique to the United States. This included, for example, the diffusion of more
effective policing strategies, the incapacitating effects of increased incarceration, or changes in the
functioning of the crack-cocaine market.
But was the reason for the crime decline truly to be found in peculiarities of the US? In the following years,
researchers began to adopt a more comparative perspective, exploring crime trends in Canada, Europe,
Australia, and elsewhere (Eisner 2008; Lappi-Seppälä and Lehti 2014; Ouimet 1999; Tseloni et al. 2010).
The findings are surprisingly consistent. They indicate that explanations built on unique American
experiences are unlikely to hold water. The crime drop happened in many societies at the same time. Eisner
(2008), for example, showed that murder rates in much of the Western world had moved broadly in
synchrony since around 1960, and that many European societies also began to see a decline from around
1994. Moreover, Tseloni et al. (2010) examined crime trends from 1988 to 2004 in 26 countries based on
what may be the most reliable source for assessing change in crime levels internationally, namely data
from the International Crime Victim survey. They found that especially after about 1995 the included
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countries predominantly experienced a significant decline in criminal victimization. In their conclusions,

Tseloni et al. (2010) state that ‘the downward trend of each crime type from the 1990s was roughly the
same across countries. The findings from this paper offer little support for country-specific explanations
for crime drops, notably those that have been proposed to explain the US crime drop’. In a further article
Farrell et al. (2011) creatively use a triangulation of approaches including cross-national contrasts, two
case studies, and disaggregated analyses of crime statistics to examine a possible explanation for the
international crime drop. They conclude that the evidence is most consistent with the ‘security
hypothesis’, the notion ‘that changes in the quantity and quality of security have played a major part in
driving crime falls in most industrial societies.’ (Farrell et al. 2011: 151).
Comparative historical analyses can also help to shed light on the forces that shape the geographical
patterns of crime in the present world. In one comparative study, I examined homicide trends in Singapore
and Jamaica (UNODC 2019: 36-46). I was interested in this comparison initially because Singapore and
Jamaica occupy opposite positions on the UNODC homicide tables: Singapore ranks as one of the countries
with the lowest homicide rates on Earth, alongside places such as Japan, Oman, and Italy. Jamaica, on the
other hand, has regularly been among the five countries with the highest homicide rates globally over the
past 20 years. But how old are these differences historically and how did they emerge?
To answer that question, I examined historical homicide statistics in both countries, stretching back to the
nineteenth century. The surprising finding was that until the time that the two former British colonies
p. 84 gained independence in the early 1960s, ↵ their homicide rates were broadly similar, as were indicators
of education, life expectancy, and income per capita. Seemingly driven by antagonistic social forces, levels
of lethal violence started to move in opposite directions during the late 1960s, with an ever-widening gap
over the decades (see Figure 3.1). Also, similar to the shared trends in Western societies since the 1960s,
the two islands appear to have partly followed a wider trend shared by cultural and geographic neighbours
in their region: The increase in Jamaica is part of a wider increasing trend around the Caribbean, while the
Singaporean decline mirrors a similar crime drop in Hong Kong and Japan.
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Figure 3.1 Long-term trend in homicide rates in Jamaica and Singapore
Note: Selected years highlighted with homicide rates. Data for Jamaica consist of figures from pre-
independence Jamaica (1873–1961) and post-independence Jamaica (1962–2016). Data for Singapore
consist of figures from the Straits Settlements (1855–1938), pre-independence Singapore (1955–1964),
and post-independence Singapore (1965–2016).
Sources: UNODC, Global Study on Homicide 2019 (Vienna 2019) based on Singapore, 1855–1940: Tai, W.S., ‘Murder and
other crimes in the Straits Settlements’, MPhil thesis, University of Cambridge, 2010; Singapore, 1955–1964: Ting, S. K. and Tan, K. K.,
‘Post-mortem survey of homicides in Singapore (1955–1964)’, Singapore Medical Journal, vol. 10, No. 4 (December 1969), pp. 243–
247; Singapore, 1965–2016: World Health Organization (WHO) mortality statistics; Colony of Jamaica, 1870–1961: Blue Book of the
Island of Jamaica, later Handbook of Jamaica; Jamaica, 1962–2016: ‘Crimes known to the police’, Jamaica Constabulary Force
annual reports.
p. 85 ↵ I drew several conclusions from this comparison. First, it makes it unlikely that long-term factors
such as a century-old culture of hegemonic masculinity or the colonial history of Jamaica can account for
the observed patterns. Instead, more recent dynamics appear to have contributed to the increasing gap
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between the 1950s and the 1980s. Possible candidates include differences between the two countries with
respect to the establishment of authoritarian rule, in the effectiveness of control over corruption and
illegal markets, and in the shape of housing and education policies. But it also seemed important to point
out that—like in the case of the US crime decline—the two nations were only partly in control of their
crime levels, and that wider regional dynamics contributed to the drift in different directions. This is where
more theoretically grounded historical comparisons with multiple societies may be deigned to answer
questions such as (Skocpol and Somers, 1980): What may have been the active ingredients responsible for
the declining trend in Singapore in the 1990s? And is it possible to find good ‘counterfactuals’, i.e.
countries in the same region that share many characteristics, but differ on the ones that one believes
mattered most?
Cross-national differences in crime levels

Attempts to explain cross-national variation in crime started in earnest in the 1970s, when criminologists
began to examine whether country characteristics such as urbanization, affluence, social inequality or age
structure predict levels of crime (Nivette 2011). In subsequent cross-national studies, homicide became the
most widely examined crime as it came to be considered the only reliably measured indicator for cross-
national comparison (Nivette 2011). Theoretically, much early cross-national scholarship was motivated
by criminological modernization theory. This theory assumes that societies with more advanced economic
development and higher urbanization have higher crime levels due to the breakdown of traditional social
controls (Shelley 1981). However, academic interest has gradually moved away from modernization
theory, mainly because studies failed to find robust associations in the expected direction between crime
levels on the one hand and urbanization and GDP on the other.
As a result, research questions informed by strain theories as well as theories of governance and state
legitimacy began to play a more important role. Several reviews summarize the findings emerging from
this research (Nivette 2011; Koeppel et al. 2015). They suggest some convergence in substantive
conclusions. Especially, many studies find associations of high homicide rates with lower scores on the
Human Development Index and higher levels of income inequality, poverty, divorce rates, ethnic
heterogeneity, and female labour force participation (Nivette 2011). At the same time, much cross-national
homicide research has important limitations: there are often large gaps with respect to geographic
coverage, especially of low income countries; the choice of predictor variables is frequently driven by ease
of access rather than careful theoretical consideration; it is generally unknown whether findings
generalize to crimes other than homicide; and the number of studies that compare change over time
remains very small (Nivette 2021).
In a recent study, van Dijk et al. (2021) have addressed some of these limitations. Using large new cross-
national data-sets, van Dijk et al. (2021) examined four distinct crime indicators for up to 166 countries,
representing 98 per cent of the world population. Two indicators represent theft and assault victimization
reported by participants in the Gallup World Surveys, while two indicators are measures of uncommon
crime, namely homicide rates and an index of organized crime. The authors examine three groups of
p. 86 predictors, namely motivators of crime (poverty, inequality, and a youth ↵ bulge), opportunities for
crime (wealth and urbanization) and the quality of state governance (state fragility).
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Their findings suggest, in line with motivational theories, that countries with poorer, more unequal, and
younger populations experience higher levels of all four types of crime. Also, and contrary to
modernization and opportunity theories, countries with higher urbanization and affluence tend to have
lower rather than higher levels of crime. Finally, the most consistent factor associated with crime levels
between countries and over time was state fragility. According to the authors this suggests a pervasive
impact of weak institutions and governance-related factors on the amount of crime in a society. The
findings corroborate prior research on the importance of state functioning, legitimacy and governance for
understanding variation in crime levels (Nivette and Eisner 2013; Messner 2014).
However, macro-causal analyses share various limitations as an empirical strategy for understanding the
causes of cross-national differences in crime. One of the most important is known as the micro-macro
problem or the problem of methodological holism in the social sciences (Matsueda 2017). The problem is
that macro-causal analyses examine questions at the level of social contexts only, i.e. they aim to explain
country-level differences in murder rates by differences in, for example, good governance. By doing so
they omit the micro-level question of what processes at the level of personality, family, or networks
motivate an individual to commit a homicide, and how these processes may be affected by macro-level
characteristics.
In other words, macro-causal analyses hide the question of the micro-level causal mechanisms in an
analytic black-box. Consider the finding reported by van Dijk et al. (2021) that a country with more fragile
state institutions has, on average, higher crime levels: The finding is important, but it doesn’t tell us what
the proximal—e.g., individual, family, or situational—mediating causal mechanisms are that produce this
association. There are many possibilities: Deterrence theorists might argue that a poor quality of state
governance could be linked to crime because it reduces the effectiveness of policing and leads to
widespread impunity; from a strain theory perspective one might hypothesize that poor governance causes
crime by promoting anger and cynicism among adolescents who seek education and jobs; and opportunity
theorists might say that failing states foster crime because they create incentives for the emergence of
organized criminal groups that compete with state services.
Questions about how differences in features of the macro-level context affect the micro-level dynamics of
individual action are at the heart of comparative criminology. To address such questions, it is important
that comparative criminologists move beyond the framework of macro-causal analyses. In particular,
comparative criminology needs better theoretical models as well as empirical data that allow researchers
to examine the cascading mechanisms which link society-wide characteristics to processes in cities and
neighbourhoods, interactions in schools, public spaces, and families, and the proximal factors that affect
crime (Eisner and Malti, 2015). This includes a temporal dimension where we aim to better understand
how historical dynamics shape individual life courses and opportunities for crime.
Testing and adapting general theories of crime

Such a framework for comparative analysis calls for renewed efforts to bridge the gap between macro-
level and micro-level thinking. As a minimum, this requires answering the question: How similar are the
p. 87 proximal causes of crime across different cultures ↵ and societies (e.g. Gottfredson 2021)? In Western
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societies, criminological research on the causes of crime can rely on a consolidated evidence-base of
regularities at the individual and situational levels. They form the empirical basis for ‘general’ theories of
crime such as general strain theory (Agnew et al. 2002), rational choice theory (Cornish and Clarke 1986),
Situational Action Theory (Wikström 2004), or the general theory of crime (Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990).
Rooted in assumptions about commonalities in human nature, they all claim to be applicable ‘to diverse
settings, people and times, including differing societies, populations, and cultures’ (Gottfredson and
Hirschi 1990: 169). In particular, they assume that criminogenic mechanisms such as low self-control,
strain, differential learning, low morality, or opportunities are universal and operate similarly in all social
contexts.
But is the hypothesis that criminological knowledge generalizes across human societies true? The question
arises at different levels of knowledge. At a descriptive level one can examine whether key statistical
regularities replicate across societies. An example is the spatial concentration of crimes. We know that in
the United States and in Europe crimes are heavily concentrated in a few locations, with around 5 per cent
of all micro-locations in a city accounting for around 50–60 per cent of all crimes. Weisburd (2015) has
called this phenomenon the ‘law of crime concentration at place’, which can be approximated statistically
by the so-called power law distribution. But is this a true law that describes the urban geography of crime
in all cities? We don’t know for sure, and more data are needed to draw firmer conclusions. But current
research suggests that the distributions appear to be very similar across cities of different population size
and in different world regions (Oliveira et al. 2017).
Another example is the age-crime curve. Across Western societies the age distribution of offenders looks
very similar and has changed little over the past 200 years. It increases steeply during mid-adolescence,
peaks around age 20, and then slopes down with increasing age (Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990).
Steffensmeier and colleagues (e.g., Steffensmeier et al. 2020) have tested whether this pattern holds
elsewhere. They examined the age distribution of recorded offenders in India, Taiwan, and South Korea,
and compared it to the United States. Their findings contradict the hypothesis that the age-crime curve is
universal. In contemporary Asian societies the age-crime curve is much flatter than in the US, and the peak
of offending is typically at a later age, often at ages 30–39. Steffensmeier et al. (2020) argue that these
differences likely result from disparities in how cultures shape adolescence, with Asian societies giving
greater weight to the integration of adolescents into adult society and obligations, and having less
tolerance for teenage deviance as a manifestation of individualist acting out.
At the level of risk factors, comparative researchers ask whether correlates of crime generalise across
societies and cultures. For example, de Ribera et al. (2019) conducted a systematic review of 86 studies on
correlates of youth violence, focusing on sixty low- and middle-income countries. The guiding question
was whether risk factors for violence found in low- and middle-income countries differed from those
established by research conducted in Western high-income societies. De Ribera et al. (2019) mainly found
support for cross-cultural universality. Like in Western high-income countries, major correlates of youth
violence were male gender, childhood conduct problems, impulsivity, substance use, violent media
consumption, suicidality, violent victimization, poor parental supervision, parental substance use,
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association with delinquent peers, low school attachment, and high neighbourhood crime and poverty.
However, the authors also note that the heterogeneity of study designs and measures make firm
conclusions currently impossible.
p. 88 ↵ Increasingly, therefore, tests of general theories rely on comparative surveys where equivalent
sampling, data collection, and measurement puts comparisons on a more robust basis. For example,
Vazsonyi et al. (2021) recently examined associations between delinquency and three predictors derived
from general theories, namely low self-control, peer deviance, and risky routine activities. Their analyses
were based on participants of the Second International Self-Report Delinquency Study (ISRD-2). The
findings add nuance to the issue of generality versus culture-specificity. Vazsonyi et al. (2021) found that
low self-control, peer delinquency, and routine activities risk were significantly associated with
delinquency in all 28 countries. However, there was also variation between countries. For example, the
association between self-control and delinquency was significantly stronger in countries with a high life
expectancy than in countries with a low life expectancy. The findings partly contradict the hypothesis of
one single universal explanatory model, but the authors leave it open why such variability may exist. It
may be that the differences in response behaviour found by Enzmann et al. (2018) and described above play
a role.
A rigorous test of the generality of causal mechanisms would require a comparative multi-site longitudinal
study that follows a cohort of children growing up in different neighbourhoods in different cultures across
the globe (Farrington 2015). No such study currently exists, and realizing such a study would require an
extraordinary collaborative effort. A systematic review by Murray et al. (2018) is the most ambitious
attempt to find preliminary answers. It examined 39 longitudinal studies in 14 low- and middle-income
countries. The goal was to learn whether childhood risk factors for crime found in Western high-income
countries can be replicated in other parts of the world. The findings suggest that some developmental risk
factors replicate across cultures. These were mainly childhood manifestations of challenging behaviour
such as low self-control, hyperactivity, sensation seeking, and conduct problems (also see, Zych et al.
2021). The evidence was more mixed for other risk factors. For example, Murray et al. (2018) found no or
weak confirmation for health-related risk factors such as premature birth, birth complications, lead and
mercury exposure. Also, poor educational performance, childhood maltreatment, large family size, low
maternal education, and family poverty failed to have consistent associations with adolescent antisocial
behaviour in low and middle income contexts (Murray et al. 2018).
The inconsistent findings suggest that it is too early to say whether any criminological theory can account
for delinquency and crime everywhere. The answer partly hinges on whether we believe that humans
across the world have, on average, the same psychology, and whether theories built on Western
psychology are adequate to explain crime in other cultures. There are doubts that this is unconditionally
the case (Karstedt 2001). In a recent book, anthropologist Joseph Henrich (2020) has argued that humans
are an immensely cultural species, with a rich array of cultural psychologies, shaped by diverse social
institutions and technologies (Henrich 2020: 470). More specifically, he maintains that members of
WEIRD—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic—societies have a peculiar psychology,
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moulded in a long historical process that reaches back to the European Early Middle Ages. This cultural
psychology, in his view, affects all aspects of psychological functioning including ‘perception, memory,
attention, reasoning, motivation, decision-making, and moral judgment’ (Henrich 2020: 21).
The argument by Henrich (2020) has important implications. It suggests that comparative criminologists
should ask more systematically how social contexts—beliefs, institutions, family structures, networks,
inequality, or harsh environments—shape the psychological mechanisms associated with crime. This
p. 89 includes, for example, the ↵ perception of opportunities to commit crime, the sense of obligation to kin
who have been victimized, whether shame or anger dominate when we fail to achieve our goals, or our
propensity to forgive or take revenge when we are harmed (Henrich 2020; McCullough et al. 2013;
Wikström 2004; Furukawa et al. 2012).
How do societal contexts shape psychological mechanisms associated with crime (Rutter et al. 2001)? One
possibility is that the social context influences the threshold at which a psychological mechanism is
triggered. An example of this argument is Elijah Anderson’s (2000) theory of the ‘code of the street’. It
predicts that young men growing up in ‘harsh’ ecological contexts—i.e. unpredictable and high-crime
environments characterized by a lack of faith in the police and the justice system—develop a set of adapted
cognitions and beliefs that govern their behaviour, especially in public space. In particular, men in these
contexts are more sensitized to reputational threats than men in ‘stable’ environments regulated by the
rule of law, and more likely to display a tough or violent demeanour as a strategy that deters others from
attempting to show disrespect (Mears et al. 2013).
Another possibility is that cultural contexts differ in the moral value they attach to community obligations
and family networks, and that these differences then influence the causal mechanisms that lead to crime
(Wikström 2004). Liu (2016), for example, emphasizes that many Asian societies are characterized by a
Confucian ethos of attachment to the group, honour, and the importance of ‘group/relationship harmony,
conflict avoidance, self-sacrifice, and compromise when personal interests are harmed or personal
conflict arises’ (Liu 2016: 215). As a consequence, lacking child socialization into these values may be more
strongly associated with crime in East Asia than in, say, a more individualist European social context.
The literature on how contexts shape psychological mechanisms related to crime is still limited. An
exception is the longitudinal study by Lansford et al. (2014) of almost 1200 children in eight countries in
most major cultural areas in the world (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Thailand,
and the United States). Their findings suggest that the effects of corporal punishment on psycho-social
development partly depend on cultural context. Across the study sites, corporal punishment was generally
associated with an increase in child aggression at a later age. However, the strength of the association
varied between societies. In societies with stronger authoritarian beliefs about parenting the effects of
corporal punishment were significantly less negative. The authors interpret this finding as evidence
suggesting that corporal punishment has fewer negative effects on child adjustment in contexts where
harsh parental discipline is normative.
An informative approach for examining context effects are comparative experiments. These are studies
whereby participants from different contexts are presented with scenarios that aim to trigger
psychological processes associated with crime. Few such studies have been conducted. An exception are the
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famous experiments by Nisbett and colleagues in the 1990s (Nisbett 1993; Cohen et al. 1996). They aimed
to shed light on how cultures of honour affect male behaviour in situations of insult and provocation. In
these experiments, trained members of the research team bumped into a male study participant and called
him ‘asshole’ as he was on his way to a lab task, not knowing that the insult was a planned part of the
study. Subsequently, participants completed a number of tasks. Participants were recruited so that equal
numbers came from the ‘honour culture’ in the South and from the more individualistic North of the
United States. Results showed that, after the affront, southerners were more likely than northerners to be
upset, to experience a rise in cortisol levels, to feel threatened in their masculine status, and to behave
aggressively in subsequent interpersonal encounters (Cohen et al. 1996).
p. 90 ↵ Later studies have realized similar experimental paradigms in other societies. Vandello and Cohen
(2003) aimed to understand cultural scripts that perpetuate domestic violence. They compared how
students in Brazil and the United States responded to written vignettes that involved female infidelity. In
line with the culture of honour hypothesis, findings suggest that Brazilian students were more likely than
US students to think that female infidelity reflected poorly on their male partner’s good character and
manliness. Moreover, only Brazilian students thought that a man who subsequently hit his wife was more
manly and re-gaining some of the lost honour. Ayse Uskul and Susan Cross have examined Turkey ‘as an
example of a context where a cultural logic based on honour is used to respond to events and to build
reputations, motivating individuals to engage in a variety of behaviours that can have negative (e.g.,
aggressiveness) or positive (e.g., reciprocity) inter-personal consequences’ (Uskul and Cross 2019). In one
set of studies, the researchers had undergraduate students in the US and in Turkey write an essay and
randomly allocated them to neutral feedback and feedback that implied allegations of dishonesty (Uskul et
al. 2015). Participants in the Turkish honour culture were, as predicted, more likely to retaliate
aggressively when accused of dishonesty than North American students.
Despite their potential to shed light on the link between macro-level context and neuro-cognitive
processes, comparative experiments remain rare in criminology. This may change thanks to new
technologies. For example, van Gelder et al. (2019) are pioneering the use of immersive virtual reality
scenarios to better understand criminal decision-making with respect to how actors are provoked to use
violence, when people are tempted to engage in dishonest behaviour, or how and when people inflict
punishment on others. If adapted to different social contexts, VR scenarios could significantly advance our
understanding of how cultural and social contexts influence decision making with respect to crime,
interactions with law and justice personnel, and moral judgments involved in punishment.
Sustainable Development and Comparative Research on Effective Pre

vention and Intervention
Over the past decades, the demand for a global knowledge-base to address crime and violence in a way that
is compatible with freedom and democracy has grown exponentially (Dahlberg et al. 2016). International
declarations and treaties such as the Seville Statement on Violence (1986), the UN Charter of the Rights of
the Child (1989), and the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (1993) have
created the basis for worldwide action. Moreover, the UN Sustainable Development Goals launched in 2015
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include ambitious goals to implement lasting solutions to reduce violence, to combat corruption and
organized crime, to deliver justice for all, and to ensure effective, accountable and inclusive institutions. So
far, criminologists’ engagement with this agenda has been limited, and some have raised concerns about
the risk that the agenda may be misconstrued for ideological purposes (Blaustein et al. 2018). However, as
Karstedt (2021) has argued, the SDG framework gives particular urgency to a comparative research agenda
on crime prevention as well as on the processes that affect innovation, transfer, and adoption of public
policies relating to prevention and criminal justice.
p. 91 ↵ The rise of evidence-based crime and violence prevention as a global agenda makes it particularly
important to better understand which intervention strategies believed to be effective can be transferred
across societies. This includes, amongst others, parenting skills interventions, school-based
interventions, policing strategies, or offender treatment programmes.
The number of experimental intervention studies conducted in criminology and related fields has grown
massively since about 1990. However, most work comes from studies conducted in the US and a few other
Western societies, raising questions about whether programme transfer and adoption, sometimes
facilitated by international agencies, is adequate. The body of systematic comparative work on this
question is still small. However, it currently appears that the transfer of interventions into other contexts
often fails.
Sundell et al. (2014), for example, discuss replications of empirically supported family-based interventions
in different contexts. For many programmes considered ‘evidence-based’ in the United States they found
mixed evidence, with both successful and unsuccessful replications even within other Western societies.
Knerr et al. (2013) examined whether parenting interventions to reduce violence against children are
effective in low- and middle-income countries. They arrived at a positive assessment overall, but they also
warn that the heterogeneity of effects and the limited quality of many studies make firm conclusions
impossible. In a systematic review of 100 studies in 24 countries, Gaffney et al. (2019) examined the extent
to which anti-bullying programmes were effective in different contexts. The findings were mixed.
Concerningly, Gaffney et al. (2019) found that anti-bullying programmes are most effective in the
countries where they were developed. This suggests that transfer into other cultures is often fraught with
challenges, even though most programmes examined by Gaffney et al. (2019) were implemented in
culturally similar Western societies. A few evaluations were conducted in countries in Africa, Asia and
South America. Results suggested that while antibullying programmes are effective in Europe and North
America, no effects could be found in Africa, Asia or South America.
Sundell et al. (2014) discuss four main mechanisms that may account for contradictory findings:
differences in the evaluation design; ambiguities in the translation and adaptation of interventions;
differences in the quality of the programme implementation; and variation in the social context. All these
aspects matter, but the impact of social, political, and cultural contexts is particularly relevant. Sundell et
al. (2014) highlight that treatment effects may be affected by differences in the quality of existing systems
and resources. Also, they emphasize that the salience and constellation of the risk actors addressed by an
intervention will vary between contexts. Finally, a different cultural context may affect the meanings that
potential users associate with a programme. These conclusions concur with results by Parra-Cardona et al.
(2021) on the dissemination of parenting programmes aimed at reducing child maltreatment and
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strengthening a culture of prevention in Mexico, Panama, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The authors use a
comparative case study approach to synthesize the experiences from four prevention initiatives in these
settings. Findings suggest that it is essential to adapt preventive interventions to the respective culture
and context, and that contextual resources and challenges, political environments, and socio-cultural
factors influence the extent to which initiatives can effectively promote a culture of prevention.
Similarly, Collazos et al. (2021) found that consideration of context is essential when implementing hot
spots policing. In an experimental design, street segments in Medellin in Colombia were allocated to hot
spots policing and control conditions. Contrary to the evidence emerging from most studies conducted in
p. 92 the United States and a study ↵ conducted in Bogota, the authors found no effects of hot spots policing
in Medellin for motorbike theft, personal robbery, homicide, and assault, and a possible marginally
significant positive effect on car thefts. The authors speculate that the higher presence of criminal
organizations in Medellin may be a relevant context-level factor that explains the lack of treatment effects
there.
Finally, criminologists use comparative designs with the goal of advancing the evidence base on the effects
of policy change at the macro-level of communities and societies. Such comparative policy analyses are
often methodologically framed as quasi-experimental designs whereby one or several contexts serve as a
plausible counterfactual world against which putative ‘treatment’ effects can be assessed (Nagin and
Sampson 2019). Such comparative designs have been used in studies on the effects of alcohol or cannabis
legislation on crime (Obradovic 2021), possible effects on deterrence of change in the death penalty
(Zimring et al. 2010), amnesties or additional police force, or—recently—of stay at home orders related to
COVID on routine activities and criminal opportunities (Nivette et al. 2021).
One major challenge of comparative criminology is to correctly identify treatment effects of policy
interventions at the level of social contexts. For example, comparative criminologists may ask about the
effects of the legalization of cannabis, the abolition of the death penalty, a city-wide violence prevention
strategy, or a major amnesty. In all such cases the question is whether an abrupt change in the legal,
economic or social environment has an effect on a criminologically relevant outcome. The methodological
problem for causal inference is that often there is no single obvious counterfactual that can serve as a
comparison case.
A recent approach to address this problem is the synthetic case control method. The method aims to
construct a valid counterfactual with observational data. Synthetic control approaches aim to overcome
the issue that the choice of a comparison unit is often arbitrary. It relates to the ambiguity of choosing the
most adequate ‘control’ units for a comparative analysis, which has traditionally entailed a lot of
subjective judgment. In synthetic control approaches, a combination of suitable aggregate units is used to
create a ‘synthetic’ comparison case that is as similar as possible to the ‘treated’ case in all aspects other
than the intervention (Abadie et al. 2010).
While still used rarely in criminology, several recent studies have used a synthetic case control approach in
criminology. Synthetic control methods have recently been used to examine the effects of place-based
crime interventions (Saunders et al. 2015), the effects of crime prevention policies in Sao Paulo on
homicide (Freire 2018), effects of right-to-carry arms legislation on violent crime (Donohue et al. 2019), or
the impact of the George Floyd protests on police turnover (Mourtgos et al. 2022).
Page 19 of 29
Of course, evidence on what works is only one of many factors that influence criminal justice and
prevention policies. Jones and Newburn (2021) have therefore called on criminologists to analyse the
transfer of crime control policies between countries as a core component of a comparative research
agenda: they note that ideas relating to restorative justice, evidence-based crime prevention, problem-
oriented policing or offender therapy travel internationally with increasing speed. This raises questions
about why specific policies are adopted and implemented in one context than another context, and how
ideas become transformed and adapted as they migrate across different polities.
Some comparative analyses of criminal justice policy diffusion have used large N macro-causal
approaches. Neumayer (2008), for example, studied the abolition of the death penalty in countries across
the world between 1950 and 2002. The statistical models suggested that political factors are far more
p. 93 robust predictors of the trend towards the ↵ abolition of the death penalty than affluence, inequality or
ethnic fractionalization. In particular, countries were more likely to abolish the death penalty if they were
democracies, after they had made a transition from autocracy to democracy, and if they were surrounded
by a peer group of countries that had already abolished the death penalty.
In a more recent study, Htun and Weldon (2012) examined what factors influence whether a country
adopts policies to address violence against women. Their study included 70 countries worldwide for time
points in 1975, 1985, 1995, and 2005. Findings show, amongst others, that the presence of a strong
autonomous feminist movement was a consistent predictor of policies to address violence against women.
Also, regional diffusion processes among neighbouring countries played an important role, while factors
such as the proportion of women in parliament were not predictive of policy adoption.
Jones and Newburn (2021) emphasize that large N studies based on counting the adoption of some laws,
and then regressing them on a set of country-level predictors, have important limitations when
researchers try to understand the mechanisms involved in how and why policies travel between countries.
This lines up with Neumayer (2008: 264), who notes that a deeper understanding would require
comparative qualitative studies that ‘can explore in detail the processes and mechanisms leading to
abolition and their relative importance in different country contexts’.
Conclusion
The times when criminology was almost entirely conducted in affluent Western societies are gradually
coming to an end. Thanks to an extraordinary rise in available data, the growth of research capacity in
many areas of the world, the increasing international recognition of crime as an obstacle to sustainable
development, and the critique of conventional criminology from the ‘periphery’, criminology is starting to
become less ethnocentric, more international and diverse, and global. It is on the way to becoming a
science that aims to understand the causes, consequences and prevention of crime in all human societies.
Comparative criminology is part of this change.
Thanks to a data revolution in global criminology, it is becoming possible to broadly describe levels and
trends in crime across most parts of the world. The quality of these data will need further improvement
and we continue to see large gaps of descriptive information, mostly in the poorest areas of the world.
These macro-level data are useful for monitoring purposes and for contextualizing more detailed analyses.
Page 20 of 29
However, many comparative studies in criminology have questions that aim at causal inference rather
than the mere description of differences. If well-designed, comparative studies are a particularly powerful
way to shed light on the impact that differences in the organization of wider social, cultural, political, and
economic contexts have on social conflict, aggression, adolescent mental health and risk seeking, and the
emergence of organized crime. They are also a powerful framework for testing the boundaries of general
theories of crime, and for developing more context-sensitive theories that may be better suited to
developing prevention strategies that work. Progress towards this goal is a pressing need in the context of
ambitious goals by the global community to create peaceful societies, reduce all forms of violence, and
provide access to justice for all.
Overall, comparative criminology should aim to become an integrative framework for explaining crime
globally along two dimensions (Eisner and Malti 2015). On the macro-micro dimension, this entails
p. 94 integrating explanations at multiple ecological ↵ levels from ‘the world’ to social contexts such as
cultures, countries and cities all the way down to neuro-cognitive functioning in situations. On the
temporal dimension, this entails bringing together explanations from millenia to milliseconds, ranging
from evolutionary processes that shape human nature to the historical time of societies, the biographical
time of individual development, and the situational time that guides action.

Comparative research is a booming field across the social sciences. Criminologists may first want to understand the
general logic of comparative methodologies in the social sciences. The volume by Smelser (1976) on Comparative
Methods in the Social Sciences and the article by Skocpol and Somers (1980) on the Uses of Comparative History in the
Macrosocial Inquiry are still useful introductions. The article by Esser and Vliegenthart (2017) on Comparative Research
Methods provides a brief and focused practical guidance on what to consider when designing or assessing
comparative studies in the social sciences.
Nelken’s (2010) book Comparative Criminal Justice: Making Sense of Difference is a very useful introduction to
comparative criminal justice research. No similar comprehensive treatment of comparative research on the causes
and consequences of crime exists. The edited volume Transnational and Comparative Criminology by Sheptycki and
Wardak (2012) comprises valuable contributions on global and comparative perspectives in criminology. Volume 12
(2015, issues 4 and 5) of the European Journal of Criminology has an excellent collection of articles on comparative
criminology as part of a special issue. A more recent collection of overviews by leading scholars in the field can be
found in the first issue (2021) of the new journal International Criminology. The book edited by Liu and Chang (2017) on
Comparative Criminology in Asia gives insight into the fast expanding field of comparative criminology in Asia.
Online resources

Page 21 of 29
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Page 29 of 29
4. The changing role of data in crime, criminal justice, and criminology

p. 99 4. The changing role of data in crime, criminal justice, and

criminology
Ben Matthews and Susan McVie
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0004
Abstract
Data has always been at the heart of criminological endeavours and underpins some of its most important theoretical and
conceptual developments. Recent advances in technology, computer science, and data expansion have fundamentally re-
shaped society and impacted significantly on various aspects of crime and justice. Such developments have posed challenges
for traditional methods of defining and measuring crime, but also opened up novel sources of information such as citizen
generated ‘counterdata’. The increasing availability of data has shaped the working practices and policies of criminal justice
organizations, which use increasingly sophisticated approaches towards prevention and prediction on the one hand, and
surveillance and social control on the other. And while new opportunities for criminology have increased in terms of
methodological expansion and theoretical development, potential risks have emerged in terms of replicability, reputation and
disciplinary integrity. In this chapter, we take a critical approach to examining the contemporary role of data in shaping crime,
criminal justice and criminology, with specific reference to methodological innovations, conceptual debates, ethical
controversies, and disciplinary dilemmas.
Keywords: crime data, crime statistics, crime trends, crime surveys, the crime drop, public trust
Introduction
Data has always been at the heart of criminological endeavours. Since the early work of Adolphe Quetelet,
who first observed the constancy of crime patterns in the early nineteenth century (Beirne 1987) and
introduced the concept of the ‘dark figure of crime’ (Penney 2014), data has come to pervade many areas of
criminological scholarship and underpin some of its most important theoretical and conceptual
developments. Of course, the role of data within criminology has not been without controversy. Considered
Page 1 of 27
by some a crude tool of the positivist tradition, quantitative criminologists have been parodied as
‘datasaurs’ who engage in atheoretical ‘voodoo criminology’ (Young 2004, 2011). Yet, while it is essential
to critique the types of data that are used, the statistical methods adopted, and the way in which numerical
results are interpreted or presented, pitting ‘administrative criminology’ as antithetic to ‘critical’ or
‘cultural’ criminology has been divisive and unhelpful (Garland 2012, Hough 2014). Marginalizing
important areas of academic scholarship, and those who do it, while failing to recognize that the study of
crime and justice requires a plurality of methodological approaches, runs the risk of intra-disciplinary
stagnation on the one hand and extra-disciplinary appropriation of important criminological ideas on the
other. Recent advances in technology, computer science, and data expansion have fundamentally re-
shaped society and impacted significantly on crime, and this ‘big data’ revolution has also created new
ways of measuring, modelling and managing crime, with implications for what criminology is and how we
approach it.
In this chapter, we take a critical approach to examining the contemporary role of data in shaping crime,
criminal justice and criminology. Presented in three sections, we consider methodological innovations,
conceptual debates, ethical controversies, and disciplinary dilemmas. The first section provides a critique
of traditional methods of defining and measuring crime in an increasingly digital age. We review debates
about traditional crime statistics in the context of measuring new forms of crime, raise questions about
p. 100 crime data quality and reliability, and explore novel sources of information ↵ such as citizen generated
‘counterdata’. The second section considers how data is shaping the working practices and policies of
criminal justice organizations. Using increasingly sophisticated approaches to linking and
operationalizing data, justice organizations are using data for prevention and prediction on the one hand,
and surveillance and social control on the other. We consider issues such as oversight, scrutiny,
transparency and ethics in this emerging data justice landscape. Finally, the third section examines what
the era of ‘big data’ means for criminology and criminologists. It explores the opportunities that have
opened up in terms of methodological expansion and theoretical development, considers how
technological change can lead to improved research practice, and highlights the potential risks when data
are not used with sufficient care. We conclude by considering the impact of increasingly available crime
data on criminology as a discipline and the role of criminologists as subject-specific experts.
Changing Data to Track Changes in Crime
Routine methods of measuring crime: cybercrime as a case study

Measuring, monitoring and describing crime is important for many reasons. For example, it is used to set
priorities for policing resources, keep the public informed of crime risks, and to evaluate justice policies or
programmes. Within the UK, routine collection of crime data has been in place for decades and plays a key
role in the administration of crime control, public policy development, and service design and delivery.
Publicly available crime data has also provided a rich source of material for academic scholarship. There
are two primary sources by which crime is measured and data published on a regular basis: police recorded
crime statistics, which count all crimes and offences that are formally recorded by the police; and victim
surveys, which ask a random cross-section of the public about their experience of crime. In addition, crime
Page 2 of 27
may be measured by other means, including surveys of offenders or businesses, or through the use of
administrative data sources (such as ambulance data on violence); however, such data tend not to be
published on a routine basis and are not considered ‘official statistics’ about crime.
The advantages and disadvantages of different sources of crime data have been well described and
discussed in earlier editions of this volume (e.g., Maguire and McVie 2017), so we do not replicate that here.
Rather, we consider the impact of changing patterns of crime on the adequacy of these measures and
whether they are fit for purpose in understanding contemporary crime issues, focusing particularly on the
measurement of cybercrime. One of the biggest societal changes in recent history has been the
advancement and expansion of technology, which has created new avenues for committing crime. The
widespread availability of internet-enabled devices has generated, and in some cases encouraged, the
potential for a myriad of both so-called ‘cyber-enabled’ and ‘cyber-dependent’ crimes (Bossler and
Berenblum 2019; Collier and Hutchings, this volume). Cybercrimes can encompass everything from
identity theft to ransomware attacks to social media offences such as trolling, grooming or online stalking
and harassment. However, the ways in which crimes of technology are committed are constantly changing
and there is no internationally accepted definition or classification of cybercrime (Furnell and Dowling
p. 101 2019). Moreover, there is widespread under-reporting ↵ of the problem (McGuire and Dowling 2013),
which poses significant challenges for measuring it.
Measuring the extent and nature of cybercrime is an increasingly important issue. Not only will it help to
inform crime reduction and prevention strategies and enhance policing responses at both national and
local levels; but, it is also essential for identifying emerging and changing risks and ensuring that the
public are kept well informed and educated with respect to how they can protect themselves (Fafinski,
Dutton, and Margetts 2010). There is much to be considered around the issue of measurement, including
definitional issues, data requirements, and matters of governance. From a data perspective, one obvious
way of measuring cybercrime would be to use information about observed incidents, such as accessing
reports from financial institutions, social media organizations or email providers; however, this is difficult
for a number of practical and ethical reasons (Breen, Herley, and Redmiles 2022). In the absence of ready
access to such data, the alternative is to use established forms of crime data: police records and
victimization surveys.
Measuring cybercrime using police records

Like policing organizations across the world, UK police forces record crime according to counting ‘rules’ or
‘standards’ (issued, respectively, by the Home Office for England, Wales and Northern Ireland and the
Scottish Government for Scotland). These rules or standards dictate how different types of criminal acts
are defined and coded for statistical counting purposes, with the dual aim of promoting recording
consistency across police forces and ensuring that officers take a ‘victim-focused’ approach in order to
eradicate the problem of non-recording (see Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, 2014). However,
there is no specific offence of ‘cybercrime’ and police recording systems tend not to differentiate between
crimes committed ‘online’ or ‘offline’ (McGuire and Dowling 2013). Moreover, the use of a ‘victim-
focused’ approach does not always sit comfortably alongside accurate and consistent crime counting in the
context of cybercrime (Correia 2022).
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From a ‘data’ perspective, under-reporting poses limitations on all police measures of crime, but the
problem is particularly acute for cybercrimes. Measuring crime requires someone to be aware that a crime
has been committed; yet, like other types of fraud, those who experience some types of cyber-enabled or
dependent crimes may not always realize they have been a victim (Howell and Burruss 2020). Even when
people are aware that they have been victimized, they often fail to report it. The 2019 Crime Survey for
England and Wales (CSEW) showed that only 15 per cent of those who had been victims of a computer-
related fraud, and 6% of those who had experienced computer misuse, reported it to the police or the
Action Fraud national reporting centre (Office for National Statistics, 2020). Two in five victims had
reported the incident to a financial authority; however, more than a fifth thought someone else would
report it, and one in ten said it was not worth reporting at all.
In an effort to centralize data on fraud and computer misuse crimes, the UK’s Action Fraud reporting
centre was established in 2013 under the management of the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (Home
Office 2021). A new reporting system was launched in 2018; however, due to various technical and
administrative issues, these data have not yet been published. The most recently available statistics show
that there were just over 837,000 fraud and computer misuse offences recorded in 2020/21 (Home Office
2021), an increase of 67 per cent since 2013/14. However, these statistics are described as ‘experimental’
p. 102 and overall estimates are likely to be affected by both reporting and ↵ recording practices. Overall,
therefore, the existing limitations of police-recorded crime data also apply to measuring the extent and
nature of cybercrime; however, the added peculiarities of these often ‘invisible’ crimes make them even
more susceptible to under-recording. As noted in relation to United States data, police reporting systems
‘underestimate crime generally and cybercrime specifically’ (Howell and Burruss 2020: 210). For
criminologists, it is essential to consider these additional limitations of official statistics in terms of the
implications for studying new forms of digitally enabled or dependent crimes, and consider ways of
surmounting them.
Measuring cybercrime using victim surveys

Since the 1980s, victim surveys have become a well-established and widely accepted alternative measure
of crime across the UK. Like police-recorded crime statistics, they have tended to focus on traditional
forms of offline (or ‘street-based’) crimes; however, new questions were added to the Crime Survey for
England and Wales (CSEW) in 2015 in an effort to estimate the extent of online fraud and computer
1
misuse. Initially designated as ‘Experimental Statistics because of the need for ongoing evaluation and
modification of the questions and coding process’, these data were awarded National Statistics status in
March 2018 (Office for National Statistics, 2021). Even over the three years for which these data have been
available, there has been considerable change in the estimated number of cyber-related crimes. This
emphasizes the dynamic nature of these crime types and the rapid pace at which they change.
The most recently published CSEW figures show that an estimated 3.8 million incidents of cyber-related
fraud and 1 million incidents of computer misuse were reported in 2018/19 (Office for National Statistics
2020). Incidents of fraud represented over a third of all crimes recorded by the CSEW and reflected a 12 per
cent increase since 2016/17, which was more modest than, but in line with, the upward trend seen in data
Page 4 of 27
published by Action Fraud. In contrast, estimated incidents of computer misuse had declined by 45 per
cent since 2016/17, and gone from representing 20 per cent of all crime to just 8 per cent, most probably as
2
a result of increased awareness of hacking and improved computer security.
Incorporating questions on cybercrime into victimization surveys is imperative if they are to continue to
shed light on the ‘dark figure of crime’ that goes unreported to or unrecorded by police and other official
agencies. Given the sheer volume of cybercrime offences, their exclusion from national crime estimates
gives a very misleading picture of the extent and nature of crimes experienced by the public. For example,
the former UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was criticized by the head of the UK Statistics Authority for
omitting the estimates for fraud and computer misuse when reporting on crime trends for England and
Wales (Walker 2022). Quoting published data from the CSEW, Johnson stated that crime had fallen, but
failed to include the estimates for fraud and computer misuse which, when included with the other figures,
showed that crime had actually increased. This problem of what figures we include or exclude has
implications for how we understand longer-term trends in crime, since Caneppele and Aebi (2019) contend
that the rise in cybercrime has been offset to some extent by observed falls in offline crime-although this
proposal has been contested by Farrell and Birks (2018).
p. 103 ↵ Using victimization surveys to measure cybercrime is becoming increasingly common; however, the
ever-changing nature of such crimes poses a challenge for this method of measuring crime (Reep-van den
Bergh and Junger 2018). Keeping up with new forms of cybercrime would require regular changes to survey
question wording, but this would compromise the ability to conduct time-series analysis (comparing
changes in types of crime year on year) which is a primary function of victim surveys. It is for this reason
that only a small number of general fraud and cyber questions were added to the CSEW (Collins et al. 2014).
One consequence of this decision, as Collier and Hutchings (this volume) point out, is that the range of
crimes captured by CSEW data on cybercrime is limited, being largely restricted to ‘computer viruses’ and
unauthorized access to personal information. Even in the period between 2016/17 and 2018/19, the nature
of crimes encompassed by the headings of ‘fraud’ and ‘computer misuse’ are likely to have changed, so the
relevance of the new questions is already in question. Similar issues have been noted in relation to the
collection of data on cybercrime through victimization surveys in other countries (Howell and Burruss
2020).
In practice, victim surveys always involve a degree of trade-off between measuring long-term trends in
the same types of crime and capturing the profile of new forms of crime. We do not highlight this as
criticism of these new measures specifically, but to reinforce that the resulting victimization estimates are
the end product of a process of refinement, compromise and negotiation, and add to the existing
limitations of the survey as an instrument for measuring crime. Notwithstanding these issues, agreement
on unified categories of cybercrime and the incorporation of standardized questions into victimization
surveys across multiple jurisdictions holds promise in terms of advancing our understanding of trends in
the problem at a global level (Reep-van den Bergh and Junger 2018). However, the advancement of
technology also offers opportunities for creating new sources and forms of data, as we discuss next.
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New avenues for curating crime data

Advances in technology have played a significant role in changing many aspects of social life, including
new opportunities and methods for committing crime. However, technological innovation has also
facilitated access to previously hard to reach data (including those held by justice organizations
themselves), inspired the collection of new types of organizational data, and facilitated the grassroots
production of data resources about crime. In this section, we consider examples of new mechanisms for
data curation and how they are being applied to better understand contemporary crime problems.
Organizational innovation
Crime statistics published by justice organizations have become a mainstay in the toolkit of quantitative
criminologists, albeit their value is often limited to conducting high level, aggregate analysis. However,
computer science is increasingly opening up possibilities for gathering previously inaccessible data
collected by justice organizations. In some cases, these innovations simply facilitate access to data that
was already available in principle but not in practice. For example, in Virginia, volunteer software
engineers facilitated access to court records after the Supreme Court of the United States determined that
court offices were not required to provide bulk access to individual-level information, even though it was
publicly searchable (Hannah-Moffat 2019). In this case, the ‘data’ (i.e. the underlying court records) were
already freely available, but what did not exist was a convenient way of accessing the data as a collection.
p. 104 This type of ↵ computer-assisted data collection has the potential to address limitations in the
coverage of existing official records and expand areas of criminological research. Indeed, the creation of
new ‘computer criminology’ degrees, which combine the study of crime with computing, could open up
exciting new avenues of data curation.
In other cases, justice organizations have taken advantage of technological developments to generate data
outside the boundaries of what they are required to produce for official statistical purposes. For example,
during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Police Service of Scotland created a bespoke Coronavirus Intervention
(CVI) system to monitor the extent and nature of encounters with members of the public under the
auspices of Operation Talla, the UK-wide policing response to the pandemic. Guidance issued by the
College of Policing on Operation Talla advised police forces to adopt a ‘4Es’ approach to using new
temporary powers of enforcement (i.e. use engagement, explanation and encouragement before resorting
to enforcement). Based on self-reports of daily activity by police officers, rather than purely
administrative measures of enforcement action (such as the number of fixed penalty notices issued or
arrests made), Police Scotland’s CVI system made it the only UK police force able to demonstrate that its
policing response during the pandemic had relied largely on the first 3Es (Gorton et al. 2022).
Creating ‘counterdata’
It is often the case that organizational data does not exist or cannot be extracted to address vital crime-
related questions. As a result, data collection and curation activities are increasingly being advanced by
grassroots activists who use modern technology to fill gaps in official data collections. D’Ignazio and Klein
(2020) discuss the example of María Salguero who started compiling a comprehensive dataset on
Page 6 of 27
femicides in Mexico in 2016. Her efforts followed concern from the World Health Organisation (2009) that
a lack of suitable data was one of the reasons femicide had not been sufficiently addressed in Mexico. In
this instance, the information gap was not filled by an official justice organisation, but by an individual
curating data from varied sources including newspaper reports. D’Ignazio and Klein (2020) refer to this
kind of intentional data curation to fill official data gaps as ‘counterdata’.
In some cases, counterdata can offer a more comprehensive picture of the crime problem than official
statistics. For example, in the context of a reported drop in homicide in the U.S., Roussell et al. (2021) noted
that the statistics did not count state killings (e.g. police shootings or capital punishment) and some types
of preventable deaths in prisons/jails. Roussell and colleagues constructed an alternative indicator of the
US homicide rate by bringing together data on: state killings (including by police officers) excluded from
official sources; National Violent Death Reporting from the US’s Center for Disease Control; crowd-
sourced media reports from killedbypolice.net, an anonymously run website whose curation methods are
‘unknown’ (2021: 335); and a series of media sources on police killings. They concluded that ‘extra-official
sources of data’—their term for data not curated by a government or criminal justice organization—were
far superior to official data sources in the context of homicide (2021: 337). Moreover, their alternative
measure of homicide cast doubt on the scale of the fall in homicides in the US.
Social media and mobile data

The rapid expansion of social media platforms since the late 2000s has created substantial opportunities to
access new forms of both primary and secondary data about crime. Such data collection methods can
p. 105 involve either voluntary participation (in the case of ↵ crowd sourcing, where individuals are invited to
be part of the data collection endeavour) or involuntary participation (in the case of web scraping where
publicly available information is collected directly from websites). With the advantage of being ‘real time’
data, social media posts are an increasingly popular source of temporal information about crime-related
issues, such as measuring crime rates (Vo et al. 2020) and monitoring hate crime (Müller and Schwarz
2020).
Extracting data from social media sites can also provide useful spatial information that may be difficult to
access through other, routine, methods of data collection. For example, using geotagged tweets which
mention keywords related to crime can be an indicator of offending within a given area. In London,
between August 2013–14, Williams et al. (2017) found that tweets about ‘broken windows’ topics were
positively correlated with criminal damage, theft from a motor vehicle, possession of drugs and violence in
low-crime areas, although they were negatively correlated with the same outcomes in high-crime areas.
However, some research suggests that caution is needed when interpreting spatial data from social media
sources. For example, Prieto Curiel et al. (2020) examined 32 million tweets across various Latin American
countries and found that 1.5 per cent of them were crime-related. Comparing crime-related tweets to
official data about the murder rate and the level of fear of crime from survey data, they found some
association at a national level but very little at the city level. In other words, social media posts offered
little reliable trend information about rates of crime or the level of fear of crime within urban localities.
Page 7 of 27
Another way of collecting geospatial data is to monitor mobility flows using smartphone data, which
provides a more granular picture of where and when people travel. While it is not possible to identify
‘offender populations’ using smartphone data, information about mobility flow does offer criminologists
the opportunity to create more accurate population denominators, rather than relying on resident
populations which can under or over-estimate rates of crime and levels of risk (Malleson and Andreson
2014). For example, Rummens et al. 2021 used mobile phone data to assess whether the ambient population
(that is, the number of people in a locus at any particular time) provided a more accurate ‘population-at-
risk’ measure than the resident population. They found not only that the ambient population was more
strongly correlated with crime, but that crime rates calculated using each type of population data
identified different crime hotspot areas. Rummens and colleagues note that these forms of novel data
could support and inform the development of better intelligence-led policing strategies as they provide a
more accurate reflection of underlying dynamics in spatiotemporal crime trends.
New forms of data, new forms of bias

Of course, new forms of data should be approached with care and an appropriate regard for data
comprehensiveness and trustworthiness—applying the same level of scrutiny that constructivist
approaches have long recommended for interpreting official statistics (Kitsuse and Cicourel 1963). Novel
datasets will be subject to both known and unknown sources of bias which will limit the conclusions that
can be drawn. For example, in their above-mentioned study of homicide using counterdata, Roussell et al.
(2021) note that media sources do not include all homicides and may be less likely to report on police
killings of vulnerable or powerless groups (e.g. ethnic minorities, the homeless, and those living in
poverty). Moreover, journalists may too readily accept the description of events from law enforcement
agencies, which may bias their reporting. Issues with the quality and reliability of data provenance also
p. 106 pose a challenge in the construction of ↵ novel data sources. Lagoze (2014: 4) recommends that
researchers pose a series of questions about data provenance in order to take account of such challenges,
such as: ‘What is the origin of these data? Who has been responsible for them since their origination? Can
we apply our standard notions for trust and integrity to them? Do our standard methodologies for
interpreting them and drawing conclusions from them make sense?’ In the world of ‘big data’, there can
be many answers to these questions, as methods and sources of data curation become more varied and
complex.
It is possible that bias in some types of data may reflect theoretically important information on what
people in different places find ‘subjectively important’ (Solymosi et al. 2018). Non-representativeness in
internet data is an additional issue on top of the standard challenges in quantitative analysis of
generalizing from the data you have to the population you’re interested in, and then generalizing from
indicators you have measured to the underlying concept you care about (Gelman et al. 2020). Even for more
established data sources, such as police records, understanding issues of measurement error is still an
active area of research (Pina-Sanchez et al. 2021). Any such understanding cannot necessarily be
transported directly to novel data sources. As Lagoze (2014: 5) writes:
Page 8 of 27
Absent full understanding of the data (and in some cases a failure to account for this lack of
intimacy with the data), researchers have at times unwittingly or sloppily applied methodological
tools or epistemological understanding to those data that failed to account for the fundamental
differences between them and traditional highly-curated and reliable data.
As we have argued above, to effectively analyse all sources of crime data requires a good understanding of
data provenance.
From the point of view of the criminologist, it is important to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages
of different data sources with a view to creating a legitimate and evidence-based narrative, within the
limits of quality, credibility, and trustworthiness. Statistics designated as ‘official’ or ‘national’ by
government agencies are likely to have been collected through the most rigorous means; however, they
may include gaps that prevent a full analysis of the situation (e.g. a limited overview of cybercrimes).
‘Experimental statistics’ or ‘management data’ may offer a wider range of information about crime, but
should be approached with some caution as they may be subject to error or lack a certain level of rigour or
independence. Meanwhile, counterdata and other crowd-sourced or social media data may provide a novel
perspective on a given topic but at the potential cost of verification error and methodological rigour.
Nevertheless, whilst the specifics of assessing data credibility and trustworthiness may be more varied
with these novel forms of data, the general principles are common to all types of data source.
How is Data Shaping Criminal Justice?
The previous section focused on different types of data for measuring and monitoring crime; however, we
now move on to considering how data is shaping the working practices and policies of criminal justice
organizations. Using increasingly sophisticated approaches to linking and operationalizing data, justice
organizations are using data for prevention and prediction on the one hand, and surveillance and social
control on the other. In this emerging data justice landscape, such developments raise a variety of
p. 107 ↵ questions about oversight, scrutiny, transparency, and ethics. Therefore, in this section, we provide
an overview of how data is shaping practice within criminal justice and the contentious issues that are
emerging.
Using data to make predictions

One of the most significant advances of the ‘big data’ revolution has been the ability to make predictions.
In the UK, as of 2019, at least 14 of the 44 UK police forces were using, had used or planned to use data-
based predictions of crime, victimization, or offending (Couchman 2019), although this number has likely
grown since then. Prediction is often contrasted with the more typical uses of data in the social sciences for
inference (Breiman 2001). Broadly speaking, ‘inferential analysis’ focuses on understanding the effect of
some characteristic (e.g. age) on an outcome (e.g. probability of reconviction). Whereas, ‘predictive
analysis’ only focuses on predicting the outcome, regardless of whether we can attribute that prediction to
the ‘effect’ of a particular characteristic or not. Often these predictions come from ‘Machine
Learning’ (ML) or ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) models. Below, we focus on two of the most high-profile
uses of prediction in criminal justice: predictive policing and predicting reoffending.
Page 9 of 27
Advantages and disadvantages of predictive policing

Predictive policing essentially involves ‘forecasts of when and where future crimes will occur’ (Berk 2021:
215). Using data about when and where crimes have happened in the past, predictive policing models
estimate the likely spatial and temporal patterns of crime across communities. At a basic level, predictive
policing is relatively intuitive; for example, police officers, and indeed anyone, can ‘predict’ that crime
may be more likely in some times and places (e.g. outside a pub on Friday night) than others (e.g. in a
farmer’s field on Sunday morning) (Berk 2021). However, bespoke policing software, such as ‘Predpol’,
which grew out of an academic research project involving the Los Angeles Police Department, have grown
in popularity and are now used extensively across the US and beyond. Drawing on multiple sources of data
simultaneously and applying principles of ML and AI, these mapping and database extraction tools have
become core aspects of crime control strategies in an era of ‘smart policing’ (Afzal and Panagiotopoulos
2020). Evidence for the effectiveness of such products in reducing crime is mixed, with some studies
showing that predictive policing activities are associated with subsequent falls in crime, while others show
little effect (Meijer and Wessels 2019). Perhaps as a result of this uncertainty, Benbouzid argues that the
role of predictive policing has been primarily organizational—serving not only ‘to predict where and when
crimes may occur, but also, and in fact mainly, to direct, supervise, and regulate police work’ (Benbouzid
2019: 1).
Despite the manifold attractions to policing organizations, there are several criticisms in relation to
predictive policing in general, and the PredPol predictive policing algorithm in particular. First, predictive
models have been criticized for producing higher estimated crimes in areas of poverty and those with high
ethnic minority populations (Benbouzid 2019); although, proponents of predictive policing have countered
this by arguing that patrols based on PredPol are no more biased than existing policing practice
(Brantingham et al. 2018). Second, predictive policing algorithms have been criticized for potential
problems with ‘feedback loops’. Lum and Isaac (2016) argue that higher predictions of crime in areas of
poverty and/or minority ethnic populations make patrols more likely in these areas, and so result in more
crime being recorded. Whilst simulation studies have shown that feedback loops are possible (Lum and
p. 108 Isaac 2016), exactly how such feedback loops ↵ would work in practice is a complex issue depending on,
amongst other things, the specifics of the data inputs used in the predictive policing algorithm
(Brantingham 2017). Third, there is a potential injustice in using predictive policing models in that any
‘costs’ of over-policing from predictively based patrols are borne by different people than those who feel
the benefits of greater public safety. As Benbouzid puts it, the ‘unavoidably harmful component of
proactive policing is not randomly distributed in the population. It is concentrated on a minority who are
in spatial and social proximity to suspected criminals’ (2019: 10). Finally, predictive policing models can
lack proper oversight and scrutiny. Oatley (2022: 7) states that ‘in many cases, algorithms are proprietary
and have not been evaluated sufficiently’, while Bennett Moses and Chan (2018) suggest that the use of
predictive policing algorithms can reduce accountability for particular policing decisions made, with
aspects of decision-making outsourced to technical tools.
Given levels of concern about the efficacy of predictive policing to reduce crime and its potential for bias,
questions of scrutiny and oversight are important—the use of data-based forecasts of crime to organize
patrols is not neutral and technical, but inextricably bound up with normative and ethical questions.
Page 10 of 27
Advantages and disadvantages of predicting recidivism

A second use of predictive models in criminal justice is the use of risk assessment in criminogenic risk,
most commonly used in sentencing decision making or planning for prison release. Against a backdrop of
rising recidivism rates in the US, the Risk-Need Responsivity (RNR) model emerged as the most common
framework for managing known offenders and ensuring they received the appropriate type of
rehabilitative intervention based on criminogenic risk (Ogloff and Davis 2004). Over time, a range of risk
assessment tools have been developed and used within US correctional systems. A high-profile example,
used across many US states, is COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative
Sanctions), which provides an assessment of a person’s future probability of being reconvicted based on
their previous offending, as well as other characteristics such as education level and employment status
(Angwin et al. 2016). In theory, the advantages of COMPAS include reducing organizational costs, reducing
crime, and improving individual outcomes (e.g. ensuring that bail is used where appropriate, thus reducing
the prison population). However, studies have failed to clearly identify the benefits of risk assessment
instruments generally (Desmarais et al. 2017), and COMPAS in particular (Rudin et al. 2020).
The most serious criticism of COMPAS is that it is racially biased, as it predicts higher reconviction rates
for minority ethnic groups than for white people (Angwin et al. 2016). However, empirically demonstrating
this is tricky because bias in predicting recidivism is a multifaceted concept. Whilst, broadly speaking, all
considerations of fairness concern ‘equality for protected groups’ (2021: 15), Berk and colleagues articulate
‘at least six kinds of fairness, some of which are incompatible with one another and with [predictive]
accuracy’ (2021: 3). The technical details of these different measures of fairness are too involved to go into
here, but the material point is that there is no ‘unbiased’ way to predict reconviction—any specific risk
assessment requires trade-offs that are fundamentally normative (Berk et al. 2021). Aside from these
technical considerations of bias, part of the controversy surrounding COMPAS was that its parent company
‘does not publicly disclose the calculations used to arrive at defendants’ risk scores’ (Angwin et al. 2016).
As discussed above, the use of any predictive tool has ethical and normative implications. In some cases,
predictive models can be hard to scrutinize because they are based on complex, hard-to-interpret
p. 109 statistical models. However, COMPAS ↵ is a ‘black-box’ algorithm because it is proprietary, not
because the methods are mathematically complicated (Neufeld and Witten 2021: 173).
In practice, the legitimate use of models for predicting recidivism are not just affected by technical
problems of assessing bias in particular algorithms. They are also bound up with broader normative
concerns about who gets to decide what kind and level of bias is acceptable, and the level of transparency
around these decisions, potentially including the commercial interests of companies providing predictive
services to criminal justice organizations. Nevertheless, machine learning can be used productively to
support and improve the work of such organizations, as we discuss next.
Machine learning for evaluation and data improvement

Algorithms are not restricted to predicting crime or offending, but also can be used for organizational
improvement or to add structure to otherwise unstructured data held by justice organizations. One
example of using ML for organizational improvement is the evaluation of the Domestic Abuse, Stalking,
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Harassment and Honour Based Violence (DASH) risk assessment tool. DASH is used by police forces in
England and Wales ‘to identify domestic abuse victims at high risk of serious harm for referral to Multi-
Agency Risk Assessment Conferences’ (Turner et al. 2019: 1015). Three groups of academics (Turner et al.
2019; Grogger et al. 2021; and Ellison et al. 2019) partnered with UK police to analyse the predictive
accuracy of DASH. Turner and Ellison’s teams analysed the predictive performance of different questions
included in DASH, with both teams concluding that it would be possible to shorten the DASH questionnaire
without losing predictive accuracy. Going further, Ellison et al. (2019) highlighted the economic costs to
Greater Manchester Police (GMP) of including extra items in DASH which did not increase the accuracy of
the risk assessment, estimating this to be equivalent to around 3 per cent of all officer time. In these
analyses of DASH, ML was used to evaluate a risk-assessment tool that is used to structure professional
judgement—ML was not being used to predict risk per se but to describe how well a risk-assessment tool
was predicting risk.
Another way in which AI and ML models can be used in criminal justice settings is to provide structure to
unstructured datasets. For example, Langton and colleagues (2021) used text mining to quantify mental
ill-health demand on police within the GMP force area utilizing a dataset of incident logs (both the call
record and free-text data about the incident). Whilst only around 2 per cent of incidents in GMP were
identified as dealing with mental ill health in the data system itself, analysis of the free-text data
suggested that this was closer to 10 per cent of all incidents. These analyses show that unstructured data
can be classified and analysed, including by using methods such as text mining, to generate greater
insights into operational practice and improve resource deployment within policing. Arguably, these uses
of ‘predictive models’ to provide structure to otherwise unstructured data and to evaluate the predictive
performance of risk assessment tools are more ethical, less harmful, and more operationally useful than
using ML models to predict outcomes that include both known and unknown sources of bias. Nonetheless,
the use of ‘data-driven’ tools is extending into other areas of crime control, as we discuss below.
The role of data in ‘influence government’

In the context of the ‘big data’ revolution, private-sector marketing agencies have been at the forefront of
developing data-driven innovations to influence or ‘nudge’ individual behaviour. Some justice
p. 110 organizations have adopted these innovations in an effort to ↵ control, reduce, or prevent crime, using
methods that Collier et al. (2022) describe as ‘influence government’. Using the example of the UK’s
National Crime Agency’s (NCA) CYBER CHOICES diversion programmes, Collier and colleagues (2022)
describe how demographic information was combined with surveillance data of young people’s online
activity to identify individuals considered likely to engage in cybercrime, despite no evidence of them
having committed an offence. People identified as ‘high risk’ were potentially subject to interventions by
the NCA. At the same time, the NCA also used advertising targeted at Google search users with specific
demographic profiles to dissuade them from purchasing cybercrime services (2022: 8). This is an example
of a broader trend in public sector bodies adopting private sector data analytic techniques, relying on
‘found’ data and predictive analytics, as opposed to relying on traditional tools such as victimization
surveys (Savage and Burrows 2007). However, as Collier et al. explain, the ethical and practical
implications of using techniques such as targeted advertising are profoundly different for government
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agencies compared to private companies. As we saw above with other uses of predictive analytics,
appropriate legal and governance arrangements for these emerging types of ‘influence government’ are
crucial, and a lack of transparency in areas such as targeted advertising poses a key concern (Collier et al.
2022). This is particularly important for interventions which may only be known by or visible to select
groups of people, thus reducing the capacity for broader scrutiny and critique.
As we discuss next, ethics and data governance are key issues in how data is used in the criminal justice
system—particularly so when interventions are based on data and analytics.
Practical challenges of using criminal justice data
Data linkage problems

Whilst criminal justice organizations may generate and store enormous amounts of data, these can be
fragmented across multiple data systems and held by multiple organizations. Within policing, even a
single incident can result in a proliferation of data from various sources spread across multiple data
systems and held in a wide range of formats. Jessica Phoenix’s study of domestic violence and abuse (DVA)
incidents within Lancashire Constabulary provides a good example of this data fragmentation. Despite
having access to a large volume of data, she found that existing police datasets were ‘unsuitable to
measure DVA repetition or evaluate police action’ (2021: 268). She identified four key issues. First,
different datasets used inconsistent units of analysis (for example, some were based on the victim and
others on the perpetrator), meaning that cases could not be matched across datasets. Second, personal
details were recorded inconsistently, making it difficult to measure repeat offending or victimization.
Third, there were multiple markers used to flag DVA incidents, which were sometimes inconsistently or
inaccurately used, adding ‘complexity and confusion to police data recording’ (Phoenix 2021: 268). Finally,
important information was sometimes included only in free-text fields which meant that it was not
available for quantitative analysis.
These issues illustrate the problems faced when working with administrative data—both as a practitioner
and as a researcher. Just because there is some, and potentially a lot, of data collected about an incident, it
does not mean that the data will allow researchers or criminal justice organizations to answer the
questions they need answers to. As a result, whilst data linkage is a valuable tool in practice and for
criminological research (Stewart et al. 2015), it also brings with it novel challenges (Doidge and Harron
2019) and relies on a level of linkability that is not guaranteed in messy, operational data systems.
p. 111 The impact of data systems and staffing

The data infrastructure of criminal justice organizations can also pose challenges to effective data use. In
its annual report on Police Services in England and Wales for 2019, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of
Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) stated that ‘the service as a whole lacks the
infrastructure and consistency of approach necessary to exploit fully the data it holds … because many of
Page 13 of 27
its information systems are unconnected’ (2020: 50). This is particularly the case as agencies face an
increasing variety of data sources which require storage, including images, text, biometric data, and social
media streams (Oatley 2022: 1), all whilst having to comply with data compliance regulations.
Whilst some of these problems of data quality and interoperability could be resolved by new ‘joined up’
technical infrastructure, changing the technical infrastructure which underpins policing data can be
challenging. In Scotland, plans were introduced to create a new unified data system after the merging of
eight forces into one single police service in 2013, with a view to improving police efficiency and reduced
duplication (Fyfe 2019). Despite considerable cost and time, the planned improvements to police data
systems in Scotland were not achieved. Audit Scotland undertook an investigation into the failure of the
project and concluded that a number of factors were responsible, including failings by the commercial
provider of the new system to properly assess the scale and complexity of the task (Audit Scotland 2017:
16). These problems are not unique to Police Scotland: as of mid-2021, the move from the Police National
Computer (PNC) to the proposed new Law Enforcement Data Service (LEDS) in England and Wales was
delayed, with an overspend of £45m (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue
Services 2021: 35).
As well as infrastructural issues, criminal justice organizations using data in practice require sufficient
trained staff in policing organizations. However, between 2010 and 2020 the number of police staff and
designated officers across the UK fell (Home Office, 2022). Furthermore, working with ‘big data’ requires a
skilled workforce which can be hard to find (King 2011), and justice organizations can find it hard to retain
employees with specialist skills who can achieve higher salaries in other industries (see Harkin et al. 2018).
These factors—fragmentation of records across different databases, out-of-date IT infrastructure, and
having suitable staffing—can all impact on the availability, usability and credibility of policing (and other
justice system) data.
Data governance issues

The proliferation of data within the criminal justice system brings with it the burden of retaining and
destroying these data securely. As Hannah-Moffat describes (2019), data pose a source of risk which has to
be carefully managed by justice organizations; and criminal offence data is particularly sensitive, being
subject to special guidance under the General Data Protection Regulations (Information Commissioner’s
Office, 2022). However, as the data landscape becomes more complex, data governance issues extend to
data held by third parties. In late 2021, the investigative journalism website The Markup published the first
analysis of predictions made by PredPol (Mehrotra et al. 2021). Of interest here is how The Markup acquired
the data source used for analysis. The report’s authors state:
We discovered access to PredPol prediction data through a page on the Los Angeles Police
Department’s (LAPD) public-facing website that contained a list of PredPol reporting areas with
links. Those links led to an unsecured cloud storage space on Amazon Web Services
p. 112 ↵ belonging to PredPol that contained tens of thousands of documents, including PDFs,
geospatial data, and HTML files for dozens of departments … The data was left open and available,
without asking for a password to access it (Mehrotra et al. 2021).
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Here the ‘risk’ posed by storing data was not isolated to data held by the LAPD themselves, but also held by
an external commercial body. As the volume and variety of data produced by justice systems increase, data
governance issues become more important and inseparable from wider data ‘landscapes’—including data
quality, ethics, the technology used to store and manipulate data, and having suitably qualified and trained
staff to work with crime and justice data.
Implications for Criminology
Having considered issues of crime data measurement in the first section, and the various uses of crime and
justice data by justice organizations in the second section, we now turn to what this changing data
landscape means for criminology and criminologists. This section explores the opportunities that recent
developments in computing power and data analytics bring to quantitative criminology, describes the
challenges of working with data that have surfaced during the ‘replication crisis’ in social science, and
outlines the challenges and opportunities for criminology that come from computer scientists and
statistical experts working with readily-available data about crime.
Widening criminological opportunities

Considering the implications of the rise of ‘big data’ for criminology (as for any other area of academic
scholarship) is imperative and, as we have demonstrated in the previous two sections, is likely to both
widen areas of opportunity for scholarship and generate matters of increasing concern. Criminology is an
enduring discipline with a long history of redefining its parameters and expanding its territorial grasp.
Data expansion offers the potential to investigate many existing and emerging crime and justice-related
phenomena in more intricate and methodologically complex ways. When done well, its proponents suggest
that analysing ‘big data’ using modern statistical and ML methods, and drawing on the associated
computational power that makes them feasible, can help ‘address some of the critiques of positivistic
scholarship to date, especially those of reductionism and universalism, by providing more finely-grained,
sensitive, and nuanced analysis that can take account of context and contingency, and can be used to refine
and extend theoretical understandings of the social world (Kitchin 2014: 7). If we are to placate and
reassure the adherents of the aforementioned ‘datasaur’ analogy, it is essential that criminologists apply
such technologies in ways that advance and improve criminological theory building and provide rigorous
foundations for conceptualizing and explaining criminal behaviour and society’s response to it. As Tittle
(2000: 86) noted, theoretical development within criminology has tended to lag behind because
‘integrating various levels of explanation has never been completely successful.’ New forms of data hold
the potential to contribute to such multi-layered theory.
The computational power that has accompanied the big data revolution (Kitchin 2014), and the
development of software to implement statistical models which would otherwise have been
computationally intractable, allows researchers to answer questions that would previously have been
p. 113 impossible. In our own work, we have relied ↵ on modern probabilistic programming languages and
computing power to fit flexible statistical models which previously would have been practically impossible
for applied researchers to use on standard hardware (see Matthews et al. 2022). We think this is a positive
development—the promise of such models is to allow our statistical practice to be better aligned with our
Page 15 of 27
theoretical understandings (Evans et al. 2018). Whilst we have discussed the many practical and ethical
problems of data linkage in this chapter, we are starting to see much greater access to linked
administrative data from criminal justice and other government departments through initiatives like the
Administrative Data Research UK’s Data First programme. Moreover, whilst they come with particular
challenges of data provenance, ‘counterdata’ alternatives to standard police records and victimization
surveys provide new opportunities for criminologists to triangulate analyses, which can be crucial for
generating reliable results (Pina-Sanchez et al. 2021). So, there are many reasons to be optimistic that the
data revolution holds promise for widening the future scope and range of criminological endeavours.
However, this brings with it some particular challenges, which we discuss further below.
Avoiding the ‘replication crisis’

As noted in the introduction, those with an interest in crime have exploited quantitative data for around
two centuries, while the field of ‘quantitative criminology’ has grown rapidly and advanced in complexity
since the advent of modern computer technology (Piquero and Weisburd 2010). In recent years, however,
concerns have been raised in various areas of quantitative social sciences about ‘questionable research
practices’ in which scholars only produce results that are exciting, publishable, and career enhancing
(Bakker, van Dijk & Wicherts 2012). The inability to verify the results of academic research has been widely
described as the ‘replication crisis’, and has led to increasing calls for openness around quantitative data
and methods, including the sharing of analytical data and code (Baker 2016). The problem came to
prominence within criminology when Dr Eric Stewart and his co-authors withdrew five articles from three
journals in a ‘large-scale retraction event’. Noting significant irregularities in the data presented, one of
Stewart’s co-authors suggested that these papers were likely fraudulent (Pickett 2020). This is an extreme
case, and (lack of) replication can arise from more mundane reasons than outright fabrication. However, it
acts as a warning to criminologists of the dangers of working with quantitative data and the need to be
scrupulous in collecting, analysing, interpreting, and presenting statistical work and ensuring that it can
be replicated by others (see Pridemore et al. 2018).
Sweeten (2020) claims that best practice around data and code sharing, which is essential to increasing
reproducibility, is not yet customary within criminological research. He notes that ‘pre-registration’ could
help to increase openness and transparency by specifying ahead of time what analysis will be conducted
(thus preventing researchers from making later decisions aimed at producing more favourable results).
Making such activities standard practice could well improve the quality of quantitative criminology, but
they are not panaceas. Sharing data and code may not lead to fully reproducible analysis, making it
onerous for reviewers to reproduce analysis during peer review ‘unless the authors put in significant work
to put together a replication package’ (Sweeten 2020: 268). As discussed in the second section, some
criminological datasets are drawn from complex administrative systems and may be subject to data access
agreements that prevent sharing of the source data. Whilst pre-registration can increase transparency,
p. 114 published analyses can and do still diverge from pre-registered plans (Wooditch et al. 2020), ↵ and
even with pre-registered plans there can be unexpected features in a given dataset which require
unanticipated decisions on the part of the researcher. In addition, changes to individual workflow may not
be sufficient to overcome structural selection pressures that incentivize poor research practices, if poor
research practices more readily lead to publications and publications lead to career advancement
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(Smaldino and McElreath 2016). Nevertheless, whilst Sweeten’s suggested solutions may not guarantee
reproducibility, they should reduce the chances of future ‘retraction events’ and lead to greater confidence
in the corpus of quantitative criminological knowledge.
Ensuring disciplinary integrity

‘Criminologists’ have never had a monopoly on researching crime. Many important and influential studies
have been conducted by those working in other disciplinary fields (including economics, geography and,
increasingly, computer science) and published in non-criminological journals. However, the growing
availability of crime and justice data increases the likelihood that scholars from other fields, particularly
those looking for applications for AI and ML models, will move into terrains previously considered the
preserve of criminologists (Oatley 2022). Of course, as David Downes (1988) famously noted, criminology
is a ‘rendezvous discipline’ which sits in the interstitial space between many disciplinary perspectives, and
the breadth and depth of the discipline has benefited greatly from drawing on alternative theories and
methods. However, there are both theoretical and policy risks associated with the appropriation of such
data by those with little knowledge or understanding of the peculiarities of the subject discipline and its
associated systems. For example, Lavorgna and Ugwudike (2021) conducted an analysis of abstracts for
published papers describing data-driven tools for decision-making in criminal justice organizations and
found that these papers were mostly written by computer scientists and very few discussed important
issues of justice bias, including critical problems of racism. It is imperative, therefore, that those of us
working in the field of criminology are aware of, and responsive to, the risks to disciplinary integrity
created by poor scholarship around crime and justice datasets.
An issue of particular concern arose recently when two computer scientists published research aimed at
establishing whether they could discriminate between ‘criminals and non-criminals’ using ML methods
(Wu and Zhang 2016). They claimed that their ML classifiers ‘consistently well and empirically establish
the validity of automated face-induced inference on criminality, despite the historical controversy
surrounding this line of enquiry’ (2016: 1)—a nod to the troubling aspects of criminology’s history which
can be traced back to Lombroso (Coretta and Bowling 2017). There are reasons to be sceptical of the
authors’ conclusions on technical grounds (Bergstrom and West n.d.), but the normative issues presented
by this kind of analysis are of greater concern. Following criticism of the paper, the authors published a
rejoinder stressing that their interest was on the performance of their ML classifiers rather than
advocating for such predictive methods to be used in law enforcement (Wu and Zhang 2017: 1)—although
their original paper emphasized the value to criminology of ‘analyzing and quantifying social perception
and attributes of faces’ (2016: 1). As an example of the potential for labelling and stereotyping, this study
demonstrates the risks of paying insufficient attention to the ethical problems of researching crime which
would be familiar to students of criminology.
Interdisciplinary collaboration around crime and justice data has many benefits, not least that
p. 115 criminological research can learn from methodological specialists in other ↵ fields. There are good
examples of this in practice within criminology, such as the recent debate around whether it is possible to
identify racial discrimination in policing using administrative data. Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo (2020)
argued that racial discrimination within policing could not be reliably estimated using administrative
Page 17 of 27
records, because such datasets exclude encounters with the police that do not lead to enforcement.
However, a team of mathematicians, engineers and statisticians demonstrated that some aspects of racial
discrimination could be identified using administrative data (Gaebler et al. 2022), although there were
some limitations to their approach. The technicalities of such debates are not new; for example, Bushway
et al. (2007) discuss some of the same problems. However, it emphasizes that advances in important areas
of criminological scholarship require the infusion of new methods and ideas from those in other
disciplinary areas. Therefore, the increasing interest in crime and justice could be of significant benefit to
criminologists, as long as we are prepared to work in partnership with others to ensure that disciplinary
health and integrity is maintained.
Conclusion
This chapter provides a critical overview of how changes in crime and justice data are shaping how we
define and measure crime, influencing how justice organizations use data, and creating new opportunities
for criminological scholarship. Focusing on the example of cybercrime, we have argued that constructing
measures of crime is always a balance between stability (in terms of enabling comparison with the past)
and change (to keep pace with changing types and modes of crime). Technological change is enabling the
creation of new sources of data about crime, but it is imperative that users are aware of the ‘provenance’ of
such data and properly establish their trustworthiness and veracity. A myriad of new data-driven tools are
being used by a range of organizations to make predictions about crime and offending, which have both
advantages and drawbacks, but suitable scrutiny and accountability around prediction is urgently needed.
The data revolution offers many benefits to criminology, and criminologists, including the potential for
methodological innovation and theoretical advancement, especially if we work in partnership with those
who also wish to exploit increasingly available crime and justice data. However, potential problems of poor
practice, including non-replicability, and a lack of understanding about justice system processes and
inherent biases pose risks in terms of individual and disciplinary harm. Overall, we conclude that data is—
more than ever—at the heart of criminological endeavour and those of us who engage in quantitative
scholarship need to embrace new technologies and work collaboratively to maximize its potential, while
ensuring that inadvertent or deliberate misuse does not risk discriminating against or placing at risk those
whose data we seek to understand.

For a general introduction to criminal statistics with a focus on the UK context, we recommend starting with Crime
Data and Criminal Statistics: A Critical Reflection by Maguire and McVie (2017) in the previous edition of The Oxford
Handbook of Criminology. This chapter provides a more detailed introduction to and comparison between different
types of data available about crime and discusses contemporary challenges in its measurement. We also
p. 116 ↵ recommend James Treadwell’s chapter on Crime Statistics and Crime Data in his textbook Criminology (2006).
While now somewhat vintage in nature, we still advise people interested in this issue to review Coleman and
Page 18 of 27
Moynihan’s Understanding Crime Data (1996) for a comprehensive overview of the key issues, and to consult A Note on
the Uses of Official Statistics by Kitsuse and Cicourel (1963) for a more conceptual introduction to the constructivist
perspective on administrative crime data.
There is now, more than ever, an abundance of publications (and freely available data) on crime statistics available
from government sources within the UK. The Office of National Statistics publishes a number of statistical bulletins
(and their underlying data) on a wide range of crime and justice-related topics in England and Wales. Particularly
prominent are the series Crime in England and Wales, released quarterly, which include data from police recorded
crime and from the Crime Survey for England and Wales. The Office for National Statistics has also released a podcast
in the Statistically Speaking series discussing recent (as of October 2022) challenges in and benefits of measuring
crime, including proposed new advances in researching domestic violence and harassment.
In Scotland, there are both annual and quarterly reports and data releases on police recorded crime in the series
Recorded Crime in Scotland as well as regular publications presenting findings from the Scottish Crime and Justice
Survey. For Northern Ireland, the Police Service of Northern Ireland release a recorded crime statistical bulletin with
both monthly updates and an annual summary, while victimization data from the Northern Ireland Safe Community
Survey are published by the Department of Justice.
For further detail on measuring cybercrime, we recommend the chapter by Collier and Hutchings in this volume. For
an overview of issues in predictive modelling in criminal justice, Berk’s (2020) overview in the Annual Review of
Criminology provides a comprehensive, if technical, review. In the same publication, Pridemore and colleagues (2018)
provide an overview of issues involving replication in criminology.
Online resources

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Young, J. (2004), ‘Voodoo Criminology and the Numbers Game’, in Cultural Criminology Unleashed, 27–42, Routledge-
Cavendish.
Young, J. (2011), The Criminological Imagination, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Notes
1
The equivalent victim surveys for Scotland and Northern Ireland introduced questions on cybercrime in 2018/19 and
2019/20 respectively.
2
Author’s calculations based on Table A1a(YE Mar 20) in Office for National Statistics (2021).
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Page 27 of 27
5. Developmental and life-course criminology: An overview

p. 121 5. Developmental and life-course criminology: An overview

Darrick Jolliffe and Katherine M. Auty
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0005
Abstract
This chapter discusses the key concepts of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology (DLCC). It explains that DLCC is the
result of the integration of developmental research, informed by psychology, individual differences and human development,
with life-course research. The DLCC framework integrates all criminological investigation that brings a new perspective into
the way antisocial and criminal behaviour starts, escalates, and concludes. The results of DLC research have been used to
inform the content of developmental prevention programmes, such as associating impulsivity with an increased likelihood of
later offending. The chapter tackles developmental and life-course theories that explain the main focus of the DLC research,
which includes the social development model (SDM).
Keywords: Developmental and Life-Course Criminology, developmental and life-course theories, social development
model, developmental research, criminological investigation, developmental prevention programmes
Introduction
The main aim of this chapter is to summarize the large body of knowledge known as Developmental and
Life-Course Criminology (DLCC). Given that an important American Society of Criminology Presidential
Address argued that DLCC research should now be ‘the’ framework that integrates all criminological
investigation (Cullen 2011), this is no small task. Colloquially referred to as the study of ‘development from
the womb to the tomb’ (Farrington, Kazemian, and Piquero 2018, p. xiii), DLCC is a relatively new lens
through which to view the way antisocial and criminal behaviour starts, occasionally continues, potentially
escalates, more commonly de-escalates and finally ends. DLCC is the result of the integration of
developmental research, informed by psychology, individual difference and human development, with
life-course research, informed by sociology, and the examination of the impacts of social structures and
Page 1 of 33
life-events. The three main areas of focus for DLC criminological research are (1) understanding the
development of antisocial and offending behaviour over time, (2) identifying the risk, promotive, and
protective factors for these behaviours at different ages, and (3) examining the impact of life events at
different ages, such as moving to a high delinquency school, getting married, or getting a desirable job
(Farrington 2003a). Based on the above three, some scholars additionally include evaluations of
developmental prevention interventions as a fourth component (Blokland and Nieuwbeerta 2006).
In a single chapter it is not possible to cover every aspect of DLCC. Readers interested in further detail are
encouraged to consult Cullen 2011; Farrington, Kazeminan and Piquero 2018; Blokland and Nieuwbeerta
2006; and the Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology.
This chapter will begin with a brief history of the origins of DLCC, namely the introduction of criminal
careers as a framework and the link with early prospective longitudinal studies in criminology. This will be
followed by an explication of three main components that comprise DLCC research and an examination of
the main DLCC theories that have been developed to account for the key findings in this area.
p. 122 DLCC: A History
A relatively brief history of DLCC is presented here. For a more thorough review of the development of this
approach see Piquero (2022). The origins of the DLCC paradigm may be traced back as far as the early
attempts to understand how crime varied systematically with age (Quetelet 1831). DLCC became a distinct
academic movement in the 1980s when the ‘criminal career’ approach to organizing thinking about the
pattern of an individual’s offending over time was linked with the considerable findings of the many
longitudinal studies that had been conducted in the US and other Western countries up to that point. A
‘criminal career’ is defined as a longitudinal sequence of offences committed by an individual offender
(Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, and Visher 1986). By definition, examining criminal careers requires
longitudinal data on offending which could include official instances of offending (i.e., arrests,
convictions, incarcerations) or self-reports of offending obtained as part of longitudinal surveys.
The publication of Blumstein and Cohen’s (1979) ‘Estimation of Individual Crime Rates from Arrest
Records’, set the tone for this new discipline by taking aim at previous criminological research and because
of the policy orientation and purpose of the investigation. Specifically, the authors pointed out that despite
considerable previous study little was known about the progress of an individual’s criminal career over
time, such as the number of crimes they commit each year (which they termed ‘lambda’), the change in
crimes committed per year as individuals age, and the factors that influenced this change. This study was
produced against the backdrop of historical increases in crime in the US. The authors were particularly
interested in determining the potential incapacitative effect of prison (MacLeod, Grove, and Farrington
2012).
Incapacitation, or physically preventing further offending by incarcerating offenders, continues to be a

popular crime control strategy (Reuter and Bushway 2007), but the benefit of this approach in terms of
reducing offences (or ‘offences saved’) depends on the individual’s crime rate. For example, one approach
calls for more certain and longer imprisonment for offenders with a prior criminal record. However, if
Page 2 of 33
individual crime rates decrease as one’s criminal career progresses, there may be fewer ‘crimes saved’
from imprisoning an offender well into their criminal career, compared to incarcerating those with no
prior criminal record, who are potentially at the beginning of their criminal career (MacLeod et al. 2012).
This is obviously an important but contentious empirical question.
Blumstein and Cohen’s (1979) work prompted the US National Institute of Justice to have the National
Academy of Sciences convene a panel to examine research on criminal careers, resulting in a two-volume
contribution, Criminal Careers and ‘Career Criminals’ (Blumstein et al. 1986). This articulated key concepts
such as onset (the point at which a criminal career starts), desistance (the point at which a criminal career
ends) and explored the relationship between age and crime. These publications were highly influential but
were generally at odds with criminological approaches at the time which tended to use cross sectional
surveys to explain adolescent crime (e.g. Hirschi and Gottfredson 1980).
The intellectual backlash led by Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1986) challenge to the utility of the criminal
career approach (based predominantly on their proposal that the age distribution of crime was invariant;
Piquero 2022), and the subsequent responses defending this (e.g., Blumstein, Cohen and Farrington 1988a,
1988b) were DLCCs ‘Big Bang’. From this point forward those investigating the causes of crime could be
p. 123 categorized ↵ into two broad schools, the neophyte DLCC school, who adopted an age-graded and
developmental approach, and what Cullen (2011) referred to as the ‘adolescent-limited’ school (a reference
to Moffitt’s (1993) highly-influential theory, see below), focused on testing theories to explain adolescent
offending.
Early Prospective Longitudinal Studies
The result of some early longitudinal studies such as the Glueck’s (1950) and Wolfgang, Thornberry, and
Figlio (1987) both informed the criminal career approach and also added much needed depth to this
1
framework. Table 5.1 provides details of some important prospective longitudinal studies. It is of
theoretical and practical importance to know how many offences someone has committed, but also to
investigate the factors that may influence this. Prospective studies provided opportunities to examine
these and other questions about the development of criminal careers. Prospective longitudinal research
involves repeated measures of the same people where the risk or promotive factors are measured before
the outcomes so that there is clear temporal ordering. For example, if harsh and erratic parenting was
measured before a young person’s offending, we have increased confidence that harsh and erratic
parenting is a ‘risk factor’ for later offending and not that a young person’s offending resulted in harsh
and erratic parenting, which in cross-sectional research would be equally plausible.
Page 3 of 33
Table 5.1 Overview of Early Longitudinal Studies
Title/Location/ Sample Ages interviewed Key Results

Year/Citation
Glueck’s Study 500 incarcerated boys matched with 500 First assessed at ages 7–11 * Development of a prediction tool based on five social background
Boston nondelinquent boys on age, family background, Followed up at average factors: discipline of the boy by the father, supervision of the boy by
general intelligence, ethnicity, and residence in age of 14, 25 and 31 the mother, affection of the father for the boy, affection of the
1939–1944
an under-privileged neighbourhood mother for the boy, and the cohesiveness of the family.
Gleuck & Glueck
* Between-individual approach to studying offending
(1950)
Cambridge- 506 under-privileged boys placed in matched First assessed age 5–13 * The first randomised controlled trial in criminology
Somerville Youth pairs with one group receiving a treatment (median 10.5). * The finding that ‘directed friendship’ was desirable based on
Study (‘directed friendship’) and the other provided Three follow-ups between subjective measures (interviews with men), but harmful according
Cambridge, Mass with no support the ages of 14–22, 22–30 to objective measures (offending, mental health outcomes).
1939 and 45–53.
McCord (1992)
Werner’s 505 males and females born in 1955. First assessed at birth, * One-third of high-risk children (e.g., prenatal complications,
Longitudinal Study then ages 1, 2, 10, 18 and brough up in families with discord, divorce, parental
Kauai/Hawaii 31–32 psychopathology, etc) did not develop learning or behaviour
problems.
1955
Werner & Smith
(1992)
Columbia County All 436 3rd grade boys in Columbia County New First assessed at age 8, *
Study York (about age 8) then 19, 30 and 48.
Page 4 of 33
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Year/Citation
New York Lifetime self-reports and official records of offending were generally
1960 predicted by the same childhood and adolescent variables, and
these were correlated with many of the same adult outcome
Dubow et al (2014)
measures.
Wolfgang’s Birth 1) 974 boys born in Philadelphia in 1945 (random 58% assessed at age 26. * The identification of ‘chronic offenders’. About 6% of the men
Cohort Studies selection from 9,945 residing there from 10–18). Follow-up in official accounted for 50% of the offences.
Philadelphia records from 7 to 30.
1945
Wolfgang, Figlio &
Sellin, (1987)
Cambridge Study in 411 boys from a working- class area of London First assessed at ages 8-9, * The probability of being reconvicted decreased with increasing
Delinquent then 10, 14, 16, 18, 21, 25, time since the previous conviction, but was still substantial
Development/ 32 and 48 (19%) even after 15 crime-free years.
London, UK
1961
West and Farrington
(1977)
Newcastle 1000 All children born to families in Newcastle upon First assessed at birth, * Greater levels of deprivation based on six factors (marital
Family Study/ Tyne in the months of May and June 1947 then followed up from 5– instability, parental illness, poor care of the children and home,
Newcastle, UK 10 with school records. social dependency, overcrowding, poor mothing ability) associated
Delinquency data to age with greater prevalence and frequency of official offending.
1947
32–33
Kolvin et al. (1990)
Page 5 of 33

Year/Citation
Individual All children in a single grade at one year, and all First assessed at 10 and * Few persistent female offenders (with recorded offences both
Development and children aged 11–16 who subsequently moved again at 43 (females) and before and after age 21).
Adaptation Study/ into Orebro 48 (men) Followed-up in * Persistent offenders have profound adjustment problems
Orebro, Norway official records between including alcohol and psychiatric problems.
these time periods
1965
Bergman &
Andershed, (2009)
Jyvaskyla 196 boys and 173 girls from 12 Grade 2 classes First assessed at age 8, * Low self-control in childhood and adolescence is a precursor to
Longitudinal Study (about aged 8). Half the classes from the town then 14, 27, 36 and 42. crime and accidents.
of Personality and centre, half from suburbs.
Social Development
Jyvä skylä /Finland
1968
Pulkkinen et al.
(2009)
Page 6 of 33
One of the earliest prospective longitudinal studies, that of the Gluecks’, involved following up 500 boys
incarcerated in a youth reformatory who were matched with a non-incarcerated comparison group in
Boston, Massachusetts (Glueck and Glueck 1950). The results of this study, that delinquency could be
predicted by the presence of six factors, had an immediate policy impact with teachers first in Boston, but
later in New York taught to identify ‘early’ delinquents (Lukas 1952). Similarly, Wolfgang et al. (1987) used
the Philadelphia Birth Cohort Study to identify ‘chronic offenders’ which sparked searches for the factors
that predicted this form of offending.
These early prospective longitudinal studies provided the platform for christening the main DLC pillars
and ushered in a ‘Golden Era’ in the late 80s/early 90s. This was punctuated by the Office of Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention in the US launching the Causes and Correlates programme of three
highly successful prospective longitudinal sister studies in Pittsburgh, Rochester and Denver. These
studies collected information on similar potential risk factors but also had elements that were unique to
their local contexts. For example, The Pittsburgh Youth Study over-sampled for high-risk children with
about half of the sample being African American (Loeber, Farrington, Stouthamer-Loeber, and White
2008). Other important prospective longitudinal studies are the Adolescent Health Study (Add Health) a
school-based longitudinal study of a nationally-representative sample of over 20,000 adolescents in
grades 7–12 in the United States in 1994–95 (Harris et al. 2019) and the Pathways to Desistance Study, a
study following about 1,300 serious adolescent offenders from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Phoenix,
2
p. 125
124 Arizona, after court involvement (Mulvey 2004). ↵ ↵
p. 126 ↵ Longitudinal studies are not without methodological limitations and practical challenges. For
example, it can be challenging to determine where to attribute any changes observed in the participants.
These could be the result of aging, period effects (i.e., factors affecting all people in that period of time) or
cohort effects (i.e., factors affecting only those of a specific age). An accelerated longitudinal design in
which multiple cohorts are followed up (e.g., Program on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods;
Sampson and Smith 2021) can help to address these questions (Farrington 2015).
These studies generally provide temporal ordering, but it can be problematic to draw causal conclusions
from them (Murray, Farrington, and Eisner 2009). This is because it is not straightforward to disentangle
the impact of one factor from the effects of numerous others, and many factors which may be related to
antisocial behaviour tend to occur together. For example, children who are impulsive tend to have
permissive parents and are more likely to live in deprived areas (West and Farrington 1973). Statistical
approaches such as hierarchical linear modelling have helped advance, but have not solved, this issue (e.g.,
Jolliffe et al. 2019).
The greatest practical challenge to longitudinal studies is the cost, and therefore the challenge in obtaining
funding. Presently, public and government funding for social research is at historic lows and studies which
will take years to produce results are not popular. The Youth Endowment Fund, a charity provided with a
£200 million endowment from the Home Office to ‘prevent young children and young people becoming
involved in violence’, has not funded prospective longitudinal studies. Instead, YEF have prioritized
funding and evaluating time-limited randomized controlled trials in the hope that the longitudinal impact
of the various interventions can be assessed through linking administrative data (Stewart et al. 2015).
Page 7 of 33
However, this approach fails to provide a consistent initial assessment of the young people (limited
information about risk and promotive factors, see below) and also risks missing important information
about life-events not recorded in administrative data (e.g., family disruption). This will make explaining
the variation in the later observed effectiveness of these interventions problematic. Embedding these
experiments within a prospective longitudinal study would have provided much better evidence about the
causes of offending and what works to reduce violence (Farrington 2013).
Attrition (i.e., people dropping out of the study, being difficult to trace, or being reluctant to be re-
interviewed) is another practical challenge. It is well known that the most antisocial individuals tend to be
most reluctant to be re-interviewed, but their responses increase the validity of the results substantially
(Farrington 2015). Similarly, the infrequency of data collection can make time ordering a challenge and
disentangling testing effects (i.e., the finding that self-reported delinquency admissions are greater at first
administration compared to later administrations) are additional challenges. However, these challenges
can be addressed by skilled and tenacious researchers (e.g. Stouthamer-Loeber 2012).
The Development of Antisocial and Offending Behaviour Over Time
The empirical study of longitudinal patterns of antisocial and criminal behaviour is a central component of
DLCC, and one of the most replicable findings has been the relationship between age and offending. The
unimodal age-crime curve shows that offending is low in late childhood and early adolescence, peaks in
p. 127 middle to late adolescence ↵ (between 15 and 19; Farrington et al. 2006) and decreases subsequently
(Loeber et al. 2008). However, the shape of the curve and the peak age of offending have been found to vary
depending on a range of factors including the measure of offending (arrest data has a later peak than self-
reported data), who is being studied (males have an earlier and higher peak than females), or the type of
offence, as more serious offences tend to peak later than less serious offences (Loeber and Ahonen 2014;
Loeber et al. 2008). In addition, the age crime curve can change over time with researchers noting
differences following the significant crime drop in the US and other countries in the late 1990s (Blumstein
and Wallman 2000).
The main criminal career parameters that allow for an examination of individuals and their offending over
time are prevalence, frequency, onset, continuity or persistence, and desistance. These are described below
with some key results.
The prevalence of offending is the proportion of individuals who commit an offence in a given time period.
This metric was, and to some extent remains, the focus of much criminological research (e.g. Cullen 2011),
but this is just one component. Longitudinal results have shown that the prevalence for individuals
generally replicates the age crime curve for offending rates (e.g., peak prevalence around age 15–19 and
then declines; e.g., Piquero, Farrington, and Blumstein 2003). In addition, results have shown that a
relatively high proportion of individuals accrue official offences. In the Philadelphia Cohort Study about
one third of males born in 1945 had experienced a police contact by age 18 (Piquero, Hawkins, and
Kazemian 2012), and in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, over 44 per cent of males had a
conviction by age 62 (Farrington 2020). However, almost all individuals self-report involvement in some
sort of criminal behaviour by early adulthood. In the Cambridge study over 98 per cent of men had self-
Page 8 of 33
reported an offence by age 48 (Farrington, Ttofi, Crago, and Coid 2014) and in the Seattle Social
Development Study of 808 boys and girls followed-up from age 10–17 about 86 per cent self-reported an
offence (ranging from burglary to selling drugs; Farrington et al. 2003a). This high prevalence of offending
illustrates that, at least for minor offences, offending is normative.
The frequency of offending, or the number of offences committed, is less consistently defined, with some
researchers operationalizing frequency as the number of offences committed by a particular sample, while
others operationalize this as the number of offences committed by active offenders over a set time period
(Piquero, Hawkins, and Kazeminan 2012). Partly because of this tension, but also because of the greater
3
likelihood for measurement error, conclusions about changes in individual offending frequency over time
are less firm. However, when operationalized as the number of offences per active offender at each age,
using the CSDD data up to age 40, Piquero, Farrington, and Blumstein (2003) found the peak age of the
frequency of offending for official offences to be about 16 (about 1.8 convictions) which remained fairly
stable through to age 22, when it declined steadily. Similarly, using self-reported data about serious theft
and violence from the Pittsburgh Youth Study Loeber et al. (2008) found that the frequency of serious
violence increased over three age blocks (10–12, 13–16, 17–19) up to about two offences per offender, but
the frequency of serious theft peaked at age 13–16.
The age of onset of antisocial behaviour and offending is likely the most studied of all criminal career
p. 128 parameters, probably because the age at which a first criminal offence ↵ is committed is one of the
strongest predictors of a number of other important offending outcomes (Jolliffe et al. 2017a). There is
considerable evidence that those who begin offending at the earliest ages continue to offend at the highest
rates over longer periods of time, are more versatile in their offending (committing a range of different
types of offences), and are more likely to commit serious and violent offending (Farrington 2020; Loeber
and LeBlanc 1990). Therefore, an early age of onset is also of practical importance for identifying those
who may benefit the most from interventions and support to reduce later offending.
Onset is usually measured by official records of arrests or convictions as these are relatively easy to obtain
and have dates, however many researchers point out that official data cannot establish when a criminal
career actually begins (Farringon 1983). This is because the probability of a self-reported offence being
detected is very low (Farrington et al. 2014; Farrington et al. 2003a), and this would be particularly the case
for a first offence by a young person (where discretion is most likely to be used). For example, in the
Cambridge Study the average age of onset for convictions (up to age 48) was about 19, but for self-reports
this was just over age 10 (Farrington et al. 2014). In the same study, those who had the earliest age of onset
for convictions (between the ages of 10–13) had an average of 9.2 convictions up to age 61. This was much
greater than those in the next age block (6.8 offences; ages 14–16), and those of all other ages (between 17
to greater than 30) which had between 2.8 to 2.3. convictions (Farrington 2020).
There is also evidence that the onset of less serious behaviours generally proceeds more serious behaviours
(Loeber et al. 2008). In the Pittsburgh Youth Study Loeber et al. (2008) showed that less serious forms of
theft had an age of onset of about one year earlier than more serious forms of theft, and this also true for
violence, with moderate violence proceeding serious violence by about one year.
Page 9 of 33
It is a consistent finding that there is strong continuity in antisocial behaviour from childhood to
adolescence to adulthood (Farrington et al. 2006). For example, in the Cambridge Study about 72 per cent
of those convicted as juveniles between the ages of 10–16 were reconvicted between 17–24, in comparison
with only 16 per cent of those not convicted as juveniles (Farrington 1992). In fact, across many studies
strong continuity exists for offending, particularly for contiguous time periods, and this continuity is
strongly related to the number of offences previously committed (Jolliffe et al. 2017b; Piquero, Hawkins,
and Kazemian 2012). That is, high frequency offenders tend to persist.
Two hypotheses have been proffered to explain this continuity (or persistence). One, called ‘persistent
heterogeneity’ suggests that this reflects stable persistent between-individual underlying constructs such
as an antisocial tendency or criminal potential (Nagin and Farrington 1992). The second, termed ‘state
dependence’ suggests that the commission of one offence increases the likelihood of subsequent offences
through reinforcement or stigmatization (McAra and McVie 2010). While some have concluded that
continuity may reflect persistent heterogeneity more than state dependence (e.g, Farrington 2002), it is
generally acknowledged that both processes are operative (Nagin and Paternoster 2000).
A number of factors will influence the level of persistent offending including how offending is measured
and how persistence is defined. Again, most conclusions about continuity have been drawn based on
official records which may underestimate the strength of this relationship, as relatively few offences are
officially identified (Farrington et al. 2003a). Equally, having a previous offence may bias processing
decisions resulting in an overestimate, particularly for some minoritized groups (The Lammy Review
2017). There is also debate about what should constitute persistence (Whitten, McGee, Homel, Farrington,
and Ttofi 2019). Typically, studies define persistent offenders (occasionally termed a life-course
p. 129 ↵ persistent offender) as those who have committed a crime as a young person (usually up to age 17)
and done so again as an adult (from age 18 up to the latest follow-up of that study). This definition reflects
committing crime as a ‘youth’ and an ‘adult’, according to most criminal justice systems, but this
definition fails to consider the duration or length of criminal career (Jolliffe et al. 2017a). By this definition,
an individual who committed only two offences at ages 17 and 18 would be included in the same category as
those who have committed many offences between the ages of 10 and 30.
There has been much less research on criminal career duration (i.e., the length of time between onset and
termination of a criminal career) likely because there are few long-term prospective longitudinal studies
in criminology, and by definition duration will be influenced by the age of the last follow-up. Jolliffe et al.
(2017a) systematically searched for such studies and found only 11 that measured official and self-reported
offending at least up to age 30, 18 that measured only official offending at least up to age 30, and one that
measured only self-reported offending at least up to age 30. Farrington (2019) showed the variation in
estimates of criminal career duration using the Cambridge Study. When convictions to age 32 were
available for the sample the average criminal career duration was 5.8 years (beginning at about age 17.5;
Farrington 1992), when convictions to age 40 were available the average duration was 7.1 years (beginning
at about age 18.6; Farrington, Lambert, and West 1998) and when convictions to age 56 were available the
average duration was 9.8 years (beginning at about age 19.7; Farrington, Piquero, and Jennings 2013).
Page 10 of 33
Using the same study, up to age 48 the average criminal career duration for eight offences was 5.9 years for
convictions (beginning at age 19.1), but 24.9 years according to self-reports (beginning at age 10.3;
Farrington et al. 2014).
The other challenge with studying criminal career duration is operationalizing when a criminal career
terminates, or desistance (see Chapter 6 this volume). This topic was the subject of an extended Special
Issue in the Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology (Vol 4, Issue 4, Vol 5, Issues 1 and 3), but
has received less investigation than the other criminal career parameters (see Chapter xxx this volume).
When operationalized empirically (as in the examples above), desistance is the observed termination of
offending. However, when interpreted theoretically desistance is considered to be a continuous variable,
referring to decreases in the underlying frequency, variety or seriousness of offending (i.e., Maruna and
Roy 2007). Understanding this ‘journey travelled’ approach is an important area for future investigation;
however, conclusions need to be based on very long-term follow ups. When the men of the Cambridge
Study were followed up to age 61, Farrington (2019) found that average criminal careers were very long
with 26 per cent of those convicted having a duration of 20 years or more. The results showed that the
probability of being reconvicted was high even after a gap of 10 (20 per cent) or 15 years (19 per cent) since
the previous conviction, but it was only 8 per cent after a 30-year gap and only 6 per cent after a 40-year
gap.
The Risk, Promotive, and Protective Factors for Antisocial and Offending
Behaviour at Different Ages
Risk factors are defined as variables that predict a high probability of a later outcome and therefore require
longitudinal data. When considering the relevance of risk factors it is important to distinguish between
p. 130 behavioural risk factors (e.g., school bullying, being ↵ aggressive) and explanatory risk factors (e.g.,
high impulsivity, poor parental supervision). Arguably, behavioural risk factors are tautological and assess
early behavioural manifestations of offending behaviour, but explanatory risk factors provide insight into
the potential causal mechanisms that might lead to an increased likelihood of offending.
Extensive research has been dedicated to identifying the most important risk factors for offending (e.g.,
Farrington and Welsh 2008), although these have most typically focused on explaining the prevalence or
onset of offending (although see Jolliffe et al. 2017a for risk factors for criminal career duration). These
range from biological (heart rate, skin conductance; Choy et al. 2019), individual (e.g., impulsivity, low
school attainment; Denno 1990; Jolliffe and Farrington 2009), peer delinquency (Loeber et al. 2008),
parenting and family (e.g., child rearing methods, disrupted homes, family convictions and incarcerations;
Farrington and Welsh 2008), to neighbourhood and social (e.g., low socioeconomic status (SES), family on
welfare, low family income and poor housing; Derzon 2010; Loeber et al. 2008). There is typically a high
degree of replicability for these risk factors across different longitudinal studies (e.g. Jolliffe et al. 2017a) in
different countries (Farrington and Loeber 1999) and even for different generations (Farrington, Ttofi,
Crago, and Coid 2015).
Page 11 of 33
This ‘risk factor’ approach has been criticized for its focus on deficits or problems. As a result, researchers
such as Pollard, Hawkins and Arthur (1999) have proposed re-imagining the risk factor approach to
include both risk and protective factors. However, the nomenclature around protective factors has lacked
clarity, with some researchers conceptualizing these as the opposite of risk factors (i.e., if high impulsivity
is a risk factor, then low impulsivity is a protective factor; White, Moffitt, and Silva 1989), while others
have operationalized protective factors as those which interact with a risk factor to negate its impact (i.e.,
loving parent negating the impact of a disrupted family; Rutter 1985). Protective factors have also been
considered as those that reduce the likelihood of offending amongst a group ‘at risk’, such as children
living in deprived neighbourhoods (Werner and Smith 1992).
In a major step towards clarifying this definitional challenge, Loeber et al. (2008) adopted Sameroff,
Bartko, Baldwin, and Seifer’s (1998) approach by suggesting that a variable that predicts a low likelihood
of offending should be termed a promotive factor. For example, if low impulsivity was a promotive factor,
those with low levels of impulsivity would have a low likelihood of committing offences, while those with
middle and high levels of impulsivity would have a high likelihood. The fact that the same variable may be
a promotive factor, a risk factor or both a promotive and risk factor (referred to as a mixed factor by Loeber
et al. 2008) at different ages is one of the reasons why confusion about risk and promotive factors persists.
Using the Pittsburgh Youth Study, Loeber et al. (2008) undertook one of the most comprehensive
investigations exploring risk, promotive, and mixed factors for serious theft and violence. Many variables,
including hyperactivity–impulsivity, and parental supervision, were better conceptualized as promotive
factors, while depressed mood, and parental reinforcement were better conceptulatized as linearly related
to offending (what Loeber et al. (2008) termed mixed factors). Many of these variables had previously only
been considered risk factors, but including those identified as promotive factors improved the prediction
of later serious theft and violence.
Admittedly, most of the risk, promotive, and protective factors have been identified using samples of white
males. However, in their longitudinal study of boys and girls in New Zealand, Moffitt, Caspi, Rutter, and
Silva (2001), found that males and females who committed offences tended to possess similar risk factors.
Using the Pittsburgh Youth Study researchers found that physical punishment (Farrington and Loeber
p. 131 2003), ↵ and low intelligence (Lynam, Moffitt, and Stouthamer-Loeber 1993) may be differently
related to later offending for African American boys compared to Caucasian boys. Similarly, Jolliffe,
Farrington, Loeber, and Pardini (2016) found that high academic achievement, perceiving a high likelihood
of getting caught, low peer delinquency, and low hyperactivity predicted low levels of violence amongst
African American boys.
Importantly, and despite the success of risk-focused prevention programmes (i.e., interventions which
target early factors such as impulsiveness with the aim of reducing later offending; e.g., Augimeri et al.
2018), risk and promotive factors are not equivalent to causes. Most criminological research is not able to
identify the possible causal relationships between the range of explanatory factors and later offending.
This is because most criminological research persists in utilizing a between-individual approach. This is
likely a legacy of the Gleuck and Gleuck (1950) approach and can be seen when the risk factors of offenders
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are compared to those of non-offenders or when risk factors are correlated with levels of offending. In
both instances the between-individual differences in risk factors are being compared with the between-
individual differences in offending in an attempt to draw conclusions about the causes of offending.
The main limitation of this method is that it is difficult to disentangle the influence of the risk factor of
interest (e.g., impulsivity) from the influence of the numerous other risk factors that are correlated with
impulsivity and that might also impact the likelihood of offending. For example, compared with less
impulsive children, impulsive children tend to be less successful in school, reside in families with poor
parental supervision, and live in poor housing in deprived areas.
There are a number of statistical approaches that have been developed in order to attempt to draw causal
conclusions from observational data, such as propensity score matching (e.g., Jolliffe and Hedderman
2012). However, the causes of offending can best be examined by comparing the within-individual changes
in risk factors over time with the within-individual changes in offending over time. This is because, in
studies of changes within individuals, essentially the individual is acting as their own comparison, so all
other pre-existing differences are held constant. This makes isolating the effect of the particular factor,
for example, poor parental supervision on offending, possible as changes in the young person’s offending
can be observed as parental supervision changes from being good (well supervised) to being poor (poorly
supervised). However, because this approach requires repeated measures of both risk factors and measures
of offending in a longitudinal study it has rarely been employed.
Farrington, Loeber, Yin, and Anderson (2002) were perhaps the first to compare between-individual and
within-individual correlations and they did so using the oldest sample of the Pittsburgh Youth Study, a
prospective longitudinal study of 506 boys followed up at seven points between the ages of 13.8 and 17.8.
When the between-individual correlations were examined they found that all 10 risk factors were
significantly correlated to later offending. However, when the forward-lagged within-individual
correlations were examined (i.e., where the risk factor in one year was correlated with offending in the
next year) only poor parental supervision, low parental reinforcement and low involvement of the boy in
family activities were significant. This suggests that these were more likely to be causally related to
offending. Similarly, Jolliffe et al. (2019), using data from the Pittsburgh Youth Study, employed a
hierarchical linear random effects model to investigate anxiety and depression as potential causes or
outcomes of self-reported theft and violence. Contrary to expectation, the results suggested that anxiety
and depression were unlikely to be causes of offending. Instead offending was associated with later
increases in anxiety, and to a lesser extent, depression.
p. 132 Examining the Impact of Life Events at Different Ages
The impact of a number of life events on offending have been investigated in prospective longitudinal
studies. These include getting married (Horney, Tolan, and Weisburd 2012), peer relationships
(Thornberry, Lizotte, Krohn, Farnworth, and Jang 1994) being employed (Farrington, Gallagher, Morley,
St Ledger, and West 1986), and joining the military (Sampson and Laub 2003). Importantly, these events
could be viewed as a dichotomous within-individual changes from, for example, being unmarried to being
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married, occurring at a specific point. Alternatively, the underlying construct may be continuous, such as
an increasing commitment to a loving relationship that builds over time, or a change in motivation that
results in one obtaining a job.
The life event that has been most commonly investigated in prospective longitudinal studies is getting
married with most research showing that for males, marriage is associated with a reduction in criminal
behaviour (Horney, Tolan and Weisburd 2012). A challenge in studying the impact of marriage, however, is
controlling for the potential impact of selection effects. That is, those individuals who get married might
be different from those who do not on many variables that may influence their future offending. This
requires statistical approaches such as propensity score matching (Theobald and Farrington 2009) or
inverse probability of treatment weighting (Sampson et al. 2006).
Theobald and Farrington (2009) used the Cambridge Study to examine the impact of marriage on
offending by matching married and unmarried men on both their number of previous convictions and also
on a propensity score which predicted their likelihood of getting married. The results suggested that
convictions decreased after marriage. In later research Theobald and Farrington (2010) found that men
who got married when they were older did not show reductions in their likelihood of offending. The
authors suggested that this was because the men who married later were more likely to be binge drinkers
and drug users who continued to go out with their male friends after marriage.
Unfortunately, there is limited evidence about the impact of marriage on later female offending, and that
which exists provides inconsistent evidence (e.g. Bersani, Laub, and Nieuwbeerta 2009; King, Massoglia,
and Macmillan 2007). This lack of evidence likely reflects the fact that there are few longitudinal studies of
female offending that would allow this relationship to be adequately studied.
Having delinquent friends is an important predictor of later offending (Battin, Hill, Abbott, Catalano, and
Hawkins 1998). Offending by young people tends to be committed in small groups (of two or three people,
usually) rather than alone, but co-offending decreases with increasing age. In the Cambridge Study, the
likelihood of committing offences in groups decreased with age. Before age 17, boys tended to offend with
other boys who were similar in age and who lived close by. After the age of 17, co-offending became much
less common (Reiss and Farrington 1991).
It could be that young people are more likely to commit offences when in groups than when alone, or it
could be that the high prevalence of co-offending reflects the fact that when young people go out, they
tend to go out in groups. It could also be that the commission of offences encourages association with
other delinquents or because of the stigmatizing effects of official processing (e.g., McAra and McVie 2010;
Petrosino, Turpin-Petrosino, and Guckenburg 2010). Using the Rochester Study, Thornberry et al. (1994)
identified reciprocal effects, with delinquent peers causing delinquency and delinquency causing
p. 133 association with delinquent peers. However, using a within-individual ↵ approach Farrington et al.
(2002) showed that peer delinquency was a correlate but not a cause of offending in the Pittsburgh Study.
It has been demonstrated that those who are employed are generally less likely to offend than those who
are not (e.g., Uggen 2000). This may be because being employed is indicative of bonding and/or that
employment increases informal social control (e.g., Sampson and Lau 1993). Also, having income may
reduce the likelihood of committing acquisitive offences, and the time spent at work may simply reduce
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opportunity. Using the Cambridge Study, Farrington et al. (1986) showed that the men’s likelihood of
offending increased when they were unemployed compared to when they were employed. However, the
relationship between employment and offending might not be straightforward with some research
suggesting that only certain forms of employment (e.g., high-quality employment; Wadsworth 2006) or a
certain mindset related to work (e.g., having a high commitment to work; Jaynes 2022) may be associated
with a reduced likelihood of offending.
In their follow-up of the Gluecks’ sample, Sampson and Laub (1993) identified military service as an
important component of their age-graded theory used to explain reductions in offending in later life.
Military service was proposed to ‘knife off’ individuals from their previous environment and replaced this
with structure and discipline (Bouffard and Jin 2018). In addition, the military could provide education,
training, and other opportunities that may promote prosocial opportunities. Sampson and Laub (1993;
1996) identified a beneficial impact of military service on later offending for those who served in World
War II, but overall the evidence for reducing offending is equivocal (Bouffard and Jin 2018). Attempts to
translate the proposed benefits of military training into correctional interventions such as boot camps
have not proven successful (Wilson, MacKenzie, and Mitchell 2005).
There has been a very recent focus on investigating the impact of macro-political influences on offending
using a DLC approach. Farrall, Gray, and Jones (2019b) illustrated how the relationship between school
truancy (a behavioural risk factor for offending) and later offending was influenced by government
economic policies for those who experienced these at a critical point in their development. Similarly,
government policies on housing were found to be associated with homelessness and offending (Farrall,
Gray, and Jones 2019a). Sampson and Smith (2021) highlight the importance of cohort differences and the
potential impact that growing up in different historical contexts can have. They argue that accruing an
arrest is as much a function of societal change as it would be a function of the traditional risk factors (e.g.,
high impulsivity) that one possesses.
The next section will present the main DLC theories that have been developed to explain the results of the
prospective longitudinal studies.
Developmental and Life Course Theories
Developmental and life-course theories seek to explain the three main areas of focus of DLC research. This
section reviews six of the most influential developmental and life-course (DLC) theories; the social
development model (Catalano and Hawkins 1996), the dual taxonomy of life-course persistent and
adolescence-limited behaviour (Moffitt 1993), the age-graded theory of informal social control (Laub and
Sampson 2003; Sampson and Laub 1993), The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential (ICAP) Theory
(Farrington 2005), interactional theory (Thornberry 1987), and Situation Action Theory Wikstrom (2006).
p. 134 Each of these DLC theories blend elements of classic theories, as shown in Table 5.2 below. ↵
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Table 5.2 DLC theories and their relationship with classic theories
DLC Theorist Individual Socialization Bonding Social learning Strain Labelling Rational choice Routine activities
Hawkins & Catlano √ √ √ √ √ √
Moffitt √ √ √ √ √ √ √
Sampson & Laub √ √ √ √
Farrington √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √
Thornberry & Krohn √ √ √ √
Wikstrom √ √ √ √
Source: Adapted from McGee and Farrington (2019).
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The Social Development Model

The social development model (SDM) argues that both prosocial and antisocial behaviours are learned by
children through the same process (Catalano and Hawkins 1996; Hawkins and Weis 1985). The SDM has
been developed and tested by the Social Development Research Group based at the University of
Washington. The theory has been operationalized in a programme called Communities that Care (CTC) and
tested empirically by The Community Youth Development Study (CYDS), which is the first community-
randomized trial of CTC (Hawkins et al. 2008).
The SDM finds its foundations within criminological theory and provides a framework for analysing the
various risk and protective factors that affect human behaviour. The model incorporates a number of ideas
from social control theory, social learning theory and differential association theory, but also contains
aspects of other theories. The goal of the SDM is to provide a more accurate and comprehensive analysis of
its component theories. It addresses underlying theoretical assumptions about human behaviour and
recognizes the need for a developmentally appropriate approach to behaviour.
The SDM studies the relationship between pro- and anti-social behaviour. It delineates two different
pathways of socialization, one pro-social, the other antisocial/deviant, and whilst socialization
experiences may be similar, factors such as the individual’s attributes and their context will influence
which of the two pathways they take. It suggests that two factors influence the formation of these
behaviours: beliefs and values. For instance, strong moral beliefs in social order are associated with
prosocial behaviour, while those with antisocial values are more likely to develop antisocial behaviour. The
path to antisocial behaviour can be determined not only by one’s own beliefs, but also by the rewards that
exist for antisocial behaviour. Individuals with strong moral convictions can still commit acts of violence if
the incentives to do so are large enough. Beliefs and values develop from a person’s strong bonds to social
groups. The obligation that one feels to that group can also influence one’s actions. As Cambron, Catalano,
and Hawkins (2019, pp. 3–4) detail, there are ‘four processes that establish a social bond between an
p. 135 ↵ individual and a socialization unit: (1) perception of opportunities for pro- or antisocial behaviour;
(2) involvement with pro- or antisocial groups; (3) social, emotional, and cognitive skills that enhance
involvements and make recognition or reward more likely; and (4) the perception of rewards for
interactions with pro- or antisocial groups.’ Individuals who are committed to maintaining a prosocial or
antisocial social unit will eventually become bonded to these groups. They will also benefit from the
rewards that membership of these groups provides. The more strongly people are bonded to a social group,
the more likely they are to adopt their beliefs.
The social development process is affected by three external factors: position in the social structure (which
is determined by SES, age, gender, and race), individual characteristics (such as impulsivity), and external
constraints (such as membership of a community group). These factors have demonstrated their ability to
predict antisocial behaviour (Cambron et al. 2019). The SDM also suggests that these factors can influence
the development of social skills, such as how people feel about their interactions with others and their
perceived rewards for doing so. The SDM has a set of submodels that describe a child’s journey from birth
to school stage (entry, elementary, middle, and high). These submodels specify the types of prosocial and
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antisocial behaviour that are most prevalent during the development phase. The environmental changes
that occur during the development of these submodels can create new opportunities for children to
develop antisocial and prosocial behaviour. For instance, the shift from middle school into high school can
provide children with more access to illegal drugs. New opportunities for children to develop prosocial and
antisocial behaviour can also be created by the expansion of their educational, civic, and extracurricular
activities. These new sources of social opportunities can help children develop their skills and attitudes.
During the preschool period, families are the dominant social unit, while peer groups play a more
prominent role as children enter middle school.
Early childhood experiences can influence how children perceive their social bonds, rewards, and beliefs
when they get older. For instance, a child with strong prosocial family bonds during the preschool period
may perceive more opportunities for prosocial social behaviour during the elementary school years.
However, this may change as they move into new environments, such as a new school, where the rewards
and opportunities that previously were associated with being a prosocial child may suddenly disappear.
Life-course persistent and adolescence-limited antisocial behaviour

Moffitt’s dual taxonomy of life-course persistent and adolescence limited behaviour (Moffitt 1993) derived
from the observation that antisocial behaviour can be stable throughout the life course, yet there is a
distinctive peak in adolescence. Moffitt argues that these behaviours are exhibited by two distinct groups
of adolescents; hence life-course persistent and adolescence limited. Individuals characterized as life-course
persistent have noticeable deficits early in life in areas such as neuropsychology and language acquisition.
This then develops into problematic social interaction and antisocial behaviour from an early age.
Adolescence limited behaviour has a very different origin. It is thought to be ‘a result of the “maturity gap”
between the onset of biological maturity and social maturity. These adolescents want to have adult roles
and material goods but cannot obtain them legitimately’ (McGee and Farrington 2019, p. 612). They end up
copying the antisocial behaviour of the life-course persistent adolescents, who they see as having achieved
these adult roles, in spite of them being maladaptive. Moffit’s typology has been expanded to
p. 136 ↵ include three other types of offender: abstainers—those who never behave antisocially; low-level
chronic—those who behave antisocially in childhood, but have abstained by adolescence; and unclassified
—those whose behaviour cannot be classified by any group.
Two different theories are presented in the framework of Moffitt’s (2006) theory to explain adult-onset
offending. These theories claim that there was a failure by the criminal justice system to spot the signs of
this type of offending, and that it could have been caused by a combination of factors. The first theory
states that adult-onset offending is actually low-level chronic offending (this group was previously called
the ‘recovery group’ (Moffitt, Caspi, Dickson, Silva, and Stanton 1996)). This group includes individuals
who have been committing these types of crimes since childhood. If these individuals were first detected as
adults by the criminal justice system, they would be considered adult-onset offenders. The second theory
proposes that the individuals who are identified as adult-onset offenders are those who were initially not
considered to be as problematic when they were children. However, their life experiences (losing a job or
alcohol addiction) means that they are unable to return to the behaviours they learned as children (Moffitt
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1993). The criminal justice system would then be able to identify these individuals as adults. However, it is
not clear why these individuals’ childhood or adolescent offending were not detected earlier. The evidence
supporting these two theories is mixed (see; Beckley et al. 2016; McGee and Farrington 2010).
Early research indicated that the pathways of females are more likely to support a delayed adolescent-
onset group, but not a life-course persistent typology (Silverthorn and Frick 1999). One strategy for
identifying which types of offenders might exist is by using a latent class trajectory analysis: Piquero
(2008) has found fewer offending trajectories in female samples. In contrast to earlier research,
researchers found that the trajectories of female offenders in the Pittsburgh Girls Study were different
from those of males. They did not find evidence supporting the existence of a life-course persistent group
(high-rate versatile offending) (Ahonen, Jennings, Loeber, and Farrington 2016). Despite the similarities
in the risk factors for offending and antisocial behaviour between males and females (Moffitt, Caspi,
Rutter, and Silva 2001), further research is needed to understand the developmental pathways of these two
groups.
The age-graded theory of informal social control

Sampson and Laub developed their age-graded theory of informal social control in two books (Laub and
Sampson 2003; Sampson and Laub 1993). One of the key concepts is the idea of ‘turning points’. Turning
points are major life events, such as marriage, employment, or joining the military. They can lead to
desistence from offending, for example, getting a well-paid job, but can also lead to persistence in an
antisocial lifestyle.
Crime in the Making introduced a framework for understanding childhood and adolescent delinquency and
crime in adulthood. The main idea of this theory is that the more people lose their bond to society, the
more likely they are to commit crimes.
In their study Sampson and Laub reanalysed data collected by the Gluecks for their (1950) book Unravelling
Juvenile Delinquency. Sampson and Laub argue that the choice of behaviour should be made in response to
the structural changes or ‘turning points’ that can lead to the development of criminal behaviour. The
concept of agency is used to describe the actions of offenders, and they often carry out their actions in a
way that aims to either disassociate themselves from criminal activity or persist in committing crime.
Although some of the Glueck men explicitly describe their desire to stop committing crime, many of them
p. 137 also show examples of decisions that lead to their desistance. ↵ For example, almost unconsciously, the
men had already invested a lot of time and resources in their marriage, which they would not risk by
becoming criminally involved again. They believed that desistence was on some level desired or willed by
the offender. In this sense their behaviour will likely be regarded as ‘desistance by default.’ The Glueck
men were also seen as active participants in their own desistance. Sampson and Laub also believed that
human agency could help explain and understand their behaviour. Some of them insisted on committing
crime due to the rewards of it, while others were motivated by a desire to avoid being perceived as not in
control of their lives. The life histories of the Glueck men reveal the injustices they experienced at the
hands of the criminal justice system due to their acrimonious relationship with it. Therefore, agency can
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play a critical role in the development of criminal behaviour (see; Paternoster 2017), as it influences a wide
range of factors that can lead to various life-course turning points, resulting in a large degree of
complexity.
The integrated cognitive antisocial potential theory

The Integrated Cognitive Antisocial Potential (ICAP) theory evolved primarily from Farrington’s work on
the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) (for recent reviews of the study’s numerous
findings see Farrington 2021) but also from other prospective longitudinal research studies. The ICAP
theory focuses on an individual’s antisocial potential. The Integrative Cognitive Antisocial Potential (ICAP)
Theory was developed by Farrington (2005) to explain the offending behaviour of lower-class males. It
was developed using data from the males in the CSDD and incorporates ideas from several other theories. It
focuses on between-individual differences (such as impulsivity) and within-individual changes (becoming
unemployed) to explain who are more likely to commit crimes. The key concept is thought to be antisocial
potential (AP), and this is defined as ‘the potential to commit antisocial acts’ (Farrington and Ttofi 2012, p.
48). It is proposed that the transition from antisocial potential to antisocial behaviour is determined by the
individual’s cognitive processes (such as decision making), that takes into account external factors such as
opportunities and victims. The ICAP theory suggests that there is only one developmental pathway, from
childhood to adulthood, and that it is dependent on the individual’s AP. The theory distinguishes between
long-term factors related to AP (impulsivity, strain, modelling and life events) and short-term factors
related to AP (motivation and situational factors). Very few individuals in the community have high AP, but
those that do are prone to commit a wide variety of antisocial and criminal acts. Analysis of the CSDD data
has found evidence of within-individual changes than can explain the relationship between
unemployment and crime. For example, males in the study committed more crime when they were
unemployed, but these were mainly offences that would bring some material gain, such as burglary or
robbery (Farrington et al. 1986). Therefore, the factor that explained the link was more likely to be the
male’s need for money, rather than other factors such as boredom (Farrington 2003b). Factors that
influence long-term AP change throughout childhood, adolescence and adulthood, with parents being
most important in early years and then declining in influence and being replaced by peers as the primary
influence.
Interactional theory
Interactional theory was first proposed by Thornberry in 1987. The theory was influenced by Thornberry
and colleagues research findings from the Rochester Youth Development Study (RYDS) and the Rochester
p. 138 Intergenerational Study (RIGS). Borrowing elements ↵ from social control theories, interactional
theory claims that a series of factors that start in early childhood affect the social bond, for example, being
born into a family that experiences socioeconomic disadvantage increases the likelihood that those
children will associate with delinquent peers and engage in delinquent behaviour. This disruption of social
bonds can cause what Thornberry, Freeman-Gallant, and Lovegrove (2009, p. 81) call ‘disorderly
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transitions’ from adolescence to adulthood. The theory considers how the dynamic interplay of a series of
developmentally-determined factors plays a role in the onset, continuation, or desistence of offending
behaviours.
Thornberry and Krohn (2019) detail three assumptions that underpin the theory. Firstly, that the factors
explaining delinquent behaviour vary according to the developmental stage of the individual; earlier life
events can also have an effect on later life events (Thornberry and Krohn 2005). Secondly, the importance
of interactional processes in the development of delinquent behaviour is emphasized: adolescents interact
in a two-way process with people such as their parents and peers and with society’s institutions, such as
their school. The nature of these interactions is influenced by the individual’s delinquent behaviour.
Thirdly, the idea of the proportionality of cause and effect is key ‘as the magnitude of the causal force
increases, so too does the likelihood of [a] magnitude of the outcome’ (Thornberry and Krohn 2019, p.
248). What this means in practice is that higher levels (or a greater number) of factors we know to be
related to delinquency increase the likelihood of delinquency. Some outcomes, like delinquency may have
many causes (called the principle of equifinality), but not all are required to produce an outcome such as
delinquency.
Thornberry and Krohn proposed that the children of antisocial parents experience troubled relationships
with their parents that are characterized by weak bonds and conflict. They propose that the parents’ own
experiences of adversity has a negative impact on their ability to parent their children. Consequently, their
children may have temperamental problems and neuropsychological problems. Over time this negative
reciprocal relationship between parent and child becomes ingrained and their lives become linked together
in a complex, but mutually reinforcing process.
Most offenders’ criminal careers are eventually curtailed, and they desist from any further offending.
Interactional theory believes that this process occurs during the transition from adolescence to adulthood:
as individuals assume the roles and responsibilities of adulthood, such as caring for children, getting
married, and working they becomes more tightly bonded to (and invested in) the traditional institutions of
society and are less likely to be involved in antisocial or criminal behaviour.
Situational action theory

Some more recent theories have begun to focus more intensely on the situation and circumstances in
which crime is more or less likely to happen. Situational Action Theory (SAT) would be an example of this.
SAT was developed through analyses of data collected for the Peterborough Adolescent Development Study
(PADS). This theory also focuses on moral rule breaking. Wikstrom (2006 p. 61) suggest that ‘people are
moved to action … by how they see their action alternatives and make their choices when confronted with
the particularities of a setting’. SAT proposes that crimes occur as a result of the interaction between two
things: people with specific crime propensities and settings with criminogenic features. The theory
therefore focuses on the interaction between the individual and their environment. SAT argues that crimes
break moral rules and what is acceptable depends on the setting and the individual. So, if your own moral
p. 139 rules ↵ correspond with the moral rules of your environment (e.g., laws) then you are less likely to
break them.
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The concept of Situational Action Theory (SAT) is a general and dynamic theory (Wikstrom 2006, 2010,
2014) that states that humans are basically rule-guided creatures who rely on shared rules of conduct to
make decisions. This concept assumes that people make their own decisions based on their own desires
and reactions to conflicts or frustrations. The SAT perspective contrasts with many criminological theories
that see offending as a result of self-interested behaviour.
SAT defines moral rules as ‘value-based rules of conduct specifying what is the right or wrong thing to do,
or not do, in response to particular motivations in particular circumstances’ (Wikström 2014, p. 76).
Although SAT was originally developed to explain the concept of moral rule-breaking in a legal context, it
can also be used to explain other types of behaviour that are not necessarily considered criminal (i.e
professional codes of conduct). The concept of crimes as an outcome of person-environment interactions
also implies that crimes cannot be fully understood by focusing on just one aspect. Understanding the
factors that contribute to the rise of crime and the ways in which it occurs is therefore important to
understand the causes of crime. For instance, it is not enough to simply state that crimes occur due to the
convergence of factors such as the likelihood of getting involved in criminal activities and the lack of
capable guardians (i.e., Routine Activities Theory). Through this process, one can then start to understand
the various factors that influence the development and the likelihood of crime. These include the
establishment and maintenance of criminogenic settings, as well as the individuals’ exposure to these.
An idea that is key to the SAT account of crime is the PEA model (P × E → A), which as Wikstrom and Treiber
(2019, p. 276) explain, suggests ‘that people’s acts of crime (A) are an outcome of a perception–choice
process (→) initiated and guided by the interaction of a person’s crime propensities (P) and criminogenic
exposure (E)’. The concept of perception-choice suggests that people and settings can be linked to crimes
via a perception–choice process. This process begins with the motivation of people, which is focused on
the opportunities that are presented to them. The various factors that influence a person’s perception-
choice process include their environment, personal interests, and actions. This filter helps determine
which action options they should pursue. This can be useful in understanding how people are motivated to
act and what kinds of rules they should follow. Unfortunately, traditional strategies such as deterrence
have failed to work. The concept of the perception-choice process (Wikstrom 2006, 2010, 2014) is
commonly used to describe the various factors that influence people’s actions and motivations. It can also
be used to identify which of these factors are most relevant to crime.
The concept of rule-breaking is a central component of SAT’s framework for understanding people’s
behaviour. It argues that people’s crime propensities are dictated by ‘(1) their law-relevant personal
morals (internalized rules of conduct and supporting moral emotions, such as shame and guilt) and (2)
their ability to exercise self-control (to withstand external inducements to act against their personal
morals).’ (Wikstrom and Treiber 2019, p. 277). The more a person’s own morals and the rules of conduct as
stated in law converge, the less likely he or she is to consider breaking them. Likewise, the stronger a
person’s self-control is, the less likely he or she is to break these rules. The stronger a person’s own
morals and the ability to self-control are, the less likely he or she is to break these rules. Conversely, those
with weak law-relevant morals and a poor ability to self-control are more prone to criminal behaviour.
p. 140 This is because these factors ↵ are the main factors that influence people’s crime propensities.
According to SAT, the development of these propensities is influenced by various factors, such as cognitive
nurturing and moral education.
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Limitations of the DLCC Approach

As we have illustrated, DLCC is a powerful way of organizing the empirical evidence and theorizing about
offending across the life-course. There are, however, criticisms of this approach that are important to
note. For example, this approach is closely aligned with positivist models that apply a scientific and causal
lens to explain crime, while neglecting more critical questions about the definitions of crime and deviance
and, further, whose interests these definitions may serve (Loader and Sparks 2007). Aligned to this, DLCC
has been criticized for is its close alignment to policy, with many prominent researchers in this area being
influential in government decisions about criminal justice (e.g., McAra and McVie 2017). Most research in
this area is based on quite restricted populations, namely Western, industrialized and democratic
countries, and predominantly White boys from the US and UK. Also, the nature of the longitudinal needed
to study human development (i.e., prospective longitudinal studies) means that results risk being out of
date by the time researchers obtain and analyse the data.
Conclusion
DLC criminology has generated significant new knowledge over the past 30 to 40 years. This has included
identifying typical patterns for the onset, prevalence, frequency and desistance of offending, as well as the
biological, individual, family, and neighbourhood/community factors that might be associated with these.
More recently the impact of political and social changes (i.e. cohort effects; Sampson and Smith 2021) on
offending across the life-course have also been documented, as have the impacts of official interventions
(e.g., arrests) on the lives of young people (McAra and McVie 2017).
Generally, the focus of DLC research has been on the development of ‘offenders’ or those who have an
elevated likelihood of committing offences in a given situation. However, the explanation of the
commission of offences has received much research attention (although see Wikstrom 2014). Future
studies should aim to identify both the development of offenders and explain the commission of offences.
The results of DLC research have been used to inform the content of developmental prevention
programmes (e.g, Augimeri et al. 2018). For example, impulsivity is associated with an increased likelihood
of later offending (Jolliffe and Farrington 2009), so these programmes aim to increase the levels of
impulsivity in young people and therefore reduce the likelihood of later offending. Generally these
programmes have been found to be successful (Farrington and Welsh 2008).
While DLC continues to flourish it is generally doing so based on researchers applying novel statistical
approaches to data that was collected many years ago. This situation has arisen as a result of a lack of
funding for prospective longitudinal studies, and this could eventually lead to DLC research becoming
irrelevant. It is essential that new accelerated longitudinal design studies with criminological focus are
launched soon to continue the evolution of this important paradigm.
Page 23 of 33
p. 141 Selected Further Reading

Cutting-edge research on this topic can be found in the Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology
(Springer). The edited Oxford Handbook of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology (Farrington, Kazemian, and
Piquero 2018) provides chapters that comprehensively review topics that could only be touched on in this chapter.
The history of developmental and life-course criminology is well summarized by Piquero (2022). A more detailed
account and comparison of the key theories in this chapter is given in McGee and Farrington (2019).
Online resources

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Notes
1
For detail about early prospective longitudinal studies in criminology see Farrington (1979).
⤴
Farrington, D. P. (1979b). Longitudinal research on crime and delinquency. In N. Morris and M. Tonry (eds), Crime and
justice, vol. 1 (pp. 289–348). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2
Farrington (2013) reviews more recent prospective longitudinal studies.
3
The number of official offences may be truncated or elevated based on processing decisions, and the number of self-
reported offences may be truncated (e.g. by forgetting/concealing) or elevated (e.g., by over-estimation/boasting).
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6. Turning over a new leaf: desistance research for a new generation

p. 146 6. Turning over a new leaf: desistance research for a new

generation
Beth Weaver, Hannah Graham and Shadd Maruna
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0006
Abstract
This chapter introduces the notion of desistance, which refers to the sustained abstinence from offending among those who
previously had engaged in patterns of criminality. Early desistance research implies how people can change and criminality is
not a permanent trait. Desistance was also a product of its time, catching fire at a particular moment in British criminology
that involved Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ Government’s criminal justice policies. The chapter explains how the potential of
intersectionality to generate new, critical insights into desistance research and theory. It references several case studies and
literature on justice practices being influenced by desistance theory.
Keywords: desistance, sustained abstinence, criminality, British criminology, New Labour Government, criminal justice
policies, justice practices, intersectionality
Introduction
Despite being an awkward word to pronounce or spell, ‘desistance’ is something of a buzzword in

criminology and criminal justice policy and practice in the UK and beyond. It essentially means the
sustained abstinence from offending among those who previously had engaged in patterns of criminality
1
(Maruna 2001). Rocque (2017) traces the term back to Thorsten Sellin (1942: 16) who wrote, ‘Most
offenders sooner or later desist from crime’. The term resurfaced in the 1990s in research around ‘criminal
careers’ (Shover 1996) or ‘crime in the life course’ (Sampson and Laub 1993). Yet, what has since become
known as ‘desistance research’ did not emerge until around the turn of the century with a smattering of
studies in the UK (e.g., Bottoms et al. 2004; Farrall and Bowling 1999; Farrall 2002; Maruna 2001; Rex
1999) and in the US (e.g., Giordano, Cernkovich, and Rudolph 2002; Laub and Sampson 2003). Prominent
Page 1 of 26
among these was the influential work by Laub and Sampson (2003) where the authors tracked down a
sample of participants from a classic ‘delinquency’ study conducted in the 1940s to see how they fared in
later life. It turns out almost all had desisted from crime despite dire predictions to the contrary.
Indeed, the fundamental message of this early desistance research was that people can (and do) change,
that criminality is not a permanent trait of individuals but rather is common, often short-lived, and
situationally driven. That such ideas no longer seem controversial 25 years later is one indication of the
success of the desistance message. At the time this research emerged, desistance was seen as a radical—
even dangerous—concept, seriously challenging the hegemonic risk orientation of much of the justice
p. 147 system. Yet, by 2010, it was claimed that ‘theorizing and research about desistance from ↵ crime is one
of the most exciting, vibrant, and dynamic areas in criminology today’ (Paternoster and Bushway 2010:
1156). Some of the excitement was about its novelty. From its origins, criminology sought to understand
the aetiology of criminal behaviour (why do they do it?). Like Matza (1964), desistance theory and research
turned this question on its head, asking instead how people stop committing crime (regardless of why they
started). This might be the more important question—especially for justice practice. Indeed, somewhat
surprisingly, desistance ideas have had particular traction for those interested in changing practices in
justice delivery. Leadership within probation, in particular, became very interested in something loosely
understood to be ‘desistance-focused’ practice (McNeill 2006).
Desistance was also a product of its time, catching fire at a particular moment in British criminology
(around the mid-1990s). Crime rates in England and Wales were growing at this time, and the politics of
crime control were truly toxic with the two major political parties competing to be the most punitive.
Tonry (2010: 388) argues that Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ Government’s criminal justice policies ‘were the
most repressive of any western country’s since the Second World War’ despite the promises of being
guided by a new thing called ‘evidence-based justice’. Desistance theory and research emerged in this
difficult context as a counter narrative; here was social scientific evidence that seemed to suggest that so-
called ‘super predators’ (a prominent 1990s concept imported from the US) can change and indeed almost
always do.
This represented not just a challenge to the punitive culture of a ‘tough on crime’ era, but was even more of
a challenge to the established ‘medical model’ of rehabilitation or ‘reform’. Indeed, from its origins,
desistance research emerged as something of a challenge to the notion of a top-down ‘correctional
treatment’ model. Trasler (1979: 315), for instance, defines spontaneous desistance as that which is ‘not to
be credited to the efficient functioning of the criminal justice system.’ Rather than looking at change from
the perspective of the institution and asking ‘what works’ in ‘curing’ or correcting those in the justice
system, desistance research centred the individual’s journey, in social context. The question animating the
research is how did they do it, and the answer for many was that they got there in spite of, rather than
because of, justice system actions (Maruna 2001). In debates around probation practice, to be ‘desistance-
focused’ became a sort of shorthand for those seeking to challenge risk-oriented, state-centric approaches
to rehabilitation and replace them with more ‘strengths-based’ (Maruna and LeBel 2003), mutual-aid-
based (Weaver and Weaver 2016) and person-centred approaches (McNeill et al. 2012).
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Unfortunately, at times in the past two decades, the excitement around desistance ideas significantly
outpaced the development of the research and theory itself, and the concept has generated legitimate
criticism from some in the field. The gist of these (mostly unpublished) critiques is that desistance
research might be ‘neo-liberal’ in its focus on agency, absolving the state or wider society of any
responsibility for desistance. Some critics might also suggest desistance research is ‘colonising’ in its
approach because it tends to focus on white, male, western and northern samples. Finally, some criticisms
have suggested that desistance research gives too much attention to ‘street crimes’ like theft and burglary,
and ignores other crimes like rape or violence against women. In short, now that desistance has become
mainstream, the once radical area of study is beginning to be seen by some as potentially part of the
problem rather than the solution.
In this chapter, we argue that desistance research has evolved in important ways well beyond the original
studies in the field. In what follows, we outline the contours of contemporary developments in desistance
scholarship that, to greater or lesser degrees, address these exact challenges listed above. First, recent
p. 148 desistance research has shifted towards ↵ a critical focus on the influence and impact of multi-
dimensional socio-structural, cultural and situational challenges. Second, the potential of
intersectionality to generate new, critical insights in desistance research and theory has been recognized,
and we have seen a diversification of both desistance researchers and research subject matter. Third, new
scholarship in desistance has expanded beyond ordinary street crime to include issues such as sexual
offending and intimate partner violence largely elided by early research. After adding detail to these
emerging areas of research, we conclude with an overview of some of the significant contributions we
believe the desistance literature has made on the wider field of criminology and criminal justice. In
particular, we review literature on how justice practices have been influenced by desistance theory,
including emerging ideas and initiatives surrounding innovative forms of justice practice. Most of all, we
review desistance theory’s contributions to conversations around ‘lived experience’ in the justice system
—perhaps the primary achievement of the past two decades of British desistance research.
Discovering Structure, Contextualizing Agency
Some critiques of desistance research relate to its apparent focus on within-individual change, or agency,
putatively neglecting the socio-structural, relational and situational contexts that shape individuals’
possibilities of action. Indeed, in leading theories of desistance, ‘personal agency looms large’ (Laub and
Sampson 2003: 280) and desisters are framed as ‘active participants in constructing their lives’ (ibid.: 281).
This impression is based on the sorts of first-person testimonies that make up the heart of desistance
research. After all, the mantra of many desisting individuals is that ‘you rehabilitate yourself’ (Harris
2005: 317). For example, one formerly incarcerated person wrote:
Although I believe people make the biggest difference, they can do little more than help you find
the desire to change; they can help you see reasons for changing. However, the real battle still
rests within the self, and the really hard work must be carried on alone (Thornton 1988: 28).
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Whilst fully honouring such accounts, newer theoretical discussions of desistance (e.g., Healy 2013; Farrall
et al. 2010; King 2013; Weaver 2015) have problematized this concept of agentic ‘choice’, drawing on
sophisticated philosophical approaches to structured agency by Margaret Archer (2000) and others.
Instead of framing desistance as a ‘choice’ (e.g., Cusson and Pinsonneault 1986), today’s growing body of
desistance research suggests that desistance is most often ‘co-produced’ (Weaver 2015; McCulloch 2020)
between individuals and those around them in an inter-connected, relational process (Barr and Christian
2019; Barry 2017). Indeed, our analysis of more recent desistance scholarship suggests that studies have
transcended the initial pre-occupation with within-individual cognitive and behavioural change to an
increased focus on:
the dynamics of social relations in enabling or constraining change;
understanding how macro socio-structural and cultural contexts influence individual desistance;
and
identifying the various structural and situational challenges people encounter—how they respond to
them and to what effect.
p. 149 ↵ This work has helped to advance a more integrated and situated analysis of desistance that
illuminates the intersections between the individual, and their socio-structural and cultural contexts.
Although relationships have long been recognized as powerful influences on desistance dynamics and
processes, early explanations primarily drew on within- and between-individual theories, including life-
course theories (Farrington 1999, Loeber and LeBlanc 1990), social learning or differential association
theories (Warr 1998; 2002), social control (Laub and Sampson 1993; 2003), and rational choice (Cusson
and Pinsonneault, 1986). Subsequently, the socio-historical and cultural context of research samples of
that era have come under increased scrutiny (Farrall 2021). Moreover, such critiques paved the way for a
more nuanced, critical, gendered, socio-structural analysis of desistance processes more broadly, and
social relations in particular (see Farrall et al. 2022). This section showcases how newer desistance
research draws attention to the plurality of, and diversity within and across, different forms of social
relations, how they are shaped by diverse socio-cultural and economic contexts and changes, and how
they in turn shape both offending and desistance.
While cross-national comparative desistance studies remain rare, this work illuminates points of
similarity and divergence, in distinct socio-cultural, economic and justice contexts and their effects (Barry
2017; Fernando 2021; Österman 2018; Segev 2020). Österman’s (2021: 21) cross-national analysis of
women’s desistance in Sweden and England, for example, demonstrates the importance of such situated
analyses by revealing ‘how narratives may be structurally mediated by wider social, cultural, penal—and
gendered—conditions and processes’. Österman’s (2018, 2021) research shows how different social
welfare and penal cultures, underpinned by distinct values and norms, shape women’s experiences of both
desistance and justice systems. She demonstrates how Sweden’s socio-democratic values result in
different responses to, and outcomes for justice-experienced women in the form of ‘ladders’, denoting
infrastructures for change, opportunities for social inclusion and civic participation, and the accessibility
of supports to overcome the internal and external challenges they face. In contrast, accounts of such
opportunities and supports for change were comparatively absent in women’s narratives in the more neo-
Page 4 of 26
liberal, individualistic and punitive English culture she researched (Österman 2018). Such studies not only
mark a departure from earlier desistance studies that focused on individual behaviours, isolated from
wider social forces, but they illuminate the influences of different socio-cultural and politico-economic
systems on people’s immediate social environments and in turn, individual outcomes (see also Farrall
2021; Segev 2020).
The impact of enabling wider socio-economic contexts can be ‘mediated by the opportunities and
constraints within [people’s] … immediate environment’, as illustrated in Healy’s (2016: 54) research.
Conducted during Ireland’s so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ era prior to the economic crash, Healy found that,
although many in Ireland benefited from labour market expansions and generous welfare supports, her
participants were excluded from these gains. As she notes, ‘the majority were residing in communities that
were blighted by poverty, educational disadvantage, chronic unemployment … they encountered drug use,
violence and criminality in their neighbourhoods on a daily basis’ (ibid.: 53). How people navigate and
respond to the structural constraints of their immediate social environment has similarly been the focus of
an emerging body of research. Bell and colleagues (2021), for example, show how distinct subcultural
norms, shaped by socio-economic conditions of two neighbourhoods in Northern Ireland, were
p. 150 particularly influential in impacting offending and desistance patterns. They observed that ↵ ‘the
neighbourhoods appeared to house a criminogenic sub-culture … in which particular types of crime had
become commonplace and tolerated by some residents’ (ibid.: 819). Widespread availability and tolerance
of drugs within the neighbourhoods, for example, created particular situational challenges and, with
limited employment opportunities, dealing represented an accessible and gainful means for offsetting
financial constraints. Where certain types of offending were deemed acceptable (they had not harmed local
residents) those returning from prison did not encounter the stigmatization or marginalization
experienced by those whose offending was deemed unacceptable, many of whom faced threats of
paramilitary violence. Such threats in turn adversely affected their mental health and recourse to
substance misuse, and restricted their geographical and social mobility and access to social supports. Thus
what Bell et al. (2021) demonstrate is how subcultural norms and values within a given neighbourhood also
affect people’s abilities and opportunities to desist. Such studies, bring into sharp relief not only the well
documented structural challenges that people face, but also the situational constraints they must confront
and navigate in their daily efforts to desist.
While some people may be able to overcome or resist the pressures they face, others may not be ready to do
so, and for yet others, despite their intentions, the challenges they face overwhelm them. However, as
Nugent and Schinkel (2016) observe, although these structural challenges to desistance are widely
acknowledged by research, the challenges of maintaining desistance over time are not. The authors
suggest this may be, partly, a product of retrospective studies with those who have successfully desisted
(see also Hunter and Farrall 2018; Johns 2018). Rather than being a ‘straightforwardly positive outcome’,
Nugent and Schinkel (2016: 569) argue, the ‘experience of “going straight” can be painful and lead to
limited lives’ characterized by ‘isolation and loneliness; goal failure; and, increasingly a lack of hope’ (p.
572). This occurs because of their efforts to avoid contact with former friends, and situational stressors, or
due to collateral consequences of convictions on opportunities such as employment, or socio-economic
liminality characterizing contemporary youth transitions, all of which combine to produce a sense of
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hopelessness. Perhaps then, it is no wonder that people trying to desist often press the so-called ‘f*ck it!’
button (Halsey et al. 2017: 1041) in the absence of effective and timely support, or in the face of persistent
targeting by the police (Schinkel et al. 2019).
Indeed, our discussion here omits an obvious structural impact on the lives of those seeking to desist:
criminal justice involvement itself. Of all the so-called ‘risk factors’ facing justice-involved individuals,
desistance research suggests that the stigma and collateral consequences of justice involvement is by far
the most damaging and difficult (McNeill et al. 2012). Space does not permit a full review of the impact of
imprisonment upon desistance (see Maruna and Toch 2005), but suffice it to say that desistance research
has, since its origins, been twinned with the literature on ex-prisoner reintegration (see LeBel and Maruna
2012; Miller 2021). Both areas of research have, by definition, centred the impact of labelling, stigma, and
the criminogenic effects of punishment in the understanding of life course outcomes (Maruna and LeBel
2010).
Desistance and Diversity
Some of the most formative studies in the early desistance literature are notable for the homogeneity of
their research samples, with Laub and Sampson’s (2003) sample of Boston males possibly being the most
p. 151 extreme in this regard. Additionally, some of the ↵ best known findings of this research—pithily
summarized as the benefits of ‘a steady job and the love of a good woman’—can sound like something
from the conformist 1950s. (Indeed, that was the era in which the men in that particular research sample
came of age.) More recently, there has been a diversification of voices in desistance literature and an
exploration of diverging paths taken by those with different perspectives, though this remains a
comparatively nascent area of research (Graham and McNeill 2019).
Race, ethnicity and desistance

With notable exceptions, there is limited research in the UK exploring the intersections between race,
racialization, criminalization and desistance, resulting in calls to diversify desistance research (Graham
and McNeill 2019). Recently, some scholars have used the concept of intersectionality as a conceptual lens
to better contextualize lived experiences and desistance processes of people of colour and minoritized
ethnic communities. Fader and Traylor (2015), for example, use intersectionality to highlight the
interactive impacts of racial and criminal stigma on futures, identities and social bonds, particularly in
contexts with stark disparities in patterns of mass incarceration and mass probation/supervision. They
contend that:
an intersectional perspective that examines the experiences of individuals occupying unique

positions on various dimensions of social inequality, such as race, gender, social class, age, sexual
orientation, physical ability, and incarceration could bring together prior research in a way that
illuminates new pathways for advancing desistance theory (Fader and Traylor 2015: 255).
Page 6 of 26
Glynn (2016: 27) also advocates an intersectional approach. His research ‘clearly indicates that “race” as a
single category of explanation for the difficulties Black men face in relation to their desistance is limiting
and in need of revision’, instead advocating that applying an intersectional approach reveals ‘issues
associated with race, masculinity, poverty and social disorganisation’, offering ‘a more complex and
rounded assessment of how the lived reality of Black men will impact on their desistance’. In other words,
there is a need to recognize the fullness of their lives and lived experiences, not just compartmentalized
racialized versions within the penal sphere. Taking an intersectional approach foregrounds the civil and
human rights of people of colour and minoritized ethnic communities who can produce their own
‘counter-narratives’ of desistance to re-story the past, challenge present racialized typographies as
‘criminal’, and reimagine futures (Glynn 2016, 2021).
Calverley’s (2013, 2016) research examines the dynamics underpinning the broader process of desistance
for thirty-three males of Indian, Bangladeshi and Black and dual heritage ethnic origin, identifying
distinct variations in their desistance pathways, particularly at the level of family and community. For
Indian participants, desistance was influenced by their families’ ‘aspirational values’ and expectations,
and, through their families, by greater access to economic resources and employment opportunities,
which in turn influenced the development of new non-offending identities, structured around work.
Bangladeshi participants’ families, while occupying a less favourable socio-economic position, showed a
willingness to offer support, acceptance, and forgiveness connected to their religious values. This
influenced the development of non-offending identities around the adoption of expected roles and familial
responsibilities, and the beliefs, value, norms, and expectations of their religions. Calverley argues that for
p. 152 men in both of these ethnic groups, desistance was typically a more ↵ collective experience involving
their families’ active support. Contrastingly, Black and dual heritage participants’ experiences were more
individualized and isolated. For them desistance generally necessitated their disengagement from previous
relationships, developing a structured lifestyle and independently initiating steps towards ‘self-
improvement’. As Calverley observes, the comparative invisibility of their efforts to change limited their
capacity to convey and be recognized for that change, which they sought to counter through participation
in training, education, and generative activities. This suggests the existence of what Calverley (2013: 1)
refers to as different ‘cultures of desistance’ among different ethnic groups.
Calverley emphasizes that ethnicity indexes significant structural and cultural differences which shape
individuals’ social environments. Particularly, differences in structural location, cultural expectations, and
practices influence individuals’ identities and shape the availability of different forms and characters of
masculine identity available to desisters. While ‘the effects of racism played a formative role upon the[ir]
initial criminal careers … the effects of racism upon desistance … produced two divergent sets of
experiences’ (Calverley 2016: 141). Black and dual heritage desisters encountered more direct effects, and
more frequently reported being stopped and searched by the police than Indian and Bangladeshi
participants, for example, which undermined their emerging non-offending identity and generated a
sense of shame and stigma. However, the ‘interventionist collective collaborations between desisters and
their family and community’ (ibid.: 142) effectively shielded Indian and Bangladeshi desisters from direct
effects of racism, by facilitating employment, and access to pro-social networks and communities which
structured their time and the places and spaces they occupied, thus militating against discrimination in
the labour market and reducing exposure to surveillance by the police. In contrast to Glynn (2013),
Page 7 of 26
Calverley found little evidence ‘that the development of their desistance was contingent upon a process of
identity transformation enabling the establishment of a politically self-aware racial identity’ (ibid.: 143).
As a response to the issues and insights outlined here, there have been calls for specialist services and
supports for Black and minority ethnic people, which are attentive and responsive to their lived
experiences (Robertson and Wainright 2020). Whilst that offers a starting point, far more social change
and anti-racism efforts are needed.
Religious diversity and desistance

While religion and spirituality have not been central units of analysis in many desistance studies (but see
Giordano et al. 2007; Maruna, Wilson, and Curran 2006; Schroeder and Frana 2009), they have nonetheless
emerged as salient factors for some people in initiating, enabling, and sustaining change (e.g., Calverley
2013; Hallett and McCoy 2015).
DiPietro and Dickinson (2021) recently explored the role of Islam in the desistance narratives of four men
with extensive histories of crime and violence, situating their analysis within broader socio-historical
contexts:
For each man, war and extreme religious persecution consequent to the ethnic cleansing
campaigns targeting Muslims in Bosnia provided the background against which his identity,
sense of personal agency, and the discourses of masculinity and success were forged (p. 653).
Accordingly, they showed how this wider context influenced their self-perceptions, their views on the
world, and how both shaped their offending. The men’s faith became a mechanism for self-
p. 153 transformation and behavioural guidance and offered a ‘toolkit’ for ↵ reform. Specifically, Islam
enabled these men to reconfigure their masculine identities, to make sense of the past trauma they had
endured, to apprehend the world differently, and forge a new way of being. Each man cited their newly-
found commitment to the religion as the principal motivation underpinning their desistance, providing
them with a new lens through which to relate to others. Conversion altered their definitions of success and
perceptions of what it meant to be a man. Their faith also enabled them to reinterpret their pasts and
imbue them with a different meaning no longer limited to performances of masculinity influenced by
culturally hegemonic norms (DiPietro and Dickinson 2021):
Violent criminality and aggressive posturing was necessary to prove one’s manhood prior to their
religious transformation, the new measure of manhood was self-mastery and self-control,
demonstrated through adherence to the principles of Islam (p. 657).
British research by Calverley (2013) also found that the (re)discovery of Islamic faith was a significant
feature of desistance for some British Bangladeshi participants. Embracing Islam provided opportunities
for the establishment of an alternative non-offending identity but, in contrast to DiPietro and Dickinson’s
(2021) sample, one which was contiguous with their past selves, and thus represented a discovery or return
Page 8 of 26
to their ‘true self’ (see relatedly Armstrong 2016; Maruna et al. 2006 on Christianity). Like DiPietro and
Dickinson (2021), however, Calverley suggested that Islamic teachings provided his sample members a
moral compass, and a resource for emotion coping.
Similarly, Giordano et al. (2007) found that desisters’ newfound commitment to Christianity enabled the
development of different forms of social capital in terms of the consolidation or reparation of existing
relationships (see also Schroeder and Frana 2009). This particularly seems to be the case when such
relationships reinforced or affirmed their religious commitments, and the development of new
relationships and social networks through affiliation to religious institutions or faith groups (Holligan and
McLean 2018). However, the availability of these specific supports inherent in religious or spiritual
communities depends to an extent on the willingness of faith-based communities and institutions to offer
support to desisters, and on a person’s receptivity to, and experiences of, engaging with them (for a
nuanced analysis of this dynamic, see Armstrong 2016).
Together, these studies emphasize the significance of different faith traditions to some desisters in
processes of change, which can be reinforced through participation in religious practices and
communities. Conversely, however, participation in religious observances or externalized faith alone, may,
for some, be insufficient to sustain change (Armstrong 2016), highlighting the need to understand the
wider social-structural context.
Gender and desistance

Gender differences in desistance have a longer history. A considerable body of mostly quantitative studies
have sought to explore whether the ‘factors’ associated with desistance by men (e.g. marriage, friendship
groups, parenthood, employment) are equally influential in supporting women’s desistance (for a review,
see Rodermond et al. 2016). Unsurprisingly, findings in this regard have been conflicting, since people’s
experiences of such social relations, their quality and nature, vary according to context. While such studies
can provide an overview of general patterns, they are limited in the extent to which they can explain the
underlying mechanisms and processes that shape outcomes.
Qualitative, critical feminist scholarship in the last decade has added nuance and texture to our
p. 154 understandings of how women experience both desistance and their ↵ contact with the justice system,
situated in the context of their wider lives, and the socio-cultural, politico-economic processes that shape
them (e.g. Barr 2019; Farrall 2021; Österman 2018; Rutter and Barr 2021; Sharpe 2015). This developing
body of research suggests that women’s pathways into offending are distinct from men’s. Such pathways
include experiences of, exposure to, and the interrelationships between, poverty, unemployment,
homelessness, intimate partner and sexual violence and abuse, mental health difficulties, and problematic
substance use (Barr 2019; Gomm 2016). Such factors often underpin their repeat criminalization,
compounding the challenges they face (Barr 2019), and frustrating efforts to desist (Wright 2017). Overall,
research reveals that women’s desistance is closely linked to personal relationships, to acquiring stable
accommodation, and to recovery from addiction and poor mental health (e.g. Barr 2019; Gomm 2016,
Rutter and Barr 2021).
Page 9 of 26
How women experience these processes, and how they shape desistance is often distinct from men
(Gålnander 2019) and may differ by life stages (Sharpe 2015) and social contexts (Österman 2018). For
example, for many women, intimate or romantic relationships, particularly with men, are
‘overwhelmingly negative and linked to both the beginnings and continuation of offending’ (Barr 2019:
90) with drug use and exposure to intimate partner violence a ‘common experience’ (ibid.: 92). Thus, while
participation in stable and supportive relationships can enhance women’s self-efficacy (Barr 2019), for
many, desistance can be encouraged by disengagement from intimate partners and even friendship groups
(Österman 2018).
This research suggests that women’s desistance aspirations involve desires to get ‘clean’ from addictions;
to acquire one’s own home; to find work; to give back; to become a mother or become a ‘better’ one
(Wright 2017: 29; see also Barr 2019; Hart 2017, Sered and Norton-Hawk 2021), yet realizing these aims is
often impossible (Barr 2019). Different socio-economic, political and cultural contexts shape women’s
experiences of the justice system and of desistance, not least in relation to the provision of adequate
financial assistance, access to stable and safe housing, and pathways into and opportunities for
employment (Österman 2018; Sered and Norton-Hawk 2021). In neo-liberal societies, a responsibilizing
penal discourse and practice results in a focus on individual choice and personal responsibility,
overlooking or obscuring the numerous gendered personal, relational, economic and structural challenges
women encounter (Barr 2019; Hart 2017; Rutter and Barr 2021; Sered and Norton-Hawk 2021). Internalized
perceptions that criminalized women have transgressed gendered socio-cultural expectations of the ‘good
woman’ engenders shame that can compound the stigma of criminalization. This can create negative
impacts for women’s self-image, personal and social identities, relational networks, and ultimately
desistance (Gålnander 2020; Rutter and Barr 2021). Thus, patriarchal forces in the wider society can
magnify the difficulties of women’s desistance (Fredriksson and Gålnander 2020).
Expanding the Scope of Desistance Research
Traditionally, the focus of desistance research has been on samples of individuals involved in fairly low-
level, but persistent forms of ‘street crime’—typically excluding individuals convicted of white collar,
sexual, domestic, or terror-related offences on the grounds that such crimes were sufficiently unique to
p. 155 merit special treatment ↵ (see Maruna 2001). The past decade has seen a distinct shift in this regard
and, in particular, a proliferation of studies involving people convicted of sex offences (e.g., Hulley 2016;
Kara and Blasko 2016; see also Blagden and Winders, this volume), and, although less developed, intimate
partner violence (e.g., Morran 2013). We highlight both below.
Desistance from sexual offending

Studies of the process of desistance from sex offending are often analysed through the lens of theories of
desistance from ‘ordinary’ street crime—and while there are similarities, there are also important
differences. McAlinden and colleagues (2016) found that the social attachments most closely linked to
desistance from other types of crimes (e.g., stable employment and strong personal relationships) have
ambiguous relationships with desistance from sexual violence. While both work and relationships are
Page 10 of 26
typically central to non-offending identities, this was not in the more linear sense suggested by wider
desistance studies. Many of those desisting from sex offences described strong attachments to work and
family preceding their offending which were often lost post-conviction, and yet they were able to desist
nonetheless (McAlinden et al. 2016). Of course, people with convictions for sex offending face significant
obstacles to obtaining employment and relationships (Harris 2014; Hulley 2016), with many describing a
life of social isolation and a sense of being permanently stigmatized (Farmer et al. 2011; Harris 2014).
Research on individuals convicted of sex offences, and those with high profile convictions more broadly
(Liem and Weggemans 2018), documents the pervasiveness of structural obstacles to employment,
housing and relationships resulting from social stigma, societal attitudes, and penal practices (Huebner, et
al. 2019):
Structural stigma perpetuates and worsens a stigmatized status because of social institutions that
enforce and reinforce … differentiation and discrimination…. When institutions implement
policies to target or limit the opportunities of a group, they are potentially introducing new or
amplifying social stigma (p. 717).
Indeed various analyses of contemporary approaches to the management of sex offenders in the UK
observe that it is principally characterized by restrictions, surveillance, enforcement, and compulsory
treatment—all of which might constrain opportunities for offending but also undermine reintegration and
social participation (Levenson and Cotter 2005; McAlinden 2005; Burchfield and Mingus 2008; Weaver and
Barry 2014).
A sense of being a part of a social group appears significant for desistance from sex offending (Farmer et al.
2011) and this seems to be an emerging pattern across the research. Walker and colleagues (2020: 3659)
emphasize the importance of more general family support rather than intimate or marital types of
relationships. They argue that for those convicted of sex crimes:
[i]f families remain supportive of offenders throughout the gruelling legal proceedings, despite
the fact that they may also be subject to the stigma associated with a conviction for sexual offense,
this may be indicative of strong social bonds between the individual and his family … established
prior to the offense, and they may be the last source of support remaining for the individual.
Kras (2021) found that despite experiencing social exclusion, participation in treatment or groupwork
programmes also afforded a sense of community, otherwise absent, and affirmed cognitive shifts and
identity change. For others, participation in religious communities represented a mechanism of inclusion,
p. 156 a source of social connectedness, and ↵ an opportunity to experience forgiveness and redemption
(Harris et al. 2017). Those desisting from sex offending also appear to experience internal shifts in the form
of attitudinal changes including increases in awareness of the impact of their offending (Farmer et al. 2011)
and empathy for their victims (Harris 2014; Hulley 2016; Kras 2021).
Page 11 of 26
Desistance from intimate partner violence

Research into desistance from intimate partner violence (IPV), or domestic abuse more broadly, represents
another emerging body of work. Existing studies, while generating important insights, have a number of
limitations. These include a reliance on small samples comprised of men (though see Giordano et al. 2015),
who have committed IPV, rather than other forms of domestic abuse (Walker et al. 2018), and who have
participated in treatment. These limitations tend to reflect the challenges of participant recruitment and
the measurement of desistance in this domain (an equally difficult challenge for sexual offending).
Longitudinal studies, while effective in measuring and analysing change over time, are—in this field—
limited by the problems of attrition, who participates in follow-up studies, and the length of time between
follow-up studies (Walker et al. 2013). Nonetheless, there are some clear patterns emerging about the
desistance pathways among men who have perpetrated IPV, which include within-individual changes and
interpersonal adjustments and supports.
Giordano and colleagues’, (2015) US based study comprised a mixed sample of 89 young adults, with an
average age of 25, who had desisted for over a year (average 3.2 years). For this sample, successful
desistance was associated with ‘articulated relationship goals and associated shifts in their everyday
conduct within the relationships that likely increased their chances for long-term success’ (ibid: 345).
Indeed, 90 per cent of desisters in their sample referred to relationship-based changes, focusing on three
areas: changed perspectives towards the use of violence; changes in relationship behaviours underpinning
conflict situations, including infidelity and negative forms of communication, and a move towards more
open forms of communication; and changes in how they approached developing relationships and
partners.
Walker and colleagues (2018) draw on an analysis of the narratives of 13 male desisters, 9 male persisters,
9 programme facilitators, and 7 female survivors to shed insight into the process of primary desistance
from IPV through an analysis of self-reported lifestyles. Their sample is older than that of Giordano et al.
(2015), with the mean age of 38 for the desisting sample. Learning and finding a ‘new way of being’
appeared to be a central tenet of the desistance narratives, underpinned by enhanced self-awareness and
an understanding of the antecedents and consequences of their behaviour. Early desisters made certain
behavioural and cognitive changes to prevent violence. These included the need to reframe their
interpretation of events, resulting in a better understanding of triggering situations and more awareness
of others’ perspectives. It also meant reorganising and changing lifestyles principally by removing or more
effectively managing the kinds of life stressors that could exacerbate risk of IPV.
Moving beyond within-individual changes, Walker et al. (2018) emphasize the significance of external
support in signalling what needs to change, and how change can be achieved and sustained, both within
the group work setting (see also Morran 2013) and in the form of support and encouragement from others.
Walker et al. (2018) identified that sharing of experiences and being challenged by peers was particularly
influential in enabling men to recognize their behaviour as wrong. Over time, when those men take
p. 157 ↵ on the role of supporting newer members, this has the effect of certifying their own change
processes. Outside of the treatment/programme context, support and encouragement from others, and
particularly partners, appears to be influential in encouraging men to maintain being violence free, and
Page 12 of 26
reinforces that sense of self as changed. In a similar study, Morran (2013), likewise, found strong support
for the mutual aid aspects of group treatment experiences with those in early stages of desistance looking
to others who had made changes in their behaviours as role models.
Desistance and Innovations in Justice Practices
Part of the appeal of early desistance research was the implications the research potentially had for
‘assisting’ or ‘supporting’ the practice of reintegration. In summarizing the evidence, various scholars
have delineated key principles for desistance-based practice in this regard. Anderson (2016) argues that
‘bearing witness’ to desistance means recognizing the textured realities of people’s lives and treating
them with humanity (Anderson 2016). Likewise, McNeill and colleagues (2012) distil the ‘lessons’ of
desistance research down to the following: respecting individuality and human dignity; being realistic
about lapses and acknowledging the pains of desistance while sustaining hope; working with and through
relationships to support change; recognizing social context and building social capital; and minding our
(professional) language (McNeill et al. 2012).
Perhaps the key contribution of desistance work has been around who ‘does’ rehabilitation. Departing
from a top-down ‘correctional’ model where agents of the state ‘reform’ people’s ‘criminal thinking’,
desistance research has highlighted the much more important role of individuals, families, communities
and civil society organizations in the change process. These insights have encouraged a shift from ‘deficit
focused’ practices to a greater awareness of people’s strengths and to the social and relational contexts
through which desistance occurs (Weaver 2013a). In this vein, McNeill (2006: 46) proposed that ‘offender
management services need to think of themselves less as providers of correctional treatment (that belongs
to the expert) and more as supporters of desistance processes (that belong to the desister)’ (McNeill 2006:
46). By necessity, then, promoting desistance means transcending a focus on isolated individuals and
addressing the social opportunities and obstacles that can help or hinder the process (see Farrall 2002). In
order to take desistance research seriously, individuals need to be understood in the context of their
relationships with families and communities (or lack thereof), with a recognition that both social and
professional relationships are central to the process of change (Weaver 2013a).
Many desistance-oriented developments in the justice sector might be broadly conceptualized as co-
productive in orientation, in bringing differently situated actors together, and in recognizing the
contributions that people with lived and living experience can make in supporting similarly situated
others. Such practices have encouraged, for example, the development of peer support (McCulloch 2020)
and peer mentoring initiatives (Buck 2020), the development of self-help (Dwyer and Maruna 2011) and
mutual aid groups (Weaver and Weaver 2016), service user forums (Weaver et al. 2019), and User Voice
Prison and Community Councils (Schmidt 2020).
There has been, then, a growing recognition of more community-oriented and innovative ways of enabling
desistance which do not conform to a traditional systemic preoccupation with correctional programming.
p. 158 Some are based on familiar ways of enabling ↵ human development and change, whereas others are
more unorthodox such as arts-based interventions (see Graham and White 2015, 2016; Graham 2012).
Creative arts have a long tradition in justice contexts, yet, in the last decade, much of the scholarship
Page 13 of 26
around the arts in imprisonment has taken an explicitly desistance ‘lens’ (e.g. Cheliotis et al. 2014; but see
Caulfield and Simpson 2019 on the warning not to infer causal impact from such interventions). Insights
from some of the more innovative arts-based initiatives, involving people with convictions, highlight the
importance of hospitality, generativity, peer support, solidarity, collaboration, space for dialogue, and
belonging (Parsons 2018; Urie et al. 2019).
Studies on sports and physical exercise have likewise utilized a desistance frame, exploring the influences
of sport involvement on personal wellbeing, behaviour change, identity, relationships and hope (e.g., Kay
and Mason 2019; Meek 2019). Jump (2021) for example, explores the desistance-promoting potential of
boxing for working class men, critically analysing intersectionality and precarity in research participant
narratives. She observes how boxing can be time-consuming and habit-forming, offering positive role
models, a sense of community or kinship, and informal mechanisms of social control, with participants
saying it ‘keeps them off the streets’ and away from illegitimate violence such as retaliation and revenge
(Jump 2021):
It is helpful in reducing barriers to engagement and in building relationships among segregated

communities, and I commend boxing in the way it creates a family structure for people who may
not have that in their lives. Furthermore … many of those interviewed discussed how exercise
contributed to their feelings of increased self-esteem. The sport also gave participants a sense of
belonging, loyalty, and support, and members often discussed how peers and trainers in the gym
acted as second parents or brothers and sisters (Jump 2021: 170).
Importantly, her analysis of boxing is attentive to hegemonic masculinities and a need to understand, and
sometimes challenge, the dominance of hyper-masculinity in the gym and instead encourage re-framing
of boxing in more inclusive ways.
Other recent developments in desistance-focused practice range from considering how technology can be
used to support desistance (Morris and Graham 2019), through to how social entrepreneurship and social
cooperative structures of employment might collaboratively enable desistance (Weaver 2016; Gibbon and
Rutter 2021). Moreover, recent reviews of horticultural and environmental initiatives have conceptualized
how some of these have enhanced social capital and positive relationships; identity transformation;
mental health; education engagement; and employment prospects in ‘green jobs’ (Graham and White
2015; DelSesto 2022).
Whilst recognizing the potential for such engagements, research on these creative initiatives has also
recognized the potential for paradoxical outcomes, and numerous questions remain. What kinds of
reckoning are needed for more community involvement in such initiatives, given the reality that
communities that are not always welcoming and positive forces? How can desistance-oriented initiatives
seek to combat stigma without meaningfully seeking to change the very structures that led to that stigma
in the first place? Are some of the emerging creative initiatives in jeopardy of becoming what Cheliotis
(2014) calls ‘decorative justice’—masking penal harms and systems with ‘good news’ stories and claims of
care and benevolence? Prison systems, in particular, can co-opt desistance into their own agendas as a
Page 14 of 26
form of public relations. As such, Graham and White (2016) differentiate between creative and innovative
initiatives predicated on an emancipatory ethos and visions of truly different futures, from those that do
no more than accommodate and decorate the status quo.
p. 159 Conclusions: Lived Experience as a Social Movement
Contemporary desistance research appears, then, to be attempting to move away from some of the
shortcomings of earlier work on the topic. In particular, newer research has sought to re-balance the focus
on agency and choice with a more sophisticated understanding of the role of structure and culture on
agentic change. It has sought to understand a wider diversity of pathways to change, with an emphasis on
the role of gender, race, ethnicity and religious background. Likewise, it has sought to expand and diversify
the research lens beyond ‘street crimes’ to include previously excluded types of harm such as sexual and
domestic violence. Finally, we have highlighted some of the justice innovations that have been inspired by
desistance research. We conclude this chapter by foregrounding perhaps one of the most significant
legacies of the desistance agenda. An emphasis on lived experience in the desistance scholarship in the UK
and Ireland and internationally has put people at the centre. In short, if the principal contribution of
desistance research is the understanding that people can change, given the circumstances and supports to
do so, then people who have ‘been there, done that’ are well situated for the rest of us to learn with and
from.
This centring of the voices (‘lived experience’) of desisting individuals has helped to foreground things
that actually matter to those in desistance processes. Unsurprisingly, these may differ from programmatic
and systemic priorities and notions of ‘progression’ in the risk framework. Such developments have
fostered better insight and recognition of achievements and normative expectations that others (who have
not been criminalized, with the collateral impacts on rights and citizenship that entails) may take for
granted. For instance, research has explored the personal and symbolic importance of attaining
‘desistance credentials’, like a passport, driver’s licence, acceptance into or graduation from university or
college, and so on (Maruna 2012; Coyle 2019; Hernandez et al. 2022). Participants in Todd-Kvam and
Todd-Kvam’s (2022: 924) research on desistance experiences in Norway describe a sense of freedom and
new horizons that can come from achieving such official markers of competence and citizenship:
Yesterday I kind of did the biggest job of my life. And it was applying for a passport for the first
time in my life, I haven’t had a passport. Like I couldn’t travel any further than Denmark. And last
year … I submitted my application and I have from then until yesterday been sending all the
information, everything I need. Because this is the first time I can say, ‘I am a human being’. I
have a passport, I have an ID…. It is a feat for me. (Dag, quoted in Todd-Kvam and Todd-Kvam
2022: 924).
Events like getting a passport might be seen as peripheral issues by system actors, or even framed
negatively by some through a risk lens (e.g., making the person a ‘flight risk’). Yet, by foregrounding
desister perspectives, the value of these ‘desistance credentials’ can be contextualized as part of a process
of human development, of reintegration, and of belonging (Cherney and Fitzgerald 2016; McNeill 2016).
Page 15 of 26
In short, the centring of lived experience in desistance research has had an ‘unfamiliarizing’ and
‘unsettling’ impact upon the dominant assumptions that ‘professionals’ have a monopoly on knowledge
and expertise (Fredriksson and Gålnander 2020). In the early years of desistance scholarship, there was a
lingering sense of desistance defining people by what they are not, by what they are ending and leaving, by
p. 160 what they have been hindered and harmed by. These are real issues worthy of consideration. ↵ Yet,
their emphasis may have obscured more diverse issues which are salient in narrative and experiential
accounts. There are few social and institutional contexts more laden with inequalities and power
imbalances than criminal justice contexts and penal communication about people with convictions.
Desistance as an area of inquiry has seen expanses and shifts in epistemology. Who can know, whose
voices are heard, the legitimacy and prominence afforded to lived/living experience, are now more central
considerations, alongside changes in the language of how experience and expertise are framed (see Earle et
al., this volume). This should not be overstated as being a finished result. Orchestrated poorly, efforts to
centre people with lived experience can lead to feelings of exploitation and co-optation (Booth and
Harriott 2021). Indeed, Táíwò (2022) critiques certain instrumental forms of deference to lived experience,
where ‘being-in-the-room privilege’ of including a select few individuals with lived experience may help
in some ways and, in other ways, it can sanitize and distract from the responsibilities of the more powerful
people and institutions who are including and deferring to them. ‘Individual heroes’ of an oppressed group
may become prominent voices (which is valid and celebrated), while powerful others who defer to them
may be afforded cover to abdicate responsibility for substantive action about the ‘trauma politics’ which
still defines that group by their suffering and traumatic experiences, much more than their aspirations,
capital, and humanity (Táíwò 2022).
Epistemic participation is critical. Our acknowledgement here is of the inherent worth in making space,
choosing proximity, sharing and giving up power, ‘passing the mic’, and leaving some ‘places at the
table’ (or indeed on building better tables). Services, conferences, training, publications, parliamentary
inquiries, practice collaborations and so on have very much benefited from contributions informed by lived
experience. Alongside academic accounts, narrative accounts of desistance and interrogation of desistance
literatures by those who have lived it, offer perceptive resources to aid learning in higher education and
2
professional development. Some progress has been made in recognizing plurality of expertise, with
important insights being offered by those with lived experience and other forms of experience—be it
academic experience, professional experience, familial experience, or all of the above (see Weaver and
Weaver 2013; Maguire 2021; Binnall 2022). More published accounts are amplifying the multi-faceted
nature of what it is like to be a ‘professional ex-’, a ‘wounded healer’, or a practitioner or researcher with
lived experience, negotiating identities and navigating power dynamics (Hart et al. 2020; Honeywell 2021;
Buck et al. 2022).
If there is one thing that we as desistance scholars are convinced of, it is that responsivity to individuals
and specialization of justice system responses is, on its own, not enough. One of the continuities of
desistance scholarship is to hold our gaze on the socio-structural locus and macro-political influences on
crime and justice. If listening to lived experience does nothing to change the material and social-structural
conditions which gave rise to those experiences, and, if the same experiences of the same issues are being
heard years later without anything having changed, then there are substantial questions to be asked of
those with the power to act. Yet, first person testimony is at the heart of any social movement—from the
Page 16 of 26
feminist movement to the movement to anti-racist activism. Mobilizing a social movement around
desistance experiences has become a nascent area of desistance scholarship and activism building on these
p. 161 legacies ↵ (Maruna 2017; Glynn 2021). After all, social movements may be one of the only known ways
to make genuine structural and cultural change on a societal level (Maruna 2017). Such ambitions are
certainly grandiose but they may also be necessary to achieve the sorts of reintegration outcomes
advocated in desistance scholarship. As Hart and colleagues (2020: 61) put it, ‘desistance is a societal
process as much as a personal journey or a criminal justice issue.’ Desistance scholarship teaches us that if
we want people to change, we need to change society.

The ground-breaking essays in Hart and van Ginneken’s (2017) New Perspectives on Desistance represented a major
turning point for critical desistance research and remain among the best examples of contemporary, critical research
on desistance. Those interested in further exploring the role of social factors in desistance should refer to the book,
Offending and Desistance: The Importance of Social Relations (Weaver, 2015) and Farrall, Bottoms and Shapland’s
(2010) article on ‘Social Structures and Desistance from Crime.’ Those interested in newer developments around
diversity and intersectionality should see Barr’s (2019) book Desisting Sisters, Calverley’s Cultures of Desistance, and
Graham and McNeill’s (2019) chapter on ‘Diversifying Desistance Research’. Finally, the article ‘Desistance as a Social
Movement’ (Maruna 2017) further develops the case for moving desistance research away from its individual focus and
toward a wider, socio-cultural perspective (see Reuben Miller’s award-winning 2021 book Halfway Home for a work
that realizes this vision in the American context).
Online resources

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Notes
1
The British criminologist Gordon Trasler (1979) attributed the introduction of the term ‘desistance’ into criminology
to the eminent American scholar Marvin Wolfgang, writing in the 1960s, and indeed Wolfgang is arguably one of the
fathers of developmental or life course criminology with his ground-breaking longitudinal studies of birth cohorts and
crime. Yet, Rocque (2017) has identified several earlier uses of the term, most prominently by Wolfgang’s mentor
Thorsten Sellin. Of course, social scientists like Goring (1919) and Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck (1940) were describing
the related concept of ‘maturational reform’ even earlier.
2
For example, see the first-person accounts in Special Issue collections like ‘Desistance, social justice and lived
experience’ in the Journal of Prisoners on Prison, edited by Maier, Ricciardelli and Maruna (2022) and ‘The realities of
crime, punishment and desistance: first hand perspectives’ edited by Weaver (2013b).
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7. Urban criminal collaborations

p. 166 7. Urban criminal collaborations

Alistair Fraser and Dick Hobbs
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0007
Abstract
This chapter examines a range of criminological classifications for urban criminal groups, covering both youthful and adult-
oriented collaborations. The chapter provides a critical overview of the following categorizations: gangs; subcultures;
professional crime; the underworld; and organized crime. Debates relating to each are introduced. While criminological
approaches to youthful groups have a clear history, from the ‘Chicago School’ to the ‘Birmingham School’, perspectives on
adult groups are less solid and more interdisciplinary. In both cases, the chapter argues that criminological classifications have
struggled to capture the complexities brought on by the changing nature of the urban political economy. The chapter
concludes by introducing a critical perspective that problematizes criminological categorizations of urban criminal
collaborations.
Keywords: criminal collaborations, gangs, subcultures, neighbourhood crime groups, professional crime, the underworld,
organized crime, political economy
Introduction
Metaphors of communal transgression, for instance the gang, mob, firm, or outfit carry implicit essences
of undiluted deviant intent or sophisticated criminal organization. When presented as collectivities,
criminals compound the threats posed by the actions of individuals, and the resultant categories become
easily objectified by law enforcement agencies, and valorized by the mass media. However, not all
collaborative criminal activity is presented in terms of collectivities, for instance, fraud and white-collar
crime are generally exempt from these emotive terms (Levi 1981). Instead it is overwhelmingly social
groups emanating from the urban working class who are regarded as suitable for plural as opposed to
individual consideration. As will be discussed in this chapter, criminological categories represent at best
Page 1 of 25
loose approximations of a complex social reality, at worst a wilful blindness toward forms of crime
perpetrated by more powerful groups, and the history and politics of classification tells its own story. The
categories developed or adopted by criminologists have a major impact on the way we understand crime,
and the footprint of a criminological category tends to have a long life, perhaps, as we will discuss in this
chapter, outliving the phenomena that inspired their creation.
The chapter will focus first on categorizations of urban criminal collaboration involving young people,
specifically efforts to define street-based, urban youth under the heading of ‘gangs’ and subcultures,
tracing these concerns over time. As will be seen, though there is a clear trajectory of scholarship on
youthful collaboration, which has become central to the criminological canon, the groups these terms
attempt to depict constantly evade definition. In the context of large-scale shifts in society, particularly
the wrench of post-industrialism and the dizzying rise of digital technology, we argue that it is
increasingly difficult to press the breadth and diversity of urban groups through such narrow
categorizations. The chapter will then connect haphazard youthful subcultural experimentations to adult
collaborations via a consideration of changes in the urban political economy and discuss the shifting
efforts of criminologists to categorize these groups through a range of terms from ‘the underworld’ to
professional crime. Some of these affiliations have been labelled as organized crime, a concept that
p. 167 presents a somewhat ambiguous threat to the contemporary political and ↵ economic order. In tracing
these categorizations it must be noted that adult collaborations have not received the same level of
criminological attention as their youthful counterparts. The criminological orthodoxy, particularly in the
UK, seldom features adult confederations unless they feature as a law enforcement driven social problem
such as organized crime. Consequently, we draw in this section from across disciplinary boundaries under
headings that, while lacking the chronological parameters of the criminology of youth, make explicit our
central argument concerning the need to embrace concepts and theoretical frameworks that have tended
to be ignored. In the conclusion, we summarize this argument through reference to the notion of epochs,
which construct a broad brush typifications of criminal actions, and discuss the limitations of epochalist
categorization in relation to the chaos of contemporary social and economic life.
In tracing these categories of urban criminal collaboration, a central theme will be the social, cultural, and
structural processes underpinning both criminal and academic labour. Both criminal and criminological
collaborations respond to the changing character of the urban political economy and our emphasis is
therefore not only on successive generations of criminal collaborations—their origins, modus operandi,
and the principles around which they are organized—but also the changing parameters of research
funding, and the entrepreneurial efforts of scholars to respond to perceived social problems. As we will
discuss, the changing character of the political economy has ensured that many of the traditional
theoretical props upon which criminologists have framed their work are becoming increasingly worn. In
some cases this has resulted in a blurring of categories which renders them little more than convenient
indicators of the division of academic labour. The rigidity of these categories ignores the flexibility of
criminal actors, who should be considered by addressing both the sweeping social changes that have
reshaped urban life, and the methodological sensibilities that these changes require in order to conduct
innovative research into criminal lives.
Page 2 of 25
Youthful Collaborations
Much of the collective criminological product is concerned with youth, and, as will become apparent from
these studies, scholarship on youthful collaborations has a traceable chronology. As Schaefer, Rodriguez,
and Decker (2014) indicate, it is almost universally acknowledged that most offending, particularly among
young people, occurs in groups. Approximately half of all offences involve co-offending, and male co-
offenders tend to have longer criminal careers than solitary criminals (Reiss and Farrington 1991). Co-
offenders tend to share not only gender, but also age and neighbourhood, as well as living close to the site
of offences and, especially for young people, can extend offending careers. While these similarities
between offenders decline with age, youthful co-offenders share in territorial and gender specific
activities and this tendency for delinquency to manifest itself as a male territorially based group activity
(Shaw and McKay 1942) has become central to criminological curricula. However, the social history of
categorizations such as ‘gang’ do not always match with the social history of the street culture they seek to
depict (Weaver and Fraser 2022). This section will explore a range of ways in which these activities have
been studied and labelled over time by criminologists, incorporating discussion of a number of these
classic contributions.
p. 168 The Chicago school gang

Although social groups banding together for criminal or political purposes have a longer genealogy
(Pearson 1983), it was not until the end of the nineteenth century, in the United States, that the
categorization of ‘gang’ for these forms of criminal collaborations developed momentum. Initially used to
describe frontier outlaws and prisoners, it was only in the wake of urbanization that usage became
attached to street-based groups of young people. As Sanchez-Jankowski argues:
The social science academy’s research on gangs has its own history, and the focus of this research
has in turn been influenced largely by what society has considered the major social problems of
the period. (Sanchez-Jankowski 1991: 1)
From this point of view, definitions of the ‘gang’ during different historical periods suggests more about
the society doing the definition than the groups themselves. The central fact about gangs, as with
deviance, is that they are ‘created by society’ (Becker 1963).
Research focusing specifically on youthful collaborations under the label of ‘gangs’ began in earnest in the
early twentieth century, in the work of Asbury in New York (Asbury 1927) and Thrasher (1927/1963).
Asbury’s book was a journalistic account of the conflicts between differing criminal groups in the Bowery
1
and Five Points areas of Manhattan, and documents detail their violent struggles for supremacy.
Thrasher’s book, by contrast, grew out of the urban sociology of the Chicago School of Sociology, which
sought to distinguish generic patterns of social interaction within a developing urban milieu (Deegan 2001:
11–25).
Page 3 of 25
Thrasher developed an explanation of youth gangs that was rooted in a combination of social, cultural and
urban processes, arguing that gangs emerge in neighbourhoods with high densities of population, with
limited space and resource, where children and young people congregate in public space (Thrasher 1963:
23). Naturally-forming peer groups are then forced to defend this space from other groups (Thrasher 1963:
117), becoming ‘integrated through conflict’ (Thrasher 1963: 193) in the process.
The gang is an interstitial group originally formed spontaneously … It is characterized by the

following types of behaviour: meeting face to face, milling, movement through space as a unit,
conflict, and planning. The result of this collective behaviour is the development of tradition,
unreflective internal structure, esprit de corps, solidarity, morale, group awareness, and
attachment to a local territory. (Thrasher 1963: 57)
Notably Thrasher documented a range of different groups that exhibited ‘gang-like’ features, including
sports clubs, fraternity houses, and various adult associations as well as organized criminal groups and
political parties. While these groups may carry out criminal acts, for Thrasher this was not their raison
d’etre (Thrasher 1963: 51). Following in the Chicago tradition, subsequent scholars sought to situate
youthful gang associations within the context of broader socio-cultural forces. For instance, in Shaw’s
classic study (1930/1966), youths flow in and out of gang activities, while Whyte’s classic study (1943)
revealed the often banal routine that patterned gang life, and the importance of situating gang
identification within the broader fabric of social relations in the community.
What these early studies of gangs have in common is an effort to seek out general explanations of youthful,
p. 169 urban collaborations using a form of categorization that was ↵ apt for reformist zeal of the time: ‘the
gang’. Early studies were rooted in nascent sociological perspectives on deviance, which emphasise the
social and cultural causes of crime. The term ‘gang’ was used as a relatively neutral descriptor of a type of
social group, rather than as a specific, definable or universalized phenomenon. Nonetheless, it must be
recognized that these studies were premized on a view of social life that paid little attention to the role of
gender, ethnicity or social class in structuring social life in communities. Much of this early research was
premized on studies of white, working-class youth, whose involvement in crime was relatively
disorganized: African-American gangs, for example, made up only 7% of Thrasher’s sample (Thrasher
1963: 139–140). In this sense the early body of gang scholarship was structured by the broader
ethnocentrism and gender-bias that characterized the broader field of criminology at that time (Chesney-
Lind and Hagedorn 1999).
The exception to this general trend was the overlap between youth gang research and the subcultural
theories of the 1960s. Cohen (1955), for example, was influenced by the aspirational assumptions of North
American society and incorporated analysis of class and blocked opportunities (Merton 1938). For Cohen,
the middle-class ‘measuring rod’ of the school created oppositional subcultures, in which the values of the
school were turned on their head in a process of ‘reaction-formation’. This analysis sowed the seeds of a
political economy perspective on youthful collaboration, which with certain adaptations found fertile soil
in the subcultural studies of post-war UK.
Page 4 of 25
Post-war subcultural studies

Downes (1966) considered these subcultural theories in a UK context, and echoing earlier findings from
Scott (Scott 1956), found that ‘American-style’ gangs were nowhere to be found. Accordingly, Downes
argued that Cohen’s theory of ‘status frustration’ did not apply to his observations on the streets of the
Stepney and Poplar boroughs of London. For Downes, the middle-class values of Cohen’s theory had not
been internalized by young men in the community and instead they had relatively low aspirations. Downes
stressed instead the process of dissociation through which all aspects of middle-class life, and in
particular the primary engine of aspirational culture and education were rejected. Further, as structural
inequalities within working-class communities were cross-generational, working-class youths took over
traditional practices from the parent culture, and as a consequence, rather than a theory of gang
formation, this was closer to a theory of class reproduction. Other studies from this period followed a
similar pattern. As Parker argued in his study of ‘Roundhouse’, ‘[t]he Boys are not a gang, they do not
possess such rigid defining criteria; they are a network, a loose-knit social group’ (Parker 1974: 64. See
also Wilmott 1966; Gill 1977). The key to these British studies was not youthful resistance or rebellion, but
2
adaption to the material conditions that young people shared with their parent culture.
The loose-knit confederacy of, ‘Anarchists, CND, Young Communists and International Socialists’ (Cohen
1974: 27) that constituted the National Deviancy Conference (NDC) (see Cohen 1972, Chapter 1), was a self-
p. 170 conscious effort to break away from what was ↵ perceived to be the positivist dogma of the period, and
studies of youth were prominent on their agenda. Heavily influenced by the Chicago School and
3
interactionism, studies focused on processes of labelling (Young 1971) and moral panic (S. Cohen 1972).
Elements of resistance lay at the core of much of the work that emerged from the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies (CCCS), or ‘Birmingham School’, who focused on the symbolic meanings and stylistic
responses of youth to the tensions and contradictions within the ‘parent’ working-class culture as
traditional industries fell into decline. (Hebdige 1979, Clarke 1975, Jefferson 1975). As Cohen summarized,
‘the latent function of subculture is this—to express and resolve albeit “magically”, the contradictions of
the parent culture’ (P. Cohen 1972: 23). Willis, in his famous study of working-class ‘lads’ in
4
Hammertown, was unconcerned with ‘magic’, and focused instead on social reproduction, detailing the
ways in which strategies of resistance for ‘lads’ at school prepared them for the manual shop-floor culture
they were soon to enter. (Willis 1977. See also Corrigan 1979).
The overlapping concerns of the NDC and the CCCS trained attention on the ways in which forms of
exclusion and labelling were institutionalized in the bureaucracies of the state, while placing attention on
the way these modes of exclusion were internalized by young people growing up, resulting in cultural
reproduction. Hall and colleagues’ collective CCCS work (1978), for example, deconstructed the complex
ideological and social apparatus that underpinned the emergence of a new moral panic over ‘mugging’ in
1970s Britain. Demonstrating that the phenomenon was thoroughly racialized, targeting young men of
Afro-Caribbean origin, the authors bring the politics of race and racism centre-stage in the analyses of
youth and crime (Jefferson 2008). The parallels with contemporary racialized policing of ‘gangs’ is
abundantly clear (Fraser, Armstrong, and Hobbs 2021; Weber et al. 2021).
Page 5 of 25
In a climate of post-war counterculture and the expansion of higher education in the UK, the
categorization of youthful collaborations as ‘subcultures’ represented a significant break with previous
generations of criminological classification. Due in part to the study of crime being carried out from within
sociology departments, the role of culture and political economy were brought to the fore. As in the early
gang research in the United States, however, theories of youthful subcultures were largely rooted in the
social patterning of industrialism, particularly in a perspective of stability between youth and parent
cultures. While critical theories of race and class were brought to bear, much of the work remained focused
on male, working-class subcultural groups, and the role of young women and gendered relations left
unexamined (McRobbie and Garber 1976; McRobbie 1980). In the context of deindustrialization, some of
these predictable continuities have fragmented with corresponding impacts on youthful street cultures
(Hobbs 2013). While the concept of ‘subculture’ has fallen away amid a post-industrial context of ‘neo-
tribes’ and ‘post-subcultures’ (Bennett 1999, 2011), the categorization of ‘gangs’ has emerged once more
in the twenty-first century. As will be seen, however, in certain cases this may reflect more of the shifting
sands of academic labour than definable changes in urban youth.
p. 171 Gangs in the twenty-first century

At a global level it is clear that ‘gangs’ and gang-like groups represent an important optic through which
to examine youthful collectives and their relationship with the state (Brotherton and Gude 2021). In some
jurisdictions gangs act as paramilitary groups, militias, or as adjuncts of the state (Hazen and Rodgers
2014). In others, it is evident that street-based, urban collaborations of youth have become
institutionalized in communities where the state is absent, either due to a weak state or active
retrenchment in policy-making (Wacquant 2008), forming community structures that incorporate both
adults and young people, engaged in both organized and disorganized forms of crime, individually and
collectively, in ways that defy easy categorization. These groups tend to react responsively to the social and
economic environment in which they develop, particularly the forms of inequality in their community.
Gangs have in some cases formed in prisons (Skarbek 2014), with the experience of prison reinforcing
community-based collaborations in the ‘free world’ (Moore 1978). Other groups have adopted
entrepreneurship as a central ethos (Padilla 1992), with some members graduating to international drug
trafficking. In other contexts the term is used simply to describe street-based youth involved in low-level
crime, but the ‘dangerous associations’ (Williams and Clarke 2015) conjured by the term are difficult to
shake and can become a warped looking glass.
In the aftermath of England’s ‘summer of violent disorder’ (Treadwell et al. 2013; Smithson et al. 2013), for
example, rising violence became increasingly viewed through the gang lens with UK Prime Minister
5
Cameron declaring ‘all-out war on gangs and gang culture’. Against this backdrop an animated academic
debate took shape. On one side, scholars drew on the conceptual vocabularies of subcultural theory to
argue that local identity and group conflict represent an enduring feature of life in working-class
communities across the UK, and as such that territorial ‘gangs’ are nothing new (Alexander 2000;
Hallsworth and Young 2008; Hallsworth 2013; Wilson 2016). From this perspective, categorization of this
behaviour as ‘gang-related’ represents a cynical example of academic entrepreneurialism (Hallsworth
2011) that follows a trend for punitive social policy toward ‘gang-related’ activity (Cottrell-Boyce 2013).
Page 6 of 25
This strand of debate focused attention on the role of academic, political, and media audiences in
constructing gangs as a contemporary ‘folk devil’ which cloaks racialized stereotypes (Alexander 2008;
Williams 2015). On the other side, researchers argued that the subcultural theories of the 1970s were no
longer relevant, with the social and structural shifts brought on by the post-industrial era resulting in new
street-based groups for whom ‘gang’ was a meaningful descriptor (Pitts 2008; Pitts 2011; Densley 2013).
From this perspective, identifiable groups of street-based youth bearing similar traits to US groups—with
names, organizational capacity, and criminal intent—had evolved from the street-based subcultural
groups of previous eras. While both sides argued that economic austerity and social marginalization had
divisive implications for urban youth, there was intense debate as to whether the ‘gang’ label should
6
apply.
In more recent years, as policy debate has moved on, the heat in this debate has cooled noticeably. Just as
the ‘gang’ label has established a second life in bureaucratic classifications of prisons, probation, and law
(Williams and Clarke 2015), a host of new ‘folk devils’ (Cohen 1972) have emerged to take its place. In these
p. 172 new iterations ‘the gang’ is ↵ no longer in the spotlight but instead a background shadow, predating on
desperate and vulnerable populations. Some, like the short-lived moral panic over ‘drill’ (Fatsis 2019;
Bakkali 2019), represent a new take on a hoary old folk devil of media and violence (Loseke 2003). Others,
such as the aggressive expansion of urban drug markets to rural areas referred to as ‘County Lines’, are
more novel. Initially the concept referred to the mobile phone line used to enable the transportation of
illegal drugs to rural ‘county’ contexts (Coomber and Moyle 2018), utilizing coerced child labour and
vulnerable adults (Moyle 2019), but has since evolved as an umbrella term in public discourse to reframe
the ‘gang’ trope for bespoke audiences.
Like the gang phenomenon before it, County Lines is not a devoid of historical precedent (Spicer 2021).
Both pre-industrial and industrial urban settings fostered criminal collaborations featuring the
7
exploitation of child labour. In the nineteenth century, Dickens’ Oliver Twist famously includes the
character of Fagin, who takes Oliver off the street into his gang to groom him into the perfect criminal,
(Dickens 2003). Mayhew later described a similar process of older thieves training street children as young
8
as five years old in the art of pickpocketing (Mayhew 1862). Similarly twentieth century criminal
entrepreneurs were swift to exploit child labour that served to shroud the violent intent that lay behind
seemingly benign activity (Fraser 1994: 13–15). Particularly in environments where the state is largely
absent (Wacquant 2008), urban youth ‘have become as much lumpen capitalists as outlaw
proletarians’ (Davis 1990: 310), and while the concept of County Lines may be a contemporaneous tactic of
criminal entrepreneurs, it should be seen as integral to the at times converging strategy of drug market
expansion (Hales and Hobbs 2010) and the employment of children, both of which have long featured in
the portfolios of constantly evolving criminal collaborations. As this ‘newly noticed kind of human
behaviour’ (Hacking 1999: 136) has emerged, essential lessons from critical research on gangs and gender
(Young 2011; Batchelor 2009), racialized impacts of knife and gun crime (Solomos 1993:125), and gang
policies (Williams and Clarke 2015) appear to have been forgotten once more.
What is clear from these debates is that there have been significant changes to urban life in recent years,
and traditional conceptualizations and categorizations may need substantial revision and reconstruction.
Much of young people’s lives are now lived in the hybridized hinterland between online and offline worlds,
a world of constant connectivity where ‘youth subcultural life is a continuous virtual-real
Page 7 of 25
experience’ (Wilson 2006: 308), and where distinctions like ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ are increasingly obsolete.
Streetwise youth increasingly gain respect and ‘street capital’ (Sandberg, 2008) not from from interstitial
urban places (Thrasher 1963) but in the hinterland between the noxious aftermath of deindustrialization
(Fraser and Clark 2021) and online echo-chambers where insults and offence are both hidden and
amplified (Urbanik and Haggerty 2018; Lane 2018). Yet criminology has been slow to connect the dots
between the economic plight of youth in relation to the parent culture (MacDonald 1997; 1998), the chaos
p. 173 of ↵ the post-industrial city (Hobbs 2013; Winlow and Hall 2006), and the emergent implications of
networked sociality (Wittel 2001). To properly interrogate these issues would be to refigure and revise
subcultural analysis, but instead the concept has been associated with an epoch now deemed redundant,
and reduced to a few verses in a criminological karaoke primed by chronocenterism, ‘the belief that one’s
own times are paramount, that other periods pale in comparison’ (Fowles 1974: 249; Rock 2005).
Adult Collaborations
While it has long been one of the few indisputable empirically established ‘facts’ of the criminological
enterprise that most youths ‘mature out’ of delinquency (Hirschi and Gottfredson 1983), the confidence
with which criminologists have wielded concepts such as subcultures and gangs in order to categorize
deviant youth has not been apparent in scholarly approaches to adult urban criminal collaborations: a
category of transgression that has been poorly served by criminological scholarship. As we discuss above,
within territorially based youth collaborations conflict is crucial in forming identities, creating reputations
and moulding communal distinctiveness in the face of opposition. These groups occupy spaces or
interstices between sections of the city that are frequently situated within ‘delinquency areas’ typified by
working class territorial imperatives defined by the experiences of low income, poor housing and poor
health (Shaw and McKay 1942). This is often the locale where adult criminal careers are nurtured from
youthful associations (Yablonsky 1962: 147–148), yet by and large the study of adult collaborations—like
the study of organized crime—remains ‘part science, part gossip, part theology’ (Lacey 1991: 367). In what
follows we review some of the more prominent categories in this mixed criminological bag.
Professional crime
The concept of professional crime has long been associated with urban alcoves where regimentation of the
poor was most ineffective (Tobias 1974, Salgado 1977, Stedman Jones 1971). However, while historians
have documented the world of professional criminals (Klockars 1975, Ch. l; Hay 1975; Munsche 1981;
McMullan 1982, 1984), it was left once more to the sociologists of the Chicago School to devise an analytic
template for their practice and culture. Sutherland (1937) challenged the then dominant Chicagoan
explanation of crime being the result of social disorganization, and located a cohesive group that shared
technical skill, consensus via a shared ideology, differential association, status, and organization. While
Sutherland established the foundation for an important body of subsequent sociological work (see also
Maurer 1955; Einstadter 1969; Shover 1973), some scholars highlighted professional criminal activity that
required no collaboration and little skill (Lemert 1958), while others stressed the importance of non-
specialist adaptable ‘hustlers’ (Holzman 1983; Polsky 1964; 1971; Roebuck and Johnson 1962; Williams and
Milton 2016) who engage in a wide range of criminal endeavours while displaying a distinct lack of any
Page 8 of 25
9
p. 174 shared consensus with other hustlers. This calls ↵ into question the notion of a cohesive behaviour
system, and while commitment to making a living from crime (Letkemann 1973) provides a useful
criterion for identifying these `full-time miscreants’ (Mack 1964). Mack’s emphasis upon sub-cultures is a
useful reminder of the commonality of urban working-class origins within adult as well as youthful
criminal collaborations. The violent potential and instrumental physicality of industrial cultures were
ideally suited to armed robbery, whose rationale was often explicitly hedonistic (McVicar 1979: 158.
10
Reynolds 2000: 116).
The morphing from territorially based youth collaborations into adult acquisitive crime, with the
neighbourhood providing new recruits via the local delinquent sub-culture, has been documented by a
wide range of writers, commenting on disparate urban milieus (Chin 1990; Boyle 1977; Capeci and Mustain
1992; Thrasher 1963; Cummines 2015). Working class communities of the industrial era were not
homogenous, but were made up of, ‘a social patchwork of intensively localist culture and
sentiment’ (Robson 1997: 7), where adjacent territories were regarded with deep mistrust (Davies 2013).
Neighbourhood-based groups abounded, and territorial imperatives featuring individual, local, and family
reputations were forged in youthful combat that was ideal preparation for the world of acquisitive adult
crime (McDonald 2000). Often bound by family affiliation (Lambrian 1992: 29), these territorially based
groups proved especially potent units when exploiting local entrepreneurial opportunities, before locating
vulnerable targets in adjacent territories (Whyte 1943: 10; Boyle 1977) with variations of extortion and
11
territorial domination providing the most common entry level activities (Hobbs 2013).
As discussed above the key variable in the history of youthful collaboration was class, and more specifically
the territories that cumulatively constitute the working-class city. Street collaborations of the industrial
era were typified as ‘[l]oose collectivities or crowds within which there was occasionally some more
structured grouping, based on territorial loyalty’ (Cohen 1972: 128), reinforced by the parent cultures
long-term affiliation to neighbourhoods in close proximity to centres of employment, and to related
institutions and agencies of informal order and social control: in particular the hegemony of a single class
social structure built upon the firm foundations of unionized manual labour, the extended family, and the
ecology of the working class area (Cohen 1972). For Cloward and Ohlin (1960), criminal collaborations of
both youthful and adult varieties were understood as an ecological whole, with the evolution of a youthful
street-gang into a more organized criminal enterprise contingent on the illegitimate opportunity
structures that existed. Indeed, in the UK we can see a distinct urban working-class subculture of robbery
emerging from working class neighbourhoods that had been bypassed by the disciplining functions of
industrial society (R. Smith 2005, T. Smith 2005, Hobbs 1995: 47, Mason 1994: 126–133). The family and
the street thus provide two central props in understanding the way in which the youth collaborations
discussed above can mutate into adult collaborations where apprenticeships into ‘professional crime’
might occur.
Informal networks of violent entrepreneurs evolved from loose-knit youth groups into enduring adult
affiliations of professional criminals (McIntosh 1971, 1975), providing ‘a sphere of continuity in the life of
p. 175 the area’ (Robson 1997: 9). ↵ For instance, analysis of the London-based criminal careers of the
12 13 14
Sabini, Kray, and Richardson families show how iconic adult crime collaborations emerged from
youthful territorial violence, and into extortion before morphing into more entrepreneurial pursuits while
retaining their culturally embedded violent potential. All three groups retained and nurtured their
Page 9 of 25
traditional bases and refused to be constricted by the parochial restraints of the working class
neighbourhood. While retaining their neighbourhood roots, what marks out all three of these groups of
extortioners turned entrepreneurs was their ability to reach beyond the locale that nurtured them. (Hobbs
2013: 58–88).
The underworld
15
The world of the professional criminal has been commonly located within an urban underworld an iconic,
essentially transgressive cultural space, ‘a passive screen on to which the righteous project their own
inhibited lusts and rapacities’(Benney 1936: 194–195). Inextricably associated with, ‘[t]hat dangerous
class which is found occupying a position between pauper and convict’ (Archer 1865), and with its origins
in urban working class neighbourhoods, the underworld was essentially a transgressive annexe of
proletarian industrial culture populated by those who were unable or unwilling to engage with the
industrial project, yet with ‘too little moral restraint to starve’ (Archer 1865), and dominated by an
16
occupational group defined by their level of commitment to illegal economic activities (see Becker: 1960).
Further, by providing physical boundaries for the underworld within specific working-class urban alcoves
crime is stabilized and concentrated (Rock 1973: 30), reducing our perception of the criminal population to
those resident within those boundaries.
The decline of industrial society has impacted massively upon the working-class neighbourhoods from
which both youthful and adult urban criminal collaborations have emerged (Hobbs 1995; 1997). The
activities once associated exclusively with professional crime are no longer the sole prerogative of an
‘underworld’ (cf Haller 1990: 228–229). The mid-1970s rise of the drug trade marked a shift towards
entrepreneurial relationships that mimicked the legitimate political economy, and the notion of a self-
contained criminal underworld became increasingly redundant. Similarly, post-industrialism destroyed
traditional communities, and assured the fragmentation of working-class populations and the
disintegration of extended family networks. Both mainstream and criminal economies along with their
accompanying cultures have been redefined by this post-industrial shift which in turn has fostered
clusters of decentered, unpredictable, and fractious trading economies (Hobbs 2013).
Working-class neighbourhoods have been erased, eroded, and colonized by bourgeois incomers, and their
populations dispersed and relocated to places often lacking the pragmatic economic logic that bound
working-class communities of the industrial era. Neighbourhood crime firms and armed robbery teams
were very much part of this process of fragmentation and relocation, and fragments of the working-class
p. 176 city’s ↵ old underworld became attached to entrepreneurial opportunities that were no longer linked to
neighbourhood-based affiliations (Hobbs 2013). Criminal labour mimicked its legitimate counterpart and
became negotiated within networks of small flexible firms characterized by short term contractual
commitments (Lash and Urry 1987), determined by market demand (Castells 1996: 272), and manifesting
themselves, ‘… as fluid sets of mobile marauders in the urban landscape alert to institutional weakness in
both legitimate and illegitimate spheres’. (Block 1983: 245).
Page 10 of 25
Crimes previously central to the concept of a criminal underworld, for example, armed robbery, whose
practitioners were embedded in urban working-class neighbourhoods (Hobbs 2013), have become
essentially amateur excursions utilizing base levels of competence (Matthews 2002, Smith 2005).
Meanwhile, extortion evolved to accommodate demands for muscle in the night-time economy (Hobbs et
al. 2003), as professional criminals followed the post-industrial route into entrepreneurship. With the
demand for recreational drugs driving criminal activity and coinciding precisely with de-industrialization
and the fragmentation of traditional communities, trading relationships, albeit within post-industrial
urban settings, now provide the basis for contemporaneous criminal collaborations.
The gangsters and robbers of the old underworld, and the youths that fed their ranks emerged from
working-class neighbourhoods that were products of industrial society. De-industrialism marked the end
of this culture and, in response to the hedonism and rampant entrepreneurship promoted by post-
industrialism, contemporary street-based working-class collaborations of youths and adults are now
mediated through market engagements that transcend traditional transgressive categories, making it
difficult for family-based units to establish the kind of parochial dominance they once enjoyed. Yet kinship
along with neighbourhood roots are far from redundant in post-industrial crime collaborations and should
be regarded as highly instrumental trust variables, assuring loyalty by appealing to something other than
self-interest (Gambetta 1988, Reuter 1985). ‘If a group all speaks the same language, has the same village
roots, possesses the same myth and culture norms, then it can function as a unit with greater trust and
understanding …’ (Lupsha 1986: 34 see Reuter 1984: 115).
However, criminal collaborations must constantly evolve, and the level and extent to which a criminal
enterprise is embedded in the so called ‘upperworld’—the sphere of legitimate transactions—is a major
factor in its effectiveness (Antonopoulos et al. 2015: 14). In the post-industrial era carefully nuanced
market engagements with the upperworld enabled professional criminals to access new arenas that exceed
circumscribed terrain (Lashmar and Hobbs 2018). These arenas are entrepreneurially orientated,
supportive of networks, and constitute an ideal environment for a range of both legal and illegal
opportunities. Operating in accord with local conditions, ‘… flexible, adaptive networks that readily expand
and contract to deal with the uncertainties of the criminal enterprise’ (Potter 1994: 12) emerged from the
‘inherited basic architecture’ (Castells 1996: 146) of the working-class city.
The entrepreneurial habitus of post-industrial society has created collectivities that are linked via
networks of illegal trading to strategically relevant pragmatic partnerships (Taylor 1999: 171–173; Clark,
Fraser and Hamilton-Smith 2021). Urban street collaborations, however they are branded by
commentators, are vital components of the dynamics of this unlicensed form of capitalism (Castells 1996)
whose indistinct parameters are defined by the chaos and fragmentation of de-industrialization and the
subsequent pragmatics of the working class city.
p. 177 Organized crime

In spite of some resistance from British politicians and police, who preferred to emphasize ‘professional’,
as opposed to ‘organized’ criminality to describe serious criminal collaborations in the UK, (Home Affairs
Committee 1994, 16–17), international pressures led to the adoption in the 1990s of ‘organized crime’,
Page 11 of 25
essentially a transnational phenomena that was attributed to foreigners (Woodiwiss 1988: 11–15.
Nadelmann 1993: 470; Sheptycki 2003: 127). Specialist police budgets rapidly benefited as the UK adopted a
17
form of alien conspiracy theory (Cressey 1969, 1972), and the essentially racist assumptions embedded in
transnational organized crime narratives (Raine and Cilluffo 1994), were reproduced in early 1990s UK
police rhetoric (NCIS, 1993a, 1993b). However, unlike studies of youth and the professional criminal
collaborations and cultures into which they morphed, when the British version of organized crime was
launched (Woodiwiss and Hobbs 2009), the indigenous urban origins of British criminal collaborations
were ignored, and as a consequence, organized crime was confirmed in British political discourse as the
18
product of globalization and the practice of foreigners (see Hobbs 2013, Ch. 2).
By ignoring the importance of urban social ecology in favour of a concentration upon transnational
networks of deviant foreigners, organized crime has been rendered problematic as an analytic category.
While the contemporary working-class street is now a profoundly multi-cultural entity—‘vernacular
cosmopolitanism’ (Diouf 2000)—this does not denote transnationalism. The important point is that
contemporary working-class urban street collaborations increasingly share domains of interest with
apparently legal actors operating within a post-industrial entrepreneurial habitas, and both unlicensed
capitalism and the community of practice within which it resides are central to the way that we now live
(Hobbs 2013).
The quest for order that seeks to capture and package criminal collaborations in convenient theoretical and
distinctly non-empirical categories has also been extended to adult collaborations, and with the demise of
the industrial-era underworld, the notion of organized crime has proved to be a particularly potent
phantom that has rapidly colonized law enforcement agencies and their allies in the academic community
(Van Duyne 1996). Whatever transgressional sobriquet is applied to them, contemporary urban criminal
collaborations both youth and adult alike, are integral to the assemblage that constitute the ‘community of
practice’ that has replaced the self-contained proletarian underworld of industrial society. This
community of practice is not exclusively reliant upon the cultures of the urban working class, for the
fragmentation of entrenched communities produced disordered mutations of traditional culture which are
enlivened by post-industrial entrepreneurial engagement mixed with cosmopolitan influences and their
accompanying irregular trading networks, constituting, ‘a far less exclusive zone than traditional
underworld narratives would suggest’ (Hobbs 2013: 230). Within this disparate collection of marketized
scavengers the notion of extra-legal governance (see Varese 2010) is not apparent and, ‘there is no
imminent tendency towards the consolidation of large scale modern illegal bureaucracies’ (Paoli and
Fijnaut 2004: 610). However, the trope of the street remains vital in contextualizing a community of
practice responding to interpretations of global markets operationalized via local identities and
sensibilities (Hobbs 2013).
p. 178 Conclusion: Problematizing Criminological Categorization
A great deal of social scientists tend to describe the present as the dawn of a new epoch in human
history, in one way or another marking a profound break with hitherto existing social structures
of modern societies. (Osrecki 2015: 131)
Page 12 of 25
The tendency of much academic discourse to adopt a particularly rigid model of criminological epochs
such as subcultures, gangs, professional crime, and organized crime fails to reflect the messy realities of
urban life. While some of these products of the academy have their origins in the corridors of government,
cumulatively these convenient collaborative categories, should not be taken as literal epochalist models
(see Savage 2009), for while ‘sociological epochalisms can be regarded as a legitimate strategy of raising
public awareness for sociological debates’ (Osrecki 2015), they are essentially genres of reasoning that lack
historical consciousness, and do not constitute clear-cut unambiguous categories. For instance, both
industrialism and post-industrialism constitute social processes that overlap (Strangleman 2016), and the
neighbourhoods from which urban working-class collaborations have emerged are subjected to these
processes, which in turn can both conflict and complement. Consequently, the epochs of subcultures,
gangs, professional crime and organized crime should be regarded as academic genres with contested
boundaries.
Although the changing categories used to define such groups reflect the shifting contours of criminology,
these shifts take place within a broader social and political context in which policing and political priorities
have contributed considerably to shaping the field. Nonetheless, in this brief chapter we have endeavoured
to examine the changing nature of urban working-class criminal collaborations, in particular the impact of
shifts from industrialism to post-industrialism, and the implications of this change for life in former
working-class communities is our central theoretical concern. Formulated by academics and often
supported by institutions of welfare and law enforcement, categories of transgression may not be
acknowledged by proponents of transgression. The messy realities, shifting identities and fluid economies
of the post-industrial city produce forms of transgression that tend to fall outside political or
administratively convenient categories. Working class lives are rather more chaotic, and less conveniently
ordered (Winlow and Hall, 2006) than is suggested by either the literal transplantation of gang or
organized crime urban narratives from the USA. For instance, the definitions of Thrasher (1963 [1927]), or
Landesco (1968) were created in the maelstrom of industrial-era Chicago, and their relevance to
contemporary post-industrial urban populations are limited. However, this has not prevented politicians
and law enforcement agencies from utilizing potent media-enhanced narratives relating to gangs,
organized crime, or more recently ‘County Lines’ in order to generate electoral clout, or budgetry leverage.
Importantly, the rapidly changing urban milieu has rendered these rigid criminological categorizations
problematic. Their persistence in curricula and text books can be largely attributed to the emergence of
criminology as a self-contained discipline whose self-imposed parameters are generated by an
increasingly narrow set of market-led criminological concerns (Hobbs 2012). However, gentrification,
rehousing, and a proletarian residue constantly enhanced by a shifting churning cosmopolitan population,
has created a chaotic contemporary urban reality that can no longer rely upon the predictability that
p. 179 emanated from settled working class neighbourhoods imbued with ↵ the certainties and hierarchies of
industrial society. The post-industrial drift of working-class communities away from their traditional
urban heartlands has bloated the periphery with new towns and extended suburbs. Criminal collaborations
are integral to this proletarian diaspora, and they will continue to mutate.
Page 13 of 25

For a starting point on the ‘gang’ categorization, Thrasher’s The Gang (1927) stands the test of time. On gangs in a
global context, see Hagedorn (2006), Dowdney (2007) and Brotherton (2015). For discussion of contemporary debate
in UK gang research, see Goldson (2011). Classical approaches to youth, crime, and subcultures in the UK come in the
form of Downes’s Delinquent Solution (1966), Taylor, Walton and Young’s The New Criminology (1973), Cohen’s Folk
Devils and Moral Panics (1972), Pearson’s Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (1983), Hall et al.’s Policing the Crisis
(1976), and Resistance through Ritual (1978). Critical questioning of these points can be found in recent special issues
of the British Journal of Criminology (49/1) and Crime Media Culture (4/1). Finally, Fraser’s ethnography of gangs in
Glasgow (2015) brings our understanding of urban youth collaborations into the post-industrial era, while Jeffrey
Lane’s (2018) explores the interaction between street-based and online identities.
On adult criminal collaborations, Sutherland’s The Professional Thief, Klockars’s The Professional Fence (1974), Hobbs’s
Bad Business (1995), and Taylor’s In the Underworld (1983), along with Levi’s classic study of ‘Long Fraud’ (1981) all
provide classic accounts of professional crime. Chin’s study of Chinatown (1996) and Shore’s (2012) study of the move
from the neighbourhood into violent entrepreneurship, along with Pearson’s classic account of the Kray twins provide
valuable studies of neighbourhood crime groups. On organized crime, Alan Block’s superb history of organized crime
in NewYork (1983), Gambetta’s study of Sicily (1993), Reuter’s down-to-earth account of how organized crime actually
operates, and Hobbs’s (2013) study of how youth and adult criminal collaborations come together in post-industrial
society all provide a foundation for further study.
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Organized Crime Policing in America and Britain’, British Journal of Criminology, 49 (1): 106–128.
Yablonsky, L. (1962), The Violent Gang, New York: Macmillan.
Young, J. (1971), The Drugtakers: The Social Meaning of Drug Use, London: Paladin.
Young, T. (2011), ‘In Search of the “Shemale” Gangster’, in B. Goldson (ed.), Youth in Crisis? ‘Gangs’, Territoriality and
Violence, London: Routledge, 128–144.
Notes
1
The book was made famous 75 years later when it formed the basis for a feature film, directed by Martin Scorsese,
Gangs of New York (2002).
Page 23 of 25
2
The one notable exception from this period is James Patrick’s A Glasgow Gang Observed (1973)—now infamous for
the author’s use of covert participant–observation—explains the persistence of gang phenomenon in Glasgow as
related to the ‘interconnecting and cumulative forms of inequality’ that were embedded in the city’s fabric, producing
‘feelings of frustration, rage and powerlessness’ (1973: 170). Further, he argues that ‘available evidence … points to
the conclusion that there is no English equivalent of the Glasgow gang’ (Patrick 1973: 164–165).
3
The utopianism of a ‘fully social’ (Taylor et al. 1973: 268–282) theory of deviance became honed towards neo-
Marxism (Taylor et al. 1973) and was rejected by formal Marxists for whom the relationship between the industrial
working class and the (criminal) lumpenproletariat was set in stone (Hirst 1975: 203–244).
4
See Stan Cohens devastating critique of such ‘magical thinking’ (Cohen 1980).
5
BBC (2011) ‘Riots: David Cameron’s statement in full’. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-
politics-14492789 [Accessed 21st June 2023] <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14492789>.
6
Alternative descriptions such as ‘on road’ (Hallsworth and Young 2008), ‘street culture’ (Bourgois 1995; Ilan 2015) or
‘street capital’ (Sandberg 2008).
7
In 1816 the ‘Report of the Committee for Investigating the Causes of the Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency in
the Metropolis’ reported that ‘there are some thousands of boys under seventeen years of age in the metropolis, who
are daily engaged in the commission of crime’. These children ‘associate(ed) with professed thieves of mature age,
and with girls, who subsist by prostitution’ (1816: 9–10. See Mathers 2021). These thieves were also known as ‘lads-
men’, who trained impressionable and vulnerable children into criminals for their own gain.
8
Interestingly as a result of the 1857 Industrial Schools Act (Gear 1999) apprehended child criminals found that the
manual tasks that were enforced upon the inmates, ‘ruined for ever the delicacy of touch necessary for a pick-
pocket’(Lloyd Baker 1889: 23).
9
See Irwin, (1970) and Irwin and Cressey, (1962), which stress that the most crucial aspect in determining an inmate’s
adaptation to prison is the culture that is imported from the working class urban milieu, which in turn also informs the
identity of the professional criminal (Cohen and Taylor 1972, McVicar 1979, Fraser 1994, Mason 1994, Foreman 1996,
Cummines 2015).
10
See Hobbs 2013 and Matthews 2002.
11
Extortion is not only a highly effective vehicle for consolidating control over territory (Falcone 1993: 116), it also
assures market dominance (Gambetta 1988: 140).
12
See Shore 2012, 2015.
13
See Pearson 1973, 2001.
14
See Richardson 1992, Robson, 1997.
15
For an historical overview of the concept see Shore, 2015.
16
Mack and Kerner (1975) include ‘background operators’ and `service providers’ such as accountants lawyers and
corrupt police officers amongst this population.
17
For critiques of alien conspiracy theory see Block 1983, Morris and Hawkins 1970, Smith 1975, Hawkins 1969.
18
Subsequently the concept expanded to embrace threats as diverse as the Taliban, Somali Pirates and ‘delinquent
youth gangs’. (Cabinet Office Strategy Unit 2009).
Page 24 of 25
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Page 25 of 25
8. Drug use, drug problems, drug control: A political economy perspective

p. 184 8. Drug use, drug problems, drug control: A political economy

perspective
Toby Seddon and Alex Stevens
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0008
Abstract
This chapter presents an overview of the phenomenon of illicit drugs and their control. We show that drugs are not just a
matter of crime, morality, or health but rather are also a global commodity the use and control of which continue to run along
lines shaped by inequalities of geography, wealth and power. Viewing the drug problem through the lens of political economy,
and in global and historical perspective, provides a clearer view of the issue. It allows us to see how some facets of the
problem are exaggerated (e.g. crime and health harms) whilst others are under-stated (e.g. pleasure, harms to producer
countries in the Global South). It also sheds new light on why some policy approaches and interventions continue to fail and
why others may be more promising. Lastly, the prospects for radical alternatives to prohibition through drug law reform are
considered.
Keywords: drugs, prohibition, political economy, inequalities, harm reduction, drug law reform
Introduction
The trade in illicit drugs is a fully global phenomenon, reaching every inhabited corner of the planet. It has
been estimated to be worth up to US$650 billion (May 2017) which makes drugs amongst the most traded
commodities in the world, matching or even exceeding the size of markets in many very mainstream
goods, such as, vegetable oils, or tea and coffee.
This business is conventionally read as a ‘problem’ in several different ways. It is of course illegal and so
the business entities that benefit from much of it are organized crime groups. The entanglement of drugs
with crime is a complex matter that we return to later in the chapter but it is clearly one of the major
Page 1 of 23
dimensions of its status as a social problem. Related to this, drug-taking and drug-trafficking are often
viewed through the lens of morality, partly because they are criminal activities but not only for that reason.
The language of ‘junkies’, ‘addicts’, and ‘dealers’ is highly emotive and stigmatizing. It is common to see
drug problems presented as uniquely corrosive of positive personal, family, and community relations.
Lastly, drugs are also connected with serious health problems, from drug dependency, to overdose deaths,
to the spread of serious blood-borne viruses like HIV and hepatitis C through the sharing of injecting
equipment, to links with mental illness.
Beyond these problem frames of crime, morality, and health, we can also read drugs and drug control in
some other ways. They are in an important and fundamental sense about politics, as drug laws concern
state power over citizens. It is hard to think of a more intensely political question than the state controlling
what individual citizens are allowed to snort, swallow, smoke or inject into their own bodies. Drugs are
also about economics, as drugs are consumer products that are traded in markets. And they are about
political economy, or the way that power is distributed between different groups in society (Stevens 2011).
We argue, therefore, in this chapter for a political economy perspective—concerned with the inter-
p. 185 relationships between states, markets, and ↵ citizens—as key to unlocking our understanding of the
drug question and moving us away from the analytical limitations of sticking too closely to seeing drugs as
a problem of morality, crime, or health (although all these concepts are obviously important).
The chapter begins with a brief exploration of the historical development of the drug question. The two
main sections then focus on outlining, first, the contours of the drug problem in the UK in the 2020s and,
second, the ways in which we currently respond to the problem through law and policy. In conclusion, we
summarize how a political economy perspective can not only help us to understand today’s problems but
can also point us towards the key policy issues that need to be grasped. We end by highlighting what in our
view are the priorities for future research and policy development.
A Short History of Drugs
The human desire for intoxication has a history which is long and wide. Rituals and practices that involve
the consumption of mind-altering substances can be found across the globe, and historians have traced
these all the way back to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Sumeria, and Egypt many thousands of
years ago (Berridge 2013: 9). Even further back, into the very distant past before the invention of the
written word—human history in ‘deep time’—signs of intoxicant use can be found amongst the evidence
that archaeologists and palaeo-scientists have unearthed (Smail 2009). Based on this historical and
cultural ubiquity, Siegel (1989) famously argued that the desire for intoxication is the fourth fundamental
driver of human behaviour, after hunger, thirst and sexual desire.
This sense of the universality of human psychoactive desire might suggest that the story of our
engagement with mind-altering substances is equally universal and unvarying. In fact, the opposite is the
case. One of the consistent features of the history of intoxicant use in society is how practices and
preferences are culturally and geographically specific (Goodman et al. 1995). The examples here are
endless but include wine drinking in ancient Greece and Rome, and later the European side of the
Mediterranean; coca leaf chewing in the Andean region in South America; hashish smoking in Asia and the
Page 2 of 23
Middle East; khat chewing in East Africa; and beer drinking in Northern Europe. This tells us something
important: practices of intoxication are bound up with and deeply embedded within the way of life of a
society and so are rich with insights for the keen cultural observer. These different cultural histories of
intoxication are shaped by multiple factors: geography, climate, religion, politics, fashion, and trade.
These psychoactive histories provide a window onto much more general histories of human existence and
so trends and trajectories of preferences and practices of intoxication must always be understood as part of
a bigger picture.
To make sense of this large canvas, it is helpful to start with the historian David Courtwright’s (2001)
important book Forces of Habit. Courtwright focuses on the last 500 years, which he describes as the period
that saw the ‘making of the modern world’. In brief, he argues that from the early 1600s, as the building
blocks were assembled of what would become modern global capitalism, the phenomenon of psychoactive
commerce also began to emerge and expand. Mind-altering substances were increasingly becoming
commodities which circulated around the new routes of global trade. As a result, substances that had once
been indigenous to only one region, began to spread across the world and become globalized commodities.
By the 1800s, psychoactive commerce had also become entangled with the projects of the European
p. 186 imperial powers ↵ that then dominated the world. This entanglement with empire would prove to be a
pivotal moment in this history.
Probably the most significant example of this unfolded in the nineteenth century. The British fought two
wars against the Chinese, between 1839–42 and 1856–60 respectively, to force China to accept the trade in
opium that was largely being cultivated in British-controlled India (Lovell 2011). The two Opium Wars
would have a long-lasting impact. When an International Opium Commission was convened in Shanghai in
1909, the main driver was the opium problem in the ‘Far East’ and China’s wish to bring the opium trade
under strict international controls. The Shanghai Commission paved the way for further meetings at The
Hague between 1911 and 1914 which led to the international agreements that would just a few years later
form the first iteration of what we now call global drug prohibition. Signing up to this new system was one
of the requirements for signatories to the peace agreements negotiated at the end of the First World War
and international drug control came under the auspices of the League of Nations at its foundation in early
1920. In this sense, prohibition today has its origins partly in colonial trade wars fought in Asia more than
150 years ago.
Part of what was accomplished with the creation of drug prohibition at the start of the twentieth century
was the separation of intoxicating substances into different categories, with alcohol and tobacco regulated
very differently from what were now labelled as ‘drugs’ (Seddon 2016). Initially, it was primarily opium
and derivatives like morphine that came under the drug label, but they were soon joined by cocaine and
then a little later by cannabis. Progressively more and more substances were added to the category for
prohibition. Today, the list runs to hundreds. It is often assumed that drugs are fundamentally different
from those intoxicants that are not prohibited but scientific attempts to assess relative harmfulness tend
to tell a different story, with alcohol, for example, typically evaluated as significantly more harmful than
many prohibited drugs (e.g. Nutt et al. 2010; van Amsterdam et al. 2010). Historical perspective helps us to
understand that these demarcations between drugs, alcohol and tobacco are largely political and
regulatory, rather than scientific and medical.
Page 3 of 23
By the end of the Second World War, the League of Nations had collapsed, as it had clearly failed in its
overarching mission to maintain world peace. It was replaced in 1945 by the United Nations which took
over the running of the international drug control system. The international legal framework for
prohibition is today enshrined in three United Nations Treaties: the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic
Drugs, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances and the 1988 Convention Against Illicit Traffic in
Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. The fact that the United Nations oversees the system reflects
not only the global nature of the problem but also prohibition’s historical origins in international meetings
and agreements made a century ago.
What about the story of drugs and drug control in the UK specifically? Aside from some temporary
regulations applied during the First World War, the first national drug laws were contained in the
Dangerous Drugs Act 1920. This was passed to satisfy the UK’s commitment to the new League of Nations
system described above. It applied to opium, morphine, heroin and cocaine. Cannabis would not be
prohibited until 1928. A major policy landmark was the publication in 1926 of the Report of the Ministry of
Health’s Departmental Committee on Morphine and Heroin Addiction, known as the Rolleston Report after
its chairman Sir Humphry Rolleston. Rolleston provided official support for the medical prescribing of
morphine or heroin as a treatment for addiction, including long-term ‘maintenance’ prescribing for those
who could not be ‘cured’. This idea of prescribing as a cornerstone of addiction treatment became known
p. 187 as the ‘British ↵ System’ and was widely considered to be a success. It was often compared (favourably)
with the more penal approach on the other side of the Atlantic in the United States. Indeed, the British
encounter with drugs remained small-scale, with consumption rates extremely low, for several decades
after this.
It was only in the 1960s that this began to change. There was a sharp rise in heroin use, which was ascribed
to over-prescribing by a handful of London-based doctors which led to diversion of prescribed heroin to
the illicit market (Spear 1969). In response to this, the Dangerous Drugs Act 1967 created a new model
known as the Clinic System, with prescribing concentrated in a small number of Drug Dependency Units
based in hospitals. During the 1970s, the prescribing of heroin reduced significantly, to be replaced by
methadone which remains today the principal ‘substitution’ drug for people who have a problem with
heroin. For many commentators, this marked the demise of the ‘British System’ which had been based
since Rolleston on doctors being able to prescribe heroin on a long-term maintenance basis. Even greater
anxiety was created by the place of drug-taking within the new youth cultures that emerged during the
1960s (Young 1971). Smoking of cannabis (‘weed’) increased significantly, as did the use of LSD (‘acid’),
barbiturates (‘sleepers’), and amphetamines (‘thrusters’), although they still remained minority rather
than mainstream pursuits amongst young people (Laurie 1967). Nevertheless, policy-makers responded,
including developing new legislation which became the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (Seddon 2022).
The 1971 Act remains in operation in the early 2020s. One of its most distinctive features was the creation
of a classification system that was intended to reflect the differential harms associated with different
drugs, with the harshest penalties reserved for offences relating to drugs in Class A and the lightest for
those in Class C (see Table 8.1). The Act also divides substances into schedules, as now set out in the Misuse
of Drugs Regulations 2001. These regulate whether a drug can be used as a medicine, and the conditions of
storage and recording (see Table 8.2). The other novel feature of the 1971 Act, which has subsequently
Page 4 of 23
become an embedded feature of drug policy and drug control, was the separation of offences concerning
possession from those that involved supply, so that the latter could be targeted for stricter penalties. The
Act also created the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which has provided advice (sometimes
p. 188 accepted, sometimes ignored) to ministers throughout the last 50 years (Stevens 2021). ↵
Page 5 of 23
Table 8.1 Classification and maximum sentences for drug offences, Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (as at February 2022)
Class Drugs covered (selected examples) Maximum sentence for Maximum sentence for
possession supply
A Diamorphine (‘Heroin’), cocaine, methamphetamine, amphetamines (‘Speed’) when prepared for 7 years Life
injection, MDMA (‘Ecstasy’), LSD, psilocybin (magic) mushrooms
B Cannabis, synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists (‘Spice’), ketamine, amphetamines when not 5 years 14 years
prepared for injection.
C Anabolic steroids, GHB/GBL, benzodiazepines (e.g. diazepam/Valium, alprazolam/Xanax), khat 2 years 14 years
Source: Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, as amended.
Page 6 of 23
Table 8.2 Scheduling of drugs, Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001 (as at February 2022)
Schedule Drugs covered (selected examples) Regulations
1 Cannabis (when not prepared as a No medical use. Research requires a license.

medicine), LSD, MDMA, psilocin.
2 Cannabis-based medical products, Medical use allowed, with strict regulations on prescription,
diamorphine, amphetamine, cocaine, storage, and recording.
ketamine
3 Temazepam, tramadol Prescribing and safe storage rules apply, but less stringent
recording.
4 Part i: Benzodiazepines, Sativex (a Prescribing restrictions for controlled drugs do not apply, and
cannabis-based medicine) no requirement for safe storage. Drugs in part ii can legally be
Part ii: Anabolic steroids possessed without a prescription and imported and exported
for personal use if they are in the form of a medical product.
5 Low strength derivatives of controlled Minimal record-keeping.

drugs
Source: Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001, as amended.
The drug situation in Britain began to change significantly in the 1980s. There was, first of all, a serious
heroin epidemic which for the first time spread into areas in the North of England and Scotland which had
previously seen negligible levels of use. The ‘new heroin users’ (Pearson, 1987) were younger than their
counterparts from the 1960s and 1970s, and were more likely to be living in areas of high unemployment
and economic deprivation. The connections between heroin, crime and socio-economic disadvantage that
emerged so strongly in the 1980s continue to be key to the construction of the British drug problem
(Seddon 2006; MacGregor 2017; Winstock et al. 2021).
Towards the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, a major change in ‘recreational’ drug use became
apparent. As encounters with cannabis in particular (and to a lesser extent ‘dance drugs’ like ecstasy)
became much more common, researchers developed the concept of the ‘normalization’ of recreational
drug use (Parker et al. 1998). This reflects the idea that what had once been at the margins of youth culture
had now moved to the mainstream. Although, for example, regular smoking of cannabis was still an
activity that most young people did not do, changes in awareness and attitudes towards cannabis indicated
that it had become increasingly accommodated in the social lives of ‘conventional’ youth. Later
developments of the normalization concept emphasized that it does not apply to all young people.
Normalization is ‘a contingent process negotiated by distinct social groups operating in bounded
situations’ (Measham and Shiner 2009), such as, for example, people who frequently attend festivals and
night clubs, who have higher levels of illicit drug use than other young people.
Page 7 of 23
A critical historical perspective can teach us (at least) two key lessons that may help us understand the
present better. First, that the twin characteristics of the long human engagement with psychoactive
substances are continuity (the universal human desire for intoxication) and change (variations in
p. 189 consumption practices and preferences). ↵ Second, that drug prohibition—that is, attempts to control
the drug trade and drug consumption through criminalization—is a recent phenomenon that is barely 100
years old.
Contemporary Patterns of Drug Use and Drug Problems in the UK
In understanding the present, there is an important circular dynamic to grasp. The contemporary drug
situation is, in part, the product of how we have understood and responded to previous settings of drug
production and consumption. In turn, how we understand current patterns will go on to affect our
response, and therefore the future of drug use and related pleasures and harms.
If we take at face value the stated aim of drug policy as eliminating non-medical use of the substances that
have been placed under control, then it has manifestly failed. Every year, the United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime publishes The World Drug Report. This very often shows high and rising levels of both
production and consumption of controlled drugs. The 2021 report, for example, suggested that in 2019
about 200 million people used the most popular illicit drug, cannabis, an increase of 18 per cent in a
decade. As is also the case for alcohol, illicit drug consumption tends to be higher in wealthier countries,
where more people have time and money to spend on leisure (see Ter Bogt et al. 2014). Globally, the
potency of cannabis has been increasing, while the proportion of young people who view it as hazardous
has fallen (UNODC 2021). These are the exact opposites of the aims of the global drug control system. A
different way to view this system is that it seeks to regulate the availability and use of these substances. So
how is that going?
In the UK, illicit drug use among all adults has been fairly stable over the past 25 years, with about 10 per
cent of people aged 16 to 59 reporting to the Crime Survey for England and Wales that they had uses an
illicit drug in the past year (ONS 2020). Again, this was mostly cannabis, although there have been reported
increases in the use of cocaine. Among younger people, patterns of use have been more volatile, with the
proportion of people aged 16 to 24 who reported using an illicit drug falling from a peak of 32 per cent in
1997 to 7 per cent by 2013 before rising again to 20 per cent by 2020 (ONS 2020).
Different drugs are associated with different patterns of use and harms, which themselves differ by
geography and levels of socio-economic deprivation. Cannabis use is associated with higher levels of
mental health problems among young people, although the extent to which this relationship is causal is a
matter of ongoing controversy (Hamilton and Monaghan 2019). Some countries, including the UK, have
seen rapid rises in deaths related to cocaine (which can cause cardiac arrest). But the largest numbers of
drug-related deaths are associated with the use of opioids. This category includes substances derived from
the opium plant (like diamorphine, otherwise known as heroin), or synthetic substances which have a
similar effect in reducing pain and suppressing breathing (like fentanyl). There are ongoing crises of
opioid-related deaths in North America and the UK. Lives lost in drug overdoses or poisonings rose in 2020
to records of over 91,000 in the USA, over 8,000 in Canada, over 1,300 in Scotland, and over 4,500 in
Page 8 of 23
England and Wales (NIDA 2022; NRS 2021; ONS 2021; PHAC 2021). In the UK, the increase in deaths has
primarily affected people who started using heroin in the 1980s and 1990s, but there have also been
increases in younger age groups (Lewer et al. 2021).
p. 190 ↵ Drug consumption and injecting patterns still vary widely between places. Some Scottish cities, for
example, see high levels of public injecting of both heroin and cocaine. This has been identified as
contributing to an outbreak of HIV in Glasgow (Trayner et al. 2020). Both drug-related deaths and blood-
borne virus infections are still concentrated in areas of high unemployment and poverty (NRS 2021; ONS
2021), serving as a reminder that drug use and harms are not just about the drug, but also the setting in
which use occurs (Zinberg 1984).
There are also various ongoing harms related to the production and distribution of drugs. The production
of coca and opium has fuelled long-running wars in Colombia and Afghanistan, respectively. Attempts to
control the production and transit of cocaine, heroin and cannabis have produced huge numbers of
murders—including extra-judicial killings by military and police forces—in Mexico (OAS 2013). There is
also violence in the drug trade in the countries of consumption, although this is sometimes exaggerated.
There are plausible pathways that link drug use to other crimes. The most commonly mentioned are those
from the ‘tripartite framework’ developed by Paul Goldstein in his work on the crack market in New York
City (Goldstein 1985). He suggested that there are three causal pathways from drugs to crime. The first is
‘psycho-pharmacological’. This involves the effects that some drugs (including alcohol) may have in
stimulating aggression and reducing inhibitions. The second is ‘economic-compulsive’. Some people feel
compelled to use drugs by cravings and the need to avoid withdrawal symptoms. If they do not have the
economic means to buy these drugs, they may resort to crime to fund this consumption. The third—and
potentially most intriguing—of Goldstein’s posited paths for drug use to produce violence is ‘systemic’.
This involves the use of violence to regulate conflicts that arise in the operation of an illegal trade. Disputes
over drug selling territories, or unpaid debts, cannot be solved in the courts, so some drug sellers may
resort to violence. Violence, in this sense, is a resource for doing business.
This is an analytically useful framework, but it has often been used to exaggerate and oversimplify the
links between drugs and crime. This must be seen as influenced by its social context, rather than viewed as
just comprising three, unidirectional, decontextualized links (Seddon 2006; Stevens 2011). Goldstein’s
framework ignores, for example, that there may be other individual and social factors that produce both
drugs and crime. Examples of individual factors that may lead to both drug use and other crimes include
impulsivity, or some forms of mental illness. Social factors may include poverty, oppression, or the
glorification of both drug use and crime.
The idea that drugs cause crime is so widespread that it sometimes leads to uncritical acceptance of some
very questionable claims about the scale of this link. For example, the UK drug strategy for 2021 to 2031
makes much of the idea that half of all murders are drug-related (HM Government 2021). This claim is
based on a Home Office report which suggested that in a large proportion of murder cases, either the
victim or the suspected killer ‘were known to be involved in using or dealing illicit drugs’ (Home Office
2018, p. 33). This is not a good indicator of whether a murder is ‘drug-related’, as it does not show whether
drug use played any causal role in the crime. By the same logic, it could be argued that 100 per cent of
Page 9 of 23
murders are water-related, as all the victims or suspects will have consumed it. This continues a long
tradition of using inflated claims about drug-related crimes in a way that obscures the role of other socio-
economic factors in producing violence, going back to the demonization of the cannabis plant by British
colonial doctors in the nineteenth century (Mills 2003).
A closely related harm is the over-policing and over-incarceration of people who are racialized as Black.
p. 191 This is a common focus of media attention and political protest ↵ in the USA, where it has played a key
role in producing mass incarceration of Black people. Similar aspects of systemic racism can be seen in the
British response to illicit drugs (Shiner et al. 2018). Black people are nine times more likely to be stopped
and searched for drugs than are white people in England and Wales. More than half of stop and searches
are for drugs. Black people are eight times more likely to be imprisoned for drug offences (Akintoye et al.
2022). This cannot be justified by Black people having higher rates of drug use or offending, despite
attempts to whitewash the figures. The most sophisticated recent study compares levels of police contact
not just to the proportion of Black people in the residential population, but to their presence in the
numbers of crime suspects. It shows ongoing ‘officer bias’ in the over-policing of Black people (Vomfell
and Stewart 2021).
A recent phenomenon in global and British drug markets is the emergence of a range of substances that
mimic the effects of other, more established illicit substances. The biggest classes of these Novel
Psychoactive Substances (NPS) are synthetic cathinones and synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists,
which mimic the effect of cannabis. These have been particularly problematic in prisons, where they are
reported to have taken over from more ‘traditional’ prison drugs, including cannabis and heroin (Gooch
and Treadwell 2020).
The first synthetic cathinone to gain a foothold in the UK market was mephedrone, which was used by
people who wanted the effects of cocaine or ecstasy at a period, in the late 2010s, when the purity of these
substances in the market was low (Measham et al. 2011). Since then, a range of more powerful substances
have entered the market. These are sometimes sold falsely as MDMA, even though the reported strength of
MDMA pills in the market has risen dramatically since 2009 (The Loop 2022).
British politicians have focused a lot of their rhetoric in recent years on the emergence of ‘county lines’ as
a method of drug supply (Spicer 2020). This involves organized crime groups in major cities running
phone lines which are used by consumers in provincial towns to order drugs. The drugs are then delivered
by people at lower levels of the organization, often children and young people who are vulnerable to this
form of exploitation. While there is no doubt that this is a violent and exploitative trade, there are
questions about just how violent and exploitative it is. The available evidence shows that much of the youth
violence that is attributed to drug supply and county lines is more to do with inter-personal disputes than
conflicts over drug supply, often accelerated via social media, and which overwhelmingly involve young
people who have had difficult, violent childhoods, who live in poverty and squalid housing, and are often
excluded from school (Irwin-Rogers et al. 2020). If young people are seeking associations with drug
suppliers, we need to ask why that is, rather than assuming that they are the passive dupes of sinister
criminals (Densley and Stevens 2014).
Page 10 of 23
As can be seen from this brief tour of the illicit drug phenomenon, this is a complex picture. We observe a
consistent pattern of the media and politicians focusing on simplistic explanations that exaggerate the
malevolence of the people who use and supply drugs. These sensational, click-worthy accounts mask a
more complex world in which drug use and supply are driven by a mixture of individual choices and
socially structured opportunities and constraints. The underlying economic patterning of drug markets
and drug problems is clear and so the choice to highlight individual morality is equally clearly revealed as a
political one. What is necessary is an analysis that can make visible the inter-connections between state
action, markets, and economies, and individual behaviours.
p. 192 Responding to Drugs: Prevention, Law Enforcement, Treatment, Harm

Reduction, and Law Reform
In response to its definition of what the drug problem is, the UK government continues to follow the
prohibitionist precept of the international drug control system. Since 1985, the government has set out a
series of drug strategy documents, each promising a ‘new approach’, but each advocating the same basic
policy mix: prevention, law enforcement, and treatment (Winstock et al. 2021).
The idea that illicit drug use can be prevented is attractive in principle, but hard to achieve in practice.
There are politically popular approaches—such as mass media campaigns and the provision of
information about the harms of drug use—which have been shown not to work reliably in reducing levels
of drug use (Allara et al. 2015). In some cases, such as the US Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE)
programme, evaluations have suggested that such interventions may actually increase illicit drug use
(Rosenbaum 2007).
There are some principles for effective drug prevention, including that life skills should be taught
alongside the provision of drug information (Warren 2016), but even some interventions that have used
this evidence have been shown not to reduce drug use in randomized trials (Room 2012). The search
continues for effective and reliable ways to prevent illicit drug use. This is crucial to the UK government’s
stated aim to create a ‘generational shift in the demand for drugs’ (HM Government 2021). The historical
and anthropological evidence on the universality of the human desire for intoxication suggests this search
may prove to be the proverbial ‘fool’s errand’.
Meanwhile, law enforcement continues to evolve symbiotically with illicit drug markets. This is the area of
drug policy on which most money is spent but is least often the subject of rigorous study. It is taken for
granted that drug laws must be enforced, so very little research is done to test what return is provided on
the massive spending on police, courts, and military efforts to interdict drug supply and to punish users
and dealers. As a result, there is an absence of evidence that arresting dealers or seizing drugs produces
benefits that are worth the accompanying costs or harms (Eggins et al. 2020).
There is stronger evidence that these efforts do indeed produce collateral harms. These range from the
destabilization and overthrow of national governments, to breaches of human rights (including
compulsory treatment, police brutality, and even mass killings in some countries, such as Mexico and the
Philippines), to the creation of violence and health harms (Lasco and Yu 2021; Lines 2017; Werb et al. 2011).
Page 11 of 23
Drug law enforcement may actually produce violence by disrupting a stable illegal market and creating
violent competition to take it over (Woods and Rafaeli 2017). It can also produce health harms by deterring
people from seeking treatment, or by pushing people to use their drugs hurriedly and in unsafe spaces
(Rhodes et al. 2007).
The usual political response to the emergence of new substances in the market is to ban them. As the
number of NPS multiplied, some countries moved to blanket bans that attempted to prohibit all these
substances at once, rather than having to describe each substance to be banned. Ireland and Poland led the
way on this, with the UK following suit in 2016. The Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 banned the
production, importation, and sale of any substance that affects a person’s ‘mental functioning or
emotional state’ (section 2(2)). This definition is absurdly broad, although explicit exemptions are made
p. 193 ↵ for tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, food, medicines, and substances that are controlled under the Misuse
of Drugs Act 1971. It is also inconsistently enforced. Cannabidiol is an extract of cannabis which is not
covered by the Misuse of Drugs Act. It has effects on ‘emotional state’ by reducing anxiety among some
users (Crippa et al. 2011). Yet it is sold openly (as CBD), and even promoted in televised adverts. Despite the
Psychoactive Substances Act, the numbers of deaths associated with NPS has continued to climb (Deen et
al. 2021). Their harms have been concentrated in marginalized groups, like people who are homeless or in
prison (Ralphs et al. 2021), as some had predicted (Stevens et al. 2015).
Treatment can work in reducing health harms that are related to drug use. There is robust evidence for the
effectiveness of a range of treatment options (Babor et al. 2018). Perhaps the best-evidenced is opioid
substitution therapy which, as we have seen, has a long history going back to the ‘British System’ and the
Rolleston Report in the 1920s. This involves the prescription of opioid medicines—like methadone,
buprenorphine, or heroin itself—to people who have a problem with illicit heroin or other opioids. This
has been shown repeatedly to reduce the use of street heroin, to reduce offending, and to cut the number of
people who die of drug overdoses and other causes (ACMD 2016; Killias et al. 2009). More recent evidence
also supports contrasting approaches, including the 12-step model in which people who are recovering
from a drug problem support each other to remain abstinent (Bøg et al. 2017). These forms of treatment are
often placed in opposition, as if one were damaging to the other. It is true that they have to compete for
funding, but they may both be effective for different people, or for the same people at different stages of
their lives. Much of the ‘heat’ generated by debates about maintenance versus abstinence-based treatment
approaches can only be properly understood in a political economic context and in relation to debates
about the use of welfare state resources. Is it right, for example, to spend money on providing services to
help people who are dependent on heroin if at the same time we are having to ration expensive medication
for cancer patients? And even if we accept that it may be, can this extend to forms of treatment that
‘maintain’ patients rather than cure them? In these ways and others, the political economy of drug policy
also raises fundamental ethical dilemmas.
In addition to the three approaches that have consistently appeared in UK drug strategies, there is a fourth
pillar of drug policy, known as harm reduction (Newcombe 1987). This is less often trumpeted in national
drugs strategies, although it is written explicitly into the Welsh policy (Welsh Government 2019). The
harm reduction approach was developed from the practices of people who used drugs in protecting
themselves and others from blood-borne virus infection. A classic harm reduction intervention is the
Page 12 of 23
provision of sterile equipment for injecting drugs (Platt et al. 2018). A more recent innovation is the
provision of naloxone, a medicine which reverses the effect of opioid overdoses in suppressing breathing,
and so saves people from dying of opioid poisoning (McDonald and Strang 2016).
The harm reduction concept has developed, and now encompasses a wide range of ‘policies, programmes
and practices that aim to minimise negative health, social and legal impacts associated with drug use, drug
policies and drug laws’ (HRI 2022). In the UK, controversy continues to surround one such practice that
has been adopted in at least 14 other countries, which is the provision of safer spaces for people to use
drugs they have purchased illicitly. These ‘drug consumption rooms’ (otherwise known as safer injecting
facilities, or overdose prevention sites, depending on the context and character of the service) have
evidence to support their effects in reducing deaths, infections, ambulance call outs, and injection-related
litter (Belackova et al. 2019; Kerr et al. 2017; Potier et al. 2014). They are still controversial as they are seen
p. 194 by some as condoning ↵ or encouraging drug use (despite there being no high-quality studies which
suggest that they increase or prolong drug use). In 2020/21, an unsanctioned overdose prevention service
was run in a converted vehicle by the activist Peter Krykant in Glasgow (Shorter et al. 2022). The Scottish
government and some other agencies are now exploring whether and how to set up officially sanctioned
services.
Controversy over the idea of reducing harms of illicit drug use while accepting that use continues goes back
further than the current debate over drug consumption rooms, largely driven by the same welfare state
and moralistic politics that have bedevilled debates about maintenance versus abstinence approaches in
the treatment sector. Partly as a result, harm reduction initiatives have tended to be introduced in the
context of temporary pilot schemes, in contrast to the permanent and unevidenced innovations that are
often made in law enforcement. An ironic consequence is that harm reduction interventions have a much
stronger evidence base than law enforcement. Repeated studies and reviews have found benefits that
outweigh costs for needle and syringe programmes, naloxone provision, drug consumption rooms, as well
as for the opioid substitution therapies that merge harm reduction principles with prescribed treatment
(EMCDDA 2015; Ferri et al. 2013; Platt et al. 2018). In the 2020s, the harm reduction movement is moving
on, partly at the insistence of organizations of people who use drugs, to consider wider issues of human
rights, anti-racism, decriminalization, and legalization (Daniels et al. 2021).
A range of different alternatives to the prohibition of drugs are now being developed in various countries.
Alternatives that fall short of legalizing the supply of drugs include depenalization, diversion, and
decriminalization (Stevens et al. 2021, 2022). Depenalization involves police and prosecutors adopting a
policy of not prosecuting or punishing low-level drug offences. In England, this was introduced in the
cannabis warning system from 2004, under which police forces issue a written on-street warning, rather
than arresting and charging people who are in possession of small quantities of the drug. This has since
largely been replaced by the use of other community resolutions, which are a more generic way of avoiding
arrest for a wide range of minor offences. Repeat offenders can still be given a Penalty Notice for Disorder
(an on-street fine) rather than being taken to court. In 2019/20, over half of all drug offences in England
and Wales were dealt with by such an out-of-court disposal (Shaw et al. 2022). There are risks that the ease
Page 13 of 23
of use of such disposals (relative to arresting and charging the person) can lead to increases in the number
of people who are dealt with formally by the police for drug possession (Gibson 2021; Stevens 2011), a
process called ‘net-widening’ by the criminologist Stan Cohen (1985).
In the Netherlands, depenalization has been official policy since 1979, when the prosecutors’ office stated
it would not prosecute offences of possession or even sale of cannabis, as long as some guidelines relating
to age, amounts, and promotion of sales were adhered to. This is what allowed the Dutch coffee shop
system to emerge. Levels of cannabis use have stabilized in the Netherlands since the guidelines were
tightened in the 1990s, and the number of coffee shops reduced. There remain, as with other alternatives
that do not regulate production and wholesale supply, problems in dealing with organized crime in the
supply chain (Jacques 2019).
Australia was one of the first countries to adopt formal systems for diversion of drug law offenders
(Hughes and Ritter 2008). Under a diversion scheme, a person found in possession of a small amount of
drugs will be asked to attend an educational session or treatment assessment, instead of being arrested
and charged. In the UK, this is done in several police forces, including Avon and Somerset, Thames Valley,
p. 195 West Midlands, and ↵ Durham. The Scottish government has also announced plans to expand diversion
after years of debate on this issue, and it is supported in the 2021 UK drug strategy, although with a
promise that ‘tough consequences’ will meet those who continue to offend (HM Governmen 2021). Where
evaluated, these schemes have been shown to cut costs and reduce re-offending (e.g. Weir et al. 2021).
Decriminalization involves the removal of the criminal offence of possession from the law. Around 30
countries have decriminalized drug possession to some extent, for cannabis at least (Eastwood et al. 2016).
Long-standing cases include Germany (whose federal constitutional court decriminalized possession of
small amounts in 1994) and the Czech Republic, whose parliament did it in 1991 in the aftermath of the
communist era (Bollinger 2004; Zábranský 2004). Several US states decriminalized the possession of up to
an ounce of cannabis from the 1970s onwards, although many replaced criminal penalties with a civil fine
(Pacula et al. 2005). A more famous example is Portugal, which decriminalized the possession of up to ten
days’ supply of any illicit drug in 2001 (Rêgo et al. 2021). If a person is found in possession of such a small
amount, they are ordered to attend a meeting with a ‘committee for the dissuasion of addiction’ rather
than being sent to court. In most cases, the committee takes no action, using a ‘provisional suspension of
proceedings’. In repeated cases of possession by people who are not assessed to be addicted, the
committees can issue a civil fine. If the person is assessed as having a problem with drugs, the committee
can also advise people to seek treatment.
Subsequent trends in drug use in these countries do not support the idea that liberalizing the approach to
drug possession necessarily increases drug use (Stevens et al. 2022). In some places, like Portugal,
decriminalization was followed by a substantial reduction in drug-related health harms, including HIV
infections and drug-related deaths. It should be noted, however, that Portugal simultaneously invested in
a range of public health and social welfare programmes that will have contributed to improving health for
people in poverty.
Page 14 of 23
In Portugal and elsewhere, people who use drugs have argued that they should be able to buy drugs legally
from a regulated supply. The first country to legalize cannabis fully, ‘from seed to sale’, was Uruguay in
2013. In several US states and Canada, a rapidly growing cannabis industry has been eager to meet this
demand where it has been legalized. In both these North American countries, this started by legalizing the
sale of cannabis for medical use, followed by cannabis for recreational use. It is too early to tell what the
long-term effects will be. Early studies suggest some increases in use among older adults, but not in
children or young people (Anderson and Rees 2021). Increasing proportions of users are getting their
cannabis from the legal market, but some illegal supply persists (Wadsworth et al. 2022).
In the UK, changes to the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001 were made in 2018 in response to a
‘manufactured scandal’ over the plight of two young boys with severe forms of epilepsy that responded
only to cannabis (Monaghan et al. 2020). Cannabis-based medical products were moved out of Schedule 1
of the Regulations (used for substances with no medical purpose) into Schedule 2 (alongside substances
like diamorphine, ketamine and cocaine). This means that specialist doctors can prescribe these products,
although not many of these medicines are licensed for use in the UK and available on prescription from the
NHS. Costs remain high, and the number of NHS prescriptions remains very low.
There has been no other decriminalization in the UK of drugs that are controlled under the Misuse of Drugs
Act 1971. This creates an anomaly with the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, which does not criminalize
p. 196 the possession of the substances it ↵ controls (unless it occurs in a custodial setting). Proposals have
been made, including in an unpublished report by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, to resolve
the anomaly by repealing the subsections of the Misuse of Drugs Act that make possession a criminal
offence (Douse, Eastwood, et al. 2022).
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 in 2021, many campaigning organizations like
Transform and Release called for the repeal of the Act and argued that the time had come for major drug
law reform. The developments with cannabis legalization in the Americas, as well as the wider
experimentation with decriminalization and diversion, have led to some optimism that reform is more
possible now than it has ever been. What is clear is that any new frameworks for the regulation of drug use
and drug markets must be designed to take into account, and address, the issues of social and racial
injustice that have long been associated with prohibition.
Conclusion
In this introduction to the study of illicit drugs and their control, we have emphasized that drugs are not
just a question of morality, crime, or health. We have shown that drugs are a global commodity which have
been used for millennia, whose trade contributed to the development of colonialism and capitalism. Their
use and control continues to run along lines that are determined by inequalities of geography, wealth and
power.
Viewing drug use, drug problems, and drug policy through the lens of political economy, and in global and
historical contexts, enables us to take a broader view of the British drug problem. As for all policy
problems, it is constructed by the ideas that people have available for understanding it (Ritter 2022). We
Page 15 of 23
have seen that various harms have been prioritized in constructing this problem, including harms to
health and the exaggeration of the drug-crime link. The benefits and pleasures that drugs can bring have
been given less attention and are often ruled out of drug policy discussions as ‘sending the wrong
message’. Certain types of harms, notably those experienced in producer countries in the Global South like
Colombia and Afghanistan, are also often down-played, illustrating the continuing significance of political
power at the international level.
We have also discussed four types of interventions that have been used to address the various problems
that have been identified with drugs, including prevention, law enforcement, treatment, and harm
reduction. As many of these problems related to drugs are at least partly driven by prohibition, countries
around the world are increasingly looking for alternatives, including depenalization, diversion and
decriminalization of possession, and the legal regulation of production and supply.
We argue that both the definition of the problem and the search for solutions can be improved by taking a
broader view which places drugs in the contexts of the political and economic forces which drive their
trade, consumption, and control.

In addition to our books on the History of Drugs (Seddon 2010) and Drugs, Crime and Public Health (Stevens 2011),
there is a wealth of excellent work on the issues covered in this chapter. Classic works in the field include Jock Young’s
(1971) The Drugtakers, Thomas Szasz’s (1975) Ceremonial Chemistry, Norman Zinberg’s (1984) Drug, Set and Setting,
p. 197 and David Courtwright’s (2001) Forces of Habit. For a critical look at the categories of drugs and ↵ addiction, see
the book by Susanne Fraser, David Moore, and Helen Keane (2014) on Habits. The history of drug use and control is
excellently covered in Virginia Berridge’s (2013) Demons. The history of cannabis, in particular, is covered in two books
by James Mills (2003, 2013), Cannabis Britannica and Cannabis Nation. More recent British and international drug
policy is traced by Susanne MacGregor (2017) in The Politics of Drug Policy. The ongoing links between drugs and
colonialism are covered in a collection edited by Kojo Koram (2019) on The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line.
For more on international drug policy, including its relation to human rights, see Rick Lines (2017) on Drug Control and
Human Rights in International Law and Melissa Bone (2021) on Human Rights and Drug Control. For international
overviews of knowledge on drug policy, see the collaborative work on Drug Policy and the Public Good (Babor et al.
2018) and Alison Ritter’s (2022) magisterial Drug Policy. David Nutt (2021) has written a useful primer on Drugs Without
the Hot Air. For a different perspective on drugs, including their benefits and pleasures, see Carl Hart’s (2021) Drug Use
for Grown Ups.
Online resources

Page 16 of 23
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9. Mental health, mental disabilities, and crime

p. 201 9. Mental health, mental disabilities, and crime

Ailbhe O’Loughlin and Jill Peay
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0009
Abstract
What is the nature of the relationship between mental disability and crime? This chapter examines its nature, scope, direction,
and implications for the study of criminology. Its early sections critically assess issues of definition, causation, and of the
success of treatment interventions. Its latter part reviews developments in policy and the emerging blurring of risk-oriented
and therapeutic objectives. It concludes by urging a more sophisticated and less discriminatory approach to the field, which
does not focus on diagnoses but rather on a holistic understanding of the relationship between people and crime.
Keywords: mental disorder, personality disorder, treatment, risk, human rights, discrimination, violence, vulnerability
Introduction
The relationship between mental disability and crime is complex. The familiar question of whether an
individual charged with a criminal offence was ‘mad’ or ‘bad’ or a bit of both has long been superseded by
more nuanced questions. What is meant by crime? What is meant by mental disability? How can culpability
be assessed in those with a mental disability? Is treatment (and if so of what nature) more appropriate
than punishment? Or, as hybrid punitive and therapeutic approaches have become more common, are
treatment and punishment compatible? And are those with a mental disability more likely to be at risk
from the criminal activities of others, or to present as perpetrators of behaviour that harms others,
possibly in the most serious of ways? Many of these questions are intractable.
Page 1 of 27
The process through which the criminal justice system deals with those with mental disabilities has been
subject to extensive review in the UK. The Bradley Review (2009) made significant recommendations,
many of which have been adopted. The Law Commission (2013, 2016a, and 2016b) has also looked at the
legal framework for insanity, automatism, and unfitness to plead, albeit their recommendations remain
merely recommendations.
A period of legislative turmoil that took place in the 2000s ultimately resulted only in amendments to the
1
Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA 1983). Reform is, however, once again on the agenda. The 2018 report of the
Independent Review of the MHA 1983, chaired by Sir Simon Wessely, put forward proposals to rebalance
the mental health system in favour of patients’ wishes, preferences, and human rights (DHSC 2018). In
response, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Ministry of Justice (2021a) published plans to
raise the thresholds for detention, limit civil powers to detain people with learning disabilities and autism
for treatment, and to enhance patients’ rights to challenge their detention and refuse treatment.
A draft Mental Health Bill, published in June 2022, proposes to amend the MHA 1983 to introduce more
p. 202 frequent reviews of detention, more stringent criteria for continued ↵ detention, statutory care and
treatment plans, and enhanced safeguards for patients in respect of compulsory treatment. The Bill further
proposes to abolish powers to detain people with a learning disability or autism for treatment under
Section 3 of the Act in the absence of a comorbid ‘psychiatric disorder’ in a move intended to reduce
inappropriate long-term detention for this group. It would, however, retain powers to detain such
individuals where they enter hospital through the criminal courts or from prison. Thus, the drafters of the
Bill seem to have overlooked concerns raised by respondents to the 2021 consultation paper that such
plans would risk pushing people with learning disabilities and autism into the criminal justice system
(DHSC and the Ministry of Justice 2021b: 88). This would do little to address the urgent concerns raised in
recent reports about the problematic position of those with mental disabilities throughout the criminal
justice system (Criminal Justice Joint Inspection, CJJI 2021a; CJJI 2021b; House of Commons Justice
Committee 2021).
Beyond these policy and legal developments there have been important economic and social changes as
well. The COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions have negatively impacted prisoners’ mental
health (HM Inspectorate of Prisons 2021) and the capacity of health services to provide mental health care
in the face of growing demand. This follows more than a decade of policies of austerity in public services.
While it is arguable that the public tone has become more benign towards those with mental disability, the
recent history of mental health law reform demonstrates that human rights and equality agendas continue
to be hampered by a pervasive culture of risk aversion.
This theme of mental disability and risk permeates the six sections of this chapter. The first section
examines the problematic concept of ‘the mentally disordered offender’. Do such individuals constitute an
isolated category meriting special provision? Or do the issues raised by this ‘group’ have wider
implications for the study of criminology? The second section considers the relationship between mental
health and crime. Does mental disorder cause crime, or does involvement in the criminal justice system
bring out mental health issues in vulnerable people? Are those with mental disabilities more likely to be
victims of offending than perpetrators of it? The third examines the fundamental justification for separate
provision, namely treatment. It takes a critical look at evidence for the treatability of people on the mental
Page 2 of 27
disability-offending spectrum, and then focuses on a key problematic group—offenders suffering from
personality disorder. The fourth section tackles some hidden agendas—bifurcation, detention for
protective purposes, due process in discharge, and release mechanisms. The fifth reviews policy
developments: the progressive blurring of therapeutic and risk-oriented objectives; the ongoing conflict
between legalism and welfarism; and the growing role for human rights developments. The sixth section
formulates some conclusions.
Perceiving those with mental disability as a separate category, a perception underpinned by our
discriminatory mental health legislation, can play into an unfounded attribution of enhanced risk. Yet the
statistical picture suggests that this perception is misplaced (see Appleby et al. 2015), with vulnerability
lying primarily with those with disorders, not from them. At the same time, public perceptions of risk seem
to have shifted, and the irrational or psychopathic stranger may have been replaced by terrorist ideologues
as the public’s bogeymen. Yet, the mental health status of those charged with terrorism offences never
seems far from popular discourse. Indeed, the susceptibility of vulnerable individuals to powerful ideology
may be an important factor in some atrocities. For both lawyers and clinicians, the teasing out, in the
context of the most extreme, repugnant, and incomprehensible violence, which behaviours are
p. 203 attributable to a ↵ disorder and which are not, has been laid bare in extraordinary detail by the
Norwegian Breivik case (Seierstad 2015; Gröning 2021).
Perhaps a more understanding era for people with mental health difficulties is approaching. These trends
are hard to establish empirically, but anecdotally our own students’ conceptions of mentally disordered
offenders as primarily violent seem to have been somewhat revised. Understandings of persons with
disabilities as vulnerable and in need of treatment are now commonplace.
Definition, Incidence, and Implications
Offenders with mental disabilities are categorically awkward. Being neither exclusively ‘ill’ nor
uncomplicatedly ‘bad’, such people ‘totter between two not always compatible discourses of state
intervention’ (Webb and Harris 1999: 2). Are they offenders who have mental disorders, or people with
mental disorders who have offended? Or both? The category itself also conjures up images of the ‘unloving,
unloved and unlovable’ (Bean 2008: 172). Such individuals can be hard to define, challenging to deal with,
and unattractive to services. It is perhaps not surprising that they have been relegated and isolated, both in
theory and practice. But is it right that they be treated separately, in the way that criminology chapters
have been historically devoted to issues of gender, race, or youth? The premise of this chapter is that how
we deal conceptually, practically, and in principle with those deemed ‘mentally disordered offenders’ is
central to the scope of criminology. Treating this as an isolated topic fails to reflect how mental disability
infuses discussion of the criminal justice system. Arguments about intersectionality are particularly telling
here; the evidence, for example, on racial disparities in mental ill-health representation in the criminal
justice process is both longstanding and troubling (Nacro et al. 2017).
To argue for the existence of a discrete group of ‘mentally disordered offenders’ would presuppose a
category of ‘mentally ordered offenders’. The criminal law broadly adopts such an approach, presuming
rationality where there is no proof of its complete absence. Yet even the notionally reasonable ‘person on
Page 3 of 27
the Clapham omnibus’ can experience moments of madness. In turn, scientific advances in our
understanding of the structure, functioning, and chemistry of the brain, and its psychological
development, have generated a more socio-medical approach to some forms of offending (O’Rourke et al.
2020). Concepts of limited rationality will be familiar to criminologists: the difficulties that stem from
offences committed whilst people are under the influence of drink or drugs, or who fail to understand the
consequences of their actions, or who process new information differently. Yet few of these individuals
would wish for the special treatment that may follow a finding of ‘defect of reason’ integral to a finding of
‘not guilty by reason of insanity’. Such a finding absolves individuals from the punishment that follows a
formal finding of guilt, but also potentially propels them into a system of compulsory mental health
treatment and the associated stigma. As Porter (2004) observed, it might be preferable to be criminalized
and maintain one’s free will than to be psychiatrized and lose it.
The expansion of forensic psychology in prisons (Crewe 2011) and the roll-out of risk assessment and
sentence planning for all individuals subject to community, suspended, or custodial sentences (NOMS
2015) further blur the boundaries between the ‘ordered’ and ‘disordered’. Legislative intervention has seen
significant increases in the numbers of prisoners serving indeterminate sentences (and extended
p. 204 determinate sentences) who ↵ are required to complete psychological treatment programmes to
demonstrate to the Parole Board that they no longer pose a risk (Guiney 2019).
Detention, interrogation, diversion, prosecution, conviction, disposal, treatment, release and recall can all
be affected by an individual’s mental state (Criminal Justice Joint Inspection 2009). Indeed, people with
mental disabilities who have offended are found across the entire criminal justice system (Hale 2017): in
hospitals, prisons, therapeutic regimes within prisons, and, most notably, within the remand population.
This is in part attributable to the underuse of the provisions of the MHA 1983 that permit the diversion of
accused and convicted persons into hospital and away from the criminal justice system. But the process of
prosecuting vulnerable individuals can also facilitate the emergence of mental disability.
People with mental disabilities are likely to make up a significant proportion of custodial populations. The
UK prison population, like that of other jurisdictions, displays high levels of disorder both before and
during custody (Tyler et al. 2019; Fazel and Danesh 2002). Around 50 per cent of those entering prison have
some kind of ‘neurodivergence challenge’ including autism, learning disability, ADHD and brain injury
(CJJI 2021b: para 4.11). And, whilst the need for up-to-date data is widely acknowledged, some 70 per cent
of prisoners are thought to meet the criteria for two or more diagnosable mental disorders at any one time
2
(House of Commons Justice Committee 2021: para 14).
Moreover, there is a long-term trend towards worsening mental health and safety in prison despite
repeated efforts to address the problem. Rates of self-harm, self-inflicted death and assault in prisons all
3
reached record levels between 2016 and 2021. Inconsistent screening practices, the lack of a common
definition of mental ill-health, inadequate record keeping and confusion over confidentiality and data
protection rules across the criminal justice system have all contributed to a prison system which fails those
with mental illness (CJJI 2021a). Indeed, both the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee
(2018) and the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment
or Punishment (2020) have concluded that the UK Government is failing in its duty of care to ensure the
safety of prisoners and to recognize their human rights.
Page 4 of 27
Yet are these high levels of disorder present at the start of the criminal justice process? Adebowale’s (2013:
12) review of the work of the Metropolitan Police Service estimated that ‘15%–25% of incidents are linked
to mental health’. Other reports have estimated the numbers of mentally disordered suspects passing
through police stations as varying from 2 per cent to 29 per cent (see, for example, Bradley 2009: 38; the
CJJI 2021a: 6). Undoubtedly there is a crystallization effect through the criminal justice process; a process
which facilitates greater disclosure or diagnosis of disability, and which in part selectively filters into the
system those with disability. Indeed, Kane et al.’s (2018: 428) analysis of over 13,000 cases found that
where mental health problems were identified, individuals were more likely to be charged and less likely to
be cautioned. Code C of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 requires an officer who has ‘any reason
p. 205 to suspect’ that a person may be vulnerable to take further action (Home Office 2019: para 1.4). ↵ The
implication is that officers should be over-inclusive when dealing with persons with suspected mental
disorder, including contacting appropriate adults.
Yet Dehaghani (2016: 411), based on her observational study of booking-in procedures at a large custody
suite, asserts that ‘almost all suspects booked in could have been considered vulnerable in some manner’.
The problem, she argues, is not the identification of vulnerability per se, but an interpretation by officers
that the appropriate adult is not required in the specific circumstances. Since personality disorder falls
within the broad definition of mental disorder under section 1 of the MHA 1983, one might question how
routinely appropriate adults are present at interrogations of, for example, those with antisocial personality
disorder.
Personality disorder is perhaps a telling example of where the mismatch between different agencies’
expectations for, and definitions of, ‘the mentally disordered’ impedes the full protection to which that
‘group’ is entitled in law. The diagnosis of personality disorder has a long and problematic history, which
has continued into the 2013 version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The DSM-5 retained the 10 distinct types of personality disorder
from the previous versions of the Manual but introduced a separate, experimental system of diagnosis that
removes the arbitrary boundaries between personality disorders and other mental disorders. This
acknowledges the fundamental similarities across disorders, recognizing that personality disorders are
‘associated with ways of thinking and feeling about oneself and others that significantly and adversely
affect how an individual functions in many aspects of life’.
Of the 10 personality disorder categories listed in DSM-5, it is inevitable that there will be some association
between personality and criminality since the concepts often overlap. Both ‘antisocial personality
disorder’ and ‘borderline personality disorder’—the latter entails strong impulses to engage in reckless
and irresponsible behaviour—are much more likely to be associated with criminal behaviour than, for
example ‘obsessive-compulsive personality disorder’, which is characterized by an excessive interest in
lists, timetables, and rules. Thus, in much the same way as for ‘schizophrenia’, ‘personality disorder’ can
be protective rather than criminogenic, where it is associated with a socially withdrawn lifestyle.
On this side of the Atlantic, the World Health Organization’s International Statistical Classification of
Diseases (ICD) is preferred. The latest version, ICD-11, is a more fully dimensional classification than
DSM-5 and introduces a new method for diagnosing personality disorder based on a severity rating (mild,
moderate, or severe) and a set of six traits or patterns: borderline pattern, negative affectivity,
Page 5 of 27
detachment, dissociality, disinhibition, and anankastia (akin to obsessive-compulsive personality

disorder) (Tyrer et al. 2019). The model has not been without its detractors. Some clinicians are concerned
that the abolition of existing personality disorder categories seems to disregard significant advances in
treatment and research (Herpertz et al. 2017). The result is that there are now two, rather different, clinical
tools for assessing personality disorder. This will impact how these disorders are diagnosed and
understood around the world.
Finally, it is worth noting that the lack of a detailed definition as to what constitutes mental disability
poses not only challenges for services but also opportunities. One such is the controversial use of police
stations as a ‘place of safety’ under the MHA 1983. Following several critical reports (Scott 2015; HMIC
2013; Docking et al. 2007) concerning the over-use by the police of their powers, police stations can now
only be used as places of safety for adults and in limited circumstances. Moreover, the government has
p. 206 committed to wholly removing police stations as a designated place of safety by ↵ 2023/24 (DHSC and
Ministry of Justice 2021a: 106). It is now proposed to achieve this through Clause 41 of the Draft Mental
Health Bill 2022, which would remove police stations from the definition of place of safety for the purposes
of sections 135 and 136 of the MHA 1983.
On a similarly positive note, the broader Liaison and Diversion (L&D) Service has been rolled out across
England (NHS England 2021). L&D services provide early intervention, treatment referral and assertive
follow-up for people with mental health problems in contact with the criminal justice system. They also
provide information to criminal justice agencies to inform bail, charging, and disposal decisions, albeit
their success in passing on this information has been criticized (CJJI 2021a: 42). A 2021 evaluation
demonstrated that successful referral to L&D services reduced the possibility of a prison sentence by 45 per
4
cent, resulting in an estimated saving of £8.83 million to the state (Disley et al. 2021: 97).
On the other hand, at a time when mental health services are themselves extremely stretched, individuals
with disabilities in the justice system are unlikely to secure priority in services unless they pose an evident
risk. Further, the lack of definitional clarity around mental disabilities permits a politicized approach in
which such individuals remain vulnerable to inconsistent and potentially punitive responses.
Mental Disability and Crime
Does mental disorder cause crime or does involvement in crime and the criminal justice system cause
mental disorder? Or do the two simply share common precursors? Are those with mental disabilities more
likely to be the perpetrators or victims of crime? Or is the critical issue why and in what ways particular
symptoms or impairments contribute to the complex and multi-factorial causes of crime? These
straightforward questions are immensely complex to unpack (Peay 2011; Bean 2008).
Whilst those with mental disabilities are over-represented in prisons, that is not a basis for concluding
that mental disorder causes crime, since the processes of selection and progressive disclosure of disability
will account for a proportion of the disproportionality. Earlier in the process it is difficult to disentangle
Page 6 of 27
the impact of various policies and diversion schemes. On the one hand, they serve to filter offenders away
from the formal process; on the other, identifying disability can have a net-widening effect. The
intersection of public order offences and mental disability is apposite.
Surveys of the incidence of mental disability at the earliest stages will be an under-representation as the
police, the CPS, and the courts are likely to identify only those with the more obvious symptomatology.
Conversely, surveys of custodial populations are likely to be over-inclusive since they will count those
whose disorders have been exacerbated, or brought about, by the process of prosecution and punishment.
Indeed, a number of those in custody would not meet the threshold for compulsory admission to hospital
under the MHA 1983. Similarly, any tendency to remand into custody to obtain psychiatric reports will
contribute to this concentration effect—a practice that continues to raise concerns amongst judges (CJJI
p. 207 2021a: 45). A tension between the desire to ↵ obtain treatment for the ‘deserving’ offender with a
mental disability, and protective concerns where that desire may be frustrated, plays out amongst a
shifting population.
The contribution that people with mental disabilities make to the totality of offending overall is difficult to
quantify. Like juveniles, their offences are frequently highly visible, petty, and repeated; and not dissimilar
to those committed by the ‘mentally ordered’. That is not to deny that some commit violent offences, or
even homicide. Yet, the best epidemiological evidence (Swanson et al. 1990), which comes from the United
States, indicates that individuals with major mental disorders account for only a modest proportion of
violent crime. In the US, the figure is around 3 per cent (Monahan et al. 2001). Drugs and alcohol issues are
much more prevalent precursors to violent crime. Other studies, for example in Sweden, have found low
rates for the association between major mental illness and violence (Fazel and Grann 2006). Notably, even
studies which report a stronger association between violent reoffending and diagnosed psychiatric
disorders (see, e.g., Chang et al. 2015) identify drug and alcohol-use disorders as markedly most common.
Indeed, the dramatically increased ‘disorder’ effect for violent reoffending in women (double that for men)
is, of course, confined to the more limited incidence of female reoffending. In essence, what studies show
is that most people with mental disabilities are not violent, and most violence is not committed by people
with mental disabilities.
The majority of those who have offended with mental disabilities are found not on psychiatric wards but in
local facilities supported by health, housing, and social services, or in prison. Properly resourcing these
facilities could have a major preventive impact. It is paradoxical, therefore, as Burney and Pearson (1995:
309) observe, that ‘a court appearance may be the only way that their needs will become apparent’. Yet,
that very involvement with the criminal justice system may be why community services are more
problematic to access for these individuals.
The evidence suggests that our focus should be not on the relationship between offending and ‘disorders’
as diagnoses, but between particular symptoms and offending. Schizophrenia is a good example. The bald
diagnosis itself is of little help in identifying those who might offend, and the collection of symptoms that
can lead to a diagnosis of schizophrenia varies widely. Under ICD-11, the subtypes of schizophrenia in
5
ICD-10 (including paranoid schizophrenia ) have been replaced by a set of dimensional descriptors. A
diagnosis of schizophrenia is now based on the presence for one month of at least two symptoms. These
include persistent delusions and persistent hallucinations but also negative symptoms, such as a lack of
Page 7 of 27
motivation (avolition) and social withdrawal (asociality). One might presuppose that false beliefs that
someone is threatening you or hearing voices telling you to attack another might make you more likely to
commit an assault. Yet, the evidence is conflicted. In some cases there is a relationship, but in others the
outcome may depend more on the nature of the threat, the gender of the person concerned, and/or
whether negative symptomatology (more common in chronic stages of the condition) is dominant
(Swanson et al. 2006). In some people, mental disability can make it less likely that a crime will be
committed.
If you have a mental disability, is your offending necessarily linked to it? Acknowledging the important
role that symptoms play has led researchers to conduct small-scale detailed studies involving individuals
immediately after the alleged offending (Peterson et al. 2014; Junginger et al. 2006). Studies found only
p. 208 relatively small ↵ percentages of offending related directly to the disability (between 8–17 per cent).
This supports Skeem and colleagues’ (2011) argument that a more sophisticated approach is required to
unpack the precursors of offending in those with mental disability. For some, the disability does appear to
have a criminalizing effect; for others, it is more a question of a shared aetiology between offending and
mental disability. For the shared aetiology group, mental disability plays little or no part and offending can
be attributed to other common criminogenic factors. Finally, in some cases it is the response to disability
—one of stigma, discrimination, and heightened fears—which is thought to lead to recidivism. Thus,
Skeem and her colleagues call for a multi-disciplinary conceptual framework for reducing recidivism in
those with mental disability. Such a framework is equally important when thinking about the causes of
crime.
Once one starts to be alert to ‘mental health’, the variety of places and ways in which it manifests itself are
legion. Thus, of young offenders in the 13–18 age group, 31 per cent were identified as having a mental
health need (Harrington and Bailey 2005). The extensive criminal victimization of people with mental
6
health problems has been, until recently, an under-researched area. Cape (2016) has noted the stress of
being on long-term police bail and its negative consequences for the mental health of formerly healthy
individuals. Bean (2008) has questioned why it is that we understand that victims of crime can suffer from
post-traumatic stress disorder, but we rarely consider how those witnessing the violence they themselves
perpetrate can equally suffer traumatically afterwards? Such trauma can be guilt-induced or, as is more
common in the case of military veterans, attributable to the sights seen and the acts done. The relationship
between cannabis use, still formally a criminal offence, and the development of psychosis, remains
controversial. Vulnerable individuals and young people are particularly at psychiatric risk from some
7
forms of cannabis use.
The intricacies of the relationship between the mind, and the experiences people have, are beyond this
chapter’s remit; it is simply worth observing two matters. First, the links between mental disability and
crime, whether violent or not, are extraordinarily complex. And hence the interventions that might
successfully follow are not self-evident. Secondly, being able to benefit from psychological therapy does
not necessarily imply that an individual is suffering from a mental disability that requires compulsory
psychiatric intervention. But some are. The next section considers where and in what ways treatment for
offenders might be appropriate.
Page 8 of 27
Offending Behaviour and Treatment
Identifying the right place to deal with people who have offended who also have mental disabilities is both
hard and easy. Easy because with the levels of disability amongst the offending population, and with our
very narrow mental condition defences (Law Commission 2013), most of those with such disabilities will
inevitably be dealt with in the penal system rather than the health system. There simply are not enough
beds, enough resources, or enough enthusiasm within the health system to take all those who might
p. 209 benefit from a health disposal. Prisons have to cope through a combination of the ↵ mental health in-
reach services, the principle of equivalence (namely, that primary care services should be as good in prison
as in the community), and, as a last resort, the possibility of transfer to hospital for individuals who meet
the MHA 1983 criteria. And even transfer, where the need is urgent and demonstrable, is subject to
unacceptable delays (House of Commons Justice Committee 2021: paras 74–76). Where compulsory
treatment is deemed necessary at the point of sentence/disposal, hospital may be the only viable option
since it is only under section that compulsory psychiatric treatment can be given, victimization by other
8
prisoners avoided, and violent or self-harming behaviour adequately monitored and controlled. For
others, treatment in the community under a community sentence with a mental health treatment
requirement may be a more suitable option, even though the treatment element cannot be compulsory.
There has been a tendency for the upper courts to underplay the duty of sentencing courts to protect the
9
human rights of convicted offenders with mental disorders and disabilities (O’Loughlin 2021). The
Sentencing Council’s 2020 guideline similarly pays insufficient attention to the need to divert from
custody those offenders who are at a real and immediate risk of death or serious harm in prison through
suicide or self-injury.
On the other hand, the question of identification is hard since, if the penal system is the default option, it is
an option that is peculiarly ill-suited to offering effective therapeutic interventions. As the Home Office
recognized as long ago as 1990, ‘For most offenders, imprisonment has to be justified in terms of public
protection, denunciation and retribution. Otherwise it can be an expensive way of making bad people
worse’ (para. 2.7). In 2008, the Ministry of Justice went further, asserting that ‘mentally disordered people
who commit offences should receive specialist mental health treatment rather than being punished,
wherever that can safely be achieved’ (Ministry of Justice 2008). Custodial environments are noisy,
stressful, overcrowded, frightening to many, and ill-equipped to manage genuine rehabilitative change. It
is clear from recent investigations that prisons continue to struggle to identify those with mental health
needs and that safety in prisons has declined (HM Inspectorate of Prisons 2021). Meanwhile, community
10
orders have become progressively punitive in their impact under the agendas of successive governments.
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 recently made community sentences even tougher by
introducing longer curfew hours and increasing the maximum curfew period from 12 months to two
11
years.
It is never, of course, clear when dealing with offenders with disability quite what is meant by treatment,
or what treatment is attempting to alter—the ‘underlying disorder’, the offending behaviour, or the link, if
any, between the two? Or are these efforts really devoted largely to alleviating the distress and emotional
problems individuals suffer, either those pre-existing or post-dating the offending? If it is the likelihood
Page 9 of 27
of criminal behaviour per se, the justification for treatment will not be confined to a ‘mentally
p. 210 ↵ disordered’ subgroup. These quandaries have not deterred the development of rehabilitative
programmes in prison.
The ‘What Works’ initiative (Home Office 2001) has had a significant impact on the philosophy of
imprisonment, with the focus being largely on treating offending, rather than mental disorder per se.
Cognitive behavioural programmes for sex offenders, offence-focused problem-solving (e.g. ‘Enhanced
Thinking Skills’), substance-abuse treatment programmes, controlling and managing anger (RESOLVE),
and cognitive self-change programmes for violent offenders, capture the flavour of these initiatives.
The extent to which treatment endeavours can be both sustained and effective remains questionable.
Achieving effectiveness will be jeopardized by three enduring factors: prison overcrowding, the use of
short sentences, and the need to obtain genuine engagement in the programmes by prisoners. Consent is
critical to the success of treatment endeavours with some offenders (Zlodre et al. 2015). Involuntary
treatments can have no effect at all, or indeed, be detrimental (Martin et al. 2012). Finally, if sentencers
believe that imprisonment will secure access to beneficial treatment programmes, ‘ordered’ offenders may
find themselves at risk of therapeutic sentencing, further accelerating the problem of overwhelming
demand.
There is mixed evidence for the effectiveness of current programmes, indicating that participation can
reduce the likelihood of minor reoffending but has little discernible impact on serious offending. An
impact evaluation of RESOLVE found that the treated group were less likely to reoffend, reoffended less
frequently, and took longer to reoffend compared to controls. The differences were slight, however: 44.7
per cent of the treatment group reoffended within two years compared to 47.4 per cent of the control
group. There was no statisically significant effect on violent offending (Robinson et al. 2021: 3). Similarly,
participation in Enhanced Thinking Skills was associated with a reduction of six percentage points in one-
year reconviction rates but there was no significant impact on severe offending (Sadlier 2010: i).
Concerning results emerged from an impact evaluation of the Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP),
a widely used programme introduced in 1992. More of those in the treated group committed at least one
sexual offence (10 per cent) than those in the untreated group (8 per cent) over an average follow-up
period of 8.2 years (Mews et al. 2017: 3). The authors concluded that participation in SOTP may have
increased participants’ propensity to reoffend, perhaps due to the sharing of offending histories in group
sessions. The findings prompted the Ministry of Justice to withdraw SOTP and fast-track its replacement
with two new progammes: Kaizen (for high-risk offenders) and Horizon (for medium-risk offenders)
(McCartan et al. 2018). Both take a future-focused, strengths-based approach and do not encourage
participants to discuss their offences (Wilkinson and Powis 2019; Henfrey 2018). Like SOTP, however,
Kaizen and Horizon are being rolled out ahead of a full evaluation of their effectiveness, and are therefore
better described as ‘evidence informed’ than ‘evidence based’ (McCartan et al. 2018). The introduction of
untested programmes poses particular problems for prisoners serving indeterminate or extended
determinate sentences, as prisoners often rely on completing programmes to convince the Parole Board of
their suitability for release.
Page 10 of 27
The shift from broadly-based rehabilitation to offence-specific crime reduction initiatives has also had an
12
p. 211 impact on Grendon Prison. Genders and Player (1995) admirably ↵ detail the way in which Grendon’s
therapeutic endeavours and security considerations are difficult to reconcile. Yet, as they note, Grendon
has been successful in controlling problematic prisoners; perhaps knowing that the rest of the prison
system provides a very different form of containment may have a positive effect on prisoner behaviour.
The motivations for the expansion of the Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) programme
under the Offender Personality Disorder Pathway (OPDP) may also be understood in this way. Originally, it
was estimated that around 2,400 men would meet the criteria for ‘dangerous and severe personality
disorder’ and a small number of treatment units were developed in prisons and high security hospitals. A
generous interpretation of the history of the DSPD initiative would suggest that it was prompted as much
by a concern for the unmet needs of diverse and un-enticing individuals as it did from a concern about
their risk to others (Home Office 1999). The DSPD group was portrayed not only as dangerous but also in
need of help due to high rates of substance misuse, suicide attempts, depression, anxiety, illiteracy,
unemployment and homelessness (Home Office 1999: 34).
While DSPD treatment programmes were expected to be grounded in evidence (DSPD Programme et al.
2008) there was a distinct lack of good quality evidence for the effectiveness of existing treatments with
the target group (Warren et al. 2003: 5). There was no agreed clinical diagnosis, no agreed treatment, no
means of confidently assessing when the predicted risk may have been reduced, and no obvious link
between the alleged underlying condition and the behaviour. Research was commissioned, but
amendments to the MHA 1983 proceeded without the results and provided the basis for further compulsory
transfer and treatment within the hospital system.
Yet despite its troubled beginnings, the DSPD initiative has proved enduring, and has even expanded under
the new title of the Offender Personality Disorder Pathway (OPDP): a wide-ranging, prison and
community-based programme of psychologically informed case management, treatment units,
progression facilities, and personality disorder services in hospitals. Like Grendon, the OPDP demonstrates
that therapeutic initiatives that serve prison management goals of maintaining order, control and safety
for staff and prisoners are more likely to survive than those that challenge or disrupt these goals
(O’Loughlin 2019). While evaluations of the DSPD programme for men found weak reductions in violence
risk scores (Ministry of Justice 2011: 7), the units were successful in managing violence and self-harm at a
much lower cost than elsewhere in the prison estate (Department of Health 2011).
The ambitious nature of the OPDP should not be underestimated. In December 2017, 31,090 men and 1,996
women were on the OPDP (Skett and Lewis 2019: 168). This vast increase in numbers over the initial DSPD
scheme has been facilitated by broader eligibility criteria. While the programme focuses on male offenders
who pose a high risk of serious harm, participants need only be ‘likely to have a severe personality
disorder’ (Benefield et al. 2015: 6). For women, a high risk of serious harm is not required (d’Cruz 2015).
Like the DSPD programme, the OPDP tends to pathologize offending and difficult behaviour. It purposely
adopts ‘a rather loose definition of severe personality disorder’ to target resources ‘at those individuals
who are causing the most concern, and the most risk, across the system’ (Skett, Goode, and Barton 2017:
215). Participants are identified based on OASys data and information including ‘childhood difficulties,
Page 11 of 27
history of mental health problems, current risk to staff, and current disruptive behaviour’ (Skett and Lewis
2019: 169). This approach leaves little room for acknowledging the harmful impact of prison on mental
health or the ethical problems raised by psychologically invasive treatment programmmes with prisoners
who have a history of trauma in coercive criminal justice settings (Player 2017).
p. 212 ↵ The inclusion of individuals without a formal diagnosis in the OPDP is problematic. Continuing
uncertainties regarding treatment effectiveness may mean that a stigmatizing label will be attached to
participants without a sufficient means of removing it. While lessons have been learned from the DSPD
programme, it is not clear how participants will exit the OPDP—an initiative that is viewed by its
commissioners as ‘a pathway for life’ (Trebilcock et al. 2019: 310). Conversely, the focus on serious
offenders may result in some individuals being excluded from services that could benefit them (Witharana
et al. 2011) and it is unclear what will happen to those who are rejected (Trebilcock et al. 2019: 314). The
OPDP therefore risks being both under and over-inclusive.
When it comes to personality disorder, psychiatrists find themselves in a dilemma, being understandably
wary of having to ‘treat’ ‘personality disordered’ offenders, where successful interventions are yet to be
reliably established, whilst clinicians are painfully aware of the needs of such individuals and their levels of
distress. ‘Treatment’ is arguably offered by the medical profession as a response to illness—something
atypical and unwelcome for an individual. Success in treating antisocial personality disorder is, however,
often calculated in terms of reduced risks of offending or violence towards others rather than a benefit to
patients (see NCCMH et al. 2010). Offenders with personality disorder commonly have low motivation for
treatment (Howells and Day 2007) and may be even less likely to engage with treatments primarily aimed
at reducing risk to the public. There is greater therapeutic optimism for those diagnosed with borderline
personality disorder, as effective treatments to reduce self-harm are available (NCCMH et al. 2009: 205).
Psychologists have entered this morass, but even their enthusiasm may wane if the treatment is primarily
containment and control. Paradoxically, professionals are criticized both for a failure to offer treatment to
those they regard as untreatable, and for releasing those they deem successfully treated.
Thus, treatment embodies several difficulties. First, given the diversity of need, ‘treatment’ may mean
many different things—ranging from the administration of anti-psychotic medication to the acquisition
of social survival skills. There may also be a mismatch between health and criminal justice personnel in
respect of treatment objectives. Secondly, if the relationship between the disorder and offending is not
primarily causal, there is less justification for excusing from punishment. Thirdly, where an individual is
treatable and there is some causal connection between the disorder and the offending, there may be less
(or no) justification for continued detention after treatment. Fourthly, successful treatment for a disability
may have no bearing on future criminality. Offenders with mental disabilities should therefore be accorded
proportionality in the length of confinement as would offenders without disabilities; release should not be
determined on the basis of unreliable predictions of future offending. Fifthly, both explicit coercion and
the use of informal coercive measures should be carefully regulated. The need is urgent to enhance the
custodial-therapeutic environment to facilitate whatever rehabilitation may be possible on a non-coerced
basis. Equally, ensuring that those who are conditionally discharged from hospital are not subject to
further deprivations of liberty, including enforced treatment in the community, should facilitate a better
13
demarcation between what the state can and cannot do legitimately with offender-patients. The
Page 12 of 27
proposals in the Draft Mental Health Bill 2022 for new powers to ‘discharge’ restricted patients subject to
conditions that deprive them of their liberty in the community do not make this sufficiently clear. And
p. 213 finally, it must be stressed that ↵ if the numerical bulk of disorder-related offending is associated with
alcohol and drug use, and/or disorders of personality, then a psychiatric hospital is probably not the best
14
venue for ‘treatment’.
It is worth stressing that the whole approach adopted in the UK can be challenged by looking further afield.
For example, Italian mental health services, including those for offender patients, have been undergoing a
radical transformation involving de-institutionalization since the late 1970s. There is not space here to
review these (see Hopkin et al. 2018) but it is notable that institutional care does not have to be the only
remedy for those with mental disabilities who offend.
Protective Sentencing: Procedural Safeguards Versus Treatment
Criminal justice reforms have been devoted primarily to increasing the court’s sentencing options and not
to addressing issues of culpability, albeit the Law Commission (2016a, 2016b) has substantial proposals for
reforming the law of unfitness to plead and has considered insanity and automatism (Law Commission
2013). If implemented, the proposals on unfitness will significantly improve the fairness of trials for
people with disabilities and address several conflicts between domestic law and the state’s obligations
under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) (Peay 2016a). The recently updated Equal
Treatment Bench Book issued by the Judicial College (2021) is a step in the right direction, giving much-
needed guidance to judges on how to make reasonable adjustments in court for people with mental
disabilities.
It is hoped that those with mental disabilities will benefit from the Sentencing Council’s (2020) Guideline
for offenders with mental disorders, developmental disorders, or neurological impairments.
Commendably, the Guideline highlights the wide range of disposals available and does not fall into the trap
of focusing solely on serious or ‘dangerous’ offenders. It highlights that coercive therapeutic measures are
not always necessary, and that a fine or discharge may be an appropriate response to minor offending.
While the Guideline has been praised for recognizing a wide range of conditions and for emphasizing the
need to consider gender, culture, and ethnicity, psychiatrists have questioned the emphasis on culpability
and the seeming priority given to punishment over safety (Taylor et al. 2021). This is largely because the
Guideline follows the Sentencing Council’s two-step approach to sentencing: evaluating seriousness
(culpability and harm) and then considering mitigating and aggravating factors.
Concepts of dangerousness and its alleged association with mental disorder pepper the academic literature
and the rhetoric of sentencing. Academics and policy-makers have been fiercely divided both on predictive
grounds—will it work?—and on questions of rights. The argument embodies the distinction between
statistical and legal-clinical decision-making. Crudely put, this is the difference between determining the
risk factors associated with groups of people who have common characteristics and determining whether
the risk will materialize for any one individual within that group (Buchanan and Zonana 2009). These
p. 214 kinds of difficult decisions are faced regularly by courts, Mental ↵ Health Tribunals (MHTs), the Parole
Page 13 of 27
Board, clinicians, and the executive (see Boyd-Caine 2010). Research concerning such decision-making
bodies is clear: despite actuarial evidence that would support the release of patients and prisoners,
attributions of risk are central, overvalued, and very difficult to refute (Trebilcock and Weaver 2012).
Should all offenders be entitled to a proportional measure of punishment? Or is a measure of prevention

warranted? If so, how is precautionary sentencing to be limited in practice? And are mentally disordered
offenders at greater risk of the imposition of such a sentence? These and other issues concerning the use of
preventive justice have been extensively reviewed in a telling analysis by Ashworth and Zedner (2014).
Dworkin (1977) described the restraint and treatment of the ‘dangerously insane’ as an insult to their
rights to dignity and liberty—an infringement that could be justified not where crime reduction might
result, but only where the danger posed was ‘vivid’. Bottoms and Brownsword (1983: 21) unpacked this
concept into its elements of seriousness, temporality (that is frequency and immediacy), and certainty.
Certainty was pivotal to precautionary sentencing, but even a high probability of future offending should
become relevant only if the behaviour anticipated involved causing or attempting ‘very serious violence’.
Thus, the right to a proportional measure of punishment would yield a ‘prima facie right to release for the
prisoner at the end of his normal term’, and this would apply—in the absence of ‘vivid danger’—equally to
the alleged ‘dangerous offender’.
But at this point theory and practice diverge. The passage of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 with its
smorgasbord of objectives (crime reduction, risk management, reparation, deterrence, rehabilitation, and
15
deserved punishment) places those with mental disabilities in triple, if not quadruple, jeopardy. Attempts
to treat or rehabilitate offenders and a deterrence philosophy which may impact even less successfully on
some offenders with mental disabilities are all likely to contribute to a greater than proportionate use of
incapacitation where offending occurs in the context of mental disability.
Community orders and suspended sentence orders can both be coupled with mental health treatment
requirements (MHTRs) under Schedule 9 of the Sentencing Act 2020. While an estimated 40 per cent of
offenders serving community sentences have a diagnosable mental health condition, MHTRs have been
little used (Judicial College 2021, para. 127). In 2019, they accounted for just 0.4 per cent of requirements
commenced under community orders or suspended sentence orders (Ministry of Justice 2020a, para. 108).
Whilst this is, in part, attributable to the problem of finding a willing practitioner and a consenting patient
it nevertheless indicates an abject failure to address the level of need in the less serious offending
population. The Ministry of Justice is now keen to encourage greater uptake in light of evidence that
community sentences and MHTRs are associated with a significant reduction in reoffending (Hillier and
Mews 2018, p.6), and there is some evidence of growing confidence in the orders (CJJI 2021a, p.45). The
success of the MHTRs may, in part, be due to the sotto voce nature of the use of treatment requirements,
since these cannot be enforced on a non-consenting offender.
At the other end of the spectrum, legislation requiring life sentences for certain ‘dangerous’ offenders has
drawn more mentally disordered offenders into the net of indeterminacy (see Schedule 19, Sentencing Act
2020). Notably, section 258 of the Sentencing Act 2020 does not prevent the courts from making a hospital
p. 215 order with restrictions, ↵ where an individual satisfies the necessary conditions under the MHA 1983.
Page 14 of 27
Indeed, only the mandatory life sentence following a conviction for murder has the capacity to trump a
potential therapeutic disposal. However, in general, protective confinement is self-justifying and difficult
to resist.
16 17
Finally, it is of concern that the Court of Appeal, in the leading cases of Vowles and Edwards, held that a
sentence with a penal element is the ‘usual course’ when sentencing a mentally disordered offender and
that courts must provide ‘sound reasons’ for departing from this. This is based on a misinterpretation of
the relevant legislation, which does not require sentencers to prioritize punishment (O’Loughlin 2021).
Vowles and Edwards also appear to prioritize prison sentences plus orders under s.45A of the MHA 1983
over therapeutic disposals under section 37/41 where there is some culpability (O’Loughlin 2021). Coupling
s.45A with an indeterminate or extended determinate sentence ensures that the Parole Board will be
responsible for release, and that the person can be recalled to prison if their risk increases. By contrast,
conditional discharge following a section 37/41 order requires, for recall, deterioration in the individual’s
mental health. In more recent appeals, the Court has been willing to prioritize public protection and the
offender’s therapeutic interests over punishment (O’Loughlin 2021). Perhaps signalling the beginning of a
18
less punitive approach, it held in Cleland that Vowles merely sets out ‘factors which are relevant to be
considered’ and that sentencing decisions are necessarily ‘fact-specific’.
Policy Development in England and Wales: Why We Are Where We Are
Policy development in mental health and crime has been chequered. Therapeutic and risk-oriented
objectives have become progressively blurred; a conflict between legalism and welfarism is evident; and
there has been a growing role for human rights. At face value the dominant policy is humane and
therapeutic, encouraging the placement of mentally disordered offenders, wherever possible, into the care
19
of health and personal social services (Bradley 2009). Notions of diversion and early intervention are
consistent with a philosophy that ‘treatment works’; people can be changed or protected from
inappropriate or damaging experiences. However, such policies are invariably accompanied by riders
which stress the need properly to protect the public. Moreover, there appears to be a persistent distrust of
therapeutic disposals for some offenders with mental disability (Peay 2019).
Perceptions and attributions of risk have had a great influence on policy development (Ashworth and
Zedner 2014). Those who have offended who have a mental disability are most ‘at risk’ of being perceived
as posing an unquantifiable danger, and thus, peculiarly apt for the ubiquitous focus on risk management.
As risk is transposed into danger, ‘dangerous’ individuals are singled out for special attention, and the
p. 216 responsibility for ↵ preventing and managing risk is transferred to those professionals dealing with or
caring for them (Douglas 1992).
Evidence of this duality in policy can be seen in the development of the DSPD programme (Home Office
1999) and its wider successor, the OPDP (O’Loughlin 2019; Player 2017). Even if these programmes began
with beneficent aims, acknowledging the neediness and vulnerability of some individuals, their impact has
been to delay release from confinement and extend control out into the community. Moreover, the
Page 15 of 27
introduction in of IPPs (indeterminate sentences for public protection—now abolished—Annison 2015)

and the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA), both of which drew in those with mental
20
disabilities, had clearly protective ambitions.
MAPPA encapsulates some of the difficulties of clinical professionals working alongside criminal justice
personnel. MAPPA are designed to ensure the identification of serious sexual and violent offenders in the
community, the sharing of information among those agencies involved in the assessment of risk, and the
management of that risk as individuals move from conditions of security into the community (Ministry of
Justice 2015). On 31 March 2020, there were 85,709 offenders under MAPPA management in the
community in England and Wales, representing a 75 per cent increase from 2010 (Ministry of Justice
21
2020b). Of those, 73 per cent were registered sex offenders and 27 per cent were categorized as violent
offenders (including those on hospital orders and some sex offenders not eligible for notification
requirements). The overwhelming majority were subject only to ordinary agency management (Ministry of
Justice 2020b).
In 2019–20, 3,989 individuals were ‘actively managed’ under MAPPA as they fell in the highest risk
22
categories and 18 per cent were returned to custody for a breach of licence. Psychiatrists are involved
with these two risk categories and, since the passage of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, various agencies,
including Health Trusts, have a duty to cooperate with the responsible authority in each of the 42 MAPPA
areas. Yet a psychiatrist’s primary responsibility is to the health of their patients; and psychiatrists, like
other health professionals, have a duty of confidentiality towards those patients, a duty that does not sit
easily with the concept of information sharing embraced by MAPPA. The tensions are evident, and as
Taylor and Yakeley observe (2013: 12) in respect of information sharing at MAPPA meetings: ‘less
experienced health representatives may be unprepared for the—often subtle—pressures placed upon them
to disclose information about patients known to them’. Their report stresses the advantages of obtaining
patient consent to disclosure to manage these confidentiality issues. Worryingly, confusion over
confidentiality and data protection rules was observed throughout the criminal justice process, hindering
23
effective communication (CJJI 2021a).
p. 217 ↵ Yet, much confusion arises because of the tensions inherent across the continuum both of ordered-
disordered behaviour and that of law-abiding/law-breaking behaviour. Care and treatment are seen as
appropriate for the seriously disordered, provided this does not arise in conjunction with worrying
offending. Similarly, preventive measures and custodial punishment have been traditionally reserved for
serious offenders, again assuming an absence of obvious disorder. These tensions are confounded where
disorder and offending exist side-by-side in one individual, or, more confusingly still, interact.
Part of the difficulty arises from the perception of those with mental disabilities who have offended as
being in thrall to their disorders. The notorious Inquiries after Homicide fell into this trap (Peay 1996)
because they made an independent inquiry mandatory wherever a homicide was perpetrated by an
individual who had been in contact with mental health services in the previous year, regardless of the links
between disability and the death. In turn, mental health practitioners became the focus for blame. As
Szmukler (2000: 7) observes:
Page 16 of 27
Inquiries … adopt a model of responsibility that is grossly oversimplified and distorted by

retrospective analysis. The offender patient is seen as lacking agency, behaving as an automaton,
like an aeroplane out of control. The patient is no longer a person with feelings, hopes, intentions
or with the capacity for choice.
The resulting amplification of discriminatory practices for such individuals has led in part to calls for
capacity-based legislation to apply to offenders with and without mental disorders (Szmukler et al. 2010).
The MHA 1983 is the key piece of legislation dealing with those with mental disabilities; Part III deals with
those involved with the criminal justice system. The Act continues uneasily to embrace both legalism and
welfarism. Its emphasis on treating people for who they are sits uncomfortably alongside a criminal justice
approach that emphasizes what people have done as the basis for a proportionate intervention. An
awkward fusion is evident between mental health and criminal justice objectives, with both sets of
professionals now expected to engage in the potentially competing tasks of the risk management and
rehabilitation of offenders. Arguably, this fusion of objectives favours risk management even in those
cases where individuals are detainable under the MHA 1983 (see Peay 2016b).
Finally, the Human Rights Act 1998 has had a powerful influence on the relationship between the executive
and the continuing detention of those with psychiatric disorders; an influence which has generally
permeated discretionary decision-making (Peay 2016a). Yet, the ECHR does not naturally lend itself to the
protection of those with mental disorders because it explicitly permits the detention of persons of
‘unsound mind’. Nonetheless, the first declaration of incompatibility under the Human Rights Act 1998
24
occurred in a case concerning an offender-patient detained in a psychiatric hospital. Perhaps this is mere
coincidence. But perhaps it reflects the tensions that permeate the practices of all who work in this field.
In short, policy development has been much influenced by a subjective approach to the framing of mental
disability and crime: achieving an approach grounded in objective facts has proved elusive. Again, this is
unsurprising where disability has been so broadly defined and objectivity itself is inherently vulnerable to
a subjective filtering of fears and fancies.
p. 218 Conclusion
This chapter has argued that individuals with disabilities who have offended are not an isolated category. A
number of issues arise.
First, effort should be devoted to developing a pluralistic model of the criminal justice system. Piecemeal
tinkering is an insufficient basis for addressing problems across the ordered-disordered offending
continuum. Equally, the temptation to solve problems by addressing only the back end of the process
(namely, sentencing and disposals) distracts attention from the urgent need for the prior issues of
responsibility and culpability to be resolved on a fairer basis.
Secondly, the impossibility of identifying such individuals consistently makes a ‘diversion and transfer’
solution unrealistic. Notably, enthusiasm among criminal justice and health professionals for diverting
more individuals from prosecution has historically been limited (CJJI 2021a: 16). Resource allocation needs
Page 17 of 27
to be across the board and not only in respect of a limited number of beds for potentially difficult offender-
patients. Moreover, as Watson and Grounds (1993) long-ago observed, greater liaison combined with
overcoming the boundaries between different parts of the criminal justice and health agencies will be
insufficient if those agencies continue to disagree on who fits into the category of ‘mentally disordered
offender’. The CJJI (2021a: 8) observed that the absence of a common definition continues to create
difficulties across the system. Establishing the demonstrable economic and social benefits of early
intervention is complex (Knapp and Wong 2020) but worthy of exploration regardless of whether mental
disability can be linked to offending.
Thirdly, treatment in prison, and in community settings, needs to be properly resourced. The problem here
is the use of overt compulsion. The circumstances in which treatment will be offered, to whom, and what
the consequences will be where it is deemed unwelcome, unsuccessful, or inappropriate needs more
careful reflection. A pluralistic model would require the same limitations on intervention for all offenders,
assuming they have the capacity to consent to treatment or undergo punishment. While adoption of a
proportionality-based approach would constitute a sounder foundation for greater fairness between
offenders, the risk-based/treatment approach continues to dominate the field. In turn, the problematic
aspects of multi-agency working need clarifying so that all are familiar with the circumstances in which
confidential ‘health’ information can be shared in the absence of consent.
Lastly, the justifications are many for singling out subsections of ‘disabled offenders’ for special
treatment. But if one lesson emerges from an understanding of the relationship between mental health
and crime it is that people are not their diagnoses. A much more sophisticated and holistic approach is
required. Special treatment can all too readily become special control; and to be seduced by the notion that
risk can be managed through the containment of identifiable individuals is to allow discriminatory
treatment, while failing to tackle the roots of the problem.

For a clear and engaging introduction to clinical criminology, see Herschel Prins’ Offenders, Deviants or Patients? An
Introduction to Clinical Criminology (2016). The fifth edition of this book draws together Prins’ unique experiences as a
probation officer, psychiatric social worker, academic, and member of the Parole Board. For fuller accounts of the
p. 219 problematic ↵ relationship between mental disorder and crime, see Peay’s Mental Health and Crime (2011) and
Bean’s Madness and Crime (2008). On the political context, see Trebilcock and Weston’s Mental Health and Offending:
Care, Coercion and Control (2020), Ch.3.
Online resources

Page 18 of 27
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Notes
1
See Mental Health Act 2007, and for commentary Peay (2011). https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1983/20/
contents <https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1983/20/contents>. Accessed 22 June 2023.
2
Albeit not all of those who are diagnosable would qualify for compulsory admission under the MHA 1983, since many
have drug and alcohol dependence or experience learning disability without it being associated with abnormally
aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct: Section 1(3) and Section 1(2A)(b) MHA 1983.
Page 25 of 27
3
Ministry of Justice (2022). See Figure 1 (Quarterly 12-month rolling rate of deaths per 1,000 prisoners), Figure 2
(Quarterly 12-month rolling rate of self-harm incidents per 1,000 prisoners) and Figure 4 (Quarterly 12-month rolling
rate of total assaults by gender of establishment).
4
Based on an average prison sentence length of 222 days, it was estimated that diversion saved the criminal justice
system £38.14 million and therefore more than offset the cost of L&D services at £29.31 million (Disley et al. 2021, p.
97).
5
ICD—10-CM Diagnosis Code F20.0, 2016; see http://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/F01-F99/F20-F29/F20-/
F20.0 <http://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/F01-F99/F20-F29/F20-/F20.0>, accessed 22 June 2023.
6
See the Report by Victim Support and the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, At risk, yet dismissed –
summary.pdf (
⤴
https://www.victimsupport.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/documents/files/At%20risk%2C%20yet%20dismissed%20-
%20summary.pdf <https://www.victimsupport.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/documents/files/
At%20risk%2C%20yet%20dismissed%20-%20summary.pdf>),
⤴
accessed 22 June 2023.
7
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/healthadvice/problemsdisorders/cannabis.aspx <http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/
healthadvice/problemsdisorders/cannabis.aspx>, accessed 22 June 2023.
8
The UK was found to have violated Art. 2 of the ECHR—the right to life—following the killing of one mentally
disordered man by another; both had been on remand and held in the same cell in Chelmsford Prison: Paul and
Audrey Edwards v The UK (2002) Application No. 46477/99.
9
In Price v. the UK (2002) 34 E.H.R.R. 53, the UK was found to have violated Art. 3 of the ECHR—the right not to be
subject to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment or torture. The case concerned a wheelchair user
sentenced to immediate custody by a judge who failed to ensure that her needs could be met by the prison.
10
See, for example, Schedule 16 to the Crime and Courts Act 2013 which required courts, unless it would be unjust to
do so, to include a punitive element in all non-custodial orders.
11
Sentencing Act 2020, Schedule 9, para. 9, as amended by s.150 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022.
12
Grendon is a secure psychiatric facility within HM Prison Service which accepts prisoners on longer term sentences
who have volunteered to enter its therapeutic community approach.
13
See Secretary of State for Justice v MM [2018] UKSC 60.
14
A 2021 review of community-based drug treatment has provided a compelling but depressing picture of the viability
of such services. See https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprobation/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2021/08/
Drug-treatment-recovery-thematic-v1.1.pdf, <https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprobation/wp-content/
uploads/sites/5/2021/08/Drug-treatment-recovery-thematic-v1.1.pdf> accessed 22 June 2023.
15
The purposes of sentencing now appear under section 57(2) of the Sentencing Act 2020 (the result of the Law
Commission’s (2018) Sentencing Code project). Offenders disposed of under the MHA 1983 are explicitly exempted
from all five purposes (section 57(3)(b) of the Sentencing Act 2020).
16
[2015] EWCA Crim 45.
17
[2018] EWCA Crim 595; [2018] 4 W.L.R. 64; [2018] 2 Cr. App. R. (S.) 17.
Page 26 of 27
18
Cleland [2020] EWCA Crim 906.
19
See also the thoughtful report from Criminal Justice Joint Inspection, available at, https://
www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/cjji/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/04/MDO_Joint_Report_12_2009 <https://
www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/cjji/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/04/MDO_Joint_Report_12_2009>.pdf, accessed
22 June 2023.
20
IPP sentences, which have left a long tail of prisoners with psychological difficulties, have been roundly condemned,
most recently by the House of Commons Justice Committee (September 2022) https://committees.parliament.uk/
publications/28825/documents/173974/default/, accessed 22 June 2023 <https://committees.parliament.uk/
publications/28825/documents/173974/default/>.
21
Registered sex offenders subject to notification requirements for life are now eligible for review of this requirement
following a declaration of incompatibility by the Supreme Court under section 4 of the Human Rights Act 1998: see R
(on the application of F and Angus Aubrey Thompson) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2010] UKSC 17.
22
See Table 7b, Ministry of Justice 2020b.
23
The rules are undeniably complex, even though there is an exemption in the Data Protection Act 2018 for sharing
data for justice purposes; see https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-
data-protection-regulation-gdpr/exemptions/?q=dpa, 22 June 2023. <https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-
data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/exemptions/?q=dpa>
24
R (on the application of H) v Mental Health Review Tribunal [2001] 3 WLR 512.
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Page 27 of 27
10. Public opinion, crime, and criminal justice

p. 223 10. Public opinion, crime, and criminal justice

Mike Hough and Julian V. Roberts
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0010
Abstract
This chapter summarizes research on public opinion about crime and criminal justice in developed industrialized societies. It
starts with an assessment of what can be said about public knowledge about crime, documenting widespread misperceptions
about the nature of crime, about crime trends, and about the criminal justice response to crime. It then considers public
attitudes towards crime and justice, which tend to be largely negative. The chapter presents evidence of the links between
levels of knowledge and attitudes to justice, suggesting that misinformation about crime and justice is the likely source of
negative public ratings of the justice system. Penal populism and populist punitiveness are considered. The chapter ends by
exploring issues of public trust in justice, confidence, and legitimacy.
Keywords: knowledge about crime, attitudes to crime, public opinion, penal populism, public punitiveness, trust in justice,
legitimacy, public surveys
Introduction
Public opinion affects every stage of criminal justice. Legislators contemplate the public’s reaction when
they propose legislation. Policies perceived to be unpopular are unlikely to be enacted, however principled
or effective they may be. The police weigh community views when allocating their resources; public
concern about a local issue such as the sex or drug trade may determine where or how often the police
conduct patrols. Prosecutors apply a ‘public interest’ test when deciding whether to launch a prosecution.
The evidence against a suspect may be very strong, but a prosecution will only proceed if the prosecutor
believes it would be in the public interest.
Page 1 of 25
Courts are affected indirectly by public opinion: research has demonstrated increases in sentence severity
as a response to increasing public concern about crime. Enns (2016) claims that changes in public
punitiveness have contributed to the rise of mass incarceration in the US. The evidence of a link between
public punitiveness and sentencing practice is less convincing elsewhere but public opinion may have
influenced sentencing policies and practice in other countries. For example, it has been argued that the
severe sentencing of offences during the English riots of 2011 was a reflection of public anger, rather than a
reasoned response to mass offending (see Lightowler and Quirk 2015). The Sentencing Councils in England
and Wales and Scotland consider public views too when devising their sentencing guidelines. Most parole
boards include members of the community to help decide whether (and when) prisoners should be
released on licence or parole and release decisions may well be affected by likely community reaction.
There is no doubt, then, that the public—or in some cases, what is assumed to be public opinion—
influences the direction and nature of criminal justice. Whether and to what extent this is appropriate is
less clear. Scholars are divided on the issue. Some argue that criminal justice would benefit from more (and
more direct) public involvement—see Berk (2021), Shammas (2020), and essays in Ryberg and Roberts
(2014) for contrasting views on this. For better or worse, however, criminal justice has become more
responsive to public opinion. For example, there has been a resurgence of interest in the jury and several
p. 224 countries have introduced or re-introduced the jury ↵ system. In England and Wales, citizens elect
Police and Crime Commissioners to provide civilian oversight of police forces. Some people refer to this as
the democratization of criminal justice, and see it as a good thing. Others regard it as a dangerous move
towards mere populism.
Deciding how to accommodate public opinion in criminal justice policy provokes fundamental questions
about the way in which democracies should function. For most of the last century, politicians tended to
assume that public opinion about crime and punishment was something to be managed. The death penalty
in Britain provides the clearest example of this: for 50 years a majority of the public was in favour of
1
bringing back hanging—yet Parliament repeatedly voted against reinstatement. In the last three decades,
however, we have witnessed signs of increasing political responsiveness to public opinion. Whether this
trend should be seen as mere ‘populism’ or as a long-overdue sensitivity to the public depends partly on
one’s reading of political motives and partly on whether public opinion can be regarded as sufficiently
informed to justify consideration in penal policy-making. Whatever the case, no system of justice can
ignore community views entirely.
Public opinion has long been, and remains, a challenge for politicians and criminal justice practitioners.
The former must devise policies that are not radically inconsistent with community views. This requires
them to first determine the nature of public opinion towards criminal justice, and to recognize the limits
on public knowledge of crime and the response to crime. Practitioners—whether prosecutors, judges, or
parole board members—need to ensure that their decisions promote or at least do not undermine public
trust and confidence. The role of scholars is to determine, using the appropriate methodologies, the true
nature of public opinion and its place in the criminal justice system. Their challenge is twofold. First, to
articulate the relationship that should exist between public opinion and criminal justice policies. Second,
to determine the true character of public opinion. The first challenge is conceptual; the second
methodological.
Page 2 of 25
A large body of research has accumulated on public attitudes to crime and criminal justice. Empirical
research into public attitudes to punishment goes back well over a century now (e.g. Sharp and Otto 1909).
Much of the current work consists of polls which pose short (and simple) questions about justice policies;
but there is also a substantial scholarly literature drawing upon a range of methodologies, both
quantitative and qualitative (see Roberts, Feilzer, and Hough 2011; Tendayi Viki and Bohner 2009). Most of
the empirical research has focused on western jurisdictions, but more recently there has been a welcome
flourishing of publications from the Global South. Of all the topics included in this Handbook, public
opinion is possibly of widest relevance to other jurisdictions. Whilst this chapter has a primary focus on
public attitudes within the UK, we illustrate the discussion—within the limits of a single chapter—with
examples from around the world.
One final introductory comment is necessary. Early research in the field treated the public as a monolithic
entity. More recently, there has been growing recognition that the experiences, perceptions, and hence
attitudes vary greatly across different ethnic groups. In particular some Black Asian and Minority Ethnic
p. 225 (BAME) communities have very ↵ different experiences with criminal justice—and accordingly hold
very different opinions about the CJS and its professionals. This is particularly true with respect to
policing, where the differential effects of police practice affect public attitudes.
For example, Black residents of London were significantly less likely than White respondents to agree that
the police use their ‘stop and search’ powers fairly (Mayor of London 2018). This finding reflects the fact
that Black individuals were almost nine times more likely than other ethnic groups to be stopped by police
officers (Mayor of London 2018). The government-commissioned review by David Lammy MP in 2017
demonstrated why BAME communities have reason to hold different views of the fairness of the criminal
justice system. It drew on extensive research and statistics to document racial disproportionality
throughout the justice system, particularly with regard to young people (Lammy, 2017).
Ethnicity-based differences pervade the criminal justice system, and are not restricted to the stage of
policing. Research on the use of imprisonment has for many years documented differences between BAME
and White defendants. Studies have focused on two measures of imprisonment: custody rates and average
custodial sentence lengths. There is long-standing evidence of ethnicity-based differences using both
measures. The Sentencing Academy (2021) recently computed an ‘Expected Custodial Sentence’ which
combines both measures and found that all BAME groups were associated with higher use of custody as a
sanction. Asian and Black ethnic profiles attracted the highest imprisonment scores in 2019. Over the
period 2009–2019, Black offenders attracted the most punitive imprisonment levels. David Lammy’s
(2017) report suggested that these differences could not be accounted for by legally-relevant variables.
Awareness of differential treatment is likely to corrode confidence in criminal justice in BAME
communities. Attitudes to criminal justice officials are likely to be more negative, and an important
function of public opinion research is to demonstrate the areas in which ethnic differences are greatest,
and why.
Page 3 of 25
Overview of chapter
The chapter is structured in four sections. The first summarizes trends in public knowledge of crime and
criminal justice. We demonstrate that most people are misinformed about trends in crime and justice; for
example, the majority of the public assume that crime rates are constantly rising, and people
underestimate the severity of the criminal justice system. The second section moves from public knowledge
to public attitudes. Unsurprisingly, given the misperceptions, most people are critical of the justice system.
The third part links these two domains by investigating the link between levels of knowledge and attitudes
to justice. The fourth section explores issues of public trust, confidence, and perceived legitimacy; these
have become particularly important in recent years.
Public Knowledge of Crime and Criminal Justice
This section first examines knowledge of crime trends—about which people have both at least some direct
knowledge, and rather more indirect knowledge. We then consider their—generally even shakier—
knowledge of the operation of the justice system.
p. 226 Knowledge of crime trends

Surveys of the public in many jurisdictions have, for decades, asked people to answer factual questions
2
about crime and justice and the results have revealed widespread misperceptions. For example, although
crime rates in most Western nations have been declining steadily since the mid-1990s, the public appear
unaware of this important trend. For example, in 2021, 60 per cent of the public wrongly believed that
crime rates across the nation were higher than 25 years ago (Sentencing Academy 2022). According to the
3
Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW), crime rates have been falling or steady since 1995. Various
sweeps of the CSEW have shed light on the dynamics of these attitudes. They have consistently shown that
most people think that crime rates have risen at a national level. In 2014, almost two-thirds of the public
held this view about national rates, but people had a more realistic sense of crime in their own
4
neighbourhood: less than a third thought this was the case (ONS 2015a). The 2016 CSEW (ONS 2017) also
found that people generally had an accurate sense of whether their local area suffered from more or less
crime than the national average. These are important findings since the CSEW has shown that levels of fear
depend more upon perceptions of the local rather than national trends (ONS 2015a).
These misperceptions should not be surprising. In the first place, the measurement of crime is far from
straightforward, even if the evidence is clear that crime has fallen in many Western countries. Second,
crime rose in most industrialized nations for most of the second half of the twentieth century, leading
people to assume that crime always rises. Third, the fact that claims about crime trends are contestable
inevitably means that politicians do contest them. Finally, the news values of the mass media, and the
priority placed on dramatic stories, ensure that reports of rising crime attract much more coverage in
newspapers, television, radio and social media than declining crime rates. In other words, there are many
factors that lead people to think that crime ‘out there’ is still rising, even if they do not think that this is
true for their own neighbourhoods.
Page 4 of 25
The public in other jurisdictions also misperceive crime trends. Research in Scotland has found the same
widely held belief that crime is increasing nationally and has been doing so for many years (Scottish
Executive Social Research 2007). In 2019/20, set against largely stable crime trends, almost half of Scots
thought that crime was rising nationally—although in common with those south of the border—they were
less pessimistic about their local area (Scottish Government 2021).
Between 1993 and 2020, the crime rate in the US declined very steeply indeed, whether one looks to
Uniform Crime Report trends or those from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ annual National Crime
Victimization Survey. Yet in 2020, 78 percent of Americans thought that there was more crime than a year
p. 227 ago. (For a summary, see ↵ Pew Research Center, 2020). Over the period 1993–2020, the percentage of
respondents believing that crime was rising averaged 63 per cent (Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics
2012). As in the UK, perceptions of local trends are much less pessimistic. Similar trends have been
observed elsewhere, including Australia (Roberts and Indermaur 2009) and Canada (Doob and Roberts
1988).
Misperceptions also exist with respect to serious crimes of violence. When samples of the public were
surveyed about murder trends in 2010 most people believed the murder rate had been increasing, when in
fact it had been declining (Mitchell and Roberts 2010). Other misperceptions have been documented. Over
three-quarters of the public in many countries including Northern Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and Barbados overestimated the proportion of crime involving violence (e.g. Doob and Roberts
1988; Amelin et al. 2000; Nuttall et al. 2003; Halstead 2015). People around the world also have overly
pessimistic perceptions of the crime rates of offenders on licence or recently released from prison, and
5
recidivism rates in general (Paulin et al. 2003).
Misperceptions also arise with respect to the workings of the justice system, and in particular the courts.
Researchers in several countries have asked people to estimate the imprisonment rate for various crimes
and most people underestimate the severity of the courts. This has been repeatedly documented in Britain
using the CSEW. In 2010–11, almost all (99 per cent) of convicted rapists were sentenced to custody.
However, when people were asked to estimate the imprisonment rate for rape, almost half (48 per cent)
estimated that less than 60 per cent of all those convicted were imprisoned; another quarter (23 per cent)
estimated between 60 per cent and 85 per cent. As many as 90 per cent of CSEW respondents
6
underestimated the custody rate for domestic burglary in 2010–11 (Hough et al. 2013a).
A decade later, little has changed. A survey reported by the Sentencing Academy asked respondents the
same questions—and found the same general pattern of findings. Table 10.1 summarizes these latest
trends and reveals that most people estimated the imprisonment rate for rape to be under 50 per cent,
7
p. 228 when as noted, the actual rate is ↵ closer to 95 per cent. The same survey found a similar tendency to
under-estimate the custody rate for burglary offences (Sentencing Academy 2022).
Table 10.1 Public Estimates of the Custody Rate for Rape
25% or less 42%
26%-50% 19%
Page 5 of 25
51%-75% 12%
76%-100% 18%
Prefer not to say 8%
Question: Of all men ages 21 or over who are convicted of rape, what percentage do you think are sent to prison?
Source: Sentencing Academy (2022).
The British public appear equally misinformed about historical trends in sentencing severity. Over the past
decade prison sentences have increased significantly, despite falling or stable crime rates. For example, the
Average Custodial Sentence Length (ACSL) has increased steadily for over a decade now, from 13.8 months
in 2009 to 18.9 months in 2019, an increase of 37 per cent. The ACSL for manslaughter almost doubled
between 2007 and 2017 (Sentencing Academy 2022). A survey conducted in 2021 asked the following
question: ‘In your opinion, over the past 25 years (i.e., since 1996), has the average prison sentence
become longer, stayed the same or become shorter?’ The correct answer is that sentence lengths are longer
now than in 1996. However, most respondents were unaware of the increase in sentence lengths over this
period. Over half (56 per cent) endorsed the view that sentences are shorter now (19 per cent ‘much
shorter’; 37 per cent ‘somewhat shorter’). About 1 in 10 believed it had remained the same, and one quarter
of the sample responded ‘don’t know’. Excluding respondents who answered ‘don’t know’, 75 per cent
believed that sentences had become shorter, the opposite of actual trends.
People recognize the limits to their own knowledge. People report knowing most about the police—
presumably because they are the most visible criminal justice professionals and the ones people are most
likely to encounter. Approximately three-quarters of the sample reported knowing a great deal or a fair
amount about the police; self-reported levels of knowledge are much lower for other parts of the justice
system. Thus, well over half the sample admitted knowing ‘hardly anything’ about youth offending teams,
and between a third and a half knew hardly anything about the probation service, the Crown Prosecution
Service, or youth courts. These branches of criminal justice are generally invisible to most people, unless
they become involved in the system as a victim or witness.
The factors that shape public knowledge—or lack of knowledge—about the criminal justice system are
very probably linked to knowledge about crime itself. Those people—perhaps the majority—who think
that crime trends are a function of the deterrent capacity of the justice system may assume that sentencing
must be too soft given that they believe that crime is rising. In addition, media coverage of the courts tends
to focus on dramatically unusual sentences—especially where judges appear to have been unreasonably
lenient.
Public Attitudes to Criminal Justice
This section moves from consideration of public knowledge to an examination of public attitudes. We
cover views on the purposes of the criminal justice system, before moving on to examine perceptions of
fairness and in particular whether sentencing is adequate.
Page 6 of 25
Purposes of the criminal justice system

The criminal justice system serves multiple purposes, seeking to prevent crime before it occurs as well as
to punish convicted offenders. Criminal policies—and media coverage—generally pay more attention to
p. 229 punishment rather than prevention. ↵ Crime prevention programmes such as Neighbourhood Watch are
less newsworthy than sentencing laws such as the ‘three strikes’ mandatory penalties. It is often suggested
that the public are more interested in punishment than prevention; the public are often described as being
more punitive than the courts—a description we will contest later in this chapter.
The public believe that crime is caused by more than individual decision-making, and that crime reduction
is therefore not a task exclusively for the criminal justice system. As long ago as 1947, Americans identified
‘lack of parental control and supervision’ as the principal cause of youth crime (see Erskine 1974). This
finding is echoed in polls conducted in many other countries (see Roberts and Hastings 2011). Over the
decade 2000–2009, Ipsos MORI asked the British public to identify the most effective ways to reduce
crime. On every occasion better parenting and better discipline were chosen most often and by over two-
thirds in the most recent administration (2009). The ‘get tough’ option—‘put more offenders in prison’—
attracted least support (MORI 2010). A more recent Ipsos Mori survey asked a slightly different question,
‘Which two or three of the following, if any, do you think would do most to reduce crime in Britain?’. The
option chosen most often was ‘more police on the beat’, followed by ‘better discipline in schools’ and
‘better parenting’. ‘More offenders in prison’ was, again, one of the least popular options (IPSOS 2019).
Consistent with this, a UK survey in 2015 found that people believed rewards for good behaviour rather
than punishment for bad behaviour were more effective (Onepoll 2015).
Politicians often believe that getting tough with offenders carries political benefits. The consequence is
punitive populism (e.g., Pratt 2007; Roberts et al. 2003). Politicians in a number of Western jurisdictions
have promoted punitive criminal justice policies, such as mandatory sentencing, more with an eye to
8
winning votes than to actually reducing crime. The emergence of penal populism raises many questions.
The first is whether politicians are sufficiently good at ‘reading’ the popular mood to enable them to craft
their policies to respond to this mood. The right answer, in all probability, is that they are, at least if the
public mood is taken to be the ‘top of the head’ opinions that people offer in response to dramatic
newspaper headlines or claims made at the hustings. They are certainly more exposed to, and sensitive to
opinion of this sort than academic criminologists. Being seen to be soft on crime is a vote-loser—and
being tough on crime can be electorally decisive (see Downes and Morgan 2012, for a discussion). Behind
this question is a more complex one, about the political legitimacy of responding to public preferences that
are poorly informed. We shall return to this question, but first, let us review the evidence about public
support for ‘tough on crime’ penal policies, as reflected by well-conducted survey research.
When the UK public was asked to identify the best response to crime, they were far more likely to support
prevention than punishment. Thus, two thirds of the polled public favoured addressing the causes of
crime, less than one third supported tougher punishment (Roberts and Hastings 2011). Given a choice
between punishment and crime prevention through social development, the US public has repeatedly
chosen the former, usually by a margin of 2:1. On the face of it, this message appears lost on politicians
who perceive the public to be very supportive of punitive responses to crime. US research also suggests that
there are electoral benefits to be gained by promoting crime prevention: a poll found that over four-fifths
Page 7 of 25
p. 230 of respondents stated that they would be much ↵ more likely to vote for a political candidate who
endorsed investing in crime prevention programmes (e.g. Cooper and Sechrest 2008). In comparison, a
much lower proportion of respondents said they would be more likely to support a candidate who endorsed
tougher sentencing. Public support for non-punitive responses to crime is not limited to the issue of crime
reduction. When asked to identify the best way to prevent reoffending, there was much more support for
rehabilitation than punishment (MORI 2010).
At the time of writing (2021), it is far from clear whether the competition between the political parties to be
‘tough on crime’ will wane or become more intense either in the UK or elsewhere. Certainly, there have
been marked falls in levels of public anxiety about crime since 2000 (ONS 2015a), and crime is much less
salient as a social issue than it was in the period from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s (MORI 2016a).
There are three probable reasons for this: first, worries about crime were displaced by concerns flowing
from the economic global crisis in 2007/09; secondly, and specific to the UK, public preoccupations about
Brexit overshadowed those relating to crime; and finally, from 2020 the world Coronavirus pandemic has
dwarfed anxieties about crime. Thus, in Britain in 2019, less than one third of respondents identified crime
as the most important problem facing the country, while almost three-quarters chose ‘Britain leaving the
EU’ (YouGov 2019). This could have opened up possibilities for more level-headed politics on law and
order, but we have argued elsewhere that these were missed opportunities (Jacobson and Hough 2018). Our
earlier hopes that the temperature of penal debate was genuinely cooling now seem to us as over-
optimistic.
Perceptions of leniency
Reviewing polls conducted over the past 40 years, it is clear that people believe that the justice system goes
to excessive lengths to protect the rights of defendants. People believe that the scales of justice are skewed
in favour of the suspect, accused, or offender, at the expense of the victim. According to the public,
‘criminals’ are treated better, and have more rights than crime victims. Thus, 70 per cent of Americans
agreed that the laws and the courts are more concerned with protecting the rights of defendants than they
are with protecting the rights of victims, while three-quarters of respondents to a poll in Britain agreed
that ‘the law works to the advantage of the criminal and not victims’ (MORI 2000). In Australia, 81 per cent
of the public believed the criminal justice system did a good job of respecting the rights of accused persons,
but less than half felt the system met the needs of victims (Halstead 2015).
Sentencing represents the apex of the criminal process and the element of the justice system which
attracts most media attention and public interest. This stage has also accounted for more research on
public opinion than all the other components of the justice system. Public views—or rather views ascribed
to the public—appear to have fueled a more punitive response to offending on the part of sentencers. For
example, penal policies in England and Wales over the period 1992–2007 became tougher in part because
successive administrations cited the need to respond to public views: a Conservative Home Secretary in the
mid-1990s justified proposals for tougher sentencing by reference to the need to maintain public
confidence (see Ashworth and Hough 1996). The subsequent Labour government expressed a desire to
align policies more closely with its perception that the public demanded more punitive responses to crime
and antisocial behaviour (Allen and Hough 2008). Research in several jurisdictions (including England and
Page 8 of 25
New Zealand) has identified sentencers’ responsiveness to public pressure as a probable cause of harsher
p. 231 sentencing (e.g. Millie et al. 2005; Pratt 2007). ↵ Many punitive and ineffective sentencing policies of
recent years such as ‘three strikes’ sentencing laws have arisen in response to public concern about serious
crime (Roberts et al. 2003). The historical record is therefore not especially encouraging for advocates of
greater public consultation. Seen from this perspective the public represent a source of pressure towards
more punitive sentencing.
A great deal of research going back 50 years has assessed the degree of ‘fit’ between public sentencing
preferences and court practice. The overall picture to emerge, especially in Common Law countries, is as
follows. If general questions are asked such as: ‘Are the courts too lenient, too harsh, or about right?’, the
weight of opinion will always be that they are too lenient. The CSEW routinely found that three quarters of
the population consistently say that the courts are too lenient (Hough et al. 2013a: the percentage saying
this in 1996 was 79 per cent; in 2008/09 it stood at 76 per cent; and in 2010/11 it fell slightly to 74 per cent.
The most recent survey is that mounted by the Sentencing Academy in 2021. It found that excluding the 15
per cent who said, ‘Don’t know’ (to ensure comparability with the CSEW), the figure stood at 76 per cent
(Sentencing Academy (2022). This level of consistency over time is striking, in view of the fact that
sentencing became progressively less lenient over this period.
Another manifestation of public dissatisfaction with the courts can be found in response to a question
about whether the judiciary is in touch with what the public think. In 2021, 59 per cent of the public were of
the opinion that judges were out of touch with what the public think, and almost as many expressed this
view of lay magistrates (Sentencing Academy 2022). Again, this perception of the judiciary has persisted
for years. A similar question appeared on the 1996 British Crime Survey: respondents were asked whether
judges and magistrates were in touch with ‘what ordinary people think’. Forty-six percent of respondents
expressed the opinion that judges were ‘very out of touch’ (Hough and Roberts 1998).
The reasons for the perception that sentence are too lenient can be found in the previous discussion of
public knowledge. When people think of the typical crime, the typical image of an offender that comes to
mind is of a violent crime committed by a recidivist (Indermaur 1987). Similarly, when people think about
sentences that they have seen in the media, they are likely to recall some sentence that appeared so lenient
that it attracted media coverage. In short, people’s ‘top of the head’ reactions to sentencing are likely to
draw upon an unrepresentative archetype of crimes and punishments.
This finding on attitudes to sentencing has been replicated over time, using different methodologies and
across disparate jurisdictions. For example, 74 per cent in Scotland (Justice 1 Committee 2007) and 85 per
cent of respondents in South Africa expressed the view that sentences were too lenient (Schonteich 1999).
US polls also reveal little variation over time in the percentage perceiving sentences to be too lenient. This
did not vary outside a narrow range from 79 per cent in 1975 to 67 per cent in 2002 (Sourcebook of
9
Criminal Justice Statistics 2012) and the same pattern emerges from Australia and Canada (see Roberts
and Indermaur 2009).
Such findings led many politicians to assume that the public are much more punitive than the courts.
However, a poll using a simple and very general question asking if sentences are tough enough is an
inappropriate method of seeing whether opinion and sentencing practice are in step, if only because it
Page 9 of 25
p. 232 takes no account of respondents’ level ↵ of knowledge. Researchers have therefore given people
summaries of actual or realistic cases and asked them to impose a hypothetical sentence. In this way
participants are more informed, having been given the details of the crime and the offender. Public
‘sentences’ emerging from this method are then compared to the sentences that were actually imposed in
these cases. The advantage of this approach is that it sidesteps problems of ignorance about actual
practice. Assessed in this way, public sentencing preferences and judicial practice are usually closer
together—the ‘punitiveness gap’ diminishes (see Roth 2014).
One example of this in England and Wales comes from the CSEW, which has since 1996 asked a sub-sample
to ‘sentence’ a 23-year-old burglar with previous convictions who broke into an old man’s home and stole
electrical goods. The case on which the vignette was modelled had attracted a sentence of three years,
reduced on appeal to two (Hough and Roberts 1998). However, when the public were asked to sentence this
case, only 54 per cent of the sample favoured imprisonment at all. Clearly, the attitudes of the public and
the practice of the courts are closer than polls would suggest. This general finding has been replicated on
numerous occasions in Britain and elsewhere (e.g. Balvig et al. 2015; see Roberts and Hough 2005a, for a
review).
The argument that public punitiveness is a myth should not be overstated, however (see de Keijser, van
Koppen, and Elffers 2007). Crime raises strong emotions of anger and anxiety in people, not only when it
involves serious harm but also in more mundane crimes. Being the victim of crime is at the very least a
significant irritant, and at worst a life-deforming experience. It is not surprising that people expect
politicians to find an effective response to it. Whether this response should be simply punitive turns partly
on questions of effectiveness—but it also depends in part on what a properly informed public would
support.
Attitudes to incarceration: Is public opinion changing?

The findings discussed so far, both in the area of knowledge and opinion, suggest that little has changed
over the past few decades: knowledge has generally been poor, and opinions stable. In this section, we
highlight an exception to this picture of stability.
One of the most significant recent trends in public opinion is a swing away from support for imprisonment.
Even in the US, where the public has traditionally been more punitive in its attitudes to offenders,
members of the public appear to be growing more sceptical of the use of custody. One survey found that
half the US voters expressed the view that there were too many people in prison (Lake, Gotoff, and
Pultorak 2013). In a California referendum held in 2012 (Proposition 36) voters overwhelmingly approved
reforms to reduce the lengths of prison sentences. This change in public attitudes probably reflects the
grass roots movement to amend or repeal mandatory sentences for drug offenders and a growing public
awareness of the striking racial disparities of prison populations in the US (The Opportunity Agenda 2015).
A further factor in the US is almost certainly the growing public and political awareness of the very heavy
tax burden imposed by the high levels of imprisonment in that country. Signs of a similar sea-change in
opinion can be seen elsewhere: Approximately three-quarters of the British public endorsed measures to
reduce crime other than increase the use of imprisonment (Onepoll 2015).
Page 10 of 25
We live in an era of austerity, in which governments around the world have been reducing the budgets of
all public services, including the criminal justice system. In recent years, the UK government has cut
p. 233 drastically the amount it spends on legal aid, ↵ the court system, and prisons. The public appear very
sensitive to the issue, even without knowing how much the system actually costs. For example, the average
10
cost of providing a prison place in England and Wales was £44,640 in 2019/20, yet when asked to
estimate the (slightly lower) costs of a prison place in 2015, approximately half the public underestimated
the figure. Yet almost three-quarters of the public agreed that the government should use cheaper
punishments (Onepoll 2015). Similarly, when people are informed about the true costs of custody, support
for imprisonment declines. Roberts and Hough (2011) found that majorities thought that sentencers
should take costs into account in sentencing—especially for less serious cases. The public in the US also
overwhelmingly support increasing the use of less expensive alternatives to prison (Pew Centre on the
States 2012).
To summarize these findings, there is now a large body of research that qualifies the conventional view
that the public are deeply punitive towards those convicted of crimes. Simple questions yield simple—and
largely negative—answers. However, when people are asked to deliberate about particular cases, a
different and more nuanced picture emerges, in which many people are less tough-minded than
sentencers. We would not want to overstate this point, however: some crimes—especially those with very
vulnerable victims—elicit anger and revulsion, and for these, there is little public tolerance for lenient
sentencing.
The Relationship Between Knowledge and Opinions
How malleable are public attitudes to criminal justice? A considerable literature has arisen around
attempts to change public attitudes—to improve the public image of criminal justice—by providing
information about the system. The hypothesis being tested is that if knowledge levels improve, attitudes
will become more accepting of current practice. One approach to changing attitudes or to increase
confidence might simply be to dispel the most persistent and prevalent misperceptions. The general
research strategy in this field has been to provide some members of the public with information about a
particular issue—such as the death penalty, community sentencing, or parole—and then to measure
attitudes to the issue in question. These peoples’ attitudes are then compared to those held by the general
public or by other participants who have not been provided with information. Since many of these studies
have used an experimental approach—involving random assignment to condition—differences in
attitudes or changes in opinions can be attributed to the role of information.
Several studies are illustrative. The first involved a ‘deliberative poll’ carried out in England in 1994, in
which almost 300 people spent a weekend together, hearing lectures, receiving information on crime and
punishment, and being given opportunities to ‘deliberate’ on the issues. The idea was to see to what extent
public views differed from their ‘top of the head’ opinions, and to see if any change was durable over time.
Analysis of ‘before and after’ surveys—including a follow-up survey 10 months after the event—showed
significant and lasting change, at least on some issues (Hough and Park 2002). On balance, attitudes
p. 234 shifted in a liberal direction. Marteache (2012) conducted a similar ↵ study and found that attitudes
Page 11 of 25
were less punitive compared to opinions expressed in polls. The importance of these studies lies in their
demonstration that considered views are genuinely different from those charted by straightforward polls,
and that attitude change following deliberation can be lasting.
Mitchell and Roberts (2011) explored the effects of information on public attitudes to sentencing for
murder. These authors tested the hypothesis that providing information about sentencing for this most
serious crime would change opinions. Most people believe that offenders sentenced to life imprisonment
are free once they leave prison on licence; in fact, these offenders are subject to recall to prison for the rest
of their life. Half the respondents to a nation-wide survey were given a brief factual description of what
actually happens to offenders convicted of murder; the other half of the sample received no such
information. All respondents were then asked questions about sentencing in cases of murder. Participants
who were given the additional information were less critical of sentencing, and less punitive in the
11
sentences that they imposed in case histories. Recent research in Holland also found that providing
information about the procedural context of criminal justice increases trust in judges and reduces public
criticism of verdicts (Grimmelikhuijsen and van den Bos 2021).
Finally, two deliberative polls in Japan (Sato 2014; Sato and Bacon 2015) offer a more nuanced view of the
impact of providing information and opportunities for deliberation, in the context of support for the death
penalty. When provided with information about hangings, some participants changed their position on the
death penalty; of these, some shifting towards abolition, others towards retention. The more striking
finding was that exposure to information and deliberation tended to increase people’s uncertainty about
their position, even if they did not change their views, and to increase their tolerance of the views of
others. The implication is that those who factor public opinion into their decisions should not construe
strongly expressed opinions to be strongly held and unamenable to change.
These studies demonstrate that it is possible to change attitudes through the provision of information.
This is not to say that public cynicism about justice can be traced exclusively to misinformation about
crime and punishment. As discussed above, it would be naïve to ignore the deep-seated anger with which
some people respond to crime, and even more naïve to think that this could be effectively countered by
public education initiatives (see Loader and Sparks 2011). Increasing public levels of knowledge is not easy
and attitude change does not always occur; the challenge is to attract peoples’ attention and to counter
news media misrepresentations of justice (see Feilzer 2007). At the same time, the evidence is
overwhelming that public misunderstanding is at least a contributory factor to the overheated nature of
political debate about crime and punishment.
Trust, Confidence, and Perceived Legitimacy
Public trust or confidence has become one of the most researched issues in the field of public opinion and
justice. Recognizing the importance of maintaining public faith in justice, almost all Western nations have
p. 235 measured levels of public confidence in criminal ↵ justice (see Hough et al. 2013b, and for reviews,
Hough and Roberts 2004; Maffei and Markopolou 2014). Polls and surveys have revealed low levels of
public confidence in justice across many countries. As a result, a number of jurisdictions have also
launched initiatives to promote public trust in the administration of justice.
Page 12 of 25
Effect of mandate of the justice system on public trust in justice

Confidence and trust are often used as synonyms—and indeed, in many European languages, both terms
are translated into the same word. Anglophone scholars have nevertheless regarded confidence as a
backward-looking concept, assessing past performance, and trust as a forward-looking one, relating to
expectations (e.g. Skogan 2006). We think that ‘trust’ is the more accurate term, having connotations of
something that has to be earned. Arguably, too, the justice system has features that differentiate it clearly
from other public services and this makes trust a more appropriate term than confidence. Public services
and utilities typically provide personal services that are financed publicly. Health, schooling, and refuse
collection, for example, are services that can be bought in the market place, but in some jurisdictions, they
are publicly funded, through taxes. As taxpayers we can reasonably expect to have confidence in the quality
of the work they do. Criminal justice is, by contrast, a public good from which we all benefit, but we often
have no choice about being the object of regulation. Our behaviour—or, perhaps, our misbehaviour—falls
within the ambit of the justice system whether we like it or not. Given that it is not our choice to be
regulated, it is, for reasons to be discussed, especially important that we can invest our trust in the fairness
of the process.
Even where we choose to involve the justice system—through reporting a crime to the police, for example
—this is often a reluctant or coerced choice that may embroil us in processes that are unwelcome.
Explaining the lack of public confidence in the courts, Kritzer and Voelker (1998) wrote that: ‘It is not
surprising that courts generate dissatisfaction; they are associated with unpleasant things such as
criminals, injuries, divorces and the like. Many, perhaps most, people are probably as likely to choose
voluntarily to go to court as they are to choose to have their wisdom teeth extracted’ (p. 59). Comparison
with the National Health Service is instructive. The patient’s wellbeing is the foremost concern of the NHS,
and of the professionals who work in the system. However, the justice system has many functions besides
responding to crime victims’ needs. For many victims, the protracted nature of legal proceedings, the
experience of being cross-examined in court, or their inability to influence sentencing may all create
frustration. This helps to explain the negative views of the justice system expressed by many victims of
crime.
Perceptions of fairness and trust in criminal justice

Research has revealed that many people regard the criminal justice system as unfair. A nationwide analysis
recently perceived a lack of fairness in justice. More troubling, these perceptions were often shared by legal
professionals. Thus, three quarters of the public—and almost 90 per cent of those working in the legal
sector—agreed that ‘lack of wealth’ was a barrier to justice (Hodge, Jones, and Allen 2015). More than half
the public agreed that the justice system is accessible to ‘only the privileged few’. Only approximately one
third of the sample felt they could trust legal professionals, and the percentage was even lower for BAME
p. 236 ↵ respondents. Finally, less than a quarter of respondents believed that the justice system was fair and
transparent (Hodge, Jones and Allen 2015). With trends like this, it is unsurprising that levels of trust in
criminal justice—particularly among visible minorities—are low.
Page 13 of 25
Trust in justice has many dimensions. Survey respondents make clear distinctions between their
judgements about the fairness of the criminal justice system and its effectiveness (Jackson et al. 2012;
Hough et al. 2013a; Hough et al. 2013b). The CSEW has found that people’s levels of trust in the fairness of
the criminal justice system are consistently higher than trust in effectiveness. In the 2013–14 CSEW, 64 per
cent of respondents said they were very or fairly confident the justice system was fair and 48 per cent said
they were very or fairly confident that it was effective (Jansson 2015). Since 2007–08 both indices show
that trust is growing. Although it is often said that UK institutions face a crisis of trust, long-run trends
since 1983 show that in common with most other occupations—with the exception of politicians—trust in
12
both judges and the police steadily increased until recently (MORI 2016b, Ipsos 2021). Since 2007–08,
trust in both the fairness and effectiveness of the criminal justice system in England and Wales increased
(Jansson 2015).
Confidence in specific functions of the criminal justice system

Considerable variability exists in public levels of confidence with respect to specific functions of the
criminal justice system. A MORI poll in 2009 found that confidence levels are much higher for some
functions than for others. Over three-quarters of the public have confidence that the system respects the
rights of accused persons and treats them fairly, but less than one quarter of the polled public are
confident that the system is effective in dealing with young people accused of a crime. A more detailed
picture of the functions that attract the lowest levels of public confidence may be derived from a MORI
survey.
This research revealed a clear discrepancy between public perceptions of the importance of different
objectives of criminal justice, and the extent to which people are confident that these objectives are being
achieved. Specifically, people were asked (a) to rate the importance of specific functions such as ‘bringing
people who commit crimes to justice’ and (b) to express their level of confidence that these objectives were
being realized. Respondents were asked about more than 20 criminal justice objectives. The objectives
people rated as being most important tended to be ones that attracted the least amount of confidence. Thus
‘creating a safe society’ was ranked second in importance, but tenth in the level of confidence that this
objective was being achieved. Similarly, ‘reducing the level of crime’ was one of the highest ranked in
importance (sixth) but attracted a very low confidence ranking (17th). In general, people gave high
confidence scores to functions such as protecting the rights of offenders, and lower scores to effectiveness
in terms of preventing crime or protecting the public.
Comparisons within and across branches of criminal justice

The CSEW has repeatedly measured public ratings of the various elements of the criminal justice system.
When asked to rate the performance of the police and other professions a clear hierarchy emerges. Table
p. 237 10.2 draws upon the CSEW to summarize levels ↵ of public confidence in various branches of criminal
justice. As can be seen, the levels are very variable with the police attracting the highest levels of
confidence. The public expressed significantly less confidence in the ability of the probation service (Table
13
10.2, and see Jansson 2015).
Page 14 of 25
Table 10.2 Public confidence in functions of branches of criminal justice
% Confident that:
Police are effective at apprehending criminals 69%
Crown Prosecution Service is effective at prosecuting people accused of a crime 55%
The courts are effective in dealing with cases promptly 45%
The courts are effective at imposing punishments which fit the crime 31%
Prisons are effective at punishing offenders 32%
Prisons are effective at rehabilitating offenders 22%
The probation service is effective at preventing reoffending 26%
The Criminal Justice System as a whole is fair 48%
Source: Adapted from Jansson (2015). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government
Licence v3.0.
The 2010 European Social Survey (ESS) is still the most up-to-date and reliable guide to variations in trust
in justice across Europe. It included a 45-question module on the topic (Jackson et al. 2012). Earlier
findings from a wider range of countries are also available from the 2005 World Values Survey (Lappi-
Seppälä 2011). The picture to emerge from the ESS is consistent with surveys that measure other aspects of
social trust and well-being. The Scandinavian countries score highest on various measures of trust in the
police and courts, and ex-communist countries tend to score lowest. The UK generally tends to fall in the
second quartile, depending on which measure is being examined (Hough et al. 2013b).
Trust in justice, legitimacy, and compliance with the law

As the discussion in the first part of this chapter shows, research on public opinion in this field has aimed
to identify the penal policies that the public will or will not tolerate. It has been conducted in a somewhat
a-theoretical way. Insofar as any hypotheses were made explicit, these tested and challenged the
prevailing political assumptions about public punitivity. To the extent that research measured trust in
justice, it did so largely because public trust in any public service was reckoned to be of self-evident value,
and thus worth monitoring. Alongside this research, however, there is an important body of work tracing
the linkages between trust in justice, perceptions of legitimacy, and public compliance and cooperation
with the law.
p. 238 ↵ These ‘compliance theories’ can be located within broader theories of normative compliance tracing
back to Durkheimian and Weberian thinking about the roots of social order. On the one hand, there has
been increasing (or perhaps, more accurately, rediscovered) interest over the last two decades in the
relationship between ‘political economy’, which traces the connections between the social distribution of
Page 15 of 25
wealth and attachment to—or detachment from—social norms; such theories fall outside of the scope of
this chapter. On the other hand, there are also compliance theories about the impact on societal norms of
the institutions of formal social control. Thus Robinson (2013) argues that if the law’s potential for
building a moral consensus is to be exploited, sentences must be aligned at least to some degree with
public sentiments. Tyler (2011) emphasizes the need for justice institutions to pursue fair and respectful
processes—in contrast to outcomes—as the surest strategies for building trust in justice, and thus
institutional legitimacy and compliance with the law. This is the central hypothesis in procedural justice
theory. Procedural justice theories offer the possibility of resolving the tension that is often thought to
exist between effective crime control and the respecting of people’s rights. They suggest that fair,
respectful, and legal behaviour on the part of justice officials is not only ethically desirable, but is a
prerequisite for effective justice.
Studies in the US, the UK, and elsewhere (e.g. Kochel 2012; Gau et al. 2012; Bradford et al. 2013; Hough 2021)
have consistently found that in general terms, the expected relationships are found between fairness,
trust, perceptions of legitimacy, cooperation with the law, and compliance with the law. In other words,
there is evidence that the way in which the institutions of justice treat people can support or erode their
consent to the rule of law. There is an emerging consensus amongst legitimacy theorists that the quality of
treatment that justice officials mete out to citizens is a key determinant of citizen perceptions of
legitimacy. The key elements of procedurally just treatment appear to be: treating people respectfully;
explaining the reasons for decisions and action; allowing people ‘voice’; and ‘playing by the rules’—
whether these are organizational standards or legal requirements. Whilst these conclusions may appear
little more than common sense, providing the foundation of policing by consent over generations, it is less
obvious that public trust in procedural justice emerges as a stronger predictor of institutional legitimacy
than public trust in institutional effectiveness. However, this is a consistent finding in the studies cited
above, and one that has obvious and important policy implications.
It should be stressed, however, that there are limits to the ability of survey research to capture such subtle
processes accurately (see Hough 2012; Jackson et al. 2012). There are problems of measurement—for
example in devising sensitive measures of trust and perceptions of legitimacy, and in measuring people’s
compliance with the law through self-report measures. There is continuing debate about the different
dimensions of fairness in justice (see, e.g., Bottoms and Tankebe 2012; Jackson et al. 2012; Tankebe 2013;
Hough 2021.) Scholars usually distinguish between procedural fairness, distributive fairness, and outcome
fairness, and it seems likely that different dimensions may play a greater or lesser role at different points
in the criminal process. For example, whilst it is very well established that procedural fairness is critically
important in policing, qualitative work indicates that in the courts, sentencing outcomes are what really
matter to the defendant, to the victim and to the defendant and to the victim (cf. Jacobson, Hunter, and
Kirby 2015). Further, it seems highly likely that in jurisdictions where relations between police and policed
are strained, distributive justice—treating different groups in the same way—may be a key factor.
p. 239 ↵ Difficulties arise in establishing the direction of causal relationships, especially in cross-sectional
(snapshot) surveys: does distrust of the police reduce obedience to the law, for example, or does law-
breaking prompt distrust? There is an emerging body of experimental research involving randomized
Page 16 of 25
controlled trials (notably Mazerolle et al. 2013) which has begun to address these issues of causality. There
are also problems of ‘reach’ in survey research of this sort, in that the most important groups to research
—marginalized young men, for example—are least likely to take part in survey interviews.
Despite the limitations, research of this kind is important; deriving a better understanding of the
relationships between people’s moral norms, their consent to the rule of law, and their perceptions and
experience of the justice system is a major enterprise—and one which in our view goes to the heart of the
criminological enterprise. There are signs, too, that this body of research is beginning to affect policy. One
example is the report commissioned by President Obama in the wake of several highly contentious
shootings by police of Black suspects. That report’s main recommendation was that ‘Law enforcement
agencies should adopt procedural justice as the guiding principle for internal and external policies and
practices to guide their interactions with ‘rank and file’ officers and with the citizens they
serve.’ (President’s Task Force 2015: 1). A significant development in the UK has been a series of
‘legitimacy inspections’ by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (see HMIC 2015, HMICFRS 2020).
Conclusion
Several conclusions can be drawn from this review of research on attitudes to crime and punishment. First,
the public in most developed countries tend towards cynicism about their justice systems, thinking that
the police and the courts are ineffective and overly lenient towards offenders. Second, these attitudes are
grounded in part on misinformation. We have not reviewed the relationship between media portrayals of
crime and justice and public trust in justice, but there is a prima facie case for believing that the media
provide little accurate information and have a corrosive impact on public trust in criminal justice. There is
good evidence to show that public trust in the police, the courts, and other criminal justice agencies is of
critical importance to the effective operation of justice. People obey the law as much out of normative
considerations as they do out of instrumental (or self-interested) ones. A lack of trust in justice is likely to
damage the mechanisms that promote compliance with the law, because it corrodes perceptions of the
legitimacy of the institutions of justice. Governments need to attend more closely to research that
identifies the drivers of trust and that can provide early warnings of any crisis in public trust in criminal
justice.

A summary of British polling on criminal justice topics can be found in Duffy et al., Closing the Gaps: Crime and Public
Perceptions (2008). For earlier reviews of the literature, see Roberts and Hough, Understanding Public Attitudes to
Criminal Justice (2005a); and Van de Walle and Raine, Explaining Attitudes Towards the Justice System in the UK and
Europe (2008). A good discussion of punitiveness can be found in Maruna, Matravers, and King (2004), ‘Disowning Our
Shadow: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Understanding Punitive Public Attitudes’. For readings on a diversity of issues,
see Wood and Gannon, Public Opinion and Criminal Justice (2009).
Page 17 of 25
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Notes
1
Support for re-introducing the death penalty fell below 50 per cent for the first time in 2014 (Curtis and Ormston
2015). See the 2014 British Social Attitudes Survey Report 32 (BSA 2015). We largely exclude further discussion of
attitudes to the death penalty in this chapter as only a small number of western jurisdictions retain this punishment. It
remains an issue in Asia, however (e.g. Sato 2014).
2
Crime and criminal justice are not the only areas of public policy where the public are misinformed. Ipsos-MORI
surveys reveal low levels of public knowledge in the field of a range of fiscal issues, including the scale of welfare cuts
(see Ipsos-MORI 2015).
3
Crimes measured by the CSEW have fallen from a peak of 19.8 million in 1995 to just over 5.6 million by the year
ending March 2020. This fall has been offset to some extent by new—and less well measured—crimes, especially
cybercrimes. However, even when these new crimes are included, the total of 10.2 million crimes is still well below the
1995 figure (ONS 2020). Later CSEW statistics are available, but the impact of COVID-19 both on the survey’s methods
and on people’s behaviour has rendered comparison problematic (ONS 2020).
Page 24 of 25
4
Media coverage of crime appears responsible for misperceptions of crime trends on the national level; people are
more likely to draw upon personal experience when responding to questions about local crime rates. The CSEW found
that when asked to identify their source of information about national trends, over two-thirds of the sample cited TV
or radio news (ONS 2015a).
5
Beyond statistical trends, most people also have unrealistic views of prisons. A common perception is that prisons
are relatively benign institutions (see e.g. Roberts and Hough 2005b). Prison officers—and prisoners—have more
realistic perceptions.
6
Similar trends have been found in Australia (Halstead 2015), Norway (Olaussen 2014), and Canada (Doob and Roberts
1988).
7
One can speculate that these large underestimates reflect a public awareness that only a small proportion of rape
cases reported to the police are prosecuted, and that an even smaller proportion result in conviction.
8
Few politicians are likely to admit to this publicly, of course, so the evidence about populist motives is almost always
circumstantial.
9
Comparable findings emerge from other countries, including Belgium (Parmentier et al. 2004), Germany (Kury 2003),
and Barbados (Nuttall et al. 2003).
10
See Table 1 of: Ministry of Justice (2020).
11
For comparable findings in Australia and Canada, see Jones and Weatherburn (2010) and Sanders and Roberts
(2000).
12
Trust in the police fell slightly in 2020, according to Ipsos MORI’s Veracity index, and more steeply in 2021—probably
reflecting some well publicised crimes and misconduct committed by serving officers, notably the murder of Sarah
Everard (Ipsos 2021).
13
The hierarchy of trust—with the police at the top and the courts at the bottom—is found in other countries. For
example, three-quarters of the New Zealand public gave the police excellent or good ratings, only 45 per cent were as
positive about the courts (Paulin et al. 2003).
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Page 25 of 25
11. Crime news, trial by media, and scandal hunting

p. 243 11. Crime news, trial by media, and scandal hunting

Chris Greer and Eugene McLaughlin
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0011
Abstract
A rapidly evolving digital media landscape, inhabited by a network of outlets, is amplifying crime consciousness, exploiting
crime’s infotainment potential, and reshaping public attitudes towards crime and criminal justice. At the same time, in depth
analysis of crime news has dropped off the criminological radar. In this chapter, we argue that because criminologists have not
kept pace with transforming news media and markets, crime news remains under-researched and under-conceptualized. We
begin by revisiting three classic concepts that continue to dominate crime news research: newsworthiness, moral panic, and
penal populism. Though these concepts are still important for understanding crime news, their institutionalization and
taxonomical application within criminology has marginalized analysis of dramatic shifts in the production and nature of crime
news, the markets in which it circulates, and its power to shape crime consciousness and criminal justice rhetoric and practice.
We then explore how ‘trial by media’ and ‘scandal hunting’ are not only redefining crime news, but also exposing institutional
failures in public protection and challenging both the efficacy and the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. It is in this
context of an unruly networked digital environment that we situate the disruptive challenge posed to criminal justice by the
rise of what we define as media justice.
Keywords: crime news, digitalization, scandal, intermediatization, moral panic, newsworthiness, penal populism,
tabloidization, trial by media, victim campaigns
Introduction
Picture this. 100 criminologists gathered at a conference are struggling to find consensus over issues of
crime and criminal justice. The definition of crime; its causes, nature, and distribution; its impact on
society; the most appropriate or effective responses to criminal behaviour—all these issues remain
sources of heated debate and trenchant disagreement. And yet, irrespective of their theoretical or
Page 1 of 28
methodological perspective, they all agree on two seemingly incontrovertible criminological ‘facts’. First,
the news media distort the ‘true’ picture of crime and criminal justice. And second, this distortion matters
because it is somehow detrimental to society. Views on the precise nature of this detrimental impact span a
wide range of possible negative effects, including, the generation of public misunderstanding of the
problem of crime and the functioning and effectiveness of the criminal justice system; the manufacture of
irrational fear of crime; the politicization of law and order; the scapegoating and criminalization of
marginalized groups; and the formation of punitive crime control policies. But at the most fundamental
level, all agree that the news media distortion of crime and criminal justice is bad.
Steve Chibnall’s (1977: 1) observation 45 years ago that crime news remained ‘a curiosity of no more than
marginal interest’ for mainstream media researchers and criminologists still applies today. Back then, the
principal media-crime research interest was in evaluating the possible behavioural effects of exposure to
media violence and pornography (Barker and Petley 2001). The lack of interest was incomprehensible to
Chibnall, given that the news media:
exert a considerable influence over our perceptions of groups and lifestyles of which we have little
first-hand experience. They have the power to create issues and define the boundaries of debates
and, while they may not be able to manipulate our opinions in any direct sense—creating
attitudes to replace old ones—they can organise opinion and develop world views by providing
structures of understanding into which isolated and unarticulated attitudes and beliefs may be
fitted. They provide interpretations, symbols of identification, collective values and myths which
are able to transcend the moral boundaries within a society like Britain. (Chibnall 1977: 226)
p. 244 ↵ In this chapter it is not our intention to present a comprehensive overview of the existing research on
crime news. Such overviews can be found elsewhere (Carrabine 2008; Greer 2003/12, 2010a, b; Greer and
Reiner 2012; Moore 2014; Jewkes 2015). Our aims are more specific. First, we revisit two key concepts that
continue to dominate UK crime news research but tend to do so in caricatured form: crime news values and
moral panic. Although these concepts remain important for understanding news power, their
institutionalization and taxonomical application within criminology has marginalized analysis of dramatic
shifts in the production and nature of crime news, the markets in which it circulates, and its power to
shape crime consciousness and criminal justice rhetoric and practice. Second, we consider the work of
penologists who have identified ‘the media’ as a key driver of the punitive turn. Third, we set out our own
position on developments that are transforming the relations between news power, crime, and criminal
justice. While these developments have global significance, our empirical focus remains in the UK because
its news ecosystem is in important respects unique (Tunstall 1996). Most important is the existence of a
tabloidized news market, managed by powerful news organizations that operate fully integrated hard copy
and digital operations. Amidst ongoing debate about the death of ‘legacy news’ and the contemporary
crisis of professional journalism (Alexander et al. 2016; Rusbridger 2019), we propose that UK news
organizations are fighting hard to evidence their agenda-setting power. In response to the emergence of
an ultra-competitive digital information marketplace they continue to develop a distinctive brand of
adversarial ‘gotcha’ journalism that is working the edges of what is legally permissible in order to
demonstrate their influence (Brock 2013). Because of tighter legal restrictions around objectivity and
Page 2 of 28
impartiality, the UK’s broadcast news media routinely follow the national press agenda (Cushion et al.
2018). Consequently, news organizations retain a pivotal role in setting the public and policy agendas
around crime and criminal justice.
The hybridization of the news market has, in certain respects, increased corporate power to define what is
news and, in the context of this chapter, what is crime news. Crime news stories circulate endlessly,
intermediatized across and between different platforms, ever-repeating, ever-proliferating beyond the
control of any one group or institution. In this context of viral informational chaos and contestation, news
organizations continue to act as powerful filters, disseminators, and legitimators, confirming which
crimes matter and imposing their own brand of interpretive order. We identify the emergence of ‘trial by
media’ and ‘scandal hunting’ as illustrative of the shifting nature of news power in this digital market.
These news practices are capable simultaneously of providing an alternative forum for delivering ‘justice’
to victims and inflicting potentially devastating reputational damage on convicted and alleged offenders,
criminal justice institutions, politicians, and policy elites. We propose that news organizations have
reconstituted themselves as the engines of a ‘scandal machine’ and dramatically extended their networked
power to shape public consciousness of crime and criminal justice and influence official rhetoric and
practice. It is in this volatile intermediatized context that we situate the challenge posed to criminal justice
by media justice.
News Making and Crime: News Values and Moral Panic
In the 1970s and 1980s scholars were motivated to move beyond psychological positivism’s
preoccupations with direct criminogenic media effects in order to develop a deeper and more nuanced
p. 245 understanding of news power in a time of radical social change. ↵ Of the numerous crime news studies
produced in this period (Halloran et al. 1970; Chibnall 1977; Cohen 1972; Cohen and Young 1973; Hall et al.
1978; Katz 1987; Ericson et al. 1987, 1989, 1991), three stand out as having defined the field: Cohen’s (1972)
Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers; Chibnall’s (1977) Law and Order News: An
Analysis of Crime Reporting in the British Press; and Hall et al.’s (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State
and Law and Order. These studies, produced in dialogue with each other, have maintained their influence
largely because of the two organizing concepts they collectively developed: news values and moral panic.
News values
Chibnall (1977: x–xi) identified crime as the news category that allows news organizations to act as
barometers of the public temper at any given moment:
Crime news may serve as a focus for the articulation of shared morality and communal
sentiments. A chance not simply to speak to the community but to speak for the community,
against all that the criminal outsider represents, to delineate the shape of the threat, to advocate a
response, to eulogise on conformity to established norms and values, and to warn of the
consequences of deviance. In short, crime news provides a chance for a newspaper to appropriate
the moral conscience of its readership.
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Chibnall’s Marxist analysis contended that news power resides in the ability of journalists, working within
the constraints of professional conventions, source relationships, and legal limitations, to select and
construct what is and what is not crime news. The reality-building selection and construction of events as
newsworthy is guided by professional ‘news values’. These news values are seldom written down and
many journalists struggle to articulate them when asked. Nevertheless, all to some extent internalize a
‘sense’ of what ‘news’ is, which provides a stock of professional knowledge enabling the informed
assessment of ‘newsworthiness’. The eight universal news values Chibnall identifies are: immediacy,
dramatization, personalization, simplification, titillation, conventionalism, structured access, and
novelty. These news values can be refined, inflected, and augmented by other criteria to add greater insight
or gravity in the reporting of particular ‘types’ of crime. For example, at least five informal rules of
relevance guide journalists’ treatment of violence by asserting the importance of: visible and spectacular
acts; sexual and political connotations; graphic description and presentation; individual pathology; and
deterrence and repression (Chibnall 1977: 776). Understanding news values helps to make sense of crime
news selection and content. For example, it explains why violence in public places tends to be newsworthy,
whilst intimate partner violence is not. It also helps explain why ‘breaking news’ headlines are dominated
by dramatic crimes, rather than abstract and complex debates around criminal justice policy or corporate
crime.
Moral panic
For Cohen (1972) the most striking demonstration of the news media’s power to shape public
consciousness of crime is the creation of ‘moral panics’. This power is most productive at moments of
cultural strain and ambiguity that challenge existing moral boundaries. First used by Young (1971) in his
study of drug-takers, the concept was developed and extended by Cohen (1972) in his interactionist
analysis of the simultaneous construction and demonization of ‘Mods and Rockers’ in 1960s Britain.
Cohen traces the spiralling social reaction to these youth subcultures through initial intolerance, media
p. 246 ↵ stereotyping, moral outrage, increased surveillance, labelling and marginalization, and deviancy
amplification that seemed to justify the initial concerns. For Cohen, youth subcultures are the visible
manifestation of rapid social transformations. They can be constructed as ‘folk devils’ who provide a
crystallizing focus for social anxieties and ‘respectable fears’ and an agenda for journalists, politicians,
and moral entrepreneurs.
Hall et al. (1978) provided a Marxist explanation of news power in their analysis of a ‘mugging’ moral
panic—with the ‘black mugger’ as ‘folk devil’—which they viewed as an ideological intervention to
address an escalating crisis in governance. Building on Cohen (1972) and Chibnall (1977), they argue that
the news media play a critical role in defining ‘for the majority of the population what significant events
are taking place, but, also, they offer powerful interpretations of how to understand these events’ (Hall et
al. 1978: 57). Crime news functions as a morality play ‘in which the ‘devil’ is both symbolically and
physically cast out from the society by its guardians—the police and the judiciary’ (1978: 66). For Hall et al.
(1978: 42) the news media have the power to orchestrate moral panics about crime, a key ideological
means through which ‘the ‘silent majority’ can be won over to supporting ‘law and order’ measures,
legitimizing the expansion of state control.
Page 4 of 28
Though both Chibnall (1977) and Hall et al. (1978) were writing from a Marxist perspective, they arrive at
different understandings of news power. For Chibnall (1977: 9–10) journalistic ‘common sense’ will place
‘news values’ above other interests, including the conspiratorial interests of the power elite, in selecting
and constructing news stories. For Hall et al. (1978), the notion of journalistic autonomy is illusory. The
news media function as part of a wider ideological state apparatus within which journalists have limited
autonomy. They sit in a position of ‘structured subordination’ to the powerful institutional claims makers
upon whom they rely for newsworthy information. From Cohen’s interactionist perspective, everyone
involved in a moral panic, including the news media, the authorities, the public and the folk devils, is
absorbed into the panic. Each of these studies is also concerned to illustrate how crime news stigmatizes
and criminalizes the powerless. For Chibnall (1977) news power is understood primarily as professional
practice. For Hall et al. (1978) it is ideological practice. For Cohen (1972) it is social practice.
These two concepts—crime news values and moral panic—have provided generations of researchers with
all they need to examine the selection, production, distribution, and ‘effects’ of crime news. They were
developed out of in depth analyses of social change that situated crime news within the wider contexts of
inter-generational conflict, the politics of law and order, and/or the emergence of an authoritarian, ‘law
and order’ state. It is their more immediately reproducible elements that have survived, caricatured and
detached from wider contextual considerations. Thus crime news is researched in order to demonstrate
that ‘news values’ retain their explanatory value—reflecting Rock’s (1973) notion of news as ‘eternal
recurrence’—and that the news media are still biased on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, age, or
sexuality. Or the news media and wider reaction to a putative social problem is examined in order to
evaluate whether or not it constitutes a moral panic (see Cree et al. 2015 for an overview). While these
concepts still have much to offer the analysis of crime news, we would propose that their taxonomical,
thinly researched application does not do them justice, and has diverted research attention from the
radical changes that have transformed the relations between news organizations, crime, and criminal
justice in the past 40 years (for important exceptions see Ericson et al. 1987, 1989, 1991; Schlesinger and
Tumber 1994).
p. 247 ↵ Useful insights into some of these changes came from penologists, who were analysing the ‘punitive
turn’. Their primary concern was explaining the rise of public support for tougher sentencing and mass
incarceration. They noted how the dominance of crime in public discourse was reshaping electoral politics
and reorienting crime control policy towards quick fix punitive solutions (Beckett 1997; Bottoms 1995;
Garland 2001a, b; Pratt 2007; Roberts et al. 2003; Sasson 1995). It is to this body of research that we turn
next.
The Punitive Turn and Vice Signalling
Hall (1980) used the term ‘authoritarian populism’ to explain how Thatcherism had harnessed public fears
and anxieties to popularize neoliberal solutions to economic and political problems, including law and
order. Building on Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978), he argued that authoritarian populism represented a
fundamental ideological shift in which the UK’s conservative news media’s role was pivotal in
criminalizing marginalized groups and legitimating punitive law and order policies. This shift would be
difficult to reverse because it was intimately connected to the attempt to create an authoritarian state and
Page 5 of 28
a free market. In the mid-1990s, following decades of rising crime rates, penologists identified the
‘punitive turn’—the adoption across many Anglophone jurisdictions of both the rhetoric and practice of
ever-harsher punishments, including the extension of criminal sanctions and criminalization, tougher
policing and sentencing, and increased imprisonment. Bottoms (1995) argued that the rise of ‘populist
punitiveness’ signalled a radical departure from a post-war consensus that had contained the expression
of excessively punitive public sentiments and the politicization of criminal justice policy-making. Unlike
Hall, for Bottoms this shift was unsustainable and would pass. At no point does Bottoms consider the
significance of news media in shaping penal populist opinion. Though they were both interested in the
law-and-order implications of the collapsing social democratic consensus, Hall’s cultural studies
approach was sensitized to an appreciation of the power of the news media. From Bottoms’ policy-centric
perspective, news power remained either invisible or insignificant. This is remarkable given that he was
writing about ‘populist punitiveness’ at the moment the James Bulger murder was dominating the UK’s
crime news agenda. The two-year old toddler was abducted, tortured and murdered in Liverpool on 12
February 1993. The discovery, via CCTV footage, that his killers were two ten-year-old boys, Robert
Thompson and Jon Venables, triggered a moral panic about child criminality (Green 2008). Thompson and
Venables were found guilty, becoming the youngest convicted murderers in modern British history. The
Sun newspaper presented a petition with nearly 280,000 signatures to Michael Howard, the Home
Secretary, demanding that the killers be locked up for life. In July 1994 Howard announced that that they
would be kept in custody for a minimum of fifteen years. The Bulger case continues to haunt British society
with relentless newsmedia monitoring of Thompson and Venables since they were released with new
identities in 2001.
More recent penological work has given greater recognition to the role of media in driving the punitive
turn. In Garland’s (2001: 158) analysis of the UK and US, the media are not responsible for populist
punitiveness but have ‘tapped into, then dramatized and reinforced, a new public experience—an
experience with profound psychological resonance—and in doing so [have] institutionalised that
p. 248 experience’. By heightening consciousness, ↵ most significantly among the previously well-insulated
middle classes, of the increasing risks of criminal victimization and an ineffectual criminal justice system,
the media have provided ‘everyday opportunities to play out the emotions of fear, anger, resentment, and
fascination that our experience of crime provokes’ (Garland 2001: 158; see also Garland, 2021). Roberts et
al.’s (2003) comparative research on penal populism and public opinion highlights ‘the dynamic and
powerfully co-ordinating force of the media—framing not only reality to feed late modern anxieties but
also telling stories about how to think about the remedies to the anxieties and what political actors are
doing or failing to do in “making things better” ’ (Roberts et al. 2003: 87). Their account of news media
influence identifies what they see as the malign outcomes of tabloid ‘law and order’ campaigns. Pratt
(2007) also recognizes the importance of tabloid campaigning. His analysis offers a deeper understanding
of a transforming media environment characterized by market deregulation, technological change,
increased competition, and globalization. For Pratt (2007), the core news media message is clear: citizens
can no longer rely for public protection on a criminal justice system that seems more interested in
protecting the rights of criminals.
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Across this body of work, a consistent ‘bad news’ view emerges. The news media fuel the punitive turn by
exaggerating threats to personal security and the threat posed by violent predatory offenders;
sensationalizing exceptional or aberrant crimes; concocting ‘new’ crime threats requiring ‘new’
punishments; employing simplified frames of good and evil; disseminating fake and inflammatory
information about ‘ineffective’ criminal justice policies and practices; demonizing politicians, judges, and
experts deemed to be ‘soft on crime’; and campaigning for ‘tough on crime’ policies. In this period
criminologists also began to consider how public fascination with ‘true crime’, crime reconstruction
television programmes and crime novels and dramas might be contributing to legitimizing punitive
sentiments (Kidd-Hewitt and Osborne 1995; Taylor 1999; Wykes 2001; King and Maruna 2006).
The most significant conclusion in the context of this chapter is the recognition of (a) the strength of
public emotions that can be unleashed by crime news reporting and (b) the growing antagonism between
the news media and the criminal justice system.
Nevertheless, the consensus amongst penologists is that the punitive turn is reversible and that sections of
the news media—a clear distinction is maintained between tabloid and broadsheet—are manageable. For
Roberts et al. (2003), the UK’s ‘lock ‘em up’ tabloids are a lost cause. The challenge is to work with
‘serious’ journalists and commentators to transform public opinion. Specifically, more accurate and
verifiable coverage of crime and criminal justice can be achieved by ‘pointing out the unintended
consequences of irresponsible, sensationalised reporting’ and improving access to staff with scientific
authority ‘such as statisticians and academics’ (Roberts et al. 2003: 175–176). We would suggest that this
view underestimates and under-conceptualizes the volatile dynamics that shape the contemporary crime
news environment, criminal justice policy-making, and the politics of law and order. In what follows, we
develop this position through reference to two key disruptive processes: tabloidization and digitalization.
These processes are pivotal to understanding the dynamic and rapidly transforming relations between UK
news organizations, crime, and criminal justice.
News Media Revolution
Though the emergence of tabloidization dates back to the 1960s (McLachlan and Golding 2000), it was in
the 1990s that tabloid formats, techniques, and logics rapidly spread across the news industry (Lang and
p. 249 Dodkins 2011). New technologies enabled newspapers to ↵ reformat and sharpen their design, style,
content, and competitive edge. But tabloidization was more than technological. It transformed journalistic
practice and the nature of news itself by prioritizing scandal, sensation, and infotainment over in-depth
political and economic coverage (Bird 1992; Conboy 2006; Franklin 1997; Sparks and Tulloch 2000).
Crime news was ideally suited to this new environment. ‘Crime’ has always been a profitable news
commodity, but tabloidization transformed newspapers’ capacity to produce stories that could seize the
public imagination. Full-colour images formed the centrepieces of increasingly graphic and emotionally
charged crime and justice stories, adding a new dimension of dramatic realism that elevated the potential
to invoke consumer empathy, shock and anger. Melodramatic headlines, moralistic interpretive
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frameworks and simplified explanations—standard practice for decades—were augmented by a growing

readiness to challenge ‘establishment’ discourses and institutional authority (Turner 1999; Reiner et al.
2000; Brock 2013).
As tabloidization was taking hold, newspapers were also experimenting with the Internet. ‘Digital
convergence’—the combination within a single portable device of, most significantly, internet
capabilities, camera functionality, and messaging services—created the technological conditions in which
the mass production and instant dissemination of news could flourish (Westlund 2013). But it was
convergence culture, ‘where old and new media intersect, where grassroots and corporate media collide,
where the power of the media producer and the power of the consumer interact in unpredictable ways’ that
was revolutionary (Jenkins 2006). In the process, it further transformed the nature and experience of
crime news and the environments in which it circulates. Three interconnected dynamics, at once fostered
and intensified by convergence culture, are key: proliferation, interactivity, and adversarialism.
Online proliferation has resulted in countless platforms and sites disseminating 24-7 ‘breaking news’
globally. The main challenge facing news-hungry consumers has shifted from finding and accessing to
choosing and filtering. Rupert Murdoch (2006) heralded a second revolution that would require further
radical adaptation from news organizations if they were to retain their relevance:
Power is moving away from those who own and manage the media to a new and demanding
generation of consumers—consumers who are better educated, unwilling to be led, and who know
that in a competitive world they can get what they want, when they want it. The challenge for us in
the traditional media is how to engage with this new audience … There is only one way. That is by
using our skills to create and distribute dynamic, exciting content … Content is being repurposed
to suit the needs of a contemporary audience … The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff
of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged: they must feed the mind and move the heart [as]
must read, must have content.
News organizations have responded to the proliferation of online ‘free news’ platforms—most notably,
Google, Facebook, and Twitter and numerous chat forums and visual-sharing sites—by transforming
themselves into digital news brands with global reach. A snapshot from July 2021 reveals that The Guardian
newspaper sold 105,000 print copies per day, yet its website attracted more than 305 million daily page
views. Daily print sales of the Daily Mail, whilst eclipsing those of The Guardian ten-to-one, were still only
920,881. MailOnline averaged over 518 million daily page views (Press Gazette, accessed 14 July 2021).
Corporate news websites are constantly updated, rendering obsolete the physical, temporal, and
geographical constraints of the printed format. In an increasingly crowded and competitive market, news
organizations are under ever-greater pressure to attract and retain fickle consumers. One effective way of
achieving this is increased interactivity in the process of sharing and disseminating news content.
p. 250 ↵ Boczkowski (2004: 21) notes that news has moved from being ‘journalist-centred, communicated as
a monologue, and primarily local, to also being increasingly audience-centred, part of multiple
conversations and micro-local’. The integration of video-streaming and podcasting, real-time comments
threads, discussion groups and blogging means that audiences are woven into the news production and
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dissemination process, breaking down traditional notions of journalist as sole gatekeeper and
reinvigorating debates about audience agency. In convergence culture, consumers can become producers,
‘watchers’ can become ‘doers’, and everyone can be a ‘citizen reporter’, sharing photographs and footage
of crime events to co-produce the news, and spreading news by sharing it on social media, or choosing not
1
to (Trilling et al. 2017; Muhlmeyer and Agarwal 2021; Goldsmith and McLaughlin 2022). ‘If it bleeds it
leads’ newsworthiness merges with ‘if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead’ shareworthiness in the co-curation of a
real-time, fully interactive crime news experience. The nature of this viral interactivity can in turn be
shaped by a third major transformation brought about by the mutually reinforcing processes of
tabloidization and digitalization—increased adversarialism.
Within a proliferating, hybrid news market, one of the main ways in which news organizations have
competed for audiences has been through increasing adversarialiam (Lloyd 2004; Milne 2005; Protess et al.
1991; Sabato 1991). The growth of press adversarialism results from a range of interconnected factors.
Some of these, as discussed above, are particular to rapidly transforming communications markets.
Others, like the widely reported decline in deference to authority and a deterioration of public trust in
official or elite institutions, reflect wider changes in values and culture (Fukuyama 2000; Seldon 2009;
Mishra 2017). As McNair (2006: 71) notes, a prominent characteristic of contemporary news coverage is its
‘negativism and wilfully destructive attitude towards authority’. We propose that this adversarialism lies
at the heart of a new business model for news organizations. Energized by tabloidization and
digitalization, and committed to challenging establishment authority by investigating and exposing
institutional failure, this business model is reconstituting what is crime news in the UK. In the next section
we illustrate the evolution of this business model by analysing the interconnected processes of trial by
media, victim-centred news campaigning, and scandal hunting.
Trial By Media and the Digital Court of Public Opinion
The dictum ‘justice must seen to be done’ creates a tension between the public’s right to know, the
newsmedia’s freedom to report and the accused’s right to a fair trial by judge and jury. The US news media
are relatively uninhibited by restrictions on the reporting of court cases. Advocates for both the
prosecution and defence ‘try’ sensational celebrity cases simultaneously in both the law courts and the
court of public opinion (Bailey 2021). Livesteaming some court proceedings in the US encourages and
reinforces frenzied media reporting. In the UK there are more stringent restrictions on the media reporting
of criminal cases. In 1973 Lord Denning stated: “We must not allow ‘trial by newspaper’ or ‘trial by
television’ or trial by any medium other than the courts of law” (Financial Times, 19 February 1973, p. 4).
p. 251 Contempt of court restrictions aim to ensure ↵ that jurors operate in a ‘no-media’ bubble, reaching
verdicts on the basis of the evidence presented in court, free from the potential influence of prejudical
news reporting. There are curbs on: naming suspects, what can be reported after an arrest is made and
what can be reported during judicial proceedings. Unlike in the US, UK court proceedings are also camera-
free. These constraints are being tested to the limit in the digital news environment.
Trial by Media (TBM) is a form of retributive populist justice in which individuals and institutions are
judged in the intermediatized ‘court of public opinion’ (Greer and McLaughlin 2010, 2011, 2012a, b, 2013).
This ‘court’ can be created and attended by media users across the globe, and anyone with internet access
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can participate in the online trial proceedings. In this court no-one is impartial. The allegations driving
TBM range across three overlapping categories of infraction: criminality, immorality, and incompetence.
The disruptive power of TBM resides in its capacity to trigger an extreme emotional public reaction—
shock, anger, outcry—that can redefine cultural, political, and policy agendas and leave an indelible
imprint on our collective consciousness. The nature and targets of these trials are diverse, and include
(Greer and McLaughlin 2017):
naming and shaming public figures and institutions accused of:
acting as if they are above the law
offending against an assumed moral consensus
failing to deliver on obligations and responsibilities
pre-judging the outcome of criminal investigations involving ‘unknowns’
‘retrying’ those considered to have evaded justice and/or proportionate punishment.
Active public participation—which may vary from posting speculation and opinion to searching for clues,
evaluating the truth or falsity of evidence, trolling and weaving evidential webs, to sharing in collective
judgement on the guilt or innocence of the accused—is integral to the immersive, interactive experience
(Are 2019). Through this viral interactivity, TBM reclaims aspects of ‘justice’ from the law courts and
returns them to a digital court of public opinion. The extra-legal investigation practices that form a core
part of TBM may uncover sufficient evidence to activate or reinforce legal due process. TBM thus has the
power to initiate legal proceedings that otherwise may not have occurred. But it can also challenge and
subvert legal due process. Inverting its defining principle, TBM cases are premised on a presumption of
guilty until proven innocent. ‘Presumed guilty’ precipitates an intermediatized search for further
‘evidence’ that contributes to consolidating a public image of the accused as ‘guilty as charged’. While
opinion and hearsay are generally regarded as inadmissible in a court of law, ‘evidence’ in TBM ranges
from that which might be legally admissible to conjecture and insinuation. Attempting to exercise the
‘right to silence’ in the face of accusation is viewed as a tacit admission of guilt. Those who publicly protest
their innocence or attempt to demonstrate that they have been wronged will be subjected to intensified
scrutiny aimed at uncovering further proof of their guilt. Anyone who identifies or stands with the accused
will also be attacked. Through the public naming and shaming of alleged ‘wrongdoers’, TBM orchestrates
both guilt scrolling and status degradation ceremonies that dramatize moral boundaries and transform the
public identity of individual and institutional actors. The ‘justice’, as delivered by a successful TBM, ranges
from varying degrees of public mockery, humiliation, vilification, and demonization, to criminal sanction,
the introduction of new regulatory frameworks, the transformation of institutional practice, and the
reconfiguration of collective memory.
p. 252 ↵ TBM has played a key role in the reinvigoration of investigative journalism from the 1990s to
establish market distinction and demonstrate newspapers’ sense of power. Campaigning across a range of
issues emboldened UK newspapers in claiming to act as the ‘voice for the voiceless’ and extended their
traditional agenda-setting role to one of overt advocacy and activism (Birks 2010). Through a series of
high-profile campaigns, different newspapers began pressurizing governments, in the name of the law-
abiding public, to take responsibility for a succession of institutional failures in the criminal justice
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system. Below we identify and analyse some exemplars that for us demonstrate the essential
characteristics of this process (Figure 11.1), namely failure through convicting the innocent; letting the
guilty walk free; dangerous offenders on the loose; and incompetent criminal justice leadership.
Figure 11.1 The Square of Institutional Failure
The development of TBM through victim-centred campaigns allowed news organizations to stress test the
legal limits and public appeal of the exposure of individual and institutional failures.
Institutional failure: Wrongful prosecutions/convictions

In the aftermath of successful ‘miscarriages of justice’ campaigns, most notably the Guildford Four,
Birmingham Six, Tottenham Three, and Maguire Seven, some newspapers continued to investigate and
campaign on behalf of individuals who it was claimed had been the subject of wrongful conviction (Walker
and Starmer, 1999; Greer and McLaughlin 2014; Poyser et al. 2018). Logistically these ‘traditional’
campaigns are difficult to run as they are premised on the assumption that the criminal justice system is
not only ineffective, but also almost certainly institutionally corrupt. In addition, it is difficult to generate
public sympathy for individuals who, for example, have been convicted of high-profile murders.
Nevertheless, there have been notable successes, including overturned convictions in the cases of the
Cardiff Three (1992), the Bridgewater Three (1997), Derek Bentley (1998), Stephen Downing (2002), and
the Oval Four (2019/2020). These campaigns were damaging to public confidence in criminal justice
because they highlighted systemic incompetence or corruption in the wrongful conviction of innocent
citizens and, in so doing, confirmed that the real killer(s) were still at large.
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p. 253 ↵ Other newspapers initiated campaigns on behalf of crime victims who had been failed by the criminal
justice system. These campaigns were grounded in intense coverage of murders where the victims’
families proclaimed that ‘justice had not been done’ because a killer or killers had not been apprehended or
prosecuted, or had received a light sentence or early release from prison. Two unprecedented TBM
campaigns marked a watershed in UK news organizations’ agenda-setting capacities.
Institutional failure: Allowing the guilty to walk free

In February 1997 the inquest into the killing of Stephen Lawrence resumed. Despite various prosecution
attempts, no-one had been convicted for the murder of the young black Londoner in a racially motivated
attack in April 1993. During this inquest the five primary suspects refused to cooperate, claiming privilege
against self-incrimination (Cottle 2004). The verdict of unlawful killing ‘in a completely unprovoked racist
attack by five white youths’ was already newsworthy because it exceeded the bounds of the jury’s
instructions (Hall et al. 2013). Outraged by what was seen as the state’s inability to secure a conviction in
the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt, the Daily Mail took matters into its own hands. Its
unprecedented front page on 14 February 1997 displayed full-colour photographs of the five suspects
beneath the headline, ‘MURDERERS: The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue
us’ (see Figure 11.2).
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Figure 11.2 Daily Mail front page
Source: Daily Mail, 14 February 1997.
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In publishing this front page the newspaper was in contempt of court, but no legal action was taken by the
accused and the Daily Mail’s campaign for a public inquiry gathered momentum. That this newspaper
championed the case was remarkable given its long history of overt hostility to campaigns around racial
discrimination (McLaughlin 2005). The Macpherson Inquiry Report, released in February 1999, reached
the historic conclusion that the Metropolitan Police was ‘institutionally racist’. It also implied institutional
corruption by police officers of all ranks for ‘fundamental errors’ that fatally undermined the
investigation. The Daily Mail’s intervention sent shock waves across the criminal justice system, and sat
uneasily with other sections of the British news media. A Guardian editorial (15 February 1997) praised the
‘powerful and bold stroke’ on behalf of the victim’s family, but expressed concern at the ‘trial by media’
methods and the precedent they set. This precedent established the foundations for the next stage in the
evolution of trial by media-driven campaigning on the cusp of digitalization.
Institutional failure: Dangerous offenders on the loose

In July 2000, eight-year-old Sarah Payne disappeared from her home in Sussex. The search for Sarah
dominated the national news agenda for three weeks, not least because the parents believed she had been
abducted by a paedophile. They were proved right (Payne 2005). Convicted paedophile, Roy Whiting, was
sentenced to life imprisonment in December 2001, with a minimum term of 40 years, for Sarah’s
abduction and murder. It transpired that Whiting had previously abducted and sexually assaulted an eight-
year-old girl, was one of the first individuals to be included on the 1997 Sex Offenders Register, and had
benefited from early prison release. With the full support of Sarah’s parents, the News of the World—the
UK’s bestselling Sunday newspaper at the time—launched a two-pronged ‘For Sarah’ crusade (Pratt 2007;
Greer 2017). It demanded that paedophiles receive life sentences and the government pass a ‘Sarah’s Law’
p. 254 giving parents ↵ the right to know whether paedophiles were living in their community. The News of
the World’s position was that the lack of such a law had cost Sarah’s life.
Sarah’s mother, Sara Payne, quickly became the campaign’s most high-profile ambassador and a tireless
advocate of Sarah’s Law. The News of the World adopted an unprecedented ‘naming and shaming’ strategy,
having already threatened to build its own online public database of convicted UK paedophiles. On 23 and
p. 255 30 July 2000 it published the ↵ names, photographs, and locations of 82 alleged known paedophiles
and set up a telephone hotline for readers to provide information on the whereabouts of others.
The News of the World vowed to identify all 110,000 known paedophiles in the UK, citing as justification a
MORI poll of 614 adults that showed 84 per cent thought paedophiles should be named and 88 per cent
would want to know if one was living in their community. In directly identifying paedophiles the News of
the World, like the Daily Mail in the Stephen Lawrence case, was taking the law into its own hands. It quickly
stood accused of creating a ‘lynch mob’ atmosphere driven by trial by media. Innocent people were indeed
attacked (Silverman and Wilson 2002). After well-publicized meetings with the Home Office and criminal
justice agencies the News of the World suspended its ‘naming and shaming’ campaign on 6 August 2000.
The campaign did not succeed in establishing all its proposed reforms, but the government was forced to
tighten up controls over paedophiles. After more than a decade of pressure, a child sex offender disclosure
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scheme known as ‘Sarah’s Law’ became operational in England and Wales in April 2011 (Jones and
Newburn 2013). The Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme allows members of the public to ask the police
to check whether someone who has access to a child has any record for child sexual offences.
Following on from the Bulger case, newspaper campaigning in the UK changed as a result of the Stephen
Lawrence and Sarah Payne murders. The Daily Mail and News of the World campaigns were potent
demonstrations of the power to set the news agenda, imposing interpretive order, galvanizing public
opinion, triggering national debates, and pressurizing politicians, policy-makers, and criminal justice
professionals to acknowledge institutional failures. The Lawrence and Payne murders demonstrated how
the violent actions of dangerous criminals, aided and abetted by a malfunctioning criminal justice system,
could destroy innocent lives and families (Charman and Savage 2009; Cook, 2020). In both cases, the
mothers acquired celebrity status and political prominence, and were officially recognized by the state for
their efforts as inspirational women who had produced significant transformations in criminal law,
professional practice, and social attitudes. After a succession of public awards, Doreen Lawrence was
elevated to the House of Lords as a Baroness in 2013. Sara Payne co-founded Phoenix Chief Advocates to
help those victimized by paedophile crimes, challenge institutional anti-victim prejudice, and help people
with PTSD. She became the first Victims’ Champion in 2009 following a Government commitment to make
such an appointment. The Stephen Lawrence and Sarah Payne cases established a new template containing
all the components necessary to run a successful victim-centred campaign in a tabloidized and digitalized
news market. These components include:
1. ideal victims murdered in horrific circumstances;
2. suspected or convicted killers who can be demonized;
3. evidence of institutional failure;
4. grief stricken, outspoken family representatives—ideally a mediagenic inspirational matriarch—

with core values and characteristics that make them instantly recognizable campaign figureheads
capable of:
stimulating public identification and empathy;
communicating loss, pain, frustration, and anger through news conferences, interviews, the
release of family photographs, and participation in high-profile commemoration events;
campaigning for reforms that transcend their own tragic personal circumstances and offer
future protection to others;
p. 256 crafting and disseminating public biographies that further memorialize the victims, who
might become posthumous celebrities;
transforming the crime into an emblematic case which will have a cultural afterlife.
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Institutional failure: Incompetent criminal justice leadership

High-profile criminal justice failures are inevitably accompanied by demands that something be done to
address the incompetent, unacountable leadership of criminal justice agencies. Sir Ian Blair was the first
Metropolitan Police Commissioner to struggle with the revolutionary news developments described in this
chapter. Considered too liberal from the outset by his opponents, Blair was the target for an unrelenting
TBM that undermined his ‘natural’ position as the UK’s most senior police officer. The tipping point in
Blair’s TBM came when he was challenged on the unequal resourcing of murder investigations. He offered
reassurance that the Metropolitan Police allocated resources to murder investigations in accordance with
their complexity, and then accused the news media of institutional racism in how they reported murders.
Blair further questioned news media selectivity by asking why the abduction and murder of two ten-year-
old Soham girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in 2002—which precipitated the biggest police manhunt
in British history—received so much news attention.
The reaction was overwhelmingly hostile. Newspapers reproduced high-profile coverage of black and
Asian murder victims as ‘proof’ that they were not racist in their reporting practices. The Daily Mail
reprinted its ground-breaking ‘Murderers’ front page, naming Stephen Lawrence’s alleged killers. But
Blair attracted an entirely different order of criticism for the Soham murders comment. He was lambasted
across newspaper front pages for daring to question the newsworthiness of Holly Wells and Jessica
Chapman’s murders. The following morning Blair publicly apologized for any offence he might have
caused the murdered girls’ families (Blair 2009). But the fallout of the Soham remarks coalesced with a
hostile political environment to make his Commissionership untenable (Greer and McLaughlin 2011).
Calling the press institutionally racist was a provocation for certain journalists, who quickly rebutted the
claim. Questioning the newsworthiness of the murder of two ten-year-old girls was inexcusable. Blair was
portrayed as an organizational liability who had lost his grip on Scotland Yard, the respect of the rank-
and-file, and political support.
On 2 October 2008, after three years of relentless TBM, Sir Ian Blair resigned from post. He was the first
Commissioner to do so since Sir Charles Warren in 1888, who resigned for failing to catch Jack the Ripper.
Sir Ian Blair’s TBM did more than delegitimize one particular Commissioner. It clarified what ‘type’ of
Commissioner and policing philosophy would be acceptable to the UK conservative national press. Further,
it set a precedent for police–media relations and established a new set of reputational risks that would
have to be managed by anyone seeking to become the UK’s most senior police officer (Greer and
McLaughlin 2011). Sir Ian Blair’s successor, Sir Paul Stephenson, resigned as a result of the Met’s role in
the News of the World phone hacking scandal. The favourite to succeed him, Sir Hugh Orde, withdrew from
the contest in the midst of publicly humiliating media scrutiny (Greer and McLaughlin 2012b). The
successful candidate, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, resigned before his term of office had ended. The same
conservative newspapers that had initially offered qualified support, questioned Hogan-Howe’s
p. 257 Commissionership following a botched police investigation (‘Operation ↵ Midland’) into historical
child sexual abuse in which high profile individuals were publicly named by the police as suspected
paedophiles in the absence of any credible evidence (Henriques 2016). The next Commissioner, Dame
Cressida Dick’s nearly five-year tenure was dogged by a series of blunders and controversies ranging from
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accusations of a failure to address institutional racism and corruption to shortcomings in the police
response to the kidnapping and murder of Sarah Everard by Wayne Couzens, a serving Metropolitan Police
officer. Dick faced further criticism for the heavy-handed policing of a vigil for Sarah Everard.
Again several news organizations, most notably the Daily Mail, ran a prolonged TBM demanding that
‘Calamity Cressida’ be removed from office. The UK’s first female Commissioner resigned in February
2022, confirming that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, had ‘lost faith’ in her ability to reform the force.
Her replacement Sir Mark Rowley experienced his own TBM for his response to a report by Baroness Casey
that labelled the Metropolitan Police as ‘institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic’(Casey 2023).
Scandal Hunting and Media Justice
There has emerged an even more ambitious form of news campaigning, directed not just at powerful
public figures but at Britain’s core institutions. In a spreadable news environment characterized by ever-
increasing proliferation, interactivity, and adversarialism, newspaper organizations have shifted from
investigating individual institutional failures to exposing systemic institutional scandal.
Scandal hunting in the UK has traditionally been viewed as the archetypal tabloid celebrity news practice:
salacious, exploitative, and a distraction from the concealed crimes and misdemanours of the powerful,
and therefore inconsequential (Conboy 2006). They are quickly replaced with yet another entertaining
celebrity scandal.
However, there is also a long tradition of institutional scandal hunting undertaken by specialist
investigative teams employed by news organizations (Thompson 2000; Pilger 2005). Institutional
scandal-hunting is now hard-wired into all news organizations and the multitude of online investigative
news, whistleblower, activist, tracker, and conspiracy sites that constitute the 24/7 scandal machine.
Institutional scandals are at heart morality tales, making public the deliberately hidden immorality,
incompetence, or criminality of institutions that typically results in outrage, condemnation, and
reputational damage. Scandals matter because they evidence ineffective internal and external regulation
and deliberate cover-ups. By definition, institutional scandals involve a dramatic TBM. Exposing scandal is
not straightforward. Most serious institutional wrongdoing never becomes public (Entman 2012).
Investigating the inner workings of powerful institutions is labour-intensive and very often dangerous
(Leigh 2019). The majority of investigations ‘run cold’ at an early stage, not least because institutions can
deploy an armoury of blocking mechanisms to protect institutional interests; obstruct external scrutiny;
neutralize complainants and potential whistleblowers; and reject or deflect blame and responsibility.
Scandal desensitization can also hinder investigations.
While anyone can potentially become a target for TBM, scandals that acquire traction implicate the
institutionally powerful—privileged individuals or institutions whose official position/mandate carries the
expectation of upholding clearly defined moral or ethical principles. If the infractions are sufficiently
p. 258 shocking, their public revelation ↵ will trigger a powerful negative social reaction that can have life-
changing reputational consequences for the protagonists (Greer and McLaughlin 2013, 2015). Though
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diverse, we would argue that a fully raging institutional scandal progresses through the following self-
energizing phases—hunting, latency, activation, reaction, amplification, accountability, and cultural re-
activation (see Figure 11.3). Some scandals become cultural lodestones.
Figure 11.3 Institutional scandal model
Scandal hunting variously involves:
investigations aimed at exposing the corruption of the powerful;
‘gotcha’ operations to catch public figures engaging in scandalous behaviours;
exploring rumours and allegations that might in turn result in a new scandal scoop;
inviting members of the public and whistleblowers to share scandalous information.
While scandals may be activated and subsequently ‘owned’ by particular news organizations, they can go
viral fuelling the digital scandal machine. In addition to being commercially valuable, scandal hunting is
inherently political. There is no shortage of high-profile examples: the politicians’ expenses scandal (Daily
Telegraph 2009); the WikiLeaks’ scandal triggered by the release of confidential US national security and
diplomatic documents (Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel 2010); the phone-hacking scandal that
Page 18 of 28
resulted in the closure of the News of the World (Guardian 2011); the mass surveillance scandal resulting
from the document leak by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden (Guardian 2013); the
Panama Papers scandal revealing the offshore tax avoidance behaviours of the world’s rich and powerful
(Guardian 2016); international sports scandals resulting from the exposure of institutionalized corruption
at the highest levels (Times and Sunday Times 2016); the UK Football Association scandal resulting from the
exposure of corruption in the transfer market (Daily Telegraph 2016); historical child sex abuse scandals
implicating dozens of UK football clubs (Guardian and Daily Mirror 2016).
However, if the Stephen Lawrence and Sarah Payne cases established a template to guide UK newspapers’
orchestration of victim-centred campaigns, the Sir Jimmy Savile case has established a template for the
activation and amplification of an all-encompassing institutional scandal.
Sir Jimmy Savile (1926–2011) was a BBC celebrity, philanthropist, and friend of the establishment (Greer
and McLaughlin 2021). One year after his death, in October 2012, an ITV documentary claimed that Savile
was a sexual predator who for decades had used his celebrity status to abuse teenage girls with impunity.
The allegations against Savile had originally been shared on an internet chatgroup. This documentary
activated an excoriating TBM that annihilated Savile’s reputation and implicated the BBC—the institution
that catapulted him to superstardom—in an extraordinary institutional child sex abuse scandal. The BBC’s
initial ‘we know nothing’ reaction widened the scandal from Savile’s alleged offending to allegations that
the BBC had covered-up for Savile over decades to protect its reputation. An explosion of allegations, wild
conspiracy theories, and an outpouring of rage further escalated and amplified the scandal, implicating
numerous individuals and public institutions (Greer and McLaughlin 2015). Child protection organizations
reported that the ‘Savile effect’ had produced a dramatic increase in reports of child sexual abuse, past and
present, more generally (see Figure 11.4).
Page 19 of 28
Figure 11.4 The Sun front page
Source: News UK/News Licensing, 19 April 2013.
Page 20 of 28
Police investigations resulted in the questioning, and in some cases high-profile arrest and prosecution, of
aged celebrities (‘Operation Yewtree’) and public figures (‘Operation Midland’) accused of historical sexual
p. 260
259 assaults. All of those accused publicly denied ↵ ↵ their guilt. Some were convicted, some were
acquitted, but all were subjected to reputation shredding TBM.
As a direct result of the Savile scandal, an Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) was
established in 2015 to investigate the extent to which institutions had failed or were continuing to fail to
protect children from sexual abuse. (https://www.iicsa.org.uk/about-us/terms-of-reference <https://
www.iicsa.org.uk/about-us/terms-of-reference>). In addition to being the UK’s most large-scale and wide-
p. 261 ranging public inquiry, the IICSA also quickly became its most scrutinized. ↵ The inquiry’s remit, the
credibility of those appointed as chair, the appointment process itself, and the character and competence
of inquiry members were all dissected across news and social media forums, and the first three inquiry
Chairs—Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, Dame Fiona Woolf, and Justice Lowell Goddard—were all
subjected to TBM, and resigned in humiliating circumstances. By March 2022, under the leadership of the
fourth Chair, Baroness Jay, the IICSA had published reports covering child sex abuse linked to
Westminster, organized networks, religious organizations, custodial institutions, and schools, among
others.
The same institutions that co-produced Savile’s ‘untouchable’ celebrity icon status—the BBC, the NHS
and the British establishment—have attempted to eradicate Savile from their institutional histories.
Processes of erasure included the removal of his images from television archives and galleries, the
donation of funds he raised for his charities to child abuse organizations, the removal of statues and
plaques erected in his honour, and the demolition of his gravestone and houses. Savile’s status
annihilation retrofitted the former celebrity icon and ‘national treasure’ as a reviled sex offender (Greer
and McLaughlin 2020). However, ongoing processes of cultural re-activation through theatre,
documentaries, and drama—including Netflix’s Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story and a BBC series, The
Reckoning—ensure that the Savile scandal continues to resonate and evolve more than a decade after it
broke.
Conclusion
Crime will always be newsworthy, and therefore profitable as a multi-dimensional media product. This is
because it works across the highly emotional registers of moral righteousness, fear, anger, and fascination
(Katz 1987). Criminologists will continue to research the processes through which crime news is selectively
produced, the social reactions it generates and the impact that some emblematic crimes have on society,
culture and politics. This programme of research will of course include continued analysis of the
transformation of news values and of the sociological conditions under which we might justifiably say that
the reaction to crime constitutes a moral panic. But for such analyses to be meaningful—for them to move
beyond their taxonomical application—they must be situated within a broader and deeper appreciation of
a rapidly transforming news market. We have argued that, as a result of criminology’s failure to keep pace
with recent transformations, the reconstitution of contemporary crime news remains under-researched
and under-conceptualized.
Page 21 of 28
Just as crime will always be newsworthy, the news media will always be a key site where criminal justice is
‘seen to be done’. Today, however, news organizations, operating in a digital environment, defined by
shareworthiness, are redefining what criminal justice is, and how it can and should be achieved. Victim-
centred campaigns are exposing a failing criminal justice system that is incapable of protecting the law-
abiding public. Media justice, in the form of TBM, is a parallel, more visible, easily accessible, and
immediately impactful justice paradigm than that represented by the dysfunctional criminal justice
process. Digital news sites have become platforms not only for the generation of crime and justice debates
and campaigns, but also for immersive participation in the naming and shaming of individuals and
institutions. Though the criminal justice system retains the executive power to prosecute and sentence
offenders, news sites are pre-empting and circumventing due legal process by pronouncing on guilt or
innocence and, if the judgment is guilty, administering their own form of retributive punishment.
p. 262 ↵ Media justice at once invokes, channels, and expresses moral outrage. Its unique form of extra-
judicial ‘gotcha’ punishment is administered through debasing or destroying the reputations of those
deemed to be ‘guilty’. Relentless scandal hunting, activation and amplification, premised on maximum
exposure and maximum moral outrage, is further complicating the state’s capacity for governance by
reconfiguring the power relations between news organizations, the digital ‘court of public opinion’, and a
scandal-ridden criminal justice system.

Greer’s Crime and Media: A Reader (2010) is a collection of key contributions covering many of the issues discussed in
this chapter. Overview texts on crime and media are Carrabine’s Crime, Culture, and the Media (2008) and Jewkes,
Media and Crime (2015). Studies that still set the agenda for many of the contemporary debates about crime news are:
Chibnall’s Law and Order News: An Analysis of Crime Reporting (1977) <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?
a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.oxfordlawtrove.com%2fview%2f10.1093%2fhe%2f9780198719441.001.0001%2fhe-97801987194
41-chapter-12%23he-9780198719441-chapter-12-bibItem-1357&c=E,
1,GDZJibszwNpe6SQgWxtKQnBsUDIMLHSa3GZ65Msf5vkjxFAkRpi5FqlXrUPEvjKC3gj3922X9rzQOtlhfZPYkc20Wy4ZxFgQMEe
qUjY09qu3egFQ8qqs&typo=1>; Ericson, Baranek, and Chan’s trilogy, Visualising Deviance (1987), Negotiating Control
(1989), and Representing Order (1991); Schlesinger and Tumber’s Reporting Crime (1994) <https://
linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?
41-chapter-12%23he-9780198719441-chapter-12-bibItem-1417&c=E,1,lBZoHDsqJ-
j3BG0QNXhG5N_bfGzBlV3QklYovU07myFEfwLCaQ6OGPlLhQnYeQXmsC7tI-3DKshyohOppFVn5sPQF30mZpCW5iPI2Z6v5A4s
0y-Jggd32BON&typo=1>; and Greer’s Sex Crime and the Media (2003/2012) <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?
41-chapter-12%23he-9780198719441-chapter-12-bibItem-1383&c=E,1,B-hmEAhU37RoxybHH4N1F2wxKMELl8bn7u-
IGmBhAiewG6ZifBbpphdYvShhFWJNGstC-eVycUZIg2Uyn3se6pKHIvAuRs9kpbIibT_No6bcRR7i-uI,&typo=1>. The most
important studies of moral panic remain Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972/2002) <https://
41-chapter-12%23he-9780198719441-chapter-12-bibItem-1358&c=E,1,EtfmHdjMcpxKGX9gKyPRYrkgOrUVNKYLTcxiVw-
JFtaacQiseVkEiL_0rFeIdSKG7hsgfJRZY2OjbOmnHoypoAvh8iGmyWzi2eabZbl9ZLtGieV_Tdgd1TV-uQ,,&typo=1> and Hall et
Page 22 of 28
al.’s, Policing the Crisis (1978/2013) <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?

41-chapter-12%23he-9780198719441-chapter-12-bibItem-1388&c=E,1,4ueblT-
A1W4tzt5ViOYqZUt5SuzkUPpQJJpgLdTHGPSiqxxpFrsWAzq0gIKG2z4Oa4Tj5FUwPgqDnM24luLToPFUzlEBt4BhHgE8zas-
KNTg2Rlzvq7D6w,,&typo=1>. An overview of debates about penal populism can be found in Pratt’s (2007) <https://
41-chapter-5%23he-9780198719441-chapter-5-bibItem-544&c=E,
1,z5h8AD9ykZIPIKApe8WG2jeSf8itLKk_bumWQttga5TovO-xSAfqc_UBQRz-
Vn1z7yIpXsbN7u2oiJWfMbq2ON_Ldssv7DTdPuJZlee_yP-VSzSxmqAcnQ,,&typo=1> Penal Populism. For comprehensive
sociological analyses of scandal, see Thompson’s Political Scandal (2000) and Adut’s On Scandal (2009). Criminologists
will also find much of interest in Mandell and Chen (2016) Scandal in a Digital Age and Tumber and Waisbord (eds)
(2019) The Routledge Companion to Media and Scandal. The journal Crime Media Culture: An International Journal
(London: Sage) is a key source for current and relevant articles.
Online resources

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Notes
1
While surrounding discussions have moved on to encompass concepts such as algorithmic filtering and news
curation, established approaches to reception in the context of audience agency still provide an important lens for
conceptualizing a significant moment in time that continues to reverberate today.
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12. Criminology and atrocity crimes

p. 267 12. Criminology and atrocity crimes

Andy Aydın-Aitchison, Mirza Buljubašić and Barbora Holá
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0012
Abstract
This chapter explores the key concepts and history of criminology being correlated with atrocity. It explains that atrocity
criminology will continue to develop in association with criminologies of overlapping and related phenomena, such as war
and organisational crime. The international criminalization of atrocity has been addressed by many authors who emphasize
different dimensions, including Austin Turk’s conflict theory. The chapter notes that aetiological inquiry on atrocity features
multiple disciplines, integrating a breach of legal or moral prohibition, and theoretical resources that situate individual action
in a wider context. It also acknowledges the dilemma surrounding the uniquely criminological approach to the problem of
atrocity.
Keywords: criminology, atrocity, atrocity criminology, international criminalization, conflict theory
Introduction: European Criminology Gathers in Sarajevo
In September 2018, the European Society of Criminology held its eighteenth annual conference in Sarajevo,
the city which suffered the longest siege in modern warfare. Because of the war of 1992 to 1995 and
ongoing prosecutions, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has a strong association with ‘atrocity crime’. The
conference title, Crimes against Humans and Crimes against Humanity fitted its immediate social, political
and spatial context perfectly. The conference was held in former military barracks, partially destroyed
during the war, then rebuilt and transformed into a University Campus. The facade of the Faculty of
Criminal Justice, Criminology and Security Studies, which hosted most of the sessions, still shows scars
from the war. On sidewalks ‘Sarajevo roses’, red resin-filled concrete wounds caused by mortar shells,
recall civilian deaths. Conference guests could choose to visit a number of museums or memorials to learn
about, or commemorate the victims of, wartime atrocities: Gallery 11/7/95 which memorializes the
Page 1 of 26
genocide at Srebrenica; the Memorial of the Killed Children of Sarajevo; the War Childhood Museum; or the
Sarajevo siege exhibition at the Historical Museum. Those with free time to explore the country could
travel further afield, to the Srebrenica memorial at Potočari, or track down Yugoslav era spomenici
(monuments) to earlier atrocity victims. For example, the Smrike monument, a striking set of modernist
blocks located near the Novi Travnik road, marks the site of World War Two massacres of Serb, Jewish and
Roma civilians. Beyond its symbolic significance, the conference increased the visibility of atrocity crimes
in the criminological mainstream. Sessions organized by the society’s working group on atrocity crime and
transitional justice were supplemented by plenary talks from Barbora Holá, Susanne Karstedt, and Chief
Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Serge Brammertz.
Atrocity crimes and atrocity justice stood at the forefront of conference discussions.
This all seems a long way from Hagan and colleagues’ observation only ten years ago, that ‘[c]riminology
is only beginning to consider the mass violence associated with war, armed conflict, and political
p. 268 repression’ (Hagan et al. 2012: 482). That is not to say ↵ that a criminology of atrocity has reached the
status of a settled field of study, rather the past decade has seen an increased volume of work building on
strong foundations laid by forerunners who applied the tools of the criminologist to understanding the
problem of atrocity and address the challenge to criminological knowledge posed by such crimes. In this
chapter, after giving an historical account of criminological engagement and non-engagement with
atrocity crime during the twentieth century, we survey the sociology of law, aetiology and penology to see
if distinctively criminological approaches to atrocity crime emerge. We reflect on how scholarship on
atrocity in each of these branches feeds back into criminology more broadly. One challenge in writing this
has been to draw a set of borders around criminology, a child raised by a full village of disciplines with the
rich and sometimes contradictory personality to match. Here, we have tended towards ‘generosity’, to be
inclusive, or even voracity, to swallow up some who might not embrace a criminological identity. A second
challenge has been to draw terminological boundaries around ‘atrocity crime’. There is, of course, no
universal definition of atrocity crimes. By looking through legal lenses, atrocity crimes are defined as ‘core
crimes’ (stricto sensu): war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression.
Although torture and terrorism are crimes of international concern in the broadest sense (lato sensu), they
can only be defined as core crimes if contextual legal elements of underlying acts are fulfilled. In contrast
to our approach to the criminological element in the studies we included, we have been stricter in defining
the atrocity element, adopting the definition advanced by David Scheffer (2002, discussed at more length
below). This stays close to the stricto sensu core crimes, but with a degree of flexibility where other acts
meet certain criteria: ‘high impact crimes … of an orchestrated character, that shock the conscience of
humankind, that result in a significant number of victims … meriting an international response holding
the lead perpetrators accountable’ (Scheffer 2002: 400). Yet we recognize that atrocity conceptualization
remains unsettled. Boundaries delimiting the phenomenon are still being discussed within and beyond
criminology, and atrocity criminology will continue to develop in association with criminologies of
1
overlapping and related phenomena (war, organizational crime, state crime, inter alia).
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A Brief History of Criminology and Atrocity
The history of atrocity criminology features a number of ‘false dawns’ and sporadic interventions prior to
more sustained engagement after war and genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Earlier halting starts demonstrate criminological responses to legal and (geo)political stimuli. The latest,
more sustained, focus on atrocity indicates a growing discipline with capacity to support specialist sub-
divisions (Bosworth and Hoyle 2011: 3, 6). Further, legal developments since the 1990s, particularly the
development of international and hybrid judicial bodies prosecuting crimes under international law,
provide much of the source material for criminologists working on the problem of atrocity crimes. Here,
we explore the criminological gap that left the study of atrocity to other disciplines for most of the
twentieth century and outline some key exceptions.
p. 269 ↵ While Durkheim has had a lasting impact on sociological criminology, his late, brief engagement
with atrocity (Durkheim 1915) is rarely cited beyond the occasional footnote on early disciplinary stirrings.
Nonetheless, his initial attempt to explain German breaches of the Hague Conventions, unannounced
bombardment of open towns, use of gas, and killing of wounded, is notable in two respects. First, while
explaining a problem of international law and international relations, he looks beyond interstate
relationships to the internal life of the perpetrator society, and the relationship between state and civil
society (Durkheim 1915: 27 ff). Second, he touches on an enduring puzzle in perpetrator studies, noting
that those committing acts of atrocity are otherwise ‘honest men’ showing no signs of criminality
(Durkheim 1915: 41). The subsequent criminological gap in the study of atrocities between the two World
Wars supports two propositions on how the discipline develops: first it responds to events; second, to law.
If the use of criminal law as a response to atrocities in war and, in the case of the Ottoman Empire against
its own citizens, was limited, so too was criminological reflection. Where criminologists did engage with
war and crime in the same breath, they focused mainly on the impact of war on the prevalence of ordinary
crimes (Mannheim 1941).
During the Second World War, Sheldon Glueck diverted his attention from his domestic research
partnership to focus on the crimes of the Nazi regime (e.g. Glueck, 1944). If Durkheim’s work represents a
beginning of a criminological aetiology of atrocity, then Glueck picks up questions of the origins of
international atrocity law, problems of atrocity penology, and through applied work in support of the
Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, atrocity criminalistics (Hagan and Greer 2002: 249). The
subsequent domestic focus of criminologists at the expense of atrocity (see Maier-Katkin et al. 2009: 230)
is ironic given Glueck’s instrumental role in this watershed moment for the application of criminal law to
atrocity; more so in the UK, where criminological scholarship developed under the influence and
stewardship of scholars taking flight from Nazi aggression, persecution or occupation: Norbert Elias, Max
Grünhut, Hermann Mannheim, Leon Radzinowicz.
The years up to the late 1990s are not completely barren, but the limited mentions of atrocity crimes by
criminologists generally state their relevance to the discipline without meaningfully advancing
criminological knowledge (e.g. López Rey 1970: 39, 43, 234). One notable, if rarely noted, exception is
Christie’s work on SS detention camps in Norway, in which 2,547 Yugoslav prisoners were held, of whom
2
1,747 were killed (Christie 1952: 439). The study focused on conditions in the camps, how prisoners
Page 3 of 26
experienced these, and on distinctions between two groups of Norwegian guards: those actively involved in
murder of detainees, and those who actively helped inmates, or who were more passive. Christie explored
prior criminality on the part of guards, with no decisive results, and their age, finding a marked difference.
The killers, who he argued were responding to pressure from German authorities, were on average 6.5
years younger than others (Christie 1952: 452).
Throughout the second half of the century, atrocities continued apace, as part of the efforts of colonial
powers to maintain their position, following the exit of those colonial powers, or as proxy-wars in the new
bi-polar international order. Here, Hagan and Greer have noted that the waning and waxing of
international criminal law has been predicted by Turk’s socio-legal focus on power in his work from the
1960s onwards (Hagan and Greer 2002: 232–233, see below). While criminologists mostly neglected
p. 270 atrocity until ↵ the 1990s, scholars in other disciplines did not, and their work influenced criminology
when it eventually woke up to the disciplinary relevance of genocide, crimes against humanity and other
atrocities. This includes psychology and Milgram’s work on obedience (Milgram 1963, see e.g. Collard
2019); philosophy (Arendt 2006, e.g. in Portella 2017); and history and political science (Hilberg 1992, e.g.
in Rafter and Walklate 2012).
3
By tracking the term ‘genocide’ as a key word in criminological journal articles, Aitchison demonstrated
the beginnings of a more sustained focus on atrocity in criminology from the late 1990s onwards
(Aitchison 2014a: 25). While the only two search results in the twentieth century came after the
establishment of international tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, neither responded directly
to these, nor to the events they were set up to prosecute. Rather, they deal with the Holocaust (Brannigan
1998), and the forced removal of indigenous Australian children from their families (Cunneen 1999). Even
at this stage in the development of criminology as a discipline, it suggests a sluggish response to events
and to legal developments. Today, there is a burgeoning criminology of atrocity featuring researchers at all
stages of their careers and covering different research problems. A special issue of the European Journal of
Criminology in 2012, under the editorship of Susanne Karstedt and Stephan Parmentier, signalled a
‘coming of age’, and the creation of a working group on atrocity crimes and transitional justice ahead of
the 2013 European Society of Criminology conference in Budapest built on this. In the following three
sections on subfields of atrocity criminology, we mine the rich seam of scholarship that has developed to
cover distinct criminological tasks of a sociology of atrocity law, the aetiology of atrocity, and atrocity
penology.
A Global Sociology of Atrocity Law: Durkheim’s Pale Shadow
Half a century ago, Sutherland and Cressey observed that the sociology of law, the ‘systematic analysis of
the conditions under which criminal laws develop’, was neglected in comparison to other endeavours in
criminology texts, and that ‘research on social aspects of criminal law is greatly needed.’ (Sutherland and
Cressey 1970, 3, 12). This is true of the sociology of atrocity law today. The extent to which the sociology of
the law of atrocity differs from a general criminological sociology of law is determined by two related
factors. First, the extent to which atrocity crimes can be criminologically distinguished from ‘ordinary’
crimes. Then, assuming separation justifies a concerted response beyond the level of individual state
jurisdictions, the impact of a shift in processes of criminalization, including legislative and adjudicative
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dimensions, from state societies to a society of states. Criminologists, and critical scholars in Public
International Law, have highlighted the extent to which gaps in criminalization and enforcement
undermine claims to universalism in International Criminal Justice (ICJ). While domestic criminal justice is
a product of political processes, ICJ brings together a different set of state and non-state actors, changing
the dynamics of criminalization.
In terms of understanding atrocity law as distinctive, David Scheffer (2002) gives a systematic analysis
p. 271 that seeks to unify a range of offences and bodies of law under the ↵ terminology of ‘atrocity’ while
exploring their criminalization in diverse processes of law-making including custom, multilateral
4
conventions, and jurisprudence. Under an umbrella term intended to be meaningful to a lay audience, he
includes crimes that cumulatively match five criteria, moving from the specifics of criminal law to more
general characteristics: magnitude, characterized by acts that are widespread, systematic and include a
large number of victims; coverage within international criminal law; planning, and leadership from a
ruling elite; individual liability; and a final criterion, which is more an exclusion of certain limiting criteria,
the possibility of a range of contexts including war, social upheaval, or peace (Scheffer 2002: 395–400).
Scheffer uses the Durkheimian language of crimes which ‘shock the conscience of humankind’ found
elsewhere in relation to atrocity (UNGA 1946). Nonetheless, his concern with identifying and criminalizing
acts under the terminology of atrocity is less about recognizing global solidarity, and more about ‘selling’
international judicial organs to the public, and deterring atrocity crimes by emphasizing their severity and
the severity of the corresponding law (Scheffer 2002, 416). Whether or not the twofold aims of legitimating
international courts and deterring the most serious crimes have been advanced by applying the term
‘atrocity’, it has been taken up by criminologists, evidenced by the working group of the European Society
of Criminology, in published works (Karstedt and Parmentier 2012; Holá, Nzitatira, and Weerdesteijn
2022), and by international agencies (UN 2014).
The international criminalization of atrocity has been addressed by a number of authors who emphasize
different dimensions, including the moral entrepreneurship of key advocates such as Raphael Lemkin and
Hersch Lauterpacht, who respectively stood behind the criminalization of genocide and crimes against
humanity (Sands 2016); or the political context, shaping which acts are subjected to international law
enforcement (Hagan and Greer 2002; Berlin 2020). Bringing Austin Turk’s conflict theory to the fore,
Hagan and Greer offer a criminological engagement with the problem of the apparent ‘lapse’ of
international criminal law enforcement after Nuremberg and ‘revival’ with the ad-hoc tribunals of the
1990s (Hagan and Greer 2002: 232). Turk’s earlier work had set the foundations for a theory of
criminalization based on culture, inclination, and power (Turk 1964: 456). Hagan and Greer cite his 1982
work, Political Criminality, to explain how a short window of alliance between the USSR and USA, before a
longer period of hostility, first permitted, then froze, international action to prosecute atrocities (Hagan
and Greer 2002: 233). Most recently, the ‘hibernation’ thesis, which posits this cold war hiatus, has been
challenged by careful excavation of developments which served as a foundation for the ‘justice cascade’
commencing in the 1990s with the founding of international tribunals, and with prosecutions in
Guatemala and other Latin American states (Berlin 2020). Essentially, Berlin argues that developments at
the international level in terms of new and expanded treaties, doctrinal developments on statutes of
limitations, domestic legislation incorporating internationally defined war crimes and genocide, and the
accompanying development of professional expertise, all qualify the degree to which atrocity law was
Page 5 of 26
dormant in this period. Key to the development were technocratic elites, academic networks, domestic and
international human rights organizations (Berlin 2020: 880–891), and transitions to democracy (Karstedt
and Lafree 2006). Mullins and colleagues (2004) describe a dialectic relationship between atrocity law and
p. 272 international ↵ politics, and the global spread of liberal democracy along with hegemony of the United
States of America immediately after the Cold War made the internationalization of atrocity laws more
likely. Ad hoc Tribunals were established while atrocities were still being committed in the former
Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. Further internationalized or hybrid judicial structures were set up for other
situations, such as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and the Special Court for
Sierra Leone (SCSL). Earlier dreams of a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) were realized, albeit
with significant gaps in membership (Mullins, Kauzlarich, and Rothe 2004). This suggests that atrocity
law development is not only a matter of ethical ideals or ideologies, but political realism, national
interests, and power relations (Mearsheimer 2018).
Moving from one disciplinary sphere of influence (international relations) to another (sociology), Marina
Aksenova (2019) turns to Durkheim to ask why crimes against humanity are criminalized and prosecuted
internationally. The task is made more pressing by the offence’s lack of foundation in an international
treaty, its blurred boundaries with other core international crimes, and issues pertaining to the role of the
state or alternative actors in perpetration. Her argument posits a global level of consciousness co-existing
with the ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ present in Durkheim’s work. This global consciousness is disturbed by
injuries to ‘values essential to the entire world community’ (Aksenova 2019: 84), undermining a social
cohesion based on the dignity of a ‘sacralized’ individual (Aksenova 2019: 87–88). The universalism this
implies is far from complete, as recognized by Aksenova (2019: 84–87). Neither the enslavement of
5
Africans, nor the brutality of colonization, trigger the collective sense of responsibility and concerted
international action that would indicate a truly global conscience shocked by extreme violations of human
rights. Such universalism was viewed as a distant prospect by Durkheim in the early twentieth century (see
Aitchison 2014a: 43). Immi Tallgren’s work calls for an evaluation of empirical evidence which would likely
show that a conscience collective remains weak at the level of the international community. She highlights
questions of which violence is repressed or tolerated, which states are indicted or not, and which arms are
regulated or unregulated (Tallgren 2013: 149, 153).
One way to take this call forward is seen in Kjersti Lohne’s ethnographic approach to ICJ (Lohne 2019). If
ICJ is an expression of an international will to punish (Lohne 2019: 4) and the ICC represents an
achievement of global civil society, Lohne’s work aims to critically explore this by tracking the spaces in
which it is made and sustained, and the people who occupy those spaces. Lohne takes a lead from Tsing,
who problematizes the assumption of a set of universals underpinning efforts to connect globally: such an
assumption already suggests unity. Rather, as identified already above, the universal is an unfinished
achievement, at best an aspiration, but one which Lohne suggests, can also be a facade covering
particularist interest and the imposition of power (Lohne 2019: 18). As well as showing the continuing
relevance of state power as a limiting factor (Lohne 2019: 216–217), her work offers a critique of ICJ and its
claims to legitimacy based on social justice, cosmopolitanism, and humanitarianism. While driven by
humanitarian impulses, it is expressed in penal terms. Claims to legitimacy, resting on a particular image
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of the victim, are contrasted to a deeper commitment to global justice found elsewhere in scholarship and
activism with a strong focus on justice as redistribution rather than retribution (Lohne 2019: 221–222; see
also Schwöbel-Patel 2021: 14–15).
The position of the victim as a passive object of justice in Lohne’s analysis can be expanded with reference
p. 273 to a growing body of victimological work focusing on atrocity ↵ (Eski 2021; Schwöbel-Patel 2021).
Schwöbel-Patel’s analysis shows the victim at the centre of an ‘enterprise’ to ‘sell’ international criminal
justice. This resembles the legitimating function of the victim in domestic politics (Boutellier 2000: 15, 45;
and Simon 2007: 4–5), albeit with a stronger emphasis on the neoliberal framing and associated market
values (Schwöbel-Patel 2021: 3, 128). Among other problems, this has a significant impact on the victims
whom international justice enterprises claim to serve. Victims’ ‘lived experience of suffering’ is
appropriated and distorted. Further, building on Christie’s work on the ideal victim, Schwöbel-Patel
identifies a similar tendency to favour those displaying particular properties with full recognition as a
victim. Those characteristics are vulnerability or weakness, dependency, and grotesqueness (Schwöbel-
Patel 2021: 132). By drawing on racialized and gendered stereotypes, those very stereotypes are reinforced
(Schwöbel-Patel 2021: 136) and can even distort the interpretation of evidence (Buss 2014). Examples of
those who find it difficult to have their victimhood recognized are people whose identities do not fit the
mainstream narratives of victims and perpetrator in a conflict (Golubović 2019), and those in post-conflict
settings where present political discourse seeks to qualify victimhood in relationship to the politics of the
past (Álvarez Berastegi and Hearty 2019, see also Chapter 34). The question of whose victimhood is
recognized and foregrounded is, in many ways a corollary of the questions asked by Tallgren, above, about
which violence is successfully criminalized through ICJ. Again, it suggests limits to the global solidarity
and shared shocked conscience proposed in a Durkheimian revival. The crossover between international
law, international relations, sociology and criminology in an emerging critical scholarship on
international criminal law and its patchy enforcement recognizes the distinctiveness of atrocity crime as a
legal category rooted not in domestic social and political developments, but in the interface between an
inter-state society and the bodies claiming to speak for a putative global society.
Atrocity Aetiology: A Crowded Field
Criminologists came late to the crowded field of inquiry seeking to identify the causes and processes
underlying atrocity crime, so face the question of what they add. The aetiology of atrocities is already
significantly developed in other disciplines. Explanations for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war
crimes have been advanced in individual disciplines including anthropology, economics, history,
philosophy and political theory, political science, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology inter alia, as well
as in studies crossing disciplinary boundaries. We discuss four features of criminology which, when taken
together, show a useful criminological contribution to aetiological inquiry on atrocity beyond simply
replicating the labours of different disciplines. First, bridging multiple disciplines (Friedrichs 2000);
second, explanations integrating a breach of legal or moral prohibitions (Trasler 1962: 11); third,
eschewing mono-causal explanations in favour of complex configurations of factors across multiple levels
(Radzinowicz 1961: 175); and finally, theoretical resources that situate individual action in a wider context
(van Baar and Huisman 2012).
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Spanning disciplinary boundaries

Friedrichs calls criminologists to integrate as many different disciplines as possible, addressing the
Holocaust ‘on historical, societal, organizational, communal, peer group, situational, and psychological
p. 274 levels’ (Friedrichs 2000: 34). This chimes with scholars ↵ who emphasize the diverse disciplinary
foundations of criminology and caution against isolating criminological scholarship from ongoing
conversations in supporting disciplines (e.g. Hagan 1988: 257). In this framing, atrocity criminology draws
on its varied disciplinary heritage to span boundaries. We examine the achievement of disciplinary
integration but argue that logically it cannot be unique to any one discipline. We consider three indicators
of integration: first, integration within atrocity criminology, whereby criminologists build knowledge,
insights and methods from a range of other disciplines into their own work; second, external
communication of criminological insights in fora hosted by other disciplines or in multi-disciplinary
settings; third, the uptake of insights by criminologists in other disciplines.
Tony Ward’s examination of explanations for the terror imposed in the Congo Free State under Leopold II
of Belgium was one of the first two papers offering detailed engagement with the aetiology of atrocity in
The British Journal of Criminology (2005). He uses a number of works of history from writers with and
without academic affiliations (Ward 2005: 435). These histories, along with contemporary journalistic
reportage, provide Ward’s data. Such use of historical research when analysing historical episodes of
atrocity is common and can be found in other disciplines (e.g. Bulutgil 2017: 87; Malešević 2017: 219–222).
Ward uses other disciplines to define the actions of the Congo Free State in a genocidal frame, reaching
beyond law to political science and sociology (Ward 2005: 435–436). Further, existing aetiologies are
brought in from political economy and anthropology, before being likened to specific strands of
criminological explanation represented by Merton and Katz (Ward 2005: 435). The anthropological strand
continues, married to Arendt’s political theory, as Ward moves into his analytical phase. This highlights
the anti-rationality encouraged by colonial domination, allowing Ward to show that excesses of violence
are not wholly irreconcilable with economic explanations (Ward 2005: 439). This takes us through an
application of Mertonian anomie and strain, filtered through its application to corporate crime by Passas.
Along the way, Ward draws parallels with sociological observations on habituation to violence in
concentration camps (Ward 2005: 439–441). Ultimately Ward presents a picture where Europeans’ brutal
6
savagery does not negate economic motivations, even when it seems at odds with them. Beyond turning
to other disciplines for data or conceptual support, here we find an attempt to use criminology as a space to
reconcile differences between disciplines.
The second aspect of criminological transdisciplinarity is activity and leadership in multi-disciplinary

spaces. This is evident in the work of Alette Smeulers, a leading example in the field of atrocity
criminology, whose work as researcher, teacher, supervisor and editor has done much to consolidate
7
atrocity scholarship in criminology. As a student of political science, then doctoral researcher in
international criminal law, Smeulers already demonstrated a degree of transdisciplinarity. This is further
exemplified by her founding role in the interdisciplinary Centre for International Criminal Justice at Vrije
p. 275 Universiteit Amsterdam. Her aetiological contributions include work with Lotte ↵ Hoex (Smeulers and
Hoex 2010), building on her earlier work on perpetrator typologies (Smeulers 2008) to interrogate group
dynamics in the Rwandan Genocide; her analysis of the role of state policy in abuse of prisoners at Abu
Page 8 of 26
Ghraib (Smeulers and van Niekerk 2009); and her work on low-level perpetrators’ (mis)understandings of
the legality of orders to commit acts criminalized by international law (Smeulers 2019). In a series of books
that she has edited with others, Smeulers has done much to advance the integration of disciplines in
aetiological and other research, and to facilitate debate between different disciplines (e.g. Smeulers,
Weerdesteijn, and Holá 2019). Similarly, a longstanding contributor to atrocity criminology, Susanne
Karstedt takes a leading role in collected volumes (Karstedt and Parmentier 2012) and acts as an
ambassador for atrocity criminology in the pages of broader social science fora (Karstedt 2013).
In terms of ‘reach’, although an early example of work on atrocity in a mainstream criminology journal,
8
Ward’s work on the Congo Free State is not yet heavily cited and a better example of reach might be found
in his work with Penny Green on state crime (Green and Ward 2004) cited more than 200 times by the time
our chapter was in preparation. As might be expected, many of the citing works are in the journal State
Crime, a key venue for the intellectual agenda set out in the original book. The impact in criminology is
evident through further citations in Crime, Law and Social Change, the British Journal of Criminology, and
Critical Criminology. Beyond this, the work is being taken into other disciplines by researchers with
criminological affiliations (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2020) and picked up at the meeting point of International
Relations and International Law (Gordon and Perugini 2020). These scholars are already working across
disciplinary boundaries, and transdisciplinary reach requires such willing interlocutors in other
disciplines. The uptake of atrocity criminology in other disciplines suggests success in spanning
disciplinary boundaries, but logically negates any attempt to present this transdisciplinarity as exclusively
criminological. Further, engaging explicitly with scholars outside one’s own discipline is more evident
than not in the wider field of atrocity studies. Historian Max Bergholz’ work on Kulen Vakuf (BiH) during
World War II (Bergholz 2016) makes regular reference to criminology; political scientist Lee Ann Fujii
(2011) cites historians and sociologists in her work on the genocide in Rwanda. Transdisciplinarity is a
collective task, and while criminological labour contributes to that, it does not mark out criminology as
exceptional.
The breach of law and morality

Criminology may claim some level of distinctiveness arising from its focus on behaviour that has been
criminalized, but as noted already, the international dimension pulls criminologists onto new ground.
Moreover, the field of atrocity studies is complicated for criminologists who normally explore crimes
defined by, rather than enacted by and through, the state. For some, the formal legal labelling of a
particular behaviour as crime is of little relevance in aetiological research; what matters is the conduct
itself and relevant conduct norms (Sellin 1938: 24). The range of conduct criminalized varies such that a
p. 276 universal explanation of crime would be too broad to hold any value ↵ (Sutherland and Cressey 1970:
20). The counter-position holds that placing conduct in a particular legal (or moral) category means that
the breach of a prohibition becomes part of the conduct requiring explanation. Trasler proposed that
knowing that behaviour contravenes law creates a phenomenological distinction (Trasler 1962: 11). His
proposal assumes knowledge of what is and is not lawful, but also says little about how great the
phenomenological distinction is and how much it contributes to an explanation of conduct. Criminal law,
whether defined internationally or in a domestic context, is one source of rules that may be relevant to
Page 9 of 26
conduct, but others beyond the specialism of criminologists such as professional codes of conduct
(Browning 1988) and broader internalized codes (Grossman 2014) are potentially breached by atrocity or
other violent acts. This is not to say that criminal law has no effect, rather it is put into effect by specific
mechanisms of control and enforcement, and the absence of these may be part of a causal explanation.
Mullins’ (2011) work illustrates this by comparing the prevalence of war crimes committed by four parties
in the Georgia-Russia war of 2008. Of the 199 crimes in his dataset, 47 per cent were carried out by South
Ossetian militia, and 42 per cent by Russian forces (Mullins 2011: 924). He argues that among the
combatants, Georgia’s forces were liable to prosecution because the country had signed up to the Rome
Statute, and that oversight arising from alliances with the EU, NATO, and US introduced a further level of
external control (Mullins 2011: 927). Where Georgian forces committed crimes, he notes that these were in
areas where the law of war is under-developed, suggesting scope for uncertainty over what may or may
not be deemed lawful by expert judges (Mullins 2011: 927). This fits with the argument that the language of
manifest unlawfulness in the Rome Statute may not correspond well to reality in the context of conflict
(Smeulers 2019). Criminal law is not the only factor taken into account. Mullins also notes that Georgia’s
aim to reintegrate territory and inhabitants into the state is also key to understanding the lower prevalence
of war crimes; regarding Abkhaz forces, not subject to the same controlling oversight, he cautiously
suggests that more limited opportunities and a stronger history of plural ethnic co-existence in Abkhazia
explain low levels of offending (Mullins 2011: 927, 930).
While the question of breaching moral, rather than simply legal, prohibitions takes us beyond a realm that
might be claimed as specifically criminological, criminologists, among others, have focused on this as one
dimension of the aetiological puzzle. Extreme acts of violence and killing are normally prohibited
(although never without exceptions), and such prohibitions have been shown to have strong inhibiting
effects against violence even in situations of extreme threat (Grossman 2014: 95). From a sociological
perspective, violence requires an extra degree of legitimation (Malešević 2017: 26) and the state is a
powerful source of that legitimation. One proposal from criminologists has been to look at temporary
inversions of morality (Jamieson 1998) or temporary and deviant normative orders (Maier-Katkin et al.
2009). For Maier-Katkin and colleagues, this is a more convincing explanation than other criminological
theories advanced. The basic assumptions of stability in Gottfredson and Hirschi’s general theory are not
compatible with Brannigan and Hardwick’s explanations positing temporary loss of self-control (Maier-
Katkin et al. 2009: 237). Similarly, other theoretical frames used to explain atrocity such as differential
association and social learning (discussed further below) do not fit with an apparent sudden onset of
violence in Jedwabne, their case study (Maier-Katkin et al. 2009: 238). While this understates the prior
history of anti-Semitic violence in the particular case, the rapidity with which normal moral prohibitions
against extreme violence are overturned calls for attention. Jamieson (1998: 482) and Maier-Katkin et al.
p. 277 (2009: 239) point respectively to anomie and strain as ↵ preconditions for such inversions. The
differences between places and contexts where law holds fast, or the apparent pre-existing morality is not
inverted or qualified, and those places where such inversions happen earlier or later in a sequence of
atrocities merit further attention in terms of strain features and other triggering factors (see, e.g. Fujii 2011
on Rwanda). The anonymized central Bosnian village of ‘Dolina’, studied by anthropologist Tone Bringa, is
an example of a place surrounded by war and other strains as Yugoslavia disintegrated, but which was late
to experience atrocity (Bringa 1996: xvi). Her full study outlines a rich identity consisting of common
village and Bosnian elements, and separate Muslim and Catholic ones (e.g. Bringa 1996: 66). Strain is
Page 10 of 26
posited as a precondition, but not sufficient to explain atrocity (Maier-Katkin et al. 2009: 240). In Bringa’s
case, we see other factors which shape and direct any physiological and psychological energy rooted in
strain among Croat villagers, who ultimately turned on their Muslim neighbours after the Bosnian Croat
army attacked the village: the expansion of ‘the accepted sphere for the use of language of exclusivity’; the
intervention of outside forces; the marking of a former neighbour as ‘a depersonalized alien, a member of
the enemy ranks’ (Bringa 1996: xvi, 56). This depersonalization, or production of enmity, may be one of
the ways in which others are defined out of the universe of moral obligation (Fein 1990). Further, the
question of a combination of inverted and stable norms would also appear to hold some explanatory power
as evident in case studies of medical professionals (Browning 1988) and engineers (van Baar and Huisman
2012, see below) and their contributions to the Holocaust.
Multi-level analyses
Genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are necessarily complex phenomena. Contextual
elements and diverse acts are written into their definitions, and they usually take place at scale, under
state authority or by groups challenging the state, and through the division of labour across individuals
and organizations. Radzinowicz recognized that any mono-causal explanation of even simple crimes
would be partial (Radzinowicz 1961: 175). When it comes to crime committed or experienced outside the
context of concentrated episodes of mass victimization, criminologists increasingly look for explanations
encompassing multiple levels (e.g. Dierenfeldt et al. 2019). As with an inclination towards
transdisciplinarity, this is not something uniquely criminological. Nevertheless, it forms an important
aspect of criminological approaches to atrocity aetiology and is evident in the proposal and utilization of
various frameworks incorporating micro-, meso- and macro-level factors in an integrated analysis (e.g.
Kramer et al. 2002; Olusanya 2013; van Baar and Huisman 2012).
There is some diversity in how levels are defined and what elements are attributed to them. For example,
the macro level is defined broadly as ‘environment’, ‘institutional environment’ (Kramer et al. 2002: 274),
or broadly in terms of structure (Olusanya 2013: 844). Rothe purposefully separated out the international
from the macro level, suggesting the macro-level is reserved specifically for state-level phenomena.
Although both levels are characterized by ideology, politics, economy, and military force, the separation
allows her to emphasize distinct and contradictory pressures arising at each level (Rothe 2008: 99–100).
Similarly, the emphasis at the micro level may be on the actions and interactions of individuals (Kramer et
al. 2002: 274) or on more internal emotional and psychological dynamics (Olusanya 2013: 844). The meso-
level is frequently used for the organizational or group settings, such as businesses, which mediate the
p. 278 larger structural pressures that ultimately fall on individuals (van Baar and Huisman 2012: 1036). ↵ The
common ground, regardless of where boundaries are drawn, is that atrocity crimes require organizational
elements and individual participation; both of these demand explanation in the aetiology of atrocity; and
interaction between elements from different levels has explanatory power. As well as analytical levels,
criminological studies disaggregate by period and territory. Kovačević notes that the headline term
‘Bosnian genocide’ reduces a complex process enacted over years to a single coherent story (Kovačević
2020: 105). Karstedt has noted that the deconstruction of larger narratives into a series of localized events
is ‘the most important’ task at present for challenging knowledge generated through a top-down lens
emphasizing totalitarian control and ideology (Karstedt 2013: 393). Aitchison (2014b), for example,
Page 11 of 26
combines organizational and local focus to examine police participation in atrocity crimes in one region of
BiH in the early stages of war and genocide. He shows how structural legacies from the former Yugoslavia
were moderated through a new, ethnicized, democratic politics at the level of the Bosnian republic. At an
organizational level, this fed into personnel changes in the police marked by politicization and
deprofessionalization, which accompanied militarization. This simultaneously shifted organizational
orientation and capabilities to produce a police force which contributed to a range of atrocities. The
research highlights differences in timing and actions across municipalities, suggesting the merit not only
of inter-regional comparison in the BiH war, but also intra-regional comparison. This turn to sub-state
territory to serve as a site from which to view wider phenomena mediated by local factors is not unique to
criminology (e.g. Bergholz 2016; Fujii 2011) but is a promising direction for multi-level analyses.
Criminological theory
If the preceding sub-sections give the sense that criminologists’ contributions to aetiologies of atrocity are
beneficial but not unique, then the theories that have grown up, and are common currency, within the
discipline may offer something more specifically criminological. As attention to atrocity grew in
criminology, a number of criminologists sought to identify conceptual and theoretical resources to adapt
from the criminological back catalogue (e.g. Day and Vandiver 2000; Karstedt et al. 2021), to problematize
such efforts (Woolford 2006), or to apply these in case studies (Ward 2005; Neubacher 2006; van Baar and
Huisman 2012). Day and Vandiver represent an early effort, but one which is criticized for simply adding
criminology and stirring (Woolford 2006: 96–97). They claim that existing scholarship on genocide and
mass killings has produced theories resembling those of criminologists, claiming that Kelman’s work on
violence can be reframed in terms of the earlier work of Sykes and Matza on techniques of neutralization
(Day and Vandiver 2000: 45). This strand of theory feeds into work by Neubacher (2006) who analyses
neutralizations in a 1943 speech by Heinrich Himmler and for Day and Vandiver is well-suited to explain
the temporary or episodic nature of genocide (Day and Vandiver 2000: 46). Their work recasting
Goldhagen’s historical analysis and Rummel’s political science of democide in terms of theories of
criminalization (Day and Vandiver 2000: 47ff) is weaker, given that the persecution of Jewish Europeans
and other groups by Nazis and their allies goes well beyond the bounds of coercion through criminal law
and is better characterized as a state policy of murder. The test of the value of these initial leads is in their
application in concrete empirical research.
Applications of criminological theory focus mostly on perpetrators, with some further victimological work.
The role of bystanders can, in part, be read into accounts which factor in control as a variable. The
p. 279 application of a combination of strain theory and ↵ differential association represents a common
strand in studies of perpetrators (e.g. Ward 2005; van Baar and Huisman 2012). The study of Topf and
Sons, the German makers of ovens for Auschwitz and other concentration and death camps, by van Baar
and Huisman provides a good example. These ovens not only burned the bodies of victims but were
adapted to warm the air and ventilate gas chambers to murder Jewish, Roma and other victims more
efficiently (van Baar and Huisman 2012: 1041). Strain theory fits the family firm’s efforts to stay afloat in a
difficult and competitive economic context but is limited in explanatory power given the small part of
company revenues represented by business with the SS (van Baar and Huisman 2012: 1039). In terms of
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differential association, where values aligned to law-breaking are learned alongside techniques
(Sutherland 1940: 2–3), the paper focuses on values of innovation and technical perfection that were
dominant in the individual enterprise, the sector, and German industry more broadly, and evident in the
work of the engineers (van Baar and Huisman 2012: 1041 ff). This represents continuity of certain values
predating the atrocities. The engineers’ clear breach of moral values, knowingly assisting mass murder, is
explained by their prioritizing this technical responsibility over moral responsibility (van Baar and
Huisman 2012: 1041). Nonetheless, when advertising their conventional crematoria, the values of
humanity, dignity and respect are highlighted in relation to new technical innovations (van Baar and
Huisman 2012: 1037, 1041). The old moral values are not abandoned, rather the victims burned in death
camps are excluded from the obligations they generate. This suggests two further paths for developing the
analysis. The first is to link differential association to ideology as a legitimating factor for participating in
genocide, which is largely dismissed in the paper. This involves further exploring the role of the close
connections between the chief engineer and the party and state through the SS (van Baar and Huisman
2012: 1043) in terms of transmission of values. The second is to explore the selective discontinuity in
9
values indicated by the simultaneous production of humane crematoria for German citizens and systems
for more effectively murdering and incinerating Jewish and other victims. Here, Helen Fein’s work on the
processes by which groups are defined to be outside the universe of moral obligation (Fein 1990: 34) can be
linked to processes of exclusion of Jewish people in economy, society and law from the earliest stages of
Nazi rule. Evidently the categorical exclusion is not absolute, given that one of the Topf brothers made
repeated efforts to secure the freedom of two Jewish colleagues in Gestapo custody (van Baar and Huisman
2012: 1039). A further step would look not only at the exclusion of the other from the universe of moral
obligation, but the creation of a moral obligation to contribute to killing members of that group (Anderson
2017: 26, 78–87).
Victimological contributions to atrocity aetiology are well represented by Rafter and Walklate’s (2012)
work on the repeated massacres and ultimate genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Using a
concept of dynamic victimality, they bring together a short-term frame of precipitation (actions in an
immediate sequence of events) and a more structural frame of proneness, linked to wider vulnerability and
risk of repeated victimization. Together these frame the social relations that explain the occurrence and
specific timing of massacres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the genocide of 1915.
Notwithstanding the challenge of explaining crimes characterized by conformity in a discipline oriented
towards explaining deviance, the contributions of criminologists to the aetiology of atrocity over the last
two to three decades add to an endeavour that is greater than any one discipline.
p. 280 Atrocity and Punishment: Sui Generis Crimes, Sui Generis Procedures
10
The mushrooming of different international courts and tribunals since the early 1990s, and the related
human rights movement towards ‘ending impunity’ for atrocities, stimulated criminological and other
disciplinary inquiries into punishment for atrocity. Scholars focusing on international, domestic, or
transitional punishment for atrocities identified two main problems for a penology of atrocity. First, the
sui generis nature of atrocity as collective, organized, and mass-scale violence, oftentimes committed for
political goals, and extending well beyond individual perpetrators and victims. Second, the sui generis
nature of the criminal justice systems, whether international or domestic, with their own idiosyncrasies
Page 13 of 26
relating to their political, societal and cultural contexts and resources impacting on how they deal with
atrocities. In the following sections we outline criminological and related interdisciplinary scholarship
concerning the conundrum of punishing collective crimes at an individual level; the punishment of
atrocities through international criminal courts and tribunals (ICCTs); and the punishment of atrocities
through domestic courts. While conventional penal theories and rationales have been applied, and called
into question, when it comes to punishing atrocities, discussions are largely limited to such critical
engagement. One distinct contribution that criminologists (and other social scientists) introduced to the
study of atrocity punishment, an area of inquiry largely dominated by normative and legal doctrinal
approaches, however, has been the empirical interrogation of existing penal norms, assumptions and
practices, as demonstrated in the growing empirical scholarship on international and domestic
prosecutions of atrocities. As with aetiological research, scholars engaging with this topic stem from a
variety of disciplines, such as criminology, law, sociology, and international relations.
Individualized punishment for collective crimes

As discussed earlier, criminologists have advanced multi-level accounts to explain acts of atrocity.
According to these models, individuals committing atrocity violence cannot be isolated from their wider
criminal contexts and vice-versa. Punishment, with its exclusive focus on individual criminal
responsibility reduces and largely obfuscates the multifaceted and complex reality of atrocity perpetrators
and understandings of their responsibility (Drumbl 2007). This gap between the empirical reality of
atrocity and legal constructions of it calls into question many penological assumptions. Scholars have
challenged the suitability of existing penal theories for atrocities. The specific socio-political and largely
violent contexts in which atrocity crimes are committed; the mass, collective, and hierarchically organized
character of atrocities; the nature of their perpetration and perpetrators (Smeulers 2008); and the unique
character of the resulting harm and victimization (Pemberton and Letschert 2022) are among the many
p. 281 factors ↵ cited by scholars to challenge penal theories and question their relevance and resonance in
case of atrocities (Drumbl 2007; Mohamad 2015). For instance, offender rehabilitation, as conceptualized
and applied by ICCTs, does not reflect the specific character of atrocity crime perpetrators (Holá and van
Wijk 2016). Following release, which is often granted part way through the custodial sentence, many war
criminals do not face any reintegration-related challenges. Quite the opposite. The social capital of some
convicted war criminals rocketed following conviction and punishment. They were welcomed as war
heroes in their domestic constituencies and frequently returned to their—more or less—influential pre-
trial political and societal positions (Simic 2011).
International punishment
A significant theoretical and empirical challenge for criminological scholarship on punishment and
atrocity is that it suffers from ‘tribunal bias’. Scholars have been predominantly focused on ICCTs, yet
these have only dealt with a negligible proportion of atrocities and atrocity perpetrators. For instance, the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) tried, convicted, or acquitted 73 individuals for crimes
committed during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. In comparison, Rwandan domestic courts and
gacaca tribunals adjudicated cases of over one million individuals accused of participation in the genocide.
Page 14 of 26
This tribunal bias manifests itself in two main ways. First, as briefly outlined below, the ICCTs feature as
predominant objects of a scholarly criminological inquiry. Second, the tribunal bias also influences
broader criminological inquiries where criminologists have largely relied on ICCT sources to explore other
domains: aetiology, victimology, or prevalence of atrocity (e.g. Aitchison 2014b; Bringedal Houge 2019).
This brings forward limits on the epistemology of atrocity given the selectivity of ICCTs, the evidence they
generate, and the particular characteristics of their criminal procedures (Bouwknegt and Nistor 2019).
Scholars have primarily studied the functioning and effects of ICCTs as sui generis international, cross-
cultural, and politico-legal institutions, with various diverse constituencies and stakeholders who have
competing agendas and goals. Empirical scholarship has, for instance, examined charging practices (Ford
2013), selectivity (Smeulers, Weerdesteijn and Holá 2015), witnessing (Stover 2007), evidence presentation
and evaluation (Combs 2010; Chlevickaitė, Holá, and Bijleveld 2021; Fournet 2020), or sentencing and its
predictability (Meernik and King 2003; Doherty and Steinberg 2016). These works identify specific features
of punishing atrocities at the international level. ICCTs are expected to operate beyond nation states, but
paradoxically are absolutely dependent on states’ cooperation for arrests, evidence, and for enforcement
of sentences. This clearly distinguishes international punishment for atrocities from most domestic
equivalents. Levi, Hagan, and Dezalay (2016) demonstrated how this means that ICCT prosecutors have to
be not only legal, but also political actors, who operate in ‘atypical political environments’. In these
contexts, the prosecutors depart from normal criminal justice routines applied in domestic systems. The
prosecutors choose their cases and evidentiary strategies, not only on principle, but also on the immediate
historical and geopolitical context. This seems subject to a degree of movement back and forth. ICC Chief
Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda sought to adopt a more ‘apolitical’ approach in contrast to her predecessor,
Luis Moreno Ocampo, who made certain accommodations of US interests (Robb and Patel 2020). This
difference showed when in 2020 Bensouda opened an investigation into the situation in Afghanistan since
the country’s accession to the Rome Statute in 2003. The US response in the form of sanctions against key
p. 282 ICC personnel ↵ demonstrates the political stakes involved. Bensouda’s successor, Karim Khan, has
subsequently indicated a deprioritizing of the Afghanistan investigations. A further specific character of
international sentence enforcement arises from international prisoners serving their sentences in
domestic prisons, scattered across those countries willing to enforce sentences passed in ICCTs. This
results in unequal treatment and isolation from other prisoners, and it dilutes the international nature of
the punishment as the sentencing court exercises less control over the delivery of punishment (Mulgrew
2013).
Criminologists have also engaged with the domestic legitimacy of ICCTs and different stakeholders’
perceptions of the justice delivered by ICCTs (Kutnjak Ivković, Datzer and Hagan 2021). These studies
demonstrate that ICCTs often lack legitimacy and fail to resonate in their post-conflict domestic
constituencies. For instance, Clark’s research in BiH (2014) shows that there are essentially three
competing versions of history: the Bosniak, the Croat, and the Serb. Each group accepts and advances
certain ‘truths’, usually in which they are victims or heroes while others are aggressors. Equally, each
group denies any conflicting ‘truths’ established by the Yugoslav Tribunal. Other studies have shown how
ICTY’s justice is often perceived through a perspective of ethnic or national group identity, and different
metrics are applied to the out-group, ‘those of the enemy group/aggressors’, as opposed to the in-group,
‘those of ours/victimized’. Using an experimental vignette, David (2014) found that in Croatia justice is
Page 15 of 26
seen through the prism of group identity. The international trials are more likely than trials in national
courts to be perceived as just only if they punish a wrong-doer from the out-group, in this example, Serbs.
Drawing on David, Bijleveld et al. (2022) developed experimental vignettes based on a case of a war crime
inspired by atrocities committed during the Bosnian war to measure perceived fairness of a sentence. They
manipulated factors such as perpetrator rank, apology or trial location. Results coming from 570 responses
from 39 countries demonstrated that only the perpetrator’s apology had an effect on preferred sentence
length. Interestingly the study did not find differences in perceptions of justness of punishment between
respondents from countries without recent conflict (e.g. the Netherlands, Germany) and post-conflict
countries (e.g. Croatia, Colombia).
Domestic punishment
Compared to criminological scholarship on international punishment, research on domestic punishment
of atrocities is limited. National criminal justice systems often try to mimic ICJ (Drumbl 2007). However,
as Holá and Chibashimba’s (2019) case study of Rwanda shows, domestic penal power is dynamic,
conditional, and instrumental. It is part of a broader political and societal change in the wake of the
atrocity, closely driven by and connected to political and societal demands for a society in transition. Such
demands largely influence design, implementation, and enforcement of punishments for atrocities. Such
‘punishment in transition’, punishment for atrocities implemented in transitioning societies, is not only
shaped by the character of the past atrocities, but also by the socio-political context of the transition and
its transformative goals. However, retributive national criminal justice responses can be in conflict with,
or detrimental to, broader societal responses to atrocity crimes in times of transition (Mayans-Hermida
and Holá 2020). For example, the national criminal justice response in Croatia has been described as a
form of ‘victor’s justice’ (Munivrana Vajda 2019), with a bias against Serbs. Such one-sided punishment is
perceived as unjust by many and cannot foster reconciliation (Clark 2014).
In contrast, Guzman and Holá (2019) discuss how punishment for atrocity crimes in domestic settings can,
p. 283 whether from principle, pragmatism, or necessity, lead to design ↵ and implementation of creative and
innovative punishment modalities, even for the most serious crimes. In Colombia, for example, the 2016
peace agreement between the Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP)
introduced unprecedented penal measures in the form of restorative criminal punishments. Punishments
envisaged for even the most serious atrocities committed by most responsible perpetrators in Colombia
emphasize restorative elements such as community service, if certain conditions, for instance revealing
the truth by a perpetrator, are fulfilled. This diverts offenders away from highly retributive sanctions
ordinarily applied to crimes of similar gravity in Colombia. Such restorative punishment is intended to deal
with the past political violence and to contribute to the broader societal transformation through
promoting reintegration, restoration, democratization, and reconciliation (Guzman and Holá 2019).
Transitional punishment is, therefore, embedded in and interacting with other transitional justice
mechanisms adopted during a particular transitional period. McEvoy et al. offer a more in-depth
discussion of criminological engagement with transitional justice in this volume.
Page 16 of 26
Scattered empirical studies on domestic penal practices have also demonstrated that sentencing practises
for atrocity crimes in certain national systems do not differ strongly from sentencing practices applied
within the same jurisdiction to ordinary crimes (Munivrana Vajda 2019; Ristivojević and Radojčić 2019).
Furthermore, execution of sentences for atrocity crimes in national settings are often routinely
implemented, mirroring the standard operating procedures which apply to ordinary crimes, without any
particular effort to tailor them to the particularities of atrocity perpetrators. Buljubašić (2019) explored
rehabilitation practices for atrocity crimes in BiH. He argued that the Bosnian approach to imprisoned
atrocity perpetrators is ill-suited to the specific characteristics of these prisoners and the socio-political
needs and challenges of post-conflict societies. Very few atrocity prisoners can be described as typical
members of the prison population: alongside their relative old age and related health issues, their attitudes
and behaviours are incomparable to other prisoners. Likewise, few have a criminal history prior to their
atrocity offending, and those imprisoned tend to have been convicted for crimes committed while in lower
positions in organizational hierarchies and with limited authority. From the perspective of prison staff, the
atrocity perpetrators are ordinary people transformed into perpetrators by extraordinary circumstances.
Moreover, the conventional rehabilitation schemes operating in Bosnian prisons are not designed to
counter the kind of exclusionary beliefs and destructive ethnic ideologies which contributed to atrocity,
and which continue to play a prominent role in post-conflict society and political discourse. In the context
of such gaps, restorative punishments of the kind implemented in Colombia could be a more appropriate
route for low-ranking atrocity prisoners. Atrocity criminologists need to contribute to the development of
new structures and mechanisms for atrocity penality recognizing needs arising from specific kinds of
crimes, perpetrators, and victims.
Conclusion: Quo Vadis, Atrocity Criminology?
In Jasmila Žbanić’s film, Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020), we follow Aida, a translator for the Dutch UN battalion at
their Potočari base in Srebrenica. Almost constantly on the move, she is desperately trying to understand
p. 284 and navigate the logic of a real time atrocity, ↵ doing what she can to protect people in her community
and to save her family. She repeatedly encounters the cruelty, indifference, and impotence of those
responsible for the genocide taking place, including bystanders. Towards the end of the film, she returns to
her hometown, to her apartment occupied by a family, redecorated but with her own belongings still there:
the television, the clock on the wall, the sweet jar. These closing scenes capture so much of the harms that
remain or follow after atrocity: the hostility on the street; the shock of encountering a murderer on the
stairs; the women walking between the carefully laid out sets of human remains and tattered clothes.
Alongside these signs of a society disrupted and destroyed, the final scene shows how life goes on after
atrocity, as Aida returns to her work as a school teacher. Young children, perhaps not even born in 1995
when the genocide was enacted, learn in Aida’s classroom and perform for their parents. In the audience
we see survivors, mostly women, but we see perpetrators of the genocide too. As well as recognizing the
film for its careful, harrowing portrayal of genocide, and attentive observation of post-genocide society,
we find it speaks strongly to atrocity criminologists’ imperative to understand in the face of horror. In
seeking to understand, many researchers hope to contribute to preventing the occurrence, or recurrence,
of atrocity. As those final scenes force us to ask, how does life go on after genocide, we might ask where
does criminology go after atrocity? The question was already asked of sociologists by Keith Doubt, ‘can
Page 17 of 26
sociology sustain itself as a viable study of society when it ignores perhaps the most pressing and difficult
subject in its time?’ (Doubt 2000: 1). In this chapter, we have shown that even if criminologists were
generally late to recognize atrocity as one of the most pressing of subjects for the discipline, a critical mass
of scholars is now studying genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes from a criminological
perspective, collaborating with each other, and with colleagues in other disciplines, to produce new
knowledge. More than two decades of criminological research, and a thriving community populated by
scholars at all stages of their career, suggest this is no false dawn. While this community of scholars has
grown, it needs to recognize and support those scholars who are essential to the construction of sound
criminological knowledge, but who face significant challenges working in an area that is politically and
emotionally charged. Here, we think of scholars in atrocity-affected societies. The prevalence of ‘outsider’
research on atrocity is notable. This is attributable, in part, to the role of the Global North in controlling
dominant modes of knowledge production and dissemination. But the particular intensity of the political
and emotional charge surrounding atrocities in the societies where they were conducted can make it a
challenge, in the same way that transitional justice initiatives are challenged to navigate the politicization
of victimhood. Atrocity criminologists in institutions away from sites of atrocity need to consider what
they can do to open spaces for, and to support, colleagues in post-atrocity societies.
In our attempt to provide a concise, introductory account of the field, we left out much and touched only
lightly on more, including the gendering of atrocity crime, and of atrocity justice (O’Brien 2017),
developments in cultural criminology (Brown and Rafter 2013) or the ‘importing’ of specific sub-
disciplinary approaches such as the micro-sociological study of unfolding atrocity processes (Klusemann
2012). Having reviewed the field, we remain sceptical about the need to define a uniquely criminological
approach to the problem of atrocity, but recognize through the account above, that criminologists do
contribute meaningfully to a shared scholarly endeavour. From the other side, while more criminologists
engage with the problem of atrocity, it is not yet clear how this work, beyond addressing a gap, feeds back
into, and shapes, wider disciplinary conversations within a criminological mainstream. As atrocity
p. 285 ↵ criminology matures, that question should come to the fore. When we ask, quo vadis, atrocity
criminology? we identify a dilemma. To strike out independently to understand a distinctive realm of
behaviour and corresponding social and political reactions, but risk isolation from its disciplinary home, or
to maintain constant contact with that disciplinary home, learning from developments in criminology, but
potentially bound by the limits of the mainstream criminological imagination? The mid-position, evident
in the careers of some of the authors identified here, perhaps none more so than Susanne Karstedt, is a
more constant shuttling across a range of criminological topics, seeding the learning in one into the
understanding of the next in the form of questions, methods and concepts.

The new Oxford Handbook of Atrocity Crimes (Holá et al. 2022) offers a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary
exploration of the problem of atrocity crime. State Crime by Penny Green and Tony Ward (2004) is an important
criminological milestone in understanding violence promulgated by states, including genocide. For a more focused
examination of responses to atrocity crime we suggest, Breaking the Cycle of Mass Atrocities (see Marina Aksenova
2019). Last, those considering further research in this field should see Catrien Bijleveld’s Conflicts and International
Crimes: An Introduction to Research Methods (2019). Beyond these academic texts, individual accounts of atrocity by
Page 18 of 26
those who suffered them, and literary treatments of the Holocaust, add to our understanding. In this vein, we
recommend Primo Levi’s If this is a Man, and Imre Kertész’ Fatelessness, both of which deal with Auschwitz. Brown and
Rafter (2013) describe cinematic works dealing with genocide as a form of public criminology. A series of works by
Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić deal with atrocity, and post-atrocity society in BiH (Grbavica; For those who can Tell
no Tales; and most recently, Quo Vadis, Aida?). For Sama, Waad el-Kateab’s documentary, testimony, and epistle to her
young daughter, charts five years of uprising and war in Syria, including the government’s bombardment of civilian
areas and hospitals.
Online resources

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Notes
1
For example, atrocity criminology and war criminology overlap but also differ. The former also includes atrocities
committed outside the context of war, while the latter is concerned with a range of crimes occurring in wartime, not
all of which meet the criteria of atrocity.
2
We are grateful to Lilli Blomberg for an English summary of the Norwegian original.
3
By limiting the exercise to a search on genocide in a database of scholarly articles, the results returned do not offer a
comprehensive overview of criminological work on atrocity, which would include, for example, the work of Stanley
Cohen (1995).
4
He covers International Humanitarian Law, International Criminal Law, International Human Rights Law, and Military
Law.
5
We would add the colonial domination which continues well past Nuremberg (see Bashige Murhala and Chivasa
2020).
6
Merton also influences the sociology of atrocity. See Doubt’s work on the latent function of violence in ethnic
cleansing, responding to ambivalence in a putative in-group with greater violence, binding members through
collective guilt (Doubt 2000: 18–19).
7
Although a leading member of the European Society of Criminology working group on Atrocity Crime and
Transitional Justice, Smeulers advances the terminology of Supranational Criminology in her own work on the
criminology of international crimes.
8
At 26 July 2021, the Web of Knowledge database showed 12 works citing the paper, of which 10 could be easily
categorized as criminology from journal or article title, one in Third World Quarterly was co-authored by a
criminologist working with a scholar based in History and International Studies, and one was a book by an
anthropologist.
9
Jewish Germans had been stripped of their citizenship under the racist Reich Citizenship Law in 1935.
10
Since the early 1990s, many ad-hoc international and hybrid international/domestic criminal courts and tribunals
dealing were established to respond to specific situations of mass atrocities. These include the ICTY, the ICTR, the
SCSL, the ECCC, the State Court in BiH (now a purely national court, but having started off with a mix of international
and BiH judges and prosecutors), and the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. In 2002 the permanent ICC with a potentially
global jurisdiction started operating.
Related Links
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Find This Title

Page 26 of 26
13. Contagion and connections: Applying network thinking to violence and organized crime

p. 289 13. Contagion and connections: Applying network thinking to

violence and organized crime
Paolo Campana
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0013
Abstract
This chapter looks into the application of network thinking to violence and organized crime. The COVID-19 global pandemic
showcased how connections matter and far-reaching consequences for the life and well-being of individuals and
communities. Infectious pathogens exploit the web of social relations to increase their spread across individuals and places,
which then results in the emergence of epidemics. Criminology has been slow to adopt social network analysis, but it does
elucidate the mechanisms concerning violence and co-offending that involve gangs and organized crime. The chapter explains
that relations and individual characteristics do not need to be treated in opposition to each other, but can be modelled and
explored jointly.
Keywords: network thinking, violence, organized crime, COVID-19 global pandemic, infectious pathogens, criminology, co-
offending
Introduction
The COVID-19 global pandemic—amidst which this chapter has been written—has made billions of people
across the world familiar with a powerful idea: that connections matter and they can have far-reaching
consequences for the life and well-being of individuals and communities. During the pandemic, we have
all been confronted with the power of exposure to a highly infectious virus and we have experienced policy
decisions aimed at curtailing the connectedness normally wired into our social life. Lockdowns, social
bubbles, travel restrictions, ‘work-from-home’ policies, school closures and quarantines all aimed at
limiting the spread of the virus by (often severely) restricting the number of connections that individuals
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were able to establish in any given day. In other words, such policies are aimed at (temporarily) breaking
up and scaling down the social network of people to curtail contagion. Unbeknown to most, we have all
experienced network thinking at play in our daily life.
Infectious pathogens exploit the web of social relations to increase their spread across individuals and
places, leading to the emergence of epidemics. In a sense, pathogens have well ‘understood’ the power of
relations underpinning human networks. Relations play a role well beyond infectious diseases: they
underpin a variety of social phenomena as diverse as the diffusion of innovation, norms and behaviours,
the spread of gossip and online popularity, financial market crashes, but also job searches, international
trade, social support as well as power and control (Wasserman and Faust 1994: 5–6; Barabasi 2016;
Kucharski 2020).
Criminology has been slow to adopt social network analysis, i.e. the theoretical and methodological
perspective through which we can apply network thinking to the study of empirical phenomena. In 2011,
p. 290 Carrington remarked that ‘the use of social network ↵ analysis in criminology [was] in its infancy’ (p.
248). He further noted that the vast majority of the ‘so-called network studies of crime and delinquency
consider only the composition, or characteristics, of the members … and not the structure of their
relationships’ (p. 248). In other words, criminology missed the very essence—and added value—of a
network approach. This is apparent even though influential criminological theories have long discussed
the idea that social relations matter in understanding—and explaining—crime and deviance. While there
is disagreement among scholars over the exact mechanisms at play, relations are theoretically central in
Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory (1939) and Akers’ Social Learning Theory (1998) in the form
of (deviant) interpersonal influence or in Hirschi’s Social Control Theory (Hirschi 1969) in the form of
social control from one’s personal network (for a further discussion, see Krohn 1986, and Rock, this
volume). However, while such ideas have undoubtedly shaped criminological thought, the actual use of
social network analysis techniques has remained rather limited. According to Carrington (2011), this is
because few criminologists are trained in network methods and fully ‘appreciate the usefulness of social
network analysis in modeling criminological concepts and propositions’ (p. 248). Things are changing
fast, however. Formal network models have been introduced to explore the effects of personal networks,
particularly peer groups and friendships, on deviant behaviour among adolescents (see, among others,
Haynie 2002 and McGloin and O’Neill Shermer 2009). The same is happening in other areas of
criminology, quickly moving the discipline away from the status still observed by Carrington in 2011 where
‘[m]ost analyses of network structures are impressionistic, relying on visual examination of sociograms,
rather than being computational. Even the computational analyses tend to limit themselves to the simplest
network concepts and indices’ (p. 248). Furthermore, network thinking is increasingly being integrated
into public health approaches to reduce violence—although the relational element of such approaches may
not always be formally spelt out.
This chapter first introduces some key tenets of social network analysis. Next, it discusses how such an
approach has been applied to elucidate mechanisms in two areas in criminology: (a) violence; and (b) co-
offending, gangs and organized crime. While these phenomena are inherently relational as it will be
discussed below, hence very well suited to exploration through a network approach, they are by no means
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the only criminological domains in which a focus on relations can be fruitfully applied. Other examples
include terrorism (Krebs 2002; McMillan et al. 2020), corruption (Diviák, Dijkstra, and Snijders 2019), and
the prison environment (Kreager et al. 2021).
Network Thinking
Network thinking is based on the idea that relations matter in explaining social phenomena as the
structure (topology) of such relations and the position of a given actor within such structure have an
impact on the outcome of interest, e.g. how diseases spread or which person is more likely to be a victim of
violence. Actors in a network can be individuals, but also criminal groups, gangs, communities or states—
to name just a few. Bringing relations into the picture is a major shift in thinking, as non-network
approaches tend to consider each actor in isolation. Such approaches collect and analyse the evidence at
the actor level, e.g. the sociodemographic characteristics of individuals A, B, and C or the number of times
p. 291 each has been arrested for, say, drugs, theft, or ↵ violence; however, each characteristic is
operationalized and measured independently for each actor. Network thinking drops this assumption of
independence and brings relations squarely into the picture.
When looking at the world through the lens of social network analysis, the focus shifts from considering
each individual separately to considering patterns of relations among individuals (Wasserman and Faust
1994; Borgatti et al. 2013). Thinking about relations means analysing how individuals are connected in a
network. As noted by Borgatti et al. (2013: 1), networks are ‘a way of thinking about social systems that
focuses our attention on the relationships among the entities that make up the system’. In this
perspective, relations are conceptualized, operationalized, measured, and analysed. This is often in
addition to the individual characteristics that we might be interested in, for example, age, gender,
ethnicity, socio-economic characteristics, psychosocial traits or criminal justice records. Furthermore,
relations and individual characteristics can be integrated, e.g. by examining how individual characteristics
affect relation formation.
In more formal terms, networks are constituted by two sets of entities: (a) actors, also referred to as nodes
or vertices, and (b) relations, also referred to as ties or edges. Actors can be individuals, organizations,
neighbourhoods, cities, communities, police forces or any other entity of interest. What an actor
represents in a given network depends on the research design, and, ultimately, the research questions
underpinning a specific study. Similarly, relations can be of a different nature: co-offending, violent
aggression, but also cooperation, advice-seeking/giving, prestige, exchange of goods and services, kinship
or friendship. Ties can be undirected or directed, allowing for asymmetries in a relation between two actors
or directionality of flows. Ties can also capture the strength of a relation, thus carrying a value or a weight.
Although criminologists are mostly interested in social networks, that is networks related to social
phenomena, network thinking goes well beyond social phenomena and can include physical
infrastructures (e.g. power grids), communication networks (e.g. the World Wide Web), neural networks
(e.g. interactions among neurons in our brain) and cellular networks (e.g. interactions between genes,
proteins and metabolites; Barabasi 2016: 23–25). The smallest meaningful unit of analysis in network
thinking is the dyad ‘Actor-Relation-Actor’ (Wasserman and Faust 1994, see Figure 13.1a). Multiple dyads
form a network (Figure 13.1b).
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Figure 13.1 (a) Network dyad, (b) Simple network (six actors, seven ties)
p. 292 ↵ Following Wasserman and Faust (1994: 20), we can think of a network as any set of actors and the
relations among them. This is a broad and extremely flexible conceptualization of networks that is at the
basis of network science. It has two key advantages. Firstly, it can be applied to any relational phenomenon
of interest as it is neutral concerning the nature of actors and ties (these are defined based on the specific
research questions). Secondly, it does not assume any specific structure; on the contrary, structure is
derived from the evidence collected using a relational approach (Varese 2010; Campana 2016a).
Some criminologists and practitioners, however, have embraced a different conceptualization of networks
to describe a (supposedly) new mode of operation adopted by organized crime groups and terrorists. For
example, Williams (2001: 62) interprets networks as a new form of organization adopted by organized
crime (‘there is a growing recognition that organized crime is increasingly operating through fluid
network structures rather than more formal hierarchies’). Within this perspective, criminal networks are
often characterized as fluid, transient, flexible, dynamic, and adaptive, and they are contrasted with
hierarchies as epitomized by the widely popularized internal layers of the American-Italian Mafia (i.e.
boss, underboss, caporegime, and soldiers). However, there are several drawbacks to this perspective.
Firstly, it reserves the term ‘network’ to indicate only one possible network configuration, thus leaving out
other possible configurations. This severely limits the scope of a network approach as a vast variety of
relational phenomena—and associated research questions—will no longer fall within its scope, from
hierarchies within organized crime groups to networks of violence. As pointed out by Varese (2010: 13),
‘hierarchies too are networks’, and ultimately ‘any organization can be thought of as a network-based
social system’ (see also Campana 2016a; Campana and Varese 2020). As this chapter will illustrate,
networks go well beyond the study of organizations. Secondly, structure is assumed rather than derived.
However, empirical structures can vary greatly, and it is precisely in reconstructing, and understanding,
the topology of a given structure—and the position of an actor within that structure—that a network
approach achieves its full potential. Let’s take the simple network presented in Figure 13.1b as an example.
Despite its small size, some topological features can be already discerned: a cluster of actors densely
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connected on the right-hand side (actors A, B, C, D) and two more peripheral actors (E and, to an even
larger extent, F). This opens up a host of related questions, for instance: How did this specific structure
come about? And what should we expect regarding, for instance, the circulation of information within this
specific network structure?
In sum, interpreting networks as a specific form of organization is empirically limiting and theoretically
unhelpful (see Campana 2016a for a further discussion). On the contrary, focusing on patterns of relations
among individuals, as advocated by network scientists (Wasserman and Faust 1994; Borgatti et al. 2013;
also Barabasi 2016, Kucharski 2020) is a far superior approach. We now turn to discuss how network
thinking has been embraced to study (a) violence and (b) co-offending, gangs and organized crime.
‘Networked Violence’
The idea that the social structure plays a key role in explaining conflicts—and the recourse to violence to
manage such conflicts—was already present in the early works of Donald Black (1976). In his discussion of
The Elementary Forms of Conflict Management, Black (1990) maintains that the distance between parties
(social, cultural, and relational) is an important factor in explaining the recourse to violence in managing
p. 293 conflict, shifting the ↵ focus from the individual and/or the collective to what Black (1995: 851–858)
1
defines as the ‘social geometry of conflict’. This social geometry is a multidimensional construct that
includes social distances among the parties, their relative status (‘social elevation’) and direction of the
grievance (Black 2004). In Black’s view, both individualistic theories and collectivistic theories
‘understructurize the explanation of violence’ (2004: 4), ignoring the ‘conflict structures that generate
violence’ (p. 4). However, it is through understanding ‘violent structures’ that one can ‘predict and explain
precisely when and how violence takes place’, that is ‘who is violent in a particular way, toward whom, and
on what occasion’ (Black 2004: 5). According to Black (2004: 5), such violent structures ‘explain any and
all cases of violence’, including ‘scuffling between children, fighting between husband and wife, feuding
between gangs, rioting between ethnic groups [and] warfare between tribes, nations, or groups of nations’.
Black’s treatment of violent structures remains mainly theoretical and mostly rests on selected illustrative
evidence with some of his constructs rather difficult to operationalize. However, the relational nature of
violent structures—and violence more generally—lends itself to the application of a formal relational
methodology to explore such structures and test underlying mechanisms. Yet, the application of social
network analysis has largely lagged behind.
One way to operationalize violence using a formal network approach is to conceptualize it through the
‘Offender → Victim’ dyadic configuration. Instead of studying offenders or victims independently, the
dyadic approach considers them jointly. This configuration captures the victimization relationship.
Victimization relations are directional by definition. Retaliation can be captured by reciprocated ties (A ←→
B). Furthermore, individuals can be an offender in a specific dyad, and a victim in a different dyad: in other
words, their role is dyad-specific (A → B → C). Network analysis allows for the sequencing of violent events,
shedding light on the mechanisms behind ‘victim/offender overlaps’ (note that B can become a victim
again if C retaliates, as in A → B → C → B). Moving from a single dyad to a full network, we can identify
effects such as chains of violence (A → B → C) or multiple victimizations (A → B and A → C). This
conceptualization can be applied to any kind of violence.
Page 5 of 27
Contrary to Black (2004: 5), who painted structure in opposition to individuals (‘structures kill, not guns
or people’), social network analysis offers a more integrated framework allowing joint consideration of
both individual and relational factors, e.g., individual attributes and topological (structural) characteristics
linked to the network position occupied by a specific individual. Higher-order effects that go beyond a
single individual or a dyad can also be modelled. In this way, it will then become an empirical question to
establish whether it is the individual or the relational factors that play a bigger role in the explanation of
specific types of violence.
Criminologists have started to use the term ‘networked violence’ to refer to a network-based approach to
the study of violence (Papachristos 2009; Bichler et al. 2019; Niezink and Campana 2022). Despite being
relatively new, the study of ‘networked violence’ has progressed rapidly over the years, also thanks to the
increased availability of data (mostly from police records) as well as progress in statistical modelling and
computing power. This has resulted in a progression from mostly descriptive works conducted in the 1990s
p. 294 to an increasing number of explanatory works employing more sophisticated ↵ network techniques
such as exponential random graph models and longitudinal network models.
Gang-level violence
Formal network approaches to the study of violence can be traced back to the pioneering work by Kennedy
et al. (1997) as part of the Boston Gun Project—an initiative sponsored by the US National Institute of
Justice in 1995 to reduce homicide victimization among youths (‘Operation Ceasefire’). This initiative set
2
the seeds for similar initiatives in several US cities and elsewhere, including in the UK, that have been
increasingly linked to the umbrella term of ‘public health approaches’ to violence reduction. A network
approach was leveraged to map gangs and their conflicts by eliciting qualitative information from police
officers and social workers. Kennedy and colleagues (1997: 234) identified 61 gangs with some 1,300
members and systematically reconstructed both gangs’ ‘beefs’ (conflicts) and alliances.
Network analysis was employed to answer two related questions (Kennedy et al. 1997: 236): if police
wanted to disrupt key sources of conflict, which gangs would be the most efficient to target? And how
would police best diffuse a deterrent message across the gangs’ landscape? To answer the first question,
they relied on the network concept of centrality, identifying the gangs with the highest number of
relations (based on two types of centrality measures, degree and eigenvector centrality). Kennedy et al.
(1997: 240) suggested focusing resources (‘pull levers’ as they put it) on the gangs with the highest
centrality scores to reduce their level of violence (in what will then become known as ‘focussed
deterrence’: see, among others, Braga and Weisburd 2015). As these gangs are the most active in the
network—degree centrality in this context captures the extent to which a gang is violent with multiple
other gangs—this intervention will produce the largest overall reduction in the level of violence.
As for the second question—the spread of information—the authors broke down the gangs’ network into
3
cliques, i.e. densely connected subgroups within a network. The work identified 13 non-mutually exclusive
subgroups with the idea being that ‘“talking” to one member [of a clique] would effectively be talking to
all members’ (Kennedy et al. 1997: 240). Gangs spanning several cliques would make an even better target
as the message would propagate more effectively across groups.
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The work of Kennedy et al. (1997) reconstructed both the social network of gang violence and the spatial
localization of gang turfs—as well as of violent events. However, network and spatial analyses were
conducted and presented separately. Tita and Radil (2011) integrated geospatial characteristics and social
network characteristics of gang behaviour through a series of spatial regression models on geographical
units derived from census blocks using data from the Hollenbeck Policing Area in Los Angeles—an area
with a long history of urban street gangs (Tita and Radil 2011: 527–528). Theoretically, Tita and Radil
(2011: 524) sought to unpack social influence leading to gang violence across space by considering both
geographical processes (i.e., contiguity/distance between gang territories, or ‘turfs’) and social processes
p. 295 (i.e., rivalry among ↵ gangs as captured by social network analysis). Connections between spatial units
were the result of contiguity (geography) as well as behaviour (social networks of rivalry; Tita and Radil
2011: 524). The authors found that, when both spatial contiguity and social connections (rivalries) are
considered, gang violence is more strongly associated with social connections than spatial contiguity. In
other words, violence committed by, and against, gang members is ‘largely a function of a social process
that spans the local geography’ (Tita and Radil 2011: 541). Gang rivalries are found to play ‘an important
role in influencing levels of violence’, and the geographic scope of these rivalries appears not to be limited
to geographically neighbouring areas (Tita and Radil 2011: 540).
Papachristos et al. (2013) further explored the influence of geography and social networks on gang violence
in urban America using police data on homicides in Chicago and fatal and non-fatal shootings in Boston.
They found that the probability of a violent tie between two gangs was partially a consequence of turf
adjacency, but even more so of prior conflict, with a history of conflicts exerting ‘an effect above and
beyond spatial proximity’ (Papachristos et al. 2013: 439). Results held when controlling for groups’ ethnic
composition and neighbourhood structural characteristics, thus offering support to the idea that
mechanisms underlying violence are similar across ethnicities (the so-called ‘racial invariance
hypothesis’: Papachristos et al. 2013: 439). As in the case of Los Angeles, data from Chicago and Boston
suggest that gang-level processes exert a stronger impact than geographical proximity in the explanation
4
of gang-level violence.
In their study of Boston gangs, Kennedy et al. (1997: 234) noted that, at any given time, ‘quiescent rivalries
outnumber “live” and active rivalries’ (p. 234), suggesting that gangs might possess an ‘institutional
memory’ when it comes to conflict. This was empirically explored by Papachristos (2009) who modelled
gang-related homicides in Chicago at three different points in time over eight years (1994, 1998, and
2002). Using police-recorded events, he found that ‘gang murders create an enduring social structure that
is produced through dominance disputes and the social contagion of prior interactions’ (Papachristos
2009: 115), thus offering support for the idea of institutional memories. While gang members change,
‘their patterns of behavior create a network structure that persists’: Papachristos 2009: 119).
From gangs to individuals

With the increase in computing power available to researchers as well as the availability of larger datasets,
networked violence has increasingly been modelled at the individual level. Researchers have started to
apply network thinking to understand the risk of violent victimization based on network characteristics
possessed by an individual—over and above individual and/or spatial factors. This line of research builds
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on the idea that ecological proximity to crime and violence impact personal victimization (Sampson and
Lauritsen 1990); however, connections among individuals are modelled directly and not inferred through
proxies such as the level of crime measured in a person’s neighbourhood. The flip side is that evidence on
social connections is very difficult to gather, and researchers have often had to rely on co-offending or
other police data to build networks of connections.
Papachristos et al. (2012) studied the risk of gunshot injury of 763 individuals within the Cape Verdean
p. 296 community in Boston based on police records. They considered both ↵ individual-level predictors (age,
gender, ethnicity, and previous arrests) and network variables measured for each individual. The
percentage of individuals in one’s immediate network (‘alters’ in network terms) who had been shot
emerged as the strongest predictor of victimization, followed by an individual previous arrest and the
presence of gang members in one’s immediate network. Distance from a gunshot victim is also found to be
statistically related to victimization, meaning ‘the closer one is to a gunshot victim, the greater the
probability of one’s victimization, net of individual and other network characteristics’ (Papachristos et al.
2012: 999). Depending on the model, every step away from a shooting victim decreases the odds of getting
shot by between 8.8 per cent (full network) and 25 per cent (largest component; 85 per cent of all of the
5
gunshot injuries in the sample occur within this component). Further evidence for the effect of social
distance on victimization was found among the entire population of co-offenders in Chicago between 2006
and 2016. Papachristos et al. (2015a) estimated that a 1 per cent increase in exposure to gunshot victims in
one’s (co-offending) network increases the odds of victimization by 1.1 per cent, everything else being
constant. If 10 per cent of one’s associates were victims, the odds then increased by 12.1 per cent; with 50
per cent of victims in one’s immediate network, the odds were up by 76.9 per cent (Tracy et al. 2016: 80).
The risk of gunshot victimization is not evenly distributed among high-risk populations, but it is a
function of the structure of one’s personal network as well as of the overall network (Papachristos et al.
2012: 1001). Closeness to a gang member increases the odds of being a victim of a fatal or non-fatal
gunshot injury by 94 per cent compared to other offenders (Papachristos et al. 2015b: 642).
The idea that violence can be spread based on person-to-person transmission through a social network,
thus being ‘contagious’, is the basis of work by Green et al. (2017). This study is the first to use a modelling
approach developed within the epidemiological literature to study the ‘contagion’ of violence (on the
concept of ‘contagion’ see also below). The social network was approximated using a co-offending
network derived from eight years of police co-arrest data from Chicago (2006–2014). Green et al. (2017)
sought to explain gunshot victimization (both fatal and non-fatal shootings) based on previous co-arrest
as well as individual factors such as age, gender and neighbourhood of residence. They found that social
contagion accounted for 63.1 per cent of the 11,123 events of gunshot violence and that people were
victimized on average 125 days after their ‘infector’, i.e. ‘the person most responsible for exposing the
subject to gunshot violence’ (Green et al. 2017: 326; median 83 days). They also identified 4,107 separate
chains of violence with the vast majority involving a single subject and 16.6 per cent involving multiple
subjects (the largest involving 469 subjects). On average, chains of violence spanned 2.7 individuals (Green
et al. 2017: 330). Social contagion and demographics played a role: models including both sets of factors
performed best in predicting the top 1 per cent of individuals considered at risk to be shot each day. The
study concluded that ‘gunshot violence follows an epidemic-like process of social contagion that is
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transmitted through networks of people by social interactions’; therefore ‘violence prevention efforts that
account for social contagion, in addition to demographics, have the potential to prevent more shootings
than efforts that focus on only demographics’ (Green et al. 2017: 326).
Furthermore, when analysed through the lenses of networks, violence appears to be socially concentrated.
In Chicago, 70 per cent of shootings studied by Papachristos p. 297 ↵ et al. (2015a) involved a person in
the co-offending network, and 89 per cent of these occurred in the largest component of the co-offending
network; 70 per cent of all nonfatal gun injuries were concentrated in the co-offending network. In the
study by Green et al. (2017) also looking at Chicago, some 30 per cent of individuals were in the largest
connected component, which also accounted for 74.5 per cent of gunshot violence episodes.
Most of the works on networked violence have been carried out in the United States, specifically in settings
with a high prevalence of violence. Niezink and Campana (2022) is the first work to explore networked
violence in the UK. They used data from Thames Valley Police (2000–2016), the largest non-metropolitan
UK police force, to study the mechanisms underpinning the emergence of violence in the organized crime
milieu, i.e. all organized crime members known to the police and their co-offenders (Figure 13.2). Contrary
to the US-based studies, Niezink and Campana (2022) shifted the focus from victims to offenders by
p. 298 modelling acts of violence instigated by organized crime ↵ members against any other members of the
milieu. Based on a network actor-oriented modelling approach, they sought to understand why an
organized crime member decides to victimize a specific individual present in the milieu instead of all the
other individuals. They considered both individual characteristics (personal criminal history, gender,
organized crime membership, and ethnicity) and relational (dyadic) factors linking offenders and victims.
They found that relational effects are consistently stronger than the effects of individual characteristics in
explaining victimization choices. Violence was strongly associated with prior co-offending turning sour, in
particular in relation to hard drugs, and more likely to be directed against offenders from the same ethnic
background. Crucially, they also found that a violent act was often preceded by a previous act of violence
both in the form of repeated and reciprocated violence. They also found a mechanism of retaliation cum
escalation, with victims of harassment and threats responding by escalating to violence. These relational
mechanisms have the potential to sustain violence, thus making it endemic within a specific subset of the
offender (and general) population.
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Figure 13.2 Networked Violence in the Organized Crime Milieu, Thames Valley, UK
Note: Green nodes represent organized crime members, black nodes non-members. Ties are directed from offender to victim.
Source: Niezink and Campana (2022).
From victimization to transmission of violent behaviour

A separate stream of research has looked at the transmission of violent behaviour among connected
individuals. In network terms, the relation of interest is no longer a victimization dyad, but a dyadic
configuration linking an offender who has used violence at time t with an offender who has resorted to
violence at time t+1. What a tie precisely indicates depends on the specific study and evidence base: it can
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reflect causal mechanisms such as peer influence or selection, or just indicate some degree of
acquaintanceship, friendship, kinship or criminal cooperation on matters other than violence. Sometimes
the transmission of violent behaviour is captured by the catch-all concept of ‘contagion’ (see also below
for a further discussion).
Transmission of deviant behaviour has been long studied in the context of adolescents, for instance
through well-established surveys administered in schools (one example is the National Longitudinal Study
of Adolescent Health in the United States, or Add Health). Based on Add Health data, Haynie et al. (2006)
show that exposure to violence in one’s peer network increases an adolescent’s subsequence participation
in serious violence and that exposure is positively associated with neighbourhood disadvantage. Crucially,
‘positive’ peer association mediates negative neighbourhood characteristics, suggesting that ‘efforts to
reduce adolescent violence should focus on altering peer culture in places where socioeconomic resources
are in short supply’ (Haynie et al. 2006: 164). Bond and Bushman (2017) found that adolescents surveyed in
Add Health were 48 per cent more likely to have been involved in a serious fight, 183 per cent more likely to
have hurt someone badly, and 140 per cent more likely to have pulled a weapon on someone if a friend had
previously engaged in the same behaviour. They consider these findings as evidence of violence contagion
based on peer influence; such influence was estimated to extend up to four degrees of separation for
serious fights, three for pulling a weapon on someone and two for hurting someone badly. In the UK,
Brennan (2019) explored the determinants of weapon carrying among people aged 25 years or younger
using data from a self-reported offending survey conducted in England and Wales between 2004 and 2006
(‘Offending, Crime and Justice Survey (OCJS)’). He found a strong effect of having ‘more than a few’ peers
in trouble with the police on predicting weapon carrying. Only previous violence and previous drug use had
a stronger effect. Low trust in the police, neighbourhood disorder, and having been a victim of violence all
scored lower—controlling for gender, age, and ethnicity of the individual.
p. 299 ↵ Dijkstra et al. (2010) introduced formal network modelling of adolescents’ longitudinal behaviour to
explore weapon carrying among a sample of US male adolescents from disadvantaged backgrounds. They
found strong support for peer influence effects but not for selection effects, i.e. mutual selection of peers
based on weapon carrying. Carrying a weapon made a person more ‘popular’ in terms of being nominated
as a best friend. Aggression was also found to contribute to weapon carrying but not victimization. Dijkstra
et al. (2010: 208) noted that the combined effect of peer influence, aggression and increased popularity of
weapon carriers meant that ‘weapon carrying can spread easily among young adolescents through
modeling and imitation’. Conway and McCord (2002) looked at a sample of US youth offenders (under 18)
followed between 1976 and 1994 and found evidence of transmission of violence among offenders: non-
violent offenders who co-offended with a violent accomplice were at higher risk for committing a violent
crime in subsequent periods compared to other co-offenders. They suggested this may be explained by
social learning.
Finally, Campana and Giovannetti (2020) explored the transmission of violence among UK offenders based
on police co-offending records from Merseyside (Liverpool). They estimated the probability of committing
violence based on previous use of violence, had previously associated with a knife incident or a weapon
incident as well as whether the same person had associated with individuals who (a) had committed
violence; (b) were involved in a knife incident or (c) a weapon incident during the two previous years (the
association was captured by co-participation in any police-recorded event of any nature). They found that,
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while individual past violence remained the strongest predictor of future violence, network predictors did
have a significant effect in explaining future violence, particularly the prior association with a knife-
flagged individual and association with a violent individual.
A note on the concept of ‘contagion’

In the body of works applying network thinking to the study of violence, there are often references to the
idea of ‘contagion’. The first image we have in mind when hearing about contagion is the transmission of a
disease, often through direct contact. However, contagion has also been evoked outside medicine and
public health in reference to social phenomena, for example, the spread of ideas, innovations or problems.
Some authors have put forward the idea of ‘social contagion’ and linked it to mechanisms such as
imitation, competition or communication (e.g., Burt 1987). Other mechanisms relate to social influence,
also referred to as peer influence (Christakis and Fowler 2008; Haynie 2001). While public health scholars
would talk of ‘modes of transmissions’, social scientists prefer speak of mechanisms. Mechanisms can
vary greatly in relation to the same phenomena. Take weapons, for example. We can conceptualize the
diffusion of weapons as a contagion-like process caused by easier access to weapons or in terms of
contagion of fear leading to people adopting increasingly more ‘violent identities’, and, as a consequence,
getting a weapon if they perceive that there is a heightened need for them to rely on ‘self-help’ (Fagan et
al. 2007, see also Brantingham et al. 2021).
In some studies, contagion is equated to exposure, often defined as the extent to which an individual is
connected to some at-risk individuals (e.g. through co-offending or social ties; this is the view taken, for
example, by Papachristos et al. 2012; Papachristos et al. 2015a; Campana and Giovannetti 2020). Other
studies focus on spatial contagion, e.g. the transmission of violence across geographical areas, without
modelling the social mechanisms or the networks underlying transmission (e.g. Zeoli et al. 2014;
p. 300 Brantingham et al. 2021). It is best to reserve social contagion for works where diffusion ↵ processes are
modelled at an individual- or group-level and spatial contagion to works where such processes are
modelled at a geographical level.
Scholars have also interpreted violence as a disease: some metaphorically, others literally (for a review, see
Williams and Donnelly 2014). Loftin (1986) draws a difference between offences that are encouraged by
social contact (‘serious assaultive violence’) and those that are impulsive, and equates the former to
infectious diseases transmitted by social contact and the latter to those independent of social contact. He
considers ‘serious assaultive violence’ analogous to an infectious disease, as it is (a) spatially clustered; (b)
reciprocal; and (c) can escalate. Within the public health approach to violence reduction, scholars have
debated whether violence should be equated to a communicable disease (i.e. transmittable via an infectious
pathogen) or a non-communicable one (i.e., chronic). Opinions are divided (Williams and Donnelly 2014).
If it is a communicable disease, what is the pathogen? Papachristos et al. (2015: 644) explored the question
of whether violence should be treated as a blood-borne pathogen ‘transmitted through precise types of
behaviour and interpersonal contact’ or as an airborne pathogen that ‘can spread through broad and less
personal contacts’. The authors concluded that violence would be similar to a blood-borne pathogen as it
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is ‘transmitted largely through specific interactions and connections within social networks’. Non-
communicable diseases, on the other hand, are not directly transmissible from one person to another and
are the result of risk and protective psychosocial, environmental, and behavioural factors.
Overall, while each approach offers important elements, both remain unsatisfactory as violence
‘transcends the classic clear distinctions between communicable and non-communicable
diseases’ (Williams and Donnelly 2014: 128). While the study of diseases can offer a stimulating analogy,
trying to box violence into a medical/public health classification might ultimately prove unhelpful. In
different ways, both the communicable and the non-communicable approaches risk producing
underspecified models. Instead, there is merit in adopting a wider perspective on violence that transcends
the communicable/non-communicable classification and considers relational, individual and structural
factors.
Co-offending, Gangs, and Organized Crime
As noted by Warr (1996: 11), ‘one of the most firmly established features of delinquent behaviour is its
group nature’. In their 1931 Report on the Causes of Crime, Shaw and McKay reported that 81.8 per cent of
juvenile offenders who appeared in the juvenile court of the Cook County (Chicago) in 1928 were classified
as ‘group offenders’, i.e. they had committed the offence concerned with at least another participant (Shaw
and McKay 1931: 194). In their longitudinal study of 411 male youth offenders in London, Reiss and
Farrington (1991: 374) found that 51 per cent had co-offended with another person up to the age of 32.
Sarnecki (2001) observed similar levels for Sweden: 56 per cent of youth offenders in Stockholm had been
involved in co-offending between 1991 and 1995. Yet, co-offending is not restricted to youth. Data from
Canada, the US and one large metropolitan police force in the North of England shows a rate of co-
offending among the entire offender population of 21.9 per cent for England, 27.2 per cent for the US and
29.1 per cent for Canada (Carrington and van Mastrigt 2013: 2018). These percentages are higher for
p. 301 offenders under the age of 18, going up to 37 per cent for ↵ England, 43.4 per cent for the US, and 51.1
per cent for Canada. An analysis conducted for this chapter based on data obtained from Cambridgeshire
Police in the UK indicated that 28 per cent of the suspected offenders have committed a crime with at least
6
another person between May 2018 and October 2021. This is broadly in line with the findings from
Carrington and van Mastrigt (2013) based on data collected between March 2002 and February 2005 in the
North of England: the level of co-offending shows some consistency over time and across the country.
Reiss and Farrington (1991: 360) term co-offenders ‘persons who act together in a crime’ and the
commission of that crime as co-offending (also Reiss 1988). Co-offending is relational by definition and,
following network thinking, it can be conceptualized as a dyadic relationship between two offenders. It is
the simplest kind of cooperative behaviour among offenders—one that does not assume longevity or any
7
shared identity. Reiss (1988: 117) crucially noted that ‘understanding co-offending is central to
understanding the etiology of crime and the effects of intervention strategies’. Yet, the study of co-
offending has somehow lagged behind, and even more its treatment, through a formal relational approach.
Classic studies on co-offending have brought to light valuable insights on co-offenders (see, among
others, Reiss 1988, Reiss and Farrington 1991, Van Mastrigt and Farrington 2009). Yet, they focused on
individual co-offenders, neglecting the relationships among them. Applying network thinking to co-
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offending—as well as any type of group offending—brings the relationships back into the picture, offering
a fuller picture of an inherently relational phenomenon (including the strength or frequency of co-
offending relations captured through weighted networks).
Sarnecki (2001) is the first study to explicitly apply social network analysis to the study of co-offending,
focusing on the characteristics of both the relations linking offenders and the offenders themselves. Based
on four years of police records on suspected offenders aged 20 or younger active in Stockholm, Sweden, he
found that individuals that are more central in the network, measured through the number of co-
offenders, tend to be more criminally active, i.e. commit a higher number of offences (Sarnecki 2001: 50).
The same individuals tend to have a longer criminal career and receive harsher sentences. Generally
speaking, co-offending among the Stockholm youth was rather fluid, with co-offending dyads hardly
lasting more than six months. This is similar to what Warr (1996) observed among youth in the US based
on self-reported data.
A consistent result across the literature is that co-offenders tend to be similar in terms of age and gender
(Reiss and Farrington 1991; Sarnecki 2001; Carrington 2015). In network terms, the tendency to choose
similar alters is called homophily. According to Carrington (2015), age homophily tends to decrease with
the age of offenders. Homophily has been identified also in relation to the place of residence (Sarnecki
2001: 65). Charette and Papachristos (2017) explored how co-offending patterns may evolve based on eight
years of police records from Chicago, US. They jointly assessed the impact of individual factors (age,
gender and ethnicity), dyadic factors (homophily on age, gender and ethnicity, neighbourhood proximity
and co-membership in a gang) and supra-dyadic factors (centrality, i.e. the number of previous co-
offenders, and triadic closure, i.e. the tendency of sharing a link with a friend of a friend). They found that
57.6 per cent of offenders re-offended at the end of the eight-year observation period, 45.9 per cent re-
p. 302 offended with any co-offender and just a small minority (5.3 per cent) re-offended ↵ with the same
person; 80 per cent of dyadic recidivism occurred within two years of the first event (Charette and
Papachristos 2017: 5). Furthermore, they found evidence that relational factors play a central role in
explaining sustained co-offending partnerships: individuals who are similar concerning age, gender,
geographic proximity and gang co-membership are more likely to continue their co-offending
partnership. Being embedded in supra-dyadic structures as captured by centrality and transitivity also
leads to an increased likelihood of continued co-offending. On the contrary, the victimization of one’s
associates dissuades from continued co-offending (Charette and Papachristos 2017: 10–12).
While most co-offending appears to be fluid with dyads relatively short-lived, there remains a smaller set
of co-offending taking place within more structured and durable organizations with different levels of
sophistication. Without entering a definitional debate, organized crime groups and gangs are an example
of such organizations (for a further discussion about the nature of organized crime and gangs, see
8
Campana and Varese 2018; and the chapter on ‘gang and organized crime’ in this handbook).
From co-offending to organized crime and gangs

Two lines of enquiry specific to organized crime and gangs have emerged in the literature. The first
explores the groups’ internal structure and organization; the second looks at the network effects
underpinning recruitment into criminal groups and criminal careers.
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Groups’ internal structure and organization

The interest in the study of the structure of illegal groups goes back to Georg Simmel’s work on The
Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies which appeared in 1906 in the American Journal of Sociology.
However, it wasn’t until the 1991 paper by Sparrow in Social Networks that a formal network approach was
suggested to study ‘vulnerabilities’ in criminal organizations. Since then, scholars have started to explore
how groups are organized, how their structure comes about and how it is sustained over time.
The empirical study of the network structure underpinning criminal organizations was pioneered by
Natarajan (2000), who reconstructed the structure of a New York-based large drug trafficking
organization from police wiretaps. She pointed to evidence of a recognizable hierarchy and a clear division
of labour within the organization. Varese (2013) relied on a similar source of data to study the structure of a
Russian Mafia group, highlighting the presence of a clear hierarchy but also clustering based on the
activity carried out. An empirical network approach has allowed scholars to debunk conventional wisdom
about criminal organizations. For example, the idea that human trafficking from Nigeria into Europe is
carried out by sophisticated criminal organizations did not stand up to empirical scrutiny. When analysed
through a network approach, a different reality emerges, characterized by a high level of externalization of
activities and offenders’ independence (Campana 2016b).
Besides reconstructing the structure of criminal organizations, studies have also explored the mechanisms
p. 303 underpinning such structure. For instance, ↵ Campana and Varese (2013) have studied the internal
organization of a Russian Mafia group and a Neapolitan Camorra group and highlighted the role of kinship
and, crucially, sharing a violent act to foster cooperation in the absence of trust and third-party
enforcement. Grund and Densley (2015) have pointed to the effect of ethnic homophily on the structure of
a London street gang. Campana and Varese (2022) explored the determinants of co-membership among
the population of organized crime offenders in a police area in the UK (Thames Valley). Co-membership
appears to be driven by homophily with respect to ethnicity and nationality, age, gender and the use of
violence. Similar to the youth offenders studied by Sarnecki (2001) in Stockholm, the data on (mostly
adult) organized crime offenders from the UK show that members of the same group tend to be highly
localized in their activities (Campana and Varese 2022). Similar to the Russian Mafia group studied by
Varese (2013), also UK organized crime groups show a tendency towards task specialization within groups.
Cooperation takes place not just within groups, but also across them. Coutinho et al. (2020) explored
collaboration across members of different organized crime groups and outlaw motorcycle gangs in
Alberta, Canada, using a multilevel network modelling. The study shows that cross-group collaboration
decreases when organized crime groups operate in illicit markets located in the same geographical space
(market overlap). This is not the case for outlaw motorcycle gangs.
Finally, scholars have begun to explore the factors leading to a group’s growth and longevity. Ouellet et al.
(2019) is the first study to assess the impact of specific topological features of a gang’s internal structure
and its wider network of contacts on their longevity. Drawing on nine years of co-offending police records
on Haitian street gangs operating in Montreal, they find that a gang’s survival is a function of its internal
cohesion (the closer the structure, the more likely is a gang to survive) as well as its ability to build
alliances with other gangs. Interestingly, they also highlighted that the network properties associated with
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survival change depending on the stage of a gang’s evolution: groups in an early stage tend to adopt ‘more
versatile structures, enhancing their access to criminal opportunities’ while more ‘established groups
adopted closed structures to maintain their existing positions’ (Ouellet et al. 2019: 28).
Recruitment into criminal groups and criminal careers

Individuals are embedded in a host of social and, for some, criminal ties. What is the effect of the topology
of these networks, particularly personal networks, on the recruitment into criminal groups and
subsequent criminal careers? Morselli et al. (2006) carried out an in-person survey with prison inmates
from Quebec and showed that relationships matter in shaping criminal careers, particularly the presence
in one’s personal network of a ‘criminal’ mentor. The importance of social ties in providing access to
profitable opportunities in the context of organized crime was highlighted by Kleemans and De Poot
(2008) based on evidence from the Netherlands. A network of social ties that a person can leverage is
termed ‘social opportunity structure’ and is qualitatively shown to play a role in a person’s involvement in
organized crime. Once again, networks matter. However, formal modelling of such networks has lagged
behind also due to difficulties in collecting personal networks of members of gangs and organized crime
groups. Morselli (2005) ingeniously relied on biographies to study the careers of an Italian-American
mafioso and a high-level cannabis smuggler. He shows that ‘it is not simply the number of contacts that
counts, but how the structure assembling these contacts is shaped. In general, non-redundant networking
… increases criminal achievement’ (p. 121). It is often the presence (or not) of a very small number of key
p. 304 individuals that ↵ can generate far-reaching changes in an offender’s career. Furthermore, individuals
may manage their network of contacts differently depending on the stage of their criminal career. The
Italian-American mafioso studied by Morselli (2005) added contacts in the first stages of his career,
privileging non-redundant ones, but then started to decrease the size of his personal network as he grew
more powerful.
Illegal markets as networks

9
Organized crime and gangs, as well as co-offenders and solo offenders, operate in illegal markets. As
spaces of cooperation and exchange—as well as conflict—markets are relational by definition and thus can
be analysed through a network approach. How are markets structured? What factors increase the
prominence of some actors and groups within a given market?
Malm and Bichler (2011) extracted evidence from published intelligence reports to reconstruct the network
underpinning drug supply across Canada. They found a significant difference in centrality and cohesion
based on task/stage in the market, with small groups of networked entrepreneurs more likely to be
associated with activities at the far ends of the market, i.e. production and sales, while individuals in the
middle market showing a higher level of connections (Malm and Bichler 2011: 292). Baika and Campana
(2020) studied the structure of drug markets in a non-metropolitan police area in the UK (Newport,
Wales). They relied on police records to build the network of drug co-offenders in the local area and
subsequently explore the mechanisms underpinning such structure. The study showed that heroin and
cocaine networks display higher levels of cooperation and a tendency for actors to form groups compared
Page 16 of 27
to cannabis (higher average degree and lower network fragmentation). This is a consequence of a greater
need for protection and higher complexity in supply chains when dealing in heroin and cocaine. Drug
networks also show a tendency towards both commodity and spatial specialization. Within such networks,
organized crime members record a significantly higher degree centrality than non-members, suggesting
an ability to exert influence on the market.
It is not just local markets that can be approached through network lenses. Campana (2018) explored the
structure of transnational migrant smuggling focusing on the relations among smugglers operating along
the route from the Horn of Africa to Northern Europe via Libya and Italy.
Figure 13.3 presents the structure of contacts among smugglers as extracted from court records. The
polycentric topology of the network reveals a clear tendency towards clustering around a handful of high-
centrality actors (captured by the size of the nodes). Such actors operate at various stages along the
smuggling route. A study of the mechanisms underpinning this structure further revealed that smugglers
are largely independent, autonomous and local in their operations, suggesting that even in markets
concerned with the supply of a truly transnational commodity, the local dimension still plays a crucial role.
Bright et al. (2019) explored structural changes in an Australian drug trafficking network operating
between 1991 and 1996 and comprising a total of 86 actors. They found a tendency towards clusterization
with offenders minimizing the number of connections established outside their local cluster and relying on
p. 305 brokers to ↵ bridge clusters. Bright et al. (2019: 253) interpret this as a strategy to enhance network
efficiency while maintaining secrecy/security.
Page 17 of 27
Figure 13.3 The Structure of Human Smuggling
Notes: Nodes represent smugglers only; the size indicates degree centrality. Ties are undirected.
Source: Campana (2018).
Finally, studies of illegal markets can model interactions beyond individuals or groups, and focus on cities
or countries. For example, heroin flows into Europe are explored in Giommoni et al. (2017): they found that
network flows were influenced by the level of corruption of a country as well as social and geographical
proximity among countries.
Page 18 of 27
Conclusions
Relations have long been integral to different streams of criminological thought, including the work of
Shaw and McKay (1931), Sutherland (1939) and Cohen (1955). However, criminologists have not adopted a
formal approach to studying relations for a long time, contrary to other disciplines in the social sciences
and beyond. This chapter has advocated the application of network thinking to criminology based on the
idea that relations matter in explaining a variety of phenomena of interest to criminologists. Crucially—
p. 306 and contrary to Black (2004)—relations and individual characteristics do not need to be ↵ treated in
opposition to each other, but can be modelled and explored jointly. Adopting a network approach means
recognizing that individuals—as well as a variety of other entities—are embedded in webs of connections
possessing different structural characteristics. However, this does not imply any need to efface individual
10
characteristics.
Graphical representations are a key element of a network approach. However, there is more to network
analysis than offering descriptive representations of structures. As the examples discussed in this chapter
have shown, network analysis can be leveraged to explain mechanisms underpinning (relational) criminal
phenomena.
This chapter has advocated conceptualizing networks as any set of nodes and relations—in line with
network science—and not as a specific form of organization, as suggested in some works on organized
crime. Without any claim to exhaustiveness, this chapter has discussed the application of an instrumental
network analysis approach to two broad criminological domains: the study of (a) violence and (b) co-
offending, gangs and organized crime. Both domains are well-suited to a network treatment as they are
inherently relational.
Works on gang violence have shown the benefit of a network approach to identify gangs that are more
central in webs of violence, laying the basis for public health approaches to violence reduction—following
the model first introduced in Boston by Kennedy and colleagues (1997). Social connections have been
shown by different authors to be stronger than spatial contiguity in the explanation of gang violence.
These social processes appear to remain stored in a kind of institutional memory, creating an ‘enduring
social structure’ of gang violence (Papachristos 2009).
Based on a network approach, scholars have been able to unpack ecological proximity by directly
modelling connections between dyads of individuals and then studying how such connections impact both
future victimization and future violent offending. Different works have shown that closeness to a victim of
violence is related to future victimization, suggesting that victimization is not evenly distributed—not
even among high-risk communities—but is a function of the structure of the network that a person is
embedded in. Violence is also highly clustered and can spread through chains—although even in a high
violence setting as Chicago, these chains do not exceed 2.7 individuals on average (Green et al. 2017).
Relational mechanisms such as retaliation, escalation, retaliation cum escalation and prior co-offending
are stronger than individual characteristics in explaining victimization choices within the organized crime
milieu (Niezink and Campana 2022).
Page 19 of 27
Violence can be ‘transmitted’ across individuals through different mechanisms often grouped under the
umbrella term of ‘contagion’. Studies have explored different mechanisms among different populations,
conceptualized as peer influence, social learning or exposure through co-offending, and they have
consistently shown a positive effect of connections on the transmission of violent behaviour. However,
simply equating the spread of violence to a disease might offer a quite evocative metaphor, yet it remains
limiting. Ultimately, it is not necessary to introduce such as analogy to adopt a network perspective.
Network thinking can be applied to further our understanding of group criminality and co-offending more
generally. Centrality in co-offending networks has been shown to be associated with a higher level of
criminal activity, longer criminal careers and harsher sentences. Homophily on age, gender, geographical
p. 307 proximity and gang co-membership ↵ sustain co-offending over time. Furthermore, a network
approach is well suited to study organizational arrangements both within organized crime groups and
illicit markets more broadly. Scholars have reconstructed internal hierarchies and clusters within markets
and organizations, highlighting patterns of division of labour and specialization. In some cases, the
empirical evidence went against conventional wisdom, debunking pre-conceived ideas about
organizational structures and drivers of cooperation among offenders. Crucially, studies have started to
unpack the mechanisms leading to cooperation among offenders, finding evidence of homophily on
violence, ethnicity and age on fostering such cooperation. Additionally, the structure of one’s personal
network has been shown to influence career paths within organizations.
Applying network analysis to study criminal phenomena is not without its limits. One of the major issues
relates to data collection: the evidence on criminal activities is difficult to collect, to begin with; in
addition, network analysis requires a much more complex and richer data collection on nodes and
relations. Collecting evidence on relations can be particularly challenging. Scholars have largely relied on
police records and court documents to build networks of, e.g., violence, co-offending and organizational
structures. While these sources remain extremely valuable and fruitful, they also come with limitations in
their coverage and potential biases (e.g. they are influenced by police priorities: see Faust and Tita 2019,
Campana and Varese 2020, and Bright et al. 2021 for a discussion). Further, individuals are not only
connected by criminal ties but they are embedded in more complex social structures. Enriching our models
with social ties can be crucial in furthering our understanding of a broad set of processes, including
contagion, influence and selection. Capturing these social ties can be difficult and criminal justice data are
only partially helpful. Finally, as the discussion about contagion has shown, network thinking achieves its
full potential when combined with theoretically-driven mechanisms. Despite its limitations, however,
network thinking remains a powerful tool to further our understanding of criminal phenomena—adding
to and complementing criminologists’ conceptual and methodological toolkits.

For an introduction to social network analysis data structures and methods, including centrality measures,
community detection algorithms and techniques for statistical modelling (e.g, QAP regressions, ERGMs models, etc.)
see Wasserman and Faust (1994) and Borgatti et al. (2013). Campana (2016a), Faust and Tita (2019), Campana and
Varese (2020), and Bright et al. (2021) offer a criminology-focused discussion of data sources and research designs that
Page 20 of 27
researchers interested in carrying out empirical work in this domain may find helpful, as well as a further discussion of
potential limitations and ‘banana-skins’. Further examples of empirical works employing network analysis to study
criminal networks are in Carrington (2011) and Morselli (2013).
Online resources

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Notes
1
According to Black (1976: 40–41), relational distance refers to ‘the degree to which [people] participate in one
another’s lives’ and can be measured by ‘the scope, frequency, and length of interaction between people, the age of
their relationship, and the nature and number of links between them in a social network’ (Black 1976: 40–41).
2
The Cincinnati project—an offspring of the original Operation Ceasefire—inspired the setting up in Glasgow of the
Violence Reduction Unit by the local police force, the then Strathclyde Police. Since then, the model has been
replicated across the UK.
3
They set the maximum diameter of a clique to two, meaning no gang was more than two steps away from any other
gang in their clique. The minimum number of gangs in a clique was set to be five.
4
Papachristos et al. (2013: 438) also found that in both cities gang violence was highly connected at the gang-level,
meaning that ‘the majority of violent acts created a single large network that linked the majority of gangs either
directly or indirectly’. Violence also tended to cluster around ethnic lines.
5
Component is a network term indicating a fully connected portion of a network (subgraph). The largest component
is the largest of such subgraphs (Wasserman and Faust 1994: Chapter 3).
6
The analysis has been conducted excluding cases of domestic abuse.
7
Co-offending can last the space of a single offence and individuals can be very loosely associated with one another
(Reiss and Farrington 1991: 360; also Reiss 1988: 117).
8
Labels can be used differently depending on the jurisdiction/context: what in the US is referred to as a ‘gang’, in the
UK may be labelled ‘organized crime’. Central American maras are often termed ‘gangs’, but they could equally be
labelled ‘mafias’ as they run protection rackets. In this chapter, I use the term ‘organized crime group’ and ‘gang’
interchangeably to indicate forms of organizations more structured, durable, and sophisticated than general co-
offending.
9
Drawing the boundaries of markets as well as of groups can be very challenging: this is what Campana and Varese
(2020) call the ‘double boundary specification problem’.
10
Quite the opposite: future research might further explore comparatively the impact of individual characteristics, e.g.
gender, ethnicity, or status in society, including marginalization, on the structure of networks and their underlying
mechanisms.
Related Links
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Find This Title

Page 27 of 27
14. Demystifying hate crime in an age of crises

p. 311 14. Demystifying hate crime in an age of crises

Neil Chakraborti and Amy Clarke
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0014
Abstract
This chapter examines the extent of hate crimes in the age of crises. It acknowledges how the concept of hate crime is
notoriously complex and contested. The continued rise of hate incidents paints a worrying picture of seemingly legitimized
hostile and prejudiced attitudes rooted within wider structural inequalities. Even though ne and physical hostility is
normalized, legitimized, and politically weaponized, there is a deafening silence from national governments when it comes to
addressing the underlying causes of hate crime. The chapter considers the complex realities of perpetration and victimization
in an effort to improve responses to hate crime in times of increasing fragility and uncertainty.
Keywords: hate crimes, crises, structural inequalities, national governments, perpetration, victimization, fragility,
uncertainty
Introduction
We live in extraordinary times where levels of hate crime continue to escalate across the world. Within the
UK, a series of particular social, cultural, and political events over the last decade have resulted in an
upsurge in reports of targeted violence. Following the EU referendum result of June 2016, for instance,
more than 14,000 hate crimes were recorded by police forces in England and Wales between July and
September 2016, with three-quarters of forces reporting record levels of hate crime during that period
(BBC News 2017a). Concerning spikes in targeted victimization have been evident throughout other parts
of the world as well, including in the USA following a build-up of tensions during and after the 2016
presidential campaign (Southern Poverty Law Centre 2016), and across Europe where populist political
parties have gained renewed popularity in certain regions (BBC News 2017b; Dearden 2017). These global
trends have continued in the wake of continued terrorist attacks, the Black Lives Matter movement, and
Page 1 of 23
the COVID 19 pandemic; each one a crisis point which has exposed fault lines and fragilities across Western
nations and which has triggered further alarming surges in hate crime across the UK, US, Canada,
Australia, and Europe (see, inter alia, Moreau 2022; Tan et al. 2021; European Union Agency for
Fundamental Rights 2021; Home Office 2021; FBI 2023).
The continued rise of hate incidents paints a worrying picture. Now, seemingly legitimized hostile and
prejudice attitudes that are rooted within wider structural inequalities mean that expressions of hate,
prejudice and hostility are continuously used to marginalize ‘difference’ and to sustain hegemonic
boundaries. Sustained and unchallenged ‘othering’ leads to violence that becomes a mechanism used to
reinforce power dynamics between dominant and subordinate groups and to create cultures of fear within
those stigmatized communities (see, inter alia, Chakraborti and Garlan 2012; Perry 2001). Research has
also highlighted that the volume of online and interpersonal hate incidents can be influenced by ‘trigger’
events which generate ripple effects at a local, national, and international level (Awan and Zempi 2017).
This serves to heighten the vulnerability of many groups and communities at a time when ‘other’
identities continue to face intense scrutiny.
p. 312 ↵ This chapter outlines the ubiquity of hate crime in an age where the coalescence of multiple points of
crisis has been used to legitimize and normalize targeted hostility. To make sense of its relevance to
targeted ‘others’, to criminal justice policy, to criminology, and to the wider public we begin by examining
definitions of hate crime. The concept of hate crime is notoriously complex and contested, and this chapter
seeks to navigate this conceptual minefield by identifying core features which inform our understanding
and which set hate crime apart from other forms of criminal behaviour. It then turns to consider a set of
key questions which underpin collective efforts to gauge the nature and impacts of hate crime. Which
groups and communities typically fall victim to hate crime and on what basis are they targeted? What
kinds of physical and emotional harms do victims tend to suffer? What motivates perpetrators to commit
acts of hate crime? And how can we collectively respond to hate crime in a way that acknowledges these
lived realities and multiple crises?
Defining Hate Crime
The term ‘hate crime’ is now used with regularity by practitioners, policy-makers, activists, and
academics in many countries around the world. However, despite the wide use of the concept, establishing
consensus for a clear, universal definition has been highly challenging. ‘Hate’ is an emotive and elusive
concept, and if taken literally, the term ‘hate crime’ can be rather misleading and it seldom describes the
experiences of most victims who are targeted on the basis of their identity.
Various definitions of hate crime can be found within the wider body of academic and policy literature but
almost all are consistent in referring to a broader range of factors than hate alone to describe the
motivation that lies behind the commission of a hate crime (see, inter alia, Chakraborti et al. 2014; Hall
2013; Gerstenfeld 2013; Petrosino 2003; Perry 2001; Jacobs and Potter 1998).
Page 2 of 23
One noteworthy attempt to develop a common understanding of hate crime was provided by the Office for
Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR 2009: 16), whose guidance for the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) member states describes hate crimes as ‘criminal acts
committed with a bias motive’. This definition does not require the bias element to be expressed as ‘hate’
to be conceived of as a hate crime, nor is ‘hate’ required to be the primary motive. The same is true for
most interpretations of hate crime. For instance, the College of Policing in England and Wales (2020: n.p)
state that ‘Hate crimes and incidents are taken to mean any crime or incident where the perpetrator’s
hostility or prejudice against an identifiable group of people is a factor in determining who is victimised’.
Elsewhere, Belgium’s hate crime legislation includes crimes motivated by ‘contempt’, while Ukraine’s
Criminal Code states that if the offence were based on ‘racial, national or religious enmity’ the incident will
be considered an aggravated offence. As such, the concept of ‘hate’ rarely features in contemporary
definitions of hate crime.
Criminologists’ definitions of hate crime have strongly influenced the policy frameworks of many nations.
One of the most enduring conceptual frameworks has been provided by the Canadian criminologist,
Barbara Perry (2001), who describes hate crime as a mechanism for asserting dominance and power over
those who transgress majority society’s perceived ‘norms’. Western norms, she argues, predominantly
reflect the established values of White, middle-class, Christian, heterosexual, cis-gender, and able-bodied
p. 313 men. According to Perry (2001: 47), symbolic but widely accepted ‘social ↵ hierarchies’ allow
individuals and groups to position themselves in a way that ‘implies dominance, normativity, and privilege
on the one hand, and subordination, marginality and disadvantage on the other’. Consequently, those who
are labelled ‘other’ are often the target of prejudice, hostility and victimizing behaviours. Importantly
though, Perry argues that hate crimes are acts of violence and intimidation whose target is not just the
individual victim but the wider community to whom the victim is perceived to belong. Such acts are
intended to convey a powerful message which reinforces that community’s sense of ‘difference’ and
inferiority. As ‘message crimes’, acts of hate reach ‘into the community to create fear, hostility and
suspicion’. Within this framework, the victims themselves are interchangeable and, almost invariably,
strangers with whom the perpetrator has had little or no contact, as they are chosen on the basis of their
generic subordinate identity rather than any individual characteristics (Perry 2001: 29).
This definition is particularly useful not only in highlighting the role of power and inequality in the
commission of hate offences, but also in centralizing the concept of difference. However, it does not fully
acknowledge the more everyday experiences of targeted hostility faced by victims which are not necessarily
motivated by deep-seated prejudice or hate. In an attempt to capture these more ‘mundane’ or ‘ordinary’
experiences, Chakraborti, Garland and Hardy (2014) describe hate crimes as acts of violence, hostility and
intimidation directed towards people because of their identity or perceived ‘difference’. The rationale for
framing hate crime in these broad terms will become clearer over the course of this chapter. However, it is
worth noting at this point that this broad and inclusive definition extends to forms of targeted hostility
which might not meet the threshold for a criminal offence themselves, but which can still have damaging
impacts upon the victim, their family and wider communities. Importantly, it also acknowledges that
victims can be victimized not exclusively because of their membership of a particular identity group, but
also because they are seen as vulnerable or somehow ‘different’ in the eyes of the perpetrator.
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Victims of Hate Crime
The absence of a shared understanding of the hate crime concept across nations has generated
inconsistency in relation to the framing of legislative responses and the recognition afforded to particular
groups of victims (Garland and Chakraborti 2012). However, there are some commonalities in the
protected characteristics mentioned in various nations’ hate crime frameworks. Within the OSCE region of
57 member states just over two-thirds record hate crime data, and ‘race’, national origin, and ethnicity are
the most commonly protected characteristics, closely followed by religion or beliefs (ODIHR 2023). This
level of recognition is unsurprising given that racist hate crime remains the strand of hate crime with
which commentators are most familiar. Indeed, politicians, journalists, practitioners, and academics
sometimes still describe hate crime exclusively in terms of racist crime, and correspondingly refer only to
people from minority ethnic communities as hate crime victims. Nevertheless, despite the almost
universal agreement that these characteristics be included in hate crime law, terms like ‘race’ and
ethnicity do not share universal definitions, which presents further conceptual challenges (see, inter alia,
Bowling and Phillips 2002; Back and Solomos 2000; Gilroy 1993). Indeed, one of the shortcomings of
existing research and policy frameworks has been a tendency to rely upon simplistic constructions which
depict ethnic minorities as one seemingly homogeneous victim group. This approach dismisses, or at best
p. 314 underplays, ↵ the differences in experiences and needs between people clustered under a ‘catch-all’
category, as well as those who are typically excluded from such frameworks altogether. This encompasses
Gypsies and Travellers, foreign nationals, refugees, asylum seekers and migrant workers who suffer racist
violence and abuse on a regular basis, but yet remain peripheral to most debates about racially motivated
hate crime.
Over the past decade religiously motivated hate crime has occupied a more significant role within political
and academic thought. The escalating level of prejudice directed towards Muslim communities in
particular has raised the profile of this form of hate crime and has been a significant factor in the
formulation of explicit legislative protection against attacks upon religious identity in many parts of the
world. There has also been a sharp rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents across most countries with
a sizable Jewish presence (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2020), with a range of
contributory factors including historical relationships of mistrust between Jews and other faith groups,
resentment of the perceived socio-economic success enjoyed by Jewish communities in the West, the
‘transfer of tensions’ from the Middle East to other countries, and pandemic-related anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories (Community Security Trust 021; Gerstenfeld 2013). Many of the most ‘notable’ trigger
events in recent years have caused significant ‘spikes’ in recorded hate crimes, particularly those
motivated by Islamophobia. For instance, increased levels of victimization were recorded following the
Paris terror attacks in 2015, the Manchester arena bombing and the London Bridge terror attack, both in
2017, the announcement of President Donald Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’, also in 2017, the Christchurch
mosque attacks in 2019 and in the aftermath of mass shootings in Vienna in 2020. In addition, the
COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to a considerable upsurge in both Islamophobic and Antisemitic hate,
particularly online (Comerford and Gerster 2021; Awan and Khan-Williams 2020).
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However, Muslim and Jewish communities are not the only faith groups to have experienced an increase in
hate crime. Research by Awan and Zempi (2018) highlighted the targeted abuse that some people suffered
simply because they ‘looked Asian’, for instance through wearing a turban, sporting a beard or simply by
virtue of being ‘dark-skinned’. This underscores the relevance of intersectionality within the context of
victim selection. Conceiving of hate crimes simply as offences directed towards discrete strands of a
person’s identity fails to give adequate recognition to the interplay of identities with one another and with
other personal, social and situational characteristics. Chakraborti et al. (2014) found that over 50 per cent
of the 1,106 victims surveyed within their research had been targeted on the basis of more than one
identity or lifestyle characteristics. Reflected in the findings are the high numbers of people who felt that
they had been victimized because of their race and gender; their mental ill-health and age; or their sexual
orientation and dress and appearance.
It is only in more recent years that greater scholarly attention has been devoted to uncovering the targeted
violence and intimidation experienced by other stigmatized groups, including people with learning and/or
physical disabilities, lesbian, gay and bisexual communities, and trans men and women. Unfortunately,
the increased recognition of these strands within criminology has not been replicated within political and
criminal justice systems across the world. Of ODIHR’s member states only half were found to record
homophobic or transphobic hate crime (19) and even fewer states (15) record disability hate crime (ODIHR
2023). However, these inconsistencies in the monitoring of particular strands over others, have been the
source of much criticism over the years (see, inter alia, Mason-Bish 2010; Jacobs and Potter 1998) and have
yet to be adequately resolved. A specific challenge relates to the way in which hate crime policy
p. 315 ↵ creates and reinforces hierarchies of ‘deserving’ victims, where some groups are deemed to be
worthy of recognition within criminal justice frameworks and others invariably miss out. As Mason Bish
(2010: 62) observes:
… hate crime policy has been formed through the work of lobbying and advisory groups who have
had quite narrow remits, often focusing exclusively on one area of victimization. This has
contributed to a hierarchy within hate crime policy itself, whereby some identity groups seem to
receive preferential treatment in criminal justice responses to hate crime.
Activists and campaigners have played an integral part in the prioritization of hate crime policy across
many parts of the world by exposing the violence directed towards particular groups of marginalized
victims, and by generating the requisite momentum to influence the domains of law making and
enforcement (Lancaster 2014; Perry 2014). Invariably, however, this process will amplify the voices of only
selected groups of ‘others’ and not all. A more established history of stigma and discrimination, greater
public support for a cause, and access to increased resources, are all key factors which enable campaigners
working in support of certain groups to lobby policy-makers more effectively than other potential
beneficiaries of hate crime policy (Chakraborti 2015). As a result, some groups continue to find themselves
on the periphery of hate crime scholarship and policy despite being targeted on the basis of characteristics
which are fundamental to their own sense of self.
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Criminologists have questioned the failure to recognize the everyday acts of hostility directed towards the
homeless as a form of hate crime (Wertans 2020; Wachholz 2009), whilst a growing body of research
continues to highlight the challenges facing victims who are targeted on the basis of being Goths, Emos or
members of another form of alternative subculture (Garland and Hodkinson 2015), sex workers (Campbell
and Sanders 2021), or because of any number of ‘invisible’ disabilities (Burch 2021). In a similar vein to
victims of more familiar forms of hate crime, these groups too are targeted on the basis of their identity or
perceived ‘difference’. However, typically portrayed as criminogenic, undesirable, unworthy or lacking
access to the kind of political representation so entwined with more ‘legitimate’ or historically oppressed
victim groups, they continue to be excluded from conventional hate crime frameworks (Chakraborti 2015).
In reality this marginalization is much more than simply a conceptual conundrum; it is a fundamental
human rights issue which has life-changing consequences for victims of targeted violence whose
experiences are deemed to be less significant to policy-makers.
Furthermore, in parallel with the rising levels of hate crime and targeted hostility within physical spaces,
there has been a dramatic rise in online hate. Research conducted after the initial wave of the COVID-19
pandemic showed a 900 per cent rise in the volume of hate speech directed towards Chinese people on
social media platforms, and a 70 per cent increase in incidents of hate speech between children and young
people during online chats (Orlando 2020). Similar challenges were evident in a 2019 survey undertaken by
the UK’S communications regulator, Ofcom, which found that as many as half of 12–15 year olds reported
encountering hateful content online (Ofco 2019). The anonymity offered by the internet, its temporal and
geographical reach, the ease through which hateful content can be transmitted through text, photos and
GIFs, and the lack of effective regulation across a growing number of social media companies operating in
online space, are all contributory factors towards a cycle of victimization which is difficult to break—more
especially in an age when online communication is an entrenched part of everyday life (Williams et al.
2020; Kilvington 2020).
p. 316 The Harms of Hate Crime
It is well documented that the impacts of experiencing micro-aggressions, micro-crimes, and hate crime
are wide-ranging and damaging (Paterson, Walters, Brown, and Fearn 2018; Hardy and Chakraborti 2016;
Chakraborti et al. 2014; Williams and Tregidga 2013). It is also argued that hate crimes cause greater levels
of harm than equivalent offences which are not motivated by prejudice (Iganski and Lagou 2015). Craig-
Henderson and Sloan (2003: 482) suggest that the negative impacts of hate crime on victims are
‘qualitatively distinct’ from the emotions that victims of parallel crimes may experience because of the
deeply personal nature of the attack on their core identity. Victims are especially likely to experience
greater harms when, as a member of a stigmatized and marginalized group, their victimization brings to
the fore the fear and pain caused by historical, systematic discriminative attacks on their identity group.
Victims of hate crime frequently report high levels of psychological and emotional trauma as a result of
their experiences, with increased levels of anxiety, depression, loss of confidence, nervousness, anger, and
fear of repeat victimization, commonly documented by researchers (Burch 2021; Perry and Alvi 2012;
McDevitt et al. 2001). In their survey of more than 1,100 victims of hate crime Chakraborti et al. (2014)
found that 95 per cent of respondents felt that hate crime had detrimentally affected their quality of life,
Page 6 of 23
with feelings of depression, and thoughts of suicide cited by high numbers of people targeted because of
their mental ill-health, transgender status, and learning disabilities. Similarly, in the wake of increasing
numbers of reported hate crimes post-Brexit, an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Hate Crime
found that rising offences were causing significant emotional and psychological harms including leaving
some victims suicidal and feeling unable to leave their house. Victims also reported feeling increasingly
vulnerable to attacks from right-wing extremists and felt that inflamed hostility created by right-wing
politicians was to blame (Dearden 2019). Within the context of a post-Brexit and post-pandemic
environment where incidents of targeted hostility remain considerably high, it is important to consider the
harms caused to particularly marginalized and ‘hidden’ communities. Victims from these communities are
much less likely to report their experiences and to seek appropriate support for fear of negative
consequences or due to a lack of knowledge about their rights (Hardy 2019).
Hardy and Chakraborti’s (2019) analysis engaged with hate crime victims who had experienced the harms
of hate on a regular basis and in a variety of ways, including graffiti spray-painted over their house; having
derogatory phrases scratched into their car and their car windows smashed, sometimes repeatedly; eggs,
stones and bricks thrown at their house; fences pulled down and gardens ruined; rubbish, fireworks and
faeces pushed through their letter box; and their houses set alight. While the hassle and financial cost of
repairing or replacing property is more readily recognized, the emotional harm caused by property crime
of this nature is typically un- or under-acknowledged and much more far-reaching. With hostile
behaviour often experienced repeatedly and in close proximity to the victim’s home, the threatening
behaviour felt inescapable to many research participants, not least for parents and caregivers who felt
additional concerns for the safety of their children. These emotional harms are often compounded by
physical injury. Hardy and Chakraborti (2019) refer to encounters with hate crime victims who had been
pushed, punched, kicked, hit with bottles, sticks, bats and poles, stabbed, groped, raped, and driven into.
These incidents left victims with cuts, bruises, broken bones and scars (physical and emotional) which
p. 317 were still evident years later. ↵ Financial hardship was also an additional concern for many victims who
had been forced to take time off work as a result of their victimization, thereby providing a further
illustration of the longer-term and immediate impacts of hate crime.
Hate crimes are often described as ‘message crimes’ designed to intimidate not only the victim but also
their family members and the broader community to whom they are perceived to belong (Perry and Alvi
2012; Perry 2001). Indirect impacts of hate crime on wider community members often occur as part of a
process. Incidents of targeted hostility initially increase group members’ feelings of vulnerability and
empathy and this, in turn, increases their emotional reactions which manifest as anger, anxiety and fear.
Paterson et al. (2018: 21) found that ‘simply hearing about others’ victimization—whether they are friends,
friends of a friend, or even a complete stranger—can make people feel vulnerable, angry, and are likely to
affect their behaviours’. Depending on their emotional response, some community members’ anger led
them to consciously resist negative behaviours associated with ‘victimhood’ and some became more active
within their communities, while those who felt anxiety and fear were much more likely to exhibit security
concerns and to engage with avoidance behaviours (Paterson et al. 2018).
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Acts of targeted hostility are often framed as expressions of individual prejudice rather than as being part
of wider society’s systemic discriminatory and exclusionary systems that continue to disadvantage
minoritized groups (Salter, Adams, and Perez 2018). For instance, in a 2019 UN report, Special Rapportuer
Tendayi Achiume acknowledged the ongoing work by the UK government to improve racial equality
through its comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation and laws to protect victims of hate crime.
However, he noted that not enough was being done at a structural level to combat deep-rooted
institutionalized racism and hostility towards new arrivals (UNHCR 2019). Similarly, and as highlighted
more recently as part of the wider Black Lives Matter movement, Salter et al. (2018) argue that in order to
combat modern day racism and other forms of discrimination, society must acknowledge the embedded,
structural prejudice that exists within institutions such as the educational, legal and economic systems,
cultural practices and discourse. The harms caused by structural prejudice often occur in parallel to the
harms caused by individual experiences of hate crime, thereby presenting significant challenges to victims.
Research on structural racism, for example, has shown that people of colour pay an ‘ethnic penalty’ in the
labour market experiencing lower rates of pay, targeted bullying at work, and fewer opportunities for
promotion. Furthermore, in the housing market, immigrants and refugees seeking private housing are
treated less favourably than native residents (Dunn et al. 2009; Markus 2014). As a result of various forms
of exclusionary practices, especially when paired with a lower socio-economic status, this significantly
restricts new arrivals’ opportunities and pushes them into under-serviced, deprived areas (Clarke 2020;
Aalbers 2007). However, other forms of structural discrimination also serve to maintain the marginalized
status and ‘vulnerable’ positions of certain groups. Trans people, for instance, experience significantly
higher rates of homelessness, unemployment, domestic violence and health care discrimination than cis-
gendered people, with one in four trans people having experienced homelessness at some point in their
lives compared to one in 200 in the general population (Bachmann and Gooch 2017). Furthermore,
throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, disabled people were frequently the targets of abuse if they were not
wearing a mask despite being exempt by law (BBC 2020). At the same time, significant concerns arose in
relation to the succession of failures to protect disabled people from the risks of COVID-19 and to take
p. 318 seriously the deaths of people with underlying health conditions ↵ (Disability Rights UK 2020). It is
important that criminologists recognize the multiple levels of harm being experienced by victims at both
micro and macro levels if we are to develop sufficiently nuanced responses to support individuals and
communities.
Perpetrators of Hate Crime
Much academic endeavour within the field of hate studies has focused upon the nature and impacts of hate
crime victimization. Far less attention has been paid to the motivations of hate crime perpetrators, and
particularly those who do not identify with far right or extremist movements. Official data on the
demographics of hate crime perpetrators are equally sparse. Nevertheless, some significant research
studies have generated insights into the profiles of hate crime offenders. The most influential work to date
on hate offender profiles was conducted by McDevitt, Levin, Nolan, and Bennett (McDevitt et al. 2002) who
developed a typology of four categories of perpetrators based on analysis of 169 hate crime cases
investigated by the Boston Police Department. Just over two-thirds of the cases assessed of hate crime
Page 8 of 23
perpetrators were categorized by McDevitt et al. as ‘thrill’ offenders. These individuals are typically young
males, many are teenagers who, often acting in a group, commit hate crimes in search of a viscerally
exciting experience. In many instances of hate crimes perpetrated by these thrill seekers, individuals
would venture out of their own neighbourhoods in search of someone to target, and selecting victims
based on an underlying prejudice towards their group affiliation. This profile is supported by official
statistics in England and Wales which suggest that a significant proportion of hate offenders are under the
age of 25, and supplemented by a number of academic studies which have found that most hate crimes are
committed by young males acting in groups (Walters, Brown, and Wiedlitzka 2016).
A quarter of the cases reviewed by McDevitt et al. (2002) were categorized as ‘defensive’ offenders, who
share a similar demographic profile to ‘thrill offenders’. Typically, hate crimes are committed by these
offenders as a way of ‘defending’ their neighbourhood from perceived outsiders. As such, the victim (or
more pertinently, their perceived community) is seen as posing a threat, whether this be socially,
culturally, or economically. This explanation can be applied to the spike in levels of hate crimes targeting
Eastern Europeans following the 2016 EU Referendum where simply speaking in a foreign language was a
marker of ‘difference’ and was perceived as posing some sort of threat to the perpetrators’ cultural norms,
values, and sense of national identity (Lumsden, Goode, and Black 2019). Clarke (2020) also found that
new arrivals in the UK who were repeat victims of intimidatory behaviour, bullying, and property damage
reported that ongoing harassment was often perpetrated by neighbours. Participants stated that, after
moving to a majority ‘White’ area, they felt they were immediately identified by residents as unwanted
‘outsiders’ and often experienced an escalation in harassment if they remained living in the area.
‘Retaliatory’ offenders—who accounted for approximately 10 per cent of cases in McDevitt et al.’s research
—typically travel to the victim’s territory to avenge a previous incident which they perceive the victim, or
the victim’s social group, to have committed. In the case of both ‘defensive’ and ‘retaliatory’ offenders,
motivations underpinning hate crime perpetration conform to the framework proposed by Perry (2001),
mentioned earlier, in that hate crimes can be deployed as ‘message crimes’, designed to instil a sense of
fear and intimidation to victims and the wider community. Retaliatory attacks are especially likely to
p. 319 follow high profile terrorist atrocities, such as the Manchester arena ↵ bombing in 2017, noted above,
where Greater Manchester Police recorded a 505 per cent increase in Islamophobic attacks, with 224
reports of anti-Muslim hate crimes recorded in the month after the attack compared to 37 during the same
period in 2016. Similarly, in the aftermath of the London Bridge terrorist attack in the same year, the
London Metropolitan Police Service recorded a five-fold increase in Islamophobic attacks, with 20 anti-
Muslim incidents recorded per day in comparison with a daily average of 3.5 for 2017.
‘Mission’ offenders are McDevitt et al.’s fourth and final category. Unwavering allegiance to a hate-fuelled
ideology is more evident here than with the offenders in the other three categories, where engagement in
violence is prompted by an overarching ‘mission’ and the need to prove a point, to rectify perceived
wrongs, or to exterminate groups who are deemed evil or inferior. Although such offenders are relatively
rare, risks of extreme violence are the greatest. David Copeland who perpetrated the 1999 London nail
bombings, Anders Behring Breivik who was the instigator of the 2011 Norway terror attacks, and Brenton
Tarrant who was the shooter in the 2019 Christchurch mosque atrocities are perhaps some of the most
well-known examples of ‘mission’ offenders.
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Although ‘mission’ offenders conform to most people’s stereotypical image of a hate crime perpetrator, in
reality the vast majority of hate crime offenders fit more appropriately within one of the other three
categories, and their offending behaviour is much more ‘everyday’ in nature. In fact, increasingly research
suggests that many hate crimes tend to be committed by relatively ‘ordinary’ people in the context of their
‘ordinary’ day-to-day lives. These offences are not always driven by entrenched prejudice or hate
harboured by the perpetrator, but instead represent an inability or unwillingness to control language when
affected by feelings of stress, anger or drunkenness, or a sense of inadequacy, or threat driven by the
interplay of subconscious psychological processes (Walters et al. 2016; Gadd 2009).
The foundations of much hate crime scholarship and policy have been built on the assumption that these
are exclusively majority-versus-minority crimes. However, this interpretation fails to recognize that the
types of prejudices and stereotypes which underpin acts of hate crime are not the exclusive domain of any
particular group. Racist hostility, for instance, can arise from disputes between members of different
minority ethnic groups, while victims of homophobic and transphobic hate crimes are sometimes targeted
by religious minorities (Chakraborti et al. 2014). In her study highlighting the targeted hostility
experienced by new migrant communities, Clarke (2020) found that in highly diverse, urban areas that had
experienced ‘White flight’, minority-on-minority hostility was fairly commonplace. When discussing new
arrivals, feelings of suspicion and concerns over integrating new cultures, and rising crime rates were
most commonly discussed by ‘established’ minority group members. For instance, Eastern European and
non-Muslim participants most frequently discussed concerns relating to the religious and cultural
traditions of Muslim new arrivals as well as perceived threats of extremism posed by these new arrivals.
Equally, Muslim participants commonly referred to the excessive drinking behaviours and ‘aggressive’
nature of Polish people, which some perceived to relate to criminality. The propensity for those from a
typically stigmatized group to go on and stigmatize others often occurred when the perpetrators in these
situations held the belief that they had, over time, become part of the ‘established’ group. Consequently
they felt empowered to act as they perceived the majority White group to do. In other instances, it
appeared that to target new arrivals was a strategic behaviour that attempted to displace the hostility and
prejudice that they were receiving or had received onto the new arrivals, in the hope that this would
decrease the likelihood of being targeted themselves (Clarke 2020).
p. 320 ↵ Ultimately, the lack of opportunity available for many marginalized groups can create a sense of
‘competition’ which, in some cases, leads to an increase in targeted hostility. These highly nuanced power
dynamics are rarely addressed in prominent theoretical explanations of hate crime where the majority
dominant group are generally always assumed to be the perpetrators. Equally, our reliance on the labels
‘victim’ and ‘offender’ assumes dichotomous roles in hate crime offences. This reinforces a de-
contextualized picture of some cases, particularly neighbourhood conflicts, where both parties can share
culpability for the anti-social behaviour which forms the basis for the broader conflict and hate offence
(Walters et al. 2016).
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Responses to Hate Crime
Previous sections have outlined the rationale for thinking beyond the parameters of conventional
frameworks in order to capture the realities of hate crime. However, maximizing the ‘real-life’ value of
these frameworks for victims of hate crime remains an equally important challenge. Despite an upsurge of
political and media attention, policy interventions, and academic interest, many hate crime victims face an
uphill struggle to elicit meaningful support. As Chakraborti (2015: 5) observes:
… many such victims find themselves based on the margins of ‘mainstream’ society, where
knowledge of hate crime policy and associated publicity campaigns and reporting structures, is
invariably lower; where people are likely to feel less comfortable about sharing their experiences
through official channels; and where the sense of bitterness, alienation, and resentment that
often fuel acts of hate crime is likely to be felt all the more as a result of prevailing economic
conditions.
This is all the more pertinent within the points of crises referred to above. Although some significant
progress has been made in relation to recognizing the problem of hate crime and this is evident within the
data recording practices, advances in legislation and civil society initiatives reported to the OSCE Office for
Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) whose most recent report includes hate crime data
from 46 participating countries (ODIHR 2021). However, as we shall see, these developments have failed to
fully address victims’ needs, lived experiences, and frustrations. The following paragraphs identify three
persistent challenges which continue to deny many victims a sense of justice and which have been all too
evident within this age of crises: barriers to reporting hate crime; ineffective engagement with diverse
voices; and a failure to deliver effective criminal justice interventions. These challenges will be considered
in turn.
The police response to hate crime, and those from other organizations within and beyond the criminal
justice sector, is contingent on incidents being reported by the victim or any other person present, as
highlighted in previous policy guidance and research studies (Chakraborti and Garland 2015; Wong and
Christmann 2008; European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2021; ODIHR 2020; HM Government
2014, 2012). Despite a wealth of official guidance providing best practice models for responding to hate
crime, the relationship between law enforcement agencies and many marginalized communities has been
historically turbulent at best, and oppressive and life-threatening at worst (Dwyer 2013; Bowling 1999;
Hall et al. 1978). Unfortunately, the legacy of these problematic relationships, allied with negative
p. 321 ↵ media reporting of policing, and continued funding cuts during times of austerity, all continue to
create and reinforce significant barriers to reporting. Chakraborti et al. (2014), for example, found that
only 24 per cent of respondents to their survey of 1,106 hate crime victims had reported their experiences
of hate crime to the police. Fewer still had shared their experiences with other organizations who could
potentially have offered support such as a teacher (4 per cent), Victim Support (3 per cent); their local
authority (3 per cent); or a social care worker (2 per cent). Only 1 per cent of respondents had shared their
experiences of victimization with a community support organization, such as an LGBT, disability, or race
Page 11 of 23
equality network, while none had ever utilized any of the third party reporting options available through
local libraries or online, despite such third party reporting schemes being heralded within successive UK
Government Hate Crime Action Plans.
Similar findings have emerged from other studies of hate crime reporting conducted within the UK and
elsewhere in the world (see, inter alia, Vergani and Navarro 2021; European Union Agency for Fundamental
Rights 2021; Myers and Lantz 2020; Hardy 2019; Williams and Tregidga 2013). As well as illustrating how
often hate crime victims suffer in silence, and how few incidents come to the attention of the police and
other agencies, the evidence from these studies suggests that a wide range of factors underpin victims’
reluctance to disclose their experiences. Crucially, research has shown how the process of reporting can in
fact exacerbate victims’ existing concerns rather than provide the necessary levels of reassurance. For
instance, it was widely felt by participants in all studies that reporting would simply be a waste of time,
either for the victim (because the police and other partner organizations would fail to grasp the
seriousness and prevalence of hate incidents), or for the police (because of a perception that authorities
would prioritize other types of offences with more easily identifiable perpetrators and where a criminal
justice resolution would be more straight-forward to obtain). As a result, most victims tend to normalize
their experiences of targeted hostility as a routine feature of being ‘different’. Equally, many victims have
a sense of apprehension about reporting which stems from fears about being outed, drawing attention to
themselves, or retaliatory attacks (see also Hardy and Chakraborti 2016).
Irrespective of any improvements that individual forces have made in the context of reporting processes,
reputation management and partnership working, it remains the case that previous negative encounters
continue to erode levels of public confidence. A series of high-profile police failings and tragic cases in
2021, including most notably the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Sarah Everard by a Metropolitan Police
officer, have done little to assuage this deficit of trust, particularly amongst minoritized groups (Dodd
2021). Unsurprisingly within this context, awareness-raising campaigns to promote hate crime reporting
and support pathways to victim groups have failed to resonate in any meaningful fashion, typically
because initiatives are not tailored sufficiently to address the needs and expectations of specific grassroots
audiences.
A second persistent challenge relates to engagement. The term ‘hard-to-reach’ is often used by policy-
makers and practitioners to describe and exclude minoritized communities (Garland et al. 2006). However,
an increasing amount of academic research has shown that a planned process of grassroots engagement
can enable prolonged access to a diverse range of groups within environments that are familiar and ‘safe’
to them (Hardy and Chakraborti 2019; Clarke 2020; Zempi and Chakraborti 2014). Indeed, throughout the
authors’ own research with so called ‘hard to reach’ communities such as asylum seekers, new migrants
and Muslim women—our research participants have been overwhelmingly open, honest, and enthused
p. 322 about the process of engagement, and welcomed ↵ the opportunity to share their experiences and ideas
(ibid.). During interviews, many participants commented that the engagement initiatives adopted by the
police and their partner agencies often felt disingenuous, and even tokenistic. This was largely due to
current approaches that most commonly only engage with self-styled community leaders who were
frequently criticized for being typically male, older and out of touch with the range of challenges
experienced within their communities, particularly those issues faced by women and young people.
Page 12 of 23
Indeed, as noted by Chakraborti et al. (2014) fewer than 1 per cent (n = 9) of 1,106 victims surveyed had
disclosed their experiences of hate crime to a community leader. Clearly this approach is overly selective
and often fails to recognize those who do not feel a sense of belonging to any kind of established
‘community’, as agencies rarely reach beyond fixed and familiar communities.
For these reasons, criminologists continue to call for the police and other relevant organizations to see
meaningful community engagement as an integral part of their role and to prioritize approaches which
generate two-way dialogue with a much more diverse set of voices. This is especially relevant in the wake
of many years of austerity measures and the recent global pandemic, which have severely affected the
capacity for community-based organizations to provide and sustain effective support to hate crime
victims. While research has highlighted the positive impacts of localized community-based services, such
as mental ill-health support circles, faith networks for women or refugee support groups (to name just
some examples), in providing tailored, empathetic responses to victims of hate crime, these are typically
the services which have been most affected by extended, and often terminal, funding restrictions (Hardy
and Chakraborti 2017). Consequently, closures and cuts to services simply reinforce many victims’ feelings
of isolation and reduced the likelihood of them reporting future hate incidents.
A third, and related challenge in this context concerns the capacity of victims to secure an appropriate
outcome through the criminal justice system. Part of the problem in this respect lies in the initial response
provided by the criminal justice system, most commonly the police, and how that response is perceived by
hate crime victims. Many countries still do not collect data on levels of victim satisfaction after
engagement with criminal justice agencies or support services (ODIHR 2020). However, findings from the
Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) indicate that victims of hate crime are less satisfied by the
response that they receive from criminal justice agencies when compared to other forms of crime, with 55
per cent of hate crime victims very or fairly satisfied compared with 66 per cent of victims of non-hate
offences (Home Office 2020). The CSEW also shows that hate crime victims are more likely to be very
dissatisfied with the police handling of their case than victims of other forms of crime (27 per cent
compared to 17 per cent). This is evident within Liberty’s (2021) investigation into the policing of hate
crime which revealed that as many as 32 per cent of all hate crime victims in England and Wales withdrew
from criminal justice proceedings in 2020, a threefold increase from 2015 and significantly higher than the
average withdrawal rate for other forms of crime (25 per cent). Research has identified that these high
levels of victim dissatisfaction often stem from a feeling of not being listened to, not being taken seriously,
and not being treated with an appropriate level of empathy. These factors compound the considerable
emotional and physical distress already experienced as a result of the original hate incident and which
reinforces the feelings of alienation and distrust referred to above (Hardy and Chakraborti 2019).
Worryingly then, and paradoxically at a time when hate crimes have escalated to record levels, a higher
p. 323 proportion of victims than ever are opting not to engage with the criminal justice system, ↵ by not
reporting their experiences of hate crime to the police, or by withdrawing from the process after reporting.
An additional and common cause for concern for those victims willing to report hate incidents, is a failure
amongst criminal justice agencies to bring perpetrators to justice or to update victims’ on their case
progression. The difficulties surrounding legal interpretations of hostility and motive, and the stringent
burden of proof required for prosecutions, can intensify distress to victims, their families and wider
Page 13 of 23
communities (Chakraborti and Garland 2015). Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) figures from their most
recent full annual report reveal a 17 per cent drop in the number of hate crime cases sent to the CPS during
2018–19, and almost a 15 per cent drop in completed hate crime prosecutions for that year (CPS 2019). The
latest CPS quarterly statistics make for equally sobering reading. Despite the continued rise in police
recorded hate crime, the volume of police receipts to the CPS fell in the first quarter of 2021/22 to just
2,145, with the number of police receipts for transphobic hate crime dropping to only eight cases in total
for that same quarter (CPS 2021). Moreover, the average time for the police and the CPS to charge
continues to rise, with cases taking more than ten additional days from receipt to charge in the first
quarter of 2021/22, when compared to the same quarter the previous year. Extended delays have continued
since the early stages of the pandemic where many countries introduced sweeping measures which
severely disrupted the functioning of criminal justice systems. In the UK, for instance, over half of all
courts closed during the first national lockdown in April 2020, with only urgent applications involving
terrorism and domestic violence being prioritized. In turn this increased the existing backlog of cases and
reinforced a procedural crisis which is likely to damage the criminal justice system for many years to come,
according to the joint view of the Criminal Justice Chief Inspectorates for policing, prisons, probation, and
prosecutions (Criminal Justice Joint Inspection 2021).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, research has revealed that many hate crime victims are receptive to the extended
use of alternative interventions beyond conventional punitive measures (Paterson et al. 2018; Walters
2014; Rossetti and Cumbo 2010). Chakraborti and Hardy (2019) found that fewer than half (44 per cent; n =
131) of their survey respondents referred to longer prison sentences as their preferred response to hate
crime. Rather than particularly punitive solutions, 82 per cent (n=246) wanted to see a greater use of
tailored programmes of education within schools and local communities as an intervention to inform
young people about positive aspects of diversity and the harms of hate crime; just over half (n = 167) called
for more use of community ‘payback’ orders for hate crime perpetrators; and one in three people (n = 97)
were in favour of more restorative approaches to justice such as supervised mediation between the victim
and the offender. These feelings were commonplace across victims of different forms of violent and non-
violent hate crimes from diverse communities in terms of age and background, and illustrate strong levels
of support for utilizing interventions outside of the formal criminal justice routes within responses to hate
crime. However, despite the enthusiasm and continued extended use of such interventions in the context
of other criminal offences—and despite a growing body of empirical evidence to support the growth of
restorative practices, education programmes, and rehabilitative programmes as part of a package of
preventative measures to combat hate crimes (Hall 2013; Hardy 2017; Walters and Brown 2016)—their use
with victims and perpetrators of hate crime remains relatively limited. This has been highlighted by CPS
figures which reveal that out of court disposals for hate crime cases dropped by 35 per cent in the first
quarter of 21/22 (CPS 2021).
p. 324 Conclusion: Demystifying ‘Justice’
This chapter has sought to demystify hate crime at a time when conceptual clarity and evidence-based
responses are urgently needed. Preceding sections have drawn from contemporary scholarship on hate
crime victimization and perpetration to illustrate the sheer range of challenges facing policy-makers and
Page 14 of 23
frontline professionals tasked with addressing the problems posed by hate crime. In doing so, the chapter
raises important questions in relation to the appropriateness and the effectiveness of existing criminal
justice responses. Perhaps more tellingly, it raises significant concerns over the political appetite to
address glaring problems.
In an age of multiple points of crises where online and physical hostility is normalized, legitimized, and
politically weaponized against those who are targeted as ‘different’, there remains a deafening silence
from national governments when it comes to addressing the underlying causes of hate crime. This has
been all too evident following the summer of 2020 which witnessed an eruption of Black Lives Matter
protests across many parts of the world which sought to highlight institutional inequalities and the
entrenched prejudice suffered by Black people following the murder of George Floyd. These protests
sparked radical conversations about what ‘justice’ really means to victims and calls for a fresh approaches
across the political spectrum. And yet, despite statements of support from senior officials in many
different countries, in reality little by way of substance appears to have changed in terms of responding to
the needs of minoritized communities and generating clearer pathways to justice for hate crime victims.
Acknowledgement of these problems should not detract from the more positive developments that will
have been evident within this chapter. Hate crime has become a burgeoning topic within global
criminology, new knowledge and fresh ideas continue to inform our understanding of what hate crimes
are, whom they affect and why they are committed. This growth of criminological enquiry is both welcome
and necessary, as is the acknowledgement of the need for more evidence-based interventions, which is
increasingly explicit within the policy domain (see, for example, HM Government 2018; ODIHR 2018).
However, the prevailing economic, political and social conditions which serve to both fuel and mask the
hostility directed towards ‘marginal’ communities makes it increasingly imperative to address the
shortcomings identified above. This would enable responses to hate crime to move beyond the prevailing
shallow cycle of empty political rhetoric (where media-friendly soundbites in the aftermath of high profile
hate acts take precedence over genuine prioritization (Amnesty International UK 2017)); empty hate crime
action plans and associated strategies (where action is commonly confined to ‘looking at’, ‘reviewing’ and
‘working with’ without any detail of the process through which such actions will be monitored and
evaluated (Walters and Brown 2016)); and empty criminal justice processes (where agencies continue to
promote existing pathways without the resource and/or the inclination to address the significant
challenges which affect existing responses to hate crime (Chakraborti 2017).
A more hopeful vision is one where we demystify both what hate crime means and what justice means to
victims of hate crime. Conventional pathways to justice are based on a largely punitive model which is
inaccessible to many victims and largely ineffective in addressing their needs, and which from an
offending perspective does little to prevent future offending or to address the underlying prejudices that
give rise to hate. However, future policy frameworks need not be wedded to such a model. As the evidence
p. 325 above suggests, many victims are receptive to the extended use of alternative ↵ interventions,
including greater use of restorative interventions, community ‘payback’ orders, and tailored programmes
of ‘anti-hate’ education within schools and local communities. Crucially, these feelings are commonplace
amongst victims across all strands of hate crime, across different types of violent and non-violent
incidents, and from different communities, ages and backgrounds (Hardy and Chakraborti 2019). As such,
the points of crises referred to throughout this chapter have the capacity to mark a turning point where we
Page 15 of 23
reconsider our perceptions of ‘justice’ and look outside the criminal justice system for more holistic
answers to the systemic problems posed by hate crime. This would be more akin to the public health
approach to violent crime which has been endorsed by the UK Government in recent years, and which
treats violence like an infectious disease whose ‘cure’ lies in evidence-based early interventions involving
multiple public and social services to prevent people from becoming involved in violent crime (Brown
2019). Extending this approach to hate crime would have considerable merit in terms of addressing the
complex realities of perpetration and victimization, and improving responses to hate crime in times of
increasing fragility and uncertainty. It remains to be seen whether such an approach materializes over the
coming years, or is merely wishful thinking.

Walters et al.’s article on ‘Group identity, empathy and shared suffering’ (2020) explores the harms of hate and helps
to illustrate how and why incidents of hate can extend beyond the individual victim to generate impacts upon whole
communities.
Hardy and Chakraborti’s Blood, Threats and Fears (2019) offers an in-depth analysis of the lived realities of hate crime,
as informed by research undertaken with the largest sample of victims to date.
Chakraborti and Garland’s Hate Crime: Impact, Causes and Responses (2015) offers a broad and accessible insight into
the causes, impacts and responses to hate crime from a UK perspective.
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15. Ethnicities, racism, crime, and criminal justice

p. 329 15. Ethnicities, racism, crime, and criminal justice

Coretta Phillips, Ben Bowling and Alpa Parmar
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0015
Abstract
Offending, victimization, policing, the work of the courts, and imprisonment are patterned by differences between different
ethnic groups. This chapter explores these long-standing patterns and critically examines the reasons for the often uneasy and
conflictual relationship between minority ethnic groups and agents of the criminal justice system. It also interrogates new
manifestations of ethnic patterns in crime and the administration of justice, particularly those linked to the global issues of
controlling migration and terrorism. Finally, the chapter considers how criminological scholarship has developed in this
subfield of race, ethnicity, and crime.
Keywords: race, ethnicity, inequality, victimization, criminalization, disproportionality, racism, discrimination
Introduction
In the twenty years that have spanned our contributions to the Oxford Handbook of Criminology, it has
been customary for us to begin by setting out the vexed relationship between minority ethnic communities
and criminal justice agents, particularly the police. Our previous chapters have considered the racialization
of stop and search, the problem of ‘gangs’, and the observation that the prison population is
disproportionately filled with black and brown people, whose origins connect them (and us) to Britain’s
colonial past. That these dynamics remain central to this chapter is worthy of note in and of itself.
However, we now also need to engage with a transformed terrain that has become ever more politicized,
polarized and fraught.
The former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s likening of Muslim women dressed in the niqab and burkha to
‘bank robbers’ (Johnson 2018), the emphatic assertion by the former Equalities Minister—a black British
woman of Nigerian parentage—that the current government ‘stands unequivocally against critical race
Page 1 of 26
theory’ (Badenoch 2020), and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 that criminalizes
unauthorised residence on land and permits Gypsy and Travellers’ homes to be seized are emblematic of
the dangerous lurch to the right that must frame this chapter. In amidst this mix are the increasingly loud
voices of social movements such as #blacklivesmatter which have sparked a conversation about defunding
the police. Spurred on by the violent imagery of the compliant, African American George Floyd, being
murdered in 2020 as a white police officer nonchalantly kneels on his neck long after he has taken his last
breath, resistance and solidarity against the brutality of state racism have been vocally expressed in
protests around the globe.
The study of crime has a troubled and racialized history. Lombroso, the founding father of criminology,
developed a positivist science of ‘the criminal’ based on the anthropometric study of ‘racial types’,
remarking that ‘some tribes have no morality at all’ and Gypsies ‘epitomise a thoroughly criminal race’.
Later, acknowledging racist justice in the US, he still maintained that black people were primitive, brutal,
p. 330 ↵ and shiftless (Lombroso 1897). Continuing traces of such ideas are found in cruder forms of biosocial
criminology that link race, cognitive deficits, and offending, but these have been subject to eviscerating
critiques (see British Journal of Criminology 2017). So too the use of artificial intelligence to identify
suspects using technologies that misrecognize minority ethnic faces (Garvie et al. 2016) or over-predict
offending risk because of ‘algorithmic discrimination’ against people from minority ethnic groups
(Ugwudike 2020).
The contention that certain minority ethnic groups have a greater propensity to commit crime than the
white majority has been at the heart of the ‘race and crime debate’ for decades. We consider this in what
follows, examining first some conceptual and contextual issues to set the scene for an analysis of official
statistics, contemporary empirical and theoretical work on patterns of crime of victims and offenders. We
then proceed to examining the functioning of the criminal justice system. The chapter ends with a critical
look at the ways in which race and ethnicity inform the development of criminological scholarship.
Mapping the Conceptual Terrain

The pseudo-scientific notion that humanity could be divided into innate, hierarchically-arranged racial
groups originated in the European Enlightenment. For thinkers such as Hume, Kant, de Gobineau, Linne,
and Blumenbach, reason and civilization were synonymous with the Caucasian race, while other,
supposedly primitive racial groups, and especially the ‘Negro’ were regarded as naturally inferior in terms
of their moral, intellectual, and behavioural capacities (Banton 1998). Hume’s (1754/1997: 33) claim that
‘[t] here never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white’ epitomizes this perspective.
These racist ideas legitimized practices of slavery and indentured labour and became embedded in British
colonial policies. Racial science was also integral to the policies pursued in Nazi Germany and the
ideological root of the genocide of Jews and Gypsies in the Holocaust.
Scholars such as Montagu (1943) roundly rejected such ideas in the post-war period, arguing that ‘race’
should be understood as a social construction rather than an objective analytical category (Mason 2000).
Nonetheless, race has persisted in the public (and criminological) imagination. It has yet to be eclipsed by
the more politically neutral term ‘ethnicity’ which does not fix human difference as an unchanging
ahistorical, biological essence resting on notions of superiority and inferiority (Barth 1969, Fenton 2003).
Page 2 of 26
Yet, as Anne Phillips (2007: 15) notes, simply denying the validity of race ‘is never enough to combat the
hierarchies of power’. Thus, social scientists are left to find the least problematic means by which they can
enumerate and assess whether different ethnic groups have distinctive experiences of power and
(in)justice. Criminologists have reluctantly turned to the administrative categories used in the UK census
to assess differential outcomes, even though these risk reifying an essentialist notion of race and
obscuring internal heterogeneity. ‘Critical whiteness studies’, which is only just beginning to percolate
into criminology (Smith 2014), also underlines the need to reject monolithic notions of white ethnicity,
which has become increasingly relevant as a result of migration from Central and Eastern Europe. The lens
of intersectionality recognizes that individual identities straddle race, ethnicity, gender, social class,
sexual orientation, and so on (Potter 2015); however intersectional perspectives have at times been at the
expense of race rather than its inclusion (Parmar 2017).
p. 331 Early Migrant Settlement and Racialized Socio-Economic Inequalities

Britain has become an ethnically diverse society by virtue of its imperial past. Thus, many people
experiencing crime and justice in twenty-first century Britain are descendants of postwar settlers from
former colonial territories in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. In 2021, minority ethnic groups comprised 19
per cent of the population (9 per cent Asian, 4 per cent Black, 3 per cent Mixed Race and 2 per cent ‘Other’).
Britain remains predominantly White: British (74 per cent), ‘White Other’ (7 per cent, of whom less than
one per cent are Gypsies and Travellers) (ONS 2002). Migrant settlement was initially into urban areas and
minority ethnic communities are still geographically concentrated in London, the South East, the
Midlands, and the North West of England (Lupton and Power 2004).
The legacy of racial discrimination against people migrating from the former colonies has contemporary
resonance. Today, educational attainment at age 16 is lowest for those of Gypsy/Roma and Irish Traveller
origin, and comparatively low among those of White British and Black Caribbean origin of low socio-
economic status, although Pakistani-origin children also fare less well (Strand 2021; DfE 2022). School
exclusions are highest among boys of Irish Traveller, Gypsy, Roma, black Caribbean, and Mixed Race
origins (DfE 2023b). Looked-after status is more common among Black and Mixed Race children (DfE
2021c)). High unemployment and low pay are particularly marked for Black men, Pakistani, Bangladeshi,
and Black African women. The economic returns from education are still not fully realized even among the
more economically successful Indian and Chinese communities (Phillips and Platt 2016). ‘Ethnic penalties’
and correspondence tests point to racial discrimination playing a significant part in this disadvantage
(Zwysen et al. 2021). This accentuates household overcrowding, economic precarity and neighbourhood
deprivation (Shankley and Finney 2020). For those of Gypsy and Traveller origin the picture in relation to
illiteracy, unemployment, and poor physical and mental health, is particularly bleak (Smith and
Greenfields 2012). The racialized inequalities of health have further been exposed through the Covid
pandemic (Harris et al. 2021). Lastly recent migrants from outside Europe are more likely to experience
unemployment, labour market insecurity, and poverty than national or European Union citizens (Shutes
2016).
Page 3 of 26
The Social Construction of ‘Ethnic Criminality’

Markers of material disadvantage, in which racism is heavily implicated, have consequences for patterns
of criminal victimization and offending. A House of Commons Select Committee reported in 1972 that the
white and ‘West Indian’ populations offended at similar rates, with lower rates for Asians. By the
mid-1970s and into the 1980s, however, this image had changed dramatically. Sensationalist news media
reports about street robbery, for which a new label—‘mugging’—was invented, produced headlines such
as ‘black crime shock’. Together with televised scenes of street disorders in the 1980s, the media promoted
views of black people as innately violent, drug-abusing, and disorderly (Hall et al. 1978, Gilroy 1982).
Reconfigured over the decades, and including other racialized ‘folk devils’, such as ‘Yardies’ (Murji 1999),
violence among street gangs has been arecent yet persistent concern. For Williams and Clarke (2018), the
gang construct has been singularly, but erroneously, racialized to include only black and brown men, while
Evans and Jaffe (2020) have observed the use of a primordial logic that equates dark skin with violence,
nihilism, and lawlessness.
p. 332 ↵ In contrast, Asian communities were for many years portrayed as conformist, passive, inward-
looking, and self-regulating (Webster 1997). Then the ‘Asian gang’ (Alexander, 2000) was identified as
culturally separatist and a source of ‘home-grown’ Islamist terrorism (McGhee 2008). Another powerful
motif is that in which criminality is fused with race, this time with patriarchal Asian cultures and the
‘Muslim grooming gang’. This identifies Pakistani men collectively as perpetrators of organized sexual
violence against vulnerable white women. For Cockbain and Tufail (2020), the narrative is a ‘spurious
media construct’ that has trumpeted the alleged gendered failures of state protection because of misguided
‘political correctness’. Like ‘mugging’, it displays a similarly imprecise legal definition, inflammatory
media reporting, and supportive political commentaries, to capture what is a more accurately described as
child sexual exploitation.
Likewise is the longstanding characterization of ‘migrant crime waves’ when the evidence points to lower
rates of offending, at least among the first generation of migrants (Ousey and Kubrin 2018). Immorality,
dangerousness and contempt similarly inheres to the body of the ‘illegal’ migrant, while foreign national
offenders are discursively represented most typically as murderers rapists and paedophiles or some
variation thereof (Bhatia 2015, de Noronha 2018).
The ‘whiteness’ of corporate crime (Sohoni and Rorie 2019), football violence (Garland and Rowe 2014),
institutionalized child sex abuse, and alcohol-fuelled public disorder has not produced the same
essentialized notions of ‘white criminality’ in either public or political consciousness. Notwithstanding,
Gypsies and Travellers, white (minority) ethnicity has been causally but incorrectly connected to fraud,
anti-social behaviour, and criminality, with a recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme entitled The Truth
About Traveller Crime fuelling stereoptypes with misleading crime data (see also Phillips 2017). We return
to the representations of minority ethnic criminalities later in the chapter as we further examine
criminological data and research which speaks to the lived experiences of street crime. For now, we turn
our attention to address the broader picture of criminal victimization and its impact on the general
population.
Page 4 of 26
Victimization and Fear of Crime
The Crime Survey England and Wales (CSEW) estimates that the risk of being a victim of a crime in 2019/20
was highest for those describing themselves as Mixed Race (20 per cent) compared with Asian (15 per
cent), Black (14 per cent), White (14 per cent), and Chinese (10 per cent) (ONS 2021d). Rates of sexual
assault for the Mixed Race group, along with Black people, are slightly higher than the White majority
ethnic group (ONS 2021c). There is currently no racially disaggregated data on the risks of cybercrime.
Multivariate analyses of survey data on personal and household crimes have previously found that factors
such as age, low income, unemployment, urban residence, and lack of academic qualifications, were more
important than ethnic origin per se in explaining minority ethnic groups’ higher levels of victimization
(Clancy et al. 2001). Nevertheless, some of these factors, such as urban residence and unemployment, are
themselves partly explained by discrimination in housing and employment (as noted above). Questions
remain as to why victimization risks are significantly higher for people of Mixed Race origin, over and
above their younger age strcuture (Salisbury and Upson 2004). Far less is known about the victimization
experiences of newer migrants, many of whom are white, and to a degree the same can be said about
people from Gypsy and Traveller communities (James 2014a).
p. 333 Racist, Antisemitic and Anti-Migrant Victimization

There were 124,091 reported hate crimes in 2020/21, of which 74 per cent were racially motivated and 5 per
cent were religiously motivated (ONS 2021b). Data on anti-Semitic incidents numbered 2,255 in 2021, a 34
per cent increase since 2020 and with year-on-year increases for five of the past six years. Repeated
victimization can exacerbate vulnerability, fear, and insecurity (Bowling 1999). Politically motivated
spikes in incidents are also not uncommon: July 2016 saw a 15–25 per cent rise in recorded hate crime after
the Brexit referendum (Carr et al. 2020), and when the former Prime Minister (Johnson 2108), likened
veiled women to ‘bank robbers’, reports of anti-Muslim hate increased (TellMAMA 2019). Hate crimes
against Gypsies, Travellers, and Roma are often linked to the arrival of new encampments or sites
(Thompson and Woodger 2020, James 2014b), and anecdotal evidence suggests increased hate against
those of East Asian origin in response to Covid. Low reporting and recording rates, particularly where
victims’ insecure immigration status or fear of the police means they may feel threatened by state scrutiny
into their lives, makes this an area where little reliable data is available (Spenkuch 2013).
Street Crime
Comparing offending rates by ethnicity is an inherently flawed exercise, limited by biases in official data.
Arrest, prosecution, conviction, and sentencing data are accounts of decisions taken by criminal justice
officials rather than evidence of offending per se. Self-report studies also suffer methodological
limitations, but they typically find lower reported rates of offending and drug use among people of Asian
origin, with higher rates for the Mixed Race group, and with Black offending rates a little lower than or
similar to the White majority (Sharp and Budd, 2005). Older data from victims did point towards an over-
representation of Black offenders in robbery offences but these are rare crimes overall (Smith, 2003).
Notwithstanding, the pattern of a higher Black to White ratio at each stage of the criminal justice process
Page 5 of 26
from arrest to imprisonment has been stark and—until recently—consistent. Statistics on the ethnic
origin of prisoners have consistently shown a higher rate of imprisonment for black people since they were
first published in the mid-1980s. In 2020, however, similar rates of White, Black and Asian defendants
convicted by the courts received a sentence of immediate custody. Average Custodial Sentence Lengths
remain longer for those of Black, Asian, Chinese/other origin, but this is likely to be in some part due to
more serious offence profiles and previous convictions (MOJ 2021), both of which are influenced by racially
biased criminal justice processes. Of particular concern are the data on youth custody which show in 2020,
Black offenders made up 32 per cent of the prison population for under-18-year olds while 12 per cent were
Mixed Race, despite both accounting for around 5 per cent of the general population.
‘Gangs’ and Serious Violence

Densley et al. (2020) argue that we should update the nostalgic view of youth subcultures common in
sociological folklore to examine more comprehensively the empirical realities of today’s violent street
worlds. For Hagedorn (2007) gang membership reflects the disadvantage and social exclusion caused by
p. 334 economic restructuring, the ↵ neoliberal retrenchment of welfare, and the loose structuring of
youthful collectivities around territorial identification (see also Fraser and Hobbs, this volume). Qasim’s
(2018) study of The Boys of Pakistani origin in Bradford captures exactly the motivation for small scale
drug-dealing collaborations to fund consumerist lifestyles. Gunter’s (2017) and Reid’s (2022)
ethnographies portray the fun and solidarity of ‘being on road’ for Black Londoners, but amidst the threat
of volence, and active involvement for a small minority. Reid’s analysis conveys varying investment in
‘trapping’ (drug-dealing), often deployed in response to childhood trauma—‘proper sufferation’ as one
research participant put it. Along with Clarke and Williams (2020), they warn against the conflation of all
youthful collectivities with gangs (the current Black folk devil) involved in serious violence so as to avoid
punitive surveillance. Fatsis’ (2019) analysis of the discriminatory risk assessment of events featuring
drill, grime, and other black music genres, and the imposition of Criminal Behaviour Orders, similarly
draws critical attention to the criminalization of blackness, as does Owusu-Bempah’s (2022) reflections on
the risks of undue prejudice adversely impacting criminal prosecutions where ‘gang-themed music’ is of
low probative value yet insufficiently scrutinized for its legal relevance.
More sharply delineated hierarchies have been found in some qualitative studies of London gangs that seek
to violently secure both economic and street capital. Pitts (2008, 2020) has focused on the
disproportionate number of fatal and non-fatal shootings and knife woundings in areas of significant
Black population concentration. Together with Harding (2020), this research illustrates the
unpredictability of violence that can flow from the need for status and respect in addition to competition
over the financial rewards from the international drugs trade. The evolution of ‘county lines’ distribution
of heroin and crack cocaine, controlled by urban offenders who use exploitable people in provincial areas
to conduct drug sales, can also be seen in Scotland where perpetrators are predominantly White (Holligan
et al. 2020). Moreover, Spicer’s (2021) work notes the singular focus on minority ethnic urban gangs
neglects the structural drivers of this supply model.
Page 6 of 26
Studying the extent and nature of gang membership more broadly is plagued by definitional and
methodological issues (Hallsworth and Young 2008), while the role of young women in gangs has also
been relatively underexplored in the academic literature (Deuchar et al. 2020). These definitional issues are
not merely academic concerns. The ‘Joint enterprise’ doctrine creates a form of secondary liability where
individuals can be held culpable, and therefore punishable, for the actions of another individual if they
know that the other individual is intending to commit a criminal offence. Clarke and Williams (2020)
convincingly argue that this forms a kind of collective mode of punishment which relies on linguistic cues
and dehumanizing signifiers used by prosecutors deploying a gang discourse. Quotes from their research
participants—‘I didn’t even know the alleged shooter before my arrest’ and ‘We knew each other from
school and two of my [codefendants] I’d never met’ are illustrative of the erroneous connections made by
police officers in their case construction (Clarke and Williams 2020: 122). Given that ‘the gang is always
seen to wear a black or brown face’ (Hallsworth and Young 2008: 185), joint enterprise bears particularly
heavily on minority ethnic men. The Supreme Court case of R v Jogee sharpened legal understanding with
regard to the intentionality of secondary parties’ action in offence commission, but it has not been
successfully applied retrospectively in more than a few cases (Krebs 2020).
p. 335 ↵ Relatedly, the pursuit of young minority ethnic men involved in ‘county lines’ drug distribution
using the Modern Slavery Act 2015 has been claimed by some critical commentators to exemplify racialized
enforcement practices turned on their head. This time, Black slavemasters exploit vulnerable White people
in the suburbs (Koch, 2020), and here the innocence and vulnerability of Black boys are set aside as
adultification prevails and the blurred boundaries of victim and offender are applied selectively (Davis and
Marsh 2020, Wroe 2021, Moyle 2019, Coomber and Moyle 2017).
Notwithstanding, recent years have seen high levels of public anxiety about gun and knife crime within
minority ethnic communities. In the three-year period, combining data from year ending March 2019 to
year ending March 2021, there were 844 homicides in the Home Office Homicide Index where there was a
homicide conviction. In these cases, two thirds of homicide victims were White, 14 per cent were Black, 9
per cent Asian, 8 per cent were from other ethnic groups; in 3 per cent the ethnic appearance of the victim
was unknown (MOJ 2021). The data has consistently shown that serious violence is an intra-, rather than
an inter-ethnic problem. Where a suspect was identified, 85 per cent of White victims were killed by White
assailants, while 68 per cent of Asian victims and 71 per cent of Black victims were murdered by someone
from the same ethnic group (MOJ 2021).
Domestic Violence: Honour Crimes and Forced Marriage

A heightened vulnerability to gendered violence in intimate relationships has also been viewed through a
racialized lens. Undoubtedly significantly under-reported, in 2019/20, those reporting victimization in the
CSEW were Mixed Race (8 per cent), White (6 per cent) and Black and Asian (4 per cent each) (ONS 2021a).
It is unclear why the mixed race group are disporportionately affected. The media, in turn, has focused on
forced marriage and ‘honour’ killing cases where minority ethnic men violently discipline, control, or
ostracize their female relatives. While for some, this problem should be seen conceptually and legally as
domestic violence (Siddiqui, 2005), there remains a concern that media perspectives risk cultural or
religious essentialism when reporting such crimes (Dustin and Phillips 2008). The Home Office reported
Page 7 of 26
1355 cases of forced marriage in 2019 (Forced Marriage Unit 2021a). Previous research by Hester et al.
(2007) found forced marriage in South Asian, Central European, Chinese, African, African Caribbean, as
well as Irish Traveller and orthodox religious UK communities. Poverty, bride price, social control, and
immigration were motivating factors for forced marriages—all were made illegal in the Anti-Social
Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014.
Corporate Crime and State Harms
Corporate offending has never attracted the label of ‘white-on-white’ crime, or ‘gang related’ offending
despite this fairly accurately reflecting criminological understanding (see Fraser and Hobbs this volume;
Sohoni and Rorie 2019). Indeed, states have been accused of complicity in allowing unfettered global
capitalism leading to ecocide that disproportionately harms low-income, formerly colonized, countries
p. 336 comprised ↵ predominantly of black, brown and indigenous peoples (Sealey-Huggins 2018, Ciocchini
and Greener 2021, White and Kramer 2015).
The death of Ella Adoo Kissi- Debrah, a Black girl living in London, whose asthma was exacerabted by
traffic emissions in excess of WHO guidelines, illustrates the problem closer to home (CTJ 2021). The same
can be said of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 in which 72 people died, many of whom were London’s
predominantly racialised poor, including ‘Nigerian cleaners, Somali carers [and] Moroccan
drivers’ (Danewid 2020). State-corporate alliances ignored tenants’ health and safety concerns about the
tower’s refurbishment at the lowest cost possible (Tombs 2020). For Danewid (2020), however, alongside
a critique of economic inequality and neoliberal imperatives, it is also the race-inflected structuration of
urban space that is key to understanding the carnage at Grenfell. Imperial continuities are found in cities
that segregate populations—racially and economically—through gentrification, regeneration, and
proactive policing (Danewid 2020, El-Enany 2019).
Historical state-corporate legalized harms in colonial settings are also increasingly the subject of requests
for reparations for what Agozino (2021) calls the African Holocaust of transatlantic slavery. Nurse’s (2021)
work, for example, considers the ‘unjust enrichment’ slavery provided White people to establish the moral
and financial basis for restitution. We now turn to address the more traditional conception of state-
minority ethnic relations and the harms it sustains by looking at policing.
Policing and Legitimacy in Globalized Times
The relationship between police and minority ethnic communities was fractious from the start. Post-war
government policy required the police to enforce immigration law—at borders and on the streets—that
was designed to discriminate against minority ethnic groups (Bowling and Iyer 2022). Well over four
decades of research has produced extensive evidence showing that racism has been endemic in police
culture, and—due to the permissiveness of law—racism shapes everyday policing practice and decision-
makings (Hall et al. 1978, James 2014a). This was clear in Macpherson’s Inquiry (1999) into the failed
Metropolitan Police investigation into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence. The Inquiry concluded that
the initial investigation into the murder was ‘marred by a combination of professional incompetence,
Page 8 of 26
institutional racism, and a failure of leadership by senior officers’ (Macpherson 1999: 46.1). The labelling
of the police as institutionally racist was controversial but shed light on evidence of under-policing and
unequal protection from hate crimes and over-policing in the use of stop and search and the abuse of force
against minority groups.
Trust in the police has been falling in recent years and is generally lower among black and brown people.
This ‘legitimacy gap’, particularly among young people, was central to explanations of the riots of August
2011, which erupted following the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, a Mixed Race man, by the police in
London. Unrest broke out in numerous urban areas in Britain, mostly with large minority ethnic
populations, amid widespread anger about Black deaths in custody and aggressive policing. The riots,
young people told Newburn and colleagues, were ‘payback’ (Newburn et al. 2018). There is thus little sign
p. 337 that the representation of minority ethnic police ↵ officers—standing at 8 per cent in 2021—is having
any discernible impact on everyday practice (MOJ 2021). Notwithstanding, it is somewhat surprising that
Bradford et al. (2017), using crime survey data for 2008–11, found immigrants displayed higher levels of
trust towards the police than those born in the UK. This was likely a reflection on policing in their countries
of origin. In the most recent data (2017–2020) a lower percentage of Black people had confidence in their
local police compared with Asian, White, and other ethnic groups (MOJ 2021). Similarly, while some
Muslims have been critical of being ‘over-policed’ particularly with regard to counter-terrorism measures
like ‘suspicionless searches’ (Parmar 2011; Mythen 2012), as well as under-protection from victimization,
CSEW data show that Muslim respondents appear to express similar attitudes towards the police as other
socio-demographic groups. Qualitative research with Gypsy and Traveller communities has shown low
trust in police among whom some see their nomadism as a cloak for criminality (Mulcahy 2012; James
2014a).
The most recent evidence of the enduring legacy of institutional racism, sexism, and homophobia in
British policing is presented in Baroness Casey’s (2023) review of the standards of behaviour and culture of
the Metropolitan police. This extraordinary report – triggered by the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah
Everard by a serving police officer – revealed problems with strategic management of the force, a
workforce that does not reflect the community that it serves, that has weak misconduct procedures and
lacks accountability and transparency. The Review found that because of permissive racist attitudes within
the organization, minority ethnic officers experience racism at work, and racism and racial bias are
reinforced within police systems. Casey concluded that the service ‘under-protects and over-polices’ Black
Londoners.
Stop and search

Over-policing is exemplified in the way the police use their powers to stop and search and this has been a
contentious issue since for the 1970s. Searches under section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984
—which require ‘reasonable suspicion’ that a person has committed an offence—and suspicionless
searches introduced in the 1990s for counter-terrorism or in ‘anticipation of violence’ have been used
extensively against minority ethnic communities since they first became law. Despite decades of attempts
by police and policy-makers to address the unfair use of stop and search, disproportionality persists to this
day. In recent years, this has ranged from Black people being four to six times more likely to be stopped
Page 9 of 26
and searched than their White counterparts and Asian people around twice as likely (MOJ 2021). A recent
study, based on 36,000 searches by 1,100 police officers in the West Midlands, found that compared to the
demographics of patrol areas and with the ethnic composition of the crime suspects that officers interact
with, the vast majority of officers over-search minority ethnic groups.The excessive stop and search of
Asian people was accounted for by over-patrolling, while excess searching of Black people was the result of
officer bias, primarily, in addition to over-patrolling. This study supports earlier research showing that
the pattern of stop and search is the result of direct and indirect discrimination (Bowling and Phillips
2007).
p. 338 Deaths in Custody

Deaths following police contact are the most disturbing manifestations of the failure of the police to
provide equal protection. The most notorious case in recent years is the murder of George Floyd in 2020
after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine and a half minutes despite
him repeatedly saying ‘I can’t breathe’ and ‘don’t kill me’. Video of Floyd’s murder went viral on the
internet and sparked demonstrations in hundreds of cities in the USA and around the world, growing into a
global protest movement against police brutality coalescing around the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter
(Joseph–Salisbury et al. 2021). The roots of policing in slavery and colonialism are increasingly recognized
as providing a blueprint for the control of postcolonial citizens (Bowling et al. 2019). For example, in
2019/2020, the rate of taser use on Black people was seven times higher than that of White people (Home
Office, 11 2021). Likewise, the suspicious death of Chris Kaba in September 2022 after police interaction
joins a string of deaths in police custody of Black men and women, which point to the racialized use of
restraint mechanisms and the subsequent absence of police accountability (Inquest 2023).
Defunding the Police

‘Defund the police’ was a rallying cry of the George Floyd protests around the world in 2020. Defunding the
police is seen as the solution to the experience that the police more often present a danger to minority
ethnic communities rather than provide protection. The exact meaning of defunding is contested but
typically focuses on the proposal that governments should divest funds from police forces and allocate
them instead to other means of providing community safety such as education, housing, healthcare and
social services. Fleetwood and Lea (2022) argue that while the police are likely to continue to play a central
role in the criminal justice system, improvements could be made by restricting police power and autonomy
and developing specialist non-police agencies to respond to social conflicts.
Border Policing
Western states now routinely control the movement of individuals with a ‘perceived low-economic or
production value’, often of minority ethnic origin, using police powers (Weber and Bowling 2008,
Goldberg 2009). This is accomplished through the merging of criminal and immigration laws creating a
system of ‘crimmigration’ (Bowling 2013). This border policing, as part of the UK’s ‘hostile environment’
policy, culminated in the scandal of the arrest, detention and deportation of many of the Windrush
Page 10 of 26
generation who came to Britain in the 1950s (Bowling and Westenra 2020, Gentleman 2019). Globally
networked technologies also operate to identify ‘foreign national offenders’ so they can be deported
swiftly. Such practices have increased scrutiny of the immigration status of Black and Asian people in
particular, legitimized under the premise of establishing a person’s nationality (Parmar 2019).
Coalescing in the global policing of Western borders are traditional anxieties expressed in the political and
media discourse about migrants polluting superior national identities and cultures, familiar concerns
about welfare scrounging, and newer fears of the threat of Islamist terrorism. The latter is seen as an
internal risk from those ‘home grown’ in alienated and radicalised minority ethnic communities in Britain
p. 339 and ↵ as an external risk from a disparate but technologically connected Isis-affiliated diaspora. The
government’s counter-extremism policy, Prevent, was first introduced in 2003 with the aim of preventing
terrorist radicalisation of individuals through techniques within and beyond the criminal justice system
including surveillance and community policing. Following criticism that it focused exclusively on Muslim
communities (Hickman et al. 2011, Kundnani 2012), Prevent’s scope was extended in 2011 to include the
threat posed by extreme rightwing domestic terrorism groups. However, it remains the case that racialized
Muslims embody the perception of threat both in public and policy terms (Awan and Zempi 2016). Thus,
although the policy maintains a ‘veneer of colourblindness’ and its racist logic is less readily apparent, it
continues in its framing of Muslims as inherently ‘at risk’ (Younis 2021). This policy and public alignment
focuses policing disproportionately on Muslim communities such as the high-profile case of British-born
Shamima Begum who left the country as a child to marry an ISIS combatant in Syria; she was subsequently
stripped of her citizenship and refused re-entry to the UK.
The Criminal Justice Process
What Alexander (2010: 191) refers to as ‘racial caste-making’ and Wacquant (2009: 197) calls ‘carceral
affirmative action’ in the US can be seen in other Western states including the UK. By the end point of the
criminal justice process, the cumulative effects of social exclusion, direct and indirect racial
discrimination, and restrictive border controls can be seen in disproportionate rates of imprisonment. In
2020, Black people comprised 13 per cent of the prison population, despite accounting for only 3 per cent of
the general population (MOJ 2021).
The ‘race and crime debate’ has considered the degree to which these enduring patterns are the result of
discrimination in the criminal justice process. At the police station, minority ethnic suspects have been
found more likely to offer no-comment interviews and are less likely to admit offences during interview or
before trial, rendering them ineligible for a caution or sentence discount (Bucke and Brown 1997). Whilst
such decisions are formally ‘racially neutral’, minority ethnic individuals are effectively denied the
benefits of cooperation because of long-standing mistrust of the police. Similarly, in 2020, more
defendants of Black and Chinese origin received custodial remands (MOJ 2021). Housing inequalities and
an alleged lack of ‘community ties’ for Black defendants in particular, may increase the perceived risk that
they will abscond or interfere with witnesses. Being held in prison awaiting trial is in itself a burden, but
also increases the likelihood of imprisonment on conviction (MOJ 2021). Hudson (1993: 164) observed the
irony that the ‘characteristics of the penalized population are so often the very characteristics we are
building into various formalised decision-making criteria, adherence to which we take as evidence that we
Page 11 of 26
are dispensing impartial criminal justice’. This can be seen as indirect racial discrimination but is defended
on the grounds of system efficiency; yet deciding ‘which decision-making criteria are justifiable or
legitimate raises deep and difficult problems in the philosophy of law’ (Smith 1997: 753).
Evidence of direct racial discrimination comes from studies employing multivariate analysis to tease out
the independent effects of ethnicity as a predictor of a more severe outcome in the criminal justice process.
p. 340 Such studies problematically uphold ↵ individualizing notions of race and ethnicity, rather than seeing
it as a dynamic social relation (Cuneen 2011), but they have often presented persuasive evidence of
discriminatory practices. Now somewhat dated studies have found discrimination in strip-searches at the
police station (Newburn et al. 2004), increased chances of case termination by the CPS, suggestive of police
charging bias (Phillips et al. 1998, Mhlanga 1997), and in harsher sentencing (Hood 1992). More recent
analysis by Hopkins (2015) found 40 per cent and 30 per cent higher odds of custodial sentencing for
minority ethnic male and female defendants, respectively, compared with white defendants, regardless of
criminal history, although the study did not include the potentially explanatory variables of offence
seriousness, mitigating, or aggravating factors. Sentencing Guidelines also now remind judges about the
racial disparity in sentencing outcomes for certain drug offences (see for example the sentencing
guidelines for drug supply or possession;). Pina-Sánchez et al.’s (2018) novel use of sentence transcripts
for violent and sexual offences sentenced in the Crown Court in 2007–2017, found offenders with Muslim-
sounding names were not more likely to receive a custodial sentence, once factors such as plea, mitigating
and aggravating factors, presence of co-defendants, remand status, and victim injuries were accounted
for. For some, salient questions remain answered—such as whether plea decision-making may be
influenced by bias in police charging practices, reminding us of the value of seeing the criminal justice
process as a series of interconnected, cumulative rather than separate, discrete decision points (Bridges
2018).
Youth Justice
The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee inquiry into Young Black People and the Criminal Justice
System (2007) concluded that social exclusion was the main driver of Black over-representation in the
criminal justice system but noted that lone female parenting and an absence of prosocial male role models
were frequently mentioned by witnesses to the inquiry, including many from minority ethnic groups. A
recent HMIP (2020a) inspection similarly found many Black and Mixed Race young people had experienced
multiple adverse childhood experiences and had high levels of educational and mental health needs.
Notwithstanding, using a vast case management and AssetPlus dataset, the Youth Justice Board (2021)
recently reported disproportionate custodial remand decisions for black and mixed race young people that
was not the result of legally relevant factors (although plea data was unavailable). Similarly, Black young
people remained 2–10 percentage points less likely to receive a first-tier sentence and 28 percentage
points more likely to receive a custodial sentence than a Youth Rehabilitation Order.
Miller’s (2022) analysis brings a valuable historical lens, maintaining as she does, that Black youth have
typically been positioned outside benovolent assumptions of youth as rights-bearing and worthy of
philanthropic efforts. A key insight is that White working-class young people were historically afforded
Page 12 of 26
the possibilities of inclusion as they were characterized as misguided but malleable in youth penal
reforms, Black youth have been represented as intractably deviant outsiders not worthy of care and
welfare.
p. 341 Race and racism in prisons and immigration detention centres
Discriminatory treatment against minority ethnic prisoners in accessing jobs and receiving harsh
discipline was identified in Genders and Player’s (1989) classic study of prison social relations. A decade
and a half later, a formal investigation by the Commission for Racial Equality (2003) laid 17 counts of
unlawful racial discrimination against the Prison Service. The public inquiry into the murder of Zahid
Mubarek by cellmate Robert Stewart criticized officers for not responding to Stewart’s previously
disturbed, violent, and overtly racist behaviour (Keith 2006). Likewise, the death of Sarah Reed, in 2016,
raised concerns that mental illness among Black prisoners is often overlooked and therefore they are less
likely to be afforded effective treatment than their White counterparts.
Such claims about inferior and negative treatment by prison officers regularly feature in examinations of
prison life (HMIP 2020b). Quinn et al.’s (2021) survey of 62,664 prisoners found Asian, Black, and Gypsy
and Traveller populations were less likely than their White counterparts to say they had been treated with
respect by staff. Access to services may also be hindered for Gypsy and Traveller prisoners who are unable
to read or write and they may be subjected to racist abuse from staff and prisoners (Gavin 2019). Amidst
concerns about Islamist radicalization and security risks, Muslim prisoners have characterized relations
with staff as suspicious and distant (HMIP 2010). Yet, Wilkinson et al.’s (2021) study of Muslim conversion
maintains that it may actually facilitate rehabilitation by providing inner peace, remorse, solidarity, and
less often radicalisation and extremism. Understanding the affective elements and political implications of
foreign national prisoners’ experience of punishment was centre-stage in Kaufman’s (2015) study. The
long-lasting, hypocritical ramifications of British colonialism were present in prisoners’ narratives; as one
prisoner told Kaufman (2015: 189), ‘[T]he mentality of England is they go to your country and take you
over. But when you come here they don’t like you.’ Inside, xenophobia led some prisoners to perceive their
lesser access to goods and services within prisons as being punishment for their (non)citizenship rather
than their criminality (see also Martynowicz 2016). Similar findings were reported in Bosworth’s (2014)
study of immigration detention (see Bosworth, this volume). The 55 deaths of immigration detainees in
two decades (2000–2021) further underline the vulnerability of these minority ethnic individuals (Inquest,
2021).
Probation
Despite the imperialist roots of probation with the first probation officers acting like religious
missionaries seeking to save intemperate souls, the needs of minority ethnic groups only came to be
recognized in probation policies from the 1980s. Since then, policy development has been uneven.
Concerns have centred on the quality of supervision of minority ethnic individuals and whether probation
officers have given sufficient weight to the role of racism in contributing to offending behaviour. Black
empowerment programmes seeking individual change within a collective learning context of Black history
offer promise but there is scant evidence of their effectiveness (Williams 2010). Glynn’s (2014) ‘black
Page 13 of 26
criminology of desistance’, developed from critical race theory, studying Black men from Baltimore,
p. 342 Birmingham, and HMP Grendon, ↵ emphasized the need to acknowledge the trauma associated with
racialization, criminalization, father absence, neighbourhood deprivation, and negative conceptions of
blackness. Calverley’s (2012) research suggests desistance may be more easily facilitated through family
networks in Indian and Bangladeshi communities compared with Black and Mixed Race communities, but
little is known about the resettlement needs of minority ethnic girls and women (Gelsthorpe 2005). Low
literacy among Traveller service users can impede access to appropriate rehabilitation services, as can
negative assumptions about releasing prisoners on Home Detention Curfew to Traveller sites (Cottrell-
Boyce 2014). In 2021, noting the absence of a national race strategy for service users, the prisons
inspectorate found poor pre-sentence reports and little understanding of the cultural needs of minority
ethinc populations serving community sentences (HMIP 2020b).
The Discipline of Criminology
Looking inwards at the discipline, criminology’s inauspicious origins seem inescapably obvious. Mired in
the racism of the day, Lombroso’s work embodied a pseudo-scientific discourse that has not yet been fully
laid to rest. The absence of engagement with colonialization in ‘bourgeois’ criminology was highlighted by
Agozino (2003), and certainly, the grand narratives in criminology, by the likes of Cohen, Garland, Simon,
and others, can be said to partially obscure the significance of race (Phillips et al. 2020). A refreshing
theoretical intervention, in the work of Unnever and Gabbidon (2011) on African American offending may
have wider applicability. They argue that historically rooted and contemporarily experienced collective
memories of racialized humiliation, pejorative stereotyping, unfair treatment, and inhumanity, produce a
distinctive worldview because African Americans (and other minorities) ‘experience their present in light
of their past’ (Unnever and Gabbidon 2011: 27, see also Glynn 2014). These stresses result in weak bonds to
educational and workplace institutions which increases the likelihood of offending.
Critiques of criminology’s myopia on the subject of race is now more explicitly engaged with through the
lens of decolonizing and ‘southern criminology’, focusing on the failure to theorize how race is
constitutively constructed through processes of policing, punishment, and border control in postcolonial
and settler colonial states (Cuneen 2011, Carrington et al. 2016). The enduring organized, political, and
environmental violence within many low-income countries of the ‘global south’ directly impacts Britain’s
postcolonial populations inasmuch as they are affectively tied to countries of origin. Military campaigns in
Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kashmir are not entirely distant conflicts for those of Somali, Ethiopian, Indian and
Pakistani heritage in the UK. And as Ciocchini and Greener (2021) note in their critique of southern
criminology, carceral power and state repression is a feature of the present too.
Increasingly the intellectual contributions of minority ethnic scholars, including for example Du Bois (on
racism in US criminal justice—Gabbidon 2001) and Alatas (on colonial corruption—Moosavi 2019) are
being ‘rediscovered’ after decades of neglect. Critical questions of race and epistemology, methodology,
and reflexivity have also come to the fore, challenging the absence of race even in critical criminology
(Phillips and Bowling 2003, Phillips et al. 2020, Lumsden and Winter 2014). Scholars working within Black
p. 343 criminology and Indigenous criminology have also ↵ asserted the importance of contemporary
analyses centring the traumatic legacies of racist dispossession and violence by the state which are
Page 14 of 26
maintained in contemporary political ideologies and criminal justice policies (Russell 1992, Tauri 2012,
Glynn 2021). Equally significant is the rejection of mainstream criminology’s efforts to delegitimize
subaltern knowledge claims as inferior scholarship. Privileging cultural forms such as strorytelling, music,
and visual arts to ensure that lived experience is not severed from the historical present, promise a more
meaningful and ethical way to understand the racialized harms of criminal justice practices (Glynn 2021,
Tauri 2018, Walter 2010).
Conclusion
In an article considering the links between the Grenfell Tower fire and the Windrush Scandal, Bradley
(2019: 138) notes that ‘[r]acism … forecloses any meaningful sense of security’. Documenting the presence
of racism throughout this chapter, there are clear continuities in the criminological agenda such as
enduring racial disproportionality in stop and search, arrest, criminal convictions, and imprisonment; and
there is clear evidence that direct and indirect forms of racial discrimination contribute to these patterns.
No longer constrained by the narrow ‘race and crime debate’ that preoccupied earlier criminologists,
minority ethnic scholars have produced a body of work that sensitively explores these dynamics. Alert to
the racist practices of surveillance, labelling, and punitivism, these interventions remind us of the
racialized lived experiences that constrain legitimate opportunities for minority ethnic communities.
Racial capitalism underpins why we see white offshore tax evaders and black street robbers, but a
simplistic white-black racial binary impoverishes our understanding. So too we must more frequently take
note that the largest groups of foreign national prisoners are now from Albania, Poland, Romania and
Ireland, with Jamaica, Pakistan, Somalia, Vietnam, Lithuania and Portugal making up the ‘top ten’ (Sturge
2016), Criminology has been somewhat slow to recognize demographic and geopolitical changes such as
these and to document the experiences of crime and justice among new migrant communities, white
minorities, and people of Arabic, Middle Eastern, and Mixed Race origin. For the energetic criminology
student and scholar of the future, there is much work that remains to be done in developing the subfield of
racism, ethnicity, crime, and justice.

This chapter develops the ideas explored in the authors’ Racism, Crime and Justice (2002); a more recent volume is
Phillips and Webster’s (eds) New Directions in Race, Ethnicity and Crime (2014) and Phillips’ four volume Race and
Crime (2014). The newly launched Palgrave book series on Race, Indigeneity and Criminal Justice centres studies on
race and crime and the racialization of criminal justice systems and has several books that explore in detail the issues
raised in this chapter. Building a Black Criminology by Unnever, Gabbidon, and Chouhy (2019) brings together some of
the of key theoretical debates on race and crime and criminology’s neglect of race in the context of the Black Lives
Matter movement. Potter’s (2015) Intersectionality and Criminology delves into the key reasons why an understanding
p. 344 of the ↵ interconnectedness of identities is necessary for criminology. Other useful texts include Webster’s
Understanding Race and Crime (2007), and Patel and Tyrer’s Race, Crime and Resistance (2011). Bruce-Jones’s Race in
the Shadow of the State (2018) provides critical analysis of responses to institutional racism and considers how
policing and legal systems regulate racism as opposed to overturning it.
Page 15 of 26
On ethnicity and victimization, look at the special issue on hate crime in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence (2015),
Gadd and Dixon’s Losing the Race (2011) and for how hate crime came onto the political agenda, see Bowling’s Violent
Racism (1999). Rowe’s Policing, Race and Racism (2005) provides an overview and a historical perspective is provided
by Whitfield, in Unhappy Dialogue: the Metropolitan Police and London’s West Indian Community (2004). For the other
key areas of criminal justice, see May and colleagues, Differential Treatment in the Youth Justice System (2010), Lewis et
al., Race and Probation (2005), Phillips’ The Multicultural Prison (2012), Kaufman’s Punish and Expel (2015), and
Bosworth’s Inside Immigration Detention (2014). The starting point for a critical perspective on these issues is Hall and
colleagues, Policing the Crisis (1978) and Agozino’s Counter-Colonial Criminology (2003). On the overlap between race
and border control edited collections by Bosworth, Parmar, and Vázquez Race, Criminal Justice and Migration Control
(2018) and Aas and Bosworth’s The Borders of Punishment (2013) are excellent resources.
Online resources

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Find This Title

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16. Where is ‘victimology’ in an era of #MeToo?

p. 350 16. Where is ‘victimology’ in an era of #MeToo?

Maria M. Ttofi, Adrian Grounds and Lidia Puigvert
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0016
Abstract
This chapter covers the field of victimology reflecting the increasing recognition of how victims experience crime and other
forms of ill-treatment. Sexual abuse gained much attention recently, especially with individuals self-disclosing their personal
experiences on social media platforms through the #MeToo movement. Additionally, social media platforms facilitated the
new collective potential. The chapter clarifies that victimology is centrally concerned with the understanding of the experience
of suffering that recognizes antecedents and risk factors for offending identified in longitudinal studies. The possibility of
suffering provides an integrative concept for criminology that correlates to the notions of victimization, offending, and the
operation of criminal justice.
Keywords: victimology, victims, crime, ill-treatment, social media, #MeToo movement, criminology, offending, criminal
justice
Introduction
The field of victimology has grown substantially in recent decades, reflecting increasing recognition of the
importance of focusing on how victims experience crime and other forms of ill-treatment. There has been
a corresponding move, ‘… from simple stereotypes of vulnerability and victimization … towards a much
more nuanced appreciation of crime and its effects’ (Rock 2018: 50) and towards engagement with victims’
needs. This is a domain of criminology that is closely entwined with action and activism directed towards
empowering and helping victims. As Shapland and Sloan (2014: 3) summarize, ‘… victimological research
and theory have acquired a distinct identity and operate according to academic research methods and
ethics—but they both study and also influence practice and policy’.
Page 1 of 34
A particularly prominent development in the last few years has been the role of social media in promoting
social revolutions (Kidd and McIntosh 2016). A critical analysis of the potential role of these media in
helping movements strengthen themselves and expand is presented in Castells’ (2015) work, with
examples including Iceland’s Kitchenware Revolution, Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution and Egypt’s Tahrir
Square Protests. Additional instances highlighting issues of institutional, community, and political abuse
and injustice, include Black Lives Matter (Mundt et al. 2018), the Guatemalan justice movement (Harlow
2012), the rape protests in India (Shaudhuri and Fitzgerald 2015), and the #MeToo movement (Alaggia and
Wang 2020). Whilst acknowledging the uniqueness of the victimization experiences of ‘ingroups’ (referred
to as exclusive victim consciousness), perceived similarities across victim groups (referred to as inclusive
victim consciousness) may enable positive connections, including groups assisting and advocating for
each other or engaging in joint collective action (Vollhardt 2015). It is arguable that social media platforms
have facilitated this new ‘collective potential’.
Sexual abuse, a particularly difficult topic for some individuals to talk about (Tener and Murphy 2015), has
gained much attention recently, especially with individuals self-disclosing their personal experiences on
social media platforms. The influence of the #MeToo movement in drawing public attention to the issue of
sexual violence will be of particular focus in this chapter. The term ‘MeToo’ originated from the Black
p. 351 activist ↵ Tarana Burke in 2006, and in 2017, after allegations against Harvey Weinstein became public,
the actress Alyssa Milano first used the Twitter hashtag, inviting anyone else who had been sexually
assaulted or harassed to reply ‘me too’ to the tweet, resulting in a huge world-wide response.
This chapter aims to consider aspects of victimology in the contemporary context by considering the
history of the field, important areas of victimization, and some developing themes. The account is
necessarily brief and selective. More extensive and comprehensive reviews of the field include Daigle and
Muftic (2019); Doerner and Lab (2020); Hilinski-Rosick and Lee (2018); Shapland and Hall 2015; and
Walklate (2017).
History of Victimology
The English word ‘victim’ comes from the Latin, ‘victima’ and its first recorded use was in the fifteenth
century to denote a living creature used in a religious sacrifice (Oxford English Dictionary Online 2021). Its
contemporary use—to denote a person who suffers as a result of crime, amongst other harms—is broad,
but some of the associations of its original meaning, continue in the ways in which we think about
victimization.
The modern development of victimology has been traced by Fattah (2000) who noted that it was
established as a discrete research area relatively late within criminology. The term ‘victimology’ was first
proposed in 1949, and early studies in the post-war years began to focus on victims in the context of the
offender–victim relationship. Large scale victimization surveys first became prominent in the 1970s, and
in 1985 growing international recognition of the position of crime victims was marked by the adoption by
the United Nations General Assembly of the Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and
Abuse of Power (UN General Assembly 1985). The first two articles of the Declaration usefully define the
broad scope of ‘victims’:
Page 2 of 34
1. ‘Victims’ means persons who, individually or collectively, have suffered harm, including
physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of
their fundamental rights, through acts or omissions that are in violation of criminal laws
operative within Member States, including those laws proscribing criminal abuse of power.
2. A person may be considered a victim, under this Declaration, regardless of whether the
perpetrator is identified, apprehended, prosecuted or convicted and regardless of the
familial relationship between the perpetrator and the victim. The term ‘victim’ also
includes, where appropriate, the immediate family or dependants of the direct victim and
persons who have suffered harm in intervening to assist victims in distress or to prevent
victimization.
Article 18 extended the term ‘victims’ to apply beyond the confines of the criminal law of the individual
state:
‘Victims’ means persons who, individually or collectively, have suffered harm, including physical
or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of their
fundamental rights, through acts or omissions that do not yet constitute violations of national
criminal laws but of internationally recognized norms relating to human rights.
The Declaration included provisions on access to justice, restitution, compensation and assistance, and the
p. 352 development of these has featured to varying extents in the policies ↵ and practices of justice systems
internationally. Restorative justice in particular has become a major movement, for which the starting
point is commonly identified as Nils Christie’s (1977) argument that the ownership of conflicts that has
been appropriated by justice agencies should be restored to victims; a vision that is attractive, but not
without risks and limitations.
The breadth of scope for victimology implied in the Declaration has been reflected in the extending reach of
the academic field in recent decades beyond a focus on criminal victimization to other contexts of suffering
and failures of justice. Examples of this are further discussed below. As Maruna and Liem (2021) note,
these developments have been associated with a recognition of the importance of narratives in the field of
victimology. Survivor narratives have a social role in influencing public perceptions and the operations of
criminal justice, and for individuals survivor narratives can enable the discovery of meaning (Pemberton et
al. 2019a). However the pain that may be endured before such changes happen is also an important part of
the story. When individuals or groups have suffered profound harms, the experience of injustice can
remain tenacious and unabated until recognition is finally achieved, as illustrated, for example, by the
Bloody Sunday and the Hillsborough Inquiries in the UK many years after the terrible events. (Saville 2010;
Hillsborough Independent Panel 2012; Scraton 2013).
Survivor narratives and lived experiences of injustice signal the long way the field of victimology has
traveled. There has been a move away from Mendelsohn’s (1956) typology of victim blameworthiness—
and associated concepts of victim precipitation, facilitation, and provocation—to an era of wider
consensus that victim reactions to victimization must be properly reflected in criminal justice systems
Page 3 of 34
(Daigle and Muftic 2019). The concept of victim precipitation (referring to situations in which the victim
initiates his/her own victimization) and the concept of victim facilitation (referring to situations in which
the victim unintentionally makes it easier for an offender to commit a crime) could direct attention away
from properly attributing blame and responsibility to the offender.
Social media have had a role in empowering victims to disclose experiences of abuse (Alaggia and Wang
2020); and as the breadth and heterogeneity of victim experience has become better recognized, academic
discussion has revisited the insights of Nils Christie (1986) about the social perceptions and judgments
that shape the typologies of those who are most readily given victim status. Christie’s concept of the ‘ideal
victim’ has continued relevance for our understanding of how there can be both denial and
acknowledgement of harmful outcomes that fall both inside and outside the remit of the criminal law
(Duggan 2018).
From a criminal justice policy perspective, the shift of focus on the victim ‘ … from someone who would act
as a witness in court to someone who needed services and support from the community and should be
afforded a more significant role in the criminal justice system processes’ (Hilinski-Rosick and Lee, 2018:
ix) has been reflected in the presence of victim services, restorative justice programmes, and wider
victims’ service organizations in the UK, the US, and elsewhere (Roberson 2017). (However, within the
limited scope of this chapter, it is not possible to review the extensive topic of victim services in the UK or
other jurisdictions.)
The dialogic relationship of social media with the criminal justice system will be discussed in more detail
in this chapter with particular reference to sexual harassment and the #MeToo movement. In relation to
sexual offending there have been moves away from rape myths and stereotypical attributions blaming the
rape victim (Edwards et al. 2011) to a more hopeful era in which social media can have constructive
potential in forming political debate and shaping policy (Zhuravskaya et al. 2020). However, while
p. 353 ↵ social media create openings to challenge stereotypical attitudes to rape as they appear within the
legal system, these technologies also create new outlets for victim blaming that can be deeply damaging
(Boux and Daum 2015).
Contexts of Victimization
Patterns and trends

Scientific research on the prevalence and causes of victimization and criminal offending traditionally
evolved separately in the criminological literature, although recent years have witnessed a surge of
interest in the victim–offender overlap (Berg and Mulford 2020). Examining the nature of crime and
victimization in relation to the intersecting and overlapping social divisions of class, race, age, and gender
still provides a useful starting point for understanding the complex and dynamic nature of these
phenomena (Davies, Francis, and Greer 2017). Other explanatory variables—at the institutional and
societal level—are of equal analytical importance, with research establishing how multiple variables have
trended differently across countries with similar crime trends (Tonry 2014). Country-level changes in
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crime across multiple nations suggest an international drop in crime over the last few decades (Tonry
2014; van Dijk and Tseloni 2012), with significant reductions for property crimes and for violent crimes,
albeit less consistently for the latter (Tseloni et al. 2010).
Despite this ‘near universal drop’ (van Dijk, Kesteren, and Smit 2007: 13, 16), the distribution of crime
victimization has remained unchanged according to household-level victim data from the British Crime
Survey (Hunter and Tseloni 2016; Ignatans and Pease 2015) and the International Crime Victimisation
Survey (Pease and Ignatans 2016). Notably, the burden of crime is unequally distributed within society,
with victimization most likely to occur among the households that are most disadvantaged socially and
economically (Hunter and Tseloni 2016; Ignatans and Pease 2015; Pease and Ignatans 2016).
Additionally, the crime drop may have increased the inequality between those at most and least risk of
being a victim, particularly of violent crime. For example, recent quasi-longitudinal research in Scotland
by McVie, Norris, and Pillinger (2020) found that the crime drop there between 1993 and 2015, reflected,
overall, a reduction in the number of incidents experienced by victims, especially among those who were
the least likely to experience crime (one-off victims of property crime). However, there was no reduction
in the prevalence or incidence of people who experienced the most repeated victimization, and among
those at highest risk the incidence of violence increased (ibid.: 796). The evidence that the crime drop has
been unequally distributed across society has profound implications for the changing nature of distributive
justice within contemporary society (Thatcher, 2004). It underscores the importance of focusing on poly-
victimization (Wolfe 2018) and repeat victimization (Pease, Ignatans, and Batty 2018).
Studies on poly-victimization change the focus from singular, isolated events to recognition of the effects
of exposure to different forms of violence from different perpetrators. This enables a more encompassing
and developmental understanding of cumulative harm across stages of life. (Wolfe 2018), Children and
adolescents from multi-problem milieus are more likely to face several adversities and are at heightened
risk of continuing to suffer repeated victimizations throughout their lifetimes (Musicaro et al. 2019).
p. 354 Governments in the UK, Europe (Tausendfreund et al. 2016) and the US ↵ (Matthews and Kenny 2008)
have taken some initiatives to restructure child welfare protection laws and policies, along with criminal
law and youth justice systems, to respond to the multiple needs vulnerable families may be facing.
Translating child development and child welfare research into policy and practice is easier said than done
(Barth et al. 2021; Wald 2022) and progress can go into reverse. In the UK, for example, there has been
strong recent evidence of worsening social and health inequalities; these affect likelihood of adverse
childhood experiences including exposure to abuse and violence (Institute of Health Equity 2020; Marmot
2020).
Interpersonal violence and abuse

The important topic of domestic violence is discussed in Chapter 18 of this volume by Gadd. This section
therefore selectively focuses on another major area of interpersonal violence and abuse: victimization of
children in the community. The 1989 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child
recognized freedom from violence as a fundamental human right of children, and one of the goals of the
2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development is to ‘ … end abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of
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violence against and torture of children’ (United Nations General Assembly 2015: 25). Ending all forms of
child abuse by 2030 currently seems unachievable: child maltreatment remains a significant public health
and social problem across the world (Schwartz-Kenney, McCauley, and Epstein 2001).
Data collected from population-based surveys across 96 countries indicated that globally a billion children
aged two to seventeen experienced some form of violent victimization (physical, sexual, emotional, or
multiple types) in the year 2014 (Hillis et al. 2016). A systematic review of international studies of self-
reported child maltreatment (Moody et al. 2018) indicated a prevalence estimate of lifetime sexual abuse
for European boys, based on 18 studies, ranging from 4.8 per cent to 15.2 per cent with a median prevalence
rate of 6.2 per cent. Corresponding figures for North American boys, based on 56 studies, ranged from 4.3
per cent to 21 per cent, with median prevalence of 14.1 per cent. Median prevalence rates of sexual abuse for
European and North American girls were respectively 14.3 per cent (based on 27 studies) and 20.4 per cent
(based on 106 studies). Moody et al.’s scoping review noted that median prevalence rates differed markedly
for boys and girls, and by maltreatment type, and continent, pointing towards variability in victimization
risk, based on gender (Stoltenborgh et al. 2011) and culture (Nadan, Spilsbury, and Korbin 2015).
In the UK, a recent report by the Office for National Statistics, based on the Crime Survey for England and
Wales (CSEW) data, estimated that one in five adults aged 18 to 74 years (a total of 8.5 million people)
experienced at least one form of child abuse—whether emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, or
witnessing domestic violence or abuse—before the age of 16 (ONS 2020). Whilst the number of children
placed on Child Protection Registers in England has decreased overall in recent years, the number of
children registered on grounds of neglect has increased year on year, from 11,200 registrations in 1996 to
12,400 in 2001 (Tanner and Turney 2003). As of March 2019, 52,260 children in England were the subject of
a child protection plan (CPP) and 2,820 children in Wales were on the child protection register (CPR)
because of experience or risk of abuse or neglect (ONS 2020). Neglect was the most common category of
child abuse in England and emotional abuse was the most common in Wales (ibid.). Persistent neglect can
have significant neurodevelopmental consequences for young children, with potential impacts on
p. 355 cognitive, social, and emotional functioning (Perry 2001). Effects ↵ appear to be cumulative, and it has
been argued that compared to physically abused children, neglected children have more severe cognitive
and academic deficits, social withdrawal and limited peer interactions, as well as internalizing (as opposed
to externalizing) problems (Hildyard and Wolfe 2002).
The later detrimental effects of child abuse and neglect on mental health and overall well-being in adult
life should not be overlooked. Experiencing any form of child maltreatment is associated with more than a
two-fold increase in risk for depression in adulthood, according to a systematic review and meta-analysis
of prospective longitudinal studies by Li, D’Arcy, and Meng (2016), while another meta-analysis of 10
clinical trials (with 3,098 participants) by Nanni, Uher, and Danese (2012) found that childhood
maltreatment is associated with lack of response during treatment for depression both for adults and
paediatric samples. Child abuse and neglect are also strongly predictive of an antisocial lifestyle in adult
life. Based on a nationally representative sample of 2,244 young Swedish adults, Howell and colleagues
(2017) showed how childhood experiences of physical assaults, neglect and witnessing family violence
Page 6 of 34
were significantly associated with adult criminal behaviour. The additive effects of childhood adversities
should also be recognized: adult offending is disproportionately prevalent among individuals with a high
risk-index score, based on the accumulation of their adverse childhood experiences (Craig et al. 2017).
Abused children tend to come from multi-problem families (Jaffee et al. 2007) and their complex risks and
needs should be considered within a developmental-ecological perspective when reflecting on strategies
that may promote resilience (Espinosa et al. 2017). Different factors may promote or impede resilient
functioning among abused children, and their complex difficulties need a multi-faceted and tailored
approach. Amongst physically abused children maternal support has been found to be associated with
lower levels of adult offending, while school expulsion exacerbated the relationship between childhood
abuse and offending, (Teague et al. 2008). Understanding what promotes resilient outcomes for abused
and neglected children is essential for the development of evidence-informed intervention strategies. A
recent systematic review of studies examining ways to foster resilient development for such children
highlighted the important mediating roles of emotion regulation, healthy relationships with caregivers
and academic engagement (Gartland et al. 2019). Evidence from both high- and low-income countries
underscores that families, schools and local authorities need to work collaboratively and with coordinated
responses (Goldman 2003; Bacchus et al. 2017).
Breaking cycles of interpersonal violence and abuse across family generations is also important. There is
extensive research on intergenerational continuity of child abuse and neglect (Thornberry, Knight and
Lovegrove 2013; Madigan et al. 2019). Thornberry and colleagues (2013), however, noted that studies
supporting the ‘cycle of maltreatment’ hypothesis (which posits continuity in maltreatment across
adjacent generations) were relatively weak methodologically, and more robust evaluations of the
hypothesis were needed to inform intervention programmes. Similarly, the meta-analysis by Madigan et
al. (2019) noted that whilst there was empirical support for the intergenerational transmission of
maltreatment, the methodologically stronger studies showed weaker effect sizes.
Since the 1990s, efforts to understand child maltreatment have emphasized the cultural variability of child
maltreatment: aspects of the cultural setting and culturally based childcare practices and beliefs within the
family help explain why different forms of child abuse are more or less likely to occur in different cultures
(Korbin 1994). In their book examining sixteen high- and low-income countries with different socio-
p. 356 political ↵ cultures, Schwartz-Kenney and colleagues (2001) provide a guide to the very different
historical and institutional frameworks into which concern about child maltreatment has been
assimilated. Global increases in emigration have contributed to diverse, multicultural societies in which
different beliefs and practices meet (and may conflict) There needs to be awareness of this context when
investigating cases of child abuse and neglect (Nadan, Spilsbury, and Korbin 2015). The study by Euser et
al. (2011) of child maltreatment prevalence amongst immigrant families in the Netherlands, for example,
was able to identify specific socio-economic factors needing constructive intervention for particular sub-
groups.
The disproportionate representation of ethnic minority children in child welfare systems is well
documented in many countries. In England children from black and mixed ethnic backgrounds are
particularly over-represented amongst ‘looked after children’ and those on child protection registers, and
the reasons for this are insufficiently understood (Owen and Statham 2009). A simple cause-and-effect
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relationship should not be assumed when reflecting on this finding. The disproportionate and disparate
representation of cultural, ethnic, and racial groups in child-welfare systems requires investigation
through a critical ecological perspective that touches, among other things, on issues of intersectionality
(Nadan et al. 2015).
In the UK, there have been also been cases of specific forms of child abuse and neglect that are directly
linked to cultural differences in parenting practices, including female genital mutilation (FGM) and child
marriages. FGM was made illegal throughout the UK by the Female Genital Mutilation Act (2003), and the
Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation (Scotland) Act 2005 (Mohammad 2005). Recently, there have
been calls to divert effort and funding away from criminal investigation (as cases are low in number) and
towards strengthening relationships with individuals, families, and communities who have abandoned the
practice, and supporting women and girls in the UK who have already been subjected to it (Creighton et al.
2019).
Efforts to understand, research and address issues of child abuse and neglect need continually to evolve as
new challenges and contexts of risk emerge. Contemporary examples have included the COVID-19
pandemic (Katz and Fallon 2022) and war conflicts (Olema et al. 2014) that at the time of writing include
Ukraine (Disability Rights International 2022).
Institutional violence and abuse
Prisons and Detention Centres

Prisons are expected to protect incarcerated individuals in a secure environment where all forms of
victimization—those perpetrated by staff or other prisoners—are minimized. However, empirical research
in the UK and elsewhere points to a different reality, with stark differences between prisons in perceived
fairness (Ryan and Bergin 2022), safety (Ismail and Forrester 2020), and in outcomes for prisoners,
including rates of violence (Steiner et al. 2017) and suicide (Liebling and Ludlow 2016). Wolff and
colleagues (2007: 588) observe that violence may be a product of the prison ‘ … because hundreds or
thousands of people with antisocial tendencies or behaviour are aggregated and confined in close and
frequently overcrowded quarters characterized by material and social deprivation’, but it is also notable
that rates of victimization vary markedly between institutions and may be altered by environmental
changes. Initial waves of scholarship, as reflected in older corrections policies, viewed prisons as places
p. 357 that ↵ should be unpleasant so as to deter future offending (Nagin 2013), although it is now clear that
poor physical conditions in prisons promote incidents of violence and hinder prosocial change among
prisoners (Bierie 2012). Conversely, improving the quality of prison life may reduce levels of violence (Skar
et al. 2019).
Violence in prisons remains prevalent, ranging from minor disturbances to incidents of serious injury.
Serious incidents of violence also form a multi-national challenge with calls for corresponding prison
reforms (Ismail and Forrester 2020; Wolff, Shi, and Siegel 2009b). A gendered difference established in
physical victimization is that when women are physically victimized, they are more likely to be involved in
inmate versus inmate violence, whereas men are more likely to be involved in inmate versus staff violence
Page 8 of 34
(Wolff, Shi, and Siegel 2009a). Bullying in prison has also long been recognized as a serious problem
(Ireland 2000), and has been implicated in the suicides of young offenders in the UK (Ireland 2012) and
other European countries (Blaauw, Winkel and Kerkof 2001). A recent systematic review of predictors of
prisoner victimization, based on US research published between 1980 and 2014, suggested that younger
prisoners were more likely to be violently victimized than older prisoners; and prisoners who held more
favourable views of staff were less likely to be violently victimized than inmates who held opposite views
(Steiner et al. 2017). This points to the importance of staff professionalism and their maintenance of good
quality relationships with prisoners (Crewe, Liebling, and Hulley 2015).
According to Ministry of Justice (MoJ) data, assaults in prisons in England and Wales have increased
substantially since 2010: by the end of March 2018, there had been 31,025 such recorded incidents in the
preceding twelve months, including both prisoner-on-prisoner and prisoner-on-staff assaults, a 52 per
cent increase since March 2010 (Ministry of Justice 2018); although more recent data (Ministry of Justice
2020) pointed towards a small decrease in the twelve months period to June 2020, with 27,742 assault
incidents. Some scholars have related the increase in violent incidents to the potential impact of the UK’s
economic austerity policies on prisoners’ safety and their access to purposeful activities, healthcare and
other services (Ismail 2020). Other challenges exist with regard to under-reporting of victimization, for
example in relation to sexual assaults in UK prisons. Measures of sexual assault within US prisons have
gradually become more reliable due to mandated reporting which was required by the 2003 Prison Rape
Elimination Act (National Institute of Justice 2014), along with the creation of uniform definitions of
sexual violence/assault (Walsh and Cwick 2018). Such a framework for standardized reporting does not
exist in the UK.
Challenges also exist with regard to elderly prisoners, a relatively neglected but growing population of
inmates within correctional systems who are particularly vulnerable to elder abuse (Stojkovic 2007).
Prison populations worldwide are aging at an unprecedented rate and the management of the elderly in
prison needs to address their high physical and mental health needs (Bavafa and Mukherjee 2019), their
adjustment to imprisonment, and their vulnerability to victimization (Psick et al. 2017). A recent
systematic review of programmes addressing the social care needs of older prisoners, indicated some
positive impacts on prisoners, although significant methodological shortcomings in the reviewed studies
were also noted (Lee et al. 2019). More research is also needed on the community re-entry of this
particularly vulnerable group, many of whom will have become isolated and stigmatized because of their
offences. The elderly prisoner ‘ … suffers a “double whammy”: the incarceration experience is much worse
for them by comparison to other prisoners and made even worse when released back into
communities’ (Stojkovic 2007: 98–99).
p. 358 ↵ Prisons are ‘ … unique social and moral environments whose characters and practices reflect broader
social patterns and have significant consequences for those detained in them’ (Crewe 2007: 123). Providing
offenders with opportunities for personal improvement remains a cornerstone of modern correctional
practice. Although support for rehabilitation declined from the 1960s to the mid-1990s, ‘ … rehabilitation
remains widely endorsed by citizens as an important function of the correctional system’ (Cullen, Fisher
and Applegate 2000: 47). Being sentenced to imprisonment can be traumatic, and the pains, harms and
victimization risks of imprisonment are well documented. However it has been argued that we should also
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recognize the possibility for prisoners of alternative narratives of positive identity reconstruction, and that
for some the prison can be a ‘reinventive institution’ (Crewe and Ievins 2020). The concept of post-
traumatic growth, further discussed later in this chapter, has also been examined in relation to prisoners,
whose self-reports indicate it is associated with experiencing empathy, positive regard, and genuineness
from prison staff. (Hearn, Joseph, and Fitzpatrick 2019)
Beyond the penal system, institutional abuse has been evident in sectors such as immigration detention. In
the UK, for example, a BBC documentary ‘Undercover: Britain’s Immigration Secrets’ transmitted on 4
September 2017 included serious allegations of ill-treatment of detainees at the Brook House immigration
removal centre at Gatwick Airport, leading to a public inquiry (UK Parliament 2019). Failures to maintain
minimum and equivalent standards of care for persons in immigration detention centres are well
documented in the UK and other European countries (van Hout 2021), the United States and Canada
(Becerra et al. 2022), and in Australia (Peterie 2018). The pains of imprisonment extend to this form of
incarceration. Immigration detention bears many similarities to ‘traditional’ penal rhetoric, and the
criminalization of migration can be viewed through the lens of postcolonial relations in a globalizing world
(Bosworth and Turnbull 2015). Migrant women have additional vulnerabilities, particularly those who are
young, those who are pregnant, and those who are single and travelling with children. There is concern
that they are inadequately protected by existing human rights frameworks (van Hout 2022).
Hospitals and care homes

The abuse of individuals receiving care in institutions is not a new phenomenon (Stanley, Manthorpe, and
Penhale 1999). Despite the different purposes of sites of residential provision—including prisons, and care
homes and hospitals in which people may be detained—they share a potential to be locations of
victimization. They are linked not only through powers to deprive the individual of liberty (Read,
Santatzoglu, and Wrigley 2018), but also ‘ … through the conscious and unconscious delivery of harm,
punishment, and pain which is underpinned by a corrosive process of depersonalization and corruption of
care’ (Carlton and Sim 2018: 61). Whilst one of the major achievements of public inquiries in health and
social care settings has been to bring detailed accounts of the experiences of some of the most stigmatized
and socially excluded groups to the forefront of public awareness (Stanley and Manthorpe 2004), in
psychiatric hospitals in England and Wales, patients, their families, and others who attempted to speak out
regarding their concerns, have been dismissed and silenced, both historically and contemporarily (Speed
2017).
In residential settings serious victimization and abuse can be a consequence of institutional ideologies,
cultures, and routine practices rather than intentionally malicious acts by deviant individual employees.
Institutions whose ostensible purpose is to offer care provide important examples because within them
p. 359 suffering and inhumane treatment ↵ can be inflicted by those who believe they are providing benefit to
others. At the end of his searing essay, Scenes from Institutional Life, reflecting on his experience in hospital
as a teenager, the late John Vaizey wrote: ‘ … it is important to learn that within each one of us, especially
the dedicated, cruelty, insensitivity and stupidity clamour for expression. The evil that men do lives after
them in the lives of others. And nowhere is this more true than in institutions for the care of
others’ (Vaizey 1986: 88).
Page 10 of 34
Marginalized groups are particularly vulnerable in this regard. The stigma of mental disorder can still
result in vulnerable individuals being feared when ‘ … people with mental health problems are usually
portrayed as dangerous, aggressive individuals who need to be isolated to protect and safeguard the
interests of society’ (Williams and Keating 1999: 133). Despite such public misconceptions, evidence
suggests that the more salient risk is criminal victimization of, rather than by, people with mental illness.
Teplin et al. 2005 reported that over a quarter of those with severe mental illness residing in the
community in Chicago are victims of violent crime in the course of a year, a rate eleven times higher than
that of the general population. Those admitted to mental health services are also at risk. They can be
subjected to abuses of professional power (Williams and Keating 2000; Husum, Pedersen, and Aasland
2022), and to criminal victimization that is relatively hidden (Ellison and Berzins 2019) and poorly
responded to (Galpin and Parker 2007). The recurrent scandals of neglect and ill-treatment in the UK’s
long-stay psychiatric hospitals during the mid-decades of the last century, and the ‘corruption of care’
they exemplified, were documented by Martin (1984). Examples continue to the present day of psychiatric
units that have to be closed for similar reasons (Care Quality Commission 2021).
Research relating to victimization in mental health care settings highlights two themes that emerge from
the other contexts of victim experience discussed in this chapter, namely the importance of their narrative
voices, and the influence of the relationships that staff establish with those who are detained. A review of
research focusing on patients’ experiences of the process of psychiatric detention found that fear, distress
and powerlessness were frequent themes (Akther et al. 2019). It also appeared that the negative impacts
could be mitigated by staff striving to be caring and collaborative; and a recent substantial systematic
review (Staniszewska et al. 2019) identified four dimensions related to influencing in-patients’
experiences of crisis and recovery-focused care, namely: high-quality relationships; averting negative
experiences of coercion; a safe and enabling environment; and authentic experiences of care that was
patient-centred. Specifically, ‘critical elements for patients were trust, respect, safe wards, information
and explanation about clinical decisions, therapeutic activities, and family inclusion in care’ (ibid: 329).
Institutional abuse is also reflected in survivor narratives from foster-care institutions. A recent Austrian
study comparing a community sample with those who had been in Viennese foster care institutions as
children found both higher levels of reported maltreatment and higher prevalence of psychiatric morbidity
amongst the adults who had been in foster care (Lueger-Schuster et al. 2018).
Orphanages, foster care homes and related residential institutions with severe psychosocial deficiencies
and where children have experienced severe deprivation have been shown to have adverse effects on child
psychosocial development (MacLean 2003), with post-institutionalized children being at higher risk of
behavioural problems than non-adopted children reared in their birth families and children adopted from
non-institutional settings (Merz and McCall 2010; Rutter et al. 2007).
Harms are not confined to obviously adverse environments. Powerful contemporary institutions, including
p. 360 universities and colleges, can also operate in ways that contribute ↵ to traumatic experiences for
individuals who are dependent on them for safety. Such failures of prevention, response and support, and
their mental health consequences, have been characterized as ‘institutional betrayal’ (Smith and Freyd
2014; Wright, Smith, and Freyd 2017).
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Amongst the many examples of institutional ill-treatment that have been highlighted in recent years, the
case of mother and baby homes in Ireland is of particular note. In February 2015 the Irish Government
established a Commission of Inquiry into the treatment of women and their children admitted to mother
and baby homes during the period from 1922 to 1998. The Final Inquiry Report was published over five
years later (Irish Government 2020). Some of the homes were run by local health authorities; most of the
others by Roman Catholic church organizations. About 56,000 unmarried women were admitted, with the
highest rates in the 1960s and 1970s. The women were sometimes destitute, often rejected, and had no
alternative support. The infant mortality rate in the homes was very high and about 9000 children—15 per
cent of the total—died. Children were also used in unethical vaccine trials without parental consent. Within
the institutions women suffered denigration and emotional abuse. The extent to which the report
adequately and accurately described their experience has been contested: after its publication there was
criticism and dismay that testimonies—which included experiences of coercion, physical abuse and forced
adoption—had not been conveyed. The debate illustrated that the transmission of survivor narratives may
not be straightforward: it has been argued that the narrative structure of the Commission of Inquiry report
reflected a cultural defensiveness that muted the voices of the women who suffered (Condon 2021).
Institutional betrayal, and experience of fear and distress, are often felt by the elderly in institutional
settings (Erlingsson, Saveman and Berg 2005). A recent systematic review and meta-analysis by Yon et al.
(2019), found that prevalence estimates for subtypes of abuse reported by elderly residents in care facilities
were highest for psychological abuse (33.4 per cent), followed by physical (14.1 per cent), financial (13.8 per
cent), neglect (11.6 per cent), and sexual forms of abuse (1.9 per cent). Nearly two thirds of staff (64.2 per
cent) admitted to elder abuse in the past year. As previously noted, this should not lead to the inference
that abuse is to be understood in terms of individual deviance. Rather than blaming individuals, older
people have identified institutional structures (for example, the way health systems are organized) as
responsible for their experiences of abuse and neglect, both in the UK (Mysyuk et al. 2015) and Ireland (O’
Donovan 2009). There is a need to identify the organizational factors associated with abuse and to
recognize that, ‘ … care quality is produced systemically and that it can collapse as a result of seemingly
minor and unrelated organizational changes’ (Hyde et al. 2014: 197).
Developing Themes
Voices and power

As indicated above, research has made significant contributions to the understanding of victim
experiences of the criminal justice system and other settings. The contributions in the criminal justice field
have included recommendations for improvements in access to information, investigation and
prosecution, victim compensation, and victim support services (Miers 2019; Brooks and Burman 2017;
Carrington et al. 2021). These should be applicable to all victims, without discrimination of any kind (on
p. 361 the basis of ↵ race, colour, sex, age, language, religion, nationality, political or other opinion, cultural
beliefs or practices, property, birth or family status, ethnic or social origin, and disability). Nevertheless,
criminal justice policies still fail, in the twenty-first century, to meet victims’ rights, as well as to
understand the importance of solidarity networks supporting survivors and their narratives, especially
Page 12 of 34
those related to gender violence. Criminal justice responses to sexual violence have also long been
criticized for either failing or further victimizing complainants (Metzger 2017). A recent Canadian study
for example suggest that even sex crime investigators are critical of the present criminal justice response
to sexual violence and are doubtful of its ability to provide a semblance of justice to the majority of victims
(Spencer et al. 2018).
The victims’ movement and the rise of the victim’s point of view increasingly play a visible role not only in
prosecution, but more importantly in crime prevention (Hansen-Löfstrand 2009). The move towards
viewing crime victims from a survivor perspective rather than a vulnerability perspective (Walker et al.
2021; Friel and Kilcommins 2018) has given voice to victims and enabled their participatory role in criminal
justice. Such developments, particularly those that have focused on supporting survivors of gender
violence, have made significant contributions, and have shown some impact at the practice level in the
frontline of criminal justice policies.
The #MeToo movement has extended and deepened recognition of sexual violence suffered by women in
diverse contexts all over the world. Since the concept was first used in 2006 and further spread in 2017,
thousands of women of different ages, nationalities, ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, religions,
ideologies, and professions have taken to social media to break their silence on the sexual abuse and
harassment they have suffered. The movement has shed light on the fact that many victims do not report
what they have experienced and remain silent for years. As a response to this silence, the #MeToo
movement appears to have led to an unprecedented empowering of victims of sexual violence and created
empathy and solidarity towards them by making victims visible (Alaggia and Wang 2020). The #MeToo
movement has also shown how many victims want offenders to go beyond acknowledgement, and to
accept responsibility for having caused harm; and to some extent the #MeToo movement also intersects
with principles of restorative justice (Wexler and Robbennolt 2018).
The primary concern in this engagement with restorative justice is not to harden criminal justice policies
and attitudes towards offenders. Rather, it is to challenge impunity towards offenders and reduce
revictimization of survivors, while solidarity networks are also protected. The latter point is important: on
18 December 2020, for the first time worldwide, the Catalan Parliament in Spain unanimously approved
legislation on ‘Isolating Gender Violence’ (IGV) that recognized the victimization suffered by supporters of
victims of sexual violence (Vidu, Tomás and Flecha 2022). This development is further discussed below.
Although this was not penal or sentencing legislation, it did entail the first legal recognition that gender
violence included attacks against those engaged in helping and supporting victims, as envisaged in the
1985 UN Declaration described above.
Solidarity networks and the role of supportive bystanders in crime control (Shotland and Goldstein 1984)
are evidenced in the way victims’ rights have been conceptualised within a restorative justice perspective
(Bazelon and Green 2019), although it should be acknowledged that the relationship between the
emergence of a strong victim’s rights movement and the emergence of restorative justice is nuanced and
complex (Richards 2009). The importance of supportive bystanders in preventing crime and supporting
p. 362 victims has been recognized in bystander education programmes for preventing school ↵ violence
(Lodge and Frydenberg 2005), workplace bullying (Pouwelse et al. 2021), and other types of crime
including gender violence (Banyard et al. 2004; Nicksa 2014).
Page 13 of 34
The #MeToo movement has additionally highlighted the issue of second order sexual harassment, with
many describing how those who support victims of gender-based violence experience violence themselves
because of this positioning (Flecha 2021; Melgar <https://paperpile.com/c/OP0jWU/bAzQ> et al. 2021).
Although it would be generally agreed that all citizens should support victims, in reality only a few do so,
and they may receive diverse attacks that seriously affect their own lives and the lives of their families and
friends. Victims of direct gender violence who succeed as survivors may have had support that many other
victims do not have. The struggles that friends, family, and partners encounter when a loved one is
sexually assaulted are well documented in the relatively limited literature on ‘secondary survivors’. Their
experiences should also be acknowledged, and there have been calls to extend support systems to them as
well as the direct victims of sexual abuse (Clevenger and Navarro 2017).
Institution based initiatives are also relevant. Prior to the developments in Spain noted above, the
1
‘Solidarity Network of Victims of Gender Violence in Universities’ was established , with support and
recognition from the Spanish Observatory of Gender Violence, providing victims with a safe space to access
the help and support they need as survivors. This is one of the networks that participated in the main
scientific studies on gender violence conducted in Spain. Its contributions to these studies were carried out
with the communicative methodology, oriented to co-creation, that is now a priority of Horizon Europe
(European Commission 2018). The research resulting from this co-creation and the contributions of the
network led to the above mentioned approval by the Catalan Parliament of the first legal action in 2020
that extended the definition of a victim to include those who receive attacks due to helping and supporting
victims of gender violence (Vidu et al. 2021). This was followed by formal legal recognition of the new
terminology of IGV by three more Spanish parliaments and the parliament of Brazil.
Since then, research conducted on IGV has had further scientific, political, and social impacts that
contribute to empowering primary survivors of sexual violence and their support networks. Recent
research on IGV by Aubert and Flecha (2021) has also highlighted how the health outcomes for primary
victims can be impacted by the victimization suffered by those who support them.
Making IGV visible in the media can have positive consequences in helping victims break the silence.
Pulido and colleagues (2021) have underscored the social impact of ‘Voices against Silence’, a documentary
on sexual harassment which received the Golden Globe Award at the 2018 World Media Festival, Hamburg.
By analysing citizens’ voices on social media and engaging in dialogues with people who were positively
affected by the documentary, the study showed how it had social impact in contributing to overcoming re-
victimization and IGV.
Public knowledge of crime and justice is largely derived from the media, which play a key role in the social
perception of offenders, victims and those who work within the criminal justice system (Marsh and
Merville 2014). These perceptions are often inflated (Jewkes 2014). Social media platforms run the same
risks of misrepresentation of criminal justice issues, with the added risks of cybervictimization of their
users (Salter 2016) as well as promotion of desire for vengeance and encouragement of vigilante attitudes
p. 363 ↵ and behaviour (Fox 2014). Nevertheless, social media platforms and social networking have also had
a constructive role in promoting social revolutions (Kidd and McIntosh 2016) by enabling users to raise
awareness of important social problems thus validating their lived experiences.
Page 14 of 34
Psychology and trauma

Clinical studies of the psychological consequences that can result from experiencing trauma and
overwhelming threat have a long and complex history (van der Kolk, Weisaeth, and van der Hart 1996;
Herman 2015). One theme that these authors have traced in this history is the gradual recognition that
widely differing contexts of traumatic experience can lead to recognizably similar effects.
In the nineteenth century psychiatrists began to recognize associations between psychological trauma and
hysteria, the clinical name then given to conditions in which patients, mainly women, presented with
apparent symptoms of physical illness but without clear evidence of an underlying physical diagnosis. In
the early years of the twentieth century, thousands of men who served in World War I were observed to
show symptoms similar to those of hysteria and for which the diagnostic term ‘shell shock’ was first used
in 1915. During the Second World War interest in these effects was revived, particularly through the work
of an American psychiatrist, Abram Kardiner, whose book, The Traumatic Neuroses of War, (1941)
meticulously described much of the phenomenology later recognized in the diagnosis of post-traumatic
stress disorder. A later phase of work leading to the contemporary diagnostic concept of post-traumatic
stress disorder followed the Vietnam War. From the 1970s onwards there was also pioneering work by
Burgess and Holstrom (1974) on the effects on women of traumatic experiences of sexual assault and
domestic violence, recording symptoms that had been previously described in the literature on war
neuroses. The clinical diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), defining the symptom clusters
that could follow experiences of extreme threat, was first incorporated into the Third Edition of the
American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980 (APA 1980).
Saporta and van der Kolk (1992) suggested that widely differing contexts of traumatic experience can lead
to a similar clinical picture because traumatic events share four common features: they are inescapable
and overwhelming; they threaten individuals’ basic assumptions about themselves and their world; they
rupture attachments to others; and they may cause extreme physiological arousal leading to a persistent
hyper-vigilance and sense of threat.
Three key themes characterize more recent developments in the field of psychological trauma research.
First, there has been better recognition of the limitations of the diagnostic concept of PTSD which is more
apt for describing the effects of single catastrophic events experienced by adults than for describing effects
of chronic or repeated traumatic experience, or for describing the later effects of childhood traumatic
experience. The latest edition of International Classification of Diseases—ICD-11 (World Health
Organisation 2019)—now includes a new diagnostic category of ‘complex post-traumatic stress
disorder’ (6B41) reflecting the recognition that prolonged or repetitive trauma can primarily alter beliefs
about the self, regulation of emotions, and close relations with others. Allied to this development, the
increasing body of research within victimology on poly-victimization has enabled researchers to move
from a simplistic notion of single victimization events (Finkelhor et al. 2009) and towards a more nuanced
understanding of the link between multiple adverse events and trauma symptomatology,
p. 364 ↵ particularly amongst individuals involved with the criminal justice system (Yoder et al. 2019). Those
working with victims need to be aware of the complex effects of polyvictimization that require a holistic
rather than narrowly focused approach (Lussier et al. 2016). It is also important to remember that the
Page 15 of 34
range of mental health problems that may follow victimization extends beyond PTSD: for example, data
from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey in England indicate that a third of women who attempted
suicide had experienced intimate partner violence in the preceding year (McManus et al. 2022).
Secondly, the growing body of research in neuroscience, psychology, and medicine has included a renewed
focus on the neurobiological effects of traumatic experience. (See for example: Brewin and Holmes 2003;
Fitzgerald, DiGangi, and Phan 2018; Pitman et al. 2012; Polimant and Wendt 2021; Tsur et al. 2018; Tull and
Kimbrell 2020; van der Kolk 2015). In criminology, biosocial research to date has paid most attention to
offenders and the explanation of criminal conduct (Wright and Cullen, 2012). Less attention has been paid
to the victim and there is scope for biosocial criminology to contribute more to the understanding of
victimization and its prevention (Posick, Lasko, and Tremblay 2018).
Thirdly, in line with the political and social movements towards empowerment and solidarity noted above,
there has also been a constructive turn in the field of trauma research with more attention being focused
on understanding resilience (Horn and Feder 2018) and the possibilities of ‘post-traumatic growth’, a
concept that avoids the alternative connotations of pathology or recovery but sets a space for agency and
transformative change as people seek to rebuild their lives and their view of themselves after traumatic
experience (Aspinwall and Tedeschi 2010; Calhoun and Tedeschi 2014; Schubert, Schmidt, and Rosner
2016). These themes were echoed in the proposal by Green, Calverley, and O’Leary (2021) for a new
framework for victims research that recognizes resilience and ways in which personal strength and
development underpin it. A wider discussion on victimization experiences based on post-traumatic change
is also to be welcomed (Roebuck et al. 2022) since this concept may be more applicable to the dynamic
processes that victims and survivors can experience, and which can be difficult to frame within a language
centred exclusively on concepts of stress or growth.
Harms of injustice
A challenging issue for the field of victimology is the extent to which the concept of victimhood reaches
beyond victims of crime. In the context of transitional justice McEvoy and McConnachie (2012) have
cautioned against a politics that views the victim as the ‘binary opposite’ of the criminal, with innocence
being seen as a necessary attribute for victimhood: ‘To require victims to cleave to the notion of innocence
is, in our view, a politically invidious approach to victimhood that factors blame in the calibration of
human suffering and inevitably results in the morally corrosive language of victim hierarchies’ (ibid.: 535).
Hearty (2021) explored this insight further in his study of the narratives of individuals who were wrongly
convicted of bombings carried out by the Provisional IRA in the UK during the time of the ‘Troubles’ in
Northern Ireland. Their accounts showed the complexity of their framing of blaming and victimhood. They
described awareness of culpability that was not only attributed to state actors but also to themselves
because of the suffering experienced by those who supported them. They described awareness of
p. 365 victimhood that extended beyond their own experience and that they saw in those ↵ harmed by the
offences of which they had been wrongly convicted, and in their own families who were secondary victims
of their notoriety.
Page 16 of 34
The harms reported in narrative accounts of those who have suffered miscarriages of justice are described
in the limited research literature on the psychological effects of wrongful conviction. A systematic review
by Brooks and Greenberg (2021), that additionally included studies of people wrongly accused of criminal
offences, indicated that consequences were complex and could be severe and long lasting. These included
alterations in self-identity; stigma; impaired personal and family relationships; adjustment difficulties;
adverse social and financial impacts; and a range of psychiatric conditions including depression, PTSD,
and personality change. Hoyle and Tilt (2018) aptly applied Goffman’s (1963) concept of ‘spoiled
identities’ to the experience of the wrongly convicted. They have been harmed by the state and need a
distinctive resettlement framework to rebuild connections and social capital.
Grounds (2005, 2017) noted that the psychiatric conditions experienced by many wrongly convicted
individuals after release were not evident in their histories before arrest and imprisonment; and the family
and adjustment difficulties that became manifest after the return home were similar to those that have
been described in the literature on war veterans. The complex forms of post-traumatic experience needed
a treatment approach that focused not only on PTSD and depressive symptoms, but also the longer term
re-establishment of secure interpersonal relationships.
A question that remains unanswered in the absence of a well-designed comparative study is the extent to
which these harms are unique to the wrongly convicted or shared with other convicted prisoners. For the
wrongly convicted and the rightly convicted alike, long term imprisonment entails disruption of the
expected life course, loss of personal and family relationships, and adaption to prison life in ways that may
be maladaptive after release. The challenges to self-identity and maintaining hope for the future are
profound (Crewe, Hulley, and Wright 2020).
A wrongful conviction is also a distinctive failure of justice, and a breach of legitimacy. One of the pervasive
themes in the accounts of the wrongly convicted is the disillusion and enduring mistrust they developed as
a consequence of the formal failure of justice. Initially, after the unexpected shock of arrest and criminal
charge, their belief that they could rely on the criminal justice system for release after arrest, or at least by
acquittal at trial, was preserved. But confidence was progressively lost in the police, then the trial court,
lawyers, and sometimes even the appeal process. When convictions are eventually quashed as being
unsafe, there is formal recognition of error, but this does not reverse or mitigate the loss of perceived
legitimacy because there is usually no official statement of innocence, no apology, and subsequently those
who the individual considers responsible for the miscarriage of justice are not held to account. The typical
experience of the wrongly convicted is that the arrest, conviction, and sentence, and the irreversible losses
they suffered, lacked a justified purpose. Nor was there adequate remedy; nor could their previous lives be
restored.
Bottoms and Tankebe (2013) note the recognition by Lucas (1980) that the nature of justice may be
examined by focusing on injustice. Lucas observed that justice is concerned not only with the
consequences of actions but their significance and personal meaning. Injustice, he suggested, not only
hurts but insults and to understand injustice properly it should be construed as an affront that belittles the
worth of the person who suffers it. The conceptually appropriate response is indignation, which expresses
‘ … a sense of not being regarded as worthy of consideration’. (Lucas 1980:7). This precisely conveys how
many of the wrongly convicted felt.
Page 17 of 34
p. 366 ↵ The role of social media platforms in exposing miscarriages of justice is not extensively researched
(Savage et al. 2007), although they are a potentially important avenue for campaigners to challenge state
authorities and court decisions (Lev-On and Steinfeld 2020). They can give voice to the wrongly convicted
and their families, and enable media campaigns against alleged miscarriages of justice that ‘ … act (at least
up to a point) as “extra-judicial”, “extra-legal”, “non-governmental” or “unofficial” sources of
influence over the machineries of law-enforcement and criminal justice’ (Savage et al. 2007: 85). New
online communities have the potential to challenge the operation of the criminal justice system, as
evidenced in recent miscarriage of justice campaigns, such as the Exposed Facebook group in relation to
the controversial murder conviction of Keli Lane in Australia (Childs et al. 2020), and the innocence
campaign in support of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, convicted for the murder of Meredith Kercher
in Italy (Gies 2017).
Despite the promise of social media as platforms for orchestrating collective action, it has to be recognized
that not all cases of real injustice will be perceived as meriting attention. As Savage and colleagues (2007:
95) note: ‘ … it was more likely that the media would be attracted to a case such as the Sally Clark case, a
middle-class solicitor wrongfully convicted for killing her two babies … than to the plight of someone like
Stephen Downing, a working-class teenager convicted for murder and who had to wait 19 years for his
conviction to be quashed … Justice campaigns can vary in the extent to which they are able to capture
media interest according to the newsworthiness of their case.’.
Conclusion
The internet has transformed many of our lives, with most of us constantly moving between the physical
and cyber space. The internet’s intersection with victimization is now recognized in the expanding field of
cybervictimology (Halder 2021). Harm, as experienced by victims, has also been acknowledged as a major
component in the definition of cybercrime (Walls 2008).
The growing attention paid to survivor narratives and voices enables victimology to ‘ … move from
defining victimological experience in the terms of justice institutions, to understanding (criminal) justice
processes in the way they are encountered by victims as an element of their unfolding
narrative’ (Pemberton et al. 2019b: 401).
Moreover, survivor narratives, and the recognition of harms that are not confined to crime victims, attest
to a victimology that is centrally concerned with understanding the experience of suffering. Suffering is a
concept that is less explored in other domains of criminology, and there is an arguable case for change in
this regard. In the context of research on offenders, suffering is implicit in some of the recognized
antecedents and risk factors for offending identified in longitudinal studies—poor family attachments,
harsh parental discipline, and child victimization, for example. And in context of criminal justice research
the suffering that justice systems impose may be masked by the language of penology.
The possibility of suffering providing an integrative concept for criminology merits discussion, insofar as
it connects our understanding of victimization, offending and the operation of criminal justice. It is also
embedded in the histories of colonialism that have shaped the criminological field (Aliverti et al. 2021). The
concept deserves more theoretical and empirical study than it has received. It also suggests a moral
Page 18 of 34
p. 367 purpose ↵ for research and policy. If suffering is intrinsic to the causes of offending, the effects of
offending, and to the operations of criminal justice, the aim should be to minimize it to the greatest extent
possible in each of these three domains.

Interested readers can find more extensive and comprehensive reviews of topics within the field of victimology by
looking at Daigle and Muftic (2019); Doerner and Lab (2020); Hilinski-Rosick and Lee (2018); Shapland and Hall 2015;
and Walklate (2017). A systematic review of the psychological impact of wrongful accusations is provided by Brooks
and Greenberg (2021). Systematic evidence regarding the intergenerational transmission of child maltreatment is
presented in the meta-analytic work of Madigan and colleagues (2019). A critical analysis of the potential role of social
media in promoting social revolutions is presented in Castells’ work (2015), with further reflections on the role of the
#MeToo movement in the work of Alaggia and Wang (2020).
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The publisher is grateful to the United Nations for text extracts from the Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for
Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power.
Notes
1
For more information, visit the network’s official website (https://redsolidariadevictimasvdgunis.blog <https://
redsolidariadevictimasvdgunis.blog>) and Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/RedSolidariaVGU <https://
www.facebook.com/RedSolidariaVGU>).
Related Links
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17. Feminist criminology: Inequalities, powerlessness, and justice

p. 375 17. Feminist criminology: Inequalities, powerlessness, and justice
Michele Burman and Loraine Gelsthorpe
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0017
Abstract
This chapter addresses complexities and continuing concerns in thinking about feminist perspectives and contributions to
criminology. It charts feminist contributions to criminology over time, dwelling on paradigmatic shifts in substantive,
epistemological, and methodological terms, and the ways in which feminism has transformed criminological research and
practice. The chapter explores contemporary feminist research agendas focused on issues of powerlessness, justice, and
inequality, addressing research on violence against women, digital technology, human trafficking, migration, and criminal
justice. The notion of feminist criminology as a transitional phase towards a more humanistic stance in relation to crime and
justice in a globalized context is also explored.
Keywords: gender, feminism, feminist criminology, inequalities, justice
Introduction
This chapter charts the history of feminist contributions to criminology, dwelling in particular on a range
of paradigmatic shifts which have extended both the terrain of feminist criminological theorizing and
understanding of knowledge forms. It examines the diversity of feminisms that have emerged, and the
extent to which feminist criminology has transformed criminological research, teaching and practice. A
key theme is ‘inequality before the law’ and what this means in terms of promoting and delivering justice
on the ground.
We begin with a review of the ways in which early feminist scholarship reshaped the contours of
criminology and discuss contemporary ways of ‘doing feminism’. We examine feminist methodological
debates, and modes of knowledge production, including research on women who come into conflict with
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the law. This is followed by an exploration of contemporary feminist research agendas focused on issues of
powerlessness, justice and inequality, exemplified here by research on violence against women including
femicide, digital technology, and human trafficking, migration, and criminal justice. The final substantive
section of the chapter discusses influencing politics and practice and the evolution of a feminist praxis. We
conclude by considering the future prospects for feminism in criminology as it transitions towards a more
humanist stance in relation to crime and justice.
Feminist Contributions: Reshaping the Contours of Criminology
As in other academic disciplines, women and girls had been systematically excluded from criminological
studies. Feminist criminology emerged from the 1970s onwards amidst what is recognized as a second
p. 376 wave of feminism. It set out to challenge some ↵ of the gender-blind assumptions inherent within
criminology at that time and to create space for women’s experiences and voices. Early feminist
criminologists began to highlight the biases in criminological theorizing and emphasize the importance of
women’s voices in research (Smart 1976) whilst trying to shift the theoretical and empirical agendas
towards an acknowledgement that crime is a male-dominated activity. Early work questioned the neglect
of women in criminology and dominant unreflective thinking about sex role stereotypes, and began to
explain more systematically how the experiences of women and girls were similar to, and different from,
those of the men and boys who had been the focus of most research.
Carol Smart’s Women, Crime and Criminology (1976) had resounding impact on new generations of
criminologists and established a ground-breaking agenda. Thereafter, almost every textbook contained an
obligatory reference to women, if not a chapter on women in their own right. In a percipient conclusion to
the text, Smart wrote at the time:
Criminology and the sociology of deviance must become more than the study of men and crime if
it is to play any significant part in the development of our understanding of crime, law, and the
criminal process and play any role in the transformation of existing social practices. (Smart 1976:
185)
Of course, the relationship between ‘feminism’ and ‘criminology’ is a complex one, for there is no one
‘feminism’ and no one ‘criminology’; at best we might argue that we can speak only of feminist
criminologies or feminist perspectives. Criminology has changed over time and is now much more diverse,
although whether it is sufficiently diverse or open enough to accommodate the critical precepts of
feminism, remains a matter of contemporary debate. Certainly, there are feminist critics who have made a
strong case for abandoning criminology or who, because of resistance to a feminist transformation of the
discipline, see fundamental incompatibilities between feminism and criminology (Smart 1990). Smart’s
original concern was that criminology would be ‘unmoved’ by feminist critiques (bearing in mind that she
was writing in the mid-1970s when male-dominated ‘radical’ and critical perspectives in criminology
were emerging with some force but took little note of the power of patriarchy and gendered discourses).
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The range of feminist work in criminology has been extraordinarily wide—from empirical studies to
theoretical developments of women and crime and, indeed, some of the most important critiques, and
insights of feminist criminology have emerged from spirited debates amongst feminist scholars
themselves (see Gelsthorpe and Morris 1990; Rafter and Heidensohn 1995).
Feminism has been central to reorienting the criminological preoccupation with sex as a key differential
for understanding crime patterns and rates, involvement in crime, and victimization experiences, to one
focused more on gender. Early phases of work can be termed: Doing Gender which involved an early critique
of criminological theory and which, by the 1990s, developed into a consideration of how gender shaped
crime and the responses to it; and Doing Difference which drew attention to women and girls as victims and
offenders, and how this was reflected in criminal justice practices in what we might describe, respectively,
as a substantive and a political project. Later phases of work, Doing Feminism, have been influenced by third
and fourth wave feminism, and emphasize intersectionality and activism.
Doing gender
Questioning the neglect of women within criminology, this early feminist criminological work drew
attention to the continuance of sexist assumptions from Lombroso onwards. The focus of this critique was
p. 377 limited, however. Some scholars assumed that a ↵ remedy to male-centred criminological theories and
criminal justice deficiencies could be achieved by ‘inserting’ women, whether this be discovering ‘girl
gangs’ or considering girls in relation to sub-cultural theory. This soon came to be questioned. Later work
called for a close consideration of masculinity and the social construction of ‘maleness’ and the
development of more critical conceptions of gender and its relationship to crime.
West and Zimmerman proposed that women and men engage in gendered practices (i.e. ‘do gender’) in
response to situated social hierarchies and expectations about masculinity and femininity, thus
contributing to the reproduction of social structure (1987: 147). Within criminology, ‘doing gender’
became an influential perspective following arguments that for many men, crime serves as a ‘resource’ for
doing gender’ (Messerschmidt 1993: 84), and that different crimes are useful for demonstrating
masculinity depending on men’s social structural positions across axes of race and class. Of central
importance is the idea that masculinity can be seen as a crucial point of intersection of different forms of
power, stratification, and identity formation. Together with recognition of gender as a configuration of
practices within a system of gender relations (Connell 1995: 84), this work has been particularly
significant in articulating an account of gender as a dynamic and shifting system of social practices.
Conceptualizing gender as ‘situated action’ recognizes the existence of multiple masculinities and
femininities constructed across different situational contexts and social/structural positions (revealing
different hierarchies) rather than one fixed and determined set of gender roles (Connell 1995).
Feminist theoretical work on the social construction of gender and on concepts and practices of gender
converged with this work to (re)assert the crucial role and enactment of (male) power, leading to a
paradigm shift in thinking about gender and gender inequality. Perhaps most importantly, drawing
attention to the contingent nature of gender and the social processes through which it is enacted,
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mediated, and accomplished, gender as social practice also allowed for a theorization of the relationship
between agency and structural inequalities such as race, class, and age and, the role of agency in resistance
and social change.
Doing difference
Early feminist scholars also introduced a substantive political project into criminology which involved
striving for formal ‘equality’ (that is, for women to be treated as equals to men), although this early,
limited liberal feminist position gradually also came to be challenged by those who questioned the
meaning and nature of equality (MacKinnon 1987; Smart 1990). Dominant strands in feminist thinking
and research here, nevertheless, illuminated discriminatory practices. Informal controls over women and
girls were exposed in the home, at school and at work. Attention was drawn to correspondences between
the policing of everyday life and policing through more formal mechanisms of social control producing
nuanced research on the different ways in which ‘conformity’ was being reproduced (Gelsthorpe 1989).
The treatment of women in the courts also drew attention, with the conclusion that the widely assumed
concept of ‘chivalry’ was misplaced and that women who did not occupy an appropriate gender role were
seen as ‘doubly deviant’ (Edwards 1984; Gelsthorpe and Loucks 1997; Worrall 1990). A focus on women’s
prisons revealed outdated, outmoded, and gender-insensitive discourses and practices. Although Pat
Carlen disavowed the label of ‘feminist’, her skilled analysis of regimes in women’s prisons produced the
memorable phrase that ‘women’s prisons infantalize, feminize, medicalize, and domesticize their
occupants’ (1985: 182). Women and girls’ confinement was revealed to be shaped by powerful and
pervasive ideologies about femininity and the ‘proper place of women’ (Gelsthorpe 1989; Worrall 1990).
p. 378 Doing feminism

Whilst second wave feminism dominated early feminist criminology, third wave feminism, largely seen as
emerging from the mid–late 1990s, and the later fourth wave feminism dating from the early 2010s,
signalled an opening up of feminism—beyond the academy, beyond activist spheres—to engage more
publicly in a refreshing celebration of the multiplicity of ways of ‘doing feminism’. Less constrained by
earlier feminist ideals, and more embracing of diversity and individuality, third and fourth wave feminist
research and praxis, respectively, is informed by iconoclastic inter-disciplinary thinking and social media
activism. The influence of the third and fourth wave can be discerned in relation to work on gendered
violence, for example, in developments regarding intersectionality, and on the impact of criminal justice
on those who cross identities.
Developing from a critique of feminism as predominantly focused on the experiences of white women
which overlooked the challenges faced by women of colour, third wave feminism contested the
universalization of women’s issues and argued for analysis of the ways in which gender inequality
intersects with multiple other dimensions of inequality (Collins 1990; Collins and Bilge 2016). A key aim
was to understand how cross-cutting systems of oppression (of race, class, gender, nation, sexuality,
ableism and age) intersect to mutually shape each other and mediate experience (Crenshaw 1991; Healy
and Colliver 2022). This enabled the meaningful incorporation of race, class and gender as analytical tools,
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as exemplified in work on black women’s experiences of criminal justice (Chigwada-Bailey 1997).

Intersectionality is a much-travelled concept (Patil 2013) but is rooted in US Black feminist theory and in
critical race theory. It claims that people are affected by their racial and gender identities but, importantly,
these, and other identities, mutually intersect and affect each other. Intersectionality emphasizes race-
related structural oppression, as well as the mutually constitutive role that community, place and culture,
context, and power relationships can play in reproducing oppression. An intersectional approach is
complementary to feminist criminology’s longstanding commitment to deconstructing criminology’s
embedded politics (Henne and Troshynski 2013). Consideration of interlocking systems of oppression is
now a crucial part of feminist theorization, and an intersectional lens is increasingly used to examine and
explain how intersecting social identities mediate crime and experiences of victimization (Walker et al.
2019) and to engage critically in how justice systems both embody and perpetuate existing social
inequalities (Healy and Colliver 2022). Whilst there is a growing body of criminological research informed
by the intersectionality paradigm, exploring the multiplicative (rather than simply additive) effects of
varying (and messy) systems of oppression in the lives of both victims and offenders (Burgess-Proctor
2006; Malloch and McIvor 2013) and the ways in which these systems are created and recreated by
dynamics of power (Cho et al. 2013), most criminological work has yet to accomplish fully an integration of
gender with other axes of oppression, not least because feminist criminologists afford gender primacy in
their analyses.
Beyond Critique: Methodological Adventures
Feminist contributions to criminology have gone well beyond critique, making important contributions to
understandings of methodology and variant modes of knowledge production. In their raising of the
p. 379 ‘generalizability problem’ and the ↵ ‘gender ratio problem’ Daly and Chesney-Lind (1988) argued that
theories of crime must be able to take account of both men’s and women’s (criminal) behaviour and
highlight factors which operate differently on men and women. Moreover, they must be able to account for
differences in crime rates (why women commit less crime than men) and, in terms of ‘gendered’ control,
examine gendered codes in social, political and cultural contexts. Feminist criminologists thus came to
focus on ‘women’s experiences’ as an important knowledge form. Such thinking not only made women
more visible through research studies but brought to the fore feminist epistemology (beliefs about what
counts as appropriate knowledge) and feminist ontology (beliefs about the nature of the world).
Accordingly, appropriate knowledge is that which allows women to speak for themselves, rather than
knowledge about men’s worlds presuming to be about women’s worlds too. Some argued that women’s
knowledge was ‘better knowledge’, and that ‘feminist standpointism’ (which captures this) is unique
because there is commitment to seeing the world through the perspective of the socially subjugated
(Harding 1987).
If we characterize the first two methodological developments in feminist criminology as feminist

empiricism (as evidenced in the wide-ranging criminological research on women, crime, control and
justice—to counterbalance the absence of women in conventional criminology), and feminist
standpointism (drawing attention to the need to place women’s experiences at the centre of knowledge), a
third development is best described as feminist deconstructionism, since it draws on postmodern insights.
Page 5 of 29
Moving beyond the overly simplistic dichotomization between quantitative (positivist, objective,
statistical, masculinist) and qualitative methods (interpretive, textual, subjective, feminist),
contemporary feminist research tends now to be much more methodologically pluralist, with researchers
recognizing the value and salience of different research methods, if applied from a feminist perspective.
However, the feminist qualitative/quantitative debates have deep roots and despite methodological
advances yielding new insights the (old) argument, that the positivist nature of the majority of research
does not capture the realities of women’s lives, resurfaces in debates about the emphasis on
‘measurement’ in research on violence against women, and the ways in which a quantitative approach
overshadows, decontextualizes and acts as a barrier to capturing the myriad aspects of women’s
experiences.
Feminist researchers are highly cognizant of the need for research to be able to ‘speak’ directly to policy-
makers and practitioners in order to contribute to legislative, policy, and material change on both national
and international levels (Beetham and Demetriades 2007). Alongside this runs an astute awareness
(though not necessarily acceptance) that measurement and robust quantification of data is strategically
important for gaining policy attention and crucial for gaining any traction thereafter. In the current policy
and political climate where the relevance and utility of academic research is uncertain, being able to play
the ‘numbers game’ is perhaps even more important but so is being able to show, through robust
methodological means, the value of qualitative research for revealing the nuances and complexities of
women’s (and men’s) lives and the subtleties of gender and its intersections with class, race, age, and
sexuality.
Within contemporary feminism, more broadly, it is now contended that ‘there is not one method … that
necessarily makes research feminist’, rather a feminist ‘research approach, or framework, is
critical’ (Beetham and Demetriades 2007: 199–200). Mason and Stubbs (2012) argue similarly that there is
no standard methodology in feminist criminology but rather a set of methodological preferences that
feminists adopt as a means of pursuing particular research questions. This means an attentiveness to the
p. 380 ↵ insights of gender theory; a motivation towards the need for change; a privileging of the importance
of experience in understanding crime and justice; and a commitment to breaking down the power relations
inherent in research through processes of reflexivity.
Adopting a reflexive approach entails the rejection of an ontological positioning of the social world as
independent of the researcher and the research process; rather the researcher is understood as a subjective
resource within the research. This means acknowledging the ways in which the knowledge, experience,
values and identity of the researcher influence and affect the research process, but also points to the ways
in which knowledge is produced—not solely by the researcher but in conjunction with the researched, as
well as research facilitators (gatekeepers, funders). Feminist commitments to reflexivity throughout the
research process have had salience for broader criminological thinking and echo through contemporary
reflexive criminological accounts of research with the powerful and powerless (Lumsden and Winter 2014).
This has implications for the evolution of a feminist praxis, to which we return later in the chapter.
Page 6 of 29
Feminist Work on Justice-Involved Women and Girls
Having set out the methodological framings of feminist criminology, we now turn to a review of
substantive feminist criminological research on women and girls who come into conflict with the law. Here
we consider research on the conceptualization of women who have broken the law, as well as gender-
based discrimination in criminal justice policy and practice, and the search for justice.
Women who offend

The ways in which women who have broken the law have been characterized and responded to have long
been the subject of controversy and debate. Female offenders have been variously ignored, vilified,
stigmatized, medicalized and pathologized and managed, disciplined and punished in ways that call
attention to their gender (Carlen et al. 1985). Empirical research documenting the characteristics of such
women has revealed backgrounds of abuse and victimization, unmet needs and interrelated problems; we
know that women law breakers tend to have a history of violent and sexual victimization (Chesney-Lind
and Pasko 2013); poor physical and mental health (Plugge et al. 2006); addiction problems (Malloch 2000);
backgrounds of poverty (Gelsthorpe 2011); and housing and employment difficulties (Sheehan et al. 2007).
Whilst there may well be ‘psychological sequelae’ (Hollin and Palmer 2006) linking victimization to
women’s pathways into crime, there has been a tendency in some work to focus on women’s responses to
victimization as a sole explanation for their law-breaking. Situating women as multiple victims propelled
into offending through the actions of others or by circumstances beyond their control, circumscribes the
range of women’s experiences, overlooking other important aspects of their lives that may contribute to
their offending (Miller 2001). The emphasis on dependence and vulnerability results in accounts that leave
‘little agency, responsibility or meaning to women’s law breaking’ (Daly 1992: 150) and ‘tend[s] to create
p. 381 the false impression that women have only been ↵ victims … [and] cannot be effective social agents on
behalf of themselves or others’ (Harding 1987: 5).
This tendency has been challenged more recently by research, informed by broader currents in feminist
theory which has produced empirically informed critical analyses of women’s power, agency and choice,
and which explicitly recognizes the duality between victimization and agency. Through research on
women’s involvement in sex work and street drug markets (Maher 1997), gang-involved girls (Miller
2001), violent young women (Batchelor 2005), shoplifters (Caputo and King 2011), drug dealing women
(Grundetjern and Miller 2019), women drug ‘mules’ (Fleetwood 2014) and as co-offenders (Barlow 2016),
this work shows that ‘agency’ is key to understanding both women’s lawbreaking behaviour and their
response to victimization, even when social structures constrict individual motivations, choices and
decisions. Whilst there are always concerns that a focus on women’s voices might involve exploitation, it is
equally valid to argue that facilitating women’s voices to come through can be empowering (see Grace et al.
2022).
Page 7 of 29
Much of this work employs ethnographic methods, where questions of agency and resistance are explored
as ‘lived experiences’ in the specific contexts of drug use, prostitution, trafficking, and violence in order to
reveal how women’s lives are influenced by gender inequalities which act as organizing principles of social
life, and socio-economic and cultural factors, and in turn how these shape the opportunities that they have
and the choices that they make.
Whilst there is a large body of work addressing women’s and girls’ pathways into crime, with some notable
exceptions, (Giordano et al. 2002; McIvor et al. 2004), there has been relatively little work theorizing
processes of desistance for women (see also Weaver et al. this volume). Desistance work has tended to be
androcentric in character and limited in what it says about the relationships between women, their
criminogenic (and non-criminogenic) needs and (re) offending. Yet work which has paid attention to the
‘marginal spaces’ (Baldry 2010) occupied by criminalized women is instructive for understanding
women’s pathways out of crime, specifically by drawing attention to both structural and personal barriers
that inhibit women’s desistance and the role of agency within that. See also Seaman and Lynch (2022) who
point to inadequacies of desistance frameworks for women, and Schliehe (2021) who traces young
women’s challenging journeys in, out and beyond confinement.
Gender-based discrimination in criminal justice

Feminist work reveals clearly that gender-based discrimination in the criminal justice system creates
significant obstacles for the achievement of justice. Indeed, there is much evidence to suggest that women
are subject to gendered organizational logics and gendered agents of power at all levels of the system (see
Welsh 2019). Chamberlen (2016) uses the lens of women’s bodily experience of imprisonment to explore
their lived experience and subjectivities and, by so doing, shows how women are subject to gendered
prison treatment, whilst Crewe et al. (2017) highlight the acute pains of life imprisonment for women. A
growing body of work highlights the gendered impact of imprisonment on family relationships (Condry
and Minson 2020; Kotova 2019) and children in particular (Minson 2018; Baldwin 2021).
Within this research we can discern a shift in the pursuit of justice, from formal equality for women, to
substantive equality. In sympathy with this tranche of work, Baroness Corston coined the phrase ‘equality
means difference’, in her review of vulnerable women in the criminal justice system, and called for a
p. 382 ‘distinct, radically different, ↵ visibly-led, strategic, proportionate, holistic and women centred,
integrated approach’ for both women who offend and those at risk of offending (2007: 79).
The push for broader gender-specific understandings of women’s experiences and needs in the criminal
justice system has prompted a range of policy and practice developments over time, with a specific focus
on community-based provision. Examples include the Home Office’s Women’s Offending Reduction
Programme (2004), the creation of community centres for women (the Together Women Project), and
services developed in third sector partnerships for women offenders in the community (Radcliffe and
Hunter 2016). Notwithstanding some methodological problems (Jolliffe et al. 2011), evaluations of such
community-based activity give cause for optimism.
Page 8 of 29
In line with the feminist goal of collective action to promote gender equality, feminist criminologists, with
practitioners, have been at the core of campaigns for a better understanding of women and girl’s needs and
concerns, attempts to reduce women’s imprisonment, and explanations that women offenders are often
the victims of domestic circumstance and structural oppressions. Together they have played a key part in
the quest for social justice, not simply formal criminal justice, and have pushed agendas of social justice
and human rights as the core of contemporary concerns about women and punishment, with attempt to
promote a paradigm shift—away from imprisonment and towards community responses to women in
conflict with the law. The creation of international protocols have also assisted these endeavours, from the
Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)—adopted in 1979
by the UN General Assembly, to the Bangkok Rules (UN Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and
Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders) focused on the needs of women offenders and prisoners—
adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2010, though we should not be misled into thinking that the good
intentions within policy always mean positive practice. Many states have not even ratified the Bangkok
Rules, let alone have adhered to them.
Substantive justice: one step forwards, two steps back?

There is no overarching success story in the feminist quest for substantive justice. Indeed, there is
evidence that, in attempts to ‘make women count’, there are unintended consequences: with concerns that
women’s and girl’s vulnerability and high levels of ‘welfare needs’ are transmogrified into
‘risks’ (Hannah-Moffat and O’Malley 2007; Sharpe 2016). There are also unintended consequences of
creating community services for women: with concerns that involvement with these services, rather than
being on a voluntary basis, increasingly becomes a requirement of a police or court disposal. Moreover,
despite appearances that community-based centres are entirely women-friendly, some women engaged
with the services have indicated that there is a coercive element too. Barton and Cooper (2013) suggest that
women’s centres and approved premises become sites for the construction and perpetuation of idealized
forms of femininity and domesticity. Pollack observes that women are encouraged to reveal their
vulnerability and dependency only to find that the ‘dependency discourse leads to social control’ (2000).
Activity in the criminal justice system in regard to ‘personality disorder’ amongst women (d’Cruz 2015)
and ‘trauma informed’ work runs the risk of returning to a pathologization of women’s behaviour
(Radcliffe and Hunter 2016; Evans 2018). Transformations in the structure of the criminal justice system in
England and Wales also suggest that apparent progress may have unintended consequences, see Elfleet
(2021) on the neo-liberal tendencies of women’s community centres where agendas are aligned with state
intentions rather than women’s empowerment.
p. 383 Contemporary Research Agendas
Much feminist research on women and justice has focused on governance in the penal sphere, importantly
exposing a raft of injustices. Whilst this has formed the bedrock of much feminist criminological
scholarship it has, somewhat paradoxically, led to what has been described as a ‘narrowing’ of perspective
focused on women’s experiences within the criminal justice system in isolation from other institutional
forms and theorizations. Similarly, Sharpe (2016) argues that young womens’ interactions with education
Page 9 of 29
and welfare institutions and specifically their experiences of governance and control across institutional
boundaries have received relatively little attention. In some ways, this takes us back to earlier claims about
‘policing the boundaries of social life’ (Cain 1989) and despite the rapid growth and proliferation of
feminist criminology, there remains a need for a more expansive feminist research agenda, one which
demands a reconceptualization of ‘justice’ and which aims to extend feminist criminological knowledge
beyond penalties to engage with forms of governance and control within and across agency/institutional
boundaries. Highlighting this, Bosworth et al.’s (2016) work on punishment, citizenship, and identity,
shows that, when considered through the lens of citizenship, our understanding of imprisonment is
enlarged to include the prison’s connections with other geographical sites and legal frameworks, and race,
gender and class. Here we focus on three themes relating to violence against women and girls including
femicide, digital technology, and human trafficking and migration.
Violence against women and girls

One of the most significant and influential contributions of feminist scholarship to criminology has been
the generation of a large and multi-disciplinary body of theoretical, methodological, and empirical
literature on violence against women. This includes work on the challenges encountered by women in
‘going to law’, the distress caused to those who report rape and domestic abuse, and the barriers to
survivor justice (see Burman 2009; Hohl and Stanko 2015; Smith 2018). Feminist work has been pivotal in
expanding the gaze and the domains of criminology to encompass the diverse yet interlinked forms of
violence against women (Kelly 1988; Westmarland 2015), challenging its hidden and privatized nature and
positioning it as a public matter. From early work conceptualizing such violence as a continuum (Kelly
1988) and conveying its ‘everyday’ nature (Stanko 1990), to that which revealed domestic violence as a
crime that requires systematic examination through to work on state rape (Lenning and Brightman 2009),
honour killing (Begikhani et al. 2015), forced marriage (Chantler et al. 2022), rape as a ‘weapon in war’ and
techniques of domination directed at entire communities (Mullins 2009), this body of scholarship has
exposed some of the most prevalent and devastating forms of harmful behaviour committed against
women and girls. It has also broadened and deepened understandings and definitions of what counts as
‘crime’. There is recognition of ‘new victims’ of domestic violence amongst women who are disabled
(Thiara et al. 2013), violence against older women (Bows and Westmarland 2017), as well as increased
recognition of violence in ‘care’ homes, viewed through the lens of social justice and rights.
A raft of influential studies ‘gendering’ the victim, simultaneously and fundamentally expanded the study
of victimology and broadened the focus of criminology. A key strand related to awareness of women’s
p. 384 experiences as victims, subject to different forms ↵ of violence (emotional as well as physical) both
within the home, at work, and in the street. The acceptance of ‘rape myths’ was systematically challenged
and more nuanced questions posed around factors which inhibit women’s opportunity to leave violent
men. Thus, the hegemonic masculinity of criminological work and criminal justice agencies came under
critical scrutiny once more and feminist criminologists pointed the way to future gender-conscious
research and practice.
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As highlighted earlier, whilst recognizing the reality and impact of women’s experiences of victimization,
debates centring on questions and conceptualizations of women’s agency and power have been
particularly productive in challenging perceptions of women as passive and powerless and contributing
more nuanced understandings of the dimensions of power. When earlier writers were raising awareness of
the extent of violence against women and analysing it as an act of male power, it was strategically
important to construct women as victims of male violence. An unintended consequence was to reinforce a
homogenizing connection between ‘women’ and ‘victim’, depicting women as inherently vulnerable to
victimization and simultaneously underplaying women’s capacity or agency. This plays out in a
dichotomous discourse which denies women’s agency if she experiences victimization and denies
victimization if she experiences agency.
Kelly’s Surviving Sexual Violence was pivotal in recasting women ‘victims’ into ‘survivors from the
recognition that “the term victim … makes invisible the other side of women”s victimisation: the active
and positive ways in which women resist, cope and survive’ (1988: 163). With its focus on women’s
mechanisms for managing and surviving the aftermath of male violence, it shifted the emphasis from
passive victims to active survivors reconstructing their lives. The dual themes of survival and resistance
have characterized more recent work which, whilst recognizing the trauma of sexual violence, reveals the
resilience of those who experience it and also how they navigate the challenges of the ensuing
investigative, prosecution, and court processes (Jordan 2013; Brooks-Hay et al. 2019). Relatedly, work on
domestic abuse continues to demonstrate that, whilst overwhelmingly it is women that continue to be
victims, they draw on and utilize their agency in responding to, resisting, and surviving such violence in
complex ways (Forbes 2022, see also Gadd, this volume).
A particularly significant tranche of contemporary research on violence relates to femicide—commonly

defined as the killing of women and girls because of their gender (Weil et al. 2018). As one of the most
extreme manifestations of violence against women and girls, femicide has gathered international
attention in the last decade (Dawson and Carrigan 2020; Walklate et al. 2020). Against a backdrop of
awareness-raising efforts inspired by feminist movements, the ever-growing global recognition of
femicide across academic, socio-political, and legislative landscapes has prompted considerable debate
around its definition, scope, and prevalence, and the appropriateness of available responses. Campaigns
such as ‘Counting Dead Women’, the ‘Femicide Census’, the ‘Femicide Observatory’, and the emergence of
family violence death review teams globally, build on the work of the UN and WHO, highlighting the fatal
consequences of domestic abuse for women around the world (Walklate et al. 2020).
The most recent data published by the UN Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC 2021a; 2021b) suggests that
some 47,000 women and girls worldwide were killed by their intimate partners or other family members in
2020. This means that, on average, a woman or girl is killed by someone in her own family every 11
minutes. Where trends can be calculated, they show that the magnitude of such gender-related killings
remains largely unchanged. Women and girls across the world are affected by this type of gender-based
violence.
p. 385 ↵ Few countries (if any) have escaped this fatal violence; a recent report revealed that in Britain, on
average, a woman is killed by a man every three days (Femicide Census 2021). These are daunting numbers,
leading some authors to elevate the status of femicide to that of a pandemic. As Weil (2020: 110) argues,
Page 11 of 29
‘[t]he difference between Covid-19 and femicide is that coronavirus is sudden and unpredictable, whereas
femicide is constant … ’ It must be recognized, however, that men are more commonly the victims of
homicide. Women are killed in different circumstances than men, with femicide often embedded in a
continuum of patriarchy and discrimination. Therefore, the concern and problematization of femicide
does not stem solely from a ‘simple’ gendered analysis of prevalence as compared to male homicide, but
rather from the gendered nature of these fatal events, the circumstance in which it occurs, and the legal
responses towards them.
With the recognition of the specific character and devastating nature of femicide, discussions have
emerged around government responses. Questions around criminal justice interventions and punishment
are raised in light of the apparent failure to adequately address the worldwide crisis of violence against
women and girls which so often results in the loss of their lives. Important studies have been conducted
which shed light on these critical issues, ranging from interrogations of the ways in which femicide data is
collected and measured (‘counting femicide’) and the implications for policy (Walklate and Fitz-Gibbon
2022), reflections on the impact of gender effects (Salgado 2016), to discussions over the use of the justice
system by victims prior to lethal violence victimization (Yardley 2021).
Digital technology
A body of feminist research using victim-survivor testimonies has yielded rich, if enraging, insights into
the experiences of sexual violence and other forms of violence against women highlighted above,
challenging victim-blaming narratives. Over 30 years ago, Herman wrote about how some survivors, as a
result of the trauma they have experienced ‘undertake to speak about the unspeakable in public in the
belief that this will help others’ (1992: 208). Recent disclosures as a result of the #MeToo movement have
underscored Herman’s point, where the creative use of social media has ensured high visibility of women’s
victimization. Some feminist scholars have begun to explore the ways in which digital spaces are
increasingly being used by victim-survivors to share their personal experiences of violence and highlight
their treatment by the criminal justice system (Fileborn 2017; Wood et al. 2018) and shape the ways in
which sexual violence is mediated and discursively produced (Mendes et al. 2018). Women’s motivations
for using digital spaces to document their experiences include the raising of awareness, to name and
shame perpetrators, to document evidence, and as a means of gaining acknowledgement and support
(Wood et al. 2018). But some scholars, whilst recognizing the foundational role that personal stories play in
feminist responses to sexual violence, sound a note of caution about the use of personal narratives as a
political strategy. Serisier is concerned with potential consequences, both intended and unintended, of the
feminist ‘commitment to the transformative political potential of experiential story-telling’ (2018: 4)
whilst flagging a concern about the implications of ‘speaking-out’ for victim-survivors wellbeing.
In the digital context, research on contemporary anti-rape activism has adopted an intersectional lens,
highlighting how certain bodies are at greater risk of rape, but less likely to be believed and more likely to
p. 386 be blamed (Salvatori and Mendes 2022). ↵ But yet again, technology has opened up more space and
opportunity for offensive online abuse, death, and rape threats targeted at feminist activists and women
who speak out—highlighting the significant costs of such engagement.
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With rapid advances in digital technology and the pervasiveness of the digital world, it is perhaps
unsurprising that such technology is increasingly used to facilitate gendered harms. Technology-
facilitated violence and abuse includes a diverse range of behaviours perpetrated online, offline, and
through a range of technologies, including artificial intelligence, livestreaming, and social media (Bailey et
al. 2021), pointing to the potential of new technology (smart devices, connected cameras and GPS
trackers), smart home appliances (heating systems, surveillance cameras) and digital media platforms for
amplifying abuse. A raft of feminist research has revealed the extent of perpetrators’ use of technology to
facilitate domestic abuse, coercive control and digital dating abuse (Dragiewicz et al. 2018; PenzeyMoog
and Slakoff 2021), cyberstalking (Sheridan and Grant 2007), ‘revenge porn’ (Pavón-Benítez et al. 2021),
intimate image distribution (Marques 2021) and sexual exploitation of children (Martin and Alaggia 2013).
Post-separation shared parental situations, with their mobile devices being exploited by perpetrators to
maintain control over victims has increased abuse of children (Sugiura et al. 2021).
Human trafficking, migration, and criminal justice

Another area of interest, which both fuels feminist perspectives in criminology and the quest to look
beyond the traditional boundaries of criminal justice systems to all forms of social regulation (since
women are very often victims), and challenges feminist criminologists (because women are sometimes
perpetrators too) concerns human trafficking, migration, and criminal justice, with clear implications for
understandings of inequalities, powerlessness, and justice.
Recognizing that there are contested definitional issues (Gallagher and McAdam 2018) and difficulties in
measurement (Farrell and De Vries 2020), part of the problem is that popular conceptualizations of
trafficking suggest that it is primarily an organized crime and illegal immigration problem—requiring
criminal justice and immigration control interventions (Weitzer 2007). It is also assumed to be a
predominantly male activity, though the UNDOC Global Report on Trafficking (2020) suggests that in
some countries women trafficking women is the norm, and the most common form of human trafficking is
sexual exploitation (79 per cent) where victims are predominantly female. The second most common form
of human trafficking is forced labour (18 per cent), including manufacturing cannabis, cleaning, catering
and, domestic work and textile production, although this may be an underestimate. Other forms of
trafficking for exploitation are also increasing, including forced begging, baby selling, forced marriages,
benefit fraud and armed combat (UNODC 2020). A key problem concerns the difficulty in detecting
victimization. The distinction between ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ in many cases is blurred. Some women
prosecuted for offences have been held captive in slavery-like conditions, forced to work as prostitutes or
in drug factories—sometimes for years (Hales and Gelsthorpe 2012). Some have been raped and beaten,
and their documents withheld by criminal gangs. Women’s ‘stories’ explore the lived experiences of
human trafficking and challenge the official discourse of ‘prevent and protect victims and prosecute
traffickers’ which reifies victims in attributes of passivity and worthiness (De Angelis 2016).
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In Britain, notwithstanding the existence of National Referral Mechanisms (NRM) for the identification
p. 387 and support of ‘victims’ of trafficking, some women escape the ↵ protective net and find themselves in
prison as offenders. During the course of the development of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, the UK
Government reviewed the NRM (Home Office 2015; 2017) recommending major reforms so as to ensure
better safeguarding; this is clearly important in relation to conceptions of justice.
Other critical points include the relative empirical vacuum in regard to gendered dimensions of human
trafficking (Gozdziak 2014). The usual lens of men as ‘perpetrators’ and women as ‘victims’ means that
men who are victims are sometimes rendered invisible; their exploitation and vulnerability not readily
recognized. A feminist focus on the sexual exploitation of women and girls in trafficking discourse means
that we know relatively little about other forms of labour exploitation (Anker and Liempt 2012) and, whilst
human trafficking is often conceived as a ‘security threat’ to the state with the need to better control
borders, feminist analyses of human trafficking pose challenges by prioritizing the security of trafficked
persons and recognizing the manner in which victims are made subject to control via traffickers and the
state itself (Lobasz 2009).
We can add to this a number of critical observations in regard to the gendered dimension of migration: a
lack of attention to race and class (Kempadoo et al. 2012), and a convergence of controls on immigration
and crime when ‘rape epidemics’ perpetrated by male migrants capture media attention. Feminists have
drawn attention to the ‘gendering of borders’ (Pickering and Ham 2014). Indeed, Bosworth et al. (2015)
observe that gender serves to ‘delegitimize’ women as transnational migrants, especially in the face of
increasing border control. The sorting of desirable from undesirable migrants at the border is heavily
invested in ‘civilizing’ tropes and ‘gendered moralities’. Alongside forced migration (for arranged
marriages, and asylum seeking, for instance), reasons for migration include the wish to seek work to
support families back home. But the exercise of agency and efforts to meet changing gender expectations
in countries of origin (being a good mother by wanting to ensure financial security) are denied; women’s
narratives of providing for children and aged parents do not impact on ‘failed scripts of women at the
border’ (Bosworth et al. 2015). Unauthorized mobility thus fosters gendered disapproval and
criminalization.
Much of the debate regarding trade in human beings and migration has been conducted within feminist
frameworks of analysis and advocacy, noting, in particular, the importance of ‘the body’ as an instrument
(for the purposes of prostitution, reproductive care, commercial surrogacy, and domestic services). Global
feminism views human trafficking as a form of violence against women, reflecting patriarchal culture as a
‘single mould’, emphasizes the politics between nation states, and considers gender to be a structure and
process that together inform the global political economy of cross-border prostitution, sex trafficking,
and reproductive care services (Truong 2015: 2). Transnational feminism focuses on the complexity
regarding intersections of national identity, race, and sexuality in regard to economic exploitation within
an emergent global capitalism. But there is need to add another perspective, that of transfeminism which
aims to understand the nexus of identity formation and the meanings of agency as produced by the
interrelationships and interactions among individuals and groups. Indeed, there is need for innovative
ways for rethinking the relationship between ‘sex’, ‘gender’, and ‘power’.
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The wider context of closed borders in Europe (Askola 2010), the feminization of poverty, and the
feminization of the care industry (Agustin 2007) all suggest that there are more questions to ask. It is
arguably simplistic to categorize women as either ‘offenders’ or victims’. Indeed, what is required is a
criminologically informed analysis of the trafficking-migration nexus and underlying factors which
p. 388 contribute to the exploitation ↵ of women (and men) in trafficking and other forms of migration.
Investigations of social constructions of human trafficking and migration which address the limitations of
sexist and racist stereotypes in constructing categories are needed. Feminist contributions thus far have
connected the newly emerging body of work on the criminalization of mobility with feminist theorizations
and methodologies for an empirical understanding of the lived experiences of those subject to practices of
border control, but there is further to go.
Influencing Politics and Practices: Towards a Praxis
Transversing all feminist perspectives has been a strong commitment to social change, manifest within
feminist work in criminology in the use of research to transform or influence legislation, policy, and
practice within formal institutions. Researchers and activists have aligned to draw attention to the
gendered nature of crime and challenge the state and the criminal justice system to develop better
responses to women’s violent victimization, a trajectory which continues in contemporary work
combining activism, advocacy, and action research (Brooks and Burman 2017). Yet, decades of legislative
and policy reform have resulted in limited success, due to a set of interconnected problems that concern
the implementation gap between policy intent and practice (Westmarland and Gangoli 2012); the oft-
encountered problem of unintended consequences of law reform (Burman 2009); the performance of legal
practice;, and; a set of entrenched and problematic attitudes which together contribute to the ‘justice
gap’ (Temkin and Krahe 2008). Feminist reformers have thus been confronted with hard—and painful—
questions as to whether the kind of actions that have resulted from feminist activism at policy and practice
levels are really achieving what is best for those women whose lives are affected.
Operating from the belief that a clear punitive state response was required to combat violence against
women, some second wave feminists highlighted the importance of a robust legal response—advocating
mandatory arrests, ‘no drop’ prosecution policies, and harsher punishment of offenders. However, work
revealing the contextualized and gendered features of the principles and practices of criminal law and
ways in which legal and criminal justice responses might pose risks, especially to socio-economically
marginalized groups (Hoyle 2007; Lacey 2002), fed into ongoing debates on the importance and worth of a
reliance on criminal law and criminal justice to address violence against women and achieve feminist
goals. Calls for increased criminalization and sanctioning of perpetrators thus found a counterpoint in
feminist critiques pointing to the problematic nature of mandatory approaches and state-based
punishment of offenders, creating seams of uncertainty and tension about the appropriateness of law and
criminal justice within an already intensely politicized landscape.
The #MeToo movement vividly demonstrated the pervasive and pernicious nature of sexual violence,
catalysing collective action for structural change and, in some circumstances, leading to increased
punitiveness. This (re)stimulated debate amongst those who support the expansion of criminalization and
increased use of imprisonment for perpetrators, and those who call for prison abolition. In recent years,
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critiques of what has become known as ‘carceral feminism’ have proliferated, particularly in the US led by
women of colour. Essentially, the term carceral feminism is used to refer to feminist reliance on and
p. 389 support for police intervention and a belief that punitive policies against ↵ sexual violence are the most
appropriate intervention strategy. Carceral feminism is criticized for its adoption of a neo-liberal logic of
individual responsibility, which shifts attention away from structural and institutional factors that create
and sustain violence. As Terwiel (2020) points out, rather than diminishing violence, more punitive
(‘tough on crime’) policies have had the adverse effect of increasing incarceration, particularly for those
from marginalized and racialized communities. Anti-carceral feminists highlight the adverse
consequences of feminist alliances with the state and the criminal justice system and problematize
punitiveness as the sole or primary ‘solution’ (Taylor 2018). Of course, feminist disagreement is nothing
new, and these highly contested debates have been productive for conceptualizing more transformative
justice frameworks which address violence in ways that take account of social and individual
accountability and mend the harms of systemic and interpersonal violence, rather than reliance on the
punitive mechanisms offered by criminal justice (Taylor 2018). Transformative justice has its origins in
some indigenous practices, mediation, and restorative justice. Advocates of transformative justice ask us
to reframe how we think about crime, and call for the expanded use of creative community-based
alternatives to punishment, but also remind us of the challenges and impediments to the achievement of
transformational justice (Ackhurst et al. 2022).
As shown earlier in the chapter, there is little question that violence against women remains a pressing
issue globally, that its prevalence is unacceptably high, that safer communities have not been created for
women and there are still significant problems with the way victims are treated by criminal justice
agencies and systems, however there is some evidence of a shift away from a predominant focus on
criminal justice outcomes to broader questions about the relationships between violence against women
and gender equality. A process of re-evaluation of feminist goals in relation to violence against women has
broadened the lens somewhat. Here, ‘success’ is not entirely defined by conviction or attrition rates and
harsh punishment of perpetrators, but increasingly by the extent to which the criminal justice system
might afford women access to procedural and substantive justice (Hohl et al. 2022). Work in this area
emphasizes the importance of ‘therapeutic jurisprudence’ (Wemmers 2008) which enables victim-
survivors to have ‘a voice’ within the criminal justice process, to receive recognition and support from
criminal justice authorities and be treated with dignity and respect (see Brooks-Hay et al. 2019; McGlynn
and Westmarland 2018), and the importance of addressing the ways that violence against women is
tolerated in wider society.
By drawing attention to inequalities in the criminal justice process and the potential harms of excessive
criminalization and harsh penal sanctions, especially for marginalized/minority groups, several theorists
have grappled with the thorny question of the scope for ‘doing justice’ for gendered harms. In an attempt
to navigate alternatives, work has explored the potential, relevance and value of restorative justice (RJ) to
violence against women and sexual assault in particular (see Ptacek 2010). This is highly contested ground
however. Despite some reasoned arguments for the further exploration of RJ in cases of family and sexual
violence (Zinsstag and Keenan 2019), many feminist researchers and those delivering front-line women’s
services remain openly antagonistic towards RJ. Suggestions that it might offer a way of validating victim
accounts and reduce victim-blaming as well as afford a degree of victim satisfaction (McGlynn et al. 2012)
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have been met with fierce opposition, and counter claims that RJ diminishes the seriousness of violence
against women and compromises women’s safety, whilst also constituting a form of (re) victimization.
The debate often tends to dead-end in the oppositional contrasting of RJ and conventional criminal justice
(Stubbs 2007).
p. 390 ↵ It is well established that there are distinct differences between imprisoned men and women: women
are more likely to be primary or sole caregivers to their children (Minson 2018), have fewer previous
convictions, and a reduced likelihood of reconviction. Women also report higher rates of physical, sexual
and emotional abuse, low education, poverty, and are more likely to be diagnosed with mental health
conditions (Annison et al. 2018). Consideration of these issues has been central to the development of
feminist criminological work on punishment.
There has been a longstanding reform movement to reduce the incarceration of women, alongside more
recent calls for a reassessment of the punishment of women (Malloch and McIvor 2013; Prison Reform
Trust 2021) which allows for an assessment of women’s needs and what might ‘work’ in a holistic way to
ameliorate problems and thus help reduce women’s offending (Brown and Gelsthorpe 2022).
Feminists have lobbied for more available services within communities, mentoring schemes and
innovative provision to address social, structural, and personal factors that together impact upon women’s
pathways into and out of the criminal justice system, and provide support and appropriate assistance to
those women who need it. Yet the ways in which these insights into the lived experiences of women’s lives
have been incorporated into prison initiatives tailored for women to ‘help’ them with their criminogenic
need have sometimes had the undesired effect of more women being sent to prison. Carlen (2002) warned
some years ago that improvements to prison regimes may inadvertently legitimate the sending of more
women to prison and, whilst Corston (2007: 9) specifically warned against using prisons as ‘places of
safety’, concerns remain. Further, as Hannah-Moffat (2016) points out, the integration of gender into
penal policies and the integration of risk/need assessment models raise further questions about the future
of women’s penal regimes in the context of risk and gender and contradictory understandings of both
responsibility and women’s choice.
There is a vociferous debate played out amongst researchers, practitioners, and prison reform
organizations around the need or otherwise of distinctive provision for women and girls, whether in prison
or the community. Currently, gender-specific provision and ‘gender-sensitive’ approaches and resources
characterize the landscape. However, as experience internationally has shown, ‘ostensibly well-
intentioned initiatives can be subverted by wider institutional imperatives’ (Burman et al. 2015: 74), and by
overarching preoccupations with security and control (Malloch 2000) limiting the ability of prison reforms
to achieve meaningful change. Indeed government policy has attracted a lot of criticism in recent years
because of its contradictory nature. The long-awaited Female Offender Strategy 2018 (MOJ 2018) promised
initiatives relating to earlier intervention, community-based solutions, and making custody, where
necessary, effective and decent, all of which reflect wide agreement across the sector that there needs to be
a distinct or ‘gender-specific’ approach to respond to the vulnerabilities of women caught up in the
criminal justice system. However, there is little in the strategy on older or younger women, or minoritized
women. Also, the notion of ‘vulnerabilities’ mutates into ‘risk’ within the document (Booth et al. 2018).
The National Audit Office has also produced a damning report of the strategy in regard to the lack of
Page 17 of 29
implementation and accountability (NAO 2022). But beyond these important criticisms, the announcement
two years later concerning the creation of 500 extra places in women’s prisons seemingly undermines the
good intentions. The government’s defence is that the extra places will allow more women to have single
cells, and that some of the new places will also allow women to have overnight visits with their children to
prepare for post-release life (MOJ 2021a), but the most striking omission in the Female Offender Strategy
p. 391 2018 is any reference ↵ to sentencing and the need to sentence women differently to stem the flow of
women receiving short custodial sentences.
In recent years, LGBTQ+ issues have increasingly gained human and legal rights acknowledgement in
many countries in the Global North (see European Commission 2018). Contemporary feminist debates
about the management of transgender people detained in custody are highly contentious and revolve
around the questions of how to protect and safeguard women and girls from male violence and how to
support the rights of transgender people to be detained in an environment that recognizes their (often
self-identified) gender identity. In the UK, these contentions are also visible in wider national and
international debates about transgender issues and gender identities that cohere around issues such as the
reforming Gender Recognition Act (GRA) which allows people to change their legal gender, and the rights
of trans women to access women-only services.
The numbers of transgender prisoners are steadily rising in UK prisons, although it is acknowledged that
current figures are probably an underestimate (HMPPS 2021). Transgender women currently comprise
around 80 percent of transgender offenders in England and Wales (HMPPS 2021), a disproportionality
which requires further research. Colliver (2022) suggests that criminologists have been slow to consider
transgender people’s experiences in the criminal justice system, notwithstanding important developments
regarding hate crime. Drawing on empirical data, Colliver and Silvestri (2020) outline deeply exclusionary
experiences. Government has also been slow to recognize the distinct experiences of trans people within
the criminal justice system although there are now policies regarding the care and management of
individuals who are transgender (MOJ 2021b). The adequacy of the policy however remains to be seen.
Concluding Reflections: Whither Feminism and Criminology?
In reviewing the prospects for a Criminology that would fully understand and embrace the precepts of
feminist perspectives and address the quest for gender equality, Carol Smart (1990) chose to turn away
from criminology towards sociology, seeing criminology as ‘atavistic’ and as beyond redemption.
In counterpoint to Smart’s claims, this chapter has demonstrated that feminist contributions to
criminology have challenged theory and method within criminology and had some wider influence on
policy and practice. We have seen major paradigm shifts within feminist scholarship, moving beyond an
exclusive focus on gender to recognize the need for intersectionality and the ways in which social contexts
and mobilities shape human relations. We have witnessed political commitment to social change and
equality as a critical part of feminist scholarship and practice, and we have seen epistemological
questioning and creative thinking about the processes of knowledge production. We have also witnessed
Page 18 of 29
some positive policy developments in the criminal justice system, though often with unintended negative
consequences. Whether these developments amount to transformation of the discipline remains open to
question.
For some, feminist criminology is but one step towards a humanistic criminology: one that would be
oriented towards human betterment and fulfilment rather than ‘crime control’ and ‘offender
management’ (Hartjen 2015). It is also a criminology which would reflect the diversity and
p. 392 intersectionality which third wave feminist has prompted, and ↵ it is a potentially critical criminology
which would turn attention to the state as oppressor as much as defender of individuals. Whatever the
futures, the legacies of feminism remind us of the need to adopt inclusive and non-judgemental
approaches to scholarship and to ensure that the lives and experiences of women remain a central focus of
the criminological gaze.

Brown and Gelsthorpe’s Wiley Handbook on What Works with Girls and Women in Conflict with the Law (2022) is an
international book addressing wide-ranging topics, from theories of female involvement in crime, security
classification and risk assessment, evidence-based treatment and supervision approaches, special populations (such
as indigenous women) to legal and policy developments in the field of gender-responsive approaches.
Taking a global perspective, Evans’s Gender Responsive Justice (2018) outlines the different international and national
landscapes in which gender-responsive justice has been developed and played out, addressing various critiques of the
concept along the way.
Fitz-Gibbon and Walklate’s Gender, Crime and Criminal Justice (2018) explores the relationship between gender and
crime alongside the gendered nature of criminal victimization. The book addresses feminist perspectives,
victimization, sexual and domestic violence, male domination in the criminal justice system, and gendered
perspectives in law and criminal justice policy.
Grace et al.’s Criminal Women (2022) offers insights into the lived experiences of women involved in the criminal
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18. Domestic violence

p. 398 18. Domestic violence

David Gadd
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0018
Abstract
This chapter outlines the key definitional and aetiological issues surrounding domestic violence perpetration. It begins with a
discussion of how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted on domestic abuse globally, before assessing international estimates of
the percentage of women worldwide who have ever been physically or sexually assaulted by a partner. The second section of
the chapter reviews the British historical literature to show how Victorian concern with the protection of respectable women
from ‘wife-beaters’ yielded to a medical-psychiatric discourse that blamed hysterical women for provoking men with quick
tempers. It then outlines how twentieth-century feminist accounts reframed the problem of ‘wife-beating’ variously in terms of
‘domestic violence’, ‘domestic abuse’, ‘intimate partner violence’, ‘coercive control’, and ‘gender-based violence’ in efforts
that exposed the roles of sexism, inadequate legal protection, and gender inequality in perpetuating a ‘continuum’ of abuse
against women under patriarchy. The third part of the chapter appraises the critique of gender-based perspectives provided
by psychological studies, some of which point to ‘gender symmetry’ in the perpetration of domestic violence and some of
which reveal personality differences between perpetrators and non-violent men; as well as sociological studies that expose
how the intersections between gender and ethnicity, sexuality and age manifest themselves, both in incidents of domestic
violence and in official reactions to them. The chapter concludes by pointing to the challenge of finding a common voice
capable of capturing the collective experiences of those in need of protection from domestic violence as well as the need to
find ways of responding to perpetrators whose attitudes, motives, backgrounds are not necessarily identical to each other.
These challenges are rendered more acute when the law is revealed as unpredictable in its capacity to determine the
culpability of the small minority of men who perpetrate grievous assaults on their partners.
Keywords: domestic violence, coercive control, gender-based violence, abuse, perpetrators, victims, intersectionality
Page 1 of 24
Introduction
As the COVID-19 outbreak spread across the world, many organizations that respond to gender-based
violence—abuse directed predominantly at women and girls—began to talk about alarming rises in
demands for their services. This upsurge in countries that imposed lockdowns was referred to by the
United Nations (UN Women 2020), as the ‘Shadow Pandemic’. Early evidence of a growth in the reporting
of domestic violence in China, the epicentre of the pandemic, was replicated across most of Europe, as well
as in countries as diverse as Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Iran, Lebanon, Malaysia, Peru, Singapore
and the United States (Fereidooni et al. 2021; Godoy 2020; Graham-Harrison et al. 2020). Where official
responses to the pandemic failed to anticipate that the home is not a safe space for everyone, the scope for
victims to become isolated and entrapped by abusive partners intensified.
In some countries, services that could be accessed by text message or online witnessed faster growths in
demand for advice or help than emergency services that respond primarily to telephone calls, such as the
police. Over time, professionals that work to reduce the risks to women and children, began to innovate
with a mixture of online and in-person provision, but in many countries, the face-to-face supervision of
convicted offenders in the community was suspended (Walklate et al. 2021, 2022). Backlogs accumulated in
the courts. Couples who had been looking to separate in the aftermath of domestic violence had, at least for
a while longer, to stay within the same property, in many cases while home-schooling children. Others,
who had only just started dating and hence did not necessarily know each other well, were presented with a
stark choice: live together now or stay apart for an indefinite period. Same sex couples who were not yet
‘out’, had either to stay apart to keep their relationship clandestine or risk homophobic abuse from family.
Where lockdowns persisted, there were reports of some men using the vulnerabilities of women with
disabilities and health conditions to intensify their use of controlling tactics by, for example, limiting their
access to medicines and food. There were also reports of men exploiting new restrictions on meeting
people from outside one’s home by threatening to report their partners to the police for breaching
emergency COVID-19 laws if they tried to leave or seek help (BBC 2021).
Predictably, much media coverage of domestic violence during the pandemic described the rising number
p. 399 of reports as ‘unprecedented’, but this is not strictly true. ↵ As I shall explain in the next section, before
the pandemic, rates of domestic violence across the globe were already at epidemic levels. Moreover, rises
in rates of violence against women and girls have been documented in many places after ‘disasters, from
tsunamis, to earthquakes and bushfires’ (Walklate et al. 2020: 1), as well as during the Ebola and Zika
outbreaks. As Walklate et al. (2021) have highlighted, a common explanation for the rising rate of domestic
violence invoked a connection to enduring ‘stress’ and ‘insecurities’ about ‘money, jobs, health, food
supplies’ without acknowledgment that women and children respond far less frequently to stress with
violence than adult men do. In the UK, in particular, concern about the safety of women and girls amplified
in the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer. In a year when only 1.6 per cent
of adult rape offences resulted in a charge or caution and only 6.3 per cent of domestic abuse incidents
recorded by the police result in a successful prosecution, it also became apparent that domestic abuse
perpetrated by police officers was being prosecuted at even lower rates, leaving the majority of victims
unprotected by the law (George and Ferguson 2021; HM Government 2021).
Page 2 of 24
A key message of this chapter then, is that the problem of domestic violence cannot be understood apart
from the effectiveness of responses to it. Narrow definitions have long compounded the difficulties
survivors have faced in securing recognition for the harms done to them, as the chapter’s next section on
historical representations of domestic violence illustrates. Today, ‘domestic abuse’, ‘intimate partner
violence’, ‘coercive control’, and ‘gender-based violence’ are the terms more pervasively used in
international debates to convey the range of behaviours women can experience from abusive men by virtue
of their gender. However, as the third section of the chapter shows, more inclusive definitions of domestic
violence have also paved the way for several important critiques of explanations grounded in gender
inequality. As the chapter concludes, these critiques render it imperative that criminologists attend to the
specific ways in which the pandemic compounded the multiple disadvantages that make it harder for some
adults and children to escape domestic violence and/or seek protection from the law. They also beg the
question of how best to address the population of perpetrators, especially those whose abusive behaviours
will persist for many more years, given the diversity in their motives, backgrounds, and behaviours and
given that some are also victims too.
A Global Problem
At its launch on 14 February 2012, the One Billion Rising campaign highlighted that ‘one in three women in
the world will be beaten or raped in their lifetime’. A decade later, this figure remained unchanged, with
estimates by the World Health Organisation (WHO) indicating that ‘27 per cent … of ever-married/
partnered women of reproductive age (15–49 years) … have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate
partner violence at least once in their lifetime’ (WHO, 2021: 20). The WHO figures are derived from a meta-
analysis of over 300 national surveys conducted in 154 countries between 2000 and 2018. The same meta-
analysis reaches the conclusion that globally, around 13 per cent of ‘ever-married/partnered women aged
15–49 years have experienced … physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate’ within the 12 months
prior to being surveyed (p. 21). The definition of violence operationalized by the WHO is, however, much
more prescriptive than the term domestic violence usually implies. It includes: being ‘slapped or having
p. 400 something thrown at’ them that could ‘hurt’; ‘being pushed or shoved … hit with ↵ a fist … kicked,
dragged or beaten up; being choked or burnt on purpose … threatened with or actually having a gun, knife
or other weapon used on’ them by a former or current partner; and being ‘coerced’ or physically forced to
have sexual intercourse’ (p. 7). But because ‘psychological intimate partner violence’ (p. 38), economic
abuse, and online abuse are so difficult to measure consistently across countries, emotional abuse and
controlling behaviours like being stalked, constantly checked up on, having intimate images of oneself
shared without one’s consent, being verbally abused or belittled, being denied access to funds to buy
necessities for oneself or one’s children, or having one’s access to friends or family restricted—are all
excluded from the WHO’s count. This exclusion, as explained later in the chapter, means that the WHO
estimates undercount the incidence of domestic violence and the damage non-physical forms of abuse do.
What the WHO’s analysis does reveal is that the risk to women of being a victim of physical forms of
domestic violence is high everywhere, but also unevenly spread across the world. Poorer regions generally
have higher rates of intimate partner violence than prosperous regions, and regions where there have been
recent wars and conflicts typically have higher rates of domestic violence than those where peace has
Page 3 of 24
prevailed. In Kiribati, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh, and the Solomon Islands over half of ever-
partnered women have experienced some form of physical or sexual intimate partner violence. Rates are
only fractionally lower in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, South Sudan, and Afghanistan. Rates
are generally lowest in Central, Eastern and Southeast Asian countries (18–21 per cent), Latin America and
the Caribbean (25 per cent), Japan (20 per cent), Europe (20 per cent), Australia and New Zealand (23 per
cent), and North America (25 per cent). Within Europe the lowest rates of physical and sexual intimate
partner violence are to be found in Austria, Cyprus, Italy, Montenegro and Spain, and range around 15–16
per cent. Comparable rates within the UK are around 24 per cent. There is, of course, considerable in-
country variation. Across the world, those living away from urban centres are generally at greater risk than
those in the cities. Earlier analyses of prevalence rates commissioned by the World Health Organisation
have found that in the provincial regions of many poor countries like Bangladesh (62 per cent), Ethiopia
(71 per cent), and Peru (61 per cent), it is more or less the norm for women aged 15 and over to report
having been physically or sexually assaulted by a partner (García-Moreno et al. 2005). South African
studies also report very high rates of domestic assault and sexual assault in some provinces (Vetten 2014),
violence against women is inextricably embedded in both the brutality of apartheid—which encouraged
men to use violence to retain control as families were broken by forced removals and police brutality—as
well as myths about cures for HIV propagated at the highest levels of the political establishment (Squire
2016).
These comparative international rates of physical and sexual violence by former or current partners do
need to be treated with some caution, however. Willingness to discuss domestic violence varies from place
to place, as do the questions asked in surveys, the techniques used to administer questionnaires (phone-
based, postal returns, online or computer assisted interviewing) in national surveys, the timeframes asked
about (last year, last two-to-five years, lifetime), as well as the age ranges of the samples captured (Gadd
et al. 2014; Walby and Myhill 2002). The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights’ EU-wide survey
(2014) sought, not entirely successfully, to overcome these challenges. Over 42,000 women aged 15 and
over from across the 28 (then) member states of the European Union were interviewed face-to-face about
their experiences of physical, sexual, and psychological violence. Twenty-two per cent of women in Europe
p. 401 reported having ever experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner in ↵ their lifetime. In
Finland, Denmark, and Latvia lifetime prevalence rates ranged from 30–32 per cent, while in Austria,
Croatia, Poland, Slovenia, and Spain around 13 per cent of women reported having experienced physical or
sexual violence from a partner. The comparable figures for the UK, Sweden, France, and Germany were 29
per cent, 28 per cent, 26 per cent, and 22 per cent respectively. The perplexing conclusion from this study
is that, Western European countries generally regarded as better in terms of gender equality, were found to
have higher rates of intimate partner violence than some Eastern European countries with poorer records
for gender equality, causing the study’s authors to question the extent to which levels of public
consciousness about domestic violence shaped the results. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, at least, victim
surveys in the US, Australia, and the UK, suggested that rates of domestic abuse were gradually falling
(Catalano 2012; Trewin 2005).
In the UK, both the lifetime prevalence and the annual incidence of domestic violence started to be
routinely measured in the 1980s via the Scottish and British Crime Surveys (BCS). Computer assisted self-
completion technologies have been used in England and Wales since 1996. These methods are better able
Page 4 of 24
to overcome the reluctance to disclose abuse which face-to-face methods can engender (Mirrlees-Black
1999). The sweep of the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW, successor to the BCS) that ended
March 2020 (just before the UK locked down) reports a lifetime prevalence rate for (physical and non-
physical forms of) domestic violence by a partner or family member of 27.6 per cent for women and 13.8
per cent for men (ONS 2020: table 1). The figures are a little lower—23.8 per cent of women and 10.5 per
cent of men –when the analysis is confined to current or former partners. The annual incidence rates—
which are based on the proportion of people who have been victimized in the 12 months prior to
completing the survey—are inevitably lower at 7.3 per cent of women and 3.6 per cent of men 2019–20.
These figures are little different to those reported in 2018–19 (7.5 per cent and 3.8 per cent respectively)
and compare favourably with the incidence rates for women (9.3 per cent) and men (6.5 per cent) reported
for the year 2006–7, implying that rates of domestic violence in England and Wales generally declined
over a 13-year period up until the beginning of the UK’s lockdown in March 2020. A comparable decline in
rates of domestic abuse is also evidenced in the findings of the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey
(MacQueen 2014: 10; Scottish Government 2021).
That said, because both prevalence and incidence figures conceal levels of repeat victimization it is difficult
to decipher conclusively whether rates of domestic violence were falling (Walby et al. 2014a). While the
proportion of adults victimized was declining, some of those who were victims might have suffered abuse
of increasing intensity or frequency, especially given the ways in which perpetrators have found to extend
their harassment online. What is more certain is that the experiences of men counted as victims in these
surveys are rarely equivalent to those of women counted as victims. Female victims are much more likely
to report experiences of physical and life-threatening forms of violence, sexual assaults, and stalking than
male victims (Roe 2009; ONS 2016; ONS 2020). The CSEW indicates that the violence women experience is
four times more likely to be accompanied by threats than the violence men experience (ONS 2016: 5),
leading some to suggest, as explained later in this chapter, that men rarely suffer partner assaults in the
context of acutely controlling relationships. Higher rates of reporting to the police, lawyers, and health
professionals among female victims relative to male victims should also be interpreted in the light of
differential experiences of victimization too (ONS 2018: Tables 11 and 12).
p. 402 Historical Representations of Domestic Violence
While it is rarely remarked upon in the criminological literature, the consensus among many crime
historians is that tolerance of violence against female partners in England began to decline during the
nineteenth century. Hammerton (1992) explains that it was not uncommon in the mid-nineteenth century
for effigies of known wife-beaters to be paraded through the streets. These ‘rough music rituals’ were not
an early expression of pro-feminist sensibilities—‘nagging’ wives, adulterers, women said to have made
false accusations of rape, drunken women, and homosexuals were also singled out for rough music too
(ibid.: 14). Rather, the shaming—and occasional lynching—of wife-beaters symbolized the ‘patriarchal
gallantry’ of men who wished to distinguish themselves from those deemed to be taking advantage of
vulnerable women at a time when the protections offered by the church, custom, and law were dwindling
(ibid.: 13). As attitudes to wife-beaters hardened, the courts came to see it as their job, more than the
public’s, to protect vulnerable women from ‘brutal’ ‘ruffians’ ‘with no higher sense of what is due to
Page 5 of 24
womanhood’ (ibid.: 60). In England, the passing of the 1853 Act for the Better Prevention of Aggravated
Assault Upon Women and Children enabled magistrates to impose court orders, fine, or imprison men who
assaulted their wives, and was followed, three years later, by a campaign to enable women to divorce
‘wife-beating’ husbands (Stark 2007: 143).
The risks associated with disclosing both victimization and its damage to mental well-being—framed as
‘hysteria’ in the medical and psychiatric discourse—nevertheless intensified for women in Britain at the
very end of the nineteenth century as the judiciary became more concerned to ‘reconcile wives with their
violent husbands’ (Hughes 2010: 2). Men who assaulted women said to have ‘provoking tongues’ or
problems with alcoholism were more readily excused (ibid.: 22). In early twentieth-century Scotland, men
who killed their wives were convicted for ‘culpable homicide’ and sentenced only to short prison terms
instead of murder when their rage was attributed to ‘drunkeness’ (ibid.: 26). Those men who perpetrated
lesser assaults could be spared criminal sanctions altogether as ‘marriage mending’ became the preferred
discourse of the state, in part due to colonialist fears about the depletion of the British ‘race’ (ibid.: 31). In
response the courts sought to rehabilitate ‘wife-beaters without criminalizing them’ (ibid.).
The professionalizing discourses of psychiatry that permeated rehabilitative discourses from the 1920s to
the 1970s, refashioned Freudian concepts in the most reductive ways to explain men’s violence towards
women who ‘provoked’ them in terms of reactions against ‘domineering, rejecting’ wives and mothers
who failed to anticipate men’s needs (Schultz 1960: 107–8), some scholarly papers even blaming men’s
‘aggressive behaviour’ on wives who had become ‘frigid’ in the aftermath of rape by their husbands (Snell
et al. 1964: 109). The psychiatrist Gayford (1979) published a paper on one hundred ‘battered women’
supported by Chiswick Women’s Aid. Many had previously been diagnosed with psychiatric disturbances,
over a third having previously attempted suicide. Many of the women at Chiswick had suffered abuse and
incest in their childhoods—a quarter having been raped by a man other than their husband—making
return to their parents’ homes unviable, despite the concerns the majority had about the threat domestic
violence posed to their own children. The husbands and boyfriends who abused them were often no less
troubled. A third had histories of imprisonment. Half had problems with alcohol and just under half were
regular gamblers. Two thirds were assessed as being excessively jealous. In short, this was a sample of
p. 403 repeatedly abused, desperate, and ↵ vulnerable women with few other options but to go into the first
ever refuge or remain with men who were terrifying them and their children. And yet Gayford compounded
their plights by repeating the well-worn misogynistic trope of castigating women for failing to know their
places:
The neat, efficient woman of superior intelligence to her marital partner can be provocative if her
husband develops a dependency on her which she withdraws at a critical time. At the other end of
the spectrum, the inadequate woman who cannot organize her domestic life is provocative. Pair
each of these with a man of low frustration tolerance who has found that crises appear to be
solved by outbursts of aggression and violence, add an element of suspicion of the wife’s fidelity.
Dissolve his inhibitions in alcohol and a battered wife can be predicted. (ibid.: 24)
Page 6 of 24
Only when critical attention fell on the men so ‘provoked’ was there any glimmer of insight. Faulk’s (1974)
questionnaire-based assessment of 23 men remanded in custody for grievous assaults, murder, and
attempted murder—revealed a diversity of motives among wife assaulters. Two thirds had suffered
psychiatric disorders such as depression, delusional jealousy, paranoid illness, or dementia. Some were
generally ‘violent and intimidating’ men who tried to solve all their problems by ‘bullying’ people, while
others were dominating husbands ‘who would brook no insubordination from their wives’. A substantial
minority were previously a ‘stable and affectionate group’ of men who had not become abusive until a
‘time of mental disturbance’ (Faulk 1974: 181–2), though a wider group explained how they generally
pacified their partners, despite having ‘exploded’ following some ‘precipitating act’ by the victim. Some of
these prisoners were ‘dependent and suspicious’ men who had become controlling and then increasingly
violent because of their own undue jealousies.
Feminism and criminology

The vast body of feminist scholarship that reshaped thinking about sexism and gender from the 1970s
onwards challenged the view that women were somehow to blame for the violence they experienced at the
hands of men. It demanded to know why women’s experiences were typically devalued as anecdote while
men’s interpretations of female victims’ provocations were treated as science. Griffin (1971) underlined
the ‘price’ many women paid for the male chivalry that promised them a very constricted form of
protection in return for the acceptance of a range of rape-condoning myths. Brownmiller (1975) noted the
pervasiveness of the sexual and physical violence experienced by women of all social groups across the
world and history—including as a weapon of war and colonization—conceptualizing rape as part of a
strategy of patriarchal domination that protected men’s interests in maintaining sexual inequality.
Dworkin (1974, 1981) exposed the cultural hatred of women beneath apparently banal expressions of
sexism and related this to the systematic subjugation of the female body in what was then only an
emerging global pornography industry trading in the consumption of women’s bodies.
Criminology was a latecomer to this feminist scholarship, and a needy one at that, given its blindness to
issues of gender generally and its inattention to domestic violence specifically (Smart 1990: 27). The
radical sociologies of deviance that had upstaged the more therapeutic and medical orthodoxies said very
little about domestic violence, and were, for the most part, oblivious to the gendered nature of much crime
and criminalization. Dobash and Dobash’s (1979) Violence Against Wives was among the first feminist texts
p. 404 on domestic violence that spoke directly to this criminological chasm. Also ↵ drawing some of their
sample from Chiswick, Dobash and Dobash noted how women at this time became conscious of their
common experiences of domestic violence as they began talking about other matters: feelings of
‘loneliness and isolation’, for example, or how ‘to seek help for problems, ranging from poor housing to
alcoholism’ (ibid.: 1). Asked to describe the first, worst, and last ‘incidents’ of violence they had suffered,
the Dobashes’ participants explained that it had no exact beginning or end, because violent episodes
tended to permeate relationships in which conflicts about jealousies, housework, and money are
continuously laden with threat.
Page 7 of 24
Violent events … usually take place after a build-up and take on an identity of their own which is
intense and memorable … because of the meanings they have for each partner. Such events not
only dominate the daily lives of both abuser and abused but also form a crucial part in the
formation of subsequent violent events and in the continuing development of the couple’s overall
relationship. (Dobash and Dobash 1984: 269)
Dobash and Dobash (1979: ix) argued for a ‘comprehensive explanation and understanding’ of the brutal
and systematic abuse of ‘wives’ their interviews had exposed. They argued that this explanation should
incorporate: the patriarchal structures and ideology that shape expectations of women and men in
relationships; the sources of conflict that lead up to and become articulated in violent episodes; and the
effects of the violence, not only in terms of the physical and psychological harms caused, but also in terms
of the management or avoidance of further conflict by the victim, and the pressures, often imposed by the
abuser, to continue the relationship as if nothing had happened. The Dobashes discovered that many
abused women attempted to reason and argue with men who threatened them. Some screamed or cried in
order to resist a beating. Others had pushed abusers away or hit back, because they were both angry and
wanted to protect themselves. Such resistance meant that continued exposure to violence was not
inevitable. In some cases, the support of friends, neighbours, and relatives had led to the ‘eventual
termination’ of the abuse ‘either through escape from the abuser or cessation of his violent
behaviour’ (1984: 269).
Subsequent feminist scholarship underlined the pervasiveness of the gender-based violence women
experience inside and outside the home. In her book, Intimate Intrusions, Stanko (1985: 1) highlighted how
women ‘are continually on their guard to the possibility of men’s violence’ and how despite its widespread
nature, women exposed to ‘rape, incest, wife battering, or sexual harassment’ have also to contend with a
criminal justice system that construes such abuses as ‘indiscretions’ typically perpetrated against women
of questionable respectability (ibid.: 4). Similarly, Kelly’s (1988) Surviving Sexual Violence conceived of a
‘continuum of abuse’—including sexual harassment, pressurized sex, exposure to pornography, domestic
violence, incest, and rape—which women have to learn how to cope with and resist, despite the pervasive
acceptance of myths about how they incite violence or even enjoy being abused. Kelly conceived of
domestic violence as both an expression of men’s power and evidence of women’s resistance to it, the
threat of force also evoked when patriarchal authority is lacking. Theoretically, this made distinguishing
‘battered wives’ from other women beside the point. It also begged a question as to how distinguishable
male ‘batterers’ were from other ‘normal’ men. As Kelly (1987: 59) surmised:
The fact that some women only experience violence at the more common, everyday end of the
continuum is a difference in degree not in kind. The use of the term ‘victim’ in order to separate
one group of women from other women’s lives and experiences must be questioned. The same
logic applies to the definition of ‘offenders’.
p. 405 ↵ Now much more widely understood as a feature of everyday sexism, not least via the MeToo hashtag
on social media and the Everyone’s Invited project that provides a space for survivors of abuse to share
their stories—the radical importance of conceptualizing partner assaults against women, not as discrete
incidents, but as part of a continuum of abuse should not be understated. Recognition of the connections
Page 8 of 24
between the many abuses women suffer led ultimately to the advent of national crime surveys, as
described earlier, that sought to measure domestic violence; political acknowledgment of the extent of this
crime and the harm it inflicts; estimates of the economic costs imposed by domestic violence and the
necessity of resourcing interventions to support victims and tackle perpetrators; and the development of
international policy at the levels of the UN and European Union requiring national governments to tackle
gender-based violence of all kinds (Walby et al. 2014b).
Contemporary Debates and Perspectives
Coercive control and the motivations of male perpetrators

Advances in the measurement of victimization have, however, also opened up debates with regard to the
relative merits of explanations grounded in psychology, gender, and other inequalities. Taking leave from
the notion that women experience a continuum of abuse, O’Leary (1993: 25), for example, suggests there is
much to be gained from contemplating a continuum of violence perpetration:
At the more moderate end of the continuum of physical aggression against a wife …
impulsiveness, and ‘dependence’ readiness to defend oneself, suspicion of others, and a tendency
to take offense easily … are … predictive of physical aggression against a … dating partner … In
large community studies … the association of personality styles or traits and the use of physical
aggression against a partner is small but statistically significant. In men who engage in severe
acts of physical aggression and coercive tactics against a partner, the likelihood of finding that an
individual has a significantly elevated score on a scale that assesses personality disorders is very
high.
In other words, the differences between men who are not normally violent and those who are moderately
so, are subtle though measurable and more akin to nuances of personality styles than traits. As O’Leary
(1993) contends, this is partly because shades of sexism, suspiciousness, and sensitivity to criticism from a
partner are relatively common among men. The differences between men who are not normally violent
and those who are frequently and severely physically abusive are stark and easily exposed through
psychometric testing.
Psychological research has, rather oddly, had very little to say about the relationship between diagnosable
mental health conditions—depression, paranoia, psychosis, autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit
disorder—despite their recurrence among samples of perpetrators in interventions (Renehan 2021a).
Instead, the objective of much psychological research on domestic abuse perpetrators has been to
differentiate different types among the clinically known ‘batterer’ population. Holtzworth-Munroe and
Stuart (1994) distinguish between ‘family-only batterers’ (with relatively low levels of psychopathology
p. 406 and fairly liberal attitudes towards women) and two other types ↵ with conservative attitudes towards
women: ‘borderline batterers’ (who also score highly on measures of low mood, jealousy, insecurity, and
fear of rejection) and men who are ‘generally violent’ in many contexts (who score highly on measures of
antisocial personality disorder, evidenced in terms of criminal records and histories of alcoholism or
Page 9 of 24
substance misuse). Others, like Dutton (1998), distinguish between ‘instrumental’ batterers (who use
violence in many contexts to get what they want) and ‘impulsive’ batterers (who go through cycles of
being violent to their partners, giving the impression that the abuse is somehow out of character). This
latter group, according to Dutton, are more likely to have ‘fearful attachment styles’, evidenced by ‘an
unstable sense of self and an inability to tolerate aloneness’, together with high scores on measures of
borderline personality organization (BPO) (ibid.: 86).
[T]hese men depend on their relationship with female partners to prevent their fragile selfhood
from disintegrating and to dissipate the pervasive anxiety they feel … The intimate relationship of
the high-BPO scorer is asked to do the impossible, and when it fails, or appears in his eyes to fail,
extreme anger results because his very sense of self is threatened and because his use of
projection as a defense tell him that it is her fault that it is failing. He views her, at that phase of
the relationship, as ‘all bad’. If that impasse resolves, he then tends to view her as ‘all good’ and
himself as bad … (1998: 86–7, emphasis in original).
Dutton et al. (1998: 145) found evidence that ‘impulsive’ batterers, more often than men who are not
violent, report ‘feeling rejected’ or ‘a lack of warmth’ from their fathers, being ‘physically’ and verbally
abused by their fathers, and ‘feeling rejected’ by their mothers. This suggests that the causes of domestic
violence are sometimes derivative of the tensions between men’s social expectations of power and
personal insecurities that are often co-located in conflicts with their partners and in upbringings with
fathers who were emotionally distant, belittling, or abusive. Though principally sociological in
perspective, criminological theory in this area starts from a similar assumption, the structured action
approach to masculinities positing that some groups of men—young, poor, minority ethnic—have fewer
resources to accomplish their masculinity than others and hence use domestic violence as a means to
compensate for this (Messerschmidt 1999). Structured action theory has tended, however, to overstate the
social acceptability of domestic violence among men, few of whom would regard domestic abusers as the
most accomplishedly masculine men (Gottzèn 2016). By way of contrast, my own ‘psychosocial’ attempts
to theorize perpetrators’ motivations attends to ‘shameful’ problems that perpetrators typically cite as
causing them, uncharacteristically, to ‘lose control’. It also conceptualizes the role of splitting and
projection in attributing blame to victims, alongside violent men’s investments in everyday masculine
discourses that positioned them as reasonable, protectors, providers and/or disciplinarians whose
opinions should be accepted as carrying a particular kind of authority to be respected by their children and
partners (Gadd 2000, 2002).
Sexual ‘symmetry’ and women’s violence

The work of psychologists has nevertheless proved contentious among many feminist criminologists
because of its tendency to dismiss the role of gender in the aetiology of domestic violence as without
scientific foundation (DeKeseredy and Dragiewicz 2014; Dobash et al. 1992). This either/or—gender/
personality—way of thinking about causation derives in part from the studies of Straus and his colleagues’
using the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS). The CTS is a self-report questionnaire that asks participants what
p. 407 ↵ they have done to their partner and what their partner has done to them on occasions over the last 12
Page 10 of 24
months when they have tended to ‘disagree, get annoyed with the other person, or … have spats or fights
because they are in a bad mood or tired or for some other reason’ (Straus 1993: 82). Replicated in over two
hundred studies across the world, findings produced using the CTS are fairly consistent (Straus 2010). Men
and women report roughly equivalent usage of conflict tactics. The inclusion of questions about sexual
violence—which women experience much more than men—within the scale did not change the overall
conclusion in part because sexual violence, when measured as an ‘incident’ or ‘tactic’, is not as
commonplace as verbal abuse. Consequently, Straus queried the relevance of gender to the aetiology of
domestic violence. Those persuaded by his argument have called for gender-focused content to be
removed from programmes that provide preventative domestic abuse education for children and from
treatment interventions for perpetrators (Dixon et al. 2012; Dutton 2010). They have also called for the
development of victim services that serve men and women equally.
Such proposals are nevertheless almost impossible to square with the demand for services for victims of
domestic violence the world over, very little of which comes from men, despite campaigns in some
Western countries to encourage abused men to seek help. Indeed, the most likely explanation for the
‘sexual symmetry’ produced in studies using the CTS is a methodological one. Men and boys tend to apply
more constricted understandings of what constitutes violence than women when it comes to self-report
surveys (Hearn 1998). Miller’s (2008) Getting Played, for example, documents instances where women
recount experiences of gang rape orchestrated by their boyfriends, while the young men involved defined
their behaviour as a consensual form of group sex called ‘running trains’. This matters, because as Straus
(1993: 79) also noted, some of the worst domestic violence happens when women who live with a batterer
slap or throw ‘something at a partner for doing something outrageous … [This] reinforces his moral
justification for slapping her … as he sees it’. In sum, minor acts of aggression between men and women in
heterosexual relationships become part of the moral justification some men offer for grievous physical and
sexual assaults on women. The samples captured by the CTS are also more self-selecting than those used
in national victimization surveys, the most rigorous of which have long confirmed that men who have
experienced domestic abuse encounter it less repeatedly and severely than women (Tjaden and Thoennes
2000; Povey et al. 2008; Black et al. 2011).
Such shortcomings led Johnson (2006) to conclude that the CTS primarily measures one form of domestic
violence, namely ‘common couple’ or ‘situational’ violence, that is often reciprocal, rarely about power
and control, and often to do with specific crises or periods of separation. By contrast the refuge population
mostly comprises women who have been exposed to ‘intimate terrorism’, what Stark (2007) calls ‘coercive
control’, a cumulative form of subjugation that uses violence alongside a range of tactics that ‘entrap’
women in relationships with men by making them constantly fearful. Qualitative studies of male victims
and female perpetrators generally confirm the point that very little female-to-male violence can be
described as ‘coercive control’ or ‘battery’ (Stark 2007; Hester 2009). Moreover, some men identified as
victims in survey research regard themselves more as perpetrators who have been hit back, while some of
those who perceive themselves as victims are mostly aggrieved at the loss of relationships in which no or
little physical violence occurred (Gadd et al. 2003). Some male victims tell heroic stories of self-sacrificing
restraint in which they endured relationships with unkind, unfeeling, or ‘crazy’ women to protect their
children or out of a sense of chivalric duty to protect a vulnerable female. Such stories often reveal complex
p. 408 imbalances of power—borne out of ↵ disabilities, income levels, or citizenship status—amidst what
Page 11 of 24
might look like ‘common couple’ violence, while the restraints victimized men use to pacify women still
today deemed ‘hysterical’—such as pinning them down—are easily reinterpreted as intimidating
behaviours that evoke the fear of physical or sexual assault (Gadd et al. 2003). While there is no doubt that
some men are victimized by women who are abusive, dangerous, or use their children against them, social
researchers have struggled to find any substantial population of male victims fearful enough to merit
substantial investment in refuge provision either from within those identified as victims in national
population surveys (ibid.) or among those known to health professionals (Hester et al. 2015). Indeed,
Hester et al. (2015) suggest it may thus be better to map men’s experiences of victimization onto a wider
terrain of ‘negative behaviours’, some of which are violent and some of which they have also perpetrated
themselves, either in retaliation or in ways that pre-empted abuse directed against them.
Studies of women arrested for violence against a partner reveal a population that has been victimized more
often than they have perpetrated abuse and whose experiences of sexual assault are comparable to women
in the refuge population (Stuart et al. 2006). Around the world, there is concern that the criminalization of
coercive control, Stark’s thesis having appealed to many Anglophone policy-makers, will lead to those
women least well served by the law—migrant women, indigenous women, black women, and disabled
women—becoming criminalized (Fitz-Gibbon et al. 2021; Barlow and Walklate 2022). Asked why they had
abused their partners, women in Stuart and colleagues’ (2006) study said they had done so for self-
defence, to show anger, to express feelings that could not be put into words, to retaliate for emotional
hurts, to feel more powerful, and because they had been provoked. Echoing the accounts of some male
victims, a number of commentators distinguish between women who use violence as the primary
perpetrators, those who use it defensively to protect themselves, and those who adopt a ‘never again’
mentality who strike first, having been abused by previous partners (Hamlett 1998). This latter group of
women—who are sometimes cast erroneously as sufferers of ‘Battered Woman Syndrome’ (Walker 1984)
—are often perceived by criminal justice professionals as behaving in ways that are ‘mutually combative’
and criminalized accordingly (Miller and Meloy 2006). Yet studies of women in treatment programmes for
violence suggest substance abuse, mental health problems, and historic experiences of child sexual abuse
are part of the explanation for sudden outbursts of aggression from domestically abusive women that are
often geared towards protecting themselves or their children from threats that may be real or imagined
(Swan and Snow 2006). Other acts of retaliation take place in the context of what Douglas (2017) calls
‘legal systems abuse’: the proclivity among some typically male domestic abuse perpetrators to make
fictitious insinuations about their victims that present them as the ‘real’ danger, prompting child
protection, family court, police or immigration enforcement investigations into them, reducing their
recourse to law and deflecting blame mischievously away from the men attempting to control them.
Intersectionality and risk management

That such unjust criminal justice outcomes would fall more heavily upon multiply oppressed women was
first anticipated by Crenshaw (1993). Describing her own experiences of working for disadvantaged groups
in Los Angeles, Crenshaw noted the perverse outcomes that follow when gender, race, and class intersect
in the lives of battered women. While feminism had exposed how any woman, whatever her education or
p. 409 class ↵ status, could be a victim of domestic violence—leading some to suggest erroneously that all
Page 12 of 24
women were equally at risk—Crenshaw pointed out that violence afflicted the poorest women and ethnic
minority women the most. Black women generally had fewest protections, black rights organizations
unwilling, at that time, to recognize domestic violence as a social problem affecting them. Historic
experiences of police racism made many African American women reluctant to call the police when their
husbands abused them, lest this culminate in police violence directed towards the men or their sons whom
Crenshaw noted, were at increased risk of imprisonment for taking it upon themselves to intervene in
domestic assaults perpetrated against their mothers.
Such issues are still pertinent today. Organizations that deliver services for survivors for minority ethnic
groups have noted that the police find it harder to identify signs of abuse experienced by black and Asian
women, that such women have far few chances of securing justice in the courts, and that their murders are
much less likely to hit the headlines than the murders of white British women (Summers 2021). Abused
women suspected of having an irregular immigration status, risk being referred to immigration
enforcement when they present to the police as victims of abuse (HMICFRS 2020). Perpetrators can use
this risk to their advantage against migrant women who fear deportation, who can have limited right to
legal representation, limited understanding of the language of the host country, and/or no right to refuge
provision (Erez et al. 2009; Mason and Pulvirenti 2013). This type of systemic discrimination reveals the
degree to which many countries that champion criminal justice responses to violence against women
continue to fail to meet obligations conferred by the Istanbul (or more formally, The Council of Europe)
Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, despite being
signatories to it.
In Western Europe discussions about ethnicity and domestic violence have tended to focus more latterly on
the issue of ‘honour-based’ or ‘honour-related violence’, which can include domestic violence, but can
also include forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and abuse perpetrated by extended family
members. Such crimes are often assumed to be exclusive to Muslim populations, though they are also
found in some contemporary European Christian cultures too. Honour-based violence is usually
perpetrated against women regarded as having brought shame on the family or the community through
their behaviour. Dishonourable behaviour can include marrying a person of their choice against their
family’s wishes, divorcing an abusive partner, being raped, or having same-sex relationships (Idriss 2011).
Violence perpetrated in the name of honour is often sanctioned by the wider community and can also be
perpetrated against men who fail to redress the transgressions of their wives. The study of such crimes is
complicated both by migration that has increased cultural diversity among groups of the same faith, and
Islamophobia which has propagated stereotypes of Muslim men and women. Gill (2011) argues that there is
actually no honour—Islamic or otherwise—in violence towards women, just gender-based social control
geared towards maintaining particular forms of political and cultural authority.
By way of contrast, far less attention is paid to the disproportionately high rates of domestic violence
suffered by sex workers or women caught up in sex trafficking, much of which is perpetrated by men
regarded as ‘boyfriends’ with whom the victims are in exploitative relationships (Broad 2015; Pickering
and Ham 2013). Both sex ‘industries’ are ones that exploit across gender and ethnic lines, with
economically disadvantaged minority ethnic and ‘first nation’ indigenous women over-represented in
these trades in many Western countries. Those who exchange drugs for sex and vice versa debar
Page 13 of 24
p. 410 themselves from legal protections and hence become prone to taking greater risks as ↵ their
desperation intensifies and they become reliant on the protection of men who can present a credible threat
of violence (Shannon et al. 2008; see also Phoenix, this volume). As the findings of Domestic Homicide
Reviews routinely underline (Chantler et al. 2020), there are complex relationships between drug and
alcohol dependency, poor mental health and domestic abuse that not only expose some women and men to
greater risks of violence, but also delimit the capacity of service providers to work in a holistic way with
them. The reduction of these relationships to ‘risk factors’ measured through professional risk
assessments often fails to serve victims well (Robinson and Howarth 2012; Turner et al. 2019),
undermining what, for many, have been long-standing efforts to maintain an uneasy peace before the
police were called as a ‘last resort’ (Barlow et al. 2021). Primary research with couples where domestic
abuse is complicated by drug use reveals the importance of distinguishing cases where both partners are
users from those where only one person is dependent on illicit drugs, especially if their usage is
clandestine; recognizing that encouraging the resumption of drug use among women who are former
users is a strategy of coercive control deployed by some perpetrators; and understanding how withdrawal,
as much as intoxication, can anticipate the perpetration of physical assaults among users with histories of
being coercively controlling (Gadd et al. 2019).
It is well established that separated and separating women are at heightened risk of victimization relative
to married and divorced women, in part because this is a time when perpetrators fear they are losing
control and attempt to reassert it (Finnbogadóttir and Dykes 2016). Pregnant women are also at
heightened risk of domestic abuse, perhaps also because some perpetrators feel threatened by the change
in their partners’ priorities and her contact with healthcare professionals and midwives who ask questions
about her well-being. What is less commonly reported is that older women experience specific risks with
regards to domestic abuse, their victimization often not counted in general population surveys,
misdiagnosed as ‘elder abuse’ in professional practice, and their murders misclassified as ‘mercy killings’
in cases where husbands kill their terminally ill partners (Bows 2020).
In terms of prevalence rates, however, teenagers and young adults—especially students—are at much
greater risk of domestic violence—sometimes referred to as ‘dating violence’—than older people. UK
studies show that around a quarter of young people admit to perpetrating an act of domestic abuse against
a partner by their mid-teens and around two fifths of mid-teens who have dated have at least one
experience of victimization (Barter et al. 2009; Gadd et al. 2015). Tellingly, most children, like most adults,
regard hitting a partner to be wrong and want perpetrators to be ‘challenged’ (Gadd et al. 2015). At the
same time, most young people can think of exceptions when violence might be acceptable, and many
straight young men can empathize with those who act in controlling ways towards a partner because they
feel insecure and understand how a ‘fight’ between a couple can become physical given the imperative to
‘hit back’ (ibid.; Lombard 2015). These nuances of meaning—together with popular stereotypes about
what perpetrators look like—‘mad’, older men, under stress; younger men in gangs or addicted to drugs;
or ethnic minority men with religious or cultural values that are disrespectful to women—are critical parts
of the explanation as to why domestic violence persists despite widespread and historically enduring
antipathy towards ‘wife-beaters’ (Gadd et al. 2015).
Page 14 of 24
What happens as such men grow up has been little studied by criminologists, though it is evident from
both victimization surveys and treatment evaluations that many reduce their use of abusive behaviours or
p. 411 even stop completely by middle age (Bowen 2011; ↵ Kelly and Westmarland 2015). Some perpetrators
stop using violence when they accept the need to end a relationship or live alone. Conversely, violence can
escalate to lethal levels, to include strangulation and sexual assaults, among persistent perpetrators who
cannot come to such an acceptance (Monkton-Smith 2021). Nevertheless, much domestic violence is also
episodic, perpetrators zigzagging through peaks that are aggravated by ‘a particular stressor’, and troughs
‘when the stressor is resolved, the offender adapts to the change in circumstances, or the offender
attempts to desist’ (Boxall and Lawler 2021: 7; see also Gadd and Farrall 2004). Engaging perpetrators with
the perspectives of those affected by violence can induce change, and there is qualified evidence that well-
resourced groupwork programmes that hold men accountable for their behaviour can increase the safety of
women and children if accompanied by dedicated support that empowers survivors and/or works with
non-abusing parents to help children recover (Dobash et al. 2000; Kelly and Westmarland 2015;
Humphreys et al. 2020).
Interventions that engage men as fathers and support their children so that they feel safe enough to ask
them directly about previous violence can also help secure change among former perpetrators (Alderson et
al. 2012). What is less well understood is how change is secured outside of treatment contexts and what it
looks like, for there is a huge difference between a relationship in which someone who has been a victim of
domestic violence continues to pacify a partner to avoid enraging them and the conscious decision of the
person who has been violent to ensure they never react in that way again (Walker et al. 2015). Morran’s
(2013) follow up of 11 ex-perpetrators who completed celebrated UK perpetrator programmes reveals that
while treatment helps some men become reflexive about the sexism they relied upon to justify violence,
the desire for control and the feelings of vulnerability that underpinned it often persisted for decades.
Moreover, there is little attention to either neuro or social diversity in most groupwork programmes—and
very little critical discussion of ‘who’s in the room’ where interventions take place, that engages with the
challenge of how and whether participants, including facilitators, with very different experiences of
gender, race, class and sexuality identify with each other (Boonzaier and Gordon 2015: 15; Renehan
2021b).This is self-evidently a problem in places where black men, migrant men, and minority ethnic men
are criminalized at much higher rates than the white populations who predominate. Many group work
interventions utilize vignettes that presume sexual jealousies and arguments over the consumption of
alcohol that are not culturally relevant to some populations, and few consider the perspectives of men who
originate from countries, including those in Europe, which have seen the systematic erosion of women’s
rights over the last decade (Krizsan and Roggeband 2018).
The absence of bespoke interventions is also a significant problem with regard to lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender (LGBT+) populations for whom there is a dearth of interventions against a backcloth of
service provision that locates the causes of domestic violence in men’s power over women in heterosexual
couples (Calton et al. 2016; Cannon and Buttell 2015). Community-based studies of ‘out’ LGBT+
populations have tended to uncover prevalence rates similar to studies that have administered the CTS to
heterosexual couples (Renzetti 1992; Roch et al. 2010; Donovan and Hester 2011). This has led some to
suggest that domestic violence among sexual minorities is typically ‘common couple’ and rarely coercively
controlling (Johnson 2006). The few national studies that use random sampling, however, present a more
Page 15 of 24
complex picture. Some studies suggest that rates of domestic violence are either similar or lower in lesbian
relationships than in straight relationships, but that men who live with male partners are potentially at
p. 412 greater risk, and/or that the trans population is among the most heavily victimized ↵ (Bachmann and
Gooch 2018; Callan et al. 2021; Tjaden et al. 1999; Walters et al. 2013). Such findings are, of course, also
products of the lesser degree of legal protection afforded to sexual minorities, reluctance to come out to
the authorities through fear of homophobia, the heterosexist focus of much domestic violence provision,
and the presumption among some gay and lesbian people that domestic violence is a heterosexual
problem.
There are, however, also dangers of over-generalization here. Some commentators point to subsections of
the gay male population who actively pursue risky forms of intimacy via social media and/or shared drug
use. Such behaviours can be conceived as subcultural reactions against heteronormative forms of social
control that render same-sex intimacy inherently dangerous, generating the demand for virtual spaces
where risk can be actively negotiated (Frederick and Peronne 2014). Indeed, one might argue that the
original framing of domestic violence as a problem of ‘wife battery’ now conceals more than it reveals.
This is evident in relation to the problem of ‘drug-facilitated’ sexual assaults perpetrated on men and
women who are insufficiently conscious to consent. These need to be understood, not only in terms of
drink ‘spiking’, but also in the context of night-time economies in which many young people consume
illicit substances that are cheaper and have fewer side-effects than alcohol (Aldridge 2020; Carter et al.
2009; Lee and Crofts 2015), as well as the serious deficiencies in professional responses to it. Likewise, we
need to understand online dating as a context in which the power relations intrinsic to in-person intimacy
are reproduced, intensified, as well as challenged. Concomitantly, warning people, especially young
people, about the risks associated with conducting intimacy online or alongside illicit drug consumption,
can make the dangers more enticing to some, in much the same way that public health campaigns can
generate what are known as counterproductive ‘boomerang effects’, with those prone to risk-taking
tempted by behaviour marked anew as dangerous (Gadd et al. 2015).
Conclusion
This chapter has shown how the ways in which domestic violence has been conceptualized and measured,
have shaped how it has been explained and responded to. Shortcomings in official responses and inequities
in access to support and law enforcement have, in turn, impacted on the pervasiveness of the problem,
shaping which populations are at risk from the predominantly male offenders who perpetrate it.
Criminologists are called upon to explain how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted upon domestic violence:
they will need to remind policy-makers that the epidemic of violence against women is longstanding and
explain that changes in reporting rates with regard to physical and sexual assault are only a small part of
the picture. As emerging research is already revealing, domestic violence did not increase everywhere in
2020 and 2021. Indeed, we might anticipate that some abusive men felt less need to use physical violence
against partners while governments were compelling people to stay home, and more need to use coercive
control as national lockdowns ended, especially as victims were re-empowered to seek support in person
(Ingla Smith 2021). Those populations who faced barriers in reaching out for help—which will have
included many children living with a parent suffering abuse, as well as a disproportionate number of older
people, the disabled, irregular migrants, and ethnic and sexual minorities—will endure long term
Page 16 of 24
consequences from living in fear that are not reducible to incident counts. And some men who embarked
on coercively controlling behaviours in 2020 are likely to continue to do so unless held to account and
p. 413 engaged ↵ in interventions that are responsive to their behaviour. While there is considerable reason to
be sceptical about the degree to which police and criminal justice responses will be able to redress the
epidemic of domestic violence the world over, the degree to which violence against women became the
subject of global public debate during 2020 and 2021 suggests that sensibilities are changing. Whether this
renewed public awareness will change the behaviour of prospective perpetrators or extend to encompass
the dangers faced by the many victims who are not relatively young, white, and able-bodied women living
in Western countries remains to be seen. Criminologists have an important part to play in extending these
discussions and in challenging the exceptionalism that tends to note the pervasiveness of domestic
violence, but, at the same time, defines solutions in terms of the treatment of a small number of
perpetrators or batterers who can be neatly categorized into one of several psychological types.

Hydén, Gadd, and Wade’s (2016) Response-Based Approaches to the Study of Interpersonal Violence showcases
international perspectives informed by the insight that a complex range of responses often determine whether
perpetrators continue to abuse.
Barlow and Walklate’s (2022) Coercive Control provides a critical interrogation of whether the criminalization of
coercive control can deliver safety and justice to survivors.
Online resources

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19. Prostitution and sex work

p. 417 19. Prostitution and sex work

Jo Phoenix
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0019
Abstract
This chapter explores current characteristics and contexts of women’s involvement in prostitution and sex work, particularly
as they have evolved during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, before describing criminological knowledge about
prostitution and sex workers. The final sections of the chapter review current regulatory frameworks governing women’s
involvement in prostitution. Running throughout the chapter is the question: what is the relationship between how
prostitution is theorized and the politics of prostitution policy and its reform?
Keywords: prostitution, sex work, exploitation, victimization, labour, gender
Introduction
The aims of this chapter are threefold: to explore the characteristics and contexts of prostitution as they
have evolved in the twenty-first century; to examine the ways in which such phenomena have been
conceptualized within criminology; and to review the policing of prostitution-related crime. As the chapter
will demonstrate, despite the rich body of academic literature, prostitution remains a subject of intense
debate and there is little or no consensus amongst academics, politicians, policy-makers or campaigners
regarding definitional, explanatory or regulatory questions. Indeed as a field, sex work research is beset
with epistemological, methodological and political schisms and consequently risks losing sight of some
basic questions including: how is prostitution shaped by the social, economic and cultural contexts in
which it is situated; how can we account for the ‘passage’ of individuals who become involved in
prostitution over time (to borrow from Young 1987); and how can scholars utilize the answers to these
questions better to illuminate political and policy debates?
Page 1 of 27
The chapter begins with a review of the changing empirical realities of prostitution and sex work. It then
explores in more detail the ways in which women’s involvement in prostitution has been conceptualized
within criminology. This is followed by a review of how prostitution has been regulated, including evidence
that it has become all but de facto decriminalized in England and Wales today.
Empirical Realities—Change and Continuity
As a social institution, prostitution is more than merely the exchange of sex for money. It comprises
heterogeneous relationships between sex workers, their clients, the local neighbourhoods and regulatory
agencies such as the police, social workers or healthcare professionals. It takes many different shapes and
forms: from street-based sex work to indoor work which, in itself, is variable in terms of how it is
organized, the business model upon which it is fashioned and the ways in which it is regulated. The
p. 418 internet and ↵ smart phones have provided the technology for a massive expansion, diversification and
re-organization of prostitution and new and different commercial sexual experiences and products are
available (see Weitzer 2007, 2009 and Hester et al. 2019).
Globalization and the spread of neo-liberal economic policies throughout most modern democracies have
given rise to what is (now) more commonly referred to as a globally organized sex industry which extends
far wider than prostitution. Not only are national and international companies and corporations
structuring these new ‘markets’ (Brents and Sanders 2010), the sex industry has become as deeply
intertwined with licit, global economic markets (such as sex tourism) as it is with older illicit markets
(such as drugs markets). Globalization and mass migration, specifically global flows of capital and human
beings now shape routes into prostitution and the conditions experienced by those involved, with the
consequence that the lives of some of those in prostitution have become ever more precarious (O’Connell
Davidson 2015). Along with this expansion and diversification, women’s experiences of prostitution also
vary enormously between different sectors of the sex industry and different parts of the world in which
such activities are pursued (Chin and Finckenauer 2012, Kempadoo, Sanghera et al. 2015). Indeed, so
diverse is the sector that it is more appropriate to think of prostitutions (in the plural) rather than
prostitution (in the singular).
There, nevertheless, remain a few unchanging themes. Endemic levels of exploitation and violence endure
in prostitution just as there persist links with organized crime (Campbell 2000; Turnbull and Harocopos et
al. 2001; Church 2003; Hester and Westmarland 2004; Galatowicz et al. 2005; Stage 2021b). Small-scale
empirical research confirms that for women, entrance into prostitution tends to be shaped by everyday
political and economic structures that maintain women’s economic dependency on men and families;
shape their relative poverty to men; limit their access to full-time secure employment; place on women the
burden of childcare and domestic responsibilities; ensure that welfare security is mediated by and through
women’s relationships in families and with men; and maintain welfare benefits at near destitution level
(see also Hester et al. 2019: 12–14; Stage Project 2021a). In this context, sex remains—as ever—a key
economic resource in women’s attempts to provide for themselves and any dependents they may have.
These processes and structures become more pronounced for women who struggle with multiple
disadvantage and complex social welfare and health needs (Phoenix 1999; Stage Project 2021c).
Page 2 of 27
The research evidence suggests that the global Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect on women
involved in prostitution, as well as some counter-intuitive effects. In the UK, government ‘furlough’
support during the crisis, specifically during the successive periods of ‘lockdown’, was only available to
employees and businesses. Lockdown’s limits on mobility and people’s genuine health concerns reduced
demand for sexual services (Yasseri 2021). With restrictions on the freedom of movement into households,
indoor sex work was effectively criminalized (albeit through coronavirus emergency measures). Support
services for women in prostitution stopped working face-to-face which had an immediate effect on the
level and type of support women could access. In many ways, the social and economic precarity of women
who were involved in sex work, as well as their vulnerability to violence, increased significantly (Mulvihill
2019). This is not surprising as during 2020–2021 there was also what many refer to as a ‘shadow
pandemic’, with escalating numbers of women and children experiencing violence and abuse as families
1
were forced to stay inside. Part of that ‘shadow pandemic’ was, according to Women@TheWell, a
p. 419 demographic shift in the type of women seeking support. Increased numbers ↵ of women were turning
to prostitution as a result of losing their jobs. Moreover women who had not previously experienced
exploitation as part of their involvement in prostitution were increasingly exposed to this (Thompson
2021). The pandemic thus highlighted a clear causal connection between women’s poverty and
involvement in prostitution, but, paradoxically, the worsening conditions experienced may well have
contributed to greater numbers of women seeking the services of ‘exit’ projects.
Given these empirical realities, how then has criminology engaged with questions relating to prostitution?
Theorizing Prostitution
This section charts the evolution of criminological theorizing about prostitution, from early positivism to
more recent theories, including gender critical feminism, and offers a critique of the core precepts which
underscore attempts to analyse and explain women’s involvement in prostitution. It outlines how the
question of causation has been addressed within criminology and the shift away from structural
explanations of prostitution to descriptions of sexual markets and then a return to structural explanations.
In doing so it also explores different conceptions of gender which have had such a profound impact on
criminological theorizing; these range from discourses and normative expectations that relate to sex-
based inequalities, to an understanding of gender as one part of an identity and the performative aspects
connected with it.
Positivism, aetiology, and subcultures

For the better part of the last 150 years, the prostitution-related question that captured the imagination of
criminologists was: why do women do it? The answers were framed by one main assumption: that women
who sell sex are deviant or pathological and their involvement in prostitution, therefore, requires
explanation, whereas men who buy sex are normal and, therefore, the purchase of sex requires no
explanation. In this sense, most criminological theorizing of women’s involvement in prostitution took for
Page 3 of 27
granted the salience of biological sex, even if the explanations that were once put forward relied on a
highly reductionist, at times deterministic, understanding of the role that human sexual biological
differentiation plays.
One of the most well-known positivistic explanations was put forward by Lombroso and Ferrero (1898).
Briefly, Lombroso’s and Ferrero’s (1898) explanation of prostitution was an application of Lombroso’s
earlier positive method of social science and his theory of atavism as the cause of criminality. Lombroso
and Ferrero started with the observation that there appeared to be fewer atavistic women than men and
certainly fewer criminal women than men. They argued that this was because the reproductive and
maternal functions of women produced a retardation of evolution. However, once they collected detailed
physiognomic data from women involved in prostitution, they noted that such women exhibited more
atavistic qualities and certainly more criminal characteristics than ‘normal’ women. They concluded,
therefore, that prostitution must be the form that women’s criminality takes.
In a similar fashion, the Gluecks also conceptualized prostitution as a form of women’s criminality. In
their study, they included women who committed crime as well as women in prostitution, with over half
p. 420 their sample engaged in some form of sex work. ↵ They claimed that involvement in either crime or
prostitution was a result of the individual’s supposed pathological nature. The Gluecks argued that
prostitutes were women who were ‘burdened with feeblemindedness psychopathic personality and marked
instability [who] find it difficult to survive by legitimate means’ (S. and E. Glueck 1934: 300).
Whilst early positivistic accounts were reductive, later positivistic explanations were more subtle.
Wilkinson (1955) conceptualized prostitution as a deviant subculture (in keeping, it should be noted, with
dominant explanations for youth delinquency at the time). The question she asked was: what causes
women to join a prostitution deviant subculture? Her explanation was that they experienced ‘extrusion’. At
some point in the lives of such women, the various social institutions within which they were located failed
them and, as a result, they ended up in a ‘drifting and disorganised state’ (see generally the Chicago School
and social ecological explanations for criminality, Shaw and McKay 1942, Burgess and Akers 1966,
Sutherland, Cressey et al. 1992). There was no one cause:
There is a danger in this over-simplification of factors which are no more than phases of a
dialectical process, and the analysis of these factors is submitted in the belief that any factor alone
is insignificant and none can be isolated with the comment: ‘This is the case’. The cause is past
experience, plus present situation, plus personal interpretation of them both (Wilkinson 1955:
243).
Fast forward 50 years and such explanations continue in the shape of (feminist) ‘pathways’ models.
Dodsworth’s (2014) claim about routes into sexual exploitation uses much the same logic as Wilkinson: ‘a
complex pattern emerged … in which various “push” and/or “pull” factors, interconnected and overlapped
with incidents of going missing. The meaning participants gave to these experiences … appeared to
precipitate them along different pathways … ’ (Dodsworth 2014: 2). The description of the backgrounds of
individuals is now extremely familiar: women in prostitution tend to come from abusive families; have
been excluded from school; have grown up in Local Authority Care; may have experience of drug and
Page 4 of 27
alcohol issues, mental health issues; have housing difficulties; and be unemployed, underemployed or in
precarious labour (Chesney-Lind 1989; Galvin and Pearce et al. 2003; Cusick 2006; Coy 2008; Coy 2009;
Pearce 2009; Dodsworth 2014; Chesney-Lind and Shelden 2013). Hoigard and Finstad (1992) made more
explicit reference to the impact of subcultures in their ethnography of prostitution in Sweden, and made
the case (again in a manner akin to Wilkinson) that women’s involvement in criminal sub-cultural milieux
creates the conditions for many to enter sex work. Similarly O’Neill (2001) notes that involvement in
prostitution is caused by a variety of factors—not least of which being women’s poverty, particularly in
capitalist, male dominated societies. Indeed, many ethnographies and qualitative studies of prostitution
demonstrate that sex workers themselves also concur with such explanations (McKeganey and Barnard
1996; Melrose, Barrett et al. 1999; Matthews and O’Neill 2003; Kinnell 2008). Yet no matter whether the
emphasis is on subculture or social deficits, all such explanations take for granted the salience of biological
sex—or at least that it is the conditions that these women, as a sex class, share, and in particular the
fractured nature of their lives, that helps to explain their involvement in prostitution (see also Mulvihill
2019 and her distinctions between four different types of sex work).
The problems of positivism are well known and dealt with extensively elsewhere (Phoenix 1999). However,
subcultural and pathways explanations are also not without problems. There is a tendency within this body
of work to overstate the differences between the criminal and/or prostitution subculture, the mainstream
culture and the institutions ‘out of which’ women and girls have fallen. In doing so, this mode of
p. 421 ↵ theorizing merely reproduces the notion that there are normal/abnormal activities for women
(which are asymmetrical to normal/abnormal activities for men) which inheres in earlier positivist
accounts (Scoular 2007; Pitcher et al. 2007; O’Neill, Campbell et al. 2008). Explanations that focus on
specifying risk factors, routes or pathways to deviance or criminality, no matter how complex, tend to
confuse correlation with causation (Sampson and Laub 1995) (see also O’Mahony 2009, for a critique of
risk factors in relation to complex social behaviour, such as youth offending). Finally, no matter how
careful the academic is to specify that such pathways or routes into prostitution are rational choices taken
by women and would be taken by other women too, there is nevertheless the underpinning assumption
that it is these individuals whose sexual or economic lives warrant a different explanation, from those
making other sexual or economic choices. Perhaps all that can be said for subcultural and pathways studies
is that they offer little more than well nuanced demographic descriptions of women already involved in
prostitution.
Sex work, violence, economics, and sex-based oppression

Towards the end of the twentieth century, new ways of thinking about biological sex, sexual activities,
sexualities and their regulation were being articulated. Critical sexuality studies made the case that
‘sexuality’ (as in the embodied experiences of sexual desire, pleasure and sexual orientation), rather than
being solely a biological function, has important social dimensions and varies according to social and
historical context (McIntosh 1968; Gagnon and Simon 1973; Plummer 1981; Weeks 1981; Weeks 2000).
Reaching similar conclusions but arguing from a different perspective, feminist scholarship challenged the
notion that male sexual drives and female sexual passivity were biologically determined and innate and
instead argued that these ideas played significant roles in the maintenance of social structural inequalities
Page 5 of 27
between men and women (Brownmiller 1976; McIntosh 1978; Smart and Smart 1978; Daly 1979; Eisenstein
1979; Shulman 1980; Dworkin 1981; Barry 1984; see also Burman and Gelsthorpe, this volume). Foucault’s
History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 made the case that the notion of ‘sexuality’ (or as we understand it today—sexual
identity) is, itself, an historical and social construct (Foucault 1979). Together, this body of work
challenged one of the dominant assumptions underpinning earlier explanations of women and
prostitution: that prostitution served as a necessary safety valve given the biological necessity of male
sexual drive and the absolute need for men to sate their sexual desires. Deconstructing such essentialist
logic raised other important questions: if prostitution was not about sex per se, then what was ‘it’? If
ideologies and practices of sex and sexuality were socially constructed, then what did this say about the
pattern of sexual differentiation that so marked prostitution, women’s involvement in it, and the ways in
which it was regulated and policed?
In addressing the above questions, new political and theoretical conflicts emerged—conflicts that have
endured for nearly fifty years. Twentieth century structural analyses explained prostitution as EITHER a
form of labour in a materially unequal society (McIntosh 1978) OR an expression of male violence in a
patriarchal society (Millett 1975). Witness the subsequent explosion of theoretically informed (mostly
feminist and criminological) empirical studies which explored the meanings of prostitution for the women
involved. Were both prostitution and men’s violence against women social institutions resulting from
patriarchy? (Høigård and Finstad 1992; Barry 1996; O’Neill 2001). Or, could women’s experiences in
p. 422 prostitution be better explained by reference ↵ to class and labour based inequalities (Davidson 1998;
Agustin 2001; Agustín 2007)? Or both (Phoenix 1999)?
In the last decade or so, these analyses of the structural conditions of women’s involvement in prostitution
2
have given way to (economic and sexual) libertarian notions of sex work and a new political and
theoretical conflict is emerging on the foundations of the old. A political economy analysis has, in turn,
opened the space for a neo-liberal economic analysis; and an analysis of prostitution and its relation to
patriarchy has opened the doors to a sex-based violence analysis. Thus the class versus patriarchy
conflicting accounts are now also overladen with notions of economic libertarianism and a feminist
(gender critical) approach stressing the importance of biological sex as a category for analysis. Let’s take
each in turn.
Prostitution and patriarchy

Radical feminism offered a powerful theoretical tool in which the shape and form of prostitution, as well as
women’s experiences of it, was understood as related to a patriarchal social structure. To remind readers,
as a sociological concept, ‘patriarchy’ refers to an unequal social structure that supports, and reproduces
male domination of females. Feminist scholarship in the 1980s focused on specifying the contours of
patriarchy and identifying how specific social and ideological practices maintained it. Fundamental to this
perspective were the following claims: that patriarchy is sustained by powerful ideologies of gender
(namely normative and hierarchal assumptions about how females and males should live, act and behave)
which are themselves socially constructed (and thus not biologically based); that women do not have
control of their reproductive capacities because such control is mediated by powerful social institutions
and ideologies (such as the family, religious ideologies and a variety of medical practices); that women
Page 6 of 27
have less access to economic resources, largely because they are located in the private sphere of the family
and have the burden of caring responsibilities; and, ultimately, that male sexual violence is socially
3
structured (that is not a result of male biology but a result of social structural conditions).
There are several basic propositions which comprise this approach. First, prostitution is a social institution
shaped and determined by patriarchy (i.e. sex-based social structural inequality). Second, within
patriarchal societies prostitution is not a deviant or pathological social institution, but rather a key
component to patriarchy that serves particular functions—the details of which will be highlighted below.
Third, critical to the functioning of patriarchal societies is the privileging of men’s sexual agency and the
denigration of women’s agency, which finds expression in the commodification of women and their
bodies. Fourth, whilst sexual violence is a manifest example of both patriarchal social structures and the
privileging of men’s sexuality, one function prostitution performs is an ideological one, normalizing
sexual violence and the commodification of women’s sexualities and bodies. The most clear expressions of
this perspective were put forward by writers such as: Kate Millet (1975, 2000) who argued that prostitution
speaks to the heart of women’s social and political condition in patriarchal societies—prostitution, in the
p. 423 form of a cash exchange, is women’s subjection made public (without ↵ the mystification of marriage
and love), it is also a declaration of the totality of women’s value (a commodifiable vagina); Kathleen Barry
(1984, 1996) who describes the processes, practices, laws and institutional regulations which ensure
women’s sexual victimization (including prostitution) and keep women in a state of sexual ‘slavery’; and,
Sheila Jeffreys (1999, 2008) who has charted how women’s sexual victimization within prostitution has
become normalized, and latterly how the institutionalization of such sexual victimization has been
shaped, influenced and given dynamic force through global capitalism.
Prostitution, capitalism, and class

Conceptualizing prostitution as work has its roots within a broader socialist-feminist perspective. Like
radical feminism, it is a form of critical inquiry that seeks to understand women’s oppression to craft a
politics of liberation. However, unlike radical feminism, social feminist analyses located the sources of
oppression in the ways in which patriarchy and capitalism combined. The basic premises of this
perspective are as follows: prostitution is a social institution shaped and determined by both patriarchal
sex-based and economic class-based inequalities; within patriarchal-capitalist societies, women’s
economic survival is mediated by and through their relationships with men (in marriage, in families)
because of their exclusion from the public sphere (of politics, of employment and so on); and normative
assessments of women that separate them into ‘good women’ and ‘bad women’ help to mystify the
economic nature of all sexual relationships.
The most clearly articulated example of this perspective was first put forward in the now classic Working
Women: Prostitution Now by McLeod (1982). She made the case that women involved in prostitution are no
different from other women in capitalist societies. Like all women, they are engaged in a struggle against
their disadvantaged social position. Prostitution is simply the social institution that confirms that
women’s most saleable commodity in a capitalist economy is sex. Yet, as sex workers, any chance of being
able to control their labour is mitigated by male violence, male economic domination, ‘whore stigma’ and
hypocritical laws that punish women but not men, for their involvement in prostitution.
Page 7 of 27
By the late 1990s, there was an expanding literature drawing on McLeod’s (1982) theorization and
charting, not just the meanings of prostitution for the women involved, but also the social organization of
prostitution, and the historically and socially specific contours of power that are expressed within, and
made manifest at, the local, national and global levels (see for instance Kempadoo et al. 2015).
Underpinning many of these studies was a shared concern to understand the nature of prostitution as a
form of ‘labour’ within and across (late) (modern) capitalist societies.
From political economy to neo-liberal economics

There has been another (growing) prostitution/sex work literature since the turn of the twenty-first
century (see for instance Sanders et al. 2009; Hardy 2010). Starting with the basic premise that prostitution
is a form of work, this perspective locates sex work within a broader sex industry which encompasses
everything from street-based prostitution to lap dancing, from pornography to adult only stores, from sex
toys to strip clubs. There has been a proliferation of small scale studies that describe the ‘everyday lives,
businesses and relationships’ that comprise the sex industry (see for instance and Sanders and Hardy
(2013)). Theorizing the sex industry as a new (or expanding) market, industry or economy in consumer
p. 424 capitalism, these micro analyses have also sought ↵ to understand social, economic and cultural
changes that make the markets possible as well as to analyse the various ways in which this market is
similar (or not) to other ‘markets’ within capitalism. So, for instance, Bernstein (2007), after examining
sexual markets in San Francisco, Stockholm, and Amsterdam, makes the case that in the late twentieth
century, ‘the sex industry’ as a market began to change in both social and spatial terms. Socially, it moved
from street-based sex work, with its embeddedness in communities, to individual, technologically
mediated encounters. Spatially, the market moved from outdoors to indoors. Indeed Bernstein (2007: 102)
argues that late twentieth century ‘sex markets’ could be characterized and described as a ‘new post-
industrial paradigm of commercial sex’ which itself was made possible by a broader change in the socio-
cultural signification and meanings of sex—whereas once it was framed within a relational ethic, it is now
framed by and within recreational ethics.
Focusing more on the economics of the new sex markets, Brents and Hausbeck (2007) demonstrate how
the brothel industry in Nevada uses very similar marketing and business strategies to late twentieth
century leisure and tourist industries. From this they argue that the sex industry is best examined and
understood as a ‘mainstream’ business industry and as part of the rise in late capitalist global forms of
consumption (Brents, Jackson et al. 2010). In a similar fashion, Brents and Sanders (2010) make the case
that, as the sex industry expands, the distance between it and licit economies is closing. At the same time
however ‘social ambivalence’ (i.e. the normative evaluation of the sex industry as transgressive and/or
deviant) facilitates its further expansion and also shapes its regulation. To these micro studies can be
added an incredibly diverse set of largely ethnographic and descriptive studies of many different forms of
sexual services including male prostitution, sex tourism, male stripping, transgendered sex work, that
highlight, inter alia, a bewildering set of occupational cultures, strategies and tactics, drug use,
organizational and individual business practices—including health, safety and risk (see Chapter 3 in
Sanders, O’Neill, and Pitcher 2009; see also Hester et al. 2019).
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Understanding prostitution as just one part of a wider sex market, that in turn forms just one part of the
wider global economic system no longer founded upon production but upon consumption, did create a
space for a noteworthy growth in studies—even if those studies remain, largely, descriptive. Mirroring the
sociology of deviance, the commitment has been to ‘humanize’ or indeed normalize ‘the deviant’, or in
this case, the supposedly deviant market. Yet, these studies are distinguished from earlier approaches
(such as Macleod’s) which drew (often explicitly) on Marxian notions of ‘labour’ and particularly the
exploitative and alienating nature of waged labour. Instead, contemporary approaches are underpinned by
an implicit acceptance of a free market economics—best exemplified in their efforts to map the sex
industry in relation to the ‘mainstream’ economic system. The explicitly libertarian stance taken by some
is notable given that such studies tend not to highlight social structural inequalities between men and
women and instead focus on any individual’s right to bodily autonomy—including the right of people to
sell or buy sex (see for instance the activist work of Brown 2021). The politics that then follow focus on
removing prohibitions (criminal or otherwise) regulating sex work and seeing sex workers as a
discriminated-against-labour-force or identity (akin to homosexuality or disability). A core assumption of
this approach is that the problems any sex workers—men, women, and transgender people—experience in
prostitution are not related to sex based inequalities, but caused by a combination of stigma and state
interference (in the form of criminal justice regulation) in the market. These interferences make it easier
for exploiters to operate because they drive prostitution underground.
p. 425 From patriarchy to sex-based oppression

In keeping with a notable trend in criminological theorizing away from structural analysis of class and
criminalization towards governmentality studies and harm-based approaches to the study of social
problems and conflicts (including the rise of zemiology, see Canning et al., this volume), the idea that
prostitution is a form of male violence has now given way to the idea that there exists a system of gender-
based harms. However, here gender is used to denote sex and the system of gender-based harms that exist
in societies are seen as producing the deleterious effects of prostitution (see various chapters in Coy
(2013), especially Coy’s opening chapter). Most recently there have been attempts to reintroduce an
analysis that emphasizes the sociological and criminological salience of biological sex when thinking
about prostitution. The clearest example to date is that put forward by Bindel (2021). In an impassioned
reflection of 40 years of feminist activism, Bindel states that in real terms, little to no progress has been
made regarding male violence. Women still end up dead at the hands of violent men. She also argues that
conviction rates for rape are so low that rape is virtually decriminalized in contemporary Britain. The porn
industry has dramatically expanded in the last 40 years, with revenge porn a growing problem. The rise of
a liberal economics perspective, Bindel claims, has led to an increase in the eroticization of sexual violence
seen particularly in the defence of rough sex against rape. Bindel poses an interesting question about how
erstwhile socialist activists and writers, when confronted with the issue of prostitution, revert to an
analysis of it that stresses women’s consent and yet insist on taking a deeper political economic analysis of
other forms of labour, for instance, signing up to the military. Put simply: for Bindel, once we return to an
analysis that focuses on female bodies (rather than workers’ rights or identity rights), it is impossible not
to see the connections between prostitution, other forms of male sexual violence and the commodification
Page 9 of 27
of women, and from there the links to patriarchy and women’s oppression. According to Bindel, patriarchy
is the social structure shaping women’s sex-based oppression and ‘gender’ is the means through which
that oppression happens.
Critique
The theoretical approaches overviewed here are not always as clear cut as the above might imply. Women
themselves often see their involvement in prostitution as both work and a form of gendered victimization
(Phoenix 1999). Research also shows that consent, control, choice and agency are often exercized in subtle
ways and individuals’ capacities to make choices are shaped by both their wider social position (as
working-class women, as black or minority ethnic women, young women and so on) and the form of
4
prostitution in which they are located . Indeed the empirical realities of prostitution are far more complex
than theoretical models, such as those just described, could ever hope to capture. Further, there are well
trodden critiques of positivism, of subcultural theory and of the contest between a work versus violence
perspective (see for instance Phoenix 1999 and Phoenix 2017).
The literature has moved on even since the COVID-19 pandemic. Those who are now arguing for sex
workers’ rights (see for instance Mac and Smith 2020) claim that researchers who continue to stress the
p. 426 victimization of women in prostitution deny such ↵ women economic or sexual agency. Thus, calls to
abolish prostitution, strengthen exit programmes, criminalize purchasers of sex, or calls for more
adequate criminal justice measures to deal with men who exploit and abuse women in prostitution, have
5
been critiqued as a form of ‘carceral feminism’ which leads to the oppression of sex workers (see for
instance, Bernstein 2010; Kim 2018). Such arguments mark a major shift in the way in which the concept of
gender is being deployed within theory. As indicated above, feminist and critical theories of the 1980s and
1990s implicitly understood that prostitution was sex-based because of the connection between it (as an
economic endeavour) and sex-based economic inequalities. However, the new social norms that have
redefined the category ‘women’ to be an identity rather than relating to a set of social structural
preconditions of inequality (see Phoenix 2022) have given impetus to a conflict: between those that argue
that prostitution is best conceptualized as the product of societies marked by profound material and sex-
based inequalities, and those who argue that the deleterious effects of prostitution are the result of
stigmatized identities and poor working conditions; between those that argue for regulation of
prostitution and those that argue from an economic and sexual libertarian stance. And it is this conflict
which has in turn given impetus to the development of a gender critical criminology (Phoenix 2022) that is
predicated on the distinction between women-as-a-sex-class and ‘women’ as a socio-political category,
disconnected from social structure, that refers to individuals’ sense of identity.
Furthermore, the research evidence would suggest that involvement in prostitution is many things and, as
the above overview of theory has shown, it cannot always be reduced to little more than an identity any
more than it can be reduced to a question of simple economic rationality. To recognize that women in
prostitution are victimized is not the same as saying that such women have no agency or that they are
nothing more than victims.
Page 10 of 27
As much as the subject of prostitution has become mired in highly contested political rhetoric, the theories
themselves continue to have a tendency towards reductionism. They reduce the complexities of
involvement in prostitution to prostituting, that is the act of selling or swapping sex, as much as they
reduce the diversity of prostitution to (mostly) street-based and other exploitative forms of prostitution.
They reduce the totality of individuals’ social lives to their lives in prostitution in that women’s
experiences in prostitution (alone) require explanation. The debate remains framed by the structure/
agency, voluntarism/determinism tropes that characterized wider criminological theorizing for a century
or more. So, in common with such wider theorizing explanations for prostitution, researchers have missed
a more sociological understanding of agency, in which humans have the capacity to make choices, but not
in conditions of their own choosing. Recognition of patriarchal social structural inequalities then helps us
to understand why it is that selling sex—in exploitative or violent conditions—becomes a plausible
‘choice’ that many females are prepared to take (see Phoenix 1999). Given that there is now a bewildering
p. 427 diversity that marks prostitution—the question must be raised as ↵ to the utility of proffering an
explanation for prostitution itself or whether it is now necessary to treat each form and each demographic
on its own. So, for instance, what do women in prostitution have in common with men in prostitution or
with trans people in prostitution? Perhaps only the fact that they are involved in exchanging sex for
money.
Prostitution, Justice, and Decriminalization
When discussing what ought to be done about prostitution, it is not uncommon to focus on one or other of
the various abstract models of regulation. These models are: abolishing the sex industry through the use of
criminal justice sanctions such as making the purchase of sex illegal (i.e. abolitionism); the removal of
criminal justice sanctions for consensual prostitution (i.e. decriminalization); or the introduction of
specialist, usually civil regulatory sanctions, that seek to address some of the well-known problems of
prostitution (i.e. legalization). This section takes a different approach as the literature is replete with
6
discussions of these different models. What follows is a detailed examination of how, just as the academic
analysis of prostitution turned to matters of exploitation, violence, choice and consent, policing
prostitution changed, from a focus on dealing with criminal public nuisance and the presence of
prostitution on the streets of the UK, to a focus on criminal exploitation of people involved in different
types of sex markets.
From regulating nuisance to public health and harm minimization

Over the course of the late eighteenth and early and mid-twentieth centuries, the UK (and much of
Western Europe) explicitly targeted ‘fallen women’ and the threat they caused to young men’s health,
young women’s morals and family inheritances (see Walkowitz 1982). By 1957, the Report of the
Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (1957), which subsequently formed the basis of the
Street Offences Act 1959 and decriminalized male homosexuality, distinguished law from private morality.
Homosexuality and prostitution were seen as matters of private morality and as such the law had no place
regulating them. Instead, the purpose of the law was to regulate only the public aspects of prostitution that
caused nuisance to others and a framework of laws were introduced which focused on the individual (i.e.
Page 11 of 27
7
prostitutes) and regulated where, how, and what they could do. This is also known as ‘partial
criminalization’. Hence, in the UK, selling sex and (for the most part) buying it is not illegal (see Phoenix
2009a) whereas the following behaviours are illegal: for a prostitute to loiter or solicit in a public place for
the purposes of prostitution; for anyone to keep a brothel or cause, incite or control prostitution for
financial gain; for anyone to pay for sexual services from a child and/or from a prostitute ‘subject to force’;
for anyone to sexually exploit a child through prostitution and/or involvement in pornography; for anyone
p. 428 to groom children ↵ online for the purposes of sexual exploitation; or for anyone to traffic individuals,
8
that is arrange or facilitate the travel into, around or out of the UK for the purposes of sexual exploitation.
Following the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the late 1980s and 1990s a plethora of public health and welfare
services were established that sought to minimize the potential risks and address the welfare needs of
women in prostitution. Framed by a pragmatic, non-judgemental approach (see Kinnell 2008), these
projects began to identify violence from clients as being a key threat to the health of sex workers and also
sought to liaise with local police about the arrest and prosecution of violent clients and local men who were
exploiting and abusing the women: see for instance the Ugly Mugs <https://nationaluglymugs.org/> scheme
which started through the SAFE project in Birmingham in the 1990s before becoming the national project
it is today. It is difficult to overestimate the effect that the expanding sexual health services had on the
regulation and policing of prostitution. By the 1990s, the UK Network of Sex Workers Projects was
established. It continues to act as a powerful lobbying voice at local, regional, national, and international
level.
The detailed knowledge that was acquired of women’s everyday experiences of social welfare problems,
housing issues, violence, drug and alcohol problems and exploitation soon translated into wholesale
changes to what was seen as ‘the problem’ of prostitution that law and policing had to address. Sexual
health outreach services demonstrated time and again: prostitution is not a victimless crime. Its main
victims are vulnerable women and girls; its main offenders are predatory men who profit from trading in
9
that vulnerability and violent men for whom sex workers are ‘easy targets’. Hence in the last two decades,
there has been exponential expansion of initiatives and laws addressing childhood sexual exploitation
through prostitution, exploitation of adult women, purchasing of sex from an exploited person, trafficking
for the purposes of prostitution, modern slavery and so on (please see Crown Prosecution Service 2017 for
a detailed description). Now, the targets of regulation are predatory and powerful males, ‘sexual abusers’,
‘pimps’, ‘traffickers’ and ‘organized criminal gangs’ because of the threats of abuse and exploitation that
they pose to ‘society’, ‘the vulnerable’ and ‘the victimized’.
Paradoxically, over the past twenty years, just as various ways of selling sex have been deemed exploitative
or criminal, so too has greater tolerance grown towards ways of selling sex that are perceived as
consensual. These developments have had a significant impact on the regulation of prostitution not least
because the forms of selling sex labelled as exploitative come under new and different law and guidance
and are no longer being seen as ‘prostitution’. Indeed, the current approach to policing prostitution could
not be more different from the revolving doors of arrest, conviction, fine and soliciting to pay the fines and
police violence that sparked the occupation of Holy Cross Church in King’s Cross by the English Collective
of Prostitutes in 1982 (see Miren 2020). The National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing now
Page 12 of 27
recommend that police stop seeing sex working women as offenders and become attenuated to them as
potential victims of crime (see NPCC 2019). What does this mean in practice though? Are fewer women and
more exploiters arrested for prostitute-related offences?
p. 429 ↵ In 1989, there were over 15,739 women cautioned or convicted for soliciting. By 2002, this number
had fallen to 4,102. By March 2021, policed recorded only 302 offences of soliciting for prostitution i.e.
approximately 2 per cent of the numbers of recorded offences than 32 years previously. There are several
possible explanations. The most likely is that there is little to no street-based prostitution anymore.
Internet technologies have fundamentally changed the shape and form of prostitution. This, combined
with police guidance on seeing sex workers as victims, ensures that it is only those deemed ‘persistent’
and troublesome that end up being arrested.
Such a dramatic decline in criminalizing women in prostitution might be hailed as a victory, particularly if
there was also a concomitant rise in the criminalization of those who commit crime against prostituted
women, sex workers and sexually exploited girls and women. Yet as Table 19.1 demonstrates, this rise has
yet to occur.
Page 13 of 27
Table 19.1 Instances of police recorded crime by offence type and year, England and Wales, year ending March 2003 to year ending March 2021
Abuse of children through sexual Trafficking for sexual Exploitation of Soliciting for Modern
exploitation exploitation prostitution prostitution Slavery
2003 [x] [x] 127 2111 [x]
2004 [x] [x] 186 2944 [x]
2005 99 21 117 1821 [x]
2006 124 33 153 1640 [x]
2007 101 43 190 1290 [x]
2008 108 57 184 1216 [x]
2009 116 52 173 1071 [x]
2010 134 58 148 1190 [x]
2011 153 66 153 826 [x]
2012 159 59 110 767 [x]
2013 176 70 120 883 [x]
2014 289 123 124 750 [x]
2015 368 184 154 870 [x]
Page 14 of 27
Abuse of children through sexual Trafficking for sexual Exploitation of Soliciting for Modern
exploitation exploitation prostitution prostitution Slavery
2016 570 9 179 599 945
2017 632 2 214 437 2316
2018 1181 1 240 400 3436
2019 1007 [x] 238 409 5215
2020 978 [x] 236 375 8355
2021 1038 [x] 270 302 8808
Source: Home Office, Police recorded crime and outcomes open data tables (2022).
Page 15 of 27
Whilst the number of recorded offences of modern slavery has grown year on year since the introduction of
the Modern Slavery Act 2015, these offences cover a range of activities in addition to sexual exploitation
including: labour exploitation, domestic servitude, criminal exploitation and organ harvesting. The rise in
numbers represents referrals made to the police using the National Referral Mechanism. Most referrals are
made for labour exploitation. Against this, as Table 19.2 shows, the number of defendants prosecuted
remains incredibly low as does the number of convictions achieved.
Page 16 of 27
Table 19.2 Number of defendants prosecuted and number of offenders convicted for slavery and trafficking offences, England and Wales, year ending December
2016 to year ending December 2018
Offence type Jan–Dec 2016 Jan–Dec 2017 Jan–Dec 2018
Defendants Offenders Defendants Offenders Defendants Offenders

prosecuted convicted prosecuted convicted prosecuted convicted
Slavery, servitude and forced 10 20 21 11 13 9

labour
Human trafficking for sexual 35 41 24 8 13 13

exploitation
Human trafficking for non- 20 13 13 7 14 1

sexual exploitation
Offences under the Modern 80 1 180 40 141 21

Slavery Act
Total (all slavery and 136 69 206 59 162 42

trafficking offences)
Note: Statistics for offences classified as both the principal offence and the non-principal offence have been combined. If an individual is prosecuted or
convicted of multiple offences relating to different offence categories, they are counted separately in each relevant category.
Source: Ministry of Justice (MoJ), Appendix to ‘Modern slavery in the UK: March 2020’ (ONS).
Page 17 of 27
Likewise, we also know that prosecutions and convictions for child sexual abuse (the broad category within
which abuse of children through sexual exploitation falls) have halved in the four years until 2021 (see
NSPCC 2022). Taken together, these low recorded crimes, prosecutions and convictions point towards a
form of criminal justice non-interventionism in crimes related to prostitution that may well amount to an
informal de facto decriminalization of prostitution in England and Wales.
Critical reflections on the regulation of prostitution and sex work

Currently, the stated aims of criminal justice regulations and the policing of prostitution are about
protecting the vulnerable in prostitution. Yet there is little evidence that this distinction between
consensual and exploitative (i.e. coerced) prostitution produces a system that is capable of providing
justice for women whose prostitution is marked by profound poverty, violence and exploitation. Further,
there is little evidence that this bifurcated approach (protecting the vulnerable and tolerating or effective
decriminalization of the rest of the sex industry) addresses the problems faced by those individuals
working in prostitution lawfully and legally (see Hester et al. 2019 and Mulvhill 2019). Perhaps this is not
surprising. Quasi licit capitalist markets have never provided much by way of protection for the workers
within them. This is never more so the case than after three years of COVID-19 pandemic measures and 12
years of disinvestment in public services by the Conservative and Liberal Coalition government and
subsequent Conservative governments.
The rhetoric of protection does not always translate into protection for many of the women victimized in
prostitution. Even before the global pandemic, the UK’s criminal justice system was at breaking point with
criminal justice cases taking years to complete (see Secret Barrister 2019). Following the pandemic, the
situation has only become worse (see HMCPSI 2021) with justice for women, generally, in crisis. ‘Simple’
rape cases can take up to five years to prosecute (MoJ 2021). The policing of violence against women is
facing a legitimacy crisis (especially in relation to The Metropolitan Police) following the high profile
p. 430 murder of Sarah Everard by police officer Wayne Couzens, the botched ↵ policing of the vigil held in her
name (see HMICFRS 2021), and further media reports of police misogyny (Dodd 2022). Where women
victimized within prostitution are concerned, there is mounting empirical evidence that the gap between
the practice and rhetoric of protection is growing. Such women face all of the challenges that any woman
who has been the victim of (sexual and/or male) violence faces: failure to understand that they have been
the victims of crime, forms of victimization that do not fit into neatly containable and prosecutable cases,
Crown Prosecution Service guidelines regarding the collection of undermining evidence that occasionally
leads to ‘no further action’ decisions and so on (see also Gregory and Lees 1996; McGlynn 2017; and
p. 431 Carline and Gunby 2019 for a discussion of these issues in relation to prosecution of rape cases). ↵
Twenty-first century shifts in prostitution laws and policies have provided fertile ground for research and
have given new energy to the polarized political stances often taken by academics researching prostitution
policy reform. Most of this new research has attempted to deconstruct the discourses that provided the
rationale for transformations in regulation and highlight the complexity of the empirical realities faced by
many individuals in prostitution. It has shown that it is not so easy to distinguish the willing, voluntary sex
worker from the coerced prostituted woman and that consent and coercion blur. Scholars have questioned
the taken-for-granted ‘victimization and vulnerability’ discourses (Scoular 2015). They have
Page 18 of 27
demonstrated how these ‘victimization and vulnerability’ discourses in our laws and guidance connect
with, inter alia, repressive immigration regimes (see Turner and Kelly 2009; O’Connell Davidson 2011;
Anderson 2013), austere welfare policies which women and girls experience as punishment rather than
protection (Phoenix 2009) and ultimately the problems of distinguishing between ‘trafficked women’ and
‘migrant sex workers’, between exploited women and ‘consensual’ sex workers (Phoenix 2002; Chapkis
2005; Agustín 2006; Sanders and O’Neill et al. 2009; Phoenix and Oerton 2013), and between agentic actors
who choose their destinies and victims who are targeted by criminal exploiters (see also Della Guista and
Munro 2008 and Mulvhill 2019).
p. 432 Conclusion
This chapter has provided an overview of the ways in which prostitution and sex work have been theorized
within criminology and the current landscape of regulating prostitution. In doing so it highlights a number
of theoretical and political challenges for criminologists working within the field.
At the theoretical level a key challenge is how to represent the sheer complexity and heterogeneity of what
is being studied. Is it even desirable or possible to combine in any study of prostitution those individuals
who claim to exercise a degree of autonomy over what they do with women and children whose
prostitution is characterized by high degrees of poverty, exploitation and violence? At the methodological
level, a key challenge is how to address the conundrum that much of what is known about prostitution has
come from relatively small scale qualitative research on individual experience, yet most of the theorizing
about the changing nature of prostitution focuses on macro-level transformations, such as globalization
and the feminization of migration. Few studies, if any, have asked what the necessary or sufficient
conditions are for the changes which have been observed, nor have they traced with any degree of detail
the mechanisms that might help to account for the ways in which street-based sex work, for example, has
all but vanished from many of the UK’s cities.
More fundamentally this chapter has demonstrated the political challenges inherent in the application of
prostitution research to questions of public policy. There has not yet been a successful approach to sex
work and prostitution that does not distinguish between the ‘deserving’ victims and the ‘undeserving’.
Likewise, those who lobby for the decriminalization of prostitution, (see specifically Shaver (2005) and
Weizter (2011)), fail to recognize that decriminalization leaves women and girls exposed to the full force of
market economics—and we know from five decades of research on women in the workplace that market-
based economics has not yet delivered women’s equal pay much less equal working conditions.
Whilst fewer women are criminalized these days, the laws and policies that would allow the police to
return to more proactively criminalizing in the future still exist. If the last two decades and the COVID-19
pandemic have taught us anything it is this: whilst some women and men may well be able to make a living
from selling sex in the new sex services marketplace, there remain—as there ever did—a significant
number of women and girls whose involvement in prostitution is shaped by poverty and marked by
violence and exploitation. Finally what this chapter has highlighted is the continued importance of
understanding the complex links between sex-based social inequality, class-based economic inequalities
and the experiences of women and girls in prostitution.
Page 19 of 27

The literature on prostitution is now so voluminous that there are textbooks provided to help students navigate their
way through the empirical studies. The best of these is Sanders, O’Neill et al. (2009). Three early empirical studies that
set the tone for many of the contemporary debates about the politics of prostitution are Davidson (1998), O’Neill
(2001), Phoenix (1999). For a scholarly deconstruction of discourses of prostitution see Scoular (2015). In relation to
human trafficking Agustin (2001, 2006) provides some of the accessible critiques of both international policy and
p. 433 organizations working with women. Three extremely good websites are: ↵ Beyond the Gaze, National Ugly Mugs,
and Changing Lives. For male sex work please see Browne and Minichiello 1995, Hubbard and Sanders 2003, Scott,
Minichiello et al. 2005, Friedman 2014, Minichiello and Scott 2014.
Online resources

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Notes
1
Women@TheWell is a charity organization, operating across London, whose main aim is to support women whose
lives are affected by prostitution.
2
I use the term ‘libertarian’ to denote the subtle shift towards an assumption of minimal state regulation and
intervention in ‘the market’ or in ‘the private realm’ i.e. the private sexual lives of individuals.
3
For a comprehensive discussion of feminist interpretations of the concept of patriarchy which were relevant in
shaping the prostitution as victimisation please see Beechey, V. (1979) ‘On Patriarchy’ http://www.palgrave-
journals.com/fr/journal/v3/n1/full/fr197921a.html <http://www.palgrave-journals.com/fr/journal/v3/n1/full/
fr197921a.html>
4
For example women working in the legal brothels of Victoria, Australia or Nevada have fundamentally different
meanings attached to their involvement than, say, homeless girls exchanging sex for money in order to make sure they
have accommodation for the night.
Page 26 of 27
5
Those who argue for greater regulation of prostitution have been accused of being SWERFs (Sex Worker Exclusionary
Radical Feminism/feminist). Together with TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism/feminist) these are both terms
that are frequently used in social media, often in a derogatory way, to indicate that the thinking or individual so
named has either not listened to the voices of sex workers or is transphobic. They are also both terms that have
entered academic lexicon through articles that take an explicitly queer theoretical and political stance and often focus
on the problems of radical feminist and/or gender critical politics or theory (see for instance Toone 2018). These are
deeply contested terms as employment tribunals Forstater vs CDG and others (2022) and Bailey vs Garden Court
Chambers and Stonewall (2022).
6
Please see Phoenix (1999) for a discussion of the differences between partial criminalization, decriminalization,
abolition and legalization.
7
For a full account of the legal regulation and policing of prostitution post-Wolfenden and at the end of the twentieth
century, please see Phoenix (1999) especially chapter 2.
8
The Crown Prosecution Service for England and Wales provides a comprehensive list of the laws pertaining to
prostitution and exploitation of prostitution. Please see (https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/prostitution-and-
exploitation-prostitution <https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/prostitution-and-exploitation-prostitution>.
9
It is important to note that Scotland and England and Wales were not alone in Europe in changing the trajectory of
policy and in creating new frameworks for regulating prostitution. So, for instance, Sweden and many of the Nordic
countries began the process of criminalizing the purchase of sex, rather than its sale, in 1999.
Related Links
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Page 27 of 27
20. Understanding and rehabilitating men with sexual convictions: Theory, intervention, and compassion

p. 436 20. Understanding and rehabilitating men with sexual convictions:

Theory, intervention, and compassion
Nicholas Blagden and Belinda Winder
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0020
Abstract
This chapter explores the theory, intervention, and compassion to understand and rehabilitate men under sexual convictions.
It examines some of the statistics and trends around sexual offending before considering the heterogeneity and severity of
sexual offences. People with sexual convictions are a heterogeneous group often with complex needs and trauma histories.
Thus, compassionate criminology recognizes the trauma frequently experienced by those with sexual convictions while
advocating the intervention to focus on values, strengths, compassion, and other factors significant for human flourishing.
Moreover, compassionate criminology aims to reduce harm and sexual victimization by allowing an opportunity for repair. The
chapter considers the experience of imprisonment and the efficacy of intervention.
Keywords: theory, intervention, compassion, sexual convictions, men, sexual offences, compassionate criminology, sexual
victimization, trauma
Introduction
Sexual crime is widely perceived to be the most heinous of crimes by the media, the public, prison staff,
people in prison for other offences, and by those who themselves have committed a sexual offence. While
data indicate an upward trend in the number of convictions for a sexual offence, police-recorded crime
data and victim surveys show that the majority of sexual crimes do not reach the courts. Indeed, the data
suggest that many thousands of the general public commit sexual crimes but are never brought to account
for their offending. This is problematic, not just because of the damage caused by every offence, and the
potential for repeat and possible escalation in offending, but also for research reasons. Academics are
invariably limited to undertaking research with people who have been convicted of an offence. This makes
Page 1 of 25
it challenging to develop robust theories to explain sexual offending (which covers a diverse range of acts)
since most theories are based on what we know about those people who have been caught and processed
through the criminal justice system. And whilst there remains some controversy about what works in the
prevention of sexual offending, recent approaches focused on compassion and working with trauma, sit at
odds with populist views of sexual crime as deserving of the most punitive response.
In this chapter, we first examine some of the statistics and trends around sexual offending, before
considering the heterogeneity of sexual offences. We move on to explore (predominantly psychological)
explanations as to why people commit sexual crime and what can be done to support such people to lead
productive offence-free lives post-conviction. In doing so, we offer a critical review of the interventions
available for people convicted of an offence, the experience of prison, and the challenges for people as they
try to integrate back into the community. The core argument, particularly in the latter part of this chapter,
p. 437 is that a possible way forward is for intervention ↵ to adhere more closely to principles of compassion,
and for such interventions to be delivered in environments that are conducive to self-change (Blagden
2022). This ‘compassionate criminology’ recognizes the trauma frequently experienced by those with
sexual convictions. It advocates that intervention should focus on values, strengths, compassion for self
and others, and factors important in human flourishing as, for example, making sense of suffering (both
harm caused and harm endured), authenticity, fairness, and gratitude (Hall, Langer, and McMartin 2010).
A turn towards a compassionate criminology is important, not just in helping people lead meaningful
offence-free lives, but also for reducing harm and sexual victimization and allowing an opportunity for
repair.
Crime Patterns and Trends
As of June 2021, there were 87,550 people in prison in England and Wales (Sturge 2021). Of these,
approximately 25 per cent had a current or previous sexual offence (Ministry of Justice 2019). The
percentage has grown significantly since 1980 when sex offenders made-up approximately four per cent of
the prison population (Ministry of Justice 2016). The overwhelming majority (>99 per cent) of these
individuals were men. There were also approximately 54,000 people living in the community who, as a
result of the Sex Offences Act 1997, were required to register with the police because they had committed a
sexual offence. A further (unknown) number who committed a sexual offence before 1997 are not required
to register. It is estimated that there may be over 50,000 people under investigation for a sexual offence at
any one time (ONS 2021).
These numbers, large though they are, will represent only a fraction of actual sexual offending, given the
barriers to reporting rape and sexual abuse that still exist (Spohn 2020). The last British Crime Survey data
on the sexual victimization of adults aged between 16 and 74 years highlighted that, in the 12-month
period ending March 2020, 773,000 adults were victims of sexual abuse. This number should be considered
alongside data detailing the number of people who were incarcerated for a sexual offence as of March
2020, which was approximately 12,000, together with the apparently low rate of reoffending for people
who had previously been convicted of a sexual offence. The key point here is that significantly far more of
the general public commit sexual crime than are convicted for it. This has implications for our
Page 2 of 25
understanding and theorizing as to why people commit a sexual offence, and also gives an interesting
perspective on public attitudes to sexual crime (since this form of crime is clearly far more widespread
than official criminal justice statistics would imply).
Classifications and Theories of Sexual Crime
Sexual offending behaviour is often perceived to be homogeneous; this misperception is extended to

popular understandings of those who commit sexual crimes. Neither of these positions is accurate or
helpful—sexual crimes comprise a diverse range of acts and behaviours that, in part, are driven by the
prevailing socio-legal and moral notions of a society. Just as heterogeneous are the people who commit a
sexual offence. They include men, women, trans men, trans women, young people, and people of all
classes, occupations, ethnicities and religions.
p. 438 ↵ Thornton (2021) gives a functional perspective on the classification of sexual crime, highlighting a
number of ways in which sexual offences have been categorized: contact versus non-contact; extra-
familial versus intra-familial, and offences which have emerged in line with technological developments,
such as internet-mediated sexual crimes. He also highlights the ways in which previously legal behaviours
have become criminalized over time, one key example being marital rape. In 1736, in his History of the Pleas
of the Crown, Chief Justice Hale had asserted that a man cannot be guilty of the rape of his wife since she
had given consent when they married, and consent could not be retracted, and it was only in 1992 that
marital rape became illegal in the UK.
Notwithstanding the challenges presented by the disparity between offending and conviction, the
heterogeneous nature of sexual crime and of the individuals who commit it, there is now a rich and diverse
body of research which has endeavoured to explain why someone commits a sexual crime. Importantly,
almost all of the main theories of sexual offending have focused on men as the perpetrators. Whilst a
number of theories have been developed to explain sexual offences against children, such theories have
typically been extended to cover sexual offending against adults. There have also been attempts to theorize
the differences, highlighted above, between direct in-person contact and non-contact offences (such as
exhibitionism or internet-mediated offences). However, even within each type of offence, researchers
have identified differences (as for example, Krone’s (2004) typology of people who have been convicted of
internet-mediated sexual crime). Interestingly, there are numerous overlaps between alternative theories,
regardless of the offence being studied. And while the theories may have had different methodological
foundations—a forward looking observation and analysis of behaviour versus a retrospective construction
of a theory based on the analysis of a dataset—researchers have typically adopted a ‘theory knitting’
strategy. This strategy was developed by Kalmar and Sternberg (1988) and described by Ward and Hudson
(1998) as one where researchers seek to integrate the best existing ideas to create novel theories, or indeed
reframe or refine their own previous theories. As we move through the theories in order of publication, the
reader may wish to consider the extent to which a general theory of sexual offending is emerging.
Page 3 of 25
Finkelhor—Four Preconditions Model (1984)

Probably the first known model of sexual offending against children was written by David Finkelhor, an
American sociologist. Finkelhor completed his dissertation on sexually victimized children and their
families in 1978, following this up with a book that set out the Four Preconditions Model (Finkelhor 1984)
and with later additions to the model by Araji and Finkelhor (1985). The precondition model outlined four
stages through which, he argued, people pass prior to committing a sexual offence. The four stages are:
(i) Motivation to sexually abuse children (physical arousal to children, emotional congruence with
children, blockage of normal sexual expression);
(ii) Overcoming internal inhibitions (through cognitive distortions, drugs/alcohol, stress);
(iii) Overcoming external factors (finding an opportunity, including where the parents or guardians of a
child are not present or not protecting a child);
(iv) Overcoming a child’s resistance (through coercion, grooming, or by influencing a child’s thinking).
p. 439 ↵ Finkelhor’s model implies people are diverted from legal sexual relationships and behaviour to
sexual offending against children. While it is quite an old model and presents a basic ‘single factor’
explanation of motivation to commit an offence, it was the first comprehensive theory of sexual offending
against children and has been an important starting point for future theories and research. Finkelhor’s
model encouraged researchers to (usefully) focus on atypical sexual arousal, intimacy issues, self-
management of individuals in relation to risky situations and the role of socio-cultural factors (such as the
use of pornography) when seeking to understand the sexual abuse of children. Some of the problems with
Finkelhor’s theory were that it does not include any explanation as to how someone ‘arrives’ at the first
stage and is vague in its articulation of both the stages themselves and the elements of each stage. As Ward
and Hudson (2001) highlight, there are both conceptual and empirical problems with the model. In
particular, it does not have evidence-based backing, nor does it offer a platform for intervention which is
surely an important purpose of a theory in this arena. The lack of empirical validation of such a prominent
theory is concerning and points to a worrying trend within forensic psychological theory.
Marshall and Barbaree—Behavioural view of rape (1984) and integrated theory

of the aetiology of sexual offending (1990)
In 1982, Bill Marshall contributed a chapter entitled ‘A Model of Dysfunctional Behavior’ to the
International Handbook of Behavior Modification and Therapy. In this chapter, he sets out a framework for
researchers and practitioners seeking to generate theories of abnormal behaviour in the domain in which
they are working. Drawing on this framework, Marshall and Barbaree (1984) subsequently developed a
theory of the aetiology and maintenance of sexual aggression against adult men and women, and later (in
1990) delineated an integrated theory of sexual offending against children. In each of these theories,
Marshall and Barbaree focus on the role of biological and cognitive factors, as well as the influence of the
environment in shaping people’s behaviour. In particular, they assert that there is an innate fusion of sex
and aggression in males, which must be managed (and usually is managed) through the process of early
socialization. Where adolescence is dominated by insecure attachments, exposure to antisocial or
Page 4 of 25
misogynistic roles, attitudes or behaviours in others, or where the individual has not developed adequate
interpersonal skills, this results in vulnerabilities that may facilitate sexual offending. Dysfunctional early
experiences can lead to construing sex and aggression as the same. The transition from child to adolescent
is crucial in the context of the surge of male hormones in puberty, the development of factors offering
resilience to vulnerabilities, and cultural norms regarding attitudes to women and sex.
Marshall and Barbaree’s theory asserts that it is possible for anyone to commit a sexual offence, depending
on their circumstances. This certainly aligns with the crime survey statistics, highlighted above, which
reveal much higher levels of sexual victimization, than conviction data alone would suggest. Their
positioning of individual vulnerability on a continuum is a helpful addition to the body of theory to-date.
Further, they bring in the notion of resilience (as one of the poles on the vulnerability continuum), which
fits well with the strength-based approaches that have come to prominence in the last decade (see below).
Additionally, Marshall has explored some of the vulnerabilities empirically (see Marshall 1999), which has
facilitated the emergence of therapeutic strategies to support people who have committed a sexual offence,
or who are concerned about their thoughts or behaviour.
p. 440 ↵ The main weakness of Marshall and Barbaree’s theory, however, lies in its generic nature. Ward and
Siegert (2002), for example, highlight its failure to address different types of sexual crime. A further
weakness is the emphasis on men (given women commit sexual offences too), and the significance that is
given to male puberty and early development. This emphasis does not explain why some people may
commit their first offence as an adult.
Hall and Hirschmann—Quadripartite model (1992)

Initially formulated as a theoretical explanation of rape (1991) but later reworked to account for child
sexual abuse (1992), Hall and Hirschmann created their model from a comprehensive literature review of
the characteristics of people who had been convicted of a sexual offence. They grouped their findings into
four (quad) components which they postulated were important to the aetiology of the process of sexual
offending, namely: (i) physiological sexual arousal (to inappropriate targets, behaviours and/or sexual
aggression); (ii) cognitive appraisal of their arousal (for example distortions); (iii) affective dyscontrol
(namely poor emotional self-regulation); and (iv) personality problems or disorders (arising from adverse
childhood experiences).
Hall and Hirschman’s model moved on from the single factor theories, arguing that multiple factors
underpinned sexual offending. Their model considered both state and trait factors, and their interaction.
By encouraging thinking about situational and individual differences in sexual offending behaviour, the
model offered a framework for the design of interventions. However, there remained a lack of clarity about
each of the factors, and a lack of explanation as to how individual vulnerabilities and predisposition to
these vulnerabilities develop.
Page 5 of 25
Ward and Siegert—Pathways Model (2002)

This highly influential model developed by Ward and Siegert, integrated previous theories into one
comprehensive theory. As a multi-factorial model, it included a number of determinants to be considered
individually and/or in combination to explain sexual offending against children. Five pathways that lead to
sexual offending were proposed, as set out below, with any sexual offence involving every pathway to some
extent.
(i) Intimacy and social skill deficits.
(ii) Deviant sexual scripts. (According to Ward and Siegert, ‘a sexual script spells out when sex is to
take place, with whom, what to do, and how to interpret the cues or signals associated with
different phases in a sexual encounter. These cues can be internal to the individual, interpersonal,
or broadly cultural in nature’ (2002: p.332). Early experiences again lead to unhelpful sexual scripts
that may result in inappropriate and illegal behaviour.)
(iii) Emotional dysregulation.
(iv) Cognitive distortions (thoughts or beliefs that help a person justify or rationalize sexual offending
behaviour).
(v) A multiple dysfunctional mechanisms pathway.
Each pathway represents a distal factor (causal factors captured by the predisposition of a person, possible
p. 441 origins of which are genetic, biological, or developmental). Distal ↵ factors are activated by proximal
factors (as for example, stress or negative mood) which trigger the predispositions.
The pathways model was a deliberate effort to knit together previous single factor theories into a
multifactorial approach which could better explain why people commit a sexual offence. Despite this, and
the apparent focus on providing a rich theoretical framework that could be tested empirically, there has
been limited evaluation of the model to-date (Osbourne and Christensen 2020). One early attempt by
Middleton and colleagues (2006), examined the applicability of the pathways model to people convicted of
internet-mediated sexual offences. They reported mixed success, with approximately 40 per cent of their
sample not fitting with any of the pathways. Gannon and colleagues’ (2012) empirical testing of the model
failed to identify two of the pathways (emotional dysregulation and deviant sexual scripts). However,
Osbourne and Christensen’s (2020) mixed-method study reported greater success. Their thematic analysis
of court sentencing remarks for 100 people convicted of a child sexual offence, found that 98 per cent of
cases fitted one of the five pathways. Whilst not without limitations, this study did provide some empirical
evidence for the potential fit of the Pathways Model. Overall, it seems that, while the Pathways Model is an
attractively comprehensive and integrated multifactorial model, further work is needed to account for the
validation failures of a number of studies.
Page 6 of 25
Ward and Beech (2016)—Integrated Theory of Sexual Offending (ITSO)

Ward and Beech set out to delineate a theory that unified previous theories of sexual offending. Developed
initially in 2006, the ITSO was refined in 2016 to include the notion of personal agency (Ward and Beech
2016). The theory suggests that there are four sets of factors which interact to cause sexual offending.
These factors are: (i) biological (including genetic makeup and brain development); (ii) ecological niche
(social, cultural and personal circumstances); (iii) neuropsychological; and (iv) agency-level (where an
individual thinks about pursuing a goal, deliberates on it, makes a decision—perhaps aided by
justifications—and then [intentionally] acts in a way so as to achieve the goal). Sexual offending happens
through the ongoing convergence of distal and proximal elements of each factor which interact in a
dynamic manner.
ITSO provides depth, explanatory potential, and a useful framework on which to build therapeutic
strategies. Indeed, the authors assert that ITSO has the ability to explain multiple offending pathways, and
the differing presentation of individuals who commit sexual crime. As with the Pathways Model, however,
criticisms are centred on the difficulties of conducting validation studies where the model has such
complexity and depth.
Seto (2019)—Motivation-facilitation/integrated model

The motivation-facilitation model asserts that sexual offending is driven by two types of antecedents:
‘motivators’ and ‘facilitators’. Motivators act as a catalyst for an interest in sexual offending behaviour
and include paraphilia, high sex drive, or intense mating effort amongst others. According to Seto,
however, motivators cannot fully account for sex offending as, for example, someone who is high in self-
control would be able to resist such factors. Thus, the motivation needs to be facilitated by other factors
p. 442 such as self-regulation problems, hostile masculinity, negative affect, or substance misuse. ↵ The
model also considers the role of situational factors. These are significant for Seto, because even if
motivation and facilitation factors are present, sexual offences cannot take place without opportunities.
Summary and limitations

While the outlined theories have been influential in understanding and treating those with sexual
convictions, they have for the most part received little empirical attention. There is some evidence that the
Ward and Siegert Pathways Model may be salient for some people who commit a sexual offence, for
example the emotional dysregulation pathway appears important for internet-mediated offences
(Middleton et al. 2006) and contact offending against children (Osborne and Christensen 2020), but the
model remains poorly evaluated and results are mixed at best.
The other main criticism of psychological explanations of sexual offending is that they do not focus
enough on context and the social structures in individual lives. Most crimes occur in so-called convergence
settings; that is, places frequented by both the offender and the victim such as home or work (Marshall,
Smallbone, and Marshall 2015). When victims’ spatiotemporal locations are matched with those of the
offender and ‘when the potential offender’s willingness to commit a crime has been
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triggered’ (Brantingham and Brantingham 2008, p. 87), a crime will occur (Marshall, Smallbone, and
Marshall 2015). While most multi-factorial explanations will include some focus on situational factors,
they are rarely the focus of psychological theory, and more research needs to be conducted to determine
which situational factors are most relevant to sexual offending (Stephens, Roche, and Moss 2022).
Theorists face a number of challenges in this area—should they focus on explaining a specific type of
offence and for a particular part of the population (for example, should we differentiate by gender or age or
at least differentiate unless there is evidence that we can generalize to another group)? Or should theorists
look for an integrated, multi-level, theory, such as the ITSO or Pathways Model which may be useful for all
sexual offence types and populations, but is so comprehensive that it becomes difficult to prove as a
whole? And what about all the individuals who commit sexual offences but who are not convicted? Our
theories are tested on a rather skewed sample of people, which is problematic when we consider one of the
most important aspects of this work—preventing sexual offending. The chapter’s focus will now turn to
focus on prevention of sexual offending and rehabilitation of men with sexual convictions.
Intervention, Risk Assessment, and Rehabilitating Men with Sexual Con-

victions
Primary prevention initiatives

Given the major public health problem that sexual offending creates (Conti et al. 2021) there is an
argument that society has a moral obligation to increase efforts to prevent first-time sexual offending.
Most interventions with men with sexual convictions are, what is termed, tertiary level prevention, namely
intervention administered by the criminal justice system (Knack et al. 2019). This means that ‘the only way
for individuals to access services for their sexual concerns is to actually commit a sexual offense
p. 443 [sic]’ (Piche et al. 2018, p. 65). This is a less than ideal approach to abuse prevention and ↵ so a growing
area of recent research and practice within the intervention literature is primary prevention: intervention
before the abuse has started. Primary prevention can include the elimination of events, conditions,
situations, or exposure to risk factors in perpetrators as well as targeted programmes of education, public
awareness campaigns, bystander education, and professional training (see McCarten and Kemshall 2021).
Multiple studies (e.g., Piche et al. 2018; Beier et al. 2015) emphasize the importance of primary preventative
therapeutic services for at-risk individuals or those with problematic sexual interest. However, one of the
key concerns in offering a service to meet the needs of non-offending populations with problematic sexual
interests, is the degree of uncertainty and lack of consensus surrounding approaches to take, including the
structure, content, and therapeutic approach of an intervention. A prevalent assumption is that individuals
who are both distressed about their sexual interest and concerned they may offend, may be seen as ‘sex
offenders in waiting’, and this has influenced primary prevention in taking a risk-based approach, similar
to interventions designed for individuals who have been convicted (Clayton, Hocken, and Blagden 2022).
The most substantial primary prevention project to-date is the Prevention Project Dunkelfeld (PPD; Beier
et al. 2015). PPD was a German pilot study aimed at providing therapeutic support and pharmacological
treatment for at-risk individuals. This included paedophiles (those with a sexual interest in pre-pubescent
Page 8 of 25
children) and hebephiles (those attracted to pubescent children) experiencing harmful sexual thoughts
and behaviour, as well as those already using child sexual abuse material online. Based around a
therapeutic programme aiming to enhance behavioural control and reduce dynamic risk (see below), PPD
demonstrated that cognitive behavioural therapeutic (CBT) style interventions for at-risk minor attraction
persons (MAPs) can reduce dynamic risk factors associated with sexual offending against children and
offence-related behaviours (Beier et al. 2015). Beier and colleagues also reported that unidentified and
unlawful child sexual exploitative behaviours were more prevalent in their population than in officially
reported offending and called for increased implementation and evaluation of prevention projects. Despite
the reported effectiveness of PPD, Beier et al.’s (2015) study has been subject to criticism. For example, the
non-randomized waiting-list control design of PPD has been perceived as undermining its efficacy (see
Mokros and Banse, 2019). Mokros and Banse (2019) revisited the Dunkelfeld data and found that when
adjusting PPD’s statistical analyses (from an independent groups post-test to a comparison of the time x
1
group interaction ), Beier et al.’s (2015) results failed to provide empirical support for PPD’s treatment
effectiveness, particularly regarding dynamic risk factors.
Given that sexual attraction to children is highly stigmatized, including among the healing professions
(Lawrence and Willis 2021; Jahnke and Blagden 2022), and that people who experience such attraction are
likely to have increased levels of stress due to fears of rejection, internalized stigma, and the effort of
concealing their sexual interests (Jahnke 2018), a more holistic compassionate mental health approach to
primary prevention is probably required. One such UK-based programme is the Safer Living Foundation’s
(SLF) Aurora Project (TAP), which is a free therapeutic service for those with problematic sexual interest,
and which uses compassion-focused therapy (CFT) as its main approach (for more detail about the clinical
content of TAP see Hocken and Taylor 2021 or Clayton, Hocken, and Blagden 2022). The emphasis in
Aurora is on emotional regulation, compassion, shame-reduction, acceptance, and value-based living to
p. 444 help service-users develop skills to achieve meaningful, fulfilling, and offence-free lives. ↵ Early
results from the service indicate a statistically significant increase in self-esteem and social safeness
amongst users, as well as a reduction in internalized shame (Clayton, Hocken, and Blagden 2022). The
move towards compassion, compassion-based interventions and importance of addressing trauma are
discussed later in this chapter.
The role of risk assessment

As we have noted, intervention for people with sexual convictions has been almost exclusively based on
tertiary prevention and with one of the main aims being to reduce to risk of reoffending. Forensic practice
is dominated by risk and risk assessments and this has tangible impacts on the lives of many prisoners.
Psychological risk assessment is central to the lives of people with sexual convictions, violent convictions,
indeterminate sentenced prisoners and any prisoner whose progression through the prison system
towards release is dependent on favourable risk assessment outcomes. This has led some to construe
forensic psychologists as the ‘quiet ones with power’ (Shingler et al. 2020). However, risk assessment is
not a perfect science; as Jim McMahon’s oft-quoted phrase states: ‘[R]isk-assessment is failure-prone.
Otherwise, it would be called sure-thing-assessment’. We can never know with exactitude whether an
individual will commit a sexual offence; we can merely estimate its likelihood assuming various
Page 9 of 25
conditions. The task for those working with such people with convictions is to understand the factors
associated with how and why individuals chose to offend in the past, and to determine whether these or
other factors might lead the individual to make similar choices in the future. Risk assessment is thus the
process of identifying and studying hazards to reduce the probability of their occurrence (Boer et al., 1997).
In other words, it is the process of evaluating individuals, firstly, to characterize the risk that they will
commit sexual violence, for example, in the future, and, secondly, to develop interventions to manage or
reduce that risk (Monahan 1994).
Risk factors are typically categorized as static (historical and unchangeable, such as age, criminal history,
demographics), or, as highlighted earlier, dynamic (which can be stable, such as sexual preferences, or
acute—intoxicated, angry etc.). However, there is also an important and rather empirically neglected
category of factors: protective factors, in particular those factors that seem to assist desistance from
sexual offending and reduce the likelihood of causing further harm. Empirically supported risk factors
include anti-sociality, atypical sexual interest, impulsivity, poor emotional and self-regulation, life
instability and grievance and hostile thinking (Mann et al. 2010).
The focus on risk can sometimes reduce individuals with sexual convictions down to a collection of risk
factors, but simply reversing such factors is unlikely to be sufficient to bring about meaningful change. As
Ward et al. (2006, p. 391) remind us ‘we have been so busy thinking about how to reduce sexual crimes that
we have overlooked a rather basic truth: recidivism may be further reduced through helping offenders to
live better lives, not simply targeting isolated risk factors’. Accordingly, we would argue, that intervention
needs to contain strengths and ‘goods’, to focus on working compassionately with the individual, in
environments that can facilitate change. The chapter now focuses on interventions and ‘what works’ for
people with sexual convictions and future directions.
Rehabilitative interventions for people with a sexual conviction

In line with Carter and Mann’s (2016) arguments that treatment is a problematic and inappropriate term
p. 445 when describing psychological therapy for men with sexual ↵ convictions, we will use the term
intervention unless explicitly discussing, for example, the sex offender treatment programme (SOTP).
The current dominant model of rehabilitation for men with sexual convictions is the Risk-Need-
Responsivity (RNR) model of rehabilitation (Andrews and Bonta 2010). It is based on three core principles
which can be summarized as:
Risk principle: Interventions should be primarily focused on people who fall within the higher
categories of risk; intensity of dose of intervention should vary according to category of risk.
Need principle: An intervention should be designed to mainly target empirically established risk
factors. Intervention targets should be criminogenic needs/dynamic risk factors which have been
empirically linked to risk of causing further sexual harm.
Responsivity principle: The treatment should be delivered in a way that conforms with the learning
style, motivation, abilities and strengths of an individual. Includes both general and specific
responsivity.
Page 10 of 25
In this model, intervention explicitly seeks to target criminogenic needs and further ancillary risk factors
in order to reduce an individual’s risk (Mann and Fernandez 2006). Hanson et al. (2009) found that
programmes which adhered to the RNR model of rehabilitation showed larger reductions in sexual offence
recidivism than comparison groups (with 10.9 per cent of the intervention group—those on the
programme—being reconvicted as against 19.2 per cent of the control group). This led the authors to
conclude that the RNR model should be the major consideration in the designing of interventions for
people with a sexual conviction (Hanson et al. 2009).
What works? Controversies around interventions

Although the RNR model has received strong endorsement from some researchers, the evidence-base for
intervention with men with a sexual conviction remains contested. The evaluation of the Core SOTP in
England and Wales, in particular, has produced worrying results, showing significantly higher recidivism
rates for treated than untreated men with sexual convictions (ten per cent v. eight per cent) (Mews et al.
2017). Perhaps these results are not altogether surprising when previous evaluations have revealed small
or no positive effects of intervention (see, for example, Friendship et al. 2003; Hanson et al. 2004; Losel
and Schmucker 2005). Indeed, a follow-up of one of the most robust evaluations (one of the few studies to
utilize a randomized clinical trial) found no overall positive effect (Marques et al. 2005). However,
empirical research and evaluation of treatment effectiveness for those with a sexual conviction is
particularly difficult due to generally low recidivism base-rates (e.g. Hanson, Thornton, Helmus, and
Babchishin 2016; Mews et al. 2017; Schmidt and Mann 2018). The datasets, although large, tend to be dated
and may not reflect current practice within the programme. For example, Mews and colleagues’ (2017)
evaluation of SOTP was based on data collected between 1996–2012, with the current generation of
programmes bearing little resemblance to previous programmes. Indeed, the programme at the time of the
Mews et al. research, focused heavily on issues that intuitively felt risky, for example denial and victim
empathy (Blagden et al. 2013; Mann and Barnett 2013), but which were not found to be associated with
recidivism. Hanson et al. (2009) label denial a non-criminogenic need and research has found no overall
effect for denial on recidivism. Indeed, there has been evidence to suggest that denial may actually work as
a protective factor for some men with sexual convictions, assisting desistance from sexual offending. In
p. 446 this context, ↵ Marshall, Marshall, and Kingston (2011) reported denial to be negatively related to
items on three risk instruments (STATIC-99, VRS-SO, STABLE 2000), suggesting that denial may actually
signal a lower chance of reoffending. Harkins et al. (2015) too found that people with sexual convictions
classed as high risk–high denial were less likely to recidivate than people classed as low denial–low risk.
Such findings bolster Maruna’s (2004) assertion that the ‘constructive use of cognitive distortions, such as
externalizing blame, might actually promote desistance [from crime] … Personal reform or rehabilitation
may itself be a cognitive distortion of sorts’ (pp. 189–190). Indeed, psychological well-being research
suggests that honest self-appraisals are more likely to be linked to depressive disorders (Seligman 1975).
As Cohen (2001, p. 56) noted, ‘[m]ental health, it turns out, depends not on being in touch with reality, but
on illusion, self-deception and denial’. In short, research suggests that failure to ascribe responsibility for
bad acts to oneself (particularly as part of one’s core identity) is a common aspect of human cognition and
not pathological nor a sign of deviancy (Friestad 2012).
Page 11 of 25
There is now a third generation of evidence-based programmes, Kaizen and Horizon, which are
underpinned by a biopsychosocial model that aims to humanize destructive behaviour and focus on
creating skills for prosperity rather than on simply reducing symptoms and risks (Ramsay, Carter, and
Walton 2020). The new approach to intervention is influenced by third-wave therapies which contain
values-based living and compassion work; they are strengths-based in their focus on positive identity
change and subsume aspects of the Good Lives Model (GLM)(Ramsay, Cater, and Walton 2020; Walton
2020). It is argued that GLM applied to people with a sexual conviction goes beyond the risk management
model by not exclusively focusing on criminogenic need (Ward and Stewart 2003). The GLM aims to help
people construct more adaptive narrative identities while also giving them the tools to enable them to
attain those goods which are important to them post-release (Mann 2004). Such ideas have now been
integrated into interventions for people with a sexual conviction. As yet there is insufficient data on
whether strengths-based interventions have an increased effectiveness in reducing reoffending (Marshall,
Marshall, and Olver 2017), though there are some promising results (see e.g. Olver et al. 2020).
Medication to manage problematic sexual arousal

The management of problematic sexual arousal is important in the intervention of people with sexual
convictions as this can interfere with the capacity of such people to focus and engage in psychological
treatment (Winder et al. 2019, Grubin 2018). Since 2000, problematic sexual arousal (PSA; also termed
sexual preoccupation, hypersexuality and sexual compulsivity) has been highlighted as an important
dynamic risk factor for sexual (re)offending (Hanson and Harris 2000). Despite this, PSA is the sole known
risk factor that was not directly addressed by UK sexual offending treatment programmes (SOTPs).
Individuals suffering from PSA are more likely to reoffend, both in prison and the community, and PSA can
reduce the quality of life and well-being of individuals suffering with it (Winder et al. 2019).
Winder et al. (2014; 2018) published longitudinal studies demonstrating that Selective Serotonin Reuptake
Inhibitors (SSRIs) and Anti-Androgens (AAs) were equally effective at reducing difficulties associated with
PSA in people serving a custodial sentence for a sexual offence; the medication lowered PSA by 50 per cent,
reducing it to levels similar to the general public. While medication may not be appropriate or suitable for
everyone, its importance in the prevention of reoffending is increasingly recognized. The challenge here is
to broaden the availability of this treatment pathway to the community, so that its putative role in
secondary prevention can be evaluated.
p. 447 Prison, responsivity, and men with sexual convictions

Around 20 per cent of the sentenced prison population have been convicted for a sexual offence (MoJ 2021).
Since 2010, sentence lengths for those with sexual convictions have increased by over 20 per cent, with an
average of five years in prison (Williams and Bailey 2019). The rise of people with sexual convictions in
prison has increased pressure on an already overcrowded and under -funded prison system. Typical
practice in England and Wales often involves segregating men into Vulnerable Prisoner Units (VPUs) for
their own safety, though even in specialized units, men still experience threats and fear from other
prisoners and, at times, staff (see, for example, Ievins and Crewe 2015).
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The organization of prisons for people with a sexual conviction

The impact of prison climate on most prisoners is almost universally conceptualized as negative (Cid 2009;
Dhami, Ayton, and Loewenstein 2007; Sykes 1958) and counterproductive to the goals of rehabilitation and
health enhancement (Day et al. 2012; Frost and Ware 2017; Ross et al. 2008). As Ward and Laws (2010, p. 14)
argue: ‘it is probably quite safe to say that only in a very few isolated cases is prison a turning point toward
prosocial, noncriminal behaviour’. This impact is, in part, due to the physical conditions within which
prisoners are housed but also due to the characteristics of the prisoners themselves, particularly those
with long histories of violence, mental health issues, abuse and trauma. Indeed Sykes’ ‘pains of
imprisonment’—the psychosocial deprivations in prison that most prisoners experience as particularly
difficult to cope with—have been found to be related to serious prison misconduct and violence (Rocheleau
2013).
The experience of imprisonment for men with sexual convictions can be particularly brutal. Those with a
sexual conviction will be at the bottom of the prison hierarchy, living in constant fear of being identified as
a ‘sex offender’ (Schwaebe 2005; Blagden et al. 2019). Such prisoners may experience threats, physical and
verbal abuse, they may have lost, or fear losing, the support of those who care for them (Ware and Blagden
2020).They will be stigmatized by other prisoners, correctional staff, and the wider prison administration
(Higgins and Ireland 2009; Sykes 1958; Ricciardelli and Spencer 2017). Among fellow prisoners, men with
sexual convictions are rejected and are considered acceptable victims of abuse (Scrivens and Ricciardelli
2019).
Against this backdrop, there are growing concerns that rehabilitative programmes and practice are being
compromised by ineffective correctional environments, staff drift, organizational resistance, the degree to
which therapeutic integrity is maintained, and the quality of programme implementation (Day et al. 2012;
Smith et al. 2009). Prison for most people does not work; this is one of the few truisms within
criminological psychology. Most academics agree that imprisonment has, at best, no effect on reoffending
and several studies have shown that imprisonment can increase reoffending (Cullen et al. 2011). While
there has been much research into the risk factors of individuals and the changes that people make during
their treatment, there is much less examination of the context or situation of that treatment. As Ware
(2011) argued over a decade ago the ‘context in which treatment is provided may actually prove to be quite
important to the overall effectiveness of treatment’ (p. 30).
When considering this, is it really that surprising that we rarely find a treatment effect in prisons? One of
the explanations for this lack of treatment effect has been the iatrogenic contamination effects in the
prison subculture, a deferred transfer of learned contents to the world outside, difficulties during
resettlement, or the experience of the prison’s climate (Schmucker and Lösel 2015). Prisoner and staff
relationships have been found to be pivotal in the experience of a positive prison climate. Attitudes held by
p. 448 ↵ professionals toward prisoners can thus have a profound effect on their practice and consequently
the experience of imprisonment (Dirkzwager and Kruttschnitt 2012). Outside of therapy, prisoner and staff
relationships are important for maintaining treatment goals and can help with enacting important skills
learned within programmes (see e.g. Tate, Blagden, and Mann 2017; Weaver 2015).
Page 13 of 25
Improving the therapeutic impact of prison

One of the responses to poor treatment effects and the negative experience of imprisonment has been the
establishment of more prisons solely for people with sexual convictions. Such prisons have been found to
provide safe and cohesive rehabilitative environments, where the prisoners feel able to contemplate
change (Blagden et al. 2016; Blagden and Wilson 2019). It has been argued that the location of the
therapeutic intervention is a relevant issue for treatment readiness, and is an aspect of external readiness
in the multifactor offender readiness model (MORM; Ward, Day, Howells, and Birgden 2004). This is an
important point, as Blagden et al. (2016) found that prison climate predicted readiness for treatment and
was correlated with beliefs that individuals can change. Williams et al. (2019) found too that higher scores
in prison climate were related to readiness for treatment and change. These results are particularly
pertinent for prisons that have a focus on psychological interventions. Similarly, Stasch et al.’s (2018)
study found that perception of prison climate significantly correlated with their attitudes towards
treatment.
Rehabilitative climate in action—active citizenship

Active citizenship is about recognizing and promoting the voice of those serving custodial sentences, and
attempting to give them a sense of ownership over the well-being of themselves, their peers, people
working in prisons, and their environment. Historically, criminal justice has paid little attention to the
voice of prisoners, meaning that people in prison have things done to them rather than with them. This
leads to resignation and disengagement (McCartan, Harris, and Prescott 2020). Feeling alienated and
disconnected is unlikely to motivate change. However, including lived experience perspectives in
programmes builds trust, leads to better perceptions of the institutional climate, and facilitates reciprocity
(Mason and Adler 2012; McCartan et al. 2020).
A good example of active citizenship, as a whole prison approach, can be seen within HMP Stafford. In
2016, it was rerolled to hold exclusively people convicted of sexual offences. This dramatic shift in
population was closely followed by a new focus on Rehabilitative Culture across the prison estate (Mann et
al. 2018). Stafford’s approach to rehabilitative culture was to implement Active Citizenship through
operationalizing concepts of recognizing, reinforcing, and recording acts seen to be doing good for the
community, environment, and others (Blagden and Lubowski 2019). There were no financial rewards, nor
was it directly linked to the HMPPS Incentives and Earned Privileges Scheme. As Active Citizenship
embedded, it evolved with staff and residents both contributing to new opportunities including wide-
ranging peer support and mentoring roles, ways of contributing to the wider prison environment
facilitated by staff. HMP Stafford is now recognized as a prison that provides opportunities to change and
grow. In an HMPPS inspection active citizenship was highlighted on several occasions as promoting good
practice and that opportunities generated by the approach gave prisoners more responsibility and
enhanced overall work to reduce the likelihood of prisoners reoffending on release (HM Prison
Inspectorate 2020).
Page 14 of 25
p. 449 Community (re)integration

Given the contested picture and rather bleak outlook of much prison-based intervention for people with a
sexual conviction, more focus needs to be placed on community intervention and reintegration. People
with a sexual conviction often find themselves in, but not of, society. They are socially isolated, ostracized,
and find few pathways to meaningful employment. Ironically, a punitive approach to re-entry, one
characterized by monitoring and threat of sanction, may actually put individuals at an increased risk of
causing further harm.
Narratives of re-entry and sexual crime

Maruna and LeBel (2003) argue that there are broadly three narratives of community re-entry: control;
support (needs-based); and strengths-based. Control narratives are an approach to risk management that
favour intense community monitoring, supervision, and threat of sanctions (e.g. recall/breaches) as a
method of quelling criminality and keeping the public safe. However, control narratives have largely failed
to have any significant impact on recidivism and there is little evidence that they contribute to any
meaningful behaviour change (Maruna and Lebel 2003). There is very little (if any) evidence that
imprisonment or intense community supervision deters subsequent criminal behaviour (de Valk et al.
2015). Support or needs-based narratives suggest that those released from prison have multiple deficits
and outstanding criminogenic needs (dynamic risk factors) that require intervention in order to reduce
crime. As highlighted earlier, these ‘needs’ are well located within the ‘what works’ literature and have a
sound evidence-base (Maruna and Lebel 2003; Mann, Hanson, and Thornton 2010). However, it has been
argued that just focusing on ‘deficits’ is not sufficient to bring about behaviour change. The strength-
based narrative aims to redress this and provide a more positive and holistic narrative of re-entry. This
narrative asks: what do people want from life and what contribution do they want to make (Maruna and
Lebel 2003)? The strengths-based narrative has parallels with the Good Lives Model which, as noted
above, assumes that all humans fashion their lives around their core values and follow some sort of (often
implicit) good life plan.
Barriers to effective reintegration

2
One key factor for ‘making good’ is finding a place in society. Over 99.8 per cent of people who serve
custodial prison sentences for a sexual crime will leave prison and seek to integrate into the community.
Winder (2022) has delineated 13 factors relevant in reducing sexual recidivism and promoting community
integration, aims that are intertwined. Barriers to reintegration include the state of people as they exit
prison (in terms of age and health, for example) and the restrictions and constraints upon people in the
community. The latter can have unintended iatrogenic consequences. There are also gaps in provision for
those transiting from prison to the community, and challenges with reconnecting with family and friends.
Some people will also be released into accommodation that is unfit for purpose (see Lomas 2021), and into
a hostile world. Finding employment can also be especially difficult for people (Tovey et al. 2022). A further
barrier is about self-identity—how people perceive themselves, and how others perceive and label them
(Willis 2018). These barriers to successful reintegration often lead to social isolation and prevent
desistance from crime being achieved (Tewksbury and Mustaine 2009).
Page 15 of 25
p. 450 Understanding trauma and a turn towards compassion

This chapter has reviewed theoretical frameworks and interventions for people with sexual convictions,
but there is one area that we have yet to focus on and that is the role of trauma and compassion.
The role of trauma in the lives of those with sexual convictions is often neglected—whether this is adverse
childhood experiences (ACEs) (Grady et al. 2017) and their connection with the aetiology of sexual
offending, the trauma of committing a violent or abusive act (Evans et al. 2007), or the trauma of living in a
prison environment, which can exacerbate previous ACEs (see Crewe 2011, Sykes 1958). As we have noted
earlier, the experience of imprisonment can be traumatic for many prisoners, but especially so for people
with sexual convictions. Men with sexual convictions have higher rates of ACES and traumas (Hamilton
2020), especially in comparison with the general population (Jespersen et al. 2009; Levenson, Willis, and
Prescott 2016). They are twice as likely to have experienced physical abuse, three times more likely to have
experienced childhood sexual abuse, four times more likely to have experienced emotional neglect and
thirteen times more likely to have experienced verbal abuse. Previous research also shows individuals
experiencing child sexual abuse are twice as likely to endure other forms of maltreatment or family
dysfunction (Dong et al. 2003), highlighting that sexual abuse rarely occurs in isolation, and overlaps with
other ACEs.
In relatively recent history within correctional rehabilitation, prisoners’ disclosures of their own abusive
histories were seen as excuses, justifications, or cognitive distortions. There is now recognition of the real
traumas experienced by men with sexual convictions, and a growing understanding of how rehabilitative
environments including prisons can account for, and work with, those experiences (Levenson et al. 2016;
Walton 2019). Trauma-informed practice can be defined as: ‘individual or organisational practice that
understands the prevalence and impact of trauma; that recognizes the signs and symptoms of trauma; that
responds to this knowledge by revising policies, practices and procedures accordingly, and endeavours to
ensure that the response from services or systems does not retraumatise individuals’ (Vaswani and Paul
2019, p. 516). Such practice means recognising the impact that trauma, including but not limited to ACEs,
has on an individual and, in acknowledging this, providing appropriate support to that person. At the heart
of this practice is a recognition that criminal justice practice can be re-traumatizing, and so it is important
to recognize strengths and skills, build confidence and re-educate individuals– embedding new coping
skills (Blagden 2022; McCarten 2020). Taking a trauma-informed approach can be difficult: as discussed
earlier, prison can be a trauma-laden and stigmatising environment—especially for those with sexual
convictions. Indeed, the punitive role and impact of the prison environment can pose a key challenge to
one of the cornerstones of trauma-informed practice which is actively to avoid retraumatization (Vaswani
and Paul 2019).
It was not long ago in the intervention of men with sexual convictions that words like ‘trauma-informed’
or ‘compassion’ would have been considered ‘dirty words’ in criminal justice, but the emergence of
trauma-informed practice and compassion-focused practice have begun to influence wider criminal
justice working. Indeed, compassion has become a major focus for international research in prosocial
behaviour, and the emergence of compassion-focused therapy is beginning to shape forensic practice
(Hocken and Taylor 2021; Kolts and Gilbert 2018). Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) was initially
developed for people whose high levels of shame rendered them unable to benefit from traditional CBT
Page 16 of 25
(Gilbert 2014). CFT can be understood as a motivation focused therapy, based on evolutionary and
p. 451 cognitive systems, that helps people to access and ↵ stimulate the affiliative emotions, motives and
competencies underpinning compassion. The combination of these capacities plays an important role in
threat regulation, well-being, and pro-social behaviour (Gilbert 2014; Hocken and Taylor 2021). Within
CFT, the relationships we have with ourselves, especially in the forms of shame and self-criticism,
underpin a wide range of mental health problems (Gilbert 2014). The compassionate journey is about
helping people become more in touch with the reality of suffering, to become more tolerant and
empathically engaged with what they have experienced and to help people reconcile past traumas. As
Gilbert (2014, p. 30) contends ‘compassion moves us to wanting to take responsibility for change and do
what we can to engage with and help with the suffering of ourselves and others’. Helping individuals
recover from trauma is related to growth and human flourishing, as well as building compassion for self
and others (Hall, Langer, and McMartin 2010). Indeed, the acknowledgment in therapy that hurt people
hurt people is an important aspect of working compassionately with this client group, as well as helping to
limit compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma, which can result in burnout and impact the ability to
support service users effectively (Jacobowitz et al. 2015; Taylor, Akerman, and Hocken 2020). As Creeden
(2004) argues, not addressing the impact of trauma will impede the learning and effective use of skills that
are taught in treatment programmes (see also Taylor, Akerman, Hocken 2020). Indeed there is a growing
evidence base that a compassionate criminology may be a necessary condition of treatment for such client
groups.
Conclusion
Understanding, managing, intervening and preventing sexual offending is complex. People with sexual
convictions are a heterogeneous group, often with complex needs and trauma histories. This chapter has
explored the experience of imprisonment and efficacy of intervention, including interventions targeted
before people have begun their offending behaviour. While intervention and addressing risk and strengths
are important for rehabilitation, their success is largely going to be determined by whether people who are
convicted of a sexual offence can find a place back within the community. Desistance for those convicted of
sexual offences thus involves both the ceasing of crime and successful reintegration as a pro-social,
productive member of the community (Willis, Levenson and Ward 2010). Overall, this chapter has argued
that a turn towards compassion and a focus on trauma-informed practice is an alternative and potentially
more effective way of working with people with sexual convictions: an inclusive approach to supporting
human flourishing and hope for the future.

Seto’s Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children is a revised edition of a really comprehensive piece of work
about child sexual abuse, paedophilia and paedophilic disorder. Informative, definitive and provides a really sound
basis for understanding this complex and difficult area.
Page 17 of 25
The Sexual Crime book series, published by Springer, is edited by Belinda Winder, Nicholas Blagden and team. It
includes Sexual Crime and Circles of Support and Accountability, Sexual Crime and Spirituality, and Sexual Crime and
Imprisonment. See the series website <https://link.springer.com/series/15477> for further details and a list of all the
volumes to date. The books all include chapters by people with lived experience, as well as academics and
practitioners.
p. 452 ↵ Gilbert’s The Compassionate Mind (2010) gives an introduction to compassion-focused therapy. Readable and
accessible, yet still a landmark book in terms of its approach to understanding the importance of acting with kindness
to ourselves and to the people we work with.
Schmucker and Lösel’s article, ‘The Effects of Sexual Offender Treatment on Recidivism’ (2015) is a key paper in the
treatment effectiveness literature and remains the most stringently controlled meta-analysis that has been published.
Beier et al. created the first prevention project on child sexual abuse and the use of child abusive images, and their
paper ‘The German Dunkelfeld Project’ (2015) details the first results. This is highly recommended for anyone wanting
to know more about primary prevention.
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Notes
1
The time (e.g pre/post intervention) x group (treatment vs control) interaction is the most important test to
determine whether there is the intended treatment effect.
2
The remaining 0.2% are serving Whole Life Orders under which they will not be released.
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21. Cybercrime: A social ecology

p. 456 21. Cybercrime: A social ecology

Ben Collier and Alice Hutchings
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0021
Abstract
This chapter outlines the social ecology of cybercrime. The national and international contours of power, crime, and harm
emerging in Internet societies lies at the heart of many crucial areas of contemporary criminological debate. Despite the
increasing prominence of cybercrime, its integration into mainstream criminology remains fragmented and piecemeal.
Moreover, cybercrime studies are breaking new frontiers in novel forms of empirical work after drawing on the very large
datasets made available in online forums, chat channels, and social media. The chapter explains how collaborations from
different disciplines might form the seeds of an optimistic future for the criminology of cybercrime.
Keywords: social ecology, cybercrime, power, crime, harm, Internet, social media, collabroations
Introduction
In this chapter, we make the case that despite its increasingly contested nature as a field of study,
cybercrime is an important area for mainstream criminologists to understand and engage with. The
national and international contours of power, crime, and harm emerging in Internet societies are at the
heart of many crucial areas of contemporary criminological debate.
Cybercrime scholarship has sat awkwardly within criminology for the past three decades. As an empirical
phenomenon it has exploded from an initially niche interest to one which now dominates global news
agendas. Despite the increasing prominence of cybercrime, its integration into mainstream criminology
remains fragmented and piecemeal, long after its political and public relevance has become clear. While
cybercrime scholars draw on classic theories from criminological scholarship, there has been little
incorporation of new ideas from cybercrime studies into the criminological mainstream. In recent years, a
clear shift has occurred—cybercrime has begun to stabilize, and sufficient empirical and theoretical
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scholarship now exists, providing the foundations of a recognizable sub-field. We sketch these
foundations, looking ahead to possible futures, controversies, and politics in the next phase of cybercrime
scholarship.
In this chapter, we introduce cybercrime, setting out key terms, ideas, and debates which have animated
cybercrime scholarship by criminologists. We discuss the main aspects of cybercrime as a phenomenon, the
core theory through which criminologists have attempted to reckon with it, and discuss ways in which
nation states and private sector forces are attempting to govern crime on the Internet.
What is Cybercrime? Setting the Scene
Is cybercrime novel? A critical look at typologies

What do we mean by ‘cybercrime’? The term is not straightforward, and the definitions we use are drawn
from a previous era of digital technologies, when the ‘online world’ and the ‘physical world’ were more
p. 457 clearly separated (Cohen 2007). One common typology ↵ distinguishes between cyber-enabled and
cyber-dependent crime. Cyber-enabled crime refers to traditional offences that have moved online. Fraud
and theft occur in physical space but have online variants. However, cyber-dependent crimes are
dependent on the technologies that enable them. These include malware, unauthorized access, and denial-
of-service attacks—crimes which would not exist without a global infrastructure of networked computers.
We argue that the distinction between ‘traditional’ forms of crime and ‘true’ cybercrime is questionable.
First, the distinction between traditional offences that have moved online and crimes that are dependent
on technology is not clear cut. Denial-of-service attacks deny access to online resources, such as a
webpage—these are often considered to be a ‘true’, or technologically-dependent form of cybercrime
(Sauter 2014). However, ‘real-world’ analogues of denial-of-service attacks clearly exist—there are other
activities, such as protests, that can deny access to physical spaces, and sabotaging phone lines, highways,
or postal services are also comparable. Denial-of-service attacks are also used for extortion, which is
certainly a traditional type of offence (Karami, Park, and McCoy 2016). Another example is ransomware, a
type of malware that encrypts data until a fee is paid. While the use of malware (and by extension,
ransomware) is a cyber-dependent crime, ransom is a traditional offence. Similarly, while unauthorized
access may refer to accessing computer systems, it is similar to trespass on physical property.
The term ‘cyber’ is also contested. ‘Cyberspace’ was coined by William Gibson (1984) in the novel
Neuromancer to describe a virtual world divorced from terrestrial life. It is used synonymously with the
Internet and the world wide web. Some think of networked devices, physical and observable, while others
think of cyberspace as a separate dimension, distinct from physical ‘meatspaces’. Thinking of ‘cyberspace’
as a distinct topology may have made more sense in the early years of the Internet, but as networked
technologies have increasingly become incorporated and embedded in all aspects of our daily lives, digital
sociologists understand our society as being made up of hybrid spaces which incorporate a range of
digitally-networked and physical elements (De Souza e Silva 2006; Brown 2006). Although cybercrime has
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gradually become the most used term, it is by no means the only term used to refer to the same or similar
phenomena, with synonyms including online crime, virtual crime, techno crime, electronic crime, high-
tech crime, computer crime, e-crime, digital crime, and Internet-related crime.
The second concern about these typologies is they are unlikely to age well. For the future ‘digital natives’,
what is considered to be a ‘traditional crime’ will change. Future generations are likely to be puzzled by
these distinctions in years to come, as they gradually fall out of favour. Digital networked technologies
have shaped and been shaped by our societies in remarkable and often-unpredictable ways, and their
growth and adoption has been accompanied by transformations in how people work and socialize, the way
people interact with each other and their daily routines. Within a lifetime, we have seen rapid changes in
technology, from mainframe computers, to personal computers, laptops, and smartphones. Once,
computers took up entire rooms, now we can wear them on our wrists. Our lives have also become more
datafied—mediated and monitored by flows of data. While this brings efficiency, convenience and
arguably better, data-driven decisions, it also creates opportunities for harm in almost every aspect of our
lives. The cybercrimes of the future will evolve as future technologies are developed (Tuptuk and Hailes
2018).
The question then turns to how future criminologists will define cybercrime. Perhaps once the novelty
p. 458 wears off, it will no longer be distinguished from other types of crime. ↵ Research tells us cybercrime
offenders tend to differ from other types of offenders (Weulen Kranenbarg et al. 2018), so it’s unlikely that
those who steal from people’s homes will turn to more technically sophisticated methods. Long-used
definitions like violent crime and property crime may be perfectly applicable to cybercrime in the future.
Hacking versus cybercrime

The term ‘hacking’ is often used uncritically by criminologists and the media to refer to unauthorized
access and other high-tech crimes. However, in computer science the term has a longer, more
complicated, history. The hacker subculture emerged initially in the 1950s and 1960s in the US, fusing the
countercultural libertarian radicalism and utopianism of youth cultures at the time with the work and
ideas being explored in the government/academic computer labs developing networked computing
technologies. ‘Hackers’ were once operators of legitimate amateur radio and computer programmers, who
were admired for their technical skills rather than reviled. ‘Hacking’ referred not (necessarily) to illegal
activities, but to experimenting with technology and pushing it to the point of breaking to find new and
unexpected behaviours and potential uses never considered by its designers; to circumventing ‘hard
coded’ restrictions; or to building new and exciting technologies which disrupted established institutions
and social structures. The current criminalization of the term can perhaps be traced back to Levy’s (1984)
book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. While Levy was using the term to refer to those who ‘ …
guid[ed] computers to greater heights than anyone expected’, he also outlined a ‘hacker’ code of ethics,
which is occasionally misapplied as techniques of neutralization to justify causing harm. American
academic and military researchers working on computer networks in the 1950s, before modems were
developed, and when programs ran using punch cards, developed a unique set of ethics, which Levy (1984)
summarizes as follows:
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Access to computers—and everything which might teach you something about the way the world
works—should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
All information should be free.
Mistrust Authority – Promote Decentralization.
Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or
position.
You can create art and beauty on a computer.
Computers can change your life for the better.
These ethics should be considered in the historical context in which they were created. For example, the
principle ‘all information should be free’ referred to a ‘free exchange of information’ (Levy 1984, p. 27),
such as sharing computer programmes, rather than accessing another computer system illegally.
Similarly, the authorities that were to be mistrusted were not necessarily law enforcement agencies, but
rather ‘bureaucracies, whether corporate, government, or university, as they limited the free exchange of
information’. Within computer science, the term hacker still carries this somewhat positive connotation,
with some puzzlement as to why so many criminologists use it to describe criminal activities.
As cybercrime has developed into more business-like forms, it has become alienated from the practices of
experimentation and creativity which typify traditional hacking. However, the hacker ethic still provides
an important touchstone for the cybercrime subculture, even if it is increasingly divorced from the reality
p. 459 of cybercrime work ↵ (Collier et al. 2021). The core values and aesthetics still prove important to the
meanings, identities, and communities which form around cybercrime; ideas of technical mastery, anti-
authoritarianism, and techno-libertarianism still bring cybercrime communities together. The political
goals espoused in the ‘hacker ethic’ often animate more activist forms of cybercrime, and the aesthetics of
hacking, through pop culture representations, provide a powerful attraction to newcomers, meaningful
shared identities to existing members, and contribute to classic subcultural processes of labelling and
group identification.
The activities and communities of cybercrime have developed their own subcultures, distinct from the
increasingly institutionalized, politicized, and legitimate world of hackers. In English-language
communities, this draws from the libertarian, nihilistic culture associated with trolling communities—
online subcultures of ‘digital tricksters’ (Coleman 2014) who cause havoc, deliberately provoke outrage,
and engage in online harassment (Hodge and Hallgrimmsdottir 2020). Few genuine hacktivists emerge
from cybercrime forums, which are mostly concerned with petty scams, gendered violence, illicit
businesses, get-rich-quick schemes, and entrepreneurial, rather than activist, values. These cybercrime
subcultures are now rarely centred around the cultivation of serious technical skill—the majority of crimes
constitute petty fraud, cyberstalking and harassment, or repurposing well-worn exploits into easy-to-use
tools. Where aspirations of ‘hacker’ status come in directly, they are generally linked to a stereotyped form
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of masculinity (as hard technical mastery) which gives alienated young men a route to other
‘masculinities’ with which they can identify (Bada et al. 2021; Hutchings and Chua 2016; Holt et al. 2020;
Messerschmidt 2005). This combines to give these communities an adolescent ‘boys club’ atmosphere.
Cybercrime communities also draw on and overlap with a range of other online subcultures, and although
we focus on US and European communities, there is substantial variation in cybercrime and hacker
cultures around the world. These are shaped by the local political and cultural environment—e.g. the
Russian cybercrime scenes operate in a generally more permissive law enforcement environment (as long
as attacks are targeted internationally rather than domestically) and so are less dominated by petty scams
and romance fraud. In China there are a range of cybercrime communities aligned with pro- and anti-
government groups, including a thriving community operating ‘airport’ services to allow access to the rest
of the world through the Great Firewall (Chua and Collier 2019).
Cybercrime as routine activity

Cohen and Felson’s (1979) routine activity approach (henceforth RAT) is the criminological theoretical
framework most often applied to online offending. This developed from the concerns of the Chicago
School, attempting to understand how large-scale changes in movements and activities of people and the
environment of the city shaped the cultural and social phenomena they were studying. The premise is that
predatory crime occurs in the presence of likely offenders and suitable targets, and the absence of capable
guardians. As the emphasis is on criminal acts, rather than individual factors, it is well suited to the study
of large-scale social changes, such as the growth of suburbs, the rise of consumer capitalism, and changes
in women’s access to work, and how they present novel opportunities for crime (such as unattended
houses full of lightweight, expensive luxury goods) or on the ‘micro-chemistry’ of opportunity presented
by particular criminal situations.
p. 460 ↵ According to Felson (2008), technological developments are among the main factors changing
people’s routine activities, and so RAT is an easy, at-hand, theoretical tool for use in the study of
cybercrime. This focuses on analysing ‘criminogenic situations’, with the Internet’s digital infrastructures
bringing together potential offenders and victims, lowering barriers to offending, and thus creating
opportunities for crime. As our daily activities are lived through digital networks and services, we are
linked more to other people around the world, and hence increasingly exposed to threats and risks.
The crime survey for England and Wales included fraud and computer misuse offences for the first time in
2016. This revealed—contrary to previous trends—the crime rate was not dropping, it was moving online
but not being captured in the data. When the crime survey was changed, the crime rate doubled overnight.
This problem—where a lack of collection about online crime creates a perceived crime drop—is
widespread (Tcherni et al. 2016).
Of course, the data now being collected still have many limitations. The definition of computer misuse
offences used in the crime survey are quite limited, capturing ‘computer viruses’, and unauthorized access
to personal information. As we show later, the range of cybercrimes is much more extensive. Furthermore,
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surveys only capture those who are aware they have been victimized, and individual targets, rather than
organizations and government agencies. While ground truth is problematic, the crime survey illustrates
that cybercrime is a particularly important aspect of crime.
The routine activity approach can also be used to explain changes to cybercrime during and following the
COVID-19 pandemic. As property crime and violence went down, many types of cybercrime increased
(Buil-Gil et al. 2021; Horgan et al. 2021). Analysis of an online blackmarket showed that during the start of
the pandemic, there was a significant increase in transactions (Vu et al. 2020). This market stimulation
occurred as our routine activities were changing—and not just those adapting to working from home. In
particular, forum discussions indicated it was a period of intense boredom and economic change. Lallie et
al. (2021) found as governments were scrambling to implement lockdowns, distribute PPE and implement
stimulus packages to offset economic hardships brought about by the pandemic, criminals were leveraging
government announcements and key events in their cybercrime campaigns.
However, the routine activities approach has also come in for significant criticism (Wortley 2010). At the
heart of much contemporary RAT scholarship is an assumed technological determinism—new
technologies and social arrangements act unidirectionally to reshape society, with little room for
individual agency, culture, or community action. This is mirrored in the ‘situational crime
prevention’ (Clarke 1995) policy programmes which RAT scholarship suggests, which mandate hardening
of targets through the purchase of private security, ‘hostile architecture’ changes to the online built
environment to prevent crime through design, and the incorporation of technical controls into the
workings of the Internet which allow intrusive government and corporate surveillance. This both ignores
the ethic at the heart of online deviance—technologies are malleable, and can be subverted, repurposed,
and destroyed by ingenious human creativity—and paints a vision of the future based around technocratic
control, centralized design, and marketized private security, rather than collective goods, democracy, and
liberation. Technological solutionism—realized in the idea that we can design crime out of our online
spaces—has similarly negative results in offline crime control. It has been largely co-opted into neoliberal
and post-neoliberal agendas (despite its ‘high modern’ roots as a philosophy of social design) to alienate
public space, push social problems out of the view of middle-class society, and entrench technocratic
control in the built environment.
p. 461 The Tools, Technologies, and Practices of Cybercrime
One of the difficulties with researching cybercrime is that relevant datasets can be hard to come by. There
is no central way to report cybercrime, so data held by police agencies, online platforms, and financial
institutions will each only represent a fraction of the overall problem. Therefore, comparing which types of
cybercrime are more common or cause the most harm is difficult. Here, we examine some of the types of
cybercrime most often prosecuted in the UK.
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Data or system breach and vulnerability exploitation

Breaches can occur at a variety of levels. For example, a computer system may be breached, providing
access to all the data on a computer. Alternatively, an individual account may be breached, such as email
(Mirian et al. 2019). Once access is obtained, data may be stolen (although this does not necessarily deprive
the data holder of access, so is dissimilar to theft of physical property). Data may also be damaged,
destroyed, or deleted. Data breached in this way can subsequently be monetized, by demanding the victim
pay a ransom for its return, threatening disclosure (doxxing), or selling it for subsequent misuse, such as
credit card fraud (Porcedda and Wall 2019).
Data or system breaches can involve technical attacks, which exploit unforeseen weaknesses in computer
systems. An example is SQL injection, which hijacks parts of a website where users enter their own data
(such as their name). If these fields are not set up correctly, an attacker can use them to smuggle database
code directly into the server, allowing them to execute commands on the website’s databases and gain
access to sensitive data. Alternatively, they can be very non-technical in nature, such as reusing
passwords. In some cases, the person may have legitimate access to the computer system but use access in
an unauthorized way. In the UK many police officers and staff have been prosecuted for misusing access to
police databases (Hutchings and Collier 2019).
Social exploitation—romance scams, get rich quick schemes, impersonation,

and frauds
Online deception can take many forms, from elaborate advance fee frauds, to credit card fraud, and the
online sale of counterfeit, non-existent or stolen products. These often involve elements of social
exploitation, deceiving others for a financial advantage. Developments in technology have created more
opportunities for fraud, from romance scams on dating platforms, to investment scams advertised on
social networks (Cross 2019). A variety of media may be used, including email, social network sites, and
online trading sites, to manipulate others into providing money or identity details. Other frauds occur in
the workplace, such as altering computer data to divert funds for personal use or manipulating financial
records to hide unauthorized transactions.
Research into fraudulent activities targeting organizations reveals so-called CEO fraud is commonly
conducted electronically. In this type of fraud, managerial-level staff are impersonated in money transfer
requests sent by email. Junger et al. (2020) found CEO fraud is often seasonal, targeting potential victims
during holiday periods when those impersonated are likely to be away from the office. Even offline scams
p. 462 often have an online component. Bidgoli and Grossklags (2017) found scams ↵ conducted by phone
involved telephone number spoofing and electronic payment. The inverse is also true, with technical
support scams, where victims are infected with malware when they believe they are receiving assistance,
starting with a phone call (Miramirkhani et al. 2016).
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Malware and toolkits

Malware refers to malicious software—programs which, when executed, can facilitate a range of harms,
depending on the type of malware. Some forms of malware can control an infected computer remotely,
logging all the users’ keystrokes, take screenshots when a mouse is clicked, stealing credentials and
cookies to imitate sessions, and controlling webcams. Malware can connect infected machines to large
networks of other infected machines (called botnets) which can be used as a criminal infrastructure to
launch further attacks, send spam, evade law enforcement, or mine cryptocurrency.
Ransomware has become prominent in recent years due to its use in high-profile attacks on major
companies and critical national infrastructure. Ransomware can infect a single computer, or spread
around a target network. It typically encrypts data and renders it inaccessible until a payment is made
(Paquet-Clouston et al. 2019). As a wide range of major businesses and services now hold increasing
amounts of intimate user data—from banks, to hospitals, to hotels—ransomware gangs often threaten to
publish any sensitive data. This combination of tactics has led to private and public sector organizations
paying millions of dollars in ransom fees to regain access.
Malware is often differentiated by the method in which it is spread. Worms are self-replicating and self-
spreading, with the Morris worm being an early example. Viruses are also self-replicating, but require
assistance to spread, such as sharing files and discs with other users. One example is leaving USB drives in
carparks, particularly if attempting to infect a targeted organization. Trojans are not self-replicating and
require manual intervention to install. Like the Trojan horse from Greek mythology, the malware is hidden
inside a seemingly innocent computer file. On the other hand, drive-by-downloads are spread by visiting a
website using a vulnerable browser, typically requiring little human intervention.
Malware can vary in sophistication, with those exploiting zero-day (undetected) vulnerabilities being the
most valuable. While stories of targeted malware used by nation states is news worthy, the majority of
malware is spread in a scattergun fashion. Simoiu et al. (2020) examined at scale malware spread by email,
finding much was distributed globally and indiscriminately, rather than in a targeted manner.
Toolkits are attack tools made available for cybercrime. They automate the attack process. They are often
customizable, some can be updated, so attackers can use the most recent version, and some come with
support services. Toolkits can lower the barrier to entry for offenders, as they don’t have to program the
entire attack from scratch each time, and some come with nice graphical user interfaces, making them
even more usable.
Denial-of-service and low-level cybercrime

Although media accounts focus on high-profile attacks, the vast majority of cybercrime is petty. Denial-
of-service attacks are an example of this ‘low-level’ cybercrime, involving directing massive amounts of
computer traffic at a victim, knocking them offline. This was originally carried out as a ‘digital sit-in’, with
p. 463 large numbers of volunteers using ↵ their own computer to access the websites of political targets at
the same time—causing them to become choked with traffic. As automated approaches were developed—
such as networks of infected computers which could be directed to send this traffic—this developed into a
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prank or harassment tactic associated with the Anonymous (and later, Lulzsec) groups (Coleman 2014,
Sauter 2014). As the commercial possibilities of these attacks became clear, a market emerged for selling
denial-of-service tools and services.
While cases involving denial-of-service attacks rarely turn up in the criminal courts, this is a frequently
occurring type of crime, with attacks at least in the tens of thousands per day (Collier et al. 2019). The
majority of such attacks are never reported to the authorities. Of those that are, only a fraction are
investigated, and there are often difficulties finding the attack source. One reason is most denial-of-
service attacks are of a short duration, aimed at knocking services offline momentarily. Most attacks are
against home IP addresses, presumably to gain an unfair advantage in an online game.
These types of denial-of-service attacks, as well as other types of cybercrime, including fraud, are often
characterized as ‘high volume, low value’. The few that are reported are seldom investigated. Police tend to
prioritize low volume but high value crimes, which means the vast majority of reports will never be looked
into, even if individually they contain valuable parts of the overall puzzle. If online offenders can take basic
precautions to not make their identities obvious, in many cases they are operating with impunity.
Operational security and avoiding the cops—anonymity networks, currencies,

and encryption
Cybercrime offenders have a range of ways to avoid detection. Operational security (or ‘opsec’) techniques
include the use of anonymity networks, proxies, and VPNs, and alternative currencies. The most well-
known example of an anonymity network is Tor, initially invented by the US Naval Research Laboratory as
a means of securing military connections on insecure networks run by foreign governments. Tor sends
user signals through the Tor network—a global network of volunteer-operated servers (or ‘relays’)—
hiding the routing information in three layers of encryption, which are decrypted one-by-one as the
traffic bounces between relays. This means no part of the network—and hence no observer—knows both
where the encrypted traffic comes from and where it is going. Lots of people using Tor at the same time
around the world makes any individual hard to trace—and so it is often used by individuals to make their
web browsing hard to surveil by governments, and to circumvent censorship, allowing access to websites
blocked by Internet Service Providers. Tor can also be used to set up ‘Onion Services’—websites, such as
forums or marketplaces, which are only accessible through the Tor network. This makes the true location
of the server very difficult to establish and are therefore difficult to take down. While Tor often gets a bad
reputation, as we discuss below, the vast majority of cybercrime does not use it. In the meantime, Tor has
many legitimate, useful purposes (Mirea et al. 2019), including for journalists and activists within
oppressive regimes. This is one reason why Tor still receives US government funding—much like ‘Radio
Free Asia’ before it, it contributes to the USA’s use of the Internet as a tool for global soft power.
Another way for cybercrime offenders to hide their tracks is to use proxies and VPNs—servers located
around the world which are used to hide where signals are coming from and going. These act as
intermediaries, to make it look like the traffic is coming from somewhere else. Their use does not eliminate
p. 464 all risks for cybercrime offenders. ↵ Law enforcement have gone as far as operating VPNs, to access
relevant data. However, this level of complexity is often not required, as many VPNs will provide logs to
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law enforcement on presentation of a warrant. There are indications VPNs are not as trusted as they used
to be. Proxies are also used as intermediaries. Botnet-based proxy networks use compromised machines as
intermediary points for traffic. Proxies are readily offered for sale on stolen data markets (Hutchings and
Holt 2015).
Tracing the money is an important aspect of investigating financial crimes. There are two aspects to this.
One is understanding how the crime works, the other is attribution.
Currency exchange is a big aspect of cybercrime, and receiving payments for cybercrime goods and
services can be a huge undertaking. Some cybercrime relates directly to currency transfer, such as
monetizing stolen credit card data, or stealing money from bank accounts. Compromised accounts are
used for this purpose, and it often requires the use of mule accounts to move money around.
Alternative currencies provide opportunities for cybercrime. Amazon gift cards, often used for receiving
payment from fraud victims, are exchanged on cybercrime forums (Pastrana et al. 2018). Other alternative
currencies, such as airline loyalty point accounts, are targets for compromise (Hutchings 2018). Western
Union is used for transferring funds across borders, often for legitimate purposes, but sometimes for
reasons connected with crime generally, and cybercrime specifically.
eCurrencies are another form of alternative currency. Unlike Western Union, which is based on traditional
currencies and therefore more likely to be subject to local regulatory agencies, digital currencies are less
likely to be regulated. Two digital currency providers, Liberty Reserve and e-gold, were alleged to facilitate
money laundering and online crime, and were shut down amid US prosecutions. Others, like webmoney
and RBK money are commonly offered as payment options on cybercrime markets.
Cryptocurrencies use blockchain as a ledger, which provides a degree of transparency. One analysis of
online blackmarket activity shows that, after Liberty Reserve was taken down in 2013, there was a
corresponding increase in the use of Bitcoin, perhaps pointing to a displacement effect (Atondo Siu et al.
2021). While remaining a popular cryptocurrency in cybercrime markets, Bitcoin is particularly open to
traffic analysis (Vasek and Moore 2015). Paquet-Clouston et al. (2019) analysed ransomware payments,
finding a small number of actors receive the majority of payments. It seems those who use Bitcoin for high
profile cybercrime events can experience difficulty getting it out of the system and turning it into cash,
although there are ways to obfuscate the trail, such as using mixers (Meiklejohn et al. 2013).
Corporate cybercrime
Large amounts of personal information are collected about individuals and stored by companies. This
introduces security, as well as privacy, concerns if the data are breached. In many cases, there is an
information asymmetry, with individuals having little information about what data is held about them,
nor about the corporations holding such data, while they know everything about us (Zuboff 2019).
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Such databases provide opportunities for crime to a number of different parties. First, they are a target for
unauthorized access by outsiders, those who identify vulnerabilities in the security of the company holding
the data. Second, they are a target for access by those within the organization, employees or contractors,
who may misuse their authorized access. Third, companies themselves may engage in wrongdoing
(whether this is labelled as ‘criminal’ or not).
p. 465 ↵ The data footprint we leave behind enables corporations to predict our future behaviour. Online, this
means we may see more personalized content, such as advertisements tailored to us. Those with access to
the data and a large user base can do this at scale. But it’s not just about selling us the latest products.
Cambridge Analytica showed us how such data can be used for nefarious purposes, such as swaying
elections and cementing power (Wylie 2019).
Cybercrime Communities
The structure of cybercrime economies

Cybercrime has not remained static over the past thirty years, and as the nature of online crime has
evolved, so have the structures of its associated communities. While much cybercrime involves
interpersonal abuse, targeted harassment, or deliberate harm, much of it is also work—efforts by
individuals to start small businesses, run infrastructure, make money, achieve particular goals, or provide
services for one another. Economics is shaped by social structure—and as cybercrime has evolved, so have
the communities and cultures with which it is associated.
Early research on cybercrime focused on the phenomenon of hacking and the hacker, generally depicting
cybercrime as committed by talented lone actors building and researching their own tools and exploits.
However, this picture of hackers as heroic, lone actors bending the online world to their will is misleading.
Although some genuine lone actors do exist, these tend to be rare—cybercrime is mostly a community
endeavour. As more cybercrime research emerged in the 1990s, a community-based model became
prevalent. In this model, cybercrime communities could be divided between a small group of ‘l337’ (or
‘elite’) hackers who come up with new exploits and develop tools, and a much larger group of ‘skids’ or
‘script kiddies’ for whom cybercrime is more like lockpicking—learning to use pre-made tools bought
from others. This made cybercrime and ‘hacker’ status aspirational—one could start off as a low-level
script kiddie and slowly develop technical skills and online ‘street-cred’.
These tool-sharing communities have evolved in the same way business models for legitimate online
services have. Rather than selling hacking tools to customers, who then have to figure out how to use
them, a burgeoning cybercrime entrepreneur can instead turn these tools into an infrastructure—a
cybercrime platform which they can rent out as a service. One example is Zeus, a popular type of banking
malware. In 2011, the source code for the toolkit was leaked, meaning those who sold the software could no
longer make a profit. As an alternative way of monetizing the malware, Zeus-as-a-Service business
models began emerging, allowing users to hire networks of infected computers. For the provider, this
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maximizes potential earnings, as you are providing the same service to multiple users. There are
economies of scale at play here. For the user, it reduces the initial financial outlay, outsources logistical
and maintenance requirements, and reduces the risk of failure (Hutchings and Clayton 2017).
Another as-a-service business is booter services, which provide denial-of-service attacks for a fee.
Denial-of-service attacks can be difficult to monetize, at least in a way that provides a stable income over
time with minimum effort. By providing a subscription service, with short attacks, there can be a steady
income stream with relatively little effort (Hutchings and Clayton 2016). Booters are advertised towards
p. 466 gamers, with ↵ subscription options starting around $5/month. For the user, the barrier to entry is
greatly reduced; you can order strong attacks armed with nothing more than a PayPal account and your
opponent’s IP address. As this model has emerged in the last fifteen years, it has transformed cybercrime
from a small-scale, high-harm crime characterized by small numbers of high-profile attacks to a true
‘volume’ crime.
This somewhat short-circuits the aspirational model of cybercrime. Rather than developing their own
skills as an ‘apprentice’, novice entrants to cybercrime communities instead now constitute a consumer
class, purchasing services from the relatively small number of people who run cybercrime infrastructure as
a business. While one can join one of these illicit businesses or ‘gangs’, the work required is now a long
way from the creative exploitation of old—these services need customer support, website developers,
system administrators, and social media promoters rather than hackers developing creative new attacks.
These jobs are far less exciting and intellectually stimulating than the traditional work of ‘hacking’—and
increasingly, exit is through burnout and boredom rather than in handcuffs, with only small numbers of
motivated individuals progressing to genuinely skilled forms of crime (Collier et al. 2021).
Thus, an ecology has emerged—a tiny group of people create new exploits and identify vulnerabilities
(outside legitimate security researchers and nation state actors, probably only a few thousand in the
world). A slightly larger group package these up as tools. Bigger groups build and maintain infrastructure,
running customer service and curating the ‘business’ side. A community of ‘skids’ who buy and sell tools
are now followed by a sea of people—cybercrime customers—with no skills at all, who use these services.
Key sites in the cybercrime ecology

The online spaces of cybercrime have grown up and evolved along with the changing Internet. Initially,
communities were organized over BBSes—dial-up bulletin boards connected over phone lines, where
1
people shared pirated software, hacking tools, tips, and culture. The World Wide Web gave rise to a
flowering of new online sites, with hacker forums and mailing lists emerging. These fulfil a range of
functions, allowing people to teach and learn computer skills, coding, and basic ‘hacks’, providing a space
for buying and selling hacking tools and ‘how-to’ guides, facilitating a marketplace in semi-licit goods,
and acting as a place where people come to discuss social life and politics, and hang out with like-minded
people. Most of the larger ‘open’ forums have little technical component, focusing on ‘hacker culture’
discussions, social engineering, basic hacks, and petty scams. Although the more technical and serious
crime can be found largely on small, members-only forums, the larger forums play an important role in
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the wider ecology. These act as wider spaces for different communities to come together in a central site
and can be crucial places where powerful new malware is leaked, new forms of crime emerge, and
cybercrime services sold.
One ‘space’ in particular looms large in popular depictions of cybercrime—‘The Dark Web’, also known as
‘the Dark Net’. This term is often ill-specified—media and law enforcement tend to use it to mean ‘bad
things on the Internet’, while more informed commentators use it to refer to the network of hidden
services hosted on the Tor network (or other anonymity networks like I2P). These include both hidden
p. 467 forums and the ↵ legendary ‘cryptomarkets’—which function as marketplaces for drugs and other
illicit services (Barratt and Aldridge 2016). Tor’s relevance for cybercrime is overstated—cryptomarkets
and hidden forums do exist on Tor, but the vast majority of online crime and illegal trading is committed
elsewhere, on open sites and social media platforms on the ‘clearnet’.
Despite its powerful anti-surveillance properties for web browsing and hosting, Tor is an ineffective tool
for committing serious technical online crime. It is much slower than the regular Internet, services can be
easily made unavailable through denial-of-service attacks, and the skill barrier to entry for most is still
too high to grow illicit businesses into genuine mass markets. A range of much more effective tools for
online crime and illicit anonymity exist (such as VPSs, VPNs, botnets, etc.). So why do people still use Tor?
Its early notoriety meant a range of communities sprang up who admired what they saw as its embodiment
of a technolibertarian politics of privacy and anonymity. The ‘free’ marketplaces for all kinds of licit and
illicit goods provided a template for others, and a set of communities and practices which persists.
Although other, better tools are available, its open nature and existing communities effectively allow it to
function as a social network and a community of security practice—enough people are aware of it and use
it that, if you have something to sell, you know there will be a relevant market on Tor of people with shared
cultures, understandings, and anonymity practices (Bancroft and Scott Reid 2017).
Although forums and markets still have their place in this ecology, the rise of social media has provided a
range of new and diverse sites where people exchange and advertise tools and skills and participate in the
cultural life of cybercrime communities. Entry-level skills are increasingly learned through YouTube
videos, discussions about hacks and tools occur on Twitter and other apps, and services are advertised on
Instagram. Messaging platforms play an important role, with new types of spaces developed from the old
IRC chatroom model (where lots of hacking used to be done). These now appear in a twenty-first century
guise as Whatsapp, Discord, and Telegram—often sites made for very different purposes (such as
managing a videogame fan community or speaking to family and friends) are being repurposed to manage
the business of cybercrime.
Finally, it is important to remember that despite the online nature of cybercrime, the people in these
communities live in physical spaces of their own, with offline social networks, friend groups, and family
ties. People can get their friends involved and are often more likely to target friends or enemies at their
own school or in their local communities. Their motivations for entry and exit are rooted in their own lives
and the social forces at play in their immediate environment—both digital and physical. Local organized
crime gangs still operate and draw in young people to cash out fraud earnings or engage in low-level
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cybercrime (Leukfeldt and Holt 2021). Poverty, racism, and over policing still affect these young people—
the ‘digital’ dimension of offending does not overcome their rootedness in long-standing networks of
power, oppression, and harm.
Understanding pathways and desistance

The question of who commits cybercrime has been central to cybercrime scholarship. Administrative
research aims to help the police profile potential offenders. Critical scholarship explores the broader
dynamics of cybercrime as a (potentially) novel phenomenon (Yar and Steinmetz 2019). Cybercrime is
generally understood to involve a different ‘typical offender’ than other forms of crime; it is also generally
p. 468 committed by young men, but some evidence suggests those who commit cybercrime are often ↵ more
affluent. The gender skew is (of course) not due to a lack of technical skills; as shown by the many women,
queer, and nonbinary ‘hackers’, engineers, and technologists who built the computer industry, the
Internet, and the technologies on which they rely (Light 1999; Abbate 2012). Rather, it is more likely this is
due to the pervasive misogyny of cybercrime communities (Marganski 2020), a phenomenon mirrored in
wider programming-centred online communities (Nafus 2012, Brooke 2021). Some studies have shown
routes of initiation into cybercrime behaviours to involve online gender-based violence and controlling or
abusive behaviour, with many becoming involved in these communities because they want to stalk, harass,
or spy on a romantic partner or another young person (Bada et al. 2021).
Despite repeated assertions to the contrary by police and policy-makers, there is no conclusive evidence of
a causal link between being on the autism spectrum and cybercrime. Although some studies have
attempted to suggest the hyperfocus associated with some forms of autism is linked to coding skill, these
have generally failed to be replicated, with some studies showing a weak ‘autism-link’ with non-technical
forms of cybercrime and no link with technical forms (Lim et al. 2021). The forms of work involved in
contemporary cybercrime are dependent on complex social coordination, with teamworking, business, and
social engineering skills being far more important than technical prowess. Despite this, this narrative has
taken hold—and shapes policing and sentencing, leading to a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ and classic
labelling. Future scholarship could focus on how these perceptions are causing serious stigmatization and
targeting of autistic young people.
One possible entry point for cybercrime ‘careers’ is online videogames. This synthesizes theories of drift
and ‘deviant leisure’ in the context of online communities, with a pathway emerging in which young
people come across cybercrime networks while attempting to cheat or modify videogames, from which
they progress into more serious forms of online deviance and criminal offending (Goldsmith and Brewer
2015). There is some evidence to support a pathway from videogaming, though as this is now a near-
ubiquitous cultural phenomenon, it may simply be many of the teenagers at peak offending ages also tend
to play videogames recreationally.
The attractive forces which bring people into cybercrime communities are better understood. For some,
the ‘hacker ethic’ and its glamorous image provide a clear identity and set of core values, with the practices
of hacking and coding providing excitement and stimulation (Goldsmith and Wall 2019; Steinmetz,
Schafer, and Green 2017). Cybercrime communities provide spaces of community and shared identity, with
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much of the activity involving simply ‘hanging out’ with like-minded young people. Financial gain is a
motive for some—however, while the small amounts of money made through basic scams and illicit
businesses may appear enticing to teenagers, this rarely evolves into long-term financial means. In
general, while a few talented individuals specialize in particular forms of crime and become part of
cybercrime ‘supply chains’ and supportive networks of services, most engage in ‘cafeteria-
style’ (Leukfeldt and Holt 2021) offending, flitting between different forms of petty online crime and rarely
‘cashing out’ in stable long-term assets.
Desistance from cybercrime is generally conceptualized by law enforcement (with some justification) as
repurposing the same skills but for ‘legitimate’ work for private security companies and the spy agencies
—the ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’ narrative. From the available evidence, there is a clear pathway for
those who have the technical skills and motivation not to simply ‘age out’, and who are able to avoid being
caught, for a transition to state security services or the well-paid world of information security.
p. 469 ↵ For others, this is less clear, as most involved in cybercrime lack even the basic skills necessary for an
entry-level IT job. As with ‘traditional’ crime, most people appear simply to age out, desisting due to life
changes or boredom.
As early scholarship tried to come to terms with cybercrime as an apparently novel phenomenon, it asked
whether cybercrime is simply ‘old wine in new bottles’ (Grabosky 2001): a digital form of juvenile
delinquency well-known to criminologists (Yar 2005). Some cybercrime displays subcultural qualities,
however this is complicated by the interpenetration into this ecology of state security services, and
organized crime. The massive disruptive power of digital infrastructure is a complicating factor—
facilitating far more extensive and complex forms of crime, harm, and deviance with legitimate services
which can be co-opted for harm, or illicit infrastructures which can be bought as a service. In many ways,
however, the classic structural conditions for harm still pertain. Thus, we argue for a critical reappraisal of
state-focused ideas of cyber-‘criminality’—many of which criminalize legitimate forms of technical
experimentation, hacking and research, stigmatize young people engaged in petty online deviance
(Lavorgna 2019), and focus on criminal justice responses to crime rather than addressing structural issues.
Interventions, Governance, and Control
Policing the (post-)neoliberal internet

The policing of the Internet has long reflected the neoliberal politics dominant in the US and Europe in the
1990s and 2000s. In this period, the commercialization of the World Wide Web accelerated the Internet’s
spread around the world and its increasing use by business and the general public. US politicians and
policy-makers explicitly saw the spread of the Internet as part of post-Cold War global economic and
social liberalization, with former president Bill Clinton famously contending:
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Liberty will be spread by cell phone and cable modem … We know how much the Internet has
changed America, and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China …
Now there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet … Good luck. That’s
sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.
Bill Clinton, speaking in 2000, quoted in John Lanchester (2019)
This now seems naive, with an online landscape now shaped by two decades of the USA’s global War on
Terror and the Internet emerging as a powerful technology of repressive control in a multitude of states,
including both the USA and China (Lyon 2014). However, the ‘laissez faire’ approach to regulation which
this thinking embedded in the early years of the commercial Internet has been important in structuring
how law enforcement works online. Instead of a top-down hierarchy of state agenda-setting, cybercrime
policing is polycentric, organized around loose coalitions of many different actors in the public and private
sector, reflecting both its international character and the difficulty which police have had in ‘getting to
grips’ with the Internet (DuPont 2017, 2018). This is also aligned with ideological commitments by a
number of Western nations to free market, private sector provision of services, which overlapped at a
crucial period with the values of the technical experts designing and expanding the global Internet in the
1990s—who were suspicious of centralized state control (Pickard 2008; Chenou 2014).
p. 470 ↵ The policing of crime online, as a result, epitomizes the neoliberal model—in which public goods
such as security and justice are purchased on the free market by ‘responsibilized’ citizens who are
expected to see to their own safety online. Rather than be protected by the state, the public buy their own
antivirus software and security products, adopt their own defensive behaviours and measures such as
passwords, and have little recourse to justice or compensation if these fail. Private companies are similarly
expected to secure their own systems, which in practice means securing large quantities of sensitive data
about their customers—who have little say in these security arrangements. This encourages a conceptual
turn away from cybercrime as a ‘crime’ problem and towards a ‘security’ problem—which is not dealt with
by the state, but by individuals and private companies. In this model, the state acts as a ‘steering, not
rowing’ force, shaping market conditions indirectly through policy, law, and regulation and stepping in
where the market fails. This is reflected in the wider structural patterns of cybercrime enforcement. Unlike
for other forms of crime, in practice, power and priorities do not flow from the state—rather they circulate
around complex international networks, in which the state and its representatives are only one node of
many (Dupont 2017).
Despite the apparent primacy of the free market, the neoliberal model relies on strong forms of state
intervention and centralized repressive power to support and defend these free markets and the global
economic and social conditions (and inequality) on which they rely. Cybercrime policing is no different—
beneath the free market of private-public provision lies the hard power of the security services. In the
post-9/11 world, more serious forms of online crime and harm are dealt with by the security services—part
of an increasing penetration of ‘high policing’ techniques into the everyday management of crime
(Brodeur 2007). In the latter half of the 2010s, the governmentality of online law enforcement has shifted
considerably towards muscular state regulation, with law enforcement and governments moving to centre
themselves and their agendas in these relationships. States are imposing stronger regulation and
responsibilities on the dense networks of intermediaries—payment companies, social media platforms,
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etc.—on which the Internet is built. Although online policing is still a network of private and public
partners, states are increasingly attempting to centre themselves in these partnerships, co-opting the
Internet infrastructure as a technology of control.
Police and cybercrime

The decentralized multi-agency structure of cybercrime policing is a matter of government philosophy,
but is also shaped by the practical realities of cybercrime. For traditional police, cybercrime poses a range
of challenges which mean they are rarely the ‘go-to’ authority for responding to online harm. Of primary
relevance is how cybercrime complicates the principles of sovereignty and jurisdiction on which policing is
founded. For ‘traditional’ crime, the assumed co-presence of victim and offender at the moment of a
criminal act means jurisdiction is generally straightforward (with exceptions, such as threatening or
libellous communications, or situations like those depicted in popular Nordic Noir series Broen, where a
crime occurs on the bridge connecting Sweden and Denmark). However, cybercrimes can often be initiated
in one country, with victims, platforms and intermediating infrastructure all located in different
jurisdictions.
This means complex and expensive co-ordination between authorities is required to procure evidence, to
apprehend an offender, to decide on which jurisdiction they should be tried in, and to bring a successful
court case. This occurs through established links between jurisdictions (often mediated by centralized law
p. 471 enforcement agencies), ↵ through international collaborative bodies like Interpol, or specialist co-
ordination groups themed around particular issues, such as child abuse. Where any technological or
human link in this chain occurs in a country with weak international ties to the others, as is often the case
for cybercrimes originating in jurisdictions hostile to the USA, it can be near-impossible to begin an
investigation, let alone have a realistic prospect of finding or extraditing a suspect. Over time, this means
the technical infrastructure and human organizations which drive serious cybercrime have concentrated in
particular jurisdictions, making intervention difficult through normal channels.
Beneath this web of international cooperation (or its lack) lie a range of further challenges. Investigating
online crime requires serious technical skill and relationships with Internet intermediaries and other
jurisdictions. Police recruitment and training, along with laws, processes, and practices are still in many
ways rooted in a pre-digital era, although this is beginning to change. Rather than establish these
capacities individually in dozens of local police forces, the tendency has been to centralize them in
specialist agencies (Wall 2007; Harkin and Whelan 2021) or enrol private security and forensic
consultancies.
The lack of a clear role for the police, the reframing of cybercrime as a ‘security’ problem, and the
persistent responsibilization of victims, means people do not know where to report crime, or may not be
taken seriously when they do. Issues with recording and reporting mean official records of cybercrimes are
likely to be significant underestimates. Victimization can take different forms than for other kinds of crime
—in some cases, people may not know they have been targeted, while in others, hundreds of thousands of
accounts can harass a single person. The forms of harm and victimization produced by cybercrime are not
necessarily novel in themselves (often following classic patterns, e.g., gendered violence), but can be
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realized in novel ways. The victim of a harassment campaign is often advised by police to either leave
online life altogether (impossible for many) or to adopt exhaustive and complex operational security
techniques to avoid being victimized. Equally, victims are often told by the police they are one of many
people targeted by a single fraud gang—which police may not be able to adequately explain—and due to
jurisdictional issues, there is nothing they can do (Cross 2020). Generally, the belief of most low-level
cybercrime actors that they are largely safe from police action has often been a correct one.
Thus, the police role has often been relegated to information-gathering for the security agencies,
responsive work with victims, and awareness-raising through public messaging campaigns. However,
there is increasing evidence these campaigns fail to meet objectives, framed as they are in top-down, one-
size-fits-all modes, which belie how privacy and security needs vary between communities, cultures, and
places—and are collectively, rather than individually, produced (Horgan 2021; Lewis 2018).
Cybercrime and high policing

The increasing construction of cybercrime as national security threat, particularly in the years since 9/11,
has seen the security agencies take on a role in targeting the most serious, often nation-state backed,
forms of cybercrime. The ‘Five Eyes’ nations—the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand—play an
international role in sharing intelligence on threats, co-operating in surveillance of the Internet backbone.
The ‘high policing’ of the Internet is a crucial aspect of global politics and control over the Internet—both
as a means for spreading information through soft power and through dominating and surveilling
communications in support of hard power.
p. 472 ↵ The USA is a central actor in shaping the global Internet, and as a result, the 9/11 attacks were
foundational in reshaping how the Internet was policed. There was an enormous expansion of domestic
and international surveillance by the Five Eyes nations—as documented in leaks by NSA contractor
Edward Snowden in 2013. From a 1990s ‘anonymous’ Internet, we now face an Internet which carries and
records traces of all of our most intimate social interactions, and which is able to store these for the
purposes of surveillance. With the cooperation of Internet Service Providers and other platforms and
intermediaries, this gives the state an unprecedented capacity for mass surveillance, assisted by ‘machine
learning’ algorithmic approaches for processing huge quantities of data. That Snowden was employed by a
private sector security company, yet still had access to these flows, is evidence of a continuing and
complex relationship between government and the free market in how high policing is carried out.
Under the spy agencies, centralized law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and NCA engage in their own
high-profile attempts to disrupt online crime. Aside from high-profile arrests, agencies engage in a range
of proactive policing measures, as well as assisting incident response and investigation for high profile
attacks. Traditional approaches, such as arrests and sentencing, tend to be less effective for online crime
networks, with replacements or competitors filling the vacuum rapidly, and crackdown tactics stimulating
community solidarity (Ladegaard 2019). Proactive disruption of technical or social infrastructure—such as
taking down forums, messing with reputation systems, hitting hosting providers, payment systems, and
hardening security for potential targets all appear to be more effective, again, requiring the co-opting of
licit and illicit infrastructure. More recently, agencies have adopted softer approaches—such as ‘influence’
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policing involving diversionary targeted advertising campaigns, and direct diversion (the poacher-turned-
gamekeeper model) but also wider PREVENT-style campaigns borrowed from counterterrorism (Collier et
al. 2021, 2022).
Private sector security

With the eyes of police and the security services trained on ‘high policing’ threats, more mundane (but still
harmful) forms of cybercrime and online fraud proliferate, and individuals and companies are often left to
purchase their own security privately. This can involve personal protection for individuals through
technologies such as antivirus and password managers, the adoption of security behaviours or the
purchase of insurance. For medium and large businesses, security is explicitly a product—either needing
to be provided as a ‘cost centre’ within the organization or purchased from a range of private sector
providers. These companies can provide direct security for their customers, deploying security products,
testing defences through ‘red team’ offensive hacking (or ‘penetration testing’) and provide ‘blue team’
counter-hacking services to protect networks actively. Further services are based around intelligence
gathering, with companies like Flashpoint creating fake identities to infiltrate crime groups and forums
and sound the alarm if a company’s data is put up for sale. For large corporations, there exist a range of
major players providing ‘mission control’ style full-service cybersecurity.
While many governments lack the ability to cultivate the surveillance infrastructure of the Five Eyes
Nations (and within nation states, access to such infrastructure may be restricted to security services), a
range of private sector providers have emerged as a global market for nation states looking to purchase
these capacities for themselves. These consultancies build a security or surveillance infrastructure once,
then sell it off-the-shelf to multiple nations. These provide ‘governmentality-as-a-service’, providing
p. 473 ↵ the data infrastructures for digital government to nation states, but also incorporating advanced
tracking and surveillance tools (e.g. Palantir, NSO Group). These services have been controversial and are
associated with serious human rights abuses.
Infrastructures and platforms

Finally, the Internet infrastructure provides a dizzying array of technical sites and actors through which
crime is governed. Online communication of all kinds is dependent on intermediaries—e.g., Internet
Service Providers filter traffic passing through their systems (Kohl 2012). At the lowest level, the private
companies and collaborative bodies responsible for the wires, servers, cables, and modems which allow the
Internet to work are a crucial ‘control point’ for governments as they carry and view all web traffic
(DeNardis and Musiani 2016). A substantial amount of online crime is policed by intermediaries at this
deep technical level, with the use of blocklists and scanning to semi-automatically weed out suspicious
traffic. Over time, industry organizations and collaborative bodies have sprung up to coordinate this work
as a public good, sharing lists of harmful domains associated with cybercrime which should be blocked.
This is one of the levels at which access to raw Internet traffic is provided to the security services.
Page 19 of 28
Above the level of the ‘bare metal’, a range of other intermediaries, platforms, and service providers police
their own areas of the Internet. The contemporary Internet is typified by a platform model—rather than
hosting our own websites and homepages, we browse and upload on centralized sites which aggregate
content, process transactions, advertise products, and give us an online presence. These intermediaries
span the globe, and after years of attempting to appear as ‘neutral service providers’, a range of scandals
have propelled them to the frontline of policing, taking more responsibility for crime and abuse on their
own networks and services. This occurs both through design innovation—finding automated ways to
reduce or detect illicit activity—and through the more expensive processes of manual human review, with
content moderators emerging as a new exploited class of digital worker. In taking this role, the platforms
have accrued substantial political power (Myers West 2018).
Current Controversies and Critical Futures of Cybercrime Within Crimi

nology
We welcome the inclusion of this new chapter in the Oxford Handbook—this reflects the increasing
importance of cybercrime as a criminological phenomenon and the increasing maturity of cybercrime
studies as a subfield within broader criminological scholarship. We have aimed to summarize the key
scholarship on cybercrime over the last twenty years, and to chart its emergence as a criminological
subfield. In the final section, we map potential futures of the study of cybercrime within criminology.
The empirical project of ‘cybercrime studies’ or ‘cybercriminology’ began with a frantic effort to
document new forms of crime, social developments, and control strategies. This has now stabilized, with
cybercrime reaching the ‘steady state’ characteristic of other forms of crime (Anderson et al. 2019).
p. 474 Although the marketing arm of the security ↵ industry continues to ‘discover’ new crimes, attacks, or
vulnerabilities, these increasingly constitute new spins on existing, well-understood forms, with
genuinely novel developments rare, niche, or overstated. There is fertile empirical ground in the
continuing development of links between cybercrime academics and security academics—reflecting the
broader interdisciplinary character of criminology. The security industry conducts advanced research on
new forms and structures of criminal phenomena, with findings emerging from the frontlines of practice
often running alongside or ahead of academic work (see further reading). However, it is important that
criminologists understand where this knowledge has come from—paying critical attention to the ideas
and motivations behind it.
Cybercrime studies are breaking new frontiers in novel forms of empirical work, drawing on the very large
datasets which online forums, chat channels, and social media make available. By bringing in ‘big data’
techniques to study online traces (Hughes, Chua, Hutchings 2021) a range of new studies are attempting to
analyse discourse, practice, and culture in online spaces at scale. Other forms of Internet measurement, in
collaboration with computer scientists, give rise to opportunities to study natural experiments and
Randomised Control Trial-like designs to measure traces of crime and evaluate interventions. However,
there is a continuing need for more qualitative work, particularly on contemporary cybercrime
communities. As policing cybercrime becomes more interventionist, there will be more to study and
evaluate.
Page 20 of 28
Despite almost three decades of study, criminology has yet to integrate an account of digital technology—
particularly the rich and complex technologies of the Internet—in its core work of developing
theorizations of crime, deviance, harm, or government power. Cybercrime scholarship is dominated by
Routine Activities Theory, but this often paints a frustratingly deterministic account of technological
change, with technologies existing outside social life and shaping it unidirectionally. Perspectives from
Internet studies, digital sociology, and Science and Technology Studies are slowly being incorporated, but
much of this work draws on theories of society and technology from the 1980s. Despite a paper by Brown
(2006) which set the scene for an STS renaissance within cybercrime scholarship, there is still a dearth of
critical scholarship on the role played by technology in online crime and power. There is some promising
work using Actor Network Theory to account for the role of technologies in contemporary theorizations of
crime, but this focuses on the agency of technological actors (or ‘actants’) within criminal situations, and
nuances, rather than challenges, dominant situational and RAT framings (van der Wagen 2018). Other
developments of STS theories within non-cybercrime criminological scholarship also point towards
potential fruitful avenues (particularly the rich scholarship of Armstrong (2017) which develops links with
visual criminology and Crockett Thomas’ (2020) exploration of crimes as assemblages). Recent
scholarship has also used interactionist frameworks, such as social worlds theory, to understand crime
and power in digital infrastructures and link these to interactionist accounts of crime, or to
governmentality scholarship. However, this remains an under-explored domain.
More critical perspectives on the criminal aspects of cybercrime scholarship have also begun to emerge in
recent years, notably through authors, such as Steinmetz (2016), who draw on the radical tradition in
criminology. The cybercrime subfield has additional potential for critical criminologists to look beyond
governmental power—large online corporations increasingly exert more, and different kinds of, power
online than many governments. This suggests the potential for fruitful collaborations with zemiology and
its radical reimagining of harm, rather than crime, as at the centre of critical criminological enquiry.
p. 475 Additionally, while subcultural and desistance framings have ↵ proven useful in sketching the initial
foundations of theoretical work on cybercrime, there remain important critiques from the post-
subcultural and critical desistance literature which could shed welcome new light on these areas.
The next era of cybercrime scholarship is faced with the same choices as many other subfields of
criminology—namely, its orientation to and relationships with the state and private security, where the
lens of enquiry is trained, how knowledge is produced, for whom, and to what end. A truly critical
criminology of cybercrime might focus more on a critique of power and policing, new networked
modalities of control, the role of infrastructural power, and the rise of online reactionary movements.
What radical anticolonial scholars have to tell us about the links forming between the policing of
cybercrime and the development of the neocolonial security state remains largely unexplored. How can the
work of Angela Davis, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, contribute to our understanding of the state’s mobilization
of nationalism, crisis, punishment, race, and power in controlling the Internet? What do police
abolitionists have to tell us about how police work is reconfiguring to investigate online offences, and what
communities might do to prevent crime? We might find possibilities of productive exchange with the
pioneering work of feminist and queer scholars of the Internet, with digital anthropologists, social
movement scholars, activist movements, and others whose work on online harms is in some ways more
developed than our own. While criminology’s focus on state-regulated harms and control projects gives us
Page 21 of 28
our own unique contribution to these debates, we would do well to resist the temptation to establish
cybercriminology as the core site of knowledge about crime and harm in digital societies. We contend
instead that, with criminologists as one perspective among many, these collaborations might form the
seeds of an optimistic future for the criminology of cybercrime.

In this chapter, we have attempted to move beyond the ‘classic canon’ of cybercrime studies, focusing on more recent
and emerging perspectives, particularly by early career researchers, where possible. While the technical fundamentals
of most cybercrime have been largely static for the past decade, this remains a fast-emerging field where academic
papers have often struggled to keep up with developments as they happen ‘in real time’. The academic perspective
has often been primarily formulated in reaction to the priorities of law enforcement, or following primary research in
the private sector. As such, for students and ECRs interested in breaking new ground in the field it is emphatically
worth diversifying your reading beyond traditional academic papers; we provide here a list of blogs and websites
which might form a good starting point. These include the Grugq’s blog), focusing on global security issues; Krebs on
Security, which provides regular updates on the cybercrime-as-a-service ecosystem; the Cambridge Computer Lab’s
Light Blue Touch Paper blog, which covers a range of more technical security news, and Violet Blue’s writing on a
range of tech and cybersecurity issues.
Online resources

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BEN COLLIER is a Lecturer in Digital Methods in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of
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Page 27 of 28
ALICE HUTCHINGS is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Technology and Director of the
Cambridge Cybercrime Centre at the University of Cambridge.
Notes
1
Archives of many classic BBSes (a rich primary research resource) curated by Jason Scott can be found at
www.textfiles.com <http://www.textfiles.com>.
Related Links
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Page 28 of 28
22. White-collar and corporate crime

p. 479 22. White-collar and corporate crime

Michael Levi and Nicholas Lord
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0022
Abstract
This chapter covers the changing conceptions of crime and social order in correlation with the character and quality of
everyday life in contemporary Britain. It presents elements of change that involve notions of durability and persistence. The
contemporary landscapes of sources of harm, uncertainty, or tribulation that attend people’s everyday lives are diverse and
bear upon different lives and different habitats in very distinct and unequal ways. As measured by victimization surveys and
other means, fear of crime always had as its primary object threats to personal safety in public space. The chapter also
considers the contentions surrounding the notion of security and public safety.
Keywords: crime, social order, everyday life, contemporary Britain, harm, uncertainty, tribulation, victimization, fear of
crime, security
Introduction
This chapter has one main objective: to present a succinct overview of key debates and ideas associated
with theory, research, and practice in the area of white-collar and corporate crimes. First, we think about
white-collar and corporate crimes in the twenty-first century, contextualizing these phenomena and
reinforcing their criminological significance, despite their analysis remaining at the margins of
mainstream discourse. Second, we revisit ongoing conceptual debates, identifying central analytical
features of white-collar and corporate crimes before going on to argue that we ought to shift our attention
towards understanding how white-collar crimes are organized and the conditions that shape this over
time. Third, we look at ways of explaining the diverse range of ‘white-collar illegalities’, ranging from
consideration of individual propensities and rationality, through organizational context and culture, to
wider social conditions. Fourth, we analyse current policing and regulation strategies. We conclude with a
discussion of key themes in white-collar crime research and scholarship.
Page 1 of 27
White-Collar and Corporate Crimes in the Twenty-First Century: A Brief

History of the Present
Corporate scandals where otherwise legitimate business organizations and their employees are implicated
in a diverse array of criminal and illicit activities endure. Most notably since the last edition of this chapter,
the Covid-19 pandemic generated opportunities and conducive conditions for fraudulent business
activities worldwide. In the UK, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) stated that in 2020–21 alone, fraud
and error relating to Covid recovery schemes cost Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) almost
£6bn, £4bn of which is unlikely to be recovered based on HMRC’s ‘unambitious’ approach (PAC, 2022: 5).
Covid frauds include established businesses engaging in accounting frauds, but also newly created
businesses created for the sole purpose of defrauding the state, whether by ‘organized criminals’ as
p. 480 commonly understood or by ↵ criminal business people. Similar patterns can be seen elsewhere, such
as the US, where an estimated $100bn has been stolen from Covid-19 relief programmes (Wall Street
Journal 2021). There are widespread concerns over, at best, administrative poor practice, and at worst,
potential political corruption in public procurement, as governments sought to expedite access to medical
equipment and vaccines, giving preference to the ‘chumocracy’ (Transparency International UK 2021). In
the UK, unlawful VIP fast lanes gave access to those with political connections to procurement contracts
worth £millions, whilst third-party brokers with no experience in medical equipment provision emerged
to capitalize on these lax processes, generating vast profits for the ‘chumocracy’ (Good Law Project 2022).
It may be some time before the scale and scope of such corruption comes to light, and proving there was
any criminal violation is challenging.
Elsewhere, we see car manufacturers again violating emissions rules. In 2021, Toyota Motor Company
agreed to pay $180m as part of a civil settlement with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the
Environmental Protection Agency relating to ‘systematic, longstanding violations of Clean Air Act
emission-related defect reporting requirements’ (DoJ 2021). This follows on from the signal case of
Volkswagen and its corporate associates, which committed globally massive deliberate falsification of
toxic diesel emission levels to enhance corporate sales targets and profits, while others falsified data in
Japan for similar motives: this would normally be analysed as white-collar crime, but it is also properly
labelled as ‘organized crime’. In addition, car industry political lobbyists successfully (and legally)
sustained inappropriate lab-based testing to make European emissions and fuel consumption look much
better than they really were.
In the political sphere, in 2021, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) named
Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko as ‘Person of the Year’ to recognize ‘all he has done to
advance organized criminal activity and corruption’ (OCCRP no date: website). Lukashenko has been
implicated in siphoning public funds to oligarchs within his social network, amongst other dictatorial
activities. In neighbouring Russia, allegations have surfaced relating to ‘Corrupt Person of the Year’,
President Vladimir Putin’s ‘palace’. It was supposedly built using the proceeds of corruption
(Transparency International 2021), with longstanding concerns over the role of London in enabling
Russian kleptocracy (Belton 2021; Bullough 2022) that have accelerated since the invasion of Ukraine (Levi
2022).
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In other business, in 2020 major aerospace multi-national Airbus agreed a £3bn global settlement with
enforcement authorities in the UK, US, and France for widespread failures to prevent the use of third-party
agents engaging in bribery of foreign public officials on behalf of its divisions across five jurisdictions: Sri
Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan and Ghana between 2011 and 2015 (SFO 2020). The facilitation of, or
failure to prevent, money laundering by major global financial institutions continues: in the UK alone,
recidivist HSBC was fined £63.9m for ‘serious weaknesses’ in its anti-money laundering system (Jolly
2021), whilst NatWest was fined £264.8m following convictions for three offences of failing to comply
with money laundering regulations (FCA 2021). Finally, the notable collapse of Wirecard in 2020, a German
based electronic payment services provider, which admitted £1.7bn had gone missing from its accounts
after its auditor EY refused to authorize the accounts when it finally checked the claimed balance properly.
The former CEO, Markus Braun, and other senior personnel have been charged with fraud and
embezzlement (McCrum 2022) and EY has been financially sanctioned for failing to spot the fraud earlier.
Many elite accounting and advisory firms stand accused of conspiring with then President Zuma to
facilitate the ‘State Capture’ of South Africa (Zondo Commission 2022). This is merely a selection of recent
high-profile cases.
p. 481 ↵ In addition to the dramatic cases that make headline news (such as the above), corporations are
responsible for the wide-ranging and cumulatively substantial ‘routine and seemingly endless production
of harms’ (Tombs and Whyte 2020: 11) in four key areas: corporate theft and fraud (particularly in the
retail financial services sector); crimes against consumers (e.g. food unsafety); crimes against workers
(workplace safety crimes); and crimes against the environment (e.g. air pollution). Furthermore, there is a
range of ‘middle-class crimes’ in which tax and other frauds are committed by people who regard
themselves as respectable and are so regarded by others, despite the ‘shady practices’ in which they
engage (Farrall and Karstedt 2020).
Dominant representations and constructions of the crime phenomenon often reflect common-sense
conceptions of criminality associated with the ‘street’ or ‘serious and organized’ criminal who is
characterized by an inherent propensity to offend and presented as an external threat to moral society. Yet
‘crimes’ and misconduct by those in elite political and economic positions can de-legitimate the system
politically (Levi 2012) and harm firms, groups, and individuals both within and outside their socio-
economic class. Shifting analytical focus away from ‘crimes on the streets’ and ‘organized crime’ towards
‘crimes in the suites’ disturbs popular stereotypes about the composition of ‘threats to society’ and
attempts to represent criminality as a single type of person driven by risk appetites and social pathology.
Though greater attention is being paid to online fraud as evidence mounts of its ubiquity and domination
of crime survey data, the media and policing focus remains on blue-collar and ‘organized crime’
fraudsters involved in scams, crypto-frauds and ‘volume fraud’, though there has been a more recent
obsession with celebrities, especially young female ones, and with Russian oligarchs. Accounting for such a
diverse range of criminal actors, acts, and responses to them—criminal, civil, and regulatory—poses a
fascinating set of research questions, including the conditions under which at least some forms of white-
collar crime become or fail to become social problems that ‘require’ the intervention of criminal justice
rather than regulation (Katz 1980; Levi 2009a).
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What is White-Collar and Corporate Crime?
White-collar crime is a term best viewed as a sensitizing rather than a definitive concept (Blumer 1969),
and though no definition is satisfactory to all, the label retains its appeal. A brief analysis of associated
behaviours highlights the centrality of supposedly legitimate actors in the context of otherwise legitimate
business, institutional, and market environments in undertaking inherently harmful and exploitative
behaviours. For instance, Edward A. Ross’ ‘criminaloid’ characterized the inherent business duplicity of
legitimate actors alongside a pretence of respectability and piousness, driven by the same motivations as
others (Ross 1907: 47–50). In a more Marxist European than populist American tradition, Bonger (1916)
argued that lower and upper-class offending alike are explicable as a product of opportunities of the
‘capitalist economic production regime’. The integration of these key themes led Edwin Sutherland to
‘approximately’ define white-collar crime as ‘a crime committed by a person of respectability and high
social status in the course of his occupation’ (Sutherland 1949: 9). Sutherland’s empirical focus was on the
violations of the 70 largest US corporations at that time and of elite executives within these, though much
p. 482 of his actual research incorporated a diverse array ↵ of offences such as workplace theft, fraud by
mechanics, and deception by shoe salespersons. However, Sutherland’s definition is clouded in various
ambiguities (see Nelken 2012) and ‘has itself become an imprisoning framework that confuses the
offender with the offense and inadequately attends to the structural aspects of white-collar
crimes’ (Pontell and Geis 2007: xiv; see also Galvin 2020; Simpson 2019).
A key issue is that ‘if social status is a defining element of the crime … it cannot be used as an explanatory
variable because it is not allowed to vary independently of the crime’ (Benson and Simpson 2018: 9).
Aligned with analyses foregrounding how the deficiencies inherent in Sutherland’s definition ‘rendered
white collar crime an impotent construct for theory building in sociology’ (Braithwaite 1985: 3), the focus
on deception brought into scope many ‘blue-collar’ occupational crimes that would otherwise fall outside
Sutherland’s construct, watering down the elite component and broadening the public policy challenges
which we suggest should be broadened further still by including Mafia-type ‘organized crime’
involvement in major bankruptcy and VAT frauds, counterfeiting, alcohol and tobacco tax evasion/
smuggling, and public corruption activities. But offender-based and offence-based approaches can be
compatible, as we can analyse how elite occupational positions and high social esteem provide access to
opportunities to commit particular white-collar offences; to possess the knowledge, techniques, networks,
locations, and skills needed to carry them out; and to disarm or even deter the potential suspicions of
auditors, media, police, and regulators.
Sutherland included, as ‘crime’, acts sanctioned through criminal, civil, and administrative proceedings
because there were more feasible alternatives to prosecution for such misconduct, a situation that exists
today, except for some jurisdictions that operate a ‘legality principle’ which obliges prosecution whenever
there is sufficient evidence to justify it (admittedly, a term of art that is seldom reviewable by outsiders in
practice). Some lawyers argued that it was too loose a criterion (Tappan 1947), though we note that all
crime-survey and victim-survey data make precisely the same assumption. Some corporations and
individuals may admit to regulatory offences to reduce hassle and time, whereas they would strongly
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defend and sometimes succeed against criminal charges because of their imputation of dishonesty and the
collateral consequences of conviction for their right to bid for government contracts. However, as Aubert
(1952: 266) put it:
For purposes of theoretical analysis it is of prime importance to develop and apply concepts which
preserve and emphasize the ambiguous nature of the white-collar crimes and not to ‘solve’ the
problem by classifying them as either ‘crimes’ or ‘not crimes.’ Their controversial nature is
exactly what makes them so interesting from a sociological point of view and what gives us a clue
to important norm conflicts, clashing group interests, and maybe incipient social change. One
main benefit to be derived from the study of white-collar crimes springs from the opportunity
which the ambivalence in the citizen, in the businessman, and among lawyers, judges, and even
criminologists offers as a barometer of structural conflicts and change-potential in the larger
social system of which they and the white-collar crimes are parts.
Criminology, as a discipline, may be broad enough also to include arguably harmful but not criminal
behaviours (e.g., ‘large-scale’ tax avoidance). Those from a more critical position may argue that we need
to transcend state definitions, but foregrounding a classification system based on ‘informed morality’
opens up the problem of who chooses the harm criteria and whether we can properly discard intention
when calling something ‘criminal’. Lobbying and political finance can influence criminalization in law and
p. 483 in practice. However, while debates over how widely to define ‘white-collar ↵ crime’ are important for
scholars and activists, they may be irrelevant to those with the task of responding to ‘it’ who require
definitive offences and frameworks within which to pursue such white-collar offenders. Hence, the
importance of the details in contested legislation in the UK such as the Fraud Act 2006 and the Bribery Act
2010, and the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act 1989 and much civil and
criminal legislation in the US. At times, there can be a political preference for criminalization, although (or
to the ultra-cynical, even because) regulatory enforcement might arguably be more efficient and effective
(Beaton-Wells and Fisse 2011; Engdahl and Larsson 2015).
The definitions of ‘white-collar crime’ that we construct have theoretical, empirical, and policy
implications (see Pontell 2016). How we define and conceptualize our research focus shapes how white-
collar crime is represented, measured, explained, prevented, regulated, and sanctioned. Various
conceptualizations have been advanced over the years, which have significant differences of nuance,
foregrounding organizations and/or occupations, power relations, class and/or access (see previous
edition of this volume The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 6th edition). There are common analytical
features across these definitions, such as the focus on unlawful acts and omissions in an organizational
setting (public or private) and the misuse of otherwise legitimate business or institutional procedures and
practices to conceal behaviours.
Occupational crimes are offences committed by individuals, or small groups of individuals, for themselves
in the course of their occupations, often against their employers; in contrast, corporate/organizational
crimes are those committed by corporate officials acting for the corporation and by the corporation itself
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(Clinard and Yeager 1980: 16–18). But individuals can act for personal gain and for the gain of the business
(i.e., ‘by the firm, for the firm’ (Hartung 1950)). Sutherland (1983: 227; Wang and Holtfreter 2012; and
Lund and Sarin 2021) stress levels of corporate recidivism.
Focusing on the organization or corporation as an offender can create problems for criminal law
frameworks that are largely geared towards individual guilt and intent: a corporation or organization, as a
hollow entity, cannot have intent or guilt. Organizations are constellations of individuals who carry out
behaviours on their behalf, although it may be ambiguous whether these behaviours have clear criminal
intent, are acts of negligence, or involve an omission of duty, creating obstacles to investigation and
prosecution for ‘crime’. Different jurisdictions approach this issue in different ways, the US making
corporate criminal responsibility easier via the rule that junior employees can be deemed to act for the
corporation; the UK and some other jurisdictions currently have an ‘identification doctrine’ that impose a
heavy burden of proof that acts were approved by the directing mind of the corporation, alternatively via
absolute or vicarious liability for health and safety offences, for example. The OECD and Financial Action
Task Force have pressurized countries into enhancing corporate liability for transnational bribery and all
forms of money-laundering.
White-Collar and Corporate Crime as ‘Organized’ Crime
Sutherland (1983: 229–30) recognized white-collar crimes as ‘organized crime’, not in the contemporary
sense where organized crime discourse is associated with illegitimate, external criminal gangs and
p. 484 criminal enterprise, but in the need to understand ↵ the formal and informal ‘organization’ of the
white-collar crime activities. Thus, ‘offenders’ may organize their behaviours collaboratively, through
structures such as ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ (usually male), trade associations, cartels, and so on, with
the aim of influencing legislation or restricting law enforcement as well as fixing prices, falsifying
advertising etc. For Sutherland (1983: 230) one of the few significant points of difference between the
white-collar criminal and the ‘professional thief’ is their self- and public perception.
With this in mind, we can usefully consider how contemporary white-collar and corporate crimes are
organized. By analysing ‘organization’, we can identify those relations and practices that are necessary
and those that are contingent to the accomplishing of criminal enterprise (see Lord and Levi 2017). This
implies understanding (1) how and why motivated offenders recognize and exploit such financial crime
opportunities; (2) how they generate and manage the finances for and from the bribes; (3) the types of skill
sets, knowledge, and expertise that they need (or need to recruit) to organize the bribes; and (4) the
conditions that facilitate this organization. By thinking in terms of ‘how would-be offenders confront
problems of gaining finance, gaining access to crime opportunities, and retaining their freedom and crime
proceeds’ (Levi 2009b: 225), we can begin to understand how social/criminal networks are established and
maintained for criminal enterprise within legitimate business structures, networks, and situations. If we
begin to organize our thinking to consider bribery in terms of the ‘skill sets, contacts, start-up capital, and
running costs that they require’ (Levi 2009b: 231), we can recognize necessity in terms of the convergence
in space and time of a specific situation (e.g. a vulnerability in the procurement chain converging at a time
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and location), a target (e.g. the perceived simplicity of bribery through hospitalities), and the absence of
capable guardians (e.g. inadequate anti-corruption or cryptocurrency or anti-money laundering
regulation and oversight). Offenders need to have skills and confidence as well as motivation.
Explaining White-Collar and Corporate Crimes
There are a number of different foci in the explanation of these crimes, just as there are for other forms of
crime but with the additional issue that many white-collar and corporate crimes are policed by non-police
agencies, all with their varied approaches to regulation and use of the criminal law. We should analyse (1)
the immediate actions of individuals (and their nature) in the contexts of offending environments; (2) how
and why opportunities are ‘made the most of’ by individuals; and (3) how these issues relate to the wider
economic and structural landscape.
Individual differences and white-collar crime

The Lombrosian methodology for distinguishing ‘criminals’ from ‘the rest of us’ excluded white-collar
criminals because they were not in an imprisoned dataset. Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) general theory
of crime did include fraud, but its focus was not on elite managers (few of whom are convicted) but on the
much larger number of high-frequency deceivers (like credit card and welfare fraudsters) who have high
p. 485 impulsivity ↵ common among other ‘mainstream’ delinquents. It might be fruitful to examine the
links between impulsivity, the various cultures of masculinity and high-risk economically harmful
decisions taken by financial speculators, as well as by senior banking executives in search of those short-
term performance-related bonuses that will make them into the Wolves of Wall Street or avoid becoming
the failures on the wrong side of Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal: however, little such research has been
done, and senior bankers are less accessible than market traders to cortisol/testosterone measurement
(Levi 1994; Benson 2013; Coates 2013; Piquero and Piquero 2016). Some self-report studies have
challenged the unusualness of low-end white-collar crime. Karstedt and Farrall (2006, 2007) surveyed a
random sample of over 4,000 25–65 year-olds in England and Wales, the former East Germany and the
former West Germany. 61 per cent self-reported that they committed at least one out of a list of offences
against business, government, or against employers at work: common practices were paying cash in hand
to avoid taxation, keeping money when given too much change, wrongly using and swapping identity
cards for own gain and cheating in second-hand sales.
A focus on differences between individuals in the propensity to commit crime may lead us to neglect
situational influences on criminality, including the sheer length of time taken for some white-collar and
corporate offences to unfold. Thus, Levi (2008) examined bankruptcy (and other) frauds in terms of a
threefold typology:
1. pre-planned frauds, in which the business scheme is set up from the start as a way of defrauding
victims (businesses, public sector and/or individuals)
2. intermediate frauds, in which people started out obeying the law but consciously turned to fraud
later and
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3. slippery-slope frauds, in which deceptions spiralled, often in the context of trying—however

absurdly and over-optimistically—to rescue an essentially insolvent business or set of businesses,
escalating losses to creditors.
One aspect upon which Sutherland and his followers focused was on the learned attitudes to the situational
morality of business conduct—later described as ‘techniques of neutralization’ by sociologists and
‘cognitive dissonance’ by psychologists. In both academic and forensic professional circles, a popular
concept is the ‘fraud triangle’, which has received a great deal of research attention, and which outlines
necessary conditions in the commission of fraud. Albrecht et al. (1982: 34) follow Cressey (1953) in his
classic study of embezzlement in arguing that people became embezzlers if and only if all three conditions
of the fraud triangle are evident: ‘There must be (1) a non-sharable problem, (2) an opportunity for trust
violation, and (3) a set of rationalizations that define the behaviour as appropriate in a given situation’.
Relatedly, Jordanoska (2018: 8) interviewed convicted white-collar fraudsters and embezzlers and found
that neutralizations were common in justifying behaviours, including additional justifications such as
‘defence of necessity’ (i.e., necessary to survive in fierce business conditions) and a ‘claim of
normality’ (‘everyone is doing it’). In another study, Switzerland and Austria’s ‘elite’ white-collar
offenders with high professional standing and respectability were interviewed (Schuchter and Levi 2015).
They consider that though perceived pressure from peers outside and inside the firm is salient to most
frauds, the common core is only motivation. Schuchter and Levi (2015) concluded that the frequently cited
‘rationalization’ is too simplistic: rather, among those interviewed, a fraud-inhibiting inner voice before
the crime and a guilty conscience after it were present. Whether this is true more generally remains to be
determined.
p. 486 Personality differences versus learning to commit fraud

It is not clear whether there is any personality difference between ‘fraudsters’ and others (as argued by
1
Babiak and Hare (2007), who see fraudsters as an identifiable subset of psychopaths), or whether fraud
results more from differential socialization into particular (sub)cultures (see Shover and Hochstetler
2006; Benson and Simpson 2018). The latter ‘fraud is normal’ (at least in particular occupational settings)
view over-predicts the actual incidence of fraud among those with opportunities to commit it, whereas the
‘fraudsters are psychopaths’ view under-estimates the prevalence of deception in the general population
by focusing on high-frequency career fraudsters. Both models have difficulty in accounting for change in
general levels of fraud between societies, over time and—for individuals—over the life course. The foci on
personality attributes and on differential association may not be mutually exclusive: indeed it seems
unlikely that fraud is fully explicable in either framework alone. Psychiatrists long held that there was a
category of ‘creative psychopaths’ who were successful liars, though why they became such was
unexplained. Some psychobiologists consider that such persons can be identified from questionnaires and
brain scans, and Babiak and Hare (2007) suggest that ‘snakes in suits’ most commonly suffer from
narcissistic personality disorder: showing an excessive need for admiration, a sense of superiority and
entitlement, and a lack of empathy. So individual differences in propensity to commit white-collar crime is
moulded both by heredity and environment, within a context of different situational opportunities
(Duffield and Grabosky 2001).
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Like most of the embezzlers studied by Nettler (1974)—critiquing Cressey (1953)—pre-planned

bankruptcy fraudsters knew what they were doing and that what they were doing was against the criminal
law. By and large, they did not seem unduly troubled morally by this, having quite cynical views about the
morality of ordinary business and being unchallenged by those around them (Levi 2008).
Notwithstanding, the most serious (but not the most commonly committed) frauds are committed not by
vanishing swindlers using false personal names and/or intentionally short-term corporate names, but by
senior executives using their own names, manipulating—with the knowing, wilfully blind, or unwitting
assistance of their professional advisers (or ‘enablers’ in the parlance of the police and Financial Action
Task Force—see Levi 2021)—the exchange values of largely phony financial instruments while hoping to
enjoy long executive careers with multiple corporate partners.
Wheeler (1992) argues that elites engage in crime not because of greed or financial gain but because of the
fear of losing their possessions and standing. Therefore, fear of falling may be more important than the
fear of failing to explain involvement in intermediate or slippery-slope white-collar crime. The sense of
entitlement, combined with confidence in impunity, can account for the clear abuse of corporate facilities
(jets, hotels, and restaurants) for private benefit by senior executives. What the effects of prosecutions for
the latter offences may be on general deterrence remain unknown (Paternoster 2016).
p. 487 Criminal careers and white-collar crimes

Once someone has decided to offend, the specific avenues of white-collar criminality that are selected as
part of rational choice can vary according to the self-confidence, technical, and social skills, and contact
set possessed, as well as the situation in which each individual is placed: as Cressey (1950) noted, all
accountants can embezzle, and the same applies to other professionals with the capacity to defraud or to
launder money (Middleton and Levi 2015). How available ‘crime networks’ are to the willing white-collar
offender affects ‘crime capacitation’: an issue often neglected in context-free individualized explanations
of involvement in crime. Age also impacts choice of what type of white-collar crime to commit. Those
currently over-50s might be over-challenged by cyber-enabled crimes, and they might not know or trust
younger co-offenders. This is a general proposition about the relationship between age and risk-taking/
innovation, but current millennials or digital natives might not be similarly anxious about technology
when they reach their 50s.
KPMG (2016) examined ‘company fraud’ cases which its forensic departments investigated over recent
years. Whether or not prosecuted:, the willingness of clients to pay to hire KPMG means (though unstated)
that such frauds are more likely to be serious in impact and involve senior personnel. Two thirds of
fraudsters are between the ages of 36 and 55; predominantly male; 65 per cent are employed by the
company (38 per cent for over six years); hold an executive or director level position (35 per cent);
described as autocratic (18 per cent) and are three times more likely to be regarded as friendly as not; likely
to have colluded with others (62 per cent of frauds); and motivated by personal gain (60 per cent), greed
(36 per cent), and the sense of ‘because I can’ (27 per cent). Why greed is different from personal gain—
rather than just an expression of moral condemnation—is not considered. The Association of Certified
Fraud Accountants conducts biennial surveys of its worldwide members, though with a poor response rate
which—as with most such surveys—makes it hard to know what to infer from it about typical behaviour.
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The most recent gives many interesting details about perpetrators, victims, and contexts, and shows that
the more senior the insider offender, the greater the losses (ACFE 2022). None of these datasets include
frauds against individuals perpetrated from outside otherwise legitimate businesses.
In the criminal careers literature, late onset and non-violent offenders have until recently been neglected:
longitudinal studies tend to start at age 8–10 and end before major white-collar crime opportunities
present themselves. Convicted white-collar offenders in the US, UK, and the Netherlands are typically
male, white, and about 10 years older than non-white-collar offenders, and are from the middle class of
society, have previous arrests and convictions (though not at the same rate as non-white-collar
offenders), and have committed both white-collar and non-white-collar types of crimes (van Onna et al.
2014; Benson et al. 2021; Piquero and Piquero 2016; Soothill et al. 2012). Some Dutch fraud offenders are
early onset, high frequency offenders, whereas others are late onset, low frequency offenders (van Onna et
al. 2014, van Onna 2020); a construct also supported by the Organised Crime Monitor data from the
Netherlands, showing a substantial proportion apparently turning to major fraud and organized crime
business-enabled offences in middle age (van Koppen et al. 2010a, 2010b).
Soothill et al. (2012: 782) in the last of a series of thoughtful follow-up studies of middle-class offenders
over 35 years, concluded that ‘middle-class offenders who are more prolific tend to be generalists
(including committing white-collar crime) rather than specialists in a particular type of crime’, but a
p. 488 quarter of low-rate white-collar ↵ offenders were reconvicted of white-collar offences. However, what
such studies have not yet told us is how the type of offences change over time, as perhaps it becomes
harder for those convicted to gain specialized access that would enable them to commit particular offences
(or to go straight).
White-collar offenders had longer criminal careers (Piquero and Weisburd 2009). Some of the offenders
continued into their 70s, as did some British bankruptcy fraud offenders (Levi 2008). Piquero and Benson
(2004) argue that this is best understood as punctuated situationally dependent offending, in which some
traditional offending similar to other offenders occurs in late adolescence, and then white-collar crime
develops later in life when most people have given up crime altogether. The opportunity to offend—
whether that ends up being labelled as white-collar crime, organized crime, or not crime at all—may
become available to the individual only after he or she has obtained a certain occupational position; and
the motivation may be activated only if the individual experiences some crisis in his or her personal or
occupational life. On the other hand, many frauds do not require any established organizational role—
indeed in the case of many cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent frauds, they may be in a different
continent!—and one lesson from all this research is that it is absurd to expect a coherent pattern of
criminality and criminal careers from such a variegated set of criminal activities. Finally, there have been
studies of corporate recidivism, presenting a different focus from that on individuals, for the same
individuals may no longer work there but the offending continues. Investigating the ‘life-course’
trajectories, or ‘criminal careers’, of corporations is gaining prominence to gain theoretical and empirical
insights into regularities and patterns of corporate offending over time, as well as the multi-dimensional
causal factors leading offending (Blokland et al. 2021), but empirically studying corporations over time has
challenges.
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The importance of the organizational context, structure, culture, and opportu-

nity
We might explain individual offending behaviour in relation to (1) the rational choices that those with
opportunities make in pursuit of personal (or organizational) gain as the lure of offending, together with a
lack of restraint and oversight, and perhaps changing circumstances, becomes more tempting (see Shover
and Hochstetler 2006); (2) how such individuals might rationalize or ‘neutralize’ their offending
behaviour (e.g. ‘everyone is at it’, ‘I was protecting the business’); or (3) the lack of attachments that such
individuals have to society (e.g. perceiving there to be no direct victims as is the case of most
‘conventional’ crimes). However, individual level explanations do not sufficiently account for the
influence of organizational cultures or wider political-economic/cultural structures and can
‘underestimate the pressures within society and organizational structures which impel those individuals
to commit illegal acts’ (Schrager and Short 1978: 410). Thus, contextualized theories of rational choice,
and the dynamics between choice, organization, opportunity, and context (Benson et al. 2016) are most
promising in explaining white-collar and corporate crimes (in a non-deterministic way). Such theories
‘build from a rational actor framework that shows how offending decisions are affected by instrumental
and normative considerations. Such theories can take into account micro-, meso-, and macro-level
influences and have important policy implications’ (Simpson 2013: 325; see also Vaughan 2007).
We can analyse these different levels through the lens of the organization and organizational cultures.
p. 489 Some organizations may exhibit pathological characteristics ↵ (e.g. a diffusion of responsibility, an
absence of clear operating procedures, low internal compliance, or destructive social dynamics), but such
associations and internal linkages are difficult to test empirically. Except where a trail of emails and
internal phone recordings make them manifest—as in recent banking rate fixing scandals—it can be
difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt that senior staff had active knowledge of misconduct. This is
why in 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission fined JP Morgan $200m and threatened other banks
for failing to ensure that their staff retained all phone and WhatsApp-type messages during home working
in the pandemic. Such difficulties in attributing liability are quite unlike those in other areas of crime for
gain where we have merely to link the actor to the act.
The attitudes of senior managers have long been recognized as important (Clinard and Yeager 1980) as the
‘tone from the top’ shapes how behaviours are (re)defined as acceptable or not. But rather than having a
cohesive and singular ‘corporate culture’, there may also be subcultures in organizational and institutional
settings that can be in tension, with the key being to understand how and why the priorities of certain
cultures, groups, or departments are considered more important than others. For instance, the
professional ethics of lawyers or accountants may give way to commercial pressures to advise how far
companies can get away with certain activities, as they try to hit their own personal commercial targets set
by the firm. The organizational mind-set is further reinforced through processes of organizational
selection and socialization while ‘walls of secrecy and silence’ may also emerge as colleagues, through
cognitive dissonance, concerted ignorance, or an absence of interest or fear of disclosing the truth, do not
blow the whistle on deviance within the workplace (van de Bunt 2010).
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Organizations, occupations, and industries vary in the pressures and opportunities for crime and deviance.
For example, cases involving businesses using ‘defeat devices’ to falsify emissions data in the auto
industry, bribing doctors to prescribe their medical products, or adulterating food products with cheaper—
sometimes toxic—alternatives, raise questions about how pervasive criminal behaviour is in certain
industries, which are sometimes hard to prove or to falsify. Some would argue that business is
criminogenic (Clarke 1990; Punch 1996, 2011; Slapper and Tombs 1999) and that to ‘understand the social
embeddedness of deviant and criminal business behaviour it is essential to grasp that the business
organization is the weapon, the means, the setting, the rationalization, the offender, and the
victim’ (Punch 1996: 214). Managers, in response to internal and external business pressures, engage in a
wide spectrum of deviant behaviours at certain times and under certain conditions to cope with the
problems they encounter in the corporate working environment (Punch 1996: 214).
However, there is a danger of sociological or organizational determinism. Pace Clarke (2012), opportunity
alone does not ‘make the thief’ but if the cultural conditions are conducive, then offending is more likely,
especially if the offending can be concealed and there is little response from senior staff, regulators or
police. Practices, processes, and collective decisions to benefit the corporation become more than simply
the sum of individual actions (Fisse and Braithwaite 1993; Punch 1996). In such settings, the morality,
voice, and internal restraints of ‘good’ individuals may be suspended and become lost in the ‘groupthink’
of the organization, a context reinforced by the potential for the depersonalization of one’s actions and the
cognitive dissonance of colleagues. Rationality becomes bounded with amoral calculations for the benefit
of the business taking priority (Kagan and Scholz 1984). Thus, the structure, culture, and personality/
identity of business are key variables that help us explain why some companies and managers turn to
p. 490 deviant solutions/practices (Punch 1996). The same ↵ logic can be applied to Russian and other drug
cheating in the Olympics and World Championships, which has endured beyond the exposure of state-
sponsored endemic misconduct (Rodchenkov 2021).
Fligstein and Roehrkasse (2016) try to integrate these different levels, noting that the financial crisis of
2007 to 2009 was marked by widespread fraud in the mortgage securitization industry, shown by large
regulatory settlements in which many of the largest banks paid multibillion-dollar penalties. They found
that theories emphasizing the impact of deregulation or technical opacity identify only necessary, not
sufficient, conditions. Their argument focuses instead on changes in competitive conditions and firms’
positions within and across markets. As the supply of mortgages began to decline around 2003, mortgage
originators lowered credit standards and engaged in predatory lending to shore up corporate unit profits
(and, in our view, their personal bonuses). In turn, mortgage-backed securities issuers and underwriters
who were part of giant banks and building societies committed securities fraud to conceal this misconduct
and to enhance the value of other financial products.
We must also consider the wider cultural and political–economic context for white-collar and corporate
offending. For instance, the geo–historical context has seen the emergence of an enterprise culture that
promotes individualism, together with free-market principles and deregulation. This has produced social
inequality and a high-risk culture accompanied by legal and political support (e.g. the creation of limited
liability companies to reduce risk of failure). In one recent study, Tudor (2019) interviewed investment
fraudsters in the UK to examine their motivations. She concluded that consumer capitalism, and more
Page 12 of 27
specifically the fraudsters reliance on, or fear of losing, the symbolism of financial wealth and consumer
goods in the construction of their identities, had a causal role in their decisions to commit fraud. For
Slapper and Tombs (1999: 141), the ‘structural necessities of contemporary capitalism’ require the
prioritization of profit leading to amoral calculations on the part of corporations and shapes the extent to
which such crime is seen as more or less acceptable. While this may be persuasive to many readers, such a
perspective over-predicts criminality as economic markets are relatively stable, as ethical and morally
responsible corporate policies can be profitable, and as notable legal and regulatory improvements (under
consumer and worker and sometimes NGO and international political pressure) have been made to govern
business criminality. Furthermore, the detection of serious violations can threaten profitability—though
such threats may be beyond the short time-horizons of staff enjoying performance bonuses—while we
also see frauds in several non-business contexts (e.g. charity organizations, state institutions) where we
might expect the organizational cultures to be different.
Whilst the above discussion has focused on the opportunities to offend within the organizational setting, it
is also important to consider opportunities to comply and act pro-socially. There are many business
regulations, standards and requirements that oblige businesses to take action to prevent harm and non-
compliance within or by their organization. But businesses have to be willing and able to comply. A failure
to take such action can result in non-compliance by omission (e.g., with financial reporting), rather than
commission (e.g., of particular financial crimes). However, ‘ … motivation to comply is of secondary
importance if a firm does not possess the capacity to comply’, and there is variation in terms of such
business capacities (Parker and Nielsen 2011: 14–15). As with explanations of organizational deviance,
organizational compliance is a product of the ‘interaction between the adoption of formal systems for
compliance management (one component of structure), the perceptions, motivations and strategies of
p. 491 individuals ↵ within the corporation in relation to compliance (agency), and the local norms and
habituated practices (culture or cultures) that mediate between corporate structures and individual
agency’ (Parker and Gilad 2011: 172).
Policing, Prosecuting, and Regulating
We have established that white-collar and corporate crimes are varied in their victim/offender
relationships, size, longevity, and the skills required, as are the offenders and explanations of their
behaviour. There is further diversity regarding policing strategies and who is responsible for these. Note
the use of ‘policing’ rather than ‘the police’ here, because although ‘plural policing’ (Jones, this volume)
has been increasingly used to describe the way formal social control operates in the sphere of ‘ordinary’
crimes and public order, the number and diversity of modes of policing for white-collar and corporate
crimes is arguably much greater. Indeed, the history of business regulation is shot through with specialist
bodies that have been set up apart from the police (in rough historical order) to handle direct and indirect
taxes, workplace health and safety, food and drink adulteration, pollution, financial services regulation,
social security payments, etc. For these bodies (even social security fraud enforcement), criminal
prosecution is overwhelmingly the road not taken, and though studies of the police in many countries have
highlighted the role of discretion, criminal prosecution is much more routinized for theft, robbery, and
street violence than it is for their equivalents in crimes by or even against the corporation.
Page 13 of 27
Myriad state authorities are involved in the investigation and prosecution of white-collar and corporate
crimes. In the UK, these include government and non-government licensed regulatory authorities
(including the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), HM Revenue and
Customs (HMRC), Health and Safety Executive (HSE), Environment Agency (EA), the Solicitors Regulation
Authority and other regulators of the professions, and the Department for Business and Trade (DBT)
Insolvency Service criminal enforcement team); law enforcement authorities—including the Serious Fraud
Office (SFO), National Crime Agency (NCA) and economic and specialist crime units within police forces,
for example, primarily the City of London Police (CoLP) Economic Crime Directorate (Doig and Levi 2021);
and international agencies, including the European Fraud Office (OLAF), the European Public Prosecutor’s
Office (EPPO), Europol, and Interpol. A similar variation exists within the US. The FBI (including its IC3
internet fraud reporting process), the New York Department of Financial Services, the Manhattan District
Attorney’s Office, and the US (Federal) Department of Justice (DoJ) are the principal criminal investigation
and prosecution bodies. However, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the US Secret Service
(for counterfeiting and payment card fraud), and the Federal Trade Commission also have oversight of
fraud, and there is a plethora of regulators with enforcement powers. In federal systems (including
Australia, Germany, and the US), there are usually state as well as federal criminal investigation bodies.
Civil Law systems tend to have more unified systems in which white-collar crimes are dealt with in the
same ways as others: but they may be decentralized and under pressure to deal with large numbers of
cases, generating delays and short cuts. There is no space in this chapter for a review of regulatory
processes, but they tend to be based around particular issues like health and safety at work, or pollution.
p. 492 ↵ This diversity of responsibility presents difficulties in establishing what an ‘adequate enforcement’
framework should look like (see Lord and Levi 2015). For instance, competing ideologies have shaped
arguments over the most appropriate model of policing white-collar and corporate crimes, containing
both symbolic and instrumental elements, where there is often a significant problem in measuring levels
of misconduct and assessing the effects of enforcement decisions, often cross-border (see Levi and Lord
2017, for an overview of regulatory models). Responsive, risk-based forms of regulation tend to dominate
in the response to business crimes (see Ayres and Braithwaite 1992; Black and Baldwin 2010; Parker 2013)
where we see scarce regulatory resources targeted away from (recidivist) corporates that willingly
cooperate with regulators and seemingly aim to reform and reduce future non-compliance. Thus,
companies deemed lower risk are dealt with through non-conviction and negotiated justice (King and Lord
2018), with self-regulation and private remedies preferred to strategies of crime control (Croall 2003;
Wells 2011). Such regulatory landscapes that encourage compliant behaviour through persuasion and
negotiation, rather than punitive policing, incorporate a range of state and non-state actors, such as inter-
governmental and non-governmental organizations (see Braithwaite and Drahos 2000; Djelic and Sahlin-
Andersson 2006; Abbott and Snidal 2013), who interact with both public and private actors in pursuing
harmonized, transnational legal and normative standards. Such complex, plural, and dynamic regulatory
relations beyond the state, or ‘multi-centred governance’ regimes, inevitably inhere in power
asymmetries as tensions exist between ‘aspirant governors’ (e.g., state, corporate, civil society) as they
aim to confront illicit actors in partnership to realize their own agendas (Edwards 2016).
Page 14 of 27
Critique of responsive, risk-based regulatory models emanates from the political left who use low
prosecution rates to expose the neoliberal hypocrisy of capitalist societies’ crime control ideologies,
arguing that such ‘regulatory degradation’ reproduces pre-existing political-economic ideologies
advocating de/re-regulation (Tombs and Whyte 2013, 2015). Furthermore, there is a lack of credibility in
graduated sanctions models when prosecutions are so rare (Lord 2014a; Lord and Levi 2015). Anti-money
laundering measures have featured heavily in the fight against Grand Corruption and other crimes,
alongside an array of prosecutions, Deferred Prosecution Agreements against large banks and accounting
firms, and civil and regulatory sanctions such as large numerical fines and Court-appointed corporate
monitors, but the effects of these on underlying crimes are largely unanalysed (Levi et al. 2018; Halliday et
al. 2020).
Due to the diversity of the crimes, it is difficult to conceptualize the policing response to specific white-
collar offences. Distinctions in response have been made between ‘crimes against social regulation’ (i.e.
offences causing physical, human harms) and ‘crimes against economic regulation’ (i.e. offences of a
financial nature, often against the state and economic system) (Slapper and Tombs 1999: 196), though this
focuses away from many blue-collar and white-collar crimes. This is most clear in the modest fines levied
against business for such offences, reflecting the ability of often marginal firms to pay. There have been
less than 40 prosecutions and under 30 convictions 2008–2021 under the Corporate Manslaughter and
Homicide Act 2007, almost all for smaller firms in which it is easier to show a connection between the
2
harm and the demonstrable acts of senior people. Comparison with the treatment of ‘ordinary’ property
p. 493 crimes is too ↵ problematic because few such thefts are anywhere near as large as the median economic
crimes, but also because the range of regulatory sanctions is simply unavailable for ‘ordinary’ crimes,
making it policing by the police or nothing, though restorative and community penalties are possible.
Prosecuting white-collar and corporate crimes

Readers may wonder why there is such a difference between the ways we treat white-collar and ‘ordinary’
crimes for gain: this may be understood as a mix of ideology, the ‘revolving door’ between business and
regulation; and the difficulties of proving cases against respectable firms. But there are differences
between the policing and prosecution of social security fraud and of fraud scams against consumers and
investors, on the one hand, and the pursuit of health and safety violators and serious tax evaders, on the
other. In the former cases, provided that the crimes are detected and investigated to a criminal standard,
prosecution tends to be routine (though in more recent years, ‘change of circumstances’ social security
fraudsters may be dealt with by suspension of/deduction from benefits instead); in the latter, non-
criminal justice mechanisms for control are typically explored, with prosecution or indeed law only as a
last resort (Hawkins 2002; Levi 2010a; Tombs and Whyte 2015).
Some prosecutors in the US have been using techniques developed against organized crime, for example,
in insider dealing and telemarketing cases where they get one network member to give evidence against
others, even extending to insiders wearing wires to tape conversations if the conspiracy is still going on.
This has not been the case elsewhere, except where Mafia-type crime groups are involved in public sector
corruption contracts, VAT frauds, or counterfeit products.
Page 15 of 27
The boundaries of corporate legal obligations to prevent economic crime (corruption and/or money
laundering) are a contested area (House of Lords 2019). The difficulties of prosecution for the SFO partly
reflects the impact of the antiquated system of corporate criminal liability in England and Wales in shaping
the normal enforcement response to corporate bribery of accommodation and non-prosecution, despite
willingness to prosecute (see Lord 2014a, 2014b). If prosecutions fail, this may imperil the prosecuting
body if they are seen as ‘ideological’ or incompetent; if they always succeed in court, prosecutors may be
accused of being too timid or—as in the case of fugitive Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn (Greimel and Sposato
2021)—of operating in a ‘rigged’ system of (in)justice like Japan (or China, Myanmar, or Russia).
Sentencing white-collar and corporate criminals

Sentencing tends to follow the routines of just deserts, general and specific deterrence, and incapacitation
as are observed in other offence types, but with some special twists based around sentencers’ perceptions
of harm and dangerousness, and the relative absence of criminal records among executives and
professionals convicted which enables them to plead that their offences were ‘out of character’ and that
they suffer special pains of imprisonment. Because of the symbolic component of white-collar crime’s
association with elites, there is also the general issue of perceived fairness of treatment in relation to
offenders with less grace from which to fall. (Restorative justice campaigners might use white-collar crime
sanctioning as a role model for how to handle other types of crime.) In most cases, there is not the tabloid
hysteria that greets ‘lenient sentencing’ for many other offences, and few fraudsters unconnected with
p. 494 ‘organized crime’ are seen ↵ as generally dangerous (Galvin 2020). On the other hand, there has been
an increasing level of publicity about the prevalence and seriousness of fraud (especially but not only
cybercrime), and so it is little surprise that sentencing has been rising for both elite and ‘middle-class’
criminals (though we would add ‘blue-collar’, like most payment card as well as social security fraudsters)
(Levi 2010b, 2016; Stadler et al. 2013). These individual sentencing models cannot, however, be read across
to the sentencing of corporations, where we must also factor in the economic consequences of conviction
and of scandal independent of prosecution (Fisse and Braithwaite 1984; Levi 2002; Simpson 2019).
Imprisonment is usually an option only for those cases in which there is clear evidence that owners
personally instructed or implemented reckless or intentional business decisions, for example, where
corporate manslaughter charges can be connected to individuals like the West Virginia mine owner Donald
Blankenship, jailed for a year in 2016 for misdemeanour after workers died due to his refusal to undertake
expensive safety measures. Otherwise, corporate fines may reflect guidelines influenced by judicial
perceptions of intent, harm, and future likelihood of offending, some aspects of which may be mentioned
in court as mitigation or by the prosecutor (except in the UK, where it is rare for prosecutors to advocate at
the sentencing hearing). In the growing number of Deferred Prosecution Agreement and/or Monitorship
cases which bypass criminal trial, there appears to be awareness by the regulators and prosecutors of the
general level of sanctions.
In the top 10 global banks (two of which were British), poor disclosure to clients was a factor in the $25
billion of fines paid by US banks in a 2012 settlement for abusive foreclosure practices. The second most
expensive issue for the banks was failures in how they sold residential mortgage securities, which resulted
in a penalties total of $27.7 billion. The banks paid $20.2 billion in fines in relation to securitization
Page 16 of 27
failures; and ‘rate setting’ fines came to $14.6 billion, partly stemming from banks’ manipulation of
foreign exchange and interest rates (Financial Times, 27 March 2016). These data reflect relatively
aggressive US regulation, but exclude most of the £53 billion costs to banks of ‘mis-selling’ of personal
protection insurance, and the large fines imposed on other banks outside the Top Ten. But they in turn
raise issues of what constitutes ‘credible deterrence’ in the financial services sector, as well as the
relationship between large headline figures for fines and the proportionality to profits from that activity,
profits as a whole, and wealth. There is no doubt that enforcement has had a big impact on the rising costs
of compliance departments. Time (and transparency) may tell whether it has a similar effect on corporate
behaviour.
Below is a selection of sentences in spectacular and mostly well-publicized (see Levi 2006, 2010b) US
white-collar crime cases in this century that shows what, by the standards of the rest of the world, are long
sentences; where sentences are lower, this usually reflects plea and charge bargaining and/or substantial
assistance to prosecutors:
For a Ponzi scheme (in which investors are paid from incoming funds from new investors but there is
little genuine investment) defrauding investors of around $17.3 billion, Bernie Madoff received a
sentence of 150 years (and his brother received 10 years for assisting him).
For a Ponzi scheme defrauding investors of around $7 billion, American Allen Stanford received 110
years (after a not-guilty plea) in 2012, and separately was stripped of his English knighthood.
Russell Wasendorf Sr., ex-CEO of Peregrine, who defrauded clients of $215 million over 20 years, was
given a 50-year sentence.
p. 495 Minor Vargas Calvo, owner of Provident Capital Indemnity (PCI) Ltd., ran a criminal reinsurance
company that fraudulently guaranteed almost half a billion dollars of life settlement investments
worldwide, and was sentenced to 60 years.
In the Galleon insider-dealing case, Raj Rajaratnam, CEO of Galleon, was sentenced to 11 years (plus
$156 million in financial penalties) and Rajat Gupta, former director of McKinsey and of Goldman
Sachs, was given a two-year sentence (plus a $5 million fine and one year of supervised release).
Bernard J. Ebbers, the WorldCom Chief executive who masterminded an $11 billion accounting fraud,
got 25 years.
In Enron, Jeffrey Skilling initially received 24 years’ imprisonment, reduced substantially to 14 years
in 2013 in a deal that led to his dropping his appeal and repaying $40 million in his seized assets to
creditors (but not reinstating the more than 5,000 jobs and $1 billion in employee retirement funds
lost when Enron collapsed).
In Enron, Andy Fastow got a reduced sentence of six years after pleading guilty and giving evidence
against Skilling and Kenneth Lay (who died before serving his sentence).
In the Theranos corporate fraud involving fake blood test technologies, Elizabeth Holmes and
Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani received 11 and 13 year prison sentences in the US in 2022, and went to
prison in 2023 after their appeals failed.
Page 17 of 27
Critical criminologists may seek to explain this as symbolic gestures to mollify the retributive instincts of
the masses, but though there is an element of truth in this, it is difficult to conclude that this is a sufficient
explanation, either at the verstehen level of how judges feel and think about their decisions (Wheeler et al.
1988) or at a more analytical level (judges can only sentence the people put before them). Moreover,
looking comparatively (Levi 2010b), it would not explain the national variations in sentencing, a subject
that has been little examined.
Conclusion
White-collar crimes (as defined in US Federal statutes) are a broad category, ranging from credit card and
insurance frauds that most people could commit, to insider trading and price-fixing that require
significant positions of trust and socio-economic status. White-collar criminals are a heterogeneous
group in terms of their backgrounds, their involvement with ‘mainstream’ offenders, their consciousness
of transgressing social as well as legal norms, and the levels of social disapproval their offences elicit.
Weisburd and Waring (2001) usefully distinguish between occasional ‘crime as an aberration’ offenders,
intermittent ‘opportunity seekers’, and chronic ‘stereotypical criminals’; and Piquero and Weisburd
(2009) note that a focus on the propensity to commit crime is valuable only for the last category. The
general invisibility and non-prosecution of frauds make comparisons between offenders and non-
offenders perilous, but it is clear that some offenders are exceptionally low in empathy, conscience, and
‘shameability’. We now have a reasonable understanding of both motivational and situational pathways
into (though not out of) fraud, but we do not yet have a full explanation of why some people commit white-
collar crimes and others, similarly placed, do not.
p. 496 ↵ We agree with Haines (2016) that control measures are best understood when framed not only
around the methods of control (punishment or persuasion) but also around the degree to which they
explicitly attempt to reshape who can and should influence business behaviour and the institutional
conditions under which business activity occurs. But the amount and composition of effort to achieve
controls is shaped not merely by economic interests but by culture, political traditions, and the history of
legal powers. The US historically has been the most aggressive prosecutorial nation across the board;
China has taken significant action on corruption (even at times against current elites who have fallen from
favour) and over counterfeit dairy products, but there is less action over other white-collar crimes; and
other countries have varied sanctioning records. But we still know only a modest amount about the
deterrent and preventative effectiveness of controls in different contexts, and there remain fundamental
tensions between symbolic efforts at parity in the treatment of offending and offenders ‘across the board’
and narrower efficiency and effectiveness measures in looking for the optimal impact on behaviour for any
given level of control expenditure. Thus despite the opportunities for regulation as well as criminal and
other sanctions, the moral philosophy of punishment and the science of control remain far apart in white-
collar crime, as they are in other arenas of crime control.
Page 18 of 27

First, read the original research of Edwin Sutherland’s White-collar Crime: The Uncut Version, (1983). This monograph
presents Sutherland’s analysis of the ‘criminal’ activities of the 70 largest corporations in the US at the time of writing.
Second, read Sutherland’s ‘Is “White-Collar Crime” Crime?’ (1945). This original article from Sutherland provides
excellent insight into the origins of the concepts of white-collar crime and the central analytical dilemma over the
‘crime, or not crime’ debate. As you read the article, bear in mind the geographical and historical context (i.e. 1940s
USA) in which it was written. Follow this by reading Tappan’s ‘Who is the Criminal?’ (1947). This is Tappan’s response
to Sutherland. It provides a more formal legal perspective on the nature of crime, the criminal, and criminality. Third,
the following texts provide analysis from established white-collar crime scholars on key issues in white-collar and
corporate crime scholarship: Rorie’s The Handbook of White-Collar Crime (2019); Van Slyke, Benson, and Cullen’s The
Oxford Handbook of White-Collar Crime (2016); van Erp, Huisman, and Vande Walle’s The Routledge Handbook of White-
Collar and Corporate Crime in Europe (2015); Lord, Inzelt, Huisman, and Faria’s European White-Collar Crime: Exploring
the Nature of European Realities (2022); Benson’s and Simpson’s (2018) White-Collar Crime: An Opportunity Perspective
(2018); Simpson and Weisburd’s The Criminology of White-Collar Crime (2009); Pontell and Geis’ International
Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime (2007).
Online resources

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Notes
1
It may be impossible to tell when accounts by offenders (and non-offenders) of their motivations (a) are genuinely
believed by the fraudsters, and (b) represent their ‘true’ motivations at the time they contemplated and committed
their offences (Levi 2008).
2
See R v Wood Treatment Ltd and George Boden [2021] EWCA Crim 618 for an indication of the difficulties of
prosecuting more complex cases. See also https://www.kingsleynapley.co.uk/insights/blogs/criminal-law-blog/
review-of-recent-corporate-manslaughter-cases-deco-pak-bosley-mill-aster-healthcare <https://
www.kingsleynapley.co.uk/insights/blogs/criminal-law-blog/review-of-recent-corporate-manslaughter-cases-deco-pak-
bosley-mill-aster-healthcare>.
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23. Social harm and zemiology

p. 501 23. Social harm and zemiology

Victoria Canning, Paddy Hillyard and Steve Tombs
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0023
Abstract
Over the past two decades, Zemiology—the study of social harm—has proliferated internationally. Many scholars and activists
alike have come to recognize the limitations of state-centric definitions of crime and shed light instead on many forms of harm
which often go unseen and undocumented, and yet can be more far reaching and devastating in impact. This chapter
therefore introduces the foundations of the epistemological shift to social harm studies, and the development of Zemiology. It
goes on to outline typologies and dimensions of harm and highlights the avoidable and preventable nature of many such
harms. Finally, the chapter concludes by considering the centrality of action-oriented research and activism in addressing,
mitigating and ultimately preventing the endemic nature of such harms going forward.
Keywords: social harm, Zemiology, critical criminology, inequalities, premature deaths, activist academia
Introduction
We all grow up with a story of crime—of what crime and who the criminal is. This, at the same time,
entails stories of what is not crime and who is not the criminal. These stories constitute a part of the
‘common sense’ approach to crime, although these dominant constructions of common sense can change
over time and place.
In the story of crime with which many readers will be familiar, the criminal will likely look like a young,
male adult, disproportionately of black, Asian or Middle Eastern heritage, dressed in one of several
stereotypical ways, to be particularly feared in certain places at certain times. Such stereotypes are easily
contradicted, but are still recognizable. As teachers and students, we may learn very quickly to scoff at
first-year representations of Lombroso’s claims around the physical manifestations of atavism, but at the
same time we recognize it and act upon it in our daily lives. Who has not heard, said, or thought the phrase,
Page 1 of 25
‘They don’t look the type’? Who has not made assumptions about a group of young people based upon
their being gathered in a public place, dressed in a certain manner? For us, as important as those whom our
stories of crime identify as actual or potential offenders, are those excluded. Our ingrained, common-
sense tropes regarding the criminal do not include the restaurant or factory owner, nor the directors of
road transport or food-processing companies. It is even unlikely to include the company itself,
represented by a headquarters, a corporate logo, an organogram, or a memorandum of incorporation, each
of which would more accurately identify the origins of corporate-produced harm. It won’t include senior
managers at any of the UK’s high street banks involved in law-breaking (Competition and Markets
Authority 2022). Meanwhile, the effective force of law still fails to be felt by Prime Ministers, relatives of
monarchs, and Presidents.
Of course, criminologists engage with and produce much more sophisticated stories of crime and criminals
than these popular versions. But, as we shall argue here, criminology is neither immune to this general
common sense, nor is it in control of it. Indeed, much criminological research is disproportionately
produced and maintained by very powerful interests, not least the state, which produces definitions of
crime through criminal law, around which the whole edifice of the criminal justice system and its
p. 502 onlookers in the media, public, and political spheres are then mobilized. In short, ↵ criminologists, like
other criminal justice actors, have largely accepted a definition of crime as a violation of the criminal law,
hence leaving the discipline hostage to a system that has criminalized individual behaviours like
homosexuality and abortion, but not as readily the harms generated through corporate activities such as
the routine emissions which have generated climate catastrophe or state atrocities such as genocide.
Criminology is not monolithic, yet we maintain that the very roots of the subject—its state-centricity, and
its etymological focus on ‘crime’—limit its own emancipatory potential. Regarding the latter, even by the
name criminology, it can never break free from this fundamental aspect. It is in this context that we outline
the historical development of the study of social harm, and move toward defining Zemiology as a discipline
in its own right.
To do so, the chapter begins by introducing the emergence and foundations of Zemiology, and specifically
its relationship to radical and critical criminology. From here, we explore dimensions and examples of
harm production through a Zemiological lens, before providing a provisional typology of harm. In the final
section of the chapter we consider key ontological and epistemological positions. Crucially, we emphasize
throughout that harm matters. Harm production is structural, institutional, relational, and inherent to
both power and powerlessness. It is, therefore, avoidable. As the chapter progresses, we train our focus
precisely on this aspect: the avoidability of harm production, and subsequently the ways in which we can
work collectively and actively against inequalities, structural violence, and harmful inflictions which are
unequally and intersectionally experienced across societies. Indeed, we argue for an Activist Zemiology
which contests value neutrality and works toward emancipatory approaches to harm reduction,
mitigation, and abolition.
Page 2 of 25
Beyond Criminology: The Emergence of Zemiology as a Stand-Alone Disci-

pline
Many criminologists have long recognized, and struggled with, the inherent limitations of a state-based
definition of crime. Sellin (1938), for example, suggested the alternative notion of ‘conduct norms’.
Sutherland (1945) famously extended the label ‘crime’ to those acts prohibited by bodies of law beyond the
criminal law, illustrating ‘divergence between legal, social and political definitions of criminality’ and thus
reminding us ‘of the artificiality of all definitions of crime’ (Nelken 1994: 366). Using a human rights
framework, Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1970) proposed that the harms arising from racism, sexism,
and economic exploitation should be central to the study of criminology. For Michalowski (1985: 317),
illegal or harmful acts that arise from the ownership or management of capital, which he calls ‘crimes of
capital’, should also be studied within the discipline. More recently, Tifft and Sullivan (2001: 191) sought to
extend the definition of crime to include, ‘social conditions, social arrangements, or actions of intent or
indifference that interfere with the fulfilment of fundamental needs and obstruct the spontaneous
unfolding of human potential’. Notwithstanding these, and other efforts, by the turn of this century, ‘the
concept of social harm’ had ‘never seriously been incorporated into criminology’ (Muncie 2000: 3).
In the late 1990s a group of academics began to think in a more concentrated way about how a concept of
social harm could be more progressively developed as an alternative to the concept of crime. The
p. 503 motivations, or routes, via which individuals ↵ joined this conversation, were various. Some were
pursuing the conceptual struggles of Sellin, Sutherland, and others to operationalize a concept of crime in
their respective areas of work, where a lack of definitional and legal clarity, and indeed relative
non-criminalization, were the norm—notably those working on corporate, state, and white-collar crime.
Others approached this enterprise on the basis of a concern with the marked expansion of criminology as a
discipline and the concomitant increase in the number of degree courses in British and Irish universities
(now significantly more globalized), while older subjects, such as social policy and sociology, were
declining. Some of this group felt that the notion of social harm could be developed at the margins of
criminology, through challenging the discursive power of concepts of crime, criminality and criminal
justice. For others, given the integral nature of these latter concepts to the discipline of criminology itself,
any sustained focus on social harm could only be achieved within a new and separate discipline.
An outcome of these discussions was a speculative consideration of a sustained focus on the study of social
harm, or the development of an alternative discipline, Zemiology. The word was adopted in 1998 from the
Greek word for harm, Zemia, during the Annual Conference of the European Group for the Study of
Deviance and Social Control on the Greek island of Spetses. Months later, a conference, Zemiology: Beyond
Criminology?, was held in Dartington, England. It included a diverse range of contributions from
academics, policy-makers, and practitioners, from a range of disciplines, including criminal justice,
development economics and development studies, geosciences, law, poverty studies, public health, social
1
policy, and sociology, with criminology being a decidedly minority presence. Subsequently, some of these
papers, along with commissioned essays, were published as Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously
(Hillyard et al. 2004).
Page 3 of 25
The starting point of Beyond Criminology was an elaboration upon nine fundamental criticisms of the
discipline of criminology (Hillyard and Tombs 2004). These were fundamental in two senses: first, we
believed them to be significant; second, they were the basis for the considerations that followed
throughout the book about the relative merits of social harm and Zemiology, as a development of or an
alternative to criminology. These nine criticisms can be briefly summarized.
Crime has no ontological reality. There is nothing intrinsic in any behaviour that allows us to know that it is
a crime without reference to an external index—namely, criminal law. It is in fact difficult if not
impossible to conceive of any act that in all circumstances, in all places, at all times, appears as a crime.
The taking of life, the expropriation of another’s property, and the deprivation of liberty all take legal
forms. Crime is thus a ‘myth’ of everyday life, albeit a highly salient one. To be clear, to say that crime has
no ontological reality (Becker 1963; Box 1983; Christie 2004; De Hann 1996; Hulsman 1986; Mathiesen
1974; Steinert 1986) is not ‘a dismissal of crime as a “fictive event”’—it is simply to recognize that its
status as a reality is one that is constructed (and indeed can only be understood) within any given set of
social relations, a “social complex” which is always “contingent rather than necessary”’ (Lasslett 2010: 1–
3).
Criminology perpetuates the myth of crime. In the large and growing criminological literature, with a few
notable exceptions, criminologists typically take crime as an unproblematic concept and there is little or
no attempt to offer a definition. For example, it was not until its third edition that The Oxford Handbook
p. 504 contained a dedicated ↵ chapter discussing the definition of crime (Lacey 2002). Criminology texts
continue to offer theories about why people commit crime, about how crime should be measured, about
how crime might be prevented or responded to without any discussion of the concept.
Crime consists of many petty events. Most crimes in popular consciousness are perceived as very harmful
events. Yet most behaviours which are defined as crimes are relatively harmless. They would not, as
Hulsman (1986) has noted, score particularly highly on a scale of personal hardship. Reiman argues in his
‘pyrrhic defeat theory’ of criminal justice policy and system, that ‘the definitions of crime in the criminal
law do not reflect the only or the most dangerous of antisocial behaviours’ (1998: 61). He goes on to argue
that neither do the decisions of whom to arrest or charge or the resulting convictions reflect the only or the
most dangerous behaviours. Indeed, the fact that crimes cover such a wide range of effects, from the
serious (harmful) to the petty (harmless), is one of the reasons why in both professional and academic
contexts, harm or severity indices of crimes are increasingly prevalent (Ashby, 2018; Curtis-Ham and
Walton 2018).
Crime excludes many serious harms. By contrast, the criminal law often fails to embrace many serious
harmful behaviours or if it does, they are ignored or handled without resort to it. Obvious examples are
violence against women and girls and corporate crime. The focus on events that are defined as crimes
clearly distract attention away from the more serious harmful behaviours. As Tifft and Sullivan (1980: 6)
argue, ‘by insisting on legal assumptions as sacred, criminologists comply in the concealment and
distortion of the reality of social harms’, particularly those harms inflicted by persons with power. The
distraction away from more serious harmful behaviour is best illustrated by our society’s fixation on the
crime of murder—a theme which dominates so much of our popular culture in film and TV drama. In the
last 121 years there have been approximately 55,667 homicides registered by the police in England and
Page 4 of 25
Wales (Office for National Statistics 2021; Home Office 2012). Yet, in just two years, COVID-19 killed over
200,000 people in the UK. Many of these deaths were avoidable and, arguably, a direct result of
government failures (Calvert and Arbuthnott 2021).
Constructing crimes. The construction of a crime involves a number of complex and elaborate processes. For
example, central to determining guilt is the concept of ‘mens rea’ (the guilty mind) which applies
principally, but not exclusively, to the individual. This involves a series of legal processes, artificial, proxy
measures whereby intention has to be judged by examining a person’s words and deeds, then speculatively
assessing these against the standard: a fictitious ordinary person. This fixation with the guilty mind also
reflects the individualistic basis upon which bourgeois law has been constructed; this bias is evident in the
difficulties of ascribing criminal liability upon collective entities such as the corporation, in turn
underpinning the effective decriminalization of many of the socially destructive effects of corporate
activity (Hebert et al. 2019).
Criminalization and punishment. Once a behaviour or incident has been categorized as a possible crime, the
whole process of criminalization begins: arrest, prosecution, conviction, punishment. The state, as
Christie (1977) has pointed out, appropriates the conflict and imposes punishment. To categorize and
respond to harmful behaviours as criminal sets in train a process which is managed by state institutions,
focusing disproportionately on the offender and not the victim nor the underlying conditions which may
have produced the crime (Macnaughton-Smith 1970). In so doing, the state tends to reproduce pain, harm,
and indeed the likelihood of further crime, while such processes of criminalization foreclose any form of
response to harmful behaviour other than more criminalization.
p. 505 ↵ ‘Crime control’ is ineffective. Ironically, perhaps the greatest contribution of criminology has been to
show that ‘crime control’ is ineffective, namely that it fails according to its stated rationales of reducing
crime, rehabilitating offenders, improving social safety and deterring widespread violations of law. The
starkest evidence of failure is in relation to prison—the ultimate sanction in many ‘liberal-democracies’.
In his classic text Prison on Trial (1990), Mathiesen describes the prison as a ‘fiasco’ which cannot live up
to any of the rationales stated for its existence. Somewhat differently, crime control is perhaps better
understood as a form of conflict control, a criminal selectivity based upon the twin mechanisms of under-
and over-criminalization (Vegh Weis 2018). Thus crime control—along with the category of crime upon
which it is predicated—serves to maintain unequal power relations (see also below), warehouses surplus
or problem populations (not least on racialized and class bases) and, increasingly in the neo-liberal era, is
a mechanism for the generation of profit and transfer of wealth from the public to the private.
The category of crime, and therefore criminology, which is largely organized around it, gives legitimacy to the
expansion of ‘crime control’. Crime control is now a large industry solving two major problems, as Christie
(1993) noted: differential access to paid work, and the uneven distribution of wealth. The industry provides
profit and work while producing control of those who transgress laws or are deemed troublemakers (see
Davis 2003). It can expand effortlessly because crime dominates all social harm concerns. For Henry and
Milovanovic, conventional ‘crime control’ efforts fuel the engine of crime: ‘control interventions take
criminal activity to new levels on investment and self-enclosed innovation’ (1996: x–xi). Much of the
criminalization process is autopoietic: the system itself produces crimes, such as resisting arrest, assisting
an offender, defaulting on a fine or a civil order, or jumping bail, as a direct consequence of the initial
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intervention. The system therefore reproduces and maintains itself. Second, the state creates and
perpetuates harms to the individual and to their family which often far exceed the harm done by the
alleged behaviour.
The category of crime serves to maintain power relations. Crime plays a fundamental role in contemporary
societies in maintaining existing power relations: it facilitates the ignoring of the collective harmful
behaviours of those in power through privileging individual acts; it disallows reference to structural
determinants of harmful individual behaviour such as poverty or inequality; and it maintains and sustains
the powerful corporate bodies in the crime control industry. Since its inception, criminology has enjoyed
an intimate relationship with the powerful, a relationship determined largely by its failure to subject to
critique the category of crime—and disciplinary agendas set by this—which has been handed down by the
state, and around which the criminal justice system has been organized (Foucault 1980; Cohen 1981;
Garland 1992).
In the light of these nine fundamental criticisms, we argue that criminology is a distorting discipline—one
incapable, because of a framework delimited by an existing body of criminal law, of understanding and
analysing a whole range of harmful events and activities.
Many criminologists would recognize and even agree with some or many of the above observations. Yet,
just as we can all critique crime stories and crime talk, exposing their myths, fallacies, even pure
falsehoods, this does not in and of itself undermine them. In other words, a key issue for us is the power of
crime discourse. Such is its power that it is naturalizes the idea that crime captures the most important and
most dangerous of all social harms that will affect us from the cradle to the grave, as well as our belief that
the only or most effective response to social harm is ‘criminal justice’. These beliefs about crime constitute
p. 506 what Gramsci (1971: 419–25) called ‘common sense’—constructed ↵ and reconstructed through pro-
hegemonic forces, albeit that they are not, of course, immune from challenge. ‘Social harm’ and
‘Zemiology’ represent challenges to common sense about crime.
A social harm approach, or Zemiology as a separate discipline focusing on harm, may provide a number of
advantages over criminology and a focus on crime, as we will now show. First, it has the potential to be
more coherent theoretically, as well as more comprehensive, encompassing a far wider range of the
deleterious harms to peoples’ welfare throughout their life. Second, the focus of such a discipline could be
much broader than the specific harms experienced by individuals where the perpetuator had a ‘guilty
mind’. Zemiology would also include the harms experienced by individuals, households, family units, and
indeed communities from whatever source, even encompassing mass harms. As a starting point, we
suggested a typology of harm: physical, financial, psychological, and cultural/environmental, to which
many scholars have now added. Third, a focus on harm allows a much wider investigation into who might
be responsible, unrestricted by individualistic notions of responsibility. Finally, it creates the opportunity
to consider a range of policy responses to reduce harm beyond the dominant, relatively easy, but
ineffective response of criminalization.
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Dimensions of Harm Production
In this section, we wish to introduce some indicative data in order to illustrate the levels of harm which a
social harm or zemiological approach might document and seek to explain, harms which for the most part
fall entirely beyond the ambit of criminal justice systems as well as academic criminology.
We have quite deliberately selected three forms of harm for our focus. One of these emphasizes the need
for a social harm approach to encompass harms across the life cycle through a focus upon a form of harm
experienced by older people. The other two categories of harm considered are occupational injury and
illness—potentially affecting all of the working-age population—and exposure to unfit food, affecting all
of the population but which may have differential effects, for example on those with other poor-health
conditions, pregnant women, infants, and older people. These latter two categories cover workers and
consumers; they are areas potentially but in fact very rarely subject to criminalization; and they are both
phenomena at the margins of the discipline of criminology, analysed within the work of a handful of
scholars. Following a brief, discursive overview of the data, we address why this matters, and what place
such data has in the context of a social harm or Zemiology approach. While we focus on UK-based
examples for the sake of a case study presentation in this chapter, further internationalized cases are
outlined in Canning and Tombs (2021, pp. 64–85).
Excess Winter Deaths. Each year, the UK’s Office for National Statistics calculates the number of ‘excess
winter deaths’—deaths from December to March compared with the average number of deaths occurring
in the preceding and following four-month periods—in England and Wales. The most recently (November
2
2020) published figure estimates 28,300 such deaths occurred in England and Wales in 2019–20, with the
p. 507 five-year rolling average of such deaths being 32,058 per annum. More than one-third ↵ of these
deaths are caused by respiratory diseases. These are not people killed by the cold per se. (In fact, countries
with very low winter temperatures in Scandinavia and Northern Europe have very low rates of such
deaths.) Instead, most die of illnesses brought on by lack of access to affordable heating, or suitably
insulated, warm and dry accommodation, or most likely both (Office for National Statistics 2020).
Fatal Workplace Injuries. Each year, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) press releases the numbers of
‘fatal injuries’ to workers, which, in 2019–20, was 111. But this headline figure omits vast swathes of
occupational deaths. Its Health and Safety Statistics 2019–20 records 13,000 deaths ‘estimated to be linked
to past exposure at work, primarily to chemicals or dust’ (Health and Safety Executive 2020: 3). This data
still remains a gross underestimate. For example, researchers from the European Agency for Safety and
Health at Work calculated, in 2009, 21,000 deaths per year in the UK from work-related fatal diseases,
though such data ‘might still be an under-estimation’ (Hämäläinen et al. 2009: 127). And long-term
3
research by the Hazards campaign, drawing on a range of studies of occupational and environmental
cancers, the number of heart-disease deaths with a work-related cause, as well as estimates of other
diseases to which work can be a contributory cause, showed a lower-end estimate of 50,000 deaths from
work-related illness in the UK each year (see Tombs 2014).
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Food Poisoning. Finally, what is most commonly referred to as ‘food poisoning’ is a major source of death
and illness in the UK. According to one recent study, there are 180 deaths per year in the UK caused by
foodborne disease from just eleven pathogens, while there are an estimated 2.4 million cases of foodborne
illness per year (Holland et al. 2020). Even these estimates of food related illness are likely to understate
the scale of the problem (Food Standards Agency, nd). For example, the latest (2020) Food Standards
Agency sampling of chickens found six in ten to be contaminated with campylobacter, the most common
bacterial cause of food-borne illness in the UK (Food Standards Agency 2021).
There are several observations to be made on such data and the phenomena they measure. First, in each
area, alongside significant numbers of deaths, a series of less manifest harms are simultaneously
produced. These might be financial, entailing a loss of income or additional costs incurred by the stricken
person or his/her family members, or economic, in the sense that all of these harms entail various layers of
costs for the state. Where the harms are generated in profit-making settings, these costs are socialized,
while profits remain privatized—so there are harmful wealth-distribution effects, also. Moreover,
associated with these harms are various emotional and psychological harms, many of which may be short-
lived, others of which may endure over long periods.
Second, while statistics can be viewed as a collation of a series of isolated cases or incidents, the harms
captured in the above categories are much more usefully thought of, not as incidents per se, but as
processes, or effects of processes, indeed processes which arise in organizational settings, through forms
of economic and social organization, and in structures. So, although these may manifest themselves at the
level of individuals, they are not explicable at the level of individuals. Relatedly, effective responses to them
cannot be achieved through systems of accountability developed on the basis of individual categories such
as those upon which criminal law is based (see earlier).
p. 508 ↵ Third, the reference to structures in the previous paragraph should highlight to us the fact that these
and other forms of harms are not distributed randomly but indeed differentially. In this respect it is often
reasonable to emphasize the cumulative as opposed to the isolated experience of harm.
The production of social harm is not a random phenomenon. Capitalist forms of economic and harm
production may be organized in a series of quite distinct ways, but, for us, neoliberal forms of capitalism
are qualitatively and quantitatively more harmful than other forms (Tombs and Hillyard 2004). Moreover,
the very processes of globalization—the internationalization of neoliberalism—have created a new set of
economic and political realities with significant harm-producing effects within and beyond nation states
(ibid.).
Garside (2013: 248) has suggested that for a social harm approach to be truly progressive it must consider
more carefully the underlying structural and historical causes of social harm both within varieties of
existing capitalism, but also how harm might be mitigated in alternative, that is, non-capitalistic, forms of
social organization.
Relatedly, then, for Garside, reducing harm is not simply a matter of states pursuing different policies, such
as increased regulation. It will require much more profound material political and ideological
transformations to reduce harm. There is little here with which to disagree. But this is not to deny that that
there are different varieties of capitalism (Soskice and Hall 2001)—including differential levels and forms
Page 8 of 25
of regulation—which produce differing levels of harm. Pemberton demonstrates powerfully, through

cross-national analyses, how harm generation is a feature of all existing varieties of capitalism, while
varying in extent according to the specific forms of societies. Crucially, he notes: ‘these analyses
demonstrate how the extraction of surplus value, the experience of alienation and the relentless
commodification of human relations serve to compromise human flourishing in many harmful
ways’ (Pemberton 2015: 139). Thus, his focus on capitalist harm production is also a focus on the
differential existence of harm reduction infrastructures, including forms of regulation, infrastructures
which are won (and lost) through political struggle, reflecting compromises reached as regards the nature
and level of the social wage. What Pemberton refers to as the ‘social state’, and which Tombs has recently
(2016) discussed in terms of the ‘social protection state’, has been systematically dismantled under
rampant neoliberalism. Therein, the twin processes of marketization—characterized by Whitfield (2006:
4) as ‘the process by which market forces are imposed in public services’ and financialization—the
increasing pre-eminence of finance capital, coupled with the hard-wiring into civil, economic, political,
and cultural institutions of our lives—have generated greater as well as new forms of harm production
(Tombs 2016: 37–43, passim).
We are clear that neoliberalism cannot be effectively regulated (Tombs and Whyte 2015), while also
recognizing that there are some forms of capitalism where regulation can have more progressive effects.
With specific reference to the UK, the chances in the UK of a return to, for example, even the (what now
appear to be) halcyon days of the post-1945 social-democratic settlement are past. While the state has
withdrawn from a raft of areas in which it had hitherto provided social protection (however inadequately),
these have either been abandoned or handed over to private providers; in either case, the conditions under
which these can be revived and returned to state hands appear less and less obvious. Thus a smaller state is
providing fewer goods and services, and offering diminished levels of social protection as so cruelly
witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, this does not equate to any necessary
diminution of state power (Tombs 2016). Certainly, in the context of regulating populations, it can be
argued that the state is becoming bigger, a central set of actors in seemingly-endlessly proliferating forms
of social control, through processes of both panopticism and synopticism.
p. 509 Towards a Typology of Harm
The study of harm has been a feature of many disciplines and has not been confined solely to criminology.
Anthropologists at the University of Copenhagen have been developing an anthropological Zemiology to
situate harm and social suffering as a divergent field of analysis and action. In political science, Linklater
(2011) has analysed the problem of harm in world politics and suggests how different theories of
international relations posit the control of harm. In medical science, harm has long been a key concept
where harm avoidance, reduction and mitigation are ostensibly the informing rationales of thought and
practice (Panagioti et al. 2019). There have also been numerous specific studies of harm which have not
been confined to criminology: harms in the workplace (Presser 2013; Lloyd 2018); harms in sport (Wagg
and Pollock 2021); gendered harms (Cain and Howe 2008, Ní Aoláin 2009); self-harm (Laye-Gindhu and
Schonert-Reichl 2005); the harms of child protection interventions (Wroe 2022); and harm as a matter of
risk (ESRC 2013). The growth of research around eco-harms is a timely expansion, given the gravity of
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climate catastrophe as well as the endemic harms committed against non-human species, notably through
industrial farming, wildlife trafficking, as well as the pollution of whole ecosystems (for thorough
discussions, see Goyes 2019; Sollund 2015; Walters 2018; White 2018; see also Brisman and South, this
volume). Harm, then, is increasingly recognized across a plethora of disciplines and as presenting itself in
a variety of forms.
In what remains the most developed single treatment of social harm, Pemberton (2015) sets out an over-
lapping but distinct typology of harms, which incorporates physical and mental health harms; autonomy
harms, which result from situations where we experience ‘fundamental disablement’ in relation to our
attempts to achieve self-actualization (the ability or capacity to flourish); and relational harms, the latter
coming in two forms—harms resulting from enforced exclusion from social relationships (enforced
exclusion from personal relationships and social networks) and harms of misrecognition, which result
from the symbolic injuries which serve to misrepresent the identities of individuals belonging to specific
social groups (Pemberton 2015: 13–34).
4
In what follows, we draw upon the above work to set out a more developed typology of harms. These need
not be considered exhaustive—indeed, even as we write this, further research by emerging scholars is
increasing the typologies in which harms can be elaborated. Here, however, we will address the following:
physical harms;
emotional and psychological harms, which capture Pemberton’s ‘mental health harms’;
financial and economic harms, which were set out in Hillyard and Tombs’ original (2004)
formulation, albeit here we distinguish slightly between these;
cultural harms, encompassing some aspects of Alvesalo’s ‘cultural safety’ but drawing upon a recent,
extensive, potentially very significant consideration by Boukli and Copson (2020);
p. 510 harms of recognition, which raises to the fore one aspect of Pemberton’s ‘relational harm’, although
we discuss the latter as a separate category;
autonomy harms, as set out by Pemberton (2015) and expanded on empirically by Canning (2017;
2019).
Physical harms
Physical harms are often construed as the easiest to define or measure: death, illness and injury are the
obvious forms. These may develop from various avoidable social scenarios, for example through torture,
sexual abuse or homicide. Many of these examples fit quite easily within realms of criminal accountability,
with a perpetrator who can be identified possessing specific intent (although this is often complex in the
case of state violence and torture; see Green and Ward 2004 and Rejali 2007).
However, not all physical harms are a product of direct physical violence. Multiple fatalities occur in a
variety of settings, such as in the workplace, on public transport, or in leisure venues. They are not
uncommon and often easily preventable and often achieve significant international resonance—the
avoidable industrial disasters such Bhopal (1984), Chernobyl (1986), and Rana Plaza (2013) are obvious
Page 10 of 25
examples. The preventable nature of many so-called ‘natural disasters’ also raises the toll of deaths from
physical harms—tsunamis, pandemics, earthquakes, hurricanes and fires can all lead to more or less
deaths dependent upon the extent to which states invest in prevention and mitigation for their
populations. Years of under-funding in public health and health services in the United Kingdom, together
with government indecision in the early stages of the pandemic, no doubt, played a significant role in the
United Kingdom having a very high death rate from COVID-19 (Calvert and Arbuthnott 2021).
Physical harms span significant terrain. They may be related to car accidents, workplace hazards or illness
through pollution. The prevalence of each originates in the wider socio-political environments within
which we live, and where many harmful activities, conditions and processes either go unregulated or are
normalized, accepted, even promoted. They may arise from the lack of adequate food or shelter, long-term
physical health problems, disease, malnutrition, all of which can be linked as Pemberton (2015) has shown
to:
generally poor quality of life;
little or no access to a healthy diet;
little or no opportunity to exercise effectively;
poor access to appropriate health care; and
inadequate shelter and/or hazardous working or living environments.
Emotional and psychological harms

Emotional and psychological harms often develop from traumatic instances—such as witnessing death or
violence—or ongoing mental and emotional distress related to everyday pressures or problems—such as
poverty. These are separate categories, since the first requires psychological diagnosis and possibly even
intervention, whilst the latter is broader but still strongly related to (although not simplistically
determined by) the psychological, specifically where self-actualization, autonomy, and capacity to
maintain one’s own physical wellbeing are concerned.
p. 511 ↵ Hillyard and Tombs argued that emotional and psychological harms are ‘much more difficult to
measure and relate to specific causes’ (2004: 20). This is partly the case, not least since physical injury or
death can often be seen and usually easily identified. However, emotional and psychological harms are
often hidden, not least those that result from torture, sexualized violence and domestic abuse as shown in
feminist and psychological literature (Boyle 2017; Canning 2016, 2017; Dehghan 2018; Jones and Cook
2008; Herman 1992; Arcel 2003).
Although individuals may each respond to harm in different ways, the spectrum of emotional and
psychological harms is vast and, indeed, some are more amenable to identification subject to
commitments of adequate investment, time and research. For example, problems such as sleeplessness,
anxiety, depression or suicidality can be the outcome of instances of violence or other traumata. What lies
at the source of the problem of measuring or relating to specific causes is the lack of capacity or space for
Page 11 of 25
these to be drawn out. To relate to specific causes, one must be provided with the ability to speak to the
causes (Herman 1992). However, those violences which cause most emotional harm—such as sexual
violence, domestic terror, or torture—remain socially silenced in a multitude of ways.
Financial and economic harms

Collapsed into this category or type of social harms are the following:
Financial harms, that is monetary harms which affect individuals or households. These may be
temporary, such as loss through theft or fraud, or an immediate loss of income due to, for example,
unemployment; or they may be much longer term, as a result of no or precarious employment, high
rental and livings costs, or lack of affordable access to basic amenities of life such as education,
health care, transportation and so on.
Economic harms, which are also monetary harms affecting wider communities, or significant
portions of them, and, in a global sense, whole societies and nation states.
‘Financial’ and ‘economic’ likely point to distinct levels of monetary harm, but it might be argued that
their origins, the factors which maintain them, and their various effects, are so similar that they can be
collapsed into one type.
In a general sense, financial harms have been discussed by those interested in social harm in relation to
poverty—an extended concern for Pemberton (2015), for example. When seen from a social point of view,
and aside from ideological understandings of poverty in terms of poor life-decision and individual choice,
poverty is an outcome of uneven or unfair distributions of wealth. And so then, at a macro level, many
foreseeable socio-economic decisions facilitate the ongoing existence of poverty: countries or states which
charge for primary health care; reductions in trade and local industries; decreases in welfare entitlements;
the list goes on. On the other side of this coin is, for example, tax breaks or tax havens for richer people
which could otherwise facilitate wealth redistribution and tackle poverty. These often work within the law,
and yet poverty has devastating economic harms which can result in physical harm, emotional and
psychological harm and even death.
More broadly, financial and economic harms might emanate from misappropriation of funds by
governments, malpractice by private corporations and private individuals, increased prices through
cartelization and price-fixing, and redistribution of wealth and income from the poorer to the richer
p. 512 through regressive taxation and welfare policies. ↵ Financial and economic harm can therefore also
incorporate wider social harms, including the mental or emotional effects of job or property loss, and the
relational harms which families or social units living together can experience when finance pressures push
them apart.
Page 12 of 25
Cultural harms
Pemberton’s (2015: 30) category of ‘relational harms’ identified harms resulting from ‘enforced exclusion’
from social networks due, for example, to a lack of access to childcare and thus physical and social
isolation. Further, Alvesalo (1999) had argued earlier that a developed understanding of social harm could
include reference to ‘cultural safety’, encompassing access to cultural, intellectual and informational
resources generally available in any given society.
Boukli and Copson (2020) subsequently set out three ways in which ‘cultural harm’ had been implicitly
defined, based upon a review of literature around ‘cultural harm’, which they summarize thus: cultural
harm as harm to culture; cultural harm as harm by culture; and cultural harm as misrecognition (Boukli
and Copson 2020: 32).
Cultural harm as harm to culture is, they state, following Tombs (2019), ‘harm that arises through the
destruction or undermining of particular cultures or ways of being’ or, as he added, accustomed modes of
living and being. This harm can result from ‘acts such as the destruction or misuse of cultural artefacts or,
more subtly, through the undermining of particular communities’ (Tombs 2019: 32).
Harms of recognition
As we saw immediately above, Boukli and Copson include recognition harms in their extended definition
(typology) of cultural harms. Pemberton (2015) had already argued that some aspects of relational harms
follow from the impacts of social processes which misrepresent individuals, specifically those belonging to
communities which are demonized or seen as deviant. The consequent exclusion from social networks or
personal relationships often leads to daily and micro-level impacts—taking part in social activities,
inability to secure childcare and ensuring longer-term maintenance of human relationships which may
support one’s own self-actualization (2015). In essence, if social structures and surroundings work to limit
people’s ability to engage with or progress in society, then relational harm is present.
For us, the emphasis upon a peculiar form of relational and/or cultural harm highlights the usefulness of
including it in any typology, as a specific type of harm, harms of misrecognition. For Pemberton, such harms
arise when public identities are ‘imposed on people by others within society, and presented as “spoiled” or
“blemished” in one way or another, so that they are viewed as “other” and therefore distinct from
mainstream society’ (Pemberton 2015: 31), the outcome being that people’s ability to engage in said
society is reduced, distorted or relationally negatively affected.
These harms of misrecognition were defined by Nancy Fraser thus:
To be denied recognition—or to be ‘misrecognized’—is to suffer both a distortion of one’s

relation to one’s self and an injury to one’s identity … [It is] … to be denied the status of a full
partner in social interaction, as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of cultural value that
constitute one as comparatively unworthy of respect or esteem (Fraser 2000: 109–112).
Page 13 of 25
p. 513 ↵ In short, misrecognition is ‘institutionalized subordination’ ((Fraser 2000: 114), institutionalized

and systematic contempt or what Tyler has called social abjection, which results from ‘violent
exclusionary forces of sovereign power; those forces that strip people of their human dignity and
reproduce them as dehumanized waste, the disposable dregs and refuse of social life’ (Tyler 2015: 140). We
shall return to a consideration of mis/recognition below where we consider the ontological bases for social
harm, but here we are clear that misrecognition is a category of harm, a form which harm can take.
Autonomy harms
There is something about harm which relates intimately to blocked capacities, opportunities, the potential
for self-realization or actualization, and much of this is captured by what Pemberton first termed
autonomy harms.
As Canning notes, autonomy is ‘a facet central to liberty, the freedom to make plans or decisions for
oneself without sanction’ (2019: 43). For Pemberton, there are many harmful ways in which a person’s
capacity for autonomous action is undermined and self-actualization is frustrated or stalled (2015: 29).
The first of these is a capacity for understanding and learning, so that people can develop the relevant and
appropriate cognitive skills to communicate, critically evaluate and practise their skills (Feeley 2014). In
doing so, one is more likely to lead the life of one’s own choosing.
Leading on from this, self-actualization is determined by opportunities people have to engage in

meaningful and productive social activities (Pemberton 2015). Self-esteem and self-worth are often
dependent on these opportunities, and thus the reduction or dismantlement of social opportunity
negatively affects autonomy. Harms therefore result from role-deprivation and a lack of recognition or
reward. Importantly, control over one’s own circumstances and value are integral to human development
or emotional wellbeing.
Thus, autonomy harms are associated with relative and absolute poverty, lack of access to education,
employment or training, or precarious working.
Towards an Ontological Basis for Zemiology
It is plausible, then, to suggest a variety of forms which social harm can take, and any such typology opens
up a wide terrain upon which zemiologists can work. But Zemiology, if it is to be centred around a concept
of social harm, must provide an ontological basis for identifying such harm—that is, we must work toward
a coherent and convincing response to the question, ‘What makes Social Harm harmful’? Now in this
respect there remains, as we shall see, a great deal of work to be done. But this is not to deny that there are
useful contributions to such thinking and deliberation, and we wish to review some here, briefly.
For example, Lynne Copson (2011) has analysed the fundamental differences which exist between the
conceptualizations of harm within criminology, critical criminology and Zemiology, reflecting different
ideas and assumptions around issues of justice and liberty. Criminology, she argues, deploys a liberal
individualistic notion of harm as embraced by conventional jurisprudence. In contrast, Zemiology situates
Page 14 of 25
harm in the context of human needs. Thus, harm occurs when people are prevented by either the
p. 514 ↵ social structures or individual actions from meeting their needs (see Tifft and Sullivan 2001). Harm,
in this sense is linked to positive liberty in contrast to the negative liberties which law claims to protect
and to which all forms of criminology are inevitably drawn. Critical criminology’s notion of harm, she
suggests, falls somewhere between the two positions. While increasingly recognizing socially structured
harm, nevertheless, it continues to embrace individualistic notions of harms articulated in rights or
conventional jurisprudence.
On the distinction between social harm and Zemiology, Pemberton has sought to provide some clarity.
‘The existing literature’, he writes, ‘confusingly makes reference to both social harm and Zemiology, and
at times these terms have been used interchangeably’. This is, he continues,
more than an issue of semantics. Zemiology is preferable, insofar as a by-product of Beyond

criminology has been the co-option of the language of social harm into criminological discourse …
Thus, Zemiology would serve to demarcate those critical scholars whose interest lies ‘beyond
criminology’ from criminologists using the notion of social harm, to establish an alternative field
of study. Social harm therefore becomes the organising concept for Zemiology as a field of study.
When these distinctions are drawn, the emergent characteristics of Zemiology can be more clearly
articulated (Pemberton 2015, 6–7).
He goes on to note five such ‘emergent characteristics’. First, following Hillyard and Tombs (2004), he
notes that Zemiology seeks ‘to provide an alternative lens that captures the vicissitudes of contemporary
life’. Second, it requires a shift in emphasis from ‘individual level harms’ to those associated with states
and corporations; third is a recognition that most widespread social harms ‘are not caused by intentional
acts, but rather, result from the omission to act or societal indifference to suffering’; and, fourth, that such
harms are preventable, that is, products of social and economic organization. This leads him, finally, to
espouse for Zemiology a reformist commitment to identifying ‘less harmful forms of
capitalism’ (Pemberton 2015, 8).
This still begs the question, of course, of what is to be the basis for identifying a phenomenon as ‘harmful’
or a ‘social harm’, and thus falling within the legitimate ambit of Zemiology? For Pemberton, in his
original discussion of this question, the answer is to be found in a theory of human needs. Using Doyal and
Gough’s (1991) classic work, Pemberton (2007) and Pantazis and Pemberton (2009) argue that harm is
perpetuated when specified needs are not fulfilled. It is not clear, however, how invoking a theory of
‘needs’ gets potential zemiologists out of the ontological woods. However sympathetic one may be to
Doyal and Gough’s conceptualization of needs, it is hardly unproblematic. Indeed, one of the oft-raised
objections to any attempt to identify a theory of human need is that once this shifts from the most abstract
universal statements to the level of adding greater specificity to identifying such needs, then any such
exercise almost inevitably descends into relativism. This was one of the central topics of the celebrated
exchange between Kate Soper in response to Doyal and Gough’s formulation (Soper 1993; Doyal 1993), and
was also raised more recently by Lasslett (2010) in response to Pemberton’s (and others’) centring of a
theory of social harm or Zemiology around needs.
Page 15 of 25
Subsequently, Pemberton (2015) attempted to operationalize a needs approach to harm (see also Copson
2011). While in so doing he provides insightful and persuasive analyses of the performance of a number of
selected states and regimes in relation to a range of harms, the theoretical work of grounding the latter in
the context of needs remains rather over-looked. There is no doubt that he advances our empirical
understanding of the distribution of social harm considerably, while the text demonstrates the potential of
p. 515 a paradigm within which social harm is central but which is neither linked ↵ to, nor reliant upon, law,
jurisprudence or some other legal framework. But at the same time his work underscores the fact that
Zemiology was very much in its infancy, a work in progress at best (Tombs 2015).
Alongside Pemberton’s empirical representations of harm through needs there have been further
discussions about the ontological basis of ‘social harm’. Yar, for example, draws upon the critical theory of
the Frankfurt School and, in particular, Honneth’s critical theory of recognition, within which self-
realization is viewed as an inter-subjective endeavour, dependent upon self-esteem as a result of mutual
recognition of each other’s autonomy, freedom and human value—all generating a vision of a just society
(Yar 2012: 57). In her empirical research on border harms and establishment of Border Zemiology (2017;
2018; 2019), Canning expanded on these ideas to emphasize the need to draw on sociological analyses of
structural and institutional violence at macro, meso and micro levels. These, she argues, facilitate the
uncovering of mechanisms of control which deliberately inflict invisible forms of harm, harm which can
subsequently be directly correlated with state sanctioned actions, policies and even laws (See Bhatia 2020).
Francesca Soliman, too, argues that a theory of recognition can ‘give coherence to the concept of social
harm,’ (Soliman 2019: 11) but seeks to transcend this. This is necessary, she argues, because recognition
both posits an atomized individual and at the same time an individual who is only constructed socially. In
other words, there is a problem with both the presence and the absence of a certain kind of ‘social’. A
critical, analytical engagement with some contemporary sociological theorizing leads Soliman to the
conclusion that a critical Zemiology ‘revolves around a political view of the social world, and the
progressive struggle to remove obstacles to human realization’ (Soliman 2019: 14). This then equates the
question of social harm with those aspects of social life which hamper the twin and mutually reinforcing
emergence of an ideal state and human realization. And in terms of what this ideal state within which
human realization is possible looks like, Soliman turns to Nancy Fraser’s work on misrecognition. So what
we had earlier identified as ‘merely’ one type or form of social harm is here identified as the very essence of
what makes social harm harmful. Soliman in particular highlights Fraser’s understanding of
misrecognition as a fundamental dimension of social injustice: ‘distributive injustice’, or maldistribution.
She argues, ‘Misrecognition and maldistribution, while distinct, are closely linked: both need to be
included in a vision of justice, as addressing one will not ameliorate the other. The definition of social
harm must therefore include both dimensions’ (Soliman 2019: 16). This implies, therefore, that struggles
for recognition must simultaneously be—and are only progressive alongside—struggles for economic
justice. The good—least harmful—society is, inter alia, one of the greatest economic justice.
As productive as the idea is, we remain to be convinced that mis-recognition is an appropriately exhaustive
and rigorous ontological basis for social harm. (Hillyard and Tombs 2017). Yet it is worth further
exploration, while the ontology of harm is clearly not settled. This work on the ontological bases for social
harm is required, not least because, as recently observed, it is necessary to avoid positing ‘harms’ as a set
Page 16 of 25
of relativist and subjective observations, absent clear definitions, boundaries or a recognition of the
structural connections between them. For example, Rayman has questioned ‘emotivist’ interpretations of
harm, asking, ‘How do we avoid the tendency for Zemiology to become a relativistic list and descriptive
account of things we don’t like very much?’ (2021: 121). This is a question we—and likely many other
Zemiologists—agree raises points for consideration: how do we prevent ‘harm’ from being diluted to
personal dislikes in the neoliberal era?
The answer to this is quite simple: harm is a product of unjust, complex economic, political and social
p. 516 relationships, frequently expressed as global inequalities. Indeed, we write ↵ as inequalities within and
between nations increase, not least as indicated by the current grotesque inequalities in access to vaccines
as ‘intellectual property’ and associated patents are protected by ‘Big Pharma’ and their state allies, while
the COVID-19 pandemic remains an unfolding crisis—there is no ‘post-Covid’ of which to speak. Despite
the crass mantra that Covid doesn’t discriminate, this is patently and demonstrably untrue—both intra-
and inter-nationally responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have worked assiduously to exacerbate existing
inequalities (Sim and Tombs 2021). Meanwhile, the severity of a global virus may fade into relative
insignificance, or indeed be overlain by, the manifestations of armed conflict (we write as millions of
Ukrainians are being displaced by war), or the increasingly severe manifestations of climate catastrophe as
these shift from present realities not just across South East Asia or the Sahel, but become stark presences
in the hitherto relatively comfortable heartlands of the Global North. In these contexts, zemiological
analyses and responses become ever-more pressing. They must be based upon an understanding that
social harm, however it is recognized ontologically, is a product of unequal and unjust economic and social
arrangements generated, maintained and indeed experienced at micro, meso and macro levels,
It is clear then, even on the basis of this brief review, that while there is no consensus on the essence of
social harm, and in this sense there remains some conceptual work to be done, there are some emerging
observations to be made on the concept of social harm which would sit as the central focus of a discipline
of Zemiology:
There is some agreement that social harm is related to the denial of human needs, notwithstanding
significant contestation remaining over how these needs, or the harmful denial of them, can be
recognized;
Human beings have the capacities towards flourishing, self-actualization and self-realization, so
that harm is identified as the absence or stunting of such intrinsic aspirations;
For self-actualization and human flourishing to prevail requires a good society, characterized by
significant economic, cultural and social justice—this includes but is not defined by nor limited to
mutual recognition;
This good society is one which must be envisioned, imagined, and brought into being by men and
women pursuing shared goals through social practices across a variety of social fields and
institutions;
However it is precisely fashioned, that good society certainly must transcend forms of liberalism and
capitalism, based upon rights, negative liberties, and the proliferation of exchange values.
Page 17 of 25
Only a good society characterized by economic, cultural, and social justice can provide the basis for
eliminating social harm.
In seeking to mark out the nature, commitments and parameters of that discipline we have sought to
clarify the concept of social harm which is at its centre—its dimensions, its dynamic forms and its
essential elements, via both a provisional typology and an ontology of harm. It goes without saying that all
of this work is unfinished, perhaps necessarily so. Indeed, as Goyes has argued, ‘To adopt a harm
perspective is to accept that it is impossible to enumerate exhaustively all the situations that impair the
health of humans, non-humans and the eco-system’ (Goyes 2019: 514). On this, we certainly agree, and
encourage others to move the discipline forward in ways which may not only expose and highlight harms,
but to find radical solutions, as well as radical ways to mitigate their existence in the first place.
p. 517 Conclusion
We began this chapter by identifying some of the motivations which led us to propose both a social harm
perspective and a discipline of Zemiology as alternatives to the discipline of criminology. In so doing, we
have never wished, and do not wish, to deny that criminology has been eclectic, and is perhaps
increasingly so, nor that criminology has produced theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical
insight, nor that the work of criminologists has certainly been associated with progressive social change.
What we have sought to argue, however, for reasons we have set out here, is that there are necessary
limitations on the extent to which criminology can be progressive. Ultimately, criminology is tied to and
limited by necessary relationships to crime, criminal justice, and criminalization, defined in relation to
power, law, and state, constituting a disciplinary regime of power-knowledge which is ultimately
conservative. This includes its inherent etymological, discursive and linguistic foundations: for as long as
the structural basis of criminology derives from the Latin crimen for crime, all affiliated terms are tied to
the power dynamics of state defined transgressions of law.
As this chapter demonstrates through emerging research and scholarship, there is enormous scope for the
development of Zemiology empirically, conceptually, methodologically—and politically. In other words,
Zemiology is not simply about revealing harm as a result of state, corporate or pro-capitalist, racialized,
gendered practices, processes, institutions and sentiments—its objective in exposing harm is challenging
and eradicating it, and thereby furthering social justice. This is why the question of whether ‘there is any
place for certain brands of conservatism’ (Raymen 2021: 120) in Zemiology can only be answered
negatively, notwithstanding the fact that as academics we work in institutions which are inherently
conservative and are part of, by definition, wider, essentially conservative, social orders. So Zemiology is
not immune from those contexts but it is imperative that we seek to recognize them and their effects, and
to challenge them.
If criminology began its life in the service of the state, Zemiology has emerged as a disciplinary focus
committed to challenging state power, and those agents and institutions which bolster and are supported
by that power. From this commitment, a key corollary is that Zemiology must be a participative and co-
operative activity, operating beyond academic borders—Zemiology, we would argue, only makes sense as
an activist as well as an academic activity. In the words of Biko Agozino, ‘Racist-imperialist-patriarchal
oppression is real’ and must be studied with ‘the commitment to end it’. So, we cannot engage in ‘critical
Page 18 of 25
thinking without the dual emphasis on activism. Let us talk the talk and walk the walk in opposition to all
systems of oppression and in favour of liberation’ (Agozino 2021: 29). Zemiology will certainly not be the
singular approach to challenging the endemic nature of such harms, but as it expands it will, at least, offer
a perspective which moves this challenge forward.

Hillyard et al.’s Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously (2004) explores the potential of a new discipline—
Zemiology—outside of criminology and presents a number of case studies using a social harm perspective.
From Social Harm to Zemiology (2021), by Victoria Canning and Steve Tombs and with a Preface by Paddy Hillyard,
outlines key developments in understanding social harm by setting out its historical foundations and the discussions
which have proliferated since.
p. 518 ↵ In the first book-length study using a social harm perspective, Pemberton’s, Harmful Societies (2015) provides a
detailed analysis of the concept of social harm and demonstrates powerfully how harm is a feature of all existing
varieties of capitalism. Presser’s Why We Harm (2013) presents a general theory of harm based on four case studies—
genocide, meat eating, intimate partner violence, and penal harm. Other work which coheres with a zemiological
perspective are Freudenberg’s Lethal but Legal (2014), which exposes the way the food, tobacco, alcohol,
pharmaceutical, gun, and auto industries ignore public health in their pursuit of profit and thereby create widespread
harm, and the edited collection by Passas and Goodwin, It’s Legal but it ain’t Right: Harmful Social Consequences of
Legal Industries (2004).
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Vegh Weis, V. (2018), Marxism and Criminology. A History of Criminal Selectivity, Chicago: Haymarket Books.
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Wagg, S. and Pollock, A.M. (2021), The Palgrave Handbook of Sport, Politics and Harm, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Walters, R. (2018), ‘Climate Change Denial: Making Ignorance Great Again’, in A. Barton, and H. Davis (eds), Ignorance,
Power and Harm: Agnotology and the Criminological Imagination, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
White, R. (2018), Climate Change Criminology, Bristol: Bristol University Press.
Whitfield, D. (2006), ‘A Typology of Privatisation and Marketisation’, Tralee: European Services Strategy Unit.
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Notes
1
On the conference, see http://www.radstats.org.uk/no070/conference2.htm <http://www.radstats.org.uk/no070/
conference2.htm>, accessed 16 December 2016.
2
This excludes deaths where COVID-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.
3
The Hazards Campaign ‘supports those organising and campaigning for justice and safety at work’; http://
www.hazardscampaign.org.uk/?page_id=16 <http://www.hazardscampaign.org.uk/?page_id=16>, accessed 16
December 2016.
4
This discussion was developed in Canning and Tombs 2021, which itself drew upon existing typologies of harm. (see
Hillyard and Tombs 2004, 2017, Tombs 2019).
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Page 25 of 25
24. Green criminology

p. 521 24. Green criminology

Avi Brisman and Nigel South
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0024
Abstract
Criminology must maintain relevance in a changing world and engage with new challenges. Perhaps pre-eminent among
those facing the planet today are threats to the natural environment and, by extension, to human health and rights and to
other species. A green criminology has emerged as a (now well-established) criminological perspective that addresses a wide
range of crimes, harms and offences related to the environment and environmental victims. This chapter provides a review of
green criminological work on climate change, consumption and waste, state-corporate and organized crimes, animal abuse,
and wildlife trafficking. It also considers the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches to regulation, enforcement and
control.
Keywords: climate change, e-waste, ecocide, environmental crime/environmental harm, food crime, green criminology,
green cultural criminology, organized crime, poaching/wildlife trafficking, state-corporate crime
Introduction
For centuries, the planet, humanity and other species have been experiencing what Nixon (2011: 2) calls
‘slow violence’—incremental, attritional ‘delayed destruction … dispersed across time and space’. Until
recently, it seems, this was barely noticed. While awareness regarding threats to Earth’s ecosystems has
now increased enormously, this still sits uncomfortably with a human inclination to look the other way,
deny responsibility, and equivocate about whether anything needs to be done. As Klein (2014: 3) puts it, at
this ‘jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face …
we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place’—and engaging in ‘cognitive
dissonance’ on a planetary scale. Criminology has much to contribute to our understanding of these crises
and ways of addressing environmental harms, and this is reflected in a growing body of literature.
Page 1 of 29
The development of ‘green criminology’ has raised new questions, introduced new subject matter, and led
to innovation in theory and method within our wider discipline. Most importantly, perhaps, it asks: How
can we capture the significance of actions that cause harm yet are not criminal? How do we identify who or
what generates (environmental) harm? Why does this harm occur? What is the depth and extent of this
harm? How do we respond to this harm?
Environmental harms can be difficult to apprehend in a traditional criminological framework, as

conceptions of ‘harm’ and definitions of ‘crime’ often do not correspond or overlap (South 2014; White
2003; see also Canning et al., this volume). Yet, as Lynch and colleagues (2013: 998) point out, ‘green harm
and crime are more widespread, have more victims and produce more damage than crimes that “occur on
the streets” ’; documenting such harm provides evidence of the ‘substantively significant social and
economic consequences’ that ‘therefore deserve serious study within criminology’.
It has been acknowledged that the development of an explicitly ‘green’ perspective in criminology has
built upon past work (Beirne and South 2007; Lynch 1990; South 1998; South and Beirne 2006; White
2009) and, importantly, that ‘Northern’ English-language criminology’s neglect of some pioneering
research reflects a form of epistemological blindness and amnesia (Rodríguez Goyes and South 2017),
which new ‘Southern’ perspectives have begun to address (Carrington et al. 2016, 2019; Rodríguez Goyes et
al. 2021). At the same time, although green criminology is now in (at least) its fourth decade, it is still
p. 522 evolving, offering a flexible and inclusive framework orientated toward ↵ particular problems (harms,
offences, and crimes related to the environment, different species, and the planet), often borrowing from
and seeking connections with other disciplines. In sum, a green perspective is an important development
because it enables criminology to examine crimes and harms that are often overlooked or excluded from
its more traditional concerns and to illustrate how significant, wide-ranging and widespread they are.
This chapter begins by exploring the development of this green perspective and by reviewing some of the
theoretical influences that have led to innovative ways of thinking about environmental issues of relevance
to criminology. This background serves as an introduction to discussions of some key terms, typologies,
and methodological issues. This is followed by examples of different forms of environmental crime and
harm: (1) climate change; (2) economy, consumption, and waste (further subdivided into state-corporate
crime, organized crime, food crimes, and e-waste); (3) nonhuman animal abuse; and (4) poaching,
trafficking, and trading.The next part examines responses to environmental crime and harm, including the
articulation of protest, resistance, and calls for environmental justice, as well as the development of an
environmental victimology. This is followed by an overview of three areas of work that illustrate different
aspects of the global relevance of a green criminology: (1) political economy and the treadmill of
production; (2) linkages between environment and conflict; and (3) regulation, enforcement and prospects
for an international law against ecocide. Overall, we argue that green criminology can enhance and enrich
mainstream criminology by emphasizing the ways in which both ordinary and extra-ordinary forms of
behaviour are contributing to climate change, species extinction, harms to human health, and many other
damaging impacts on our ‘shared’ but ‘contested’ planet (Benton 1998; South 2016).
Page 2 of 29
Terminology and Typologies
As indicated above, criminological regard for the causes and consequences of—and possible responses to—
environmental degradation is relatively new, although there are many past studies that have examined
aspects of environmental damage, crime, and victimization (Jarrell et al. 2013; Lynch et al. 2017; South
1998). The sociology of deviance provides many descriptions of activities, such as hunting and poaching,
that may be everyday behaviours in the lives of some, socially deviant in the eyes of others, or actually
illegal but socially approved of or ignored by relevant authorities (Brisman 2015). In terms of the
theoretical shaping of a green agenda, the principles of ‘new deviancy theories’ of the 1960s and 1970s,
concerned with labelling, stigmatization, and sensitivity to the plight of the powerless and voiceless, have
informed thinking about speciesism, the treatment of Indigenous peoples, and environmental injustice.
Concurrently, Marxist and critical criminological analyses of crimes of the powerful and the bias of
dominant frameworks of law have influenced studies of environmental exploitation and injustice. In
addition, feminist-inspired critiques of masculinity and violence, including the victimization of women,
have connected with concerns about the violation of the environment and of other species (Gaarder 2011,
2013; Lane 1998; Nurse 2020b; Sollund 2020; Wonders and Danner 2015). Green criminological work also
engages with calls for respect, conflict mediation, and reconciliation (Pepinsky and Quinney 1991;
McClanahan and Brisman 2015), and an acknowledgment of the intertwining of human rights with
p. 523 environmental rights is central ↵ (Brisman 2014a; South and Brisman 2013a; Johnson et al. 2016). This
recognition has meant that green criminology has been particularly well-placed to engage with ‘Southern’
criminologies and the need to ensure the criminological compass does not always ‘point
north’ (Carrington et al. 2016, 2018, 2019; Carrabine et al. 2020a; Rodríguez Goyes 2019; Rodríguez Goyes
and South 2021). Before turning to such developments, a note on definitions is in order.
Terminology
Although this chapter uses the term, ‘green criminology’, there is no universal agreement on the
appropriate name for this sub-field or perspective, and there has been some degee of debate about its
merits (Halsey 2004; Lynch and Stretesky 2003). The term was first used by Lynch (1990) in an essay, ‘The
Greening of Criminology’, which proposed its scope and aims in a way that can still stand as both an
agenda and a ‘manifesto’ statement—a commitment to creating a ‘humanistic society’ based on
environmentalism and a radical (Marxian) framework. Although its original place of publication—a
newsletter of the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Critical Criminology—meant it did not
reach a wide audience, once ‘rediscovered’, it proved highly influential. Pečar (1981) put forward an even
earlier statement about environmentally damaging forms of criminality in Slovenia and the role of
criminology and sciences related to this (Eman, Meško, and Fields 2009), but with no English-language
translation, Pečar’s article made no international impact. Other expressions of criminological interest in
environmental problems can be found in the international literature from the 1970s to the 1990s
(Rodríguez Goyes and South 2017), including a conference on ‘La délinquance écologique’ in France in
1979 (Andre 1980). Indeed, given developments in the natural sciences, and in political attention to, and
activism regarding, environmental and conservation matters, some emergence of explicit green interests
Page 3 of 29
within criminology was inevitable, with researchers and teachers, in different ways and in various places,
expressing parallel concerns (see, e.g., Clifford 1998; Edwards et al. 1996; Halsey and White 1998; Koser
Wilson 1999; Lynch and Stretesky 2001, 2003; Sollund 2008; South 1998; Walters 2004, 2006).
Arguably, the term, ‘environmental criminology,’ should be reclaimed from what might more properly be
called ‘place-based criminology’ (White 2008; see Bottoms (2012) on acknowledgement of this point).
Other proposed terminology has included White’s (2011) notion of an ‘eco-global criminology,’ while
Walters (2010a) has suggested ‘eco-crime’ as helpful for encapsulating ‘existing legal definitions of
environmental crime, as well as sociological analyses of those environmental harms not necessarily
specified by law.’ Differing orientations include ‘conservation criminology’ (Gibbs et al. 2010a) to describe
an approach that integrates criminology, criminal justice, conservation and risk-management (see also
Herbig and Joubert 2006). Overall, however, the term ‘green criminology’, most usefully thought of as a
‘perspective’ or ‘umbrella’ category, has been used to describe the study of ecological, environmental, or
green crime or harm, and related matters of speciesism and environmental (in)justice.
To some extent, the terminology does not matter greatly. It is simply descriptive of research and debate
concerning actions and processes that are destroying our shared environment. Criminology, every once in
a while, expands its conceptions of crime, deviance, and harm, driven by theory and events (Zahn 1999). In
the case of green trends in criminology, this occurred slowly in different places from the late 1970s to the
early 1990s and subsequently expanded (Rodríguez Goyes and South 2017). The term or concept is useful,
p. 524 but it is only a signal, symbol, or expression regarding a perspective ↵ or orientation toward certain
central concerns. It might well be called something else. What matters (now more than ever) is the subject.
Typologies
Whether ‘green criminology’ constitutes a ‘theory’ depends largely on how one conceptualizes the term
‘theory’ (Brisman 2014b). South (1998) proposed the idea of a green perspective rather than ‘theory’ in the
same way that Plummer (1979: 90) had responded to critiques of labelling ‘theories’, with the contention
that, in fact, such concept categories ‘should not be equated with a theory or a proposition but should be
seen as a perspective … [able to] harbour several diverse theoretical positions’. This argument should apply
to the idea of a ‘green’ conceptual category for use within criminology and, indeed, the idea of green
criminology as a perspective or orientation has proven uncontroversial. Arguably, the treatment and
acceptance of green criminology as a ‘perspective’ has contributed to its growth, allowing for dialogue and
collaboration across various theoretical positions and schools.
Several typologies present ways of thinking about such crimes and harms. These categorizations identify
and organize clusters of issues and problems in ways that are useful for research, policy, and
methodological purposes.
One typology is based on a distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ green crimes (Carrabine et al.
2020b). This is a simple but suggestive way of differentiating clusters of harms and crimes by classifying
some as resulting directly from the destruction and degradation of the Earth’s resources (‘primary’), and
Page 4 of 29
others as those crimes or harms that are symbiotic with or dependent upon such destruction and efforts
made to regulate or prevent it (‘secondary’). Table 24.1 shows what four possible sets of ‘primary’ green
crimes and harms might be.
Table 24.1 ‘Primary’ green crimes and harms
1. Crimes/harms of the air (and beyond—pollution, space junk) 2. Crimes/harms of the land (deforestation, land-theft)
3. Crimes/harms against nonhuman species 4. Crimes/harms of water
‘Secondary’ (or symbiotic) green harms and crimes can arise from the exploitation of conditions that
follow environmental damage or crisis (e.g., illegal markets for food, medicine, water) and/or from the
violation of rules that attempt to regulate environmental harm and to respond to disaster. These can
include numerous major and minor practices, whereby states violate their own regulations (either by
commission or omission) and, in so doing, contribute to environmental harms. Potter (2014: 11) has taken
this scheme of categorization further to identify what—‘in the spirit of consistency’—he calls ‘tertiary
green crimes’, defined as those ‘committed by environmental victims or as a result of environmental
victimization … [e.g.] committed as a deliberate or direct response to environmental harm … [or]
exacerbated by the experience of environmental victimisation.’ These might include crimes committed by
those forced to migrate in response to environmental harms (e.g., Brisman et al. 2020; Hall and Farrall
2013), increasing crime rates as environmental harm and changing environments impact social and
economic conditions that relate to crime (Agnew 2012), and crimes relating to exposure to environmental
pollutants, such as lead or other heavy metals, which can have behavioural effects (e.g., aggression,
learning difficulties) that some criminological theories posit as causes of crime (Lynch and Stretesky
2014).
p. 525 ↵ White (2008: 98–9) has developed a threefold typology of ‘brown’ , ‘green’ , and ‘white’ issues:
‘brown’ issues tend to be defined in terms of urban life and pollution—air and water pollution, disposal of
toxic/hazardous waste, oil spills, pesticides; ‘green’ issues refer to conservation matters and ‘wilderness’
areas, including biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, invasive species introduced via human transport,
logging practices; and ‘white’ issues, such as the impact of new technologies and various laboratory
practices (e.g., animal testing and experimentation, cloning). (For discussion of other typologies, see
South et al. 2013.)
In the next part, we note some of the methods and issues relevant to investigation of this wide variety of
topics.
Methodological Issues
As with any social scientific inquiry, the methodology that a criminologist studying environmental crime
and harm employs—and the method or technique used to gather and analyse the research data—all depend
on the types of questions and issues to be explored (White and Heckenberg 2014: 79).
Page 5 of 29
A green criminological study is usually concerned with an actual or anticipated environmental crime,
disaster, or harm, or a pattern and practice of individual- and group-level acts, behaviours, customs, and
omissions degrading to, or destructive of, ecosystems and biotic life. Green criminologists employ a
variety of research designs to collect their data, including surveys, observation, experiments (although
this is uncommon), and secondary analysis of existing sources (Lynch and Stretesky 2001; White and
Heckenberg 2014). Scientific data, whether relating to global climate change or derived from forensic
analysis of toxic chemical spillage, are important and, with due regard to methodological cautions about
the limits and construction of such data, they are as valuable for critical as for positivist criminologies. As
Lynch and Stretesky (2014: 68) argue, ‘drawing on the scientific knowledge base of … [natural sciences
concerned with environmental matters] to enhance the examination of green crime and justice issues … is
important because it illustrates the extent to which green criminology can be linked to scientific values and
principles’.
Not all research questions and issues of interest yield readily accessible or easily observable data, of course.
In many cases, environmental crimes or harms are ‘invisible’ (Brisman 2014c; Wyatt 2014) and present
challenges related to access, examination, health and safety. The task of researching sensitive and/or
hidden forms of harm, which may, for example, be so legal and pervasive as to be overlooked, or illegal and
therefore likely to be clandestine, may require adoption of particular research methods. Ethnographic and
other qualitative methods are chosen most frequently in such cases. These can generate rich and deep
information, although the task of analysis, interpretation, and representation is then not without its own
challenges. Immersion in the field can generate numerous well-known methodological and ethical
dilemmas, such as when researchers are given the ‘choice’ between violating promises of confidentiality to
research participants or imprisonment for ‘contempt of court’ for refusing to cooperate with the
authorities (see, e.g., Scarce 1994). Qualitative approaches can include visual analysis (Natali 2010), in-
depth ethnography (Cianchi 2015; Kane 2012) and grounded theory as used in human ecology (Wilding
2012). Innovative methods combining content analysis and techniques of data-scraping from the web or
p. 526 socal media sources are ↵ also developing, as in the case study of the protest against a gas pipeline in
Italy by Di Ronco and colleagues (2018). A serious criticism, however, has been an apparent lack of
quantitative studies in green criminology (Lynch et al. 2017), although the field is responding. For
example, a collection edited by Lynch and Pires (2019) illustrates how various forms of data—on seizures,
victimization or geographic distribution of offences—can be evaluated and add to the field. In addition,
case studies based on survey questionnaire data, such as those by Tabar and colleagues (2022) and
Maxwell and Maxwell (2022), enable empirical testing of hypotheses and theories—in the first case,
reporting on polluting behaviours in rural Iran and discussing them in relation to techniques of
neutralization, religiosity and cultural context, and, in the second, using survey methods and the idea of
procedural justice, to explore citizen responses to environmental regulation mechanisms in the
Phillipines.
We turn now to a consideration of some of the different types of environmental crime and harm that green
criminologists study.
Page 6 of 29
Types of Environmental Crime and Harm
The environmental crimes and harms perpetrated by humans, individually and collectively, whether out of
necessity, hubris, greed, or simply as part of everyday life, are numerous in kind and far-reaching in
impact. Green criminology has sought to expose and analyze many of these. Here, it is helpful to highlight
some of the more common subjects and topics: (1) climate change; (2) economy, consumption, food, and
waste; (3) nonhuman animal abuse; and (4) poaching, trafficking, and trading.
Climate change
Climate change has become a focus of much scholarly attention, and this extends to interest and analysis
from green criminology (Brisman and South 2015b; Farrall et al. 2012; Kramer 2020; Kramer and Bradshaw
2020; White 2012, 2018). Much of this points to the international and domestic inequalities that will follow
(Brisman, South, and Walters 2020), as wealthy consumer societies contribute disproportionately to a
problem that will impose particularly high social and economic burdens on already poor nations. A number
of criminologists have suggested that climate change will also stimulate a number of deeply criminogenic
forces (South 2012). For example, whereas Agnew (2012) applies micro- and mezzo-level criminological
theories, such as strain and social control, to examine the relationship of climate change and crime,
Kramer (2020) argues for the conceptualization of climate change as macro-level state-corporate crime.
In other words, while the focus of Agnew (2012) is on how climate change will create ‘new’ reasons for
individuals to commit crime(s)—or will exacerbate ‘old’ ones (e.g., strains and stressors)—Kramer (2020)
contends that climate change denial and regulatory failure constitute state-corporate crime.
Economy, consumption, and waste

Current economic systems and processes facilitate or otherwise contribute to environmental harm. Here, it
is useful to subdivide green criminological research into four categories: (a) state-corporate crime; (b)
organized crime; (c) food crimes; and (d) e-waste.
p. 527 State-corporate crime

As noted above, green criminology is concerned with the perpetrators, patterns, practices, and processes
of environmental harm. States and corporations have been particularly blameworthy, and green
criminologists have illuminated a range of their acts and omissions that have resulted in ecological
degradation and environmental harm and disaster. For example, Lynch and colleagues (2002) present a
definition and examples of ‘toxic crime’ caused by corporations, while White (2002) attributes regulatory
limitations and environmental harm to the needs of capitalist political economy. In many ways,
environmental crimes and harms are associated with ‘crimes of the economy’ but sensitivity to socio-
cultural context is also vital (Deb 2020; Faroque and South 2022a; Mao et al. 2020; Ruggiero and South
2010, 2013a, 2013b).
Page 7 of 29
Organized crime
The involvement of organized crime reaches into many aspects of public services, from waste disposal to
building construction and maintenance, often resulting in corruption and pollution (Sergi and South
2016). Ruggiero and South (2010b) have described such illegal services as ‘dirty collar crime’, and Walters
(2013: 281) observes that this kind of criminal enterprise has flourished as a result of ‘lax implementation
and enforcement’ of rules and law. Where there is a legal market, there is often an illegal one, and various
commentators have explored the role of organized crime in waste disposal. A classic study by Szasz (1986)
investigated relationships between legal industries that produce toxic waste and organized crime
enterprises that offer illegal disposal, arguing that corporate actors benefit, knowingly or otherwise, from
their relationships with organized crime, refuting common claims of ‘ignorance’ and ‘powerlessness’.
Ruggiero and South (2010) examined the Naples garbage crisis of summer 2008 and described the
opportunities found by both corporate and criminal entrepreneurs when civil mechanisms and consumer
society failed to manage waste.
Food crimes
Like air and water, food is essential for life and, like other precious goods, has value in illegal, as well as
legal, markets. The ways in which food is grown, manufactured, processed, and produced, as well as
marketed and sold, attract different types of crime and harmful activity, such as food fraud, food
poisoning, violations of food labelling laws, illegal trade and pricing practices, food labour exploitation,
and financial crime (Croall 2007, 2013; Rizzuti 2020, 2021; Tourangeau and Fitzgerald 2020). Walters
(2004, 2006, 2011) employs case-study approaches, examining the social, economic, and ecological risks
of genetically modified foods and considering issues of potential exploitation of the developing world
relating to genetic modification, as well as monopolies within the biotechnology industries, state-
corporate collusion in food market control schemes, and the potential harms stemming from corporate
control of food. Similar themes, including that of biopiracy, are discussed in a case study of laws governing
the use of seeds in Colombia (Rodríguez Goyes 2020; Rodríguez Goyes and South 2016). Criminological
dimensions of food and agriculture, as well as the intersection of rural and green criminologies, are
explored in work by Donnermeyer (2016), among others, and there has been belated attention paid to
crimes at sea related to fishing practices and harms to the marine environment—a new sub-area of ‘blue
criminology’ (Bueger and Edmunds 2020; García Ruiz et al. 2020).
p. 528 E-waste
Almost 50 years ago, De Bell (1970: 153) observed that ‘[t]he production, use and disposal of
technologically sophisticated gadgets is a big part of our ecological problem’. While human lives and
livelihoods have continued to be enhanced in many ways through various electronic technologies, it has
become very clear that the disposal of these nondurable electronic goods presents considerable challenges
and can generate serious environmental harms. Gibbs and colleagues (2010b) consider white-collar crimes
stemming from the global trade in electronic waste disposal and argue for the development of responsive
regulation, including prevention, third-party- and self-regulation, and the potential for strong state
intervention. Van Erp and Huisman (2010) explore the idea of ‘smart’ regulation and examine recycling
Page 8 of 29
markets, while Bisschop (2012, 2015) explores the transnational disposal of by-products of consumer
waste in European markets and the legality of e-waste disposal in different jurisdictions. In this respect, a
major development of the past few decades has involved not simply removing and relocating waste from
the Global North to the Global South to dump there as worthless disposables, but now relocating it as
resource-rich disposables to be de-manufactured and recycled (South 2015). While recycling is obviously
‘good,’ ‘de-manufacturing’ means that paradoxical problems arise. Electronic goods do not really need to
be disposed of and replaced so rapidly, new ones do not really have to be produced and marketed with such
urgency and intensity. Importantly, the environmentally positive strategy of recycling should not hide the
exploitation of low-paid workers in China and India, employed in recycling processes that release
hazardous chemicals from e-waste, polluting air and land, and affecting the health of workers and
communities, with links to serious diseases, including cancer (Brisman and South 2017). The ‘green
technology’ revolution is not beneficial to everyone on an equal basis and it is also driving new extractive
industries that threaten ecosystems, as in the case of deep-sea mining. For example, Bedford and
colleagues (2022) examine these developments and argue that ‘planned obsolescence’ and corporate
obstruction of the ‘right to repair’—and thus reuse of—electronic goods are profligate and
environmentally damaging when they require constant cycles of consumption, extractivism and waste.
Nonhuman animal abuse

Criminology tends to be anthropocentric in its approach and orientation and one vitally important theme
in the development of a green perspective has been the call for greater awareness of harms and criminal
acts committed against nonhuman species. This effort has been led by Beirne (1995, 1997, 1999, 2009),
Sollund (2008, 2019, 2020), and others (e.g., Maher et al. 2017), who have attempted to highlight and
advance the concept of ‘speciesism’ to describe human devaluation and prejudicial treatment of
nonhuman species, as well as human perception of nonhuman animals as less worthy of attention,
compassion, or justice. Beirne (2014:55) has proposed the term, ‘theriocide,’ to describe ‘diverse human
actions that cause the deaths of animals’. This connects to, for example, established criminological
concerns with crimes, harms and aggression against the powerless (Nurse 2013); with gender and feminist
politics of social movements which have informed campaigns for animal rights (Gaarder 2011, 2013); and
with crimes of trafficking in women, children, and animals (Sollund 2020). Linkages between organized
crime and animals have been examined in various studies concerning gambling on animals (Nurse 2021;
Reueselaars and Bovenkerk 2021; Siegal and van Uhm 2021), puppy breeding (Maher and Wyatt 2021), and
the illegal wildlife trade (Martínez and Alonso 2021; van Uhm and Wong 2021), which we explore below.
p. 529 Poaching, trafficking, and trading

While poaching has long been a subject of study in criminology and the sociology of deviance, the
emphasis has usually been on it as a form of rule-breaking in the context of hunting and other leisure
activities, rather than in terms of conservation or environmental concerns (Lemieux 2014; Moreto 2018).
In law enforcement, as Moreto and colleagues (2015: 360) explain, ‘[w]ildlife offences are generally
considered low priority when compared to other crimes’. Until recently, the international trade in wildlife
as ‘live bodies’ or as harvested ‘parts and products’ was largely overlooked. As the scope, extent, and
Page 9 of 29
geographical range of illegal trade in wildlife has grown and expanded, however—and as links between
wildlife trafficking and security issues have given rise to political concern—criminological attention has
increased (e.g., Sollund 2019; Wyatt 2022). This attention has now also extended to the illegal trade in
plants (Lavorgna and Sajeva 2021; Margulies et al. 2019) and illegal fishing and poaching of rare marine
species (García Ruiz et al. 2020). Importantly, legal exploitation may take the form of corporate
commercialization of the products of nature, whereby genetic and other properties of plants and animals
are patented without compensation to Indigenous peoples living on the lands of origin—what has been
referred to as ‘biopiracy’ by critics (Rodríguez Goyes and South 2019a).
Criminologists have also explored responses, such as market-reduction regulatory schemes to curb illicit
trading in wildlife, the effect of international ivory bans on elephant poaching in Africa, and the principles
of situational crime prevention (Lemieux and Clarke 2009; Schneider 2008; Wellsmith 2010). Significant
contributions to the study of wildlife trafficking have been made by Sollund (2019, 2020), Nurse (2015;
Nurse and Wyatt 2020) and Wyatt (2012, 2022), examining similarities and differences in markets (e.g.,
South and Wyatt 2011; van Uhm et al. 2021), as well as the limitations of international treaties, such as the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which is
designed to be an enabler of trade, based on sustainability, rather than a prohibitory mechanism
(Rodríguez Goyes and Sollund 2016; Wyatt 2021). The convergence of markets for various goods, mixing
the illegal and legal—most notably drugs and wildlife—has also been noted (van Uhm and Nijman 2022;
van Uhm et al. 2021), and this inevitably involves international organized criminality. It also has
necessitated a range of responses, to which the chapter now turns.
Responses to Environmental Harm
Important research has addressed the limitations of criminal justice responses to environmental crimes.
Not all of the contributors to this literature would characterize themselves as ‘green criminologists’, but
they would recognize shared interests and commitments (Brisman and South 2015a, 2018; White and
Graham 2015). In one such early contribution, de Prez (2000) highlighted the ways in which prosecution of
environmental crimes may be trivialized by various courtroom factors, and considered the creation of
specialist courts. Situ and Emmons (2000) examined the role of criminal justice systems in protecting the
environment, while du Rées (2001) questioned the efficacy of both the criminal law and courts as
mechanisms for tackling environmental harms.
Courts are evolving, however, and one stream of green scholarship has evaluated examples of specialized
p. 530 environmental courts and put forth arguments for the establishment ↵ of an International
Environmental Court or Environmental Security Council (Faizi 2021; Hayman et al. 2015; Pring and Pring
2009; White 2022). Relatedly, proposals for a new body of law, based on putting the planet at the heart of
an Earth Jurisprudence, have also gathered attention (Burden 2011; Lampkin 2020; Lampkin and Wyatt
2020, 2022). Cullinan (2010: 144), for example, noted the gathering pace of calls for ‘legal systems to take
an evolutionary leap forward by recognizing legally enforceable rights for nature and other-than-human-
beings’. In doing so he cited the early work of Stone (1972), who argued for the extension of protection and
rights to natural objects such as trees, and Berry (1999: 161), who argued that ‘[a] legal system exclusively
for humans is not realistic’. This movement sees signs of progress in cases of the legal attribution of
Page 10 of 29
‘rights’ to rivers and other elements of nature (Lampkin 2020), although others urge caution regarding
questions about whether—and the extent to which—such commitments are honoured or enforced and the
reasons they have been made in the first place (Rodríguez Goyes and South (2019)).
Studies of law enforcement agencies and actors in preventing and prosecuting environmental crime and
harm are not as common as might be expected, perhaps related to difficulties of gaining funding or access.
The literature does, however, offer some insights into agencies and operations (e.g., Faroque and South
2022 b; Gibbs et al. 2015; Nurse 2015; Ozymy and Jarrell Ozymy 2022; Tompkins 2005).
Finally, a number of green criminologists, employing different frameworks, have expanded their
exploration of social, legal, and illegal responses to environmental crime and harm (e.g., Brisman 2011;
Cianchi 2015; Elliott 2007; Green et al. 2007; Mares 2010; Stretesky 2006; Walters 2010b). An overarching
theme emerging from all of this work is that law and justice are frequently biased and that powerful
offenders will seek to reject criminal definitions that might be applied to them and will pass on the costs of
being found in breach of environmental regulations (including safety standards for products and workers)
to others (Ruggiero and South 2010; Whyte 2020). Such corporate interests will also seek to influence and
dilute environmental protection legislation and (re)construct the public and social meaning of
‘green’ (Lynch and Stretesky 2003). As a result, the impact of environmental harm is skewed, imposing
most damage and hardship on the living conditions and lives of the least powerful.
Environmental justice and environmental victims/victimization

The differential impacts on the environment—and hence, environmental, nonhuman, and human victims
—have led to a wide range of reaction, responses, and protest. Here, we highlight: (a) environmental
justice and resistance to environmental harms affecting poor communities and communities of colour;
and (b) environmental victims and victimization. A green victimology has also developed, incorporating
critiques of the environmental justice framework.
Environmental justice and resistance to disproportionate impacts of environmental harms

Environmental justice has a lengthy history and literature outside of criminology. Bullard’s (1990: 9)
pathbreaking study illustrated how environmental discrimination is ‘a fact of life’ for many Black
communities in the United States and ‘continues to be rooted in white racism [which] has made it easier
for black residential areas to become the dumping grounds for all types of health-threatening toxins and
industrial pollution’. As Bullard (1990: xiv) observes, the industries responsible ‘have generally followed
the path of least resistance, which has been in economically poor and politically powerless black
communities’.
p. 531 ↵ A number of discussions of environmental justice have highlighted how the damaging effects of
class- and race-related inequalities are exacerbated by patterns of waste facility siting and pollution
(Pellow 2004; Pinderhughes 1996; Saha and Mohai 2005; Simon 2000). Significantly, studies of
movements of protest and resistance have also flourished (Pellow 2020; Walters 2017), notably including
cases in the Global South and affecting Indigenous peoples (Bedford et al. 2020; Brook 1998; Heydon 2020;
Nurse 2020a). The activities of international groups, such as Extinction Rebellion, that employ ‘direct
Page 11 of 29
action’ methods of protest, have called attention to the need to reduce global emissions, but have also
prompted backlash against such ‘civil disobedience’ (Axon 2019). At the same time, case studies of protests
against damage to the environment as a result of pipelines and ‘extreme energy’ projects have
demonstrated the potential of local opposition to the current environmental emergency (Di Ronco et al.
2018; Short and Szolucha 2019). The fate of some involved in resistance to mega-projects in the Global
South, involving, for example, damming, drilling, land-grabbing, and mining, can also make them
victims. According to Global Witness (2021), there were ‘227 lethal attacks’ against ‘environmental
defenders’ in 2020—‘an average of more than four people a week’ killed for trying to defend ‘their homes,
land and livelihoods, and ecosystems vital for biodiversity and the climate’ (see also Lynch et al. 2018;
Ruggiero 2020).
Environmental victims, victimization, and victimology

Environmental justice has provided a ‘conceptual starting point’ for the exploration of environmental
victimization and an ‘environmental victimology’. Williams (1996), however, regarded environmental
victiminology as an area of study distinct from an environmental justice approach (pointing to the
limitations of the environmental justice movement—particularly its subjective definitions of
victimization, assumptions about power, and taken-for-granted notions of group identity).
Subsequent works have demonstrated the range of research that can be conducted on environmental
victimization (e.g., Lynch and Stretesky 2001; Jarrell and Ozymy 2012), and have explored the unequal
distribution of victimization among the world’s populations (Hall 2013, 2020). Recent examples have
examined the situation of Indigenous peoples—those who are often the victims of environmental crimes
and harms but who have contributed the least to the conditions leading to such victimization (Crook et al.
2018; Rodríguez Goyes et al. 2021).
Current Developments and Future Directions
Research in green criminology will continue to broaden and deepen our understanding of the causes and
consequences of, as well as possible responses to, environmental harms and crimes. In this section, we
highlight several areas where we expect to see further work in the future.
Green cultural, visual, and sensory criminologies

Media images and representations are the windows through which most people see the planet they live on,
and this also applies to their knowledge of their more immediate environments, nationally and locally. The
p. 532 role of media in presenting, reporting, ↵ and imagining environmental harms and crimes is therefore
hugely important—not only as a reflection of and prediction for salient environmental issues, but as an
inquiry unto itself (Brisman and South 2013, 2014). A significant innovation in criminology has been the
sensory turn and this fits well with a green cultural perspective, recognizing the various forms of sensorial
interactions that condition and configure human interpretation and meaning-making in relation to crime,
harm, justice and punishment (McClanahan and South 2020). Young (2019: 13) writes that a consideration
of the idea of ‘atmospheres’ should encourage us to ‘include both human and non-human bodies and
Page 12 of 29
elements’ in our analysis, and McClanahan and South (2020) suggest that, in this spirit, a sensory
criminology will expand criminological awareness of how environmental harms and crimes are
experienced by all. In general, criminology has been surprisingly unconcerned with the ways in which we
experience the world, and both green and sensory perspectives contribute to remedying this.
Political economy and the treadmill of production

Lynch and Stretesky (2014: 139) argue that many environmental ‘problems’ are perpetuated by modes of
production that underpin contemporary ‘local and global political economies’ and their analysis draws on
Schnaiberg’s (1980) ideas regarding ecological Marxism and the ‘treadmill of production’ to argue that
market-oriented, advanced neoliberal societies are responsible for considerable environmental
destruction as a result of extraction processes. This leads to ‘ecological disorganization’—to ‘the ways in
which human preferences for organizing economic production consistent with the objectives of capitalism
are an inherent contradiction with the health of the ecological system’ (Lynch et al. 2013: 998).
Commercialization and commodification are processes that diminish global resources but entrap
consumers in visions of what they should be buying, drinking, eating, wearing, and so on (Brisman and
South 2014). Indeed, as O’Brien (2011: 36–7) explains, ‘the impoverishment of African and Asian
populations’, for example,
and the over-exploitation of their natural resources are, in part at least, consequential on [their]
paths to industrialization and consumerism … In turn, these processes fuel the demand for more
exploitable land and resources which … is responsible for global climate change [altering] …
patterns of rainfall and desertification and [intensifying] the struggle for arable land and water, a
key factor in many civil wars and driver of economic migration and people trafficking.
This linkage between environmental degradation and conflict is discussed next.
Environment and conflict

A wide variety of ‘high value’ natural resources can be subject to legal and illegal transactions, which can
transform social stability into conditions of insecurity, unrest, and violence fraught with violations of
human rights and environmental degradation (see Brisman et al. 2015). Such transactions can also
generate profits that finance various groups engaging in conflict.
South and Brisman (2013a) have argued that in current global economic conditions, democratic
development in resource-producer nations is hindered by Western production practices and exploitative
patterns of consumption. Monitoring these connections is one task for green criminology in the future.
Page 13 of 29
p. 533 Regulation, enforcement, and prospects for an international law against eco
cide
The two principal ‘models’ that regulatory laws and mechanisms of enforcement follow are generally
referred to as the compliance and deterrence models. The compliance approach seeks conformity with law or
regulations without need for policing and punishment of infringements: behaviour is influenced by
offering inducements and incentives, or by establishing administrative procedures designed to avoid non-
compliance opportunities. Deterrence strategies, in turn, work by aiming to enforce the law, and by
detecting violation and prosecuting and penalizing offenders. Punishment serves as a warning to others. In
practice, elements of the two approaches may be combined. Some criticize compliance systems because
they impose penalties only after an offence has actually been committed even though there may have been
prior indications or even hard evidence that precautions and prevention were not attended to adequately.
When penalties are applied, they may be quite limited in scope—usually economic measures in the form of
a fine which is then typically absorbed by an organization, with customers and taxpayers ultimately paying
out. Others, therefore, argue that more punitive measures should be taken and that where deterrent
punishments have been used in the past, these have had an impact especially where imprisonment and
negative publicity follow (Shelley and Hogan 2013).
A further view, however, might support the mixing of the voluntarism assumed by a compliance approach
with tougher enforcement and restorative justice interventions as an effective strategy. As Higgins (2010:
143) puts it, ‘Restorative justice is built on an understanding of our relationship with nature and the duty
to remedy the harm caused’—addressing ‘the needs of the beleaguered party to restore that which has
been harmed rather than simply fixating on the punishment of the perpetrator’. This kind of approach to
the administration of environmental regulation and justice, invoking methods and principles of mutual
engagement, is both practical as well as consonant with ambitions to protect the planet (Higgins et al.
2013).
The argument for an international Law of Ecocide (Higgins 2012; Higgins et al. 2013) has been gathering
pace. In June 2021, an independent Expert Panel <https://www.stopecocide.earth/expert-drafting-panel> for
the Legal Definition of Ecocide, convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation <https://www.stopecocide.earth/
who-we-are->, offered the following draft for a future international law: ‘For the purpose of this Statute,
“ecocide” means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood
of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those
acts’ (Stop <https://www.stopecocide.earth/faqs-ecocide-the-law> Ecocide 2021). Proposals such as these
may not yet be perfectly formed, but at the very least, they deserve contemplation and debate. A range of
proposals and strategies for development of the relationship between law, society and green crime is
emerging rapidly (see, e.g., Gacek and Jochelson 2022).
Conclusion
Green criminology has illuminated different types of environmental harm and described their temporal
and geographic prevalence, analyzing the causes and consequences of such harms, and the ways in which
regulatory bodies and criminal justice systems, individuals and groups have been, or should be,
Page 14 of 29
responding to such harms. The state of the environment affects populations of humans and nonhuman
animals today and into the future. A green criminology can help to identify some of the central challenges
p. 534 ↵ facing all species and the planet. It can highlight questions of social and environmental justice and
draw attention to failures and the need for remedies. Crucially, a ‘green’ perspective means that
criminology is not silent on these issues.

2022 was the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s (1962) book Silent Spring. Although not written
by a social scientist—Carson was a biologist—this is the book that exposed the dangers of pesticide pollution and
helped launch the environmental movement. Two comprehensive sets of essays can be found in Brisman, A. and
South, N. (eds) (2020) The Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology (second edition), and Holley, C. and
Shearing, C. (2018) Criminology and the Anthropocene.
Brisman and South’s (2014) Green Cultural Criminology provides an overview of some recent directions. Early
overviews include Beirne and South (eds) Issues in Green Criminology: Confronting Harms Against Environments,
Humanity and Other Animals (2007), and Sollund (ed.) Global Harms: Ecological Crime and Speciesism (2008) on animal
abuse, speciesism, and ecological harm. South and Beirne’s Green Criminology (2006) and White, Environmental Crime:
A Reader (2009) reprint contributions that provide theoretical, methodological, and substantive insights into the
nature and dynamics of environmental harm, while Ellefsen and colleagues’ Eco-global Crimes: Contemporary
Problems and Future Challenges (2012) has a focus on speciesism, animal abuse, social movements, biodiversity, and
environmental and species justice. Walters and colleagues’ Emerging Issues in Green Criminology: Exploring Power,
Justice and Harm (2013) explores issues such as animal trafficking and abuse, organized crime in the carbon trading
sector, e-waste disposal, and resource wealth and conflict, while White’s (ed.) (2012) Climate Change, Crime and
Criminology covers essays on one of the most urgent challenges facing us. White and Heckenberg’s Green Criminology:
An Introduction to the Study of Environmental Harm (2014) and Nurse (2015) An Introduction to Green Criminology and
Environmental Justice offer introductory texts.
Online resources

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Page 29 of 29
25. Crime and consumer culture

p. 542 25. Crime and consumer culture

Keith Hayward and Oliver Smith
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0025
Abstract
Proceeding from a theoretical perspective, this chapter examines the various relationships that exist between consumer
culture and crime. The chapter starts by looking at criminology’s past, and a short review of some of the main theories/
theorists that have actually trained attention on consumerism as a criminogenic phenomenon. This section also includes a
critique of the supposed oppositional potential of consumerism that dominated the social sciences until relatively recently.
Turning to the present, the chapter then introduces three distinct but complementary perspectives that offer a more useful
and critical explanation of ‘the crime-consumerism nexus’. First, cultural criminology addresses the criminogenic impact of
global capitalism at the level of cultural discourse and everyday transgression. Second, ultra-realist criminology identifies the
damage caused by consumer capitalism, and more specifically how the dominance of neoliberal ideology shapes the deep-
rooted desires and drives behind much identity-driven criminality. Finally, the deviant leisure perspective draws on both these
positions to illustrate how dominant forms of commodified leisure drive a range of social, environmental, and individual
harms. The relationship between crime and consumerism is not a simple one but, as this chapter argues, it is one that
demands serious and critical criminological attention.
Keywords: consumer culture, consumerism, crime-consumerism nexus’, cultural criminology, deviant leisure, market
culture, theoretical criminology, ultra realism
The institution of a leisure class has an effect not only upon social structure but also upon the
individual character of the members of society … It will to some extent shape their habits of
thought and will exercise a selective surveillance over the deployment of men’s aptitudes and
inclinations.
(Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, [1899] 1970: 145)
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Introduction
If we substitute ‘consumer culture’ for ‘leisure class’ in the above quotation by Thorstein Veblen, we get a
clear sense of exactly what it means to live in a society predicated on consumption. Veblen’s
‘metaphysic’ (Mills 1970: vi) suggests that to live in a consumer society is to inhabit a culture in which the
practice of consumption influences everything from economic practice and political discourse to micro-
level concerns about self-worth and self-identity. Veblen, of course, was writing at the end of the
nineteenth century and describing an elite stratum of affluent American society. Yet his work on the
symbolic practice of consumption was so perspicacious that it foreshadowed the era of mass consumption
that started in the first decades of the twentieth century and has continued almost unabated ever since.
That said, even Veblen, who originated the term ‘conspicuous consumption’, could not have predicted the
rapid global expansion of the consumer society.
Today, over a quarter of all humanity—1.7 billion people—are now said to belong to ‘the global consumer
class’, ‘having adopted the diets, transportation systems, and lifestyles that were once mostly limited to
the rich nations of Europe, North America, and Japan’(Gardner et al. 2004). In terms of annual
expenditure, private consumption now exceeds $20 trillion—a fourfold increase over 1960 levels (ibid.).
But this is not simply a matter of demographic expansion. Consumerism has changed qualitatively as well
as quantitatively (see Lury 2010, and Wiedenhoft Murray 2017, for good introductions to consumer
culture). To start with, the contemporary individual’s consumption patterns are now far less constrained
p. 543 by social class than was the case only a couple of ↵ generations ago. Today, goods and services function
not simply as markers of social class (as in Veblen’s analysis), but as symbolic props for ‘storying the
self’ (Baudrillard 1968, 1998; Featherstone 1994). Indeed, so encompassing is the ethos of consumption
that, for many individuals, self-identity and self-actualization can now only be accomplished through
material means. In other words, we have arrived at a point in human history where the process and
practice of consumption now subsumes virtually all other more traditional modes of self-expression
(Lasch 1979; Campbell 1989; Featherstone 1994).
That the vast majority of contemporary Western individuals now derive their values and subjectivities
from activities associated with consumption is a given in social theory and across the social sciences
(Slater 1997; Miller 1995). Yet the field of criminology has mostly ignored this situation, despite the
obvious implications for criminalized consumption. This chapter aims to address this oversight by
providing a general introduction to the small but growing body of criminological literature that is
committed to understanding and developing what has been described helpfully elsewhere as the ‘crime-
consumerism nexus’ (Hayward 2004a: 157–79; 2004b: 147). The chapter starts with a short review section
that looks back over criminology’s past in a bid to identify some of the moments when criminology did
engage with issues relating to consumption and crime. It then returns to the present and a series of
ongoing developments within theoretical criminology that collectively suggest our discipline is finally
starting to take consumer culture, and in particular the seemingly unchecked growth of global
consumption, seriously.
Page 2 of 28
Criminology and Consumer Culture
Although the changing sensibilities and subjectivities associated with consumerism have seldom been at
the forefront of the criminological enterprise, it would be wrong to suggest that criminologists have never
engaged with questions about market culture or the destructive emotional states, feelings, and desires
associated with capitalist materialism. For example, in the early decades of the twentieth century, the oft-
forgotten Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger was employing terms like ‘covetousness’ in his writings on
the human pains of industrial capitalism, stating: ‘As long as humanity has been divided into rich and poor
… the desires of the masses have been awakened by the display of wealth; only to be repressed again by the
moral teaching impressed upon them, that this was a sinful thing’ (Bonger 1936: 93). Occupying a far more
prominent position in the discipline is the strain theory of Robert Merton (1938). Strain theory argues that
crime and deviance occur when there is a discrepancy between what the social structure makes possible
(i.e. the means and opportunities for obtaining success), and what the dominant culture extols (i.e. the
social value of the glittering prizes associated with material success). While Merton stopped short of
evoking any such thing as a ‘consumer society’, he nonetheless recognized the growing importance of
mass consumption, peppering his writing with terms such as ‘success symbols’ and ‘differential class
symbols of achievement’ (Merton 1938: 680–1). But despite the monumental impact of strain theory on
criminology, this particular element of his work seldom features in the countless retests of strain theory
that have taken place in the subsequent decades (cf. Passas 1997).
Given these important early precursors, why then, did twentieth-century criminology largely shy away
p. 544 from further investigations into the relationship between crime ↵ and consumption? The answer lies in
the fact that, for the most part, mainstream criminology has proceeded from the position that capitalist
consumerism is an essentially positive development and thus not something a discipline preoccupied with
crime and deviance should be concerned with. The main deviation from this position came in the 1960s,
with the emergence of critical and radical criminology. Even here, though, despite the focus very much
being on the various harms associated with capitalist accumulation (white collar crime, the growth of the
prison-industrial complex, the abuses of the Western state, etc.), the specific question of whether or not
consumerism itself might be criminogenic remained largely unexplored. Instead, what interest there was
in the consumption practices associated with a burgeoning consumer society tended to coalesce around
issues of class and culture. It is to these (surprisingly few) examples that we now turn.
The obvious starting point here is the work of the broadly Marxist-inspired ‘Birmingham School’. One of
the original premises of the various scholars who gravitated to the University of Birmingham’s Centre for
Cultural Studies in the 1960s and 70s was that working-class youth delinquency should be understood as a
form of ‘symbolic rebellion’ against the dominant values and social inequalities associated with capitalist
society (Hall and Jefferson 1976). From this starting position, members of the Birmingham School saw
something potentially liberating in consumerism. In particular, they believed that, by mobilizing and
appropriating a new set of cultural signifiers drawn from the expanding world of mass consumption,
young people could enhance their self-identity and use this heightened sense of personal autonomy to
challenge convention and subvert the ‘repressive social order’. Consequently, members of the Birmingham
Page 3 of 28
School took great pains elucidating the alleged transformative potential of seemingly innocuous or prosaic
consumer items like Dr. Martin’s boots, motor scooters, donkey jackets, and a host of other eclectic
products associated with, inter alia, the mod, punk, and ‘rude boy’ subcultures.
The strength of the Birmingham approach was twofold. First, it trained the spotlight on the important
(and previously neglected) relationship between deviance and subcultural style (Hebdige 1979). Second,
and more significantly, it demonstrated sociologically the ‘magical’ quality of commodities, both in terms
of their ability to mediate human relationships and shape individual and group identities. At the time,
these were important breakthroughs. However, it is important to stress that the Birmingham School’s
analysis of consumerism, like Veblen’s, was one that turned almost entirely around the issue of class—in
this case the particular values and mores of working-class youth subcultures. As such, little attention was
paid to the more complex question of whether or not the feelings and emotions engendered by
consumerism might ultimately find expression in certain forms of criminal activity. A second problem
with the Birmingham School’s approach to consumerism was that it massively exaggerated the
transformative political potential of subcultural consumption (Hayward and Schuilenburg 2014). Put
differently, not only did Birmingham School researchers fail to grasp the inherent paradox of attempting
to resist capitalism at the point of consumption, but they also dramatically underestimated capitalism’s
ability to absorb so-called ‘inventive consumer resistance’ and then (re)market it in the form of
depoliticized items of dull conformity (Frank 1997; Heath and Potter 2006).
Despite these failings, critical criminology of the 1970s and 80s largely accepted Birmingham School
claims regarding the oppositional potential of consumerism. It was only after a full two decades of
monetarism, neoliberalism and the onward march of consumer markets into more and more spheres of
p. 545 social and private life that critical criminologists ↵ started to take consumer culture seriously. The
mood of the times was summed up succinctly by Ian Taylor (1999: 54) in a passage that speaks volumes
about criminology’s growing awareness of the ever-expanding scope of the late modern consumer society:
‘the market’ is now a fundamental motor force in contemporary social and political discourse and
practice, in a way that it was not in the 1970s. ‘The market’ is hegemonic in the realm of discourse,
and in very many practices (including some domains of that most resistant area of all, the public
sector).
In short, Taylor had recognized that, by the end of the twentieth century, there was no longer any
meaningful ‘oppositional culture’ strong enough to challenge the inexorable rise of ‘market culture’. He
evidenced this point in his 1999 book, Crime in Context, by stressing the prominence of values such as
‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘self-interest’ in end-of-the-century youth culture and how these new and fast-
developing ‘strategies of negotiation’ would likely bring about the demise of classic subcultural
adaptations (Taylor 1999: 75–7). Taylor’s analysis was important in that it highlighted the evolution of
critical criminology’s position with regard to consumerism. However, it stopped well short of linking the
forms of subjectivity engendered by a fast-paced consumer society to criminal motivation. For early
criminological forays in this direction we must look elsewhere.
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Developing a mid-range theory of post-industrial violence at around the same time, the US-based English
criminologist, Elliott Currie, also called attention to ‘the increasing potency and primacy of consumer
values’ (1997: 162). Ultimately Currie outlined seven ‘mechanisms’ that he believed were contributing to
violence in ‘materialistic US cities’, but one mechanism in particular warrants attention here. Influenced
by Bonger and Merton’s thinking on relative deprivation, Currie shared with Taylor a concern that young
people were rejecting ‘productive community life’ in favour of ‘the valorization of consumption for its own
sake—and of getting what you want, or getting ahead of others, by whatever means will suffice’ (Currie
1997: 163). But unlike Taylor and other critical criminologists before him, what makes Currie’s analysis
stand out is that he also trained attention (albeit somewhat obliquely) on the actual ‘psychological
distortions’ that were bring engendered within individuals by what he described as a ‘dog-eat-dog’,
‘frantically consumerist culture’ (ibid.). Consider, for example the following passage:
One of the most chilling features of much violent street crime in America today, and also in some
developing countries, is how directly it expresses the logic of immediate gratification in the
pursuit of consumer goods, or of instant status and recognition … People who study crime,
perhaps especially from a ‘progressive’ perspective, sometimes shy away from looking hard at
these less tangible ‘moral’ aspects … A full analysis of these connections would need to consider,
for example, the impact on crime of the specifically psychological distortions of market society,
its tendencies to produce personalities less and less capable of relating to others except as
consumer items or as trophies in a quest for recognition among one’s peers. (Currie 1996: 348)
As Currie infers, this was not the first time that instant gratification and impulsivity had featured as foci of
1
p. 546 concern within criminological theory. ↵ Famously, James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein (1985)
claimed that personality differences in traits such as impulsivity were often strongly correlated with the
development of frequent and long-term anti-social behavior. Central to their argument, and frequently
forgotten by many due to the controversy surrounding their work, was the concept of ‘present
orientation’: the idea that a ‘rapid cognitive tempo’ and ‘shortened time horizons’ are responsible for
impulsive and disinhibited behavior.
This is a line of thinking common in conservative ‘right realist’ criminology more generally. For example,
in his earlier work, Thinking About Crime (1985 [1975]), Wilson had already identified a set of emotions that
he believed acted on and effected ‘internalized commitment to self-control’. More specifically, he claimed
that, as a result of the erosion of the modernist moral order, two modes of self-expression were taking
hold: first, a growing sense of personal liberty and individual rights; and, second, a more radical
individualism linked to immediate gratification and greed (Wilson 1985: 237–8). In some ways, these
claims are not entirely out of step with the line of argument that would later be developed by Taylor,
Currie, and others (e.g. Hall 1997; Young 1999; Fenwick and Hayward 2000). Yet, despite general
agreement about the importance of subjectivities like individualism and instantaneity in the commission
of certain types of predatory crime, the right realist respective explanations for the cause of the problem
differed greatly, as one of us has commented previously:
Page 5 of 28
The problem is that Wilson’s critique of immediate gratification, the rise of nouveau fully fledged
individualism, and the concept of self-control (and thus his theory of crime more generally)
remains one-dimensional. Wilson can only frame his analysis in terms of a perceived loss of
‘traditional’ (i.e. modern, or, more accurately, a mix of modern and traditional) forms—the
erosion of the ‘Protestant work ethic’ and, more importantly, the demise of community values
(remember the centre piece of Wilson’s argument is that crime begets crime at a community
level). By placing the concepts of impulsivity and immediate gratification so squarely within the
context of a lack of social cohesion and disinvestment in society, Wilson presents us with a
reading of these important aspects of criminality that is ultimately rooted in a set of conservative
morals. By the same token, he chooses to ignore the fact that, in reality, these ‘impulsive’,
‘disinvested’ urbanites are simply the obvious end-products of an unmediated system of
consumer capitalism. (Hayward 2004a: 178)
One scholar who recognized the need for a more sophisticated analysis of impulsivity and the various other
emotional states associated with late modern consumerism was the New Zealand criminologist Wayne
Morrison. Writing in 1995, not only did Morrison (1995: 309–10) provide a more sophisticated social
theoretical context for Wilson and Herrnstein’s ideas about ‘differential time appreciation’ but more
importantly he also recognized the need to augment traditional Mertonian strain models so that they could
more effectively incorporate the profound changes—both cultural and ontological—that consumerism
was wreaking:
Criminology not only operates with underdeveloped models of desire, but also largely restricts
itself to narrow interpretations of strain theories; wherein crime is the result of frustration by the
social structure of the needs which culture identifies for the individual. Today, even in the most
contemporary of mainstream criminological theory, ideas of positionality and status are
underdeveloped. Instead, ideas of needs and greed predominate. (Morrison 1995: 317)
Morrison’s theoretical insights on the relationship between crime and consumerism are complex and
p. 547 manifold and at times get lost amidst his numerous other often overlapping ↵ arguments. However, if
one were to summarize his thinking in this area, the following quote is particularly insightful:
To become self-defining is the fate that the social structure of late-modernity imposes upon its
socially created individuality. The individual is called into action; actions which are meant to
express his/her self and enable the individual’s destiny to be created out of the contingencies of
his/her past … And while resources differ, all are subjected to variations of a similar pressure …
namely that of the overburdening of the self as the self becomes the ultimate source of security.
The tasks asked of the late-modern person require high degrees of social and technical skills. To
control the self and guide it through the disequilibrium of the journeys of late modernity is the
task imposed upon the late-modern person, but what if the life experiences of the individual have
not fitted him/her with this power? … much crime is an attempt of the self to create sacred
moments of control, to find ways in which the self can exercise control and power in situations
where power and control are all too clearly lodged outside the self. (ibid.: iv)
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Using social theory to make sense of the changing nature of the self within the open social terrain of late
modernity is not something that has featured to any great degree in the criminological enterprise (Garland
and Sparks 2000). The ascendency of consumer culture, however, meant this had to change. Following the
line of travel set down by the likes of Currie and Morrison, other criminologists started to show a marked
interest in the growing place of consumerism in everyday life. Echoing Morrison’s ‘dilemmas of transition’
thesis, and drawing on Anthony Giddens’ notion of ‘ontological insecurity’, Jock Young, for example,
urged criminologists to rethink Mertonian strain theory for a contemporary world characterized by
‘precariousness’, ‘a chaotic reward system’, the ‘rise of individualism’, and ‘a sense of unfairness and a
feeling of the arbitrary’ (1999: 8–9). Consider, for example, the following quote in which Young moves
beyond a structural or class analysis to suggest that consumerism itself might now be criminogenic:
The market … creates the practical basis of comparison: it renders visible inequalities of race, class
age and gender. It elevates a universal citizenship of consumption yet excludes a significant
minority from membership. It encourages an ideal of diversity, a marketplace of self-discovery
yet provides for the vast majority a narrow, unrewarding individualism in practice. It creates
‘uninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation’ yet
depends on a relatively uncritical acceptance of the given order. The market flourishes, expands,
beckons yet undercuts itself. It does all this but is not a mere transmission belt: the mores of the
market may be the dominant ethos of the age but this ether of aspiration is shaped, developed and
given force by the human actors involved. It is in this light that the problems in the two spheres of
order, relative deprivation and individuation, must be viewed. For these are the key to the crime
wave in the post-war period. (Young 1999: 47)
Young made good on his promise of extending the concept of strain by augmenting notions of relative
deprivation in two ways. First, he argued that relative deprivation should no longer be thought of simply as
a ‘gaze upwards’, but also as a troubled and anxious look downwards toward the excluded of society (‘it is
dismay at the relative well-being of those who although below one on the social hierarchy are perceived as
unfairly advantaged: they make too easy a living even if it’s not as good as one’s own’, ibid.: 9). Second,
and drawing on developments in cultural criminology, he sought to ‘energize’ the Mertonian position by
showing that crime was not only about bridging a material or structural gap, but that the accrual and
p. 548 display of consumer products often ↵ functioned to alleviate emotional or existential deficits (e.g. ‘the
structural predicament of the ghetto poor is not simply a deficit of goods—as Merton would have had it—it
is a state of humiliation’, Young 2003: 408). As ever, Young’s work was thoughtful and provocative, but
while it challenged researchers to update certain established criminological theories in light of the
changing nature of late modern society, it fell some way short of developing a fully-fledged theoretical
framework for understanding the criminogenic tendencies inherent in consumer societies. Two other
books, however, would do precisely that.
Although different in their approach, Keith Hayward’s City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban
Experience (2004a) and Steve Hall, Simon Winlow, and Craig Ancrum’s Criminal Identities and Consumer
Culture (2008) both focused attention on the specific question: how does consumer culture cause crime?
For Hayward, the answer was to be found in the emotions and subjectivities engendered by consumerism.
Page 7 of 28
In particular, he argued that, with its emphasis on the ‘new’ and the ‘now’, consumer culture separates
(especially young) people from the consequences of their actions and makes them more likely to pursue
exciting or risk-laden activities without regard for conventional normative restraints. Hence his analysis
focused primarily on crimes with a strong expressive dimension, such as gang violence, vandalism, joy
riding, and drug use—transgressive activities that are most likely to involve playing with new forms of
concomitant subjectivity based around desire, simultaneity, individualism, and impulsivity (2004a: 157).
Differing in their approach, Hall et al. focused on more problematic forms of narcissistic subjectivity in
which individuals were willing to engage in harmful careers of acquisitive and entrepreneurial criminality
in order to benefit the self. Their crucial insight was to reverse the conflation of norms and values which
have perpetuated the notion that such forms of criminality ‘deviate’ from mainstream culture. Instead,
Hall et al. suggest that their subjects’ steadfast adherence to the values of consumerism, in addition to
their methods of competitive entrepreneurialism within criminal marketplaces, was in many ways a
perfect reflection of mainstream consumer and neoliberal values.
Therefore, in different but overlapping ways, these books were the first in the discipline to train attention
specifically on the ‘crime-consumerism nexus’. City Limits focused upon expressive and risk-taking forms
of transgression within consumerism’s ‘culture of now’; while Criminal Identities focused upon
entrepreneurial criminals’ embodiment of ruthless neoliberal competitiveness and their fetishistic
attachment to consumer commodities and associated lifestyles. However, both texts speak to
consumerism’s criminogenic qualities and in doing so set the tone for a new wave of criminological studies
concerned with the psychological, social, economic, and environmental impacts of late modern
consumerism. It is to this fast-developing body of work that we now turn.
Cultural Criminology
Cultural criminology is concerned with the convergence of cultural, criminal, and crime control processes;
as such, it situates criminality and its control in the context of cultural dynamics and the contested
production of meaning. Attentive to the realities of a deeply unequal world, cultural criminology strives to
p. 549 highlight how power affects the upwards ↵ and downwards construction of criminological phenomena:
2
how rules are made, why they are broken, and the deeper implications of these processes. Because of its
focus on the lived experience of crime, cultural criminologists have always trained attention on those little
situations, circumstances and crimes that make up everyday life (see Ferrell 2018). For cultural
criminology’s critics, this interest in micro-level analysis is a problem (O’Brien 2006; Hall and Winlow
2007). These critics suggest that, by focusing on everyday people and everyday crimes, cultural
criminology has foregone macro-economic analyses of crime in the interests of a romantically subjectivist
or narrowly cultural focus. But such criticism misses the point. In reality, cultural criminology’s focus on
the everyday is a strategic choice (Ferrell et al. 2015: 87–91; Ferrell and Ilan 2013). For it is here in the
everyday world that it is possible to overcome the dualism of structure and agency, and to unearth the
connections that frequently link petty transgressions with large-scale criminal markets or organized
corporate crime networks. Put another way, while cultural criminologists continue to trace the damage
caused by late capitalism at the macro level, they are equally committed to documenting the wide sweep of
transcontinental capitalism amidst the most local of situations and common everyday transgressions.
Page 8 of 28
This multilayered, multifaceted approach is especially useful when it comes to outlining the relationships
that exist between consumerism and crime—not least because today consumer culture itself is transmitted
and inculcated across all levels of late modern society. Not only is it operational at a grand or civic level,
eroding informal networks of mutual support by converting collectivities into markets, public services into
privatized corporate opportunities, and people into consumers, but the pervasive logic of market society
and its attendant consumer values also function psychologically; shaping individual consciousness by
propagating insatiable wants and desires and promoting a culture that exalts atomized individual
competition and consumption over other social considerations. In light of this situation, cultural
criminology looks to analyse and highlight the criminogenic nature of consumerist discourses wherever
they may feature within contemporary society (see, for example, Moretti 2023).
Now in its third decade, cultural criminology has, since its emergence, trained considerable attention on
consumer culture. It even featured in Ferrell and Sanders inaugurating publication, Cultural Criminology, in
the guise of Lyng and Bracey’s (1995) chapter on the dynamic by which consumerism transforms
experiential opposition, and even overt criminal activity, into commodified product. Tracing the history of
‘outlaw biker style’, Lyng and Bracey show how early attempts to criminalize biker culture only served to
amplify its illicit meanings, while later marketing schemes to incorporate the signifiers of biker style
(most notably the Harley Davison motorcycle brand) into mass production effectively evacuated its
original subversive potential. This process through which criminal or illicit practices are co-opted and
then used to sell product is described by cultural criminologists as ‘the commodification of crime’, and has
been identified in everything from the steady dilution of rap music’s violent origins (Ferrell et al. 2015: Ch.
6), to the way that fetishized S&M sexual practices became integrated into high-street shopping culture
(Presdee 2000). Relatedly, cultural criminologists also talk about the ‘marketing of transgression’, a
process by which everyday products such as soft drinks (Ferrell et al. 2015: 110), cars (Muzzatti 2010), and
p. 550 trainers (Ferrell and Ilan 2013: 372) ↵ are made ‘cool’ by employing branding strategies associated with
deviant themes or criminal imagery. Various other aspects of consumer culture have also featured
prominently in cultural criminology, including work that traces the origins of everyday commodities to the
grim sweatshop factories of China or the exploited rainforests of the Global South (Boekhout van Solinge
2008), and studies that show how particular consumption choices can function as ‘tools of classification
and identification by which agencies of social control construct profiles of potential criminal
protagonists’ (Hayward and Yar 2006: 23; Treadwell 2008).
Perhaps cultural criminology’s main achievement in this area, though, is the clustering of ideas known as
the ‘crime–consumerism nexus’ (Hayward 2004a, 2004b). The crime–consumerism nexus is a theoretical
concept used by (cultural) criminologists to understand the relationships that exist within consumer
societies between the values and emotions associated with consumerism and various forms of expressive
and acquisitive criminality. The crime–consumerism nexus asserts that consumerism cultivates—
especially among young people—new forms of subjectivity based around desire, individualism, hedonism,
and impulsivity, which, in many instances, can find expression in transgressive and even criminal
behaviour, from gang activity to drug use, mugging to rioting. Importantly, this is not to suggest that
consumer culture is criminogenic in any simplistic sense of direct correlation/causation; nor is it an
attempt to integrate consumerism into a general theory of crime. Rather, the crime–consumerism nexus
should be understood simply as an attempt to outline the striking convergence between novel forms of
Page 9 of 28
subjectivity propagated by consumerism, and many of the characteristics identified within the
criminological literature as being constitutive of criminality. Interdisciplinary in nature, drawing as it does
on criminology, behavioural economics, consumer research, and the sociology of risk and identity, it is not
an easy concept to define. However, four main themes can be identified:
Page 10 of 28
1. Insatiability of desire (and its concomitant, perpetual dissatisfaction): A unique feature of

contemporary consumer culture is that insatiable desire is now not only normalized but
essential to the very survival of the current socio-economic order. Far from an unintended
or unwanted ‘side effect’, insatiable desire is actively cultivated in a consumer culture. Of
relevance to any criminological analysis of consumerism is the flip side of such a situation:
namely, a constant sense of unfulfillment, dissatisfaction, and disillusionment. The
criminogenic consequences of this ‘strange combination of perpetual dissatisfaction and a
longing for the new’ hardly need spelling out. At the most obvious level, a lot of crime—
from shoplifting to street robbery—can be understood not as a desperate act of poverty or
a defiant gesture against the system, but as an attempt to bridge a perceived ‘consumer
deficit’, and as a form of identity construction.
2. New forms of ‘hyper strain’: Such thinking is reminiscent of Merton’s classic ‘strain theory’.
However, contemporary hyper-consumerism is contributing to the crime problem in ways
that are qualitatively different from those expressed by strain theorists. Today, what
people are feeling deprived of is no longer simply the material product itself, but, rather,
the sense of identity that products have come to bestow on the individual. Such a situation
demands a move away from the instrumentality inherent in Merton’s strain theory towards
a concept predicated more on the expressivity associated with new forms of desire.
3. Engagement with risk: A further source of tension exists between the desire for excitement
that is so prominent a feature of consumer culture and the mundane/over-controlled
nature of much modern life—from the encroachment of surveillance to the drudgery of
low-wage employment. One way in which individuals attempt to escape this paradox is by
p. 551 exerting a sense of personal control—or more accurately, a ‘controlled loss of control’—
through engaging with risk. For example, many forms of street crime frequently
perpetrated within urban areas such as peer group fighting or graffiti writing should be
seen for exactly what they are, attempts to construct an enhanced sense of self or a
semblance of control by engaging in risk-laden practices on the metaphorical edge.
4. Instant gratification/impulsivity: In addition to being insatiable, consumer culture cultivates

a desire for immediate, rather than delayed, gratification. We are, at a societal level,
increasingly encouraged to eschew long-term conservatism in favour of instant
gratification as evidenced by the massive expansion of credit facilities and the constant
emphasis on immediacy in the ‘buy now’ language of advertising. The bombardment of
stimuli associated with consumer culture fundamentally distorts our experience of
temporality, now reduced to ‘a series of pure and unrelated presents’. With its particular
emphasis on the ‘new’ and the ‘now’, consumer culture separates people from the
consequences of their actions and makes them more likely to pursue excitement without
regard for conventional normative constraints. Abridged from Hayward and Kindynis,
2013. Republished with permission of SAGE Reference, from the Encyclopaedia of Street
Crime in America, Jeffrey Ian Ross (ed.), 2013; permission conveyed through Copyright
Clearance Center, Inc.)
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Since this model was developed other elements of the crime-consumerism nexus have started to emerge.
First, a growing body of work has exposed the ‘infantilizing’ nature of late-capitalist culture (Hayward
2012, 2013; Smith 2013). This work explores how ‘consumerism as a cultural ethos’ is contributing to both
the depreciation of mature adulthood (and the roles and responsibilities typically associated with that
stage of people’s lives), and importantly, the ‘adultification’ of very young teenagers (in terms of lifestyle
choices and activities involving sexual activity, drugs, criminality, etc.) (Hayward 2012: 226). Although,
the criminological implications of younger and younger people making adult decisions (or inversely,
young adults acting like children) have yet to be fully developed, research is beginning to appear that
outlines clear links between the narcissistic aspects of infantilization and the hedonistic excesses of the
night-time economy (Smith 2013, 2014), as forms of ‘anti-social consumption’ that impede efforts to
limit environmental harms (Brisman and South 2015), and the selfish motivations behind inner-city
predatory criminality (Hall et al. 2008).
A second additional element that one could now include in the crime–consumerism nexus is the
relationship between circuits of wasteful consumption and environmental harm, something that is now
being developed under the rubric ‘green-cultural criminology’ (Brisman and South 2013, this volume;
Ferrell 2013). Drawing together the thoughtful green criminological scholarship of Avi Brisman and Nigel
South with Jeff Ferrell’s (2006) decade-long ethnographic investigations into trash picking, ‘dumpster
diving’, and environmental activism, green-cultural criminology exposes the exploitative ecological
practices associated with the globalized consumerist way of life. From the material consequences of the
commodification of nature to ‘greenwashing’ campaigns by which deleterious corporate practices are
recast as supposedly pro-environmental activism, green-cultural criminology not only adds an important
component to the (green) crime-consumerism nexus, but also illustrates cultural criminology’s more
general goal of constantly enlivening and expanding the criminological imagination. With this same
ambition in mind, two other recent criminological strands have emerged that share a fundamental interest
in the relationship between consumer culture and crime: the overlapping theoretical perspectives known
as ‘ultra realism’ and ‘deviant leisure’.
p. 552 Ultra Realism
‘Ultra realism’ represents a development of some of the more critical strains of criminological theory that
have emerged since the 1970s. Through engagement with ethnographic methods, underpinned by a
complex theoretical framework, ultra realism pushes beyond both left realism (Lea and Young 1984) and
critical realism (Bhaskar 1997) to offer incisive and penetrative analysis of the realities of life in a world
shaped in no small part by global consumer culture and neoliberal ideology.
Ultra realism’s central claim is that the empirical world exists suspended above a maelstrom of deeper
forces, processes, and structures which contribute to and influence our interaction with the social. In this
sense, events such as crime, disorder, or the commission of harm are best described as symptoms—that is,
they are visible and even measurable, but not in themselves causative. To fully understand the origins of
crime and harm, we must uncover the deep-rooted human drives and actions that help perpetuate the
dominant social order.
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Taking this position as a starting point, ultra realism seeks to identify fundamental flaws in many of the
building blocks of contemporary criminology’s theoretical frameworks. More specifically, it criticizes both
mainstream and critical criminological perspectives not simply on minor points of difference, but at the
root of their fundamental domain assumptions. To illustrate this, consider the way in which ‘human
nature’ is conceived within criminological literature. Although critical to understanding the causes of
crime, assumptions about human nature are rooted in political philosophies that inform the most
dominant mainstream and critical perspectives of right realist and left liberal paradigms. If these
assumptions are questioned or problematized, then the edifice of criminological theory built upon these
‘truths’ begins to crumble.
This is precisely the aim of Hall and Winlow’s thoughtful and provocative Revitalizing Criminology (2015).
Within this book, the authors carefully explain that right realist and left liberal perspectives are, at their
most fundamental level, mirror images of one another in their approach to individual agency and
subjectivity. For ultra realists, both these positions are problematic in that they overstate the autonomy of
rational and conscious individual agency and thus fail to pay sufficient attention to issues of the
unconscious in shaping subjectivity. In a claim that bears some resemblance to the earlier work of
Zygmunt Bauman, ultra realists argue that the individual is not inherently good or immoral. Morality is
manipulated by social structures and systems as the individual subconsciously seeks to actively identify
with what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan refers to as a symbolic order—the set of signs, symbols,
3
rules, and values by which individuals make cogent sense of their lives.
However, in contemporary late modern society, identification with a coherent symbolic order appears
increasingly difficult. Our current socio-symbolic system is now overwhelmingly predicated on the
principles of neoliberal consumer-capitalism, ideologically supported and reproduced through a
corporatized mass media (see Hayward and Hall 2021). Identity and a semblance of ontological security are
p. 553 therefore only ↵ attainable through full immersion in consumer capitalism. Such a situation has
inevitable implications when it comes to thinking about how one might resist or challenge consumer
capitalism’s hegemonic position. Despite an increase in critical perspectives on global consumerism, many
scholars remain attached to the possibility of consumerism as a tool of resistance (Riley et al. 2013;
Maffesoli 1996). For ultra realists, as well as proponents of cultural criminology and deviant leisure
perspectives, resistance is impossible at the point of consumption (see Heath and Potter 2004). Rather,
consumerism appears to have a tendency to engender a perpetual state of anxiety, fear of cultural
irrelevance, and an enduring sense of lack, which in turn serves to perpetuate desire. Consumer capitalism
therefore relies upon a culture of competitive interpersonal relations to cultivate envy and a pervasive,
deep-rooted sense of dissatisfaction. Temporary relief is promised through consumption and the creation
of consumer identities. In this way people actively seek out their own incorporation into consumer culture
as a means of addressing their underlying individual anxieties.
Ultra realist theory has been utilized to develop a number of stringent critiques of contemporary issues
that highlight the link between consumerism and crime, from hate crime (James and McBride 2022; James
2020) to English nationalism (Telford 2022), workplace harm (Lloyd 2018), migration (Briggs 2020) and
white collar crime and corruption (Tudor 2019). In the wake of the UK riots of 2011, Treadwell et al. (2013)
put ultra realism to work in examining the motivations of those involved in the looting and violence. Initial
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criminological reactions were quick to fashion a narrative around the disorder that positioned those taking
part as rising up in protest against swingeing economic cuts, contracting job prospects, and an increasing
sense of injustice characterized by their interactions with state agencies. The data presented by Treadwell
et al. however, tells a different story. Initially, the breakdown of law and order and the unpreparedness of
the police response opened up a space in which rioters could have seized a political initiative. However, for
many of the rioters the overwhelming response to this opportunity was to accumulate as many of
consumerism’s symbolic objects as possible. Thus, from an ultra-realist perspective, the 2011 London riots
should be understood primarily as ‘consumer riots’—that is, rather than seeking to challenge the
established political orthodoxy, the rioters (in the main) illustrated a deep commitment to the ideology of
consumer capitalism. Despite many participants’ precarious socio-economic position, those who
participated in the riots did not want grand socio-political change but simply more of what already
existed: the commoditized markers of a life well-lived and the opportunity to correct their marginalized
image of what Zygmunt Bauman (1998) might once have described as a ‘flawed consumer’ (i.e. individuals
who are no longer capable of functioning effectively within consumer markets).
For ultra realists, competitive consumerism has infiltrated the core of Western society, impacting upon
social relations among young people, driving desire across a broad demographic, and opening up the
4
motivational capacity to commit crime and inflict harm on others in the process. While anti-capitalist
movements appear to offer a salve to the dominance of consumer capitalism, ultra realists indicate that
p. 554 even positions of ↵ anti-consumerism can be depoliticized and commodified (Frank 1997). At the same
time, new criminal markets made possible by advances in technology are increasingly embedded into
everyday life. This in turn provides the backdrop to what Steve Redhead (2015) describes as
‘claustropolitanism’—the desire of those with the wealth and means to do so to secede from the reality of
what constitutes the social today.
This is complex terrain for criminology, and thus one must be clear about some of the key terms utilized
within ultra realism. In particular, it is important to recognize what ultra realists mean by the ‘return to
motivation’ (Hall et al. 2008: 1). Stated simply, and irrespective of whether they are analysing the
privatization of public space or the intellectual wastelands of much mainstream media, the primary goal of
ultra realism is to explore below the symptoms of the crime-consumer nexus and explain why individuals
seek out the symbolism of consumer capitalism. Here, these complex forces and processes are linked to a
social order that compels the individual to consume and invokes what the philosopher Slavoj Žižek (2000)
refers to as a reversal of the cultural superego. Under different socio-economic conditions, giving into
desire would prompt a sense of guilt, as the superego brought to bear shame at an inability to defer
gratification. However, today, shame is invoked at failure to take every consumer opportunity and
experience that passes within reach of the individual. As Winlow and Hall (2013: 121) note:
A good life is a life in which we have tasted extreme indulgence, a life in which we have denied
ourselves nothing and exposed ourselves constantly to the thrill of the new; a life of sexual
adventure, global travel and committed consumerism, in which we forge our own path and
blithely ignore decaying conservative accounts of frugality, commitment, obligation and work.
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In other words, success—the ‘good life’—is measured entirely by competent and sustained engagement
within the circuits of consumption—in short knowing what to buy and how to flaunt it. However, within a
post-crash, post-Brexit economic environment, it seems reasonable to question how, despite stagnating
or falling incomes and increasing precarity, consumerism is still playing such an integral role within the
capitalist project.
For ultra realists, the answer is found in the debt economy (Horsley 2015). Because economic growth
depends (to a large degree) on the willingness of individuals to take on consumer debt, the consumer
marketplace needs to ensure we remain committed to spending money in the pursuit of cultural relevance
and status. Today, largely as a result of the emergence of the so-called ‘cashless economy’ (Graeber 2014),
British household debt stands at a record £1.7 trillion, a staggering increase from £400 billion in the
mid-1990s (Lloyd and Horsley 2022). Within this new ‘culture of indebtedness’ (Horsley 2015), access to
consumer credit is facilitated and expedited by companies operating (often with impunity) at the predatory
end of the loan market. These doorstep credit companies, payday lenders, and rent-to-buy companies
often disguise their exploitative practices as a form of community service, but in reality they exemplify the
5
toxicity of high-interest debt as it relates to individuals, families, and communities.
p. 555 ↵ As this chapter has illustrated, it is now possible to link consumerism to a range of harms, many of
which strengthen and perpetuate the existing socio-economic system. However, elsewhere, we can see a
more direct connection between consumerism and crime. In the effort to cultivate consumer identities,
many have no choice but to immerse themselves in the circuits of consumption. Of course, most are able to
acquire the necessary consumer symbolism within the legitimate market place, but for some, illegal
methods are increasingly becoming a first resort, particularly in post-crash locales of permanent
recession (see Hall et al. 2008; Telford 2022). Intimidation and a capacity for violence allow determined
criminals a direct, albeit brutal shortcut to consumer markets (Ellis 2015). Like the tax-avoiding economic
elite of the corporate boardroom (Platt 2015), committed and opportunistic criminals are able to simply
take the symbolic objects they need to raise themselves up above those to whom they feel no moral or
ethical obligation (Hall et al. 2008). Hayward (2016) is perhaps right to suggest that not all crime stories
are stories about capitalism, but the long-term effects on individuals of immersion in competitive cultures
of acquisition and ornamental display should not be overlooked. In this sense, we can see the value of ultra
realism’s response to unfolding events and criminological issues that defy simplistic interpretation.
In the following section, our attention turns to commodified forms of leisure and their attendant harms.
The development of a ‘deviant leisure’ perspective as outlined below allows us to draw on the advances in
cultural criminology discussed above, while also incorporating the role of deep structures and processes
relating to the competitive individualism and the normalized harm outlined in ultra realism.
Deviant Leisure
Commodified leisure markets are perhaps one of the most rapidly evolving examples of global consumer
capitalism. As both cultural and ultra realist criminologists have indicated, consumerism and identity are
irreversibly connected, with much identity creation and maintenance carried out in the spheres of
marketized leisure (Hayward and Turner 2019). Surprisingly, criminology to date has appeared interested
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only in instances where leisure contravenes legal definitions of crime, or where youthful leisure practices
hint at transgression, rebellion, and excitement (see Smith and Raymen 2016). More recently, however,
criminologists have begun to engage with the relationship between leisure and social harm in a more
sophisticated and coherent fashion (ibid.; Raymen and Smith 2019). This new ‘deviant leisure’ perspective
draws upon advances in both cultural criminology (see Hayward 2016) and ultra-realist criminology (Hall
and Winlow 2015) in order to illustrate the role of commodified and marketized forms of leisure in the
commission of harm. As explained above, ultra-realist criminology utilizes a broadly harm-based analysis
of the systemic corrosiveness of global capitalism as its focus, whereas cultural criminology’s traditional
interest in crime, leisure, and subcultures has continuously evolved over the last decade to include an
increasingly materialist critique of liberal capitalism, harm, and consumer culture (Ferrell 2006; Hayward
and Yar 2006). Through a careful synthesis of these two strands of criminological theory, alongside a
reconceptualization of social deviance, deviant leisure perspectives illustrate how individual, social,
economic, and environmental harms are structurally and culturally embedded within many accepted and
p. 556 normalized forms of leisure. As ↵ Oliver Smith and Tom Raymen (2016) have suggested in an important
article that outlines the parameters of this perspective:
When the underlying violence of shopping explodes into realised physical violence in time-bound
consumption events (Raymen and Smith, 2015); when sexual assault and violence is a normal,
expected, and even desired feature of the ubiquitous night-time economy (Smith, 2014); and
when the humiliation and degradation of revenge porn and torture become forms of
entertainment to be consumed through pornography and video games (Atkinson and Rodgers,
2015), criminology must look beyond what is socially-defined and culturally accepted as
affirming leisure cultures and instead interrogate the nature of leisure itself and its relationship
with an increasingly liberalised consumer capitalism.
Defining deviant leisure is not an easy task—indeed the term itself is constructed from two of the broadest
concepts in the social sciences. However, what is clear from the outset is that the deviant leisure
perspective requires criminologists to travel beyond the boundaries associated with traditional socio-legal
constructs of crime and criminality, and into the realm of harm and zemiology (see Chapter 23; Raymen
2022). Put differently, underlying the deviant leisure perspective is a fundamental rereading of the concept
of social deviance. ‘Deviance’ is generally applied throughout the social sciences to describe behaviours
that contravene socially accepted norms, values, and ethical standards. However, a deviant leisure
perspective seeks to invert this traditional interpretation. In an era characterized by the pursuit of ‘cool
individualism’, and where the primary cultural imperative is to simultaneously fit in while standing out
(Miles 1998), the cultivation of many contemporary ‘deviant identities’ can today be viewed as steadfastly
conformist (Hall et al. 2008; Hayward and Schuilenburg 2014; Smith 2014). Expressed differently, what
could within a more ethical social order be conceptualized as deviant behaviour is today being harnessed,
pacified, and repositioned as a very specific form of creative dynamism that serves to propel desire for
symbolic objects and experiences—desires which are then translated into demand within the circuits of
consumption dominated by the leisure economy.
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From a criminal justice perspective, the relationship between crime control and leisure is inconsistent.
Marketized, taxable forms of leisure such as the gambling industry (Raymen and Smith 2020a), or the
development of an alcohol-based night-time economy (Smith 2014; Briggs and Ellis 2017) are regulated
relatively lightly, despite clear links to violent crime, debt, and mental health issues (see Smith and
Raymen 2019). Other leisure pursuits however, appear to be regulated, criminalized, and controlled to an
extent that appears disproportionate to the perceived harms that such pursuits pose. In these cases,
Capital has the privilege of defining and redefining the legitimacy of a particular space, thus continuously
reclassifying the status of these activities as illegitimate ‘deviance’ or legitimate ‘leisure’. Cultural lifestyle
sports or forms of ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins 2007) such as skateboarding, parkour, and urban exploration
(Atkinson 2009; Garrett 2013; Raymen 2018) occupy a curious position at the interface between deviance
and leisure. On the one hand, they are legitimate leisure activities, with their own competitive sporting
events and official governing bodies. Moreover, the spectacular imagery of their practice is frequently
utilized for the commercial purposes of feature films and advertisements. In these and other ways, then,
sports like skateboarding and certain forms of graffiti should be conceptualized not as ‘deviant’ but
entirely conformist; part of the injunction to discover one’s true self and construct a persona of ‘cool
individualism’ (Heath and Potter 2006). However, on the other hand, these activities are also policed and
p. 557 controlled, with those participating often facing fines and other sanctions ↵ for engaging in these
leisure pursuits outside of the specific spaces of indoor gyms and skate parks. In this sense, as ‘right’ and
‘wrong’, ‘deviant’ or ‘legitimate’ have become increasingly synonymous with what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’
for the market, there has also been a move towards a spatial and, by extension, political and economic
definition of what constitutes harmful deviance and legitimate leisure.
While deviant leisure perspectives provide an explanation for the increased regulation, legitimation, and
commodification of leisure forms, they are also used to examine the cultural dominance of the leisure
industries. It is here at the interface of leisure and consumer culture that we can see harmful outcomes
emanating from the commodification and marketization of a range of activities and behaviours. The
night-time high street of bars, pubs, casinos, and strip-clubs, ubiquitous to cities across the UK and
beyond, provides us with a clear example. The night-time economy (NTE) is not only culturally embedded
within consumer society but is a valuable source of employment and taxation. In this sense it is integral to
the cultural and economic aspirations of city councils (see Chapter 25). However, it is also a site in which
social harms are written into the same urban scripts that position alcohol-based leisure as indicative of a
vibrant, 24-hour city (Roberts et al. 2006; Bianchini 1995). These harms tend to be concentrated around
fault lines of gender and race (see Smith and Raymen 2016), and in many cases are so ubiquitous as to be
accepted as an unfortunate by-product of a night out or employment in the NTE. More familiar to
criminology, is the alcohol related violence reported regularly in the media, or served up as the subject of
fly-on-the-wall documentaries (see Hayward and Hobbs 2007). These incidents of violence and disorder
have been well documented within academic literature, with many commentators explaining the million
hospital visits a year attributed to the NTE and the innumerable sexual assaults and violent encounters as
the pathology of a minority of working class men whose actions taint an otherwise unproblematic site of
creativity and identity construction (Newburn and Shiner 2001; Richardson and Budd 2003). The reality, of
course, is much more complex.
Page 17 of 28
If our night-time city centres really are loci of violence and exclusion, then how can we explain their
enduring popularity for large numbers of consumers? The answer appears to be tied to the problem of
identity within late modern society. Outside of social media, night-time leisure constitutes perhaps the
most important arena for identity creation linked to conspicuous and ostentatious consumption in this
period of consumer capitalism. Perhaps their appeal lies in the excitement of hedonism alongside the
suspension of the moral regulation and behavioural norms associated with day-time comportment.
However, central to the deviant leisure perspective is the assertion that these environments rarely
generate resistance or political solidarity (Medley 2019). For the most part, these drinkers are not kicking
back against the system; they are entirely conformist in their dedication to the values dictated by the
market. This claim is substantiated by the indication that this model of alcohol consumption is central to
the continued viability of the industry, with committed consumers (or binge drinkers to use the common
term) accounting for 60 per cent of profits accrued by the alcohol industry (Boseley 2016). By focusing on
the range of harms engendered by legitimized and normalized forms of leisure, such as the NTE, the
deviant leisure perspective opens up a space for reappraising our understanding of consumer capitalism
and its deleterious effects. Of course, social harm approaches are not new, having been used for some time
within the development of a green criminology (see; Tombs and Hillyard, this volume; South and Brisman
2013; White 2013). As our attention now turns to environmental degradation associated with the
democratization of tourism, it comes as no surprise that there is a degree of convergence between deviant
leisure and green criminological perspectives (Smith 2019).
p. 558 ↵ Over the past two decades, the emergence of a distinct ‘green’ criminology has successfully directed
criminological attention toward the harms inflicted upon the environment as a result of non-criminalized
activities (see South 1998; White 2013) and from interaction with the global economy. Deviant leisure
perspectives build upon this work and interrogate not only the environmental harms that result from
engaging with leisure cultures, but the role of consumerism in the creation of individual desire and the
cultivation of competitive individualism. For example, as commodified forms of leisure became
democratized through the rise of the budget airline, all-inclusive deals, and online booking-agents,
leisure activities began to come into conflict with the natural environment on a global scale. Even beyond
the 915 million tonnes of CO2 emissions produced by air travel each year (ATAG 2022), the
democratization of tourism places unsustainable strains upon the global commons in the pursuit of private
gain. Moreover, the environmental harms and waste associated with leisure are not restricted to the far-
off tourist idylls of the Maldives but are simultaneously experienced in multiple locations globally.
As leisure markets evolve and grow in order to circumvent the limits to capital (Harvey 2007), the deviant
leisure perspective describes a culturally symbiotic relationship between harmful leisure and
consumerism. Here, participation in particular forms of leisure promises the creation of new, cool
identities. While some of these may be relatively benign, deviant leisure scholars draw upon examples such
as the rapid growth and cultural ubiquity of the gambling industry (Raymen 2019), which represents a
market worth of £7.1 billion in the UK alone (GCUK 2015). With an increasing array of gambling
opportunities quite literally at the fingertips of internet users, it is likely that ‘social’ gambling, fiercely
defended by gambling industry lobbyists as non-problematic, masks a range of damaging social and
individual effects. Existing criminological analyses have looked at gambling within a paradigm of
‘edgework’ (Banks 2013), yet only rarely do criminologists acknowledge the social harms surrounding
Page 18 of 28
social gambling. By using a deviant leisure perspective, it is possible to emphasize how an identity-based
culture of sports betting, combined with relentless promises of ‘easy wins’ encourages chasing losses and
impulsive betting (Binde 2010). By embedding ‘sociable’ gambling within existing leisure markets, the cost
of an afternoon watching football in the pub can quickly spiral; and for some individuals these losses are
likely to manifest as stress, financial uncertainty, emotional volatility, depression, and anxiety (Raymen
and Smith 2020b).
The deviant leisure perspective undoubtedly stands in contrast to many of the more celebratory accounts
of leisure and its associated activities. For some critics, then, it may present a rather dour or pessimistic
outlook on something that for most people is a source of fun and enjoyment. However, there is some room
for optimism, through identification of and engagement with so-called prosocial forms of leisure.
However, as Smith and Raymen (2016: 5) point out, this will require disconnection of commodified leisure
from the hypercompetitive consumer ideology propagated by the current social order:
In short, prosocial forms of leisure are possible, but lie beyond what we term a hedonic realism, the
inability to see beyond the horizon of a social order where leisure identity is synonymous with the
hyper-competitive and individualized arena of consumer capitalism.
In sum, the deviant leisure perspective has the potential to allow us to think more critically about the
crime-consumerism nexus. More specifically, the synthesis of ultra realist and critical cultural
criminologies enables criminologists to illustrate and understand how individual, social, economic, and
environmental harms are structurally embedded within many accepted and normalized forms of leisure.
p. 559 Conclusion
Consumer culture pervades every aspect of our lives. The marketization, privatization, and
commodification that is perhaps the defining feature of our late modern landscape underpins the global
economy and provides us with the consumer symbolism of goods, experiences, and services that are
utilized to create new hierarchies of social significance, cultivating envy and desire. In this sense, Anthony
Giddens (1991) was right to suggest that we have ‘no choice but to choose’; the alternative to immersion in
the hypercompetitive individualistic environs of consumer markets is cultural obsolescence, a life not
worth living.
The premise of our chapter has been to explore and explain the relationship between crime and
consumerism. Here, it would be useful to point to some assiduously prepared statistics, a graph which
neatly illustrates the correlation between the growth and dominance of consumer capitalism, and steadily
rising crime rates. Unfortunately for us and indeed all criminologists, this is simply not possible. On the
surface the last two decades appear to have been an unremitting success for crime preventionists and other
proponents of administrative criminology. Much if not all of the global North appears to be experiencing
steadily declining rates of crime across the majority of volume crimes (Parker 2010). However, the so-
called ‘crime decline’ masks both a host of new and expanding crime markets, and a huge number of non-
criminal harms, some of which have been discussed above, that emanate from a socio-economic system
working within neoliberal ideology. As Hall and Winlow (2015) argue:
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Beneath the superficial empirical level, in the realms of the actual and the real, we have seen
profound developments in the neoliberal era. We have seen the normalisation and sociocultural
integration of ‘hybridized’ illegal and legal economic activities in a shadow-economy that
operates beneath governments’ statistical radar.
While some crimes are certainly declining, it is unlikely that this is as much a result of greater sociability or
enhanced societal well-being (Pinker 2012), as it is to increased securitization and implementation of
pragmatic crime control measures. As we have suggested above, criminal markets are mutating, at a pace
and into environments that collators of crime statistics are simply unable to keep up with. As scholars
writing from all three of the perspectives outlined above have repeatedly observed, while there has been a
statistical drop in ‘crime’, many harms are now simply normalized and embedded within deeply
entrenched circuits of consumption (Raymen and Smith 2015).
When social scientists dare to problematize or critique something that tends to be held in high regard, such
as consumer culture, there is a danger that they might be accused of a moralizing conservatism. Indeed,
this view is widely held and fiercely protected. Even critical criminological voices such as Roger Matthews
have positioned consumerism as ‘one of the positive achievements of capitalism’ (2014: 100). However,
these arguments tend to conflate consumerism and consumption. As we have seen, consumerism involves
significantly more than the simple purchase of material goods. Fundamentally, consumer culture relies on
the velocity of fashion—the constant renewal of consumer goods within a marketplace—in tandem with a
perpetual creation and re-creation of desire. As such it is vital for clothing, music, electronic items, and so
on to rapidly fall from fashion and be identified by the anxious consumer as in need of immediate
replacement. It is this cyclical process which we can link to global inequalities, ecological destruction,
social disintegration, and a proliferation of harmful subjectivities.
p. 560 ↵ Returning to where we started, and the work of Thorstein Veblen on leisure and consumption, many
of the connections we have drawn between crime and consumerism echo Veblen’s observations made over
a century ago. Specifically, Veblen wrote about the emerging culture of barbarism that cultivates envy,
harmful forms of competition, and narcissistic tendencies that are reflected in the perspectives outlined
above. Contemporary cultures of consumption solicit consumers at increasingly early ages with cultural
tropes that dismiss deferred gratification as being for ‘losers’. At the same time they urge immediate and
conspicuous forms of consumption which are not only tied to cultures of debt, but promote cultures of
narcissism, infantilization, and individualized hypercompetitiveness. In this sense, the relationship
between crime and consumerism is far from straightforward. Yet, within the criminological frameworks
explored above, we are at least equipped to properly explore beneath the socio-legal constructions of
criminality and examine the complex structural processes and drives underpinning the crime-
consumerism nexus.

Perhaps one of the most prescient and remarkably relevant explorations of consumerism is Veblen’s Theory of the
Leisure Classes [1899] (1970). For a more up-to-date overview of consumerism, Smart’s Consumer Society: Critical
Issues and Environmental Consequences (2010) is a useful starting point. The authors of this chapter have made a
Page 20 of 28
number of contributions to key discussions in this area. Specifically, Hayward’s City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture
and the Urban Experience (2004a) explores the core issue of how consumer culture is linked to crime and discusses
how consumerism weakens some forms of social control, driving impulsive, individualistic actions. Published a
decade later, Smith’s Contemporary Adulthood and the Night-Time Economy (2014) examines the erosion of traditional
adult identities, framing the cultural attachment to alcohol and its attendant harms as a form of deviant leisure. Hall
and Winlow’s Revitalizing Criminology: Towards a New Ultra-Realism (2015) provides readers with a cogent and
persuasive argument for the adoption of an ultra-realist criminology. More recently, Justin Kotze and Anthony Lloyd
provide an accessible and engaging introduction to Ultra-Realism, Making Sense of Ultra-Realism: Contemporary
Criminological Theory Through the Lens of Popular Culture (2022) that draws upon examples from film and television to
make sense of its core theoretical components. Hall, Winlow, and Ancrum’s captivating exploration of criminal
motivation Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture (2008), is a similarly important contribution, while the best
introduction to cultural criminology is still undoubtedly Ferrell, Hayward, and Young’s Cultural Criminology: An
Invitation (2015). The significance of commodified forms of leisure for criminology is outlined in Oliver Smith and
Thomas Raymen’s ‘Deviant Leisure, A Criminological Perspective’ (2016) published in Theoretical Criminology, while
Deviant Leisure: Criminological Perspectives on Leisure and Harm (2019) edited by Raymen and Smith offers a
collection of essays that demonstrate the versatility and vitality of work being undertaken in the field of deviant
leisure.
Online resources

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Notes
1
Most obviously, psychologists have conducted a mass of research into the way in which supposed deficits in impulse
control can bring about delinquent behaviour by interfering with children’s ability to control their behaviour and to
think of the future consequences of deviant acts (e.g. Mischel et al. 1972; Farrington et al. 1990; White et al. 1994).
2
For general introductions to cultural criminology see Ferrell et al. (2015); Hayward and Young (2012); Hayward (2018);
Hayward and Matallana-Villarreal (2021).
3
A coherent symbolic order provides a level of organization which is shared with other members of society in order to
navigate everyday life. Importantly, incorporation into a symbolic order is not achieved through inculcation or
coercion on behalf of some ideological state apparatus. Nor is it inflicted through the manufacture of consent by
hegemonic power structures. It is a necessary and inescapable part of identity formation that ought to, under the right
conditions, provide the individual with a level of stability and ontological security.
4
This willingness to inflict harm is achieved through a mechanism that ultra realists (see Hall 2012) refer to as ‘special
liberty’. Put simply, this is the individual belief that one is no longer constrained by ethical codes, and thus has the
right to freely express their own unique desires and drives. Those in possession of special liberty are exonerated from
the need to acknowledge their harm toward others. Instead, individuals are able to operate under the auspices of a
fantasy that elevates them to the status of the most transcendent free individuals in which their harm is negated due
to their powers of wealth creation, and their ability to drive new cultural trends.
5
Importantly, consumers, while being marketed to at increasingly young ages (see Schor 2004; Hayward 2013; Bakan
2011) are being inculcated into cultures of debt while still in their teenage years. Students attending university in
England today can expect to take out sizeable loans to pay for tuition. This induction into debt peonage has far
reaching implications. Put simply, immersion in a debt society negates any potential for dissent, rebellion, or
resistance to the dominant social order. Rather, as some commentators have observed, debt obligations subjugate
and depoliticize populations, binding the individual to the neoliberal socio-economic order, without removing the
desire to acquire and display consumer symbolism (Lazzarato 2015).
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Page 28 of 28
26. Security and everyday life in uncertain times

p. 567 26. Security and everyday life in uncertain times

Ian Loader, Richard Sparks, Ben Bradford, Ryan Casey, Evi Girling and Gosia Polanska
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0026
Abstract
What crimes and security concerns trouble differently-situated groups of people today? What demands for action do these
prompt from different authorities? To what extent are contemporary insecurities mediated through people’s sense of place
and attendant feelings of belonging? The field of criminology used to be confident that it knew how to answer these questions
and had a paradigm—‘fear of crime’—within which to investigate and theorize them. That paradigm was always unstable. But
over recent decades it has been thoroughly dissolved by the sheer range and scale of technological, cultural, economic and
political transformations —from the Great Crash and its aftermath, to the digital revolution, Brexit and the rise of nativist
populism, #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, the gathering climate crisis, and the legacies of the COVID pandemic, to name only
a fraction of the concerns that bear upon people’s everyday lives. We are currently investigating these questions of in/security
in everyday life by revisiting an old research site, Macclesfield in Cheshire, and an old study, Girling et al., Crime and Social
Change in Middle England (Routledge 2000). In this paper, we sketch the changing landscape that bears upon the question of
how to theorize and investigate in/security in everyday social relations today, and consider the intellectual resources that we
need to marshal if we are to understand the hopes, fears and fantasies that are in play when people think, deliberate and act in
response to the question—What does it mean to be and feel secure in Britain today?
Keywords: crime, everyday life, fear, harm, place, security, social change
Introduction: Beyond ‘Fear’ and ‘Crime’
In this chapter, we use two research projects conducted in the same place 25 years apart to frame a
discussion of changing conceptions of crime and social order in relation to the character and quality of
everyday life in contemporary Britain. Our hope is that by revisiting an old research site, and rethinking an
old study—Girling et al.’s Crime and Social Change in Middle England (2000)—we can capture elements of
Page 1 of 25
change, but also perhaps of durability and persistence, in the economic, political, social, and technological
landscape over that eventful quarter-century. We thereby confront questions concerning how best to
theorize and investigate in/security in everyday social relations, and the dimensions of change and
continuity in those relations.
We suggest that related changes in public concerns, governmental priorities, routine practices of safety-
management, and academic discourses, all contribute to some intriguing shifts of focus between these two
moments. One notable dimension of this is a movement (evident both in residents’ talk about criminal
questions and in more technical and professional vocabularies) from a ‘problem-frame’, commonly
expressed in terms of ‘fear of crime’, to one that accommodates a more extensive range of concerns with
questions of safety and security and the means of addressing them. None of this is to suggest that fear, still
less criminal harm, has somehow ceased to be an aspect of people’s experience, or even a less important
aspect. Indeed we are still in many cases struggling to comprehend the extent to which people’s lives
(women in relationships with violent men; children in situations of chronic abuse; young people facing
recurrent bullying at school and many, many others) can be dominated and confined by fear. It is simply
that some of the ideas and representations mobilized under the term ‘fear of crime’ in the 1980s and 90s
have lost some of their public salience and apparent specificity.
This raises many intriguing questions concerning which threats and security concerns trouble differently-
situated groups of people today, and about which of them are coded as crime rather than other kinds of
trouble? At any given time, some of the sources of our security concerns are likely to fall under this
definition, others not, and some provoke argument as to whether or not they should. We do not propose to
try to clarify these problems by declaratory statements about the boundaries between crimes and
p. 568 ↵ harms but rather to explore some ways in which they may figure in the everyday lives of people and
communities. What demands for action do different security concerns prompt, and from whom? How are
such contemporary insecurities mediated through people’s sense of place and belonging?
Our first project was always in part concerned to investigate and disturb the solidity of ‘fear of crime’ as a
construct (Girling et al. 2000), something that it shared with a number of its contemporaries and
successors (Taylor and Jamieson 1998; Walklate and Evans 1999; Lee 2007; Farrall et al. 2009). In the
intervening decades there have been numerous ‘twists in the discourse’ (Cohen 1985) in matters of risk
and safety, threat and security. If the reduced salience of fear of crime in public life is in some part
attributable to the ‘crime drop’ during the same period (Tseloni et al. 2010), this nonetheless coincided
with the presence, and perhaps rise, in many sources of turbulence and uncertainty, some of which include
quite direct threats to people’s sense of safety and order in everyday life. Fear of crime, as measured by
victimization surveys and other means, always had as its primary object threats to personal safety in
public space, even if we and other contributors did our best to draw out the more inchoate anxieties that
came to haunt the discussion (Girling et al. 2000; Farrall et al. 2009). It is not that fear of assault in the
street or car park, or fear engendered by local disorders, ceased to matter to people. Moreover, some fears
—concerning women’s safety in the face of male violence, or a number of forms of ‘hate crime’—receive
more focused attention now than even in the quite recent past. The question is rather one of how problems
Page 2 of 25
of safety and danger impinge upon people’s everyday lives and their relations with others in both private
and public contexts; how these affect their experiences of living in particular places; and what they hope to
see done about them.
The contemporary landscapes of sources of harm, uncertainty, or tribulation that attend people’s everyday
lives are diverse and bear upon different lives and different habitats in very distinct and unequal ways.
They may reach us by various means (for example, through a phone or tablet) and exist on very divergent
scales (for some, a well-founded fear of aggression based on race, gender or sexuality; for others a sense of
menace relating to environmental destruction, for example). All of this may make the question of where a
threat originates, and who has responsibility for dealing with it, more complex. Is it in here, or out there?
Does it come from near or far? Are ‘we’ being threatened by ‘others’, or are we agents of our own peril?
Does it lie within the competence of the police, or is it for someone else to manage?
In a recent discussion of some prospects for the future development of criminology and social studies of
security Berg and Shearing (2021: 28) note that:
The existence, and effects, of these new worlds are having, and will have, profound implications
for criminology—in terms of how we engage with new harms, how we engage with novel ways of
thinking that have often been ignored, or ousted to the periphery, and what new theoretical and
analytical tools we may need to create (or borrow from elsewhere) as we engage with shifting
realities.
In this regard, shifting lenses from the sometimes limiting purview of the fear of crime towards ideas of
harm, safety and security that are at once broader and less prescriptive, yet more embedded and grounded
in the context of everyday experience, is part of what is involved in developing a contemporary, responsive
and relevant criminological field.
We want in this chapter to consider the kinds of intellectual resources we need to marshal in order to
understand the mentalities and sensibilities that are in play when people think, deliberate and act in
p. 569 response to the question of what it means to be and ↵ feel secure in their everyday lives today. In terms
of our own empirical work that means people living in one medium-sized town in northern England, but
related questions (albeit with very different outcomes) arise everywhere. This requires some engagement
with the ways in which the idea of ‘security’ has entered and shaped enquiry over recent decades, both in
criminology and elsewhere across the social sciences—in particular with the bodies of work that have
emerged on questions of ‘everyday’ or ‘vernacular’ security in various contexts (Bubandt 2005; Crawford
and Hutchinson 2016; Stevens and Vaughan-Williams 2019), and on the kinds of projects of intervention
that exist to manage urban insecurities (see especially Valverde 2010).
We do not, however, begin from the premise that the problems posed by ‘fear of crime’ are all disposed of
simply by re-assigning them to a more capacious category called ‘security’. Indeed ‘security’ is itself a
contentious and rather invasive term, so we need to reflect carefully on what is involved in thinking about
aspects of everyday life or local politics or policing practices on these terms. We conclude by reflecting on
what we take to be the intimate relation between enquiries into public safety (however conceptualized) and
Page 3 of 25
the quality and future possibilities of a shared democratic life. We argue that in this respect, as in many
others, the modes of inquiry that seem most compelling nowadays need to be more oriented towards
dialogue, creativity and co-production than those that were applied (including by us) in the past.
Signs of the Times: The Changing Place of Crime?
In the mid-1990s, three of us conducted a study of crime-related anxiety in a medium-sized town in

1
northern England, Macclesfield in Cheshire (Girling et al. 2000). The study took place against a backdrop
in which anxiety about crime had come to be a normal part of everyday routines and consciousness and a
prominent and highly-charged topic of media discourse and political combat (Garland 2001; Simon 2007).
‘Fear of crime’ was a salient feature of lived experience, as well as a shared object of governmental
intervention and criminological concern. In the Ipsos-Mori Issues Index for October 1994 (the month our
fieldwork commenced) 41 per cent of those questioned listed ‘crime’ as one of the three most important
issues facing Britain. We know now (but could not know then) that the mid-1990s was the moment of peak
anxiety, at least as measured by the British Crime Survey (Gray 2017).
We chose Macclesfield because it was a moderately affluent and relatively safe town; in sharp contrast to
the poor, high-crime urban neighbourhoods that were—and remain—the staple of criminological
research. It was never our intention to depict the town as a place of tranquillity, untroubled by many of the
same problems as other places, and immune from the greater upheavals of the late modern world. We did
not merely want to update a version of social studies of the (mainly American) suburb, where the emphasis
falls on the studied uneventfulness and rigorously maintained conventionality of daily life (Baumgartner
p. 570 1991). Rather, we wanted to understand how questions ↵ and controversies about crime, policing,
social order, fear, and the governance of and accountability for those problems, were encountered and
experienced in situ, in the fairly un-dramatic context of one medium-sized town.
We wanted to know how the experience of, and talk about, crime shaped local social relations and spent
two years using a range of qualitative methods trying to find out. Much of what people told us was not in
itself hugely surprising. They had concerns that were fairly characteristic of the period, and not dissimilar
from those that regularly appeared in media discourse and political talk about crime in Britain in the
1990s: they worried about burglary and car crime (which they suspected was often the work of outsiders),
and about disorderly young people hanging around in public space. People’s main source of—often angry
—complaint concerned what they viewed as the disappearance of police authority from community life.
We found that these worries both shaped, and were shaped by, people’s sense of place—both their
situatedness in the economic and social hierarchies of Britain in the 1990s, and the location in which they
resided, and its past, present and anticipated futures. We also documented and analysed the ways in which
crime worked metaphorically as a condensing symbol of wider social and cultural change, both national
and global, from which local life was felt to offer some degree of insulation. Macclesfield was valued in part
because it provided a protected space. Crime was troubling in part because it revealed the protection the
town offered to be partial.
Page 4 of 25
Much has changed in the world in the intervening quarter of a century, both on the level of political events
and on the cultural, socio-technical, economic and demographic planes. Perhaps the most far-reaching
change is the digital revolution. The fieldwork for the original study took place in the early days of email
and before the proliferation of global search engines, social media platforms and new media content, and
at a time when responses to crime were conveyed by national and local media, and face-to-face
communication. Any revisiting of questions of ‘fear’ and ‘place’ plainly needs to account for the way in
which social relations are now mediated on-line, and the implications of the ‘infosphere’ (Floridi 2014) for
identity, community, participation, citizenship and other dimensions of contemporary being (Yates et al.
2015). The original study preceded the marked increase in immigration—especially from Eastern Europe—
into parts of England hitherto unfamiliar with such change. The responses to these shifts suggest that
migration has today become a lens for grasping social change, thereby doing symbolic work of the kind we
argued was performed by ‘crime’ in the 1990s (Goodhart 2017: 118–19; cf. Griffiths 2014). Since the
mid-1990s Britain has undergone a long period of economic growth and public spending followed by the
2008 crash and a decade of austerity, a political project with uneven class and generational impacts upon
housing and labour markets, and on life chances. Climate change has steadily—and perhaps now
dramatically—risen to prominence in the priorities of governments and corporations, and in lay
consciousness and everyday routines. It looks set to dominate the politics of the coming decade. Finally,
one must register the unprecedented turmoil of the Brexit process, and its attendant cleavages and
recriminations (Soboloewska and Ford 2020), as well, of course, as the ongoing economic, social and
health consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic (British Academy 2021; Lupton 2022). This turbulence has
prompted renewed interest in the politics of place and, in particular, on its uneven impact upon local social
relations and everyday insecurities in Britain’s neglected towns (Curry 2017).
Changes in levels and patterns of crime, and in modes of security governance, are also apparent. Two full
decades of declining levels of burglary, car theft and numerous other volume offences in many affluent
countries have served to moderate the heat generated by those preoccupations of our original study.
p. 571 According to the November 2021 issues ↵ of Ipsos/MORI’s monthly ‘issues index’, using polling
evidence conducted shortly after the COP26 conference in Glasgow, the biggest issue for the British public
2
was climate change. Crime, though of fluctuating and sometimes acute interest throughout the preceding
3
two decades, was at this point not in the top ten of people’s concerns.
But as certain familiar risks have abated, or perhaps more accurately, have slipped in and out of focus in a
somewhat spasmodic way, new concerns and insecurities have come into view. For us, public views of the
relative weight of a range of threats, and their impingement upon everyday life, are empirical questions
that are very much part of our current research. We know something about topics that engage media
attention nowadays and that have sparked social mobilizations at various points; and we know some ways
in which the priorities of policing, and the agendas of other agencies, have been reconfigured. It seems
apparent, for example, that gender-based violence and coercive control in intimate relationships are
public issues in twenty-first century Britain in a much more focal way than they were formerly. Gender-
based violence has often been described as Covid’s twin epidemic (Dlamini 2021). The pandemic (unlike
other crises which, as Walklate et al. (2021) suggest, have tended to make domestic abuse even more
invisible) brought to attention the increased risks of lockdown for those confined in domestic spaces with
abusers, as well as the challenges in providing services to adequately safeguard those at risk (see also Gadd
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this volume). Similarly, other dangerous spaces and harmscapes have emerged through online
communications and use of social media where vulnerability transcends physical location and creates what
Horgan et al. (2021: 222) call ‘a new ecology of risk and opportunity’. A wide variety of digitally-mediated
dangers have become salient—from internet scams and identity thefts to online grooming/sexual
exploitation, to radicalization as a precursor to ‘Islamist’ or ‘far-right’ terrorism. Some such concerns
may be especially insidious and undermining for those who experience them, precisely because they
infiltrate the cherished safe spaces of home, and channels of communication with people close to us.
The landscape of security governance has altered too. Since the late 1990s, we have seen the rise of the
reassurance/neighbourhood policing agenda (including the advent of Police and Crime Commissioners and
new powers of dispersal and exclusion) followed, arguably, by its partial fall in the face of budgetary
constraints and shifting priorities. CCTV (a live issue in the mid-1990s) is now met with banal acceptance,
while visual recording and surveillance has morphed into a pervasive feature of ‘onlife’ social relations
(Goold et al. 2013). Increasing complexity attends the question of who owns, manages, or is accountable for
public and quasi-public (retail and other) spaces. Most recently, we have witnessed a shift in priorities
from ‘volume crime’ towards safeguarding and protecting the vulnerable, as signalled by the emergence of
policing preoccupations with domestic violence, human trafficking, modern slavery, ‘county lines’ drug-
dealing, hate crime, and so on. At the same time, however, official discourse continues to acknowledge a
concern with effects of crime focused in specific localities under the name of ‘neighbourhood crime’ (HM
Government 2020). Taken together, these changes have had complex and ambiguous effects on the place
of crime, as traditionally understood, in everyday life.
p. 572 ↵ Against this backdrop, we have returned to Macclesfield (six of us this time), and are engaged in a
three-year study of the place and meanings of in/security in the everyday lives of the people living or
4
working in the town today. We are asking what crime and security concerns trouble differently-situated
groups of people today, and what demands these prompt from authorities. What crimes loom large in
everyday experience and consciousness? Is crime any longer the preeminent ‘security’ concern troubling
local people? If not, what other fears and anxieties shape everyday life today? We are exploring again the
extent and manner in which these threats and demands are mediated through people’s sense of place and
attendant feelings of belonging. How are people’s local experiences of security, and sense of what action
can or should be taken to foster and sustain civil association, tied up with their anxieties and hopes for the
future of the places they inhabit, whether at a local, national, or planetary scale?
From Fear to Everyday Security
Notwithstanding our earlier remarks, it is not our central intention here to add to the large body of work
that anatomizes, extends or critiques the notion of fear of crime. As some of the more sophisticated
discussions of that concept have long pointed out, it became a ‘slippery and contested’ term (Farrall et al.
2009: 7). It was notable among other things for the heat it generated in debates of the 1980s and 90s
between ‘realist’, ‘idealist’ and ‘administrative’ criminologies, and the related mutual allegations of
denial, alarmism, politicization, technocratic managerialism and the rest. Various commentators noted
that fear appeared not to be something that always aligned neatly with direct experiences (Sparks 1992).
Increasingly it came to be seen as also an expressive discourse, rich in metaphor and allegory, and thus a
Page 6 of 25
way of talking about trust in authority (or its absence), about confidence in the future (or its lack), about
being at ease in the world (or not), and about tensions and hostilities across social boundaries of class,
race, gender, age and related divisions. It also became dubious in the eyes of many observers by virtue of
its capacity for manipulation. Fear is an emotion ripe for exploitation, a standing invitation to populist
rhetoric, and an alibi for extending authoritarian devices of rule (Robin 2006; Lee 2007).
A great deal more might be said about places of fear in our personal, political and cultural lives. Yet fear of
crime as a specific research topic, and to some considerable extent in public policy debates (in Britain at
least) seems to have run its course for the time being (though see, Lee and Mythen 2017). In our current
work we seek to explore more grounded, less prescriptive ways of addressing people’s concerns with
sources of danger and difficulty, and the resources of safety on which they call in imagining, planning and
leading viable daily lives. These priorities lead in rather different directions, conceptually and practically.
In criminology, and across the social sciences, they have in recent years prompted renewed and energetic
interest in the idea of security (Zedner 2009; Bourbeau 2015).
p. 573 Security concerns
In his important book, Why Things Matter to People, Andrew Sayer argues that our relationship to the world
is not just one of perception or stimulus but of concern. We care about the world we inhabit, act in it,
evaluate it, are vulnerable to it. We can flourish or suffer in it (Sayer 2011: 3; see also Rosa 2019: 126).
Thinking carefully about these aspects of people’s relations to the settings of their daily lives, Sayer
argues, affects the kind of social science we practice, because it draws our attention to the duality of
capability and vulnerability that characterizes our environment of action:
How people can best live together is not merely a matter of coordination of the actions of different
individuals by means of conventions, like deciding which side of the road to drive on, but a matter
of considering people’s capacities for flourishing and susceptibilities to harm and suffering. When
we think about how to act, we do so with some awareness of the implications for well-being, both
ours and that of others. (Sayer 2011: 8)
Sayer’s remarks strike us as important for the kinds of sociology of everyday life—and of the roles of
concerns for safety and security within it—that we might wish to develop, especially when we think about
people’s ways of inhabiting a specific place. We might very well begin from a premise that people feel quite
strong concerns over how their place is faring in the world; whether they feel it to be rising or declining, or
just about holding its own. They might feel that it is a relatively safe and protective space, though the
world beyond is more dangerous, or indeed vice versa. They might be concerned not just about whether
they, or specific others such as partners or children, are safe while out on the street during the hours of
darkness (the classic fear of crime prompt question), but whether they are in some other way at risk, from
what they are receiving—or sharing—through their computer screen in their bedroom, to the looming
dread of local flooding or wider environmental catastrophe. In other words, it seems safe to conjecture that
Page 7 of 25
these are matters of concern, and that the ways in which they are so are worth exploring, but not to
presume very much about what the objects and topics of people’s concerns are, nor how intensely they feel
about each of them.
There are of course many other registers of concern that may be brought to mind when we discuss
questions of security. Very often these involve questions of national security, or security against major
threats such as terrorism. These are relevant to the extent that measures taken against them—in the form
of enhanced police powers, or the general adoption of methods of surveillance—spill over into aspects of
our wider relations with state institutions, and our general sense of the dangerousness of the wider world.
Many critical analyses of security questions are concerned with these dimensions, and the sometimes
insidious nature of moves towards securitization and its effects upon contemporary society and culture
(for example, Schuilenberg 2015). On this view, security is conceptualized as a set of political practices;
governmental speech acts mobilized to justify decisive, speedy, exceptional measures in the face of what is
presented as existential threat (Balzacq et al. 2016).
p. 574 ↵ Security is a complex, layered term—indeed so much so as barely to be useful without careful
qualification and operational definition. The literatures on securitization, security provision and their
relations to contemporary practices of policing and government remind us that ‘security’ is not simply
something we feel (unlike, ostensibly at least, ‘fear’). It certainly does refer to material and psychological
states of (well) being, and thus to the questions of flourishing and suffering that Sayer raises (see also,
Loader and Walker 2007). But at the same time security is something that is provided, managed, planned
into the fabric of buildings, integrated into the design of vehicles, phones and other things through which
we relate to the world. It claims to designate both an activity and an end state. It is, seemingly, both
something we do (or have done to us), and something we have. We live, in this sense, among ‘security
projects’ (Valverde 2010), and they are with us whenever we shop, travel, browse the internet, go out to
eat, drink or dance and so on. Since March 2020, the date of the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, the
edges of these security projects have become ever more visible as new bio-security projects were
embedded into the architecture of sociality across people’s everyday lives.
How effective these are, whether they have chronic unintended consequences, whether they are equitable
in their impacts on different people and groups, whether we can ever escape them, whether we can
exercise any form of effective voice over different aspects of them, are all important questions that
emphasize their centrality to contemporary government and politics, and to which we return in
conclusion. The present point is that questions of security in one way or another arise as aspects of many
of the things that matter to people. They raise profound questions concerning the quality of life in
contemporary societies; and they are deeply embedded in everyday social practice. Our current efforts to
study these matters in one place shares with much work in a number of fields of study (for example in
human geography, the ‘vernacular’ turn in international relations (Bubandt 2005; Jarvis 2019), studies of
local government and democracy (Wagenaar 2007; Valverde 2010, 2012), and numerous others) a concern
to understand these matters in their ‘molecular’ aspect (Schuilenberg 2015: 147) through close, contextual
observation and inquiry.
Page 8 of 25
The everyday
Fassin (2013a: 621) argues that ‘attention to the ordinary’ provides ‘a way to transform our perspective on
the world’. Our current work, and the argument of this chapter, participates in a shift towards thinking
about security concerns as being embedded in the everyday life of the very different places in which they
arise. This interest has a good deal of continuity with our earlier study of people’s fears and feelings
towards crime in the same town. On the other hand, the conditions of ‘the ordinary’ may themselves
undergo far-reaching change illuminating faultlines in the taken for granted uneventfulness of everyday
life. As we have begun to sketch above, this may be because components of the infrastructure of everyday
security can change quite rapidly. Who provides what forms of security? Against which kinds of threat?
Using what kinds of technology? and so on. These questions have a strong bearing on the kinds of habitat
in which people living in any given neighbourhood, town or city try to construct a viable form of everyday
life.
Felski (2000: 79) argues that the notion of everyday life ‘recognizes the paramount shared reality of a
mundane, material embeddedness in the world’. She continues:
Everyone, from the most famous to the most humble, eats, sleeps, yawns, defecates; no one
escapes the reach of the quotidian. Everyday life, in other words, does not only describe the lives
of ordinary people, but recognizes that every life contains an element of the ordinary. We are all
ultimately anchored in the mundane. (ibid.)
For Felski the study of everyday life is grounded in three facets, which she calls time, space and modality:
p. 575 ‘The temporality of the everyday, I suggest, is that of repetition, the ↵ spatial ordering of the everyday
is anchored in a sense of home, and the characteristic mode of experiencing the everyday is that of
habit’ (Felski 2000: 81). Felski argues that these facets are central to understanding the ordering of daily
life, and its significance to us. We form our identity, she suggests ‘through acts of repetition’. We locate
our position in the world in terms of ‘circles of increasing proximity or distance from the experiencing self.
Home lies at the center of these circles’ (2000: 85). Felski cites Doreen Massey’s wryly undramatic
depiction: ‘much of life for many people, even in the heart of the first world, still consists of waiting in a
bus-shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes’ (Massey 1992: 8). The focus on repetition and
habit can give the impression that concern for the everyday means emphasizing the tedious and routine—
and, indeed, many people may have relationships to the world that are best described as indifferent or
mute (Rosa 2019). But ‘home’ is also the site of emotion, aspiration, and investment. Everyday life
concerns the things and places we most value and are motivated to care for and defend. That in turn should
perhaps sharpen our attention to question about from whom or against what we may be most concerned to
defend them.
Considerations of these kinds, we suggest, provide a particular way in to thinking about questions of
safety, danger, and security. They remind us why people’s experience of place and locality remain of major
significance to them, and why the sense of living under safer or more dangerous conditions there is of
Page 9 of 25
central importance to them. Emergent literatures in a number of fields increasingly investigate themes of
‘everyday security’, including the ways in which differently situated people, including those in extremely
difficult and dangerous situations, try to sustain passably secure daily lives.
In an influential article Crawford and Hutchinson (2016) argue that in order to capture adequately the
‘quotidian aspects’ of these matters, there is a need to focus upon ‘security experiences’. These concern:
‘the lived realities of practical security measures, including the diverse ways in which programmes,
strategies and techniques for governing security are experienced, taken up, resisted, and even augmented
by different individuals and groups within society’ (2016: 1185). While this may seem fairly obvious to
those approaching these matters from a sociological or anthropological point of view, it makes an
important point with reference to studies of security. The analysis and critique of security, Crawford and
Hutchinson argue, has fallen overwhelmingly on the side of programmes or ‘logics’ of government, rather
than that of ordinary experience (for example, Neocleous 2008) One result of this preference has been a
limited understanding of what it means to live under particular regimes or dispositions of ‘security’. For
this reason, Crawford and Hutchinson suggest:
Asking questions therefore about the everyday lived experiences of security—and not just how
projects are ‘implemented’ on the ground, but how they are felt, lived through, sensed and borne
by individuals and groups—is vital for understanding security governance writ large. Yet such
questions have been largely absent from contemporary security research. (Crawford and
Hutchinson 2016: 1186)
This refocusing on the ‘messy everyday world’ (ibid.) of security proposes connections to the kinds of
topics that Felski indicates are integral to theory and research on everyday life in general—our routine
uses of time, the centrality of home, the meanings of dwelling in specific locales, the emotional textures of
those practices and experiences, and so on. Even in circumstances where people’s sense of safety is
severely compromised, the effort of sustaining the viability of the everyday, remains important, perhaps
indeed especially so (Ajil et al. 2020). Such an approach ‘asks us to consider the more mundane, ordinary
p. 576 routines and day-to-day discussions and practices that people engage in to help ↵ manage their own
safety. Indeed, it is in part through such everyday security processes that ordinary people foster security
for themselves and for others while striving to live with insecurity’ (Crawford and Hutchinson 2016: 1188;
emphasis in orginal).
Extending this perspective, Nyman argues that the ‘everyday life of security is multifaceted and exists in
mundane spaces, routine practices, and affective/lived experiences’ (Nyman 2021: 314). This poses both
conceptual and methodological challenges, she argues, not least because so much of what that ‘everyday
life of security’ comprises will of its nature be repetitive, undramatic, and involve the ‘non-elite
knowledge’ of ordinary people (2021: 316; see also Vaughan-Williams and Stevens 2016). Both Crawford
and Hutchinson and Nyman argue strongly that there is a political dimension to these mundane security
‘entanglements’ (Nyman 2021: 317), but that this can be difficult to make visible and bring forth for
discussion, let alone introduce to the domain of formal politics (Nyman 2021: 318). Challenges of
researching these questions therefore include finding ways of paying attention to micro dimensions of
social practice, while making appropriate connections to the larger worlds of politics and government in
Page 10 of 25
which they are embedded. Nyman uses participatory photography, but there are many ways of
approaching the challenge of facilitating a reflexive voice. In the conclusion of this chapter we introduce
some of the ways that we are currently exploring of bringing these questions into a deliberative political
frame.
Re-Placing Security? Everyday Security in an English Town
The literature on security sometimes appears caught between two opposing impulses, each involving a
different kind of re-placement. One impulse starts from the proposition that security is a dangerous,
colonizing notion, something to be approached with a hermeneutics of suspicion, and whose effects
analysis must seek to document and expose. This worry animates much of the literature on securitization,
as mentioned. But it also more generally pervades critical security studies, as well as an emergent
anthropology of security (Goldstein 2010). Security, on this view, is a set of powers and techniques that are
mobilized in the name of the state against minorities. Security politics has a preference for urgent and
speedy action that tends to be inimical to due process and democratic deliberation. It works with a
conception of political community founded on a sharp friend/enemy distinction. On this view of security,
the key analytic task is unmasking and critique. The attendant political ambition is to transcend security as
a frame for thinking about safe and viable political communities. Security cannot be redeemed as an ideal:
it has to be replaced.
A second impulse starts from the worry that security is not so much colonizing as partial. The critique here
is of the reductive association between security and physical threats to persons and property. The resultant
task is to expand the meaning of security to include adequate satisfaction of a wider range of basic needs,
such as food, shelter, and housing. As the United Nations Development Programme report that initiated
the idea of ‘human security’ put it back in 1994: ‘A feeling of insecurity arises more from worries about
daily life than dread of a cataclysmic event. Job security, health security, environmental security, security
from crime—these are the emerging concerns of human security all over the world’ (1994: 3). On this view,
security is not an idea to be critiqued and replaced, but expanded and embraced. Security becomes the lens
p. 577 through ↵ which to approach and take appropriately urgent action with respect to a whole raft of public
problems. Security comes here to be placed at the centre of political and social action. All politics is
reframed as security politics.
We appear to be faced here with a stark choice: to replace or embrace ‘security’. But maybe the choice does
not have to be so stark. What our reflections on everyday security suggest instead is that ordinary ‘security
concerns’ are never merely about security, in so far as they inescapably involve people in making sense of,
and judgements about, wider aspects of social and political life. These wider matters, in turn, are often felt
to bear on concerns about security, in so far as making sense of social relations and political life is in part a
question of evaluating how they impact upon safety and order. If we start here, the task is neither to
replace nor embrace security as our object of attention, nor to make arbitrary distinctions between
troubles that are coded as crime and security and those that are not. It requires, instead, that we engage in
the time- and place-sensitive exploration of the ways in which security concerns are always also wrapped
up with wider considerations about one’s social situation. These connections and considerations may best
be approached using a more expansive conceptual vocabulary.
Page 11 of 25
Security is, as noted above, a complex word and has never ‘belonged’ exclusively to self-nominated
practices of government and control, nor to the academic disciplines that study and critique them. It may
indeed be the case that the very forms of securitization that these fields address have meant that the
associated meanings—principally, powers of surveillance and control in the hands of states and
corporations; or practices of prevention instigated by new technologies, as in ‘cyber-security’—have
become the dominant ones. This is perhaps why authors such as Crawford and Hutchinson (2016) in
drawing attention to ideas of ‘everyday’ security, sometimes write as if from a somewhat dissident
5
position. Yet, even prior to Bauman’s well-known discussion of the layered meanings of Sicherheit in
German (Bauman 1999), ‘security’ had an array of associations that could hardly be confined to the
discourses that predominate now. Security is thus both a term in ordinary language, and one with more or
less technical senses in many different spheres. It does not denote only those practices or institutions that
preoccupy practitioners of ‘security studies’. For example, in psychoanalysis ‘security’ goes to core
questions of attachment, loss and individuation, and was a central term in the thought of thinkers like
Winnicott, Bowlby and Sullivan (Zicht 2019). In Maslow’s humanistic psychology, security or safety
‘deficit-needs’ sit close to the base of the famous hierarchy of postulated human needs (Maslow 1943;
Kenrick et al. 2010). In more recent social theory, Giddens places ‘ontological security’ at the heart of the
discussion of routinization and ordering in social life (Giddens 1984) and to the means of accomplishment
of self-identity in modernity (Giddens 1991). In other words, the question of security in daily life is not a
matter internal to international relations or security studies at all, but a reminder of some rather more
fundamental themes in psychological and sociological theory and research, touching many forms of social
p. 578 practice. In this ↵ respect, the rediscovery of everyday security augurs a welcome return to some
abiding preoccupations of social theory.
In examining questions of everyday security ethnographers have begun to explore afresh, and in situ,
these connections between global orientations and local identity. Around the world, anthropologists are
providing revealing reports of everyday in/security in visibly dangerous, conflictual or marginal situations,
such as Latin American mega-cities, Israel-Palestine, situations of civil conflict, and contested
borderlands (Ochs 2011; Fassin 2013b; Andersson 2016; Zeiderman 2016). The focal concern of these
ethnographies, particularly those embedded in the Global South, has been on places in which violence and
insecurity are normal conditions of everyday life where lived experience is analysed in terms of resilience,
resistance, and mechanisms for coping with predicaments of violent precarity (see, for example, Das 2006;
Han 2012). These are also conditions in which state authorities are not experienced as an actual or
potential source of security, but instead as an ongoing and invasive threat to the possibility of a passably
liveable existence, either because the police are an active instigator of violence, or the state is complicit
with criminal organizations in its orchestration (Denyer Willis 2015).
In the UK, questions of place, identity and everyday life have also been explored in contexts such as multi-
cultural London neighbourhoods (Hall 2012), as well as being more generally to the fore in contemporary
iterations of the anthropology of Britain (Degnen and Tyler 2017; Koch 2019; Willis 2022). What we do not
know so well, however, is how the convulsions of our time filter into lived experiences of security in the
ordinary places and routines of life in the less dramatic context of non-metropolitan twenty-first century
Britain; how that conditions the challenges faced by security providers; and what this means for local
governance and politics, and the character of the ‘security projects’ (Valverde 2010) that shape and shadow
Page 12 of 25
our daily lives. It is for these reasons pertaining to the oversight of ‘normal’ (Thies 2021) or ‘understudied
reference neighbourhoods’ (Howell 2017), that we are revisiting an old research site (see also Krause 2021:
19–21; 62–65). One argument for undertaking this work in Macclesfield today is partly that we have been
there before and partly that some of the arguments we made originally for it as a research site in terms of
size, location, social composition, economic performance and restructuring, and moderate and somewhat
typical crime rates, continue to hold. The opportunity for ‘re-studying’ sites and communities offers the
scope to appreciate longitudinal dimensions of change (O’Reilly 2012), something already acknowledged
by researchers in the community studies tradition (Crow 2012; Lyon and Crow 2012). Macclesfield also
exhibits on an accessible scale some of the aforementioned socio-economic and political cleavages of our
times. Like other places it encompasses the experiences of different generations (baby-boomers/
millennials; home-owners/renters—Simon 2017). Its residents number those who stand in different
relations to employment and wealth (the economically secure/the ‘just about managing’/the precarious).
It includes those who self-define as indigenous, and those regarded as incomers or migrants, and a mix of
what Goodhart (2017) has provocatively termed ‘anywheres’ and ‘somewheres’ (cf. Wing Chan and
Kawalerowicz 2021). Macclesfield also encompasses people who stand on either side of digital divides in
terms of their facility and comfort in using social media—with all that this entails in terms of the digital
mediation of risk and place (Helsper 2021).
How though can we best move beyond the criminology of fear towards towards a place-sensitive
exploration of a potentially more diffuse range of everyday security concerns? This, in our view, requires a
different theoretical framing—one that situates social enquiry and analysis at the intersection of places,
people, and authorities.
p. 579 Places
In a wide variety of ways, people’s interests in safety and danger are embedded in place—in the rhythms
and rituals of mundane practices. They are implicated in commuting to work and the school run, routines
of shopping and leisure, and daily ways of getting around—walking, driving, cycling, busing and so forth.
They flow from people’s engagement with, and relations to, a set of ordinary locations—home and
neighbourhood, town centres, streets (‘the quintessential space of the everyday’—Sheringham 2006: 19),
parks, subways, bus and train stations, but also nowadays digital spaces that mediate relations to physical
place (e.g. Miller 2016). Security concerns are bound up with the spaces through which people move and
those they avoid; the things that they consume and how they acquire them; the encounters and
relationships that they have and those that they shun. But this is not merely a matter of ‘human-to-
human engagements’ (Holley and Shearing 2018: 11). As Shearing and his colleagues remind us, questions
of security today also involve the relations people have, not only to the built landscape (including its
avowedly protective infrastructure), but also to the natural environment with which human sociality and
its futures are inescapably entwined (Shearing 2015). It matters enormously to people’s lived experience of
security whether those ‘thing-to-human and human-to-thing engagements’ (ibid.) are—to borrow again
from Hartmut Rosa’s (2019) terms—resonant, mute or alienating.
Page 13 of 25
In all these respects, people live in places towards which they have many, complex and sometimes
passionate feelings. Those places have histories. In smaller or larger ways—at the levels of the family’s
inter-generational story, or the neighbourhood’s changing fortunes, or the locality’s place in bigger
national and international historical sweeps—people may be intensely interested in these trajectories and
see them as important facets of their own identity and possible futures. Questions of this kind to do with
range and depth of attachment to place are heavily mediated by axes of class, gender and race (e.g. Benson
2014; Tyler 2019). They also matter a lot when it comes to the kind of security (or its lack) that is at stake in
living a certain kind of life, in a certain kind of place.
Just as importantly, places have futures that people anticipate, or work towards, or seek to escape, with
contrasting levels of hope and aspiration, or worry and dread (Norgaard 2011; Cook 2017). It is common
across an otherwise discordant literature to claim that the experience of security is, in an important sense,
future-oriented (‘being able to assume that day-to-day, moment-to-moment human planning can go
forward’—Molotch 2012: 3). Security concerns, in this sense, are bound up with the orientations people
have to the possible (and imaginable) futures of the places they reside in (from the local, to the national, to
the planetary), and with their sense of being able to exercise meaningful agency in relation to those
futures. Given this, it makes very little sense to try to conceptually demarcate something called ‘security’
from an adjacent set of questions to do with the liveability and sustainability of the places in which people
dwell and seek to build valuable lives (Calhoun 2018).
People
People of differing age or class or ethnic identification, or any number of other ‘demographics’, may relate
to place very differently and by no means always harmoniously. In this sense, the security engagements
p. 580 that people have with people (and things) in ↵ place always have a trans-local dimension. This has in
part to do with the idea of threats emanating from the outside—including nowadays those that ‘enter’ a
place digitally. But it also stems from the fact the people’s experience of everyday security is in part made
possible by living in a social situation—in terms of their location in a wider economic, social and racial
order—that enables them to be and feel secure, and to relate to place with greater or lesser degrees of
belonging. Yet how people inhabit or feel they belong to a particular place may still have much to do with
how they feel towards others who are there with them, and whether there are intermediary people and
institutions capable of bridging gaps and boundaries between such groups (Koch et al. 2020). These
dynamics have many possible outcomes, sometimes disturbing ones that take the form of hostility or
projection towards incomers, minorities, migrants and various possible others (Degnen and Tyler 2017;
Tyler 2019). Smith et al. (2021) argue that, within localities, judgements of what is beautiful or ugly,
orderly or messy—aesthetic evaluations of local environments in other words—can have a strong, if
usually implicit, racialized coding. They are also today heavily mediated through digital technologies—not
least via various online forums of ‘neighbourhood’ communication, such as Facebook, NextDoor, and
WhatsApp groups (van Steden and Mehlbaum 2022).
In this sense the experience of living among or alongside others is central to people’s sense of everyday
security and to their apprehension of the places that they inhabit or through which they regularly move.
The often stressed character of social relations in contemporary urban settings tends to reflect the degree
Page 14 of 25
to which we see their other inhabitants as menacing rather than constituting our security (see for example
Doering 2020). This also depends on whether relevant security concerns are experienced and interpreted in
terms of the threat posed to ‘us’ by dangerous others, or understood as problems in which we are all
6
somehow implicated as agents of our own peril. Conversely, the extent to which we are able to live
convivially with those others may to some quite large extent determine what we think of as the quality of
our life in that place (see further Gilroy 2005). It is for these reasons that it is difficult—not to say unwise
—to seek to effect a sharp conceptual break between questions of ‘security’ and those pertaining to
practices (and boundaries) of community and solidarity. To enquire into everyday security is to ask what
people desire in terms of living in civil association with one another today.
This relation of security to solidarity is also not always or easily restricted to the local. Consider the
consciousness that people may have, and which sometimes prompts some of them to mobilize in various
ways, of more pervasive risks and threats—to the provision of safe habitats for children or older people, or
otherwise vulnerable people; threats that potentially affect everyone at certain times or places (public
disorders? traffic?); and threats that do potentially affect everyone (climate crisis? pollution?). One of the
many problems of the ‘fear of crime’ literature is the tendency only to attend to perceptions of risk to our
p. 581 immediate safety or those of a relatively few intimates. But there is no reason ↵ to think that it is
irrational to think beyond this. Indeed to be a citizen, or to think in any way politically at all, is intrinsically
to go beyond this, and extend one’s circle of concern to those who are strangers. Social media has created
new possibilities for these trans-local concerns to be aired and for new solidarities—or what Boyd (2011)
calls ‘networked publics’—to form.
Authorities
In closely related ways, we may see the ‘projects’ of security providers in many capacities and different
scales (from the police, to other statutory agencies with designated safety responsibilities, to schools and
employers, to housing associations and landlords, to shop owners, and so on) as constituting the
infrastructures of everyday patterns and choices, and of local engagements and relations. In this respect
everyday security is—as Valverde (2012) has emphasized—a matter of how people experience the security
practices of these different governing authorities. It has to do, further, with the interplay between formal/
institutional and informal/cultural practices of security. So it involves tracing the interfaces between the
activities of formal safety-providers in the police and local government, and those of institutionalized
private actors (shopping centre security guards, for instance); private market preferences (local security
firms etc.); voluntary collective actors (churches, for example); micro-local associations (neighbours,
streets); and individual/familial choices.
Attending to matters of everyday security is not simply, however, a question as to the logics of security
projects of different authorities are communicated by those authorities (in meetings, surgeries, or via
Twitter), and experienced, interpreted or negotiated, in any given place, by different actors. It also has to
do with the demands that people make of responsible authorities (and the particular authorities they judge
to be responsible) with respect to the troubles and threats that concern them. Some of these demands may
be made formally—taking the form of calls for service, or action in response to identifiable problems.
Others may circulate in more inchoate or diffuse forms, and be confined to private grumbles or registered
Page 15 of 25
in official or neighbourhood forums for online communication. Or they may be mobilized by citizens
(again on and offline) in various urban social movements and local campaigns oriented to pressing
demands to make the places in which people reside safer or just more generally liveable.
In these respects, the connections it is important to retain and refine are, in the first instance, those that
exist between everyday security concerns and matters of trust, confidence and legitimacy in a range of
governing authorities—notably the police, but by no means only or even always most crucially police
alone. At this point, however, security always also becomes inseparable from the institutions, practices
and unredeemed possibilities of democratic life more generally (Loader and Walker 2007). People’s
experience and enjoyment of something called security is, in other words, intimately connected to their
sense of political capacity; to whether they are able to feel any authorship of the environment in which
they live, and the authorities that govern them; and can imagine exercising agency in ways that might
make a difference to their matters of concern. The experience of in/security is inseparable from one’s
inclusion or exclusion from the institutional practices of public will-formation in a democracy. Studying
security is therefore never innocent with respect to those wider political questions.
p. 582 Conclusion: Democratic Enquiry and a Better Politics of Security
How though can one best conceptualize and study that close relation of security to (democratic) politics?
What might it mean—methodologically—to enquire into questions of everyday security with democracy in
mind, with a view, that is, to extending the possibilities for people to ‘shape a common public life with
others who are not the same as us’ (Dzur 2019: x)?
As we indicated above, we are drawn to Andrew Sayer’s arguments about ‘the deeply evaluative character
of human experience, and its relation to human vulnerability’ (Sayer 2011: 4). Sayer, one might recall,
argues that people are evaluative beings whose relation to the world is one of concern. In Sayer’s view, ‘the
most important questions people tend to face in their everyday lives are normative ones of what is good
and bad about what is happening, including how others are treating them, and of how to act, and what to
do for the best’ (ibid.: 1). This entails, in his view, that social scientists stop treating themselves, their
research subjects, and their readers as spectators in social life, and instead regard them as possible co-
participants in the creation of social meanings, and in fostering and sustaining democratic practice. If we
understand ‘lay normativity’ in this way, we can begin to develop a grounded articulation of Loader and
Walker’s (2007) claim that including people in genuine dialogue about their own security is always in part
a contribution to that security.
Space forbids a detailed account here of the implications of these reflections for methodological strategies,
either in our own current work or in future work on everyday securities. Suffice to note that the range of
questions and concerns that arise, and the variety of people, publics and places in which they do so,
suggest a pluralist, even sometimes quite opportunist, orientation in which proximity, familiarity,
observation and dialogues are central. That, no doubt, requires some quite familiar approaches—
interviews, focus groups, more or less systematic observations, for example. However, it also draws
Page 16 of 25
discussion—along with many other forms of contemporary inquiry—in the direction of a wider range of
creative and participatory engagements, and we intend to explore these much more closely in subsequent
work.
We think this suggests an approach to enquiry into matters of everyday security that is quite grounded,
modest, and attuned to the conversations and controversies already in train in the places we study. It
suggests an approach to ethnographic work that seeks a granular understanding of what happens, and
what is felt to be at stake, when differently situated actors think, talk, deliberate or mobilize around their
security concerns (in our case in Macclesfield). This overarching ethnographic sensibility does not mean
privileging any specific method, not does it treat any one method in a multi-method investigation as an
arbiter of local social realities. It means, instead, paying close attention to sites of security communication
and contestation, with no presumptions about where these are to be found. Such sites can encompass local
authority meetings and consultations, planning objections and their attendant narratives, on and off-line
police-public interactions, neighbourhood Facebook groups, and the production, performance and display
of public art. It means tracking the diverse campaign groups and local social movements that mobilize
around questions of local security, and dispute what a sustainable place might be now and in the future
(such us digging up a community allotment or transforming neglected public spaces through planting,
recycling, or litter picking). It means conducting conversations at different scales with differently-situated
p. 583 people ↵ and groups—whether in biographical interviews, survey interviews, group discussions of
various sizes, and larger deliberative events. By so doing, one is able to bring multiple lenses to bear on
matters of local security concern, and pay careful and comparative attention to how different modes of
communication enable or constrain different kinds of conversation (and contestation) about the meanings
and practices of safety. In this sense it would tend to emphasize that studies of everyday security are
particularly likely to benefit from aspects of the wider movements towards thinking about social science
research as a relationship of co-creation with and alongside the people whose lives and futures are the
topic of its enquiry (Britt and Alexander 2019).
There is clear value in seeking to stage avowedly deliberative events as part of such democratically-
oriented enquiry—events at which people are actively invited to ponder and discuss local issues and
futures, or to respond to emergent findings (see, for example, Wagenaar 2007; Escobar 2011; Mansbridge
2020). However, the crucial aspect of such enquiry is not the presence of such dedicated events, but an
overriding deliberative ethos. This ethos rejects the view that research participants are to be treated as
subjects from whom data is generated. Rather, it extends an invitation to people to assemble (with us, in
ways prompted by us) to identify and diagnose matters of security concern, to think about their causes and
effects, and to propose and discuss possible solutions. It is an ethos that conducts research with people
understood as democratic agents, not on people posited as passive recipients of research. It extends an
invitation to theorize with us about matters of concern, not simply to take part in a process in which they
are theorized. This ethos carries no implication that researchers are bound to agree with, or defer to, the
outlooks and interpretations of their co-participants. Rather, as Sayer (2011: 7) points out, such an ethos
‘opens up a space for public discussion’ about what constitutes security, or makes places liveable, or social
relations convivial, or what it might mean and take to develop stronger axes of resonance to the world
(Rosa 2019).
Page 17 of 25
This, then, is one way of giving practical effect—in the course of enquiry—to the idea that security has an
intimate relation to democratic politics. It entails the open-ended and curious investigation of the
conditions and possibilities for security today, conducted with a view to extending and deepening practices
7
of democratic deliberation and contestation. The orientation in this regard is not simply methodological.
This approach to enquiry also entails a political commitment, a prefigurative one that embeds in research
practice the kinds of deliberative forms of life one is working to foster and sustain. This also means
extending an invitation to reflect not only on the present and its troubles, but also on the future and its
possibilities. To this extent the social enquiry we have in mind embodies a kind of democratic hope—
something, as Huber (2021) points out, that depends on the possibility that our concerns about the
condition of the social world are open to our individual and collective efforts to both re-imagine and
change it.
p. 584 Selected Further Reading

Readers who wish to be acquainted with the debate over ‘fear of crime’ in criminology can usefully consult Sparks
(1992), Lee (2007), and Farrall et al. (2009). Lee and Mythen (2017) have compiled an extensive and helpful collection of
more recent work on the topic. The literature on security in the social sciences is vast, diverse, and often contested.
Some sense of what is at stake can be gleaned by comparing, say, Neocleous (2008) and Loader and Walker (2007).
Zedner’s (2009) book Security is an excellent overview, as is the collection of essays assembled by Bourbeau (2015).
Introductions to more recent work on the idea of ‘everyday’ or ‘vernacular’ security can be found in papers by
Crawford and Hutchinson (2016), and by Jarvis (2019) and Nyman (2021). We have found the work of Valverde (2010,
2012) and Schuilenberg (2015) on ‘security projects’ and urban governance especially helpful in developing our own
current research. The work of Clifford Shearing and his collaborators has long been a key resource for anyone
interested in questions of security goverance, and their current research on environmental security is an important
contribution understanding these topics today (Shearing 2015; Holley and Shearing 2018).
Anyone interested in revisiting—with us—the site of our original research can do so by consulting Girling et al. (2000)
Crime and Social Change in Middle England.
Online resources

Page 18 of 25
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10.1080/10439463.2021.1896514 <https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2021.1896514>
Willis, R. (2022), A Precarious Life: Understanding Class, Race and Conflict in a De-industrialized Town, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Wing Chan, T. and Kawalerowicz, J. (2021), ‘Anywheres, Somewhere, Local Attachment, and Civic Participation’, British
Journal of Sociology, 73(1): 112–124.
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Yates, S., Kirby, J., and Lockley, E. (2015), ‘Digital Media Use: Differences and Inequalities in Relation to Class and Age’,
Sociological Research Online, 20(4): 71–91.
Zedner, L. (2009), Security, Abingdon: Routledge.
Zeiderman, A. (2016), Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogata, Durham: Duke University Press.
Zicht, S. R. (2019), ‘Observations on the Centrality of Security in Psychoanalytic Supervision: A View from the
Interpersonal Tradition and Attachment Perspective’, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79(4): 375–387.
Notes
1
‘The Symbolic Construction of Crime in Middle England’ under the ESRC ‘Crime and Social Order’ Programme
(L210252032), 1994–6. The main research output of the study was a book by Evi Girling, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks
entitled Crime and Social Change in Middle England (Routledge 2000).
2
https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/ipsos-mori-issues-index-november-2021 <https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-
mori/en-uk/ipsos-mori-issues-index-november-2021>
3
These were: climate change, coronavirus, Brexit, health, economy, poverty/inequality, lack of faith in politicians,
immigration, education, housing. See further:
⤴
https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2021-11/
Issues%20Index_Nov21%20CATI_v1_PUBLIC.pdf <https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/
2021-11/Issues%20Index_Nov21%20CATI_v1_PUBLIC.pdf>
4
‘Place, Crime and Insecurity in Everyday Life: A Contemporary Study of an English Town’ (Ref ES/S010734/1). See
further: https://securityinplace.org/ <https://securityinplace.org/>
5
Bauman argues that the word Sicherheit, although the nearest translation equivalent for ‘security’, involves three
distinct senses, best rendered in English as security, safety and certainty. This draws attention to the ambiguity in
discussion of security between an external aspect—safety—and inner states of being. In his view there is a political
dimension to this—politicians may have incentives to focus attention on questions of safety, through the provision of
policing or surveillance, though they have little capacity to offer security in the face of economic and technological
forces that exceed their control. This is one reason why, in Bauman’s view, the politicization of security is so often
regressive.
6
The emergent findings of our study relating to concerns about the volume, speed and parking of cars provide one—
but by no means the only—case in point. It matters enormously whether these issues are framed as a problem of
others (‘bad’ drivers) that require law enforcement solutions, or whether they are couched as a collective outcome of
the dominance of the car as a means of mobility, which can adequately be addressed through design solutions that
affect everyone (such as pavement bollards, 20 miles-per-hour zones, or low traffic neighbourhoods).
7
This ambition is of course fraught with practical difficulty. One of these flows from the fact that ‘consultation’ has
today become a routine practice among many government and third-sector agencies. We are finding that these claims
to listen and respond are often met with lethargy and fatalism, as if people do not believe that the efforts are sincere
or will result in improvements to their lives or communities. But this disposition can also greet our efforts, as
Page 24 of 25
researchers, to foster conversation and practice active listening. For some at least, university researchers are simply
members of another remote external authority whose claims are also to be treated with guarded wariness, even
suspicion.
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Page 25 of 25
27. Crime prevention as urban security

p. 587 27. Crime prevention as urban security

Adam Adam, Susan Donkin and Christine A. Weirich
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0027
Abstract
This chapter reviews the learning and accumulated research evidence that has developed over the last 40 years or so with
regard to crime prevention, community safety, and urban security. It begins by tracing the historic emergence of the modern
‘preventive turn’, its evolution and institutionalization within the UK, across successive waves of development. In doing so, it
highlights three broad periods of change which are characterized as: the ‘early years’ of innovation and experimentation (from
the late 1970s to the early 1990s); the period marked by ‘expansion and elaboration’ informed by infrastructure building and
the opening up of crime prevention to incorporate wider features of community safety and perceptions of insecurity (the late
1990s to 2010); and ‘fragmentation and retrenchment’ marked by austerity and the rise of vulnerability as an organizing focus
for service provision (2010 to the present). It situates the British experience in the wider context of Europe with a particular
focus on urban policies, city-level strategies and delivery through multi-sectoral partnerships. This comparative framing helps
to understand the particular British experience, its development, trajectories, persisting fault-lines and future challenges.
Consideration is given to some of the recurring challenges that feature both across time and across jurisdictions. In particular,
the question of institutional responsibility for prevention and the dissonance between the research knowledge base and
contemporary policy and practice are explored.
Keywords: crime prevention, community safety, urban security, early intervention, partnerships, implementation, research-
policy nexus
Introduction
Crime prevention, community safety and urban security have expanded considerably over the last 30–40
years as interconnected fields of scholarly interest, policy development and professional practice. They
now constitute a loosely defined domain where divergent disciplines and organiational interests coalesce,
Page 1 of 27
as exemplified by the focus in research and policy on city-level municipal authorities as the multi-
stakeholder delivery mechanisms for joined-up approaches to the prevention of crime, harm and
vulnerability (Tilley 2009).
It is not the purpose of this chapter to provide an encyclopaedic overview of this broad and rich vein of
intellectual enquiry and organizational learning, nor to offer a definitive review of ‘what works’ in crime
prevention practice (see Sherman et al. 2002; Weisburd et al. 2017). Here, we explore and assess some key
developments and learning over time and consider implications for future directions. While the focus is
1
largely on the British experience, we also situate the journey travelled by the UK in a wider European
context. This complements and extends the subject matter of earlier editions of the Oxford Handbook, with
insights into some of the divergent policy pathways, institutional arrangements and strategic choices that
inform urban security practices elsewhere in Europe. To this end, we draw on an international review of
literature conducted as part of an EU Horizon 2020 research project IcARUS—‘Innovative Approaches to
Urban Security’—supplemented by interviews with key international experts who have been at the
forefront of shaping the knowledge-base and invested in the application of research in practice (Crawford
et al. 2022). Interview material is used selectively throughout the chapter to illustrate some of the
2
arguments and viewpoints presented.
p. 588 ↵ We begin by tracing the historic emergence of the modern ‘preventive turn’, its evolution and
institutionalization within the UK, across successive waves of development. In doing so, we highlight three
broad periods of change which are characterized as the ‘early years’ of innovation and experimentation
(from the late 1970s to the early 1990s); the period marked by ‘expansion and elaboration’ informed by
infrastructure building and the opening up of crime prevention to incorporate wider features of
community safety and perceptions of insecurity (the late 1990s to 2010); and ‘fragmentation and
retrenchment’ marked by austerity and the rise of vulnerability as an organizing focus for service
provision (2010 to the present). We then situate the British context in a wider European comparative
frame, by exploring a number of differences and similarities in approach and delivery. In the final part of
the chapter we consider some of the recurring challenges that feature both across time and across
jurisdictions. In particular, we focus on the question of institutional responsibility for prevention given the
inter-organizational dimensions of partnership working and relations between the knowledge-base and
policy/practice. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on emerging fault-lines and possible future
challenges.
The British Preventive Turn
The early years

For many commentators, the period from the mid-1970s to the late-1980s marked a watershed in crime
control and policing (Feeley and Simon 1992; Garland 1996). With recorded crime rates increasing
dramatically from the 1960s onwards, growing strains were exposed across the institutions of criminal
justice, both with regard to their legitimacy and effectiveness. Most notably, this expressed itself in a loss
of faith in the ‘rehabilitative ideal’, which had informed institutions of criminal justice either directly or
Page 2 of 27
indirectly across the twentieth century (Garland 1985). This new-found pessimism was starkly evoked in
Martinson’s (1974) infamous phrase ‘nothing works’ which captured the zeitgeist of the era. The
subsequent politicization of crime in the UK—signalled in the 1979 Thatcher election campaign and
victory—was fuelled by the growth of social movements that championed the previously ignored victims
of crime. Hitherto, crime control had been largely shielded from the gaze of political criticism by a broad
consensus that it was best served by ‘expert’ judgement rather than public opinion (Loader 2006). As faith
in the traditional criminal justice establishment waned, policy-makers began to look elsewhere for
solutions (Home Office 1977). Furthermore, in light of the economic crisis, governments began to search
for fiscal savings and cost efficiencies as established modes of crime control came to be seen as
representing a significant financial burden upon the public purse.
Importantly for our purposes, this period saw the (re-)emergence of interest in crime prevention as a
focus of policy concern and intellectual enquiry. Where the criminal justice system had come to rely on
reactive and largely punitive ‘tertiary’ preventive interventions alone, greater emphasis was now to be
given to interventions that sought to prevent offending in the first place; either through ‘primary’
prevention—directed at general populations (and places) to address potentially criminogenic factors
before the onset of the problem—or via ‘secondary’ prevention involving work with people (or places)
identified as ‘at risk’ because of some pre-dispositional factor. This was the lesson powerfully made by
p. 589 Brantingham and Faust (1976) in their article ‘A Conceptual ↵ Model of Crime Prevention’, which drew
on analogies from healthcare. Consequently, crime prevention largely came to be defined in contrast to the
traditional institutions of criminal justice. In this vein, van Dijk (1990: 205) envisaged crime prevention as
encompassing: ‘the total of all policies, measures and techniques, outside the boundaries of the criminal
justice system, aiming at the reduction of the various kinds of damage caused by acts defined as criminal
by the state’. This suggested, not simply a shift in institutional focus, but also, a more instrumental and
future-oriented mentality concerned with anticipating future harms in place of the normative concern
with reordering the past by ‘doing justice’ through traditional criminal justice processes.
However, the potential of this major conceptual ‘shift in paradigm’ (Tuck 1988)—when seen today from
the vantage point of over forty years history—has yet to be fully realized. This animates a recurring theme
throughout this chapter, namely the reasons why prevention did not become a more central feature in the
governance of crime and security across the ensuing years. Despite the intense early innovations in theory
and practice inaugurated in the 1980s—much of it stimulated and sponsored by the work of the Research
and Planning Unit in the Home Office—the promise of up-stream early intervention and prevention was
stalled, diverted and confused. Consequently, there is much to learn from an analysis of the key
developments, innovations and paths taken—and not taken—during the formative years, in part because
the same issues, barriers, challenges and opportunities presented then, continue to reverberate and inform
developments today.
Historians have rightly cautioned against ‘epochal’ claims that the 1980s marked a simple transition from
a state-centred, retrospective and reactive past to a pluralized preventive present (Zedner 2006; Churchill
2017). Nonetheless, in its contemporary revival, the novel forms of crime prevention—particularly
situational approaches—drew explicitly upon earlier ideas linked to rational choice theory and altering the
opportunity structures for offending (Garland 2000). Object-change and situational modification replaced
Page 3 of 27
the focus on people-change. This was deemed both more amenable and more generalizable. It injected a
renewed optimism. Rather than focus on individual pre-dispositions to offend—and the difficulties in
identifying these—it sought to highlight the benefits to change through modifications to the physical and
built environment.
The 1980s saw a flurry of crime prevention thinking and practice, with a number of key innovations during
this period standing out as having effected significant subsequent change. One key development was
methodological, namely the initiation of victimization surveys as novel means of measuring and
understanding crime, harm and public perceptions, while another placed greater focus on up-steam
thinking in relation to crime prevention measures and policy.
Victimization surveys
Victimization surveys have been highly influential as an alternative—and often more robust—source of
information about the nature and extent of crime and harm. Fundamentally, they also disrupt the
erstwhile monopoly of the police as gatekeepers of crime data; serving as an alternative to police recorded
crime statistics. In the UK, this initially took the form of the British Crime Survey—first published in 1983
(Hough and Mayhew 1983) and now known as the Crime Survey for England and Wales—but also saw
experimentation with local variants (Jones et al. 1986), as well as international victimization surveys (van
Dijk et al. 1990; van Kersten et al. 2014) that have become vital instruments in interpreting the distribution,
p. 590 concentration and patterns of ↵ victimization across the world. Reflecting on their lasting legacy, Jan
van Dijk—a key initiator and exponent—commented in interview:
I think symbolically when you do a victimisation survey, you break the monopoly of the police on
the topic. In the old days, they were the ones who collected the statistics … When you have
victimisation survey data, you changed the rules of the game … So, I see the victimisation survey,
more than I did in the past, as an extremely important tool in the democratisation process.
Here is not the place to assess the massive contribution made by victimization surveys and the research
they have spawned. However, a few points warrant highlighting, specifically in regard to the scope of
prevention and how it influenced policy.
First, victimization surveys focused research and policy attention squarely on victims of crime—hitherto
largely neglected by the gaze of criminal justice—their experiences and the impacts of victimization. In
particular, they revealed the concentration of crime at the level of individuals, households and
neighbourhoods as well as the unequal social and spatial distribution of victimization. They exposed the
compounding effects of multiple and repeat victimization, leading pioneering criminologists to highlight
the ethical and practical benefits of targeting victims as a means of allocating resources to the prevention
of repeat crimes (Farrell and Pease 1993).
Secondly, victimization surveys also prompted considerable debate and enquiry into the role of public
perceptions of crime and insecurity—often referred to as ‘the fear of crime’—as a subject in its own right.
This centred not only on the measurement and meaning of people’s fears but more importantly on the
Page 4 of 27
relationship between subjective perceptions and objective risks of victimization. Reflecting the insight of
the Thomas Theorem that if humans define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences (Thomas and
Thomas 1928), the ways in which individuals’ perceptions of insecurity shaped reality and their
experiences of public safety became priorities (Crawford et al. 1990). This was particularly so regarding the
continuum, identified by researchers, between everyday incidents of low-level abuse and harassment (in
private and public spaces) and more extreme forms of violence (Stanko 1990), which became, and remains
today, a matter of concern for both academics and policy-makers. This subsequently served to open up
space for crime prevention to be drawn into much wider connections with both insecurity as an inter-
subjective phenomenon and the links between behaviours, incivilities, and ‘signs of crime’ that might not
be defined as criminal per se but could serve as indicators of possible future crimes or criminality.
Thirdly, from a methodological perspective, victimization survey research also helped shift the focus from
the offender to offences with the latter understood as an outcome of the convergence in time and space of
relationships set in a wider nexus. Whether this was conceived in terms of the ‘routine activities’ triangle
of a suitable target, motivated offender and the absence of a capable guardian (Cohen and Felson 1979), or
the ‘square of crime’ highlighted by self-styled Left Realists encompassing the victim, offender, state
(formal social control) and society/public (informal social control) (Young and Matthews 1992), the
emphasis was to decentre the offender and the institutions of criminal justice from the purview of both
analysing crime causation and promoting crime prevention.
Policy-makers began to recognize that the prevention of crime lay far beyond the levers of the institutions
of criminal justice and the police—who had been assumed to carry the prevention mantle. Rather,
prevention was increasingly seen as a task for the community as a whole, prompting collaboration
p. 591 between a patchwork of public and ↵ private agencies and actors with some relation to, and
responsibility for, crime prevention. This new message was elaborated in the inter-departmental circular
on ‘crime prevention’ 8/1984 which resulted from cross-Whitehall working group on crime reduction
established by then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. It declared that: ‘since some of the factors
affecting crime lie outside the control or direct influence of the police, crime prevention cannot be left to
them alone. Every individual citizen and all those agencies whose policies and practices can influence the
extent of crime should make their contribution. Preventing crime is a task for the whole
community’ (Home Office 1984). In practice, this begged the question: how was this patchwork to be
organized, marshalled and harnessed for the public good?
Up-stream thinking
A second and related feature of innovation during this period was the focus on stimulating a new
prevention mentality that encouraged ‘up-stream’ thinking and early interventions to anticipate harm
and pre-empt criminal opportunities. Much of this focused on the design and modification of the physical
environment to reduce opportunities for crime—with innovations in situational crime prevention and
‘crime prevention through environmental design’ driving, what Clarke referred to as, a ‘framework for
3
some practical and common-sense thinking about how to deal with crime’ (1995: 93). The influence on
policy and practice of this rich corpus of ‘new criminologies of everyday life’ (Garland 2001: 127) was
Page 5 of 27
extensive; ranging from the implementation of diverse opportunity reduction initiatives, to the
4
establishment of the Secured by Design police initiative and the inauguration of architectural liaison
officers—schooled in the new theories—within UK police forces.
Separate to this, a less noticeable and little commented on series of innovations was being stimulated in
relation to social and community-based crime prevention. Hope and Shaw (1988) proposed a more social
approach focused on relations and interactions rather than just design attributes and spatial
arrangements. However, given their affinity with theories of individual responsibility and rational choice,
situational approaches aligned well with the prevailing political climate. As such, situational interventions
were preferred over approaches that relied on broad social policy interventions and government action. For
O’Malley (1992: 263), the triumph of situational, over social crime prevention, in Anglophone countries,
signified ‘the displacement of socialised risk management with privatised prudentialism’. Furthermore,
for him, this needed to be understood as being connected to, and an extension of, the neo-liberal political
programmes with which it was aligned in those jurisdictions—most notably in the UK but also in Australia.
The period of ‘elaboration and expansion’ (late 1990s–2010)

This period, with its origins in the recommendations of the Morgan Report (1991) and local government
driven change, was crystallized by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (a flagship of the New Labour
p. 592 Government elected in 1997). Its key features were the ↵ elaboration of a novel architecture of
‘preventive partnerships’ and the expansion, beyond crime reduction, to incorporate wider dimensions of
community safety. The subsequent ‘opening up’ of crime prevention was stimulated, in part, by
acknowledgement of the interdependencies and interconnections between crime and wider social forces
and societal problems, and also by recourse to wider data sources in measuring the effectiveness of
preventive interventions. Furthermore, it recognized the need for responses to crime that reflected the
nature of the phenomenon itself and its complex aetiology, allowing for joined-up approaches and pooling
of expertise, information and resources.
The conceptual shift, from a narrowly defined police-centric and situationally-focused crime prevention,
to a wider notion of neighbourhood and urban safety, was intentionally designed to broaden engagement
with public, private and civil society organizations. The Morgan Report had explicitly articulated a
preference for the term ‘community safety’ over ‘crime prevention’, both to emphasize the wider social
features of urban security and to detach it from the institutional stranglehold of the police. Indeed, the
term crime prevention was seen as too narrow and too closely associated with police-related
responsibilities (Morgan 1991: 31). The shift to community safety, in the UK, also heralded both a localized
place-based focus to problem-solving and an emphasis on participatory frameworks and partnership
working. This formed a recurrent theme of the Morgan Report, subsequent research evidence (Crawford
1997) and policy pronouncements.
All of these developments drew the design, regulation and management of public spaces into sharper
focus. Despite considerable advance, there was a growing appreciation that overly crude environmental
design and ‘defensible space’ with overt surveillance as deterrence, paid insufficient regard to aesthetics
and the impact on public perceptions. In particular, it was recognized that crime prevention interventions
Page 6 of 27
had the capacity to foster insecurity by alerting citizens to risks, thus heightening sensibilities. This
hastened a trend towards a ‘process of naturalisation’, whereby regulation became embedded in the
physical infrastructure and social routines in ways that were less noticeable or threatening (Crawford
2011). The balance between security concerns and other public goods or private pursuits was an early
lesson learned in the business and retail sector where security concerns often clashed with commercial
imperatives. Hence, there remained a tension between the priority accorded to crime prevention and
security against other benefits, uses and values, notably with regard to the dangers of over-securitization
of public spaces (Cozens and Love 2017). More broadly, the language of ‘security’, with its future-
orientation and preventive implications, increasingly came to influence urban governance and local safety
policies, in part bolstered by the increased role of the private sector in preventative partnerships (Zedner
2009).
Alongside the crime prevention elements of the 1998 Act, was an emphasis on tackling ‘disorder’; activity
perceived as troublesome or as a nuisance, but which fell short of criminality. This spawned a new set of
control mechanisms, court orders to curb individual behaviour and the imposition of youth curfews in
particular streets. While the actions which these orders and curfews were designed to control were not
necessarily criminal in themselves, the breach of an order constituted a crime and could culminate in a
criminal record. The new framework was designed to counter, what had been considered, a breakdown of
community by the application of interventions to force behavioural change. It posited disorder—under the
new capacious moniker ‘anti-social behaviour’ (ASB)—as a type of ‘pre-crime’ (Zedner 2007) that, if left
unchecked, would lead to more serious criminality following a developmental trajectory influenced by
p. 593 Kelling and Wilson’s (1982) ‘Broken Windows’ thesis. As with the developmental logic ↵ in relation to
youth crime, it was claimed that crime needs to be ‘nipped in the bud’ by deploying administrative
measures to pre-empt the escalation of behaviour and problems. In the context of youth crime, the new
multi-disciplinary local Youth Offending Teams and national Youth Justice Board together formed the
requisite infrastructure to design and implement integrated strategies. Importantly, the 1998 Act also set
out the principal aim of the youth justice system as being ‘to prevent offending by children and young
persons’ (see also McAra, this volume).
The Government’s Anti-Social Behaviour agenda, also contributed to a new emphasis on the challenges of
policy delivery. The Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (established in 2001) set the template for ‘deliverology
—the science (or pseudoscience) of marshalling prime ministerial powers to deliver measurable
improvements in the public services’ (Barber 2007: 79). A key feature of this was the micro-management
of performance data linked to measurable outputs—in this instance, the number of ASBOs issued
(Crawford 2009b). While few had been issued before 2003, over 40 per cent of all ASBOs (up to the end of
2013) in England and Wales, were issued in the three-year period between 2004 and 2006, declining
steadily thereafter. This national picture, however, hid the fact that a large volume of work with young
people had been taking place prior to, and in the shadow of, such orders (Lewis et al. 2017). Thus, the
fluctuations in ASBO rates were less attributable to the effectiveness of the orders themselves (as the
performance metric was supposedly measuring) and more to other forms of agency intervention,
including youth work. The controversial short history of the ASBO (National Audit Office 2006) saw it
Page 7 of 27
subsequently abolished and replaced under the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014.
Nonetheless, the wider use of administrative preventive orders has persisted and expanded over the
ensuing years (Ashworth and Zedner 2014).
The performance management regimes across the public sector that accompanied ‘deliverology’ had a
range of other flaws (beyond those highlighted by the ASBO targets above). First, they tended to focus on
measurable output—the activities of organizations captured in administrative datasets—rather than the
societal outcomes of services and the effects on service users or the public, which are much harder to
measure and quantify. Second, the intra-organizational focus of most performance measurements
afforded scant regard to the more complex process of negotiating shared purposes and inter-
organizational relations, essential to crime prevention and urban security partnerships. Third, they
invariably produced perverse effects and ‘gaming’, whereby behaviour was shaped by the measurement
rather than the intended outcomes that the measure was seeking to capture. Increasingly across the first
decade of the 2000s, implementation revealed major problems of credibility and commitment, given the
incentives to ‘cheat’ both by target-setters and target managers.
A notable example, however, that did attempt to link institutional performance (specifically that of
community safety partnerships) to its impact on the wider public was the short-lived Single Confidence
Target, established in 2009. This target utilized data on public perceptions of safety as measured by the
Crime Survey for England and Wales (Rix et al. 2009). While it generally aimed to provide some indicators
regarding public opinion on policing, more importantly, it sought to measure the impact of the joint work
of the police and local authority. Having replaced all other policing targets in early 2009, the target was
ultimately abolished the following year. Nonetheless, it constituted an embryonic attempt at both focusing
measurement on outcomes (public confidence) rather than outputs and tying organizations (police and
local authority) into a shared collective pursuit—namely tackling anti-social behaviour and crime issues
that mattered in local areas.
p. 594 ↵ A further feature of this expansionist period was a greater investment in early intervention informed
by ‘developmental criminology’ (LeBlanc and Loeber 1998) and a ‘risk-based’ approach to preventing
youth crime (Farrington 2007; Farrington and Welsh 2007). The period saw considerable investment in
social—largely family-based but also some community-based initiatives—and developmental
approaches, within the frame of secondary prevention targeted at-risk groups.
At the heart of the risk factor prevention paradigm, according to a key proponent, is a ‘very simple’ idea to
‘identify the key risk factors for offending and implement prevention methods designed to counteract
them’ (Farrington 2000: 1). Such an approach ‘can be used not only to identify variables to be targeted but
also to identify persons to be targeted in an intervention programme’ (Farrington 2000: 10). However, as
Farrington acknowledged, risk factor analysis tends to be much better at explaining links and associations
after the event than it is at predicting future behaviour. While a risk factor is commonly understood as a
‘predictor’; namely a factor or variable that is associated with and precedes the outcome, prediction is not
the same as causation (McAra and McVie 2017). It may only be one possible element in establishing
causation. Indeed, most risk factors are markers and symptoms that are correlated to causes but are not
necessarily causes in themselves.
Page 8 of 27
Somewhat ironically, the risk factor approach to youth crime prevention was undermined by other efforts
to manage the performance of the police. The evidence shows that the introduction, in 2002, of a target to
increase the number of offences brought to justice (by reducing the gap between the number of crimes
recorded by the police and those for which a perpetrator was identified), served to increase the number of
first time entrants and hence the number of young people drawn into the criminal process—notably
between 2003/04 and 2006/07. To meet the target, the police focused attention on young people who had
committed non-serious offences, resulting in large numbers being brought into the youth justice system.
This was a further example of the perverse effects of crude performance measurement which ultimately
served to weaken the preventive logic of the youth justice reforms heralded by the 1998 Act.
The years of ‘fragmentation and retrenchment’ (2010–present day)

The Comprehensive Spending Review of 2010 ushered in a decade dominated by the language of ‘austerity’
and the refrain that government could no longer provide the range and extent of public services previously
enjoyed. Few policy areas escaped from significant cuts to funding. In the past the police and other security
services had largely been protected from the withdrawal of state funding—and even had seen a significant
expansion in police personnel during the previous decade. However, under the new politics of austerity
this was no longer the case. Unprecedented reductions in budgets and staff numbers followed; real-terms
police spending declined by 16 per cent between 2010 and 2019 and officer numbers declined by over
20,600 (Flatley 2019). The impact of austerity was also felt, often more severely, across the care sector
with particular impacts on charitable and voluntary provision for vulnerable people.
Many urban security partnerships which had been incentivized to seek new funding streams so as to
ensure their sustainability, found that opportunities to access such resources receded under austerity. In
times of fiscal constraint in the public sector, some of the first casualties were collaborative, inter-
organizational commitments, as organizations focused on their core objective and statutory duties.
p. 595 Moreover, alongside the ↵ reduction in police budgets, the new Conservative and Liberal Democrat
Coalition Government explicitly sought to narrow the police mandate to a focus on cutting crime (Home
Office 2010: para. 1.22). This served to draw police away from wider community safer commitments and
engagement with local partnerships. Subsequently, an Inspectorate report revealed that, collaborations
between police forces, as well as wider partnership relations, were ‘deeply disappointing’ (HMIC 2013: 18).
While the policing of social problems and vulnerable groups has long been an aspect of the work of the
police, the impact of austerity and the retrenchment of public services added a further dimension to such
work. Indeed, a prevailing feature of the period since 2010 has been the increased range of complex social
issues that have become cast as ‘police problems’, often with little critical assessment as to whether the
police were best suited to solve such problems, given their limited skills and capabilities. In particular, the
last decade has witnessed rapid increases in interconnected problems, including modern slavery, child
sexual exploitation and ‘County Lines’. These have added to the longer-standing challenges of policing
domestic abuse, homelessness and mental illness, as well as a variety of hate crimes. More recently, the
Covid-19 pandemic has served to further amplify existing inequalities between social groups, with the
result that many vulnerable groups have lost connection with local service providers and there is
considerable unmet need. These shifts have reconfigured relations between community safety partners, as
Page 9 of 27
policing has become increasingly the ‘service of first resort’ (HMICFRS 2018) for a host of social problems.
A Home Affairs Committee (2018: para. 143, 168) report noted: ‘In too many areas, the police are the only
emergency service for those in crisis … the police service is playing an increasing role in managing
vulnerability and risk across public services, and many individuals have complex needs which cross
organisational boundaries’. The Conservative Government’s commitment, announced in 2019, to recruit
20,000 new police officers by 2023 was, in part, an acknowledgement that the decline in police numbers
across the previous decade had coincided with an increase in complexity and volume of demand on the
police service.
The latest resourcing of the police has placed them centre-stage in community safety partnerships, given
the absence of similar levels of uplift across other public and voluntary sector services. In this light,
tackling vulnerability through early intervention and partnership working has emerged as a key theme in
contemporary community safety—both in the UK and beyond (Bartkowiak-Théron and Asquith 2012). As
an organizing framework, the focus on vulnerability both within policing and across urban safety
partnerships has simultaneously destabilized existing preventive infrastructures and breathed new life
into cross-organizational collaborations. It has done the former by re-centring the police as the focal
point of interventions and has advanced the latter by challenging the traditional bifurcation of ‘victim’ and
‘offender’. Instead it serves to highlight those people whose vulnerability derives from their peripheral,
adversarial or problematic relationship with the police as an institution—namely those whose who, due to
their social disadvantage, marginalization and deviant or transgressive lifestyles, are the traditional
‘objects’ of police attention. Furthermore, it draws attention to interconnections, divergences and
interdependencies across diverse public services and the complex trajectories that people traverse through
service provision. Unlike the incident focus of criminal justice responses to crime, vulnerabilities are seen
as multifaceted, relational, interdependent and cumulative.
In delivering inter-agency approaches, novel multi-professional collaborations, processes and teams

dedicated to particular vulnerabilities have been established. This includes: Multi Agency Risk Assessment
p. 596 Conferences (MARACs) for information ↵ sharing in relation to high risk domestic abuse cases; Local
Safeguarding Children Boards responsible for overseeing and coordinating a multi-agency response to
child sexual abuse and exploitation; County Lines taskforces aimed at tackling drugs markets and
protecting children and vulnerable adults who are often exploited by gangs into selling or moving drugs;
and street triage services in the context of policing mental health.
One of the most significant examples of police-led inter-agency collaboration has been the Violence
Reduction Units (VRUs). Inspired by Scottish developments, VRUs were established in England and Wales
from 2018, in the light of public and political concerns around knife crime and as part of the Government’s
5
Serious Violence Strategy. The Scottish experience dates back to 2005, when in response to Glasgow’s
reputation for gang violence and knife crime (Fraser 2015), the (then) Strathclyde Police force set up a VRU
with the specific aim of reducing the levels of knife crime and homicide. Initially focused on enforcement,
over time it broadened to a whole-system public health approach that incorporated both enforcement and
preventive interventions at individual, neighbourhood and societal levels. The apparent success of the
approach was evidenced by a drop of 52 per cent in police recorded crime statistics for non-sexual violent
crime in Scotland in the decade from 2006/7 (Scottish Government 2016). While it is less clear precisely
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which interventions triggered these reductions in the very specific Scottish (largely Glasgow) context, the
VRU model was transferred to areas across England and Wales, bringing together local partners to share
information to identify vulnerable children and adults at risk. VRUs now constitute a major infrastructure
in driving collaborative preventive work, drawing on a public health approach to violence reduction
(Christmas and Srivastava 2019).
Problematically, however, the contemporary ‘vulnerability zeitgeist’ (Brown 2015) has also drawn the
police further into areas of social provision, care services and early intervention rather than decentred the
police from prevention (as was the aim of both the inter-departmental circular of 1984 and the Morgan
Report, see above). It also has provided the police with greater access to other public services data and
potentially affords the rationing of scarce services (in a context of austerity) on the basis of judgement of
who is more deserving. Moreover, by further blurring the boundaries of care and control, the focus on
vulnerability can serve to further stigmatize certain socially disadvantaged groups and render them more,
rather than less, the objects of control.
Contrasting European Paths to Urban Security
Having outlined some of the key features of policy and research developments that have informed the
British experience in terms of its main (internal) features and recurring fault-lines, we now highlight
some of the contrasting (external) European developments and institutional arrangements accumulated
over the same period. The aim here is to showcase different responses to similar societal problems, rather
than to provide a comprehensive account of diversity across jurisdictions (see Crawford 2009a; Selmini
p. 597 2010) or to identify a common or dominant European approach. As such, the themes we ↵ identify
provide insights into ‘paths not taken’, to better understand the specificities of British developments and
some of the intractable challenges that continue to structure the field.
A dominant feature across continental Europe has been the focus on the city or regional level and the urban
security framing to contemporary developments. This has been promoted by the European Commission
and other European institutions. Through their aim of sharing crime prevention knowledge and practices,
pan-European institutions like the European Crime Prevention Network (EUCPN) sponsored by the EU,
6
and the looser European Forum for Urban Security (EFUS) have served inevitably (although not always
deliberately) to harmonize approaches. While across Europe there exists a considerable degree of
convergence toward a more integrated approach to urban security, nonetheless obdurate legal, political
and cultural factors significantly shape how national developments play out and, significantly, how these
are realized across cities and neighbourhoods within countries. In sum, while similarities may have
become more evident over time, country-to-country and city-to-city differences remain enduring
features of urban security practices as illustrated below.
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Actors, stakeholders, policy, and the political landscape
Relations between national and local/regional policies and strategies

Despite globalization, ‘place’ and context have become more, not less, important. Global forces and the
salience of locality have become increasingly mutually interdependent. The cross-jurisdictional nature of
some contemporary criminality and security risks—be it modern slavery, people trafficking, extremist
violence or organized crime—demand effective cross-border cooperation and joined up working. In this
light, the question of ownership of crime prevention has become a vexed one. Differing constitutional
arrangements across European jurisdictions—centralized, federal, and devolved administrations—have
resulted in a multiplicity of approaches to resolving this question. The evidence suggests, however, that a
holistic, multi-stakeholder approach to crime prevention as urban security is often undermined by a lack
of clarity as to both ownership and leadership, especially regarding responsibilities for coordinating
activity to ensure that strategic aims are delivered (Crawford and Cunningham 2015; UN Habitat 2017).
There is evidence of tensions between national and municipal authorities in respect of jurisdiction,
competencies and responsibilities, as well as conflicts—‘turf wars’—between central government
departments operating in isolation. Given the breadth of their competencies and their role as local anchor
institutions, city and municipal authorities have often played a vital role in harnessing coalitions for
change across multiple sectors and stakeholders. They also afford the possibility—not always realized in
practice—to break free from siloed governmental thinking and inter-departmental rivalries. Hence, the
relative constitutional competencies and responsibilities of municipal authorities in different jurisdictions
have significantly influenced the development of urban security. Where municipal authorities are able to
p. 598 take a strong ↵ lead in coordinating services—notably where this is brought together under the
direction of the Mayor, for example—cities have been able to develop particular trajectories of
7
development and innovation.
In Germany, the leadership role has come much more clearly from the level of the Federal Länder, and in
Italy regional administrations have played a more central role, reflecting the greater responsibility and
competency that they have. By contrast, it is noticeable how Nordic countries have invested significantly in
the development of key national infrastructure responsible for coordinating and promoting crime
prevention. For example, Sweden established a National Crime Prevention Council (Brå) as early as 1975
(the first in the world), as a leading focus for research and development, as well as collating official
statistics and monitoring and evaluating reforms. Sweden also developed an early national strategy, which
sought to integrate relevant policy domains with a focus on planning, implementation and resources. In
1996, the Swedish Government published its national crime prevention programme entitled Our Collective
Responsibility (National Council for Crime Prevention 1997: 59). It sought to pave the way for long-term,
lasting crime prevention work in every sector of society, largely by coordinating the government efforts
across policy domains nationally, and also at the regional and local levels. It also fostered greater
cooperation between the (national) Swedish Police Authority and the municipalities. A central rationale for
the national leadership of crime prevention was a strong belief in a welfarist—state driven—approach to
coordination and delivery, which resonated throughout the early strategy and remains evident today. The
current Swedish strategy declares:
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Welfare policy is fundamental to combating the causes of crime … Combating the fundamental
causes of crime is largely about creating good welfare for all. This is partly a question of financial
security, but also about fairly distributing chances in life and ensuring that people are able to
choose their path at different phases of life on equal terms. (Swedish Ministry of Justice 2016/17:
6)
Clear national leadership can foster national level partnerships in those industries and sectors where crime
concerns are highest, and ensure these partnerships are sustained and effective, with their own
preventative strategies. To strengthen this role the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, more
recently has been required to submit annual reports to the Government with a responsibility not only to
provide an account of national coordination, but also an overarching explanation of the crime prevention
work otherwise carried out at local and regional levels. Additionally, in 2018, the Swedish Government set
up the Swedish Centre for Preventing Violent Extremism under the auspices of the Council to provide
national leadership in this field of prevention.
By contrast, the UK has prioritized the local dimensions of crime prevention and community safety, in part
reflecting the localized resources and accountability structures that exist within policing and criminal
justice. Ironically, the Westminster government used the national lever of legislation to impose a statutory
duty on police and local authorities to collaborate in the delivery of community safety strategies in
England and Wales—a non-statutory regime has persisted in Scotland. Yet, as the recent Strategic Review
p. 599 of Policing conducted by the Police Foundation (2022: 62) concluded: ↵ ‘The core challenge in making a
shift to a more preventative approach to public safety is to make sure that there is clear ownership of the
problem at all levels.’ Given the long-standing lack of strategic coordination at the national level, it
proposed both a national cross-departmental strategy for crime prevention—to mobilize and join up work
across government—and the establishment of a Crime Prevention Agency, as a new non-departmental
public body to serve as a flagship that would have ownership of crime and harm prevention nationally.
Approaches to prevention
Here we provide some prominent examples of how divergent national approaches to crime prevention
strategies significantly reflect the political preferences and cultural differences between British and
European contexts. This is most acutely seen in the relative balance between situational and social
approaches and the emphasis accorded to universal services and primary prevention, as opposed to the
provision of interventions targeted at risk factors through secondary prevention.
Situational and social crime prevention

In contrast to the prevalent emphasis on situational crime prevention and environmental design in the UK
—developments in many other European countries have focused more on social and community-based
crime prevention. For example, the French approach, pioneered by Bonnemaison’s (1982) landmark
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8
report, rejected a narrow situational approach targeting proximal features and opportunities, preferring
inclusionary strategies targeted at alienated and marginalized young people and more distal, causal factors
(Ekblom 2011).
In the UK, one dominant expression of situational approaches embraced by policy-makers took the form of
CCTV surveillance as a form of deterrence. It is estimated that in the mid-1990s in England some 78 per
cent of the Home Office’s crime prevention budget was being spent on CCTV systems alone (Koch 1998).
While these surveillance systems continued to expand into the new millennium their expansion waned
thereafter. By 2013, the British Security Industry Association (BSIA) estimated there were between 4 and
5.9 million cameras in the UK (BSIA 2013), including some 750,000 in ‘sensitive locations’ such as schools,
hospitals and care homes, but just 1 in 70 of all CCTV systems were publicly owned. More recent figures
suggest approximately 5.2 million CCTV cameras nationwide (BSIA 2020). This preoccupation with
expanding CCTV systems was not evidenced across Europe where legal and cultural obstacles often held
back such technological fervour. By contrast, human forms of surveillance and regulation—such as the
Dutch Stadswachten ‘city wardens’ (Van Dijk and De Waard 2009) and French mentoring and mediation
schemes (De Maillard and Germain 2012)—were preferred.
Over the decades situational approaches in the UK moved on from an initial focus on target-hardening and
p. 600 ‘bars, bolts and barriers’ (Pease 2002: 952) to encompass protective ↵ and total surveillance systems.
Technological advances have meant that it is now possible for every phone call, text and post on social
media to be recorded, monitored, and scrutinized by national authorities. In the UK, there appears to be a
relative lack of popular concern regarding the use of such invasive surveillance measures, perhaps
betraying the extent to which adaptive, preventive practice has been normalized and absorbed into the
fabric of everyday life. Ironically, the British were keen to defend their interests against the spectre of the
intrusive surveillance state in the nineteenth century in contrast to their French counterparts, however
today the situation appears to have reversed. In France, legal restrictions and public sentiments are more
sensitive to the intrusions of surveillance, not only limiting the use of cameras, but other technological
advances such as facial recognition and the use of drones. A marked fall in the costs of technology has seen
technological solutions increasingly adopted by private citizens, installing CCTV in their homes, adding
motion-sensor and infra-red lighting equipment around private spaces, and even adding monitoring
devices to cars, sometimes initiated by insurance companies. In these ways, risk-management has been
dispersed and individuals have to some extent taken responsibility for their own crime protection,
considered an example of common-sense and risk-averse behaviour which might be adopted by all
(O’Malley 1992).
Primary and secondary prevention

Targeted interventions focused on risk factors are largely justified in terms of effectiveness, as they target
those people/factors most likely to effect change, reducing the chances of ‘false positives’, and reduce cost
as they target need in more limited ways. Hence, the history of the UK Sure Start programme, originally
conceived in more universalist language, unencumbered by crime or behavioural considerations, saw over
time a greater targeting around small numbers of problematic families. Launched in 1998, Sure Start was
an ambitious, national early intervention programme working with children under 4 years old and their
Page 14 of 27
families. Through structured, long-term support, it sought to break the intergenerational transmission of
poverty, school failure, social exclusion and delinquency. The programme was intended to deliver 250 local
Sure Start centres and a visit from an outreach worker for every mother in Sure Start areas (Melhuish et al.
9
2010). From 2010, the Sure Start programme was pared back to target ‘the neediest families’ (HM
Government 2010: 19), in part, driven by costs and the need to evidence results. From a research
perspective, it is obviously easier to isolate and identify tangible outcomes of targeted, risk-focused
approaches.
Targeted prevention initiatives, however, raise concerns about the stigmatizing potential and labelling
implications of associating specific people or places with crime. In some countries, there are strong
cultural and political presumptions in favour of universal preventive services for young people—notably in
the Nordic countries and the universalistic principles that inform French legal culture. Moreover, services
with preventive implications are often more readily justified on the basis of a child’s existing educational
or social needs and problems, rather than future risks of criminality and/or premised on the understanding
p. 601 that most young people grow out of crime. This is reflected in the ↵ very different approaches to youth
justice—in the balance between care (welfare) and control (punishment)—that exists across Europe;
exemplified in differences in the age of criminal responsibility across jurisdictions, amongst other factors.
For similar reasons, many youth service practitioners and some governments prefer universal prevention
programmes to targeted ones, despite their obvious resource implications.
While preferences for universal provision or targeted interventions are not absolute or dichotomous, in
that most countries operate with a mix of both, there are significant geographic differences in the
predominance of one or other approach, notably with regard to young people. One evident feature that
differentiates many European countries from their North American and British (especially English)
counterparts, is the strong focus on non-intervention, diversion and decriminalization in responses to
crime and anti-social behaviour in children and young people. Informed by research there has been a
greater awareness of the harmful effects of criminal justice responses and interactions with police and
penal institutions, as well as interventions that operate in the shadow of criminal justice, which has
encouraged forms of prevention through diversion (McAra and McVie 2010). Allied to this has been a
growing international emphasis on the rights of children and young people and a concern with ensuring
standards and safeguards in support of those rights. Additionally, the last decades have seen greater resort
to informal or alternative means of processing conflicts outside of the frame of criminal justice, through
restorative responses, for example. While these can serve to blur distinctions between civil and criminal
justice and ‘widen the net’ of intervention in young people’s lives, they can also serve preventive ends by
diverting young people from criminalization (Crawford and Newburn 2003).
Recurring Challenges in Urban Security
In light of the above brief comparative discussion, we now consider a number of recurring challenges that
have featured across the last 30–40 years of development and have informed the experiences of different
countries (albeit in somewhat distinctive ways) in relation to both the growth of an international
evidence-base and the institutionalization of crime prevention and urban security. In particular, we focus
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on the issue of institutional responsibility for prevention—given the intrinsic inter-organizational

dimensions of partnership working—and the vexed relations between the knowledge base, on the one
hand, and policy and practice, on the other.
Assessing learning from research in the UK and Europe

A notable feature of the period since the mid-1990s has been the significant decline in aggregate crime
rates and the fact that this is mirrored across jurisdictions and therefore not country-specific in terms of
causes. Prevention has played a significant role in the decrease in aggregate crime rates in relation to
traditional property and public crimes (Farrell et al. 2011). Despite this apparent ‘success’, crime
prevention still remains largely under-resourced and poorly implemented as compared to the resources
and investment in the systems of law enforcement, prosecution and punishment. Crime prevention suffers
problems associated with demonstrating success and appealing to political timelines and electoral
necessities. It is both difficult to evaluate a non-event (except in so far as comparisons can be drawn with a
p. 602 control sample that has not benefited ↵ from the intervention) and difficult to communicate the
success of prevention, that is, something that did not happen. As Paul Ekblom noted in interview: ‘In urban
security interventions, innovation and risk-taking is necessary, which collides with the risk aversion of
our political culture’. Moreover, the future-oriented nature of crime prevention and security problems
means they are not static or constant, but rather in perpetual flux as problems evolve in response to social
and technological change. Despite the recognition that the levers of crime and prevention lie outside the
criminal justice system and punitive approaches, criminal justice responses continue to dominate policy
and political discourse and, consequently, investments in resources. Irvin Waller in interview asserted:
‘Politicians talk about prevention but do not do it, in part because they are not familiar with the evidence
and in part because they are overly influenced by the special interests of police, lawyers and prisons’.
In contrast to the overall decline in levels of crime, there is growing evidence of a concentration of
victimization and offending amongst certain groups in the population and within certain (geographical)
areas and neighbourhoods, in ways that compound disadvantages. While these trends express themselves
differently across (and within) European countries there are common patterns. The unequal distribution
and impacts of crime, risk and vulnerability have thus become in some instances more marked and
entrenched, rather than less so. The shift and migration of crime from physical environments to
cyberspace also presents major new challenges. Not only are potential victims more abundant given the
reach of the internet, but additionally the global (non-territorial) reach of cyberspace has made
regulation, prevention and enforcement more challenging. Policing and state interventions remain
decidedly bounded to geography and often constrained by jurisdictional boundaries. Moreover, the role of
(powerful) commercial interests renders public actors relatively impotent as sole regulatory forces.
Looking back over the last 30-40 years of research and practice, we can identify a number of key trends
where accumulated learning and innovation have engendered progress, as well as some recurring—
unresolved—tensions and barriers.
Page 16 of 27
The problem of responsibility and the dynamics of partnership working

It has long been recognized that in its design and implementation crime prevention and urban security
demand collaboration through multi-stakeholder responses and the police alone cannot prevent crime.
However, delivering effective problem-oriented partnerships remains decidedly problematic (Berry et al.
2011; Bullock et al. 2022). Enduring challenges pertain to the pursuit of multi-stakeholder urban security
networks through horizontal exchanges of shared information, knowledge, resources or other
transactions that cut across vertical intra-organizational priorities, and which pay scant regard to the task
of managing inter-organizational relations.
Data sharing
Given the siloed nature of data and the different processes through which data are defined, collected and
stored—as well as the variable quality of administrative data—the issue of data sharing and information
exchange sits at the heart of community safety partnerships. Information exchange itself can be a source
of conflict particularly in the context of crime control where information sharing is governed by complex
rules and laws relating to sensitive data and privacy. Furthermore, there are problems of the non-
interoperability of data across different organizational systems for data management. Nonetheless,
p. 603 ↵ good quality data enable the better understanding of the nature and distribution of local crime and
disorder related problems, establish local problem profiles and produce a local strategy specifically aimed
at preventing the problems. As Gloria Laycock noted in interview: ‘if you take the view that you’re trying to
prevent crime on a problem-solving basis, then you need to be very clear on what the problem is, and that
means you need data’. Quality data also enable more effective multi-stakeholder partnership working by
helping to identify the roles and responsibilities that different actors can play in responding to given
problems and delivering a joined-up approach.
Despite the promise of greater data sharing for crime prevention purposes enabled by s.115 of the Crime and
Disorder Act 1998, it remains one of the most intractable and contentious aspects of urban safety practice.
Section 115 conferred a power, to disclose information to a ‘relevant authority’, on any person who would
not otherwise have such a power, where the disclosure is necessary or expedient for the purposes of any
10
provision of the Act. Yet across the years, high profile and tragic cases have exposed deep faults in
preventing harm and safeguarding vulnerable people—children in particular. In various reviews and
enquires into tragedies and scandals—from Victoria Climbié, to Fiona Pilkington, to Child Sexual
Exploitation in Rotherham—much of the blame and the identified cause of failure has been placed at the
door of inadequate inter-organizational coordination, communications, information sharing, and data
exchange. A pervasive and deeply ingrained reluctance to share information between agencies persists,
informed by technological, legal, organizational, and cultural barriers to data exchange. Yet, despite
government guidance encouraging information sharing between organizations, particularly relating to
child protection, the full benefit of data linkage and connected public sector data, remains an elusive goal.
One of the practical ways of overcoming problems with data sharing has been through the establishment of
co-located multi-disciplinary teams, where interpersonal trust and denser reciprocal relations become key
lubricants (Crawford and L’Hoiry 2017: 649). While, information exchange and informal working practices
Page 17 of 27
can provide a valuable basis for communication and negotiation, they come with certain risks. Hence,
balanced information exchange also demands mutual understanding of the limits and legal constraints in
which the sharing of sensitive data can be done ethically.
Prompted by the increase in serious violent crime (from around 2014) and reflecting the intractable nature
of barriers to inter-organizational data sharing, the Westminster government has introduced the new
Serious Violence Duty, in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. This will require local
authorities, the police, fire and rescue authorities, specified criminal justice agencies and health
authorities to work together to formulate an evidence-based analysis of the problems associated with
serious violence in a local area, and then produce and implement a strategy detailing how they will respond
to those particular issues. Importantly, the legislation grants these authorities the power to share data and
11
information with each other for the purpose of preventing and reducing serious violence. The definition
of violence for the purpose of the duty explicitly includes domestic abuse and sexual violence. Nonetheless,
it is telling that a quarter of a century after the 1998 Act, despite the digitalization of much social life and
p. 604 the volume, variety and velocity of ‘big data’, government still feels it necessary ↵ to impose another
statutory duty to require services to collaborate, given the organizational barriers and cultural obstacles
that persist.
The dissonance between research, policy and practice

Generally, crime prevention and urban security practices remain poorly informed by the research
evidence-base. All too often, strategies suffer from a combination of theory failure, implementation
failure or methodological failure. They omit to clarify the theories of change that are intended to inform
their desired beneficial outcomes, are inadequately or inappropriately implemented, and seldom involve
rigorous evaluation, such that wider lessons might be learned (Tompson et al. 2021). Forty years of
research in crime prevention and urban security tells us that nothing works everywhere but that quite a
few things work somewhere (Sidebottom and Tilley 2021; Crawford et al. 2022). Context matters—
configured in time and space—in the causation of crime and insecurity. Crime prevention and urban
security problems are complex and informed by a tangle of interacting causes and interdependencies,
which differ across problems and contexts. There has been a tendency to search for universal solutions
under the banner of ‘what works’, which has drawn attention away from the situated and contextualized
features of local places, with less regard to which groups of people benefit from particular interventions or
design features in a particular place/situation at a specific time.
One of the central challenges has been the translation and application of the growing evidence-base into
policy and practice. Much of this can be put down to policy-makers’ preferences and ideologies that do not
necessarily align with research findings, political time horizons that are short-term and reactive, and
resistant organizational cultures that are unreceptive to change and distort implementation. Nonetheless,
there are also issues that reside within the research knowledge base itself. Simply put, most of the research
is written by researchers for other researchers, focusing on exploring certain narrow questions, often to
the exclusion of wider contextual factors that are of particular interest and value to both policy-makers,
practitioners, and citizens (Crawford et al. 2022).
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Much of the research literature has over-estimated the value of methodological rigour and a rigid
hierarchy of evidence in its quest to understand ‘what works’, with insufficient regard to the relational and
process-based mechanisms that foster change. Much of the evidence-base has been influenced by
medicine and healthcare research. It posits a clear hierarchy of knowledge informed by a ranking of
methodologies with randomized controlled trials (RCTs) at its apex (Sherman 2009). One of the drawbacks
is that while RCTs provide strong internal validity, they do not tell us much about whether we could
replicate a given intervention in another context. This focus on internal validity also encourages studies of
single mechanisms with hypothesized mono-causes not least because these are easier to determine than
social complexity and interdependencies. Such contextual factors, however, may be central to a
programme’s execution, effectiveness and impact. By narrowing the frame of relevance, studies of single
mechanisms also tend to ignore the role played by practitioners in giving life to interventions and the
knowledge that they bring to the resultant effectiveness of interventions. This approach also informs a
rather unhelpful language and cataloguing of ‘what works’, as if interventions ‘work’ free of context.
In building the accumulated evidence-base, the quest for methodological rigour and internal validity has
often come at the expense of external validity and a more complex understanding of ‘what works where,
p. 605 for whom and under what conditions’, as well as ↵ a more sophisticated understanding of the
dynamics of implementation and context. In interview, Paul Ekblom noted:
Preventive interventions have to be intelligently customised to problem and context; success

stories cannot simply be copied cookbook-fashion. Intelligent replication requires a process that
customises action to problem and context. In this respect, replication will always involve some
degree of innovation, trial, feedback and adjustment, whether minor or major. This in turn places
requirements on the kind and format of knowledge that security practitioners possess, and the
institutional context of implementation.
Given the limitations of RCTs and quasi-experimental designs, greater methodological pluralism is
perhaps what is needed for such tasks. Building upon these insights, recent efforts have been given to
developing ways to combine discussions of measurement effects and their size together with other
dimensions of importance to practitioners and that enable us to assess the quality and applicability of
evaluation evidence. One notable example has been the EMMIE scale (Johnson et al. 2015), which seeks to
provide evidence that equips policy-makers and practitioners with actionable knowledge in a format that
helps users to access and understand the evidence quickly.
Conclusion
After forty years of experimentation and learning from research, there is now a rich evidence-base
demonstrating the societal benefits that derive from ‘up-stream’ prevention and early intervention. It is
clearly more effective to anticipate harm and pre-empt criminal opportunities by effecting social, physical
and technological change than responding to problems once they manifest themselves or by retrofitting
solutions after the event. Yet the promise of a sustainable turn to prevention in the field of crime and harm
reduction remains stubbornly unfulfilled (Waller 2019). Despite the evidence that prevention has played a
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role in reducing aggregate crime rates across many and diverse jurisdictions, the preoccupation with
police, prosecution, and punishment maintains a pervasive hold over the political consciousness, legal
mind-set and cultural sensibilities. However, as decades of criminological research testify, the effects of
research on policy and practice are not always benign. Knowledge does not simply solve governance
problems but can also create new ones.
In delivering problem-based preventive strategies, political leadership, public trust and institutional
commitment, appropriate levels of resources and buy-in from relevant stakeholders, are all vital to the
success of interventions. Demonstration projects backed by rigorous research evaluations may provide
interesting and valuable insights and learning but will result in modest enduring change if they are not
embedded within infrastructures that align with cultural values, and if they are not underpinned by
sustainable funding and supported by long-term organizational commitments. For many of the reasons
outlined in this chapter, implementation failure and the incapacity to mainstream evidence-based
practices remain persistent blockages. The promising potential of the ‘early years’ and the obdurate
barriers encountered over the subsequent years highlight the need to focus on the tasks of effecting
sustainable change. In the face of contemporary crime and security challenges, increasingly diverse urban
populations and growing social polarization, there is now as great a need as ever for renewed policy and
p. 606 public commitment to prevention that combines the knowledge, expertize, and ↵ insights of diverse
actors. The mounting levels of fraud and cyber-crime, as well as the interdependencies of diverse forms of
vulnerability, harm and disadvantage—exposed so sharply during the Covid pandemic—will require
governments (whether local or national) to explore new strategies to advance prevention alongside
radically different models of governance and service delivery.
Suggested Further Reading

The intersection between crime prevention, community safety, and urban security is a large field that benefits from
multi-disciplinary insights from psychology, sociology, law, philosophy, history, social policy, urban studies, and
political science. From within criminology, Tilley’s (2009) Crime Prevention remains a valuable source of
understanding, notably in outlining the theory of situational and social crime prevention techniques while situating
these within a broader theoretical backdrop. Evans offers a critical exploration of the field in the UK in Crime
Prevention: A Critical Introduction (2011), while Tilley and Sidebottom’s Handbook of Crime Prevention and Community
Safety (2017) brings together essays from many key contributors to theory and practice. In their book Preventive
Justice (2014), Ashworth and Zedner provide an excellent, historically informed analysis of the increasing advance of
preventive logics, powers, and tools within criminal justice. Zedner also explores the impact and implications of
security for criminology in her short book, Security (2009). Crawford’s edited collection, Crime Prevention Policies in
Comparative Perspective (2009), brings together international contributions that explore similarities and differences in
the application of crime prevention policies and urban security practices. The ‘what works’ literature is well-covered
in Sherman and colleagues’ Evidence-Based Crime Prevention (2002).
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Online resources

References
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Notes
1
The focus is largely on England and Wales as different policy and legal frameworks exist in Scotland and Northern
Ireland.
2
All the interview data cited in this chapter are drawn from the IcARUS Review (Crawford et al. 2022), which also
includes details of interviewees and methods; available at https://www.icarus-innovation.eu/d2-1-the-changing-face-
of-urban-security-research-a-review-of-accumulated-learning/ <https://www.icarus-innovation.eu/d2-1-the-changing-
face-of-urban-security-research-a-review-of-accumulated-learning/>
3
The current model of 25 opportunity-reducing techniques is organized under five categories: increasing the effort,
increasing the risk, reducing the reward, reducing provocation and removing excuses (Clarke 2009). Situational
principles have been applied to a range of problems and crimes, from littering and domestic burglary to white collar
crime and terrorism.
4
See https://www.securedbydesign.com/ <https://www.securedbydesign.com/>
5
In March 2019, the Home Secretary announced £100 million Serious Violence Fund to help tackle serious violence, of
which, £63.4 million was allocated to 18 police force areas worst affected.
6
Established in 1987, EFUS serves as a city-to-city network of nearly 250 member cities and regions from 15 countries
that combines local authorities and law enforcement agencies in knowledge sharing and practice learning.
7
For instance, the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands has developed a distinctive approach to integrated urban
security with its Safety Index and City Marines as prominent features of problem-based design processes, in part due
to the leadership of the Mayor (Lub and de Leeuw 2017; Crawford et al. 2022: 120–1).
8
The report outlined a decidedly social approach to crime as a counter-narrative to the traditional preoccupation with
punitive responses to crime and disorder in France. Arising from a Committee of Mayors chaired by Gilbert
Bonnemaison, the report—Face à la délinquance: prévention, répression, solidarité (which loosely translates to
‘Opposing Crime: prevention, repression, solidarity’)—set the agenda for subsequent policy developments and
prevention programmes for many years and remains a key reference point throughout France and beyond (Wyvekens
2009).
9
Applying primarily in England, slightly different variations existed across the devolved administrations of the UK. The
national evaluation of Sure Start suffered challenges of programme diversity in that there were not several hundred
programmes delivering one intervention, but several hundred unique interventions. Rutter (2006) provides an
independent review of early findings of the evaluation work and a critique of the methodology.
10
The requirements of the Common Law Duty of Confidentiality and the Data Protection Act 2018 still apply.
11
It excludes patient information. Additionally, health or social care authorities cannot share personal information
under the data sharing provisions in respect of the duty.
Page 26 of 27
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28. Security and smart cities

p. 609 28. Security and smart cities

Ben Bradford and Pete Fussey
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0028
Abstract
This chapter explains the profound implications of digital society on the questions of crime, security, surveillance, and
policing. In recent decades, digital technologies brought profound changes to human societies and the way they are governed.
The chapter explains that digital processes do more than accelerate the production and availability of information, which
highlights the implications of digital society from the abundance of data. The digital revolution has rendered criminological
preoccupations more urgent and pressing than ever before. The chapter also provides an overview of the concept of a smart
city by considering its criminogenic consequences and its potential for crime prevention and surveillance.
Keywords: digital society, crime, security, surveillance, policing, digital technologies, information, criminological
preoccupations, smart city, crime prevention
Introduction
In recent decades digital technologies have brought profound changes to human societies and the way they
are governed. While regularly bestowed with prefixes such as ‘novel’ and ‘innovative’, the history of such
technology is longer than often assumed, and engagement with digital data has become intrinsic to
contemporary life. Everyday transactions, both significant and mundane, produce unprecedented volumes
of data on a scale barely captured by available metric prefixes. An abundance of data increasingly saturates
previously untouched areas of public and private life and, once created, becomes available for scrutiny and
analysis. In turn, this abundance has been leveraged for a vast range of purposes, including the governance
of planetary processes (such as climate prediction modelling and tracking the progression of global health
crises); intercontinental mobilities and migrations; populations and cities; the day-to-day functioning of
people’s homes and lifestyles; and, in the case of biometric and health monitoring, of life itself.
Page 1 of 29
The social, cultural and economic impact of digital technology has, therefore, been profound. Thrift (2005)
identifies the beginning of an age of ‘informational capitalism’, where information (i.e. data) has become
the central means by which knowledge is created. In our current era of advanced communications
technology, this knowledge production is increasingly digitally accelerated and technologically mediated.
However, as this chapter demonstrates, digital processes do more than accelerate the production and
availability of information.
Key to the implications of digital society are the inferences made from this abundance of data, and how
these insights transform governmental knowledge practices and the exercise of social control (Ruppert
2012). How the world is seen, represented, and acted upon is undergoing rapid transformation and it is
perhaps now correct to refer to the era of ‘digital citizenship’ (Isin and Ruppert 2015). Moreover, such is
the ubiquity and embeddedness of digital technology in our lives that distinctions between the ‘social’ and
‘technological’ realms seem redundant (Latour 1987). The same might be said of any distinctions between
the ‘online’ and ‘offline’ realms. It is difficult—if not impossible—to opt out of certain digital practices
while retaining full citizenship of the contemporary world, being economically active, and, in a time of app
enabled immunity certification, enjoy basic mobility.
p. 610 ↵ The advent of the digital society has profound implications for questions of crime, security,
surveillance and policing, and in the current chapter we attempt to survey this complex and constantly
developing field. We start by describing some of the convoluted terminology current within it. To ground
the discussion in a set of ‘real-life’ systems and processes, we then introduce the organizing, if contested,
concept of the ‘smart city’, before moving on to consider its criminogenic consequences as well as its
potential for crime prevention and surveillance. Finally, we consider implications for the public,
increasingly governed by ‘smart’ systems—the ethical implications of such systems, questions of
regulation, and how people respond to their use by police and other security actors.
Understanding the Digital Society
To understand digital society and its impacts, it is necessary to first unpack some of the large and
homogenizing terms often applied to it. Specifying some of the key components of digital society helps to
distinguish the range of tools available for its management by law enforcement and other relevant
agencies, and their different uses, effects and implications.
Digital technology in this context could be regarded as a blend of hardware, software, and infrastructures
and processes that bring them together and leverage their potential. Specificity is also needed on the kinds
of data yielded by these technologies and their diverse uses. For example, the discourse surrounding ‘big
data’ often masks important differences in form and impact. As Kitchin (2014) notes, some forms of data
have huge political consequences, while others are irrelevant, and he delineates the different forms, uses
and implications of diverse manifestations and assemblages of data: ‘indexical’ (information unique to a
subject such as fingerprint and other biometric data), ‘attribute’ (information about a subject, such as
gender classification) and ‘meta’ (data about data, such as information about databases and internet
communications but not the content of these datasets) (see also Floridi 2010).
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Data also comes in direct and indirect forms. The former may be the product of targeted searches, the
latter may constitute additional information that arises in the course of such searches. This second form,
sometimes referred to as ‘exhaust data’, has gained enormous significance and commercial value in the
age of social media. Such uses are documented in Zuboff’s (2019) widely cited analysis of harvesting online
user data by Silicon Valley technology companies and the resultant individual and social costs, a process
she describes as ‘surveillance capitalism’. Distinctions between types of data and their levels of
intrusiveness are reflected in legislation designed to govern the surveillance activities of law enforcement
and intelligence agencies. For example, the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (s.216), initiated in the wake
of Edward Snowden’s revelations of illegal US National Security Agency (NSA) and UK GCHQ data
harvesting practices, separates ‘entity data’ from ‘event data’. The former concerns information about
different ‘entities’, such as IP addresses and mobile phones, and the relationships between them including
records of which phone has connected to another. ‘Event data’ is considered in law to be more intrusive
and describes specific activities in precise locations and particular times.
Key to understanding the impact of digital and data-driven practices is recognition that the value of such
p. 611 information is not necessarily in the raw data, but in its ↵ processing (Davenport and Dyché 2013). The
super-abundance of digital information means that the way we see, measure and gain understanding of
the word has fundamentally changed, with significant implications for the ways societies are managed and
1
policed. For example, in their landmark review of the transformations wrought by ‘big data’ on everyday
life, Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier (2013) coin the phrase ‘datafication’ to describe the reduction of social
life to phenomena that are measurable and calculable. Lupton (2016) makes a similar observation in her
analysis of the implications of pervasive technology for how we consider the body, our behaviours and
physiological processes, arguing that ubiquitous data-driven measurement has reduced the human
condition to ‘the quantified self’.
From a social science perspective, ‘big data’ also brings two related epistemological shifts that
fundamentally change the way we interpret and understand the world. The first concerns sampling for
research. Here, the claim is that quantitative social science research practices of ‘sampling’ sections of a
research population to gain insights applicable to the wider group may become redundant. This is because
ubiquitous data and the availability of powerful digital tools to analyse it, mean that it is possible to
analyse relevant information about an entire research population, rather than only a sample thereof
(ibid.). More complex, but equally significant, is how this practice affects the relationships between things.
Here, issues of causality (‘a’ influences ‘b’) become less significant than associations between different
data points (‘a’ is connected to ‘b’, ‘c’, and ‘d’).
These changes are highly significant when considering digital practices in policing and criminal justice
contexts. Speculative knowledge—inferences made through association—becomes valorized through the
use of technology. Examples of such inferences resulting in real policing and criminal justice outcomes
include gang databases (e.g. Amnesty International UK 2018) and sentencing decision-making (Propublica
2016). Relatedly, while data and digital tools of analysis appear objective, they implicate highly subjective,
partial and potentially biased processes. Kitchin (2014: 20), among others, remarks how ‘raw data’ does
not exist, but is instead an oxymoron; data is always ‘cooked’. It only comes into being because it is
searched for and extracted in highly specific ways. This process involves selection of information from a
range of possibilities which is then subjected to a range of human inferences; as Rosenburg (2013: 18 cited
Page 3 of 29
in Kitchin 2014: 3) argues: ‘facts are ontological, evidence is epistemological, data is rhetorical’. As the
critique of digital policing tools reveals below, while technology offers the impression of impartiality, its
use brings a range of subjectivities and biases into the management of crime.
Smart Cities and ‘Digital Ecologies’ of Crime and Surveillance
The term ‘Smart City’ is often used as a form of shorthand for many of the developments noted above,
particularly as they pertain to the linking of digital and physical infrastructures to enable processes of
social ordering. Indeed, the phrase has attained a life of its own as a descriptor of the widespread use of
p. 612 ICTs in the management, maintenance ↵ and marketing of cities around the world. As is so often the
case the term itself has no fixed meaning: Ramaprasad et al. (2017) record 36 different definitions of
‘smart city’ in use across multiple academic disciplines. That derived by Laufs et al. (2020: 2) from
Elmaghraby and Losavio (2014) may be as useful as any: a smart city is one that uses ‘information and
communication technologies to increase operational efficiency, independently shares information within
the system, and improves overall effectiveness of services and the wellbeing of citizens’. This definition is
useful precisely because it conflates the use of integrated information and communication technologies
that independently share data with the aims of those systems—to increase the efficacy of service provision
and improve the lives of the city’s residents and visitors. The smart city concept is inextricably linked with
a somewhat utopian vision of the capability of technology to improve people’s lives that, moreover, often
glosses over questions of surveillance and social control.
On a more practical level, Laufs et al. (2020: 2) note that despite the hugely diverse range of technologies,
networks, and services that may comprise any given smart city system, most such architectures comprise
three basic layers: a sensor layer, a network or processing layer, and a service or actuator layer. The sensor
layer consists of the data collection units used to measure, actively or passively, some aspect of the city’s
environment, inhabitants, traffic or commerce (e.g. a network of facial recognition cameras). The network
layer provides the infrastructure to collect, aggregate, analyse and/or transmit the data collected (e.g.
analysis software to identify specific individuals among the images captured by those cameras). Finally,
the actuators are those aspects of the system that affect some change as a result (e.g. an alert provided to a
police officer who can act should such an individual be identified in a particular locale). In the smart city,
therefore, physical or other sensory devices that collect data are linked to networks that connect them to
each other and to data storage and automated analysis systems; these, in turn, are connected to
automated, semi-automated or human decision-making and activity. This complex, multi-layered
structure is central to the crime, crime prevention and surveillance implications of smart cities and the
growing digital ecology of urban spaces. It provides for tools to solve crime more effectively and
efficiently, a large and complex ‘attack surface’ for potential offenders, and a system of surveillance of
remarkable intricacy and, potentially, intrusiveness.
Page 4 of 29
Implications for crime
Like any new development, the growth of the digital city brings with it the potential for a ‘crime
harvest’ (Pease 1997). Organized and opportunistic criminal activity can be quick to mobilize around the
introduction of new technologies, particularly if these are implemented in ways that do not attend to the
security risks they open up (Blythe and Johnson 2021; Ekblom 2013; Whitehead et al. 2008). The data
collection and monitoring that is fundamental to the concept of the smart city, as well as the way this data
is used by automated or semi-automated systems to effect various virtual and physical outcomes,
generates multiple opportunities for a wide variety of crimes or other attacks (Kitchin and Dodge 2019;
Parn and Edwards 2019).
There are (at least) five possible sources of criminal attacks or otherwise harmful activity in the smart city
context. First, there is the potential for domestic state crimes and misuses: more or less passive
p. 613 surveillance of citizens, or mass data collection/ ↵ trawls, that breach data protection and privacy laws
or norms; active tracking of individuals or groups for non-legitimate purposes; or turning actuators
against the law-abiding or those engaged in legitimate protest. Second, there is a strong potential for
international state crimes as countries take similar actions against the citizens or infrastructure of rivals
or enemies. Third, there is the possibility of non-state corporate crimes, such as illegal tracking, data
sharing, targeting and exclusion. Fourth, there are the potential ‘individual’ or organized criminal uses of
smart city technology and infrastructure, which may replicate any of the above via hacking or other modes
of illegal entry, involve misuse of systems for personal gain by those otherwise entitled to use them, or
stem from forms of ‘noble cause corruption’ (Kleinig 2002) akin, for example, to the activity of so-called
paedophile-hunters (Hadjimatheou 2021). Finally, there are non-state actors who are motivated not by
financial or other material rewards but by ideology. Terrorism is one obvious example, but so equally are
groups such as the Chinese ‘cyber-patriots’ (Henderson 2008) who engage in hacking and cyber-attacks
and operate at arms-length from, but also in conjunction with, the Chinese government, as are many other
‘hacktivist’ groups now active locally, nationally, and internationally (Tzezana 2016).
It is thus not simply the case that smart cities can suffer from criminal and/or harmful attacks on,
primarily, the digital technologies that underpin them (e.g. via some form of cyber-attack). Crime or other
harms may also stem from more subtle misuses and, perhaps, from use of the technology more or less as
was originally intended (e.g. via surveillance capacities).
Considering the active subversion of smart city technology, Kitchin and Dodge (2019: 49–51) identify five
major vulnerabilities in the technologies frequently used in smart city systems. These are:
weak software security and data encryption (e.g. use of default passwords, inability of low-powered
devices to support encrypted connections);
use of insecure legacy systems and poor ongoing maintenance (e.g. where newer systems are built on
legacy systems that are no longer supported and which have security holes which will not be
patched);
many interdependencies and large and complex attack surfaces (e.g. that increase the chance of
‘normal accidents’ such as programming bugs and human error);
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‘cascade effects, wherein “highly interconnected entities rapidly transmit adverse consequences to
each other’ (p.50), such as when an attack on the electrical infrastructure cascades to traffic
management, water management, etc.;
human error and deliberate malfeasance of disgruntled (ex)employees.
Exploitation of these weaknesses can be turned to a wide variety of specific aims (Khatoun and Zeadally
2017: Table 3). In the transport sector, for example, threats include sending false emergency messages,
taking control of connected motor vehicles, or changing GPS signals to obscure or shift a vehicles apparent
location. Similarly, ‘smart’ buildings face a range of potential attacks, from remote control of building
systems (lifts, heating, ventilation etc.) to falsifying audit or payment systems (e.g. smart meters).
Healthcare, energy, and emergency response systems are open to similar threats as well as beaches of
privacy, the use of data for fraud or blackmail, and so on.
Smart city technologies therefore suffer from many of the same frailties, vulnerabilities and lines of attack
as cognate technologies used in homes, businesses. and by individuals. What makes the smart city context
p. 614 different is the scale of the potential ↵ consequences if these vulnerabilities are exploited. Parn and
Edwards (2019: 248–249) provide a list of cyber-physical attacks (‘activities that could severely impact
upon nuclear enrichment, hospital operations, public building operation and maintenance and traffic
management’) that have taken place over last 15 years, some of which had potentially devasting
consequences. These have included: the STUXNET worm targeted at an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010,
apparently by a joint US-Israeli government operation (Lindsay 2013); the ‘WannaCry’ ransomware attack
—enabled by the use of out of date software—that caused significant damage to the UK’s National Health
Service patient databases in 2017 (Clarke and Youngstein 2017); the cyber-attack by Russia on Estonia in
2007 that targeted digital infrastructures such as banking, news providers, and voting systems (Lesk
2007); and the hacking of the US electricity network by Chinese actors in 2009 (Hjortdal 2011).
Implications for security and surveillance

In a changing landscape of threats, harms and challenges, police and other security actors in countries
across the world are increasingly turning to new technologies to undertake core functions, many of which
tap directly into the idea and indeed the structure of the digital city. Physical technologies like Body Worn
Video (BWV), drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), GPS, live and retrospective facial recognition
technology and enhanced scanning equipment are increasingly used alongside and in conjunction with
software such as ‘predictive policing’ algorithms, and with the collection and analysis of ‘big data’, in
ways that seem to herald a radical shift in the conduct of policing (see inter alia Ariel et al. 2018; Brayne
2021; Ferguson 2017; Meijer and Wessels 2019).
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Crime prevention in smart cities

Laufs et al. (2020) recently surveyed security interventions associated with the smart city concept.
Focusing on the sensor and actuator layers, they describe the diverse security-focused uses to which
digital technologies are being applied within the digital city (at least in theory—it is notable how
2
conjectural are many of the studies included in the review ). At the sensor layer, these functions primarily
focus on what might be called situation awareness, and can be summarized as (ibid.: Table 2):
Detecting (e.g. detect anomalies, individuals, behaviours etc. within a transport system)
Authenticating (e.g for access control)
Identifying (determine the presence of a particular substance or individual)
Locating (e.g. locate particular passengers within a transport system).
Profiling (e.g. classify passengers to profiles that enable targeted intervention)
Tracking (e.g. follow the movements of passengers through a station)
The actuator layer can then respond to alerts, signals or other stimuli from the sensors in an extremely
wide variety of ways (c.f. Ekblom and Hirschfield 2014). Automated responses might include raising or
lowering a barrier, turning on streetlights, changing signage, or issuing a traffic fine. Often, though, a
p. 615 human intervention is also implied, ↵ most obviously from police (e.g. in the event of identification of a
person with an outstanding arrest warrant) or other security or enforcement personnel (e.g. in the event of
unauthorized entry to a location).
Cities of sensors: advanced digital technology and urban surveillance

Whereas studies of surveillance have tended to privilege forms of visual observation (e.g. surveillance
cameras), urban spaces and their inhabitants are therefore now subjected to an ensemble of monitoring
techniques. In ‘cities of sensors’ traditional visual surveillance architectures are accompanied by other
forms of monitoring. Surveillance capability is increasingly focused on other sensory domains, including
acoustic monitoring, atmospheric surveillance, where sensors to assess airborne particulate matter from
pollution to Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) threats, and the analysis of citizens’
emotions. One development, for example, has been the use of automated gunshot detection mechanisms
such as ‘Shotspotter’, which is deployed throughout the US, where a given location is monitored by covert
microphones to record and discern gunshot sounds and automatically call for police response (Linneman
and Turner 2022). The data richness brought by the digital era, and its manifestation through smart cities,
elevates possibilities for non-visual ‘dataveillance’, thus intensifying a practice first subjected to academic
scrutiny during the 1980s (Clarke 1988).
Diversification of surveillance types also increases the range of objects and subjects exposed to scrutiny.
Supplementing the now ubiquitous surveillance camera hardware are softwares designed to establish
identity, discern emotion and automatically track movements through space. People are monitored, as are
elements within and beyond the boundaries of the human body. Biometric technologies map physical
characteristics (e.g. ‘gait analysis’), facial features (facial recognition technology), behavioural traits and
prospective malintent (sentiment analysis) (Maguire and Fussey 2016). Beyond the body, smart city
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interventions have introduced a plethora of techniques to understand aggregated human activity in

specific spaces. These include the use of video analytics to ‘heat map’ the density, direction and flow of
crowds through space and the capture of crowd sentiment through automated analysis of social media
postings.
Visibility, detection, and data extraction

By enhancing the visibility of subjects, objects, relationships and processes, digital technology is radically
altering the ways in which crimes and urban (in)security are addressed. The necessity of using digital
platforms for the routine activities of everyday life has generated an abundance of information available
for scrutiny by law enforcement and other security agencies. Several dynamics are at play here. Individuals
produce and make scrutable an abundance of information about themselves, their behaviours, movements
and social networks. This data has, in turn, focused criminal investigation and informed law enforcement
intelligence gathering endeavours.
One illustrative example is the way mobile phone data, wearable technologies (such as smartwatches) or
vehicle telemetrics (e.g., SIM cards integrated into car entertainment hubs) elicit detail on the movements
of their users. A notable criminal investigation drawing on such technology was the case of keen runner
and hired killer Mark Fellows. He was convicted in 2015 of murdering Paul Massey in Manchester (the
victim was described in the media as involved in organized crime). In one crucial piece of evidence,
Fellows’ Garmin smartwatch, for which he had logged times for the ‘Great Manchester’ 10k race two
months prior to the incident, also revealed GPS data placing him at locations used for reconnaissance
ahead of the murder.
p. 616 ↵ Other uses of digital data are more contentious, and attract particular controversy when used for
intelligence (rather than evidential) purposes. The London Metropolitan Police Service’s development of a
‘gang matrix’ serves as a cautionary tale. The ‘matrix’—essentially a database populated with names of
individuals suspected of possible gang involvement—attracted significant criticism due to its
overrepresentation of young Black males and the consequences these individuals faced (The Lammy Review
2017). Moreover, an investigation by Amnesty International revealed the spurious criteria used to enrol
individuals on this database and thus label them as potential active gang members. These included the
presence of individuals in YouTube hosted music videos (Amnesty International UK 2018).
Beyond the visibility of individuals, law enforcement agencies have become increasingly proficient at
extracting digital information from suspects and other persons of interest. At the evidential level, such
practices have informed the development of ‘digital forensics’, distinct practices governing the
investigation of digital assets such as suspects’ mobile phones and computer hard drives and maintaining
the fidelity and non-contamination of evidence chains. According to Wilson-Kovacs et al. (2022) more
than 80 per cent of digital forensic work is focused on investigating child sexual abuse imagery.
Again, other data extraction techniques have proved more controversial. This includes the practice of fully
downloading the content of sexual abuse survivors’ mobile phones, a practice human rights campaigners
3
have labelled ‘the digital strip search’ (e.g. Big Brother Watch 2019). Another example is the remote
extraction of mobile phone data for intelligence gathering purposes. One of the most contentious practices
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is the use of International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) catchers, which mimic cellphone towers and
automatically invite individuals’ mobile phones to connect and thus make their data available for
extraction. Human rights campaigners allege such technology is used by many UK police forces (Liberty
n.d.) and across at least 27 US states (ACLU 2018).
Predictive policing
These rapid advances in technology have brought a wealth of new possibilities for law enforcement,
security and commercial surveillance of citizens. Some uses—such as facial recognition technology
(Fussey and Murray 2019), sentiment analysis, social media intelligence monitoring, predictive policing
and digital forensics—have generated significant public and political interest. Nevertheless, it is the
practice of predictive policing that has gained most attention from criminologists (e.g. Joh 2016; Maguire
2018; Brayne 2021; Sandhu and Fussey 2021).
Critics have pointed to the lack of conceptual delimitation and internal discrimination in the term
‘predictive policing’. For example, Maguire (2018: 15) argues that many ‘prominent and widely circulated
papers on predictive policing have served up confusion rather than clarity’, given the regularity with which
p. 617 attention-grabbing references ↵ to predictive policing become confused synonyms for more mundane
forms of crime mapping. And as adoption increases, police applications of predictive technology
diversifies. That said, it is possible to discern at least four emerging types of applications for these
technologies: predicting spatio-temporal factors of offending, predicting offenders, predicting the
identity or profile for perpetrators of a given offence, and predicting victims. Each approach has different
goals and is underpinned by dissimilar computational architecture.
Despite these differences, at least three criminological themes cut across most analyses of predictive
policing. The first concerns the relationship between predictive modelling and longstanding
criminological emphases on futurity, which include ‘policing through risk’ (Johnston 2000), and ‘pre-
crime’ (Zedner 2009) and the dominance of ‘actuarial justice’ (Feeley and Simon 1994) concepts over the
past quarter of a century. As such, criminological analysis has a ready conceptual vocabulary to address
many of these practices.
Second, and building on this, these practices of technological prediction generate important questions
about police discretion, long a subject of criminological and sociological enquiry. The deployment of digital
technology to inform police decision-making raises further questions over the degree to which technology
frames and constrains police discretion. Examples of this include computational decisions over where
police patrols should occur (Maguire 2018) and AI-driven facial recognition algorithms that shape whether
police consider individuals to be suspects or not (Fussey et al. 2021).
Third, seemingly novel digital policing strategies often align with, and indeed replicate, existing policing
approaches. For example, many iterations of predictive policing, such as the LAPD’s PredPol platform,
involve a straightforward variation on routine crime mapping techniques in operation since COMPSTAT
measures were introduced into US policing during the mid-1990s (Eterno and Silverman 2006). These
forms of predictive policing add an additional temporal dimension to the spatial data to offer a likelihood
that future offending may take place. While predictive policing tools vary in scale and complexity (see
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Liberty 2019) their prediction and decision-making architecture consistently relies on criminological
4
theories of routine activities and repeat victimization (see inter alia Bowers et al. 2004). Indeed, despite
the suggestion of advanced leading-edge technology, analysis of how predictive technologies work reveals
that they are not always complex. For example, PredPol, the US market leader in the field, uses only five
data points to produce its crime forecasts. These are, ‘Incident Identifier’ (the crime number assigned by
the investigating authority), ‘Crime or Event Type’ (the relevant legal code or crime description used by
the same organization), ‘Location of Incident’ (GPS co-ordinates of where the offence occurred),
‘Timestamps with Start and End Date/Time for Incident’ and ‘Record Modified Date/Time for
Incident’ (PredPol 2018). These values are then combined through computational analysis to elicit
predictions of likely future offending.
p. 618 Evaluating predictive technology

There are myriad claims citing the efficacy of predictive policing tools. While many such evaluations are
conducted by technology developers and serve as marketing tools (e.g. PredPol 2014), Meijer and
Wessels’ (2019) review of the research and academic literature on predictive policing provides some
evidence for the effectiveness of this technology across two broad applications. These are the way the
technology can support the police in deploying their resources ‘more accurately in place and time’ and
‘identify[ing] individuals that potentially will be involved in an act of crime—either as victim or
offender’ (Meijer and Wessels 2019: 1033–1034). In response, criticisms of predictive policing, and digital
policing more generally, are varied. Most fall into three broad categories, however: epistemological
fallibilities; operational challenges; and impacts on fundamental rights. The first two are discussed here,
while the impact on rights is addressed below.
Evaluative studies of predictive policing have been criticized by some on the grounds that they use
extremely limited forms of data (Miller et al. 2014). Others have challenged the temporal framing of
predictive models (Haberman and Ratcliffe 2012) and the extent to which continuities can be drawn from
past events to predict the future (Chan and Moses 2016). From a statistical point of view, unfounded
assumptions are consistently made about the relationship between group averages and predictions of
individual behaviour. For example, an individual’s membership of an aggregate group (a core methodology
for predictive indicators), such as their age category, their residence in a neighbourhood with a particular
crime rate, or their membership of a family with an offending history, may say little about their individual
propensity for a future behaviour. This criticism is linked to the wider ‘big data’ shift from causation to
association, and the investment of associative factors with excessive causative value. Moreover, such
variables gain additional influence when combined with others: seemingly inconsequential data points
exert a more decisive role once combined, influencing risk scoring in a way that is multiplicative and even
exponential rather than simply additive. Several implications arise from these practices. In one sense,
variables over which subjects have little or no control—such as levels of offending in their neighbourhood
or their social/familial network—are used to inform judgements over likely (re)offending (Propublica
2016). Questions of social justice apply, as low socio-economic status is regularly coded as a synonym for
risk (ibid.), a practice that involves heavily racialized overtones in some jurisdictions. Moreover, social
injustice and unfairness is reproduced by the privileging of visible information in such models. For
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example, fewer socio-economic resources and increased welfare-related engagements with the state
necessarily generates more state-owned data available for scrutiny and subjection to these processes.
Hence, data that is visible becomes scrutinized and actionable, yet less visible phenomena are bypassed
and concealed.
Critiques concerning operational challenges have questioned the degree to which these models gain
dominance over human decision-making processes (Bachner 2013; Fussey et al. 2021), potentially at the
expense of officers’ valued experiential and discretionary knowledge (Joh 2016). Substituting human logics
of police discretion with logics of the machine brings additional critique, with particular attention focusing
on new and emerging forms of suspicion alongside concerns over the fidelity of input data and the biases
encoded into of calculative data-driven insights.
Theorizing surveillance in the digital city

The novelty of some of the technologies outlined above would suggest new conceptual and theoretical
tools are needed to understand them. However, many understandings of digital surveillance—particularly
p. 619 those involving video cameras and ↵ related technologies—initially relied on a series of previously
established narratives. Theorization of early analogue urban surveillance drew heavily on Orwellian and
Foucauldian approaches, with the latter holding being particularly influential (see Lyon 1994; Haggerty
and Ericson 2000). Among these, Foucault’s metaphor of the panopticon has been particularly influential.
In its simplest terms, Foucault’s argument centres on how the suggestion of surveillance—regardless of
whether we are being actively watched or not—invites subjects to self-police and obey behavioural norms.
Despite its prominence, the panoptic metaphor has attracted significant criticism from surveillance
scholars as being simplistic and over-literal (e.g. Haggerty 2006). Even within the text of Discipline and
Punish, Foucault states how the panopticon is intended as a heuristic framing, ‘reduced to its ideal
form’ (1977: 205; see also Foucault 2007). Perhaps the most salient limitation of the panoptic metaphor is
the assumption that, because surveillance is ubiquitous, it exerts an influence across all sections of society.
Yet, the surveillance gaze falls unevenly, and is predominantly visited on marginalized and minoritized
groups, an issue that particularly animates debates during the current moment of racial justice activism
(e.g. Browne 2015). As Foucault later explored in detail (2007), much surveillance operates to categorize
and delineate populations, not to inspire conformity towards a constructed norm. For example, automated
biometric sifting through live facial recognition or identity checks at the borders enables some individuals
to travel with ease so that scrutiny can be applied to those on watchlists or otherwise deemed undesirable.
Moreover, ideas of panopticism and discipline underplay, and even deny, agency and resistance to those
subjected to surveillance.
Three more recent conceptual frameworks have proved more durable in accommodating the complexity of
current digital surveillance practices and the diverse settings to which they are introduced. Locating his
analysis in the era of mediatized society, Mathieson (1997) contrasts panoptic notions of the few watching
the many with the observation that we are now imbued in a ‘viewer society’ where the many watch the few:
the ‘synopticon’. Driven by mass (and now social) media, the public can scrutinize the actions of specific
groups and, in contrast to Foucault’s panopticon, the activities of the powerful. While this concept has
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found importance in analyses of reality television and user-generated web content, it holds particular
resonance for criminologists. Not least, its importance is evident when reflecting on mediatized police
assaults and murders from Rodney King to George Floyd.
A second influential framing recognizes that distinct surveillance tools can no longer be considered in
isolation. Instead, it has become increasingly necessary to account for the interoperability of different
technological architecture. Indeed, the entire paradigm of ‘edge computing’, and its subset, the ‘internet
of things’, is predicated on the idea of integrating different internet-linked technologies to bring
distributed computer networks and information together. In a security context, technology development
has increasingly privileged the creation of adaptable systems to enhance or connect existing digital
architecture (Amoore 2014); an emphasis on agile softwares rather than rigid hardwares. Hence advanced
facial recognition technology and other forms of ‘video analytics’ generally comprise software that can be
retrofitted to existing camera networks. Such technological integration enhances the capacity, capability
and scope of surveillance conducted by the police, other state entities and private corporations. Critical
surveillance studies have long recognized the importance of interconnected systems in realizing the latent
potential of technology and, during the last two decades has increasingly drawn on a theoretical
vocabulary offered in the work of Giles Deleuze (e.g. 1995; Deleuze and Guatarri 1987). Most prominently
captured by Haggerty and Ericson’s (2000) concept of the surveillant assemblage, a raft of surveillance-
p. 620 focused ↵ scholarship has emphasized the growing integration of surveillance systems together to
form composite and potent forms of observation (e.g. Murakami-Wood 2013).
A third framing capable of capturing the surveillance implications of increasingly complex and novel
applications of digital technology has drawn from scholarship on the philosophy of science. These
approaches have sought to overcome the technological determinism—the sentiment that technology has
inevitable consequences that arise from its introduction—that accompanies many analyses of surveillance
and other policing technologies. Many variations of this theoretical position exist but they can perhaps be
subdivided into two distinct categories. First among these are iterations of the Social Construction of
Technology (SCOT) approach that considers the influence of political, cultural, social and organizational
contexts on the operational and outcome of specific technologies. SCOT scholars contend that technologies
are not separate from society; rather, they are ‘fully inscribed into the political, economic and social
relations of capitalism’ (Graham and Marvin 1996: 94). Technology, then, is not considered to operate
externally or with any autonomy from society and any attendant social relations. While SCOT-informed
approaches endure, they have been largely supplanted over the last two decades with insights from Science
and Technology Studies (STS), notably variants of Actor Network Theory (ANT) (e.g. Latour 2005; Callon et
al. 2009). This concept has gained particular prominence in analyses of how security technologies,
including digital surveillance, have affected their operational settings (see Salter 2019). ANT essentially
argues that technology holds agentic qualities; that, while inanimate, technology exerts an influence on its
environment. While practitioners do indeed shape the application and potential of technology, their
practices and environments are also influenced by these technologies (inter alia Latour 1987).
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Implications for Citizens
Ethics, rights, and regulation

Given the discussion above, it is unsurprising that there is significant debate and contest over the ethics of
the digital city, and over how the technologies involved, and their human users, can best be regulated. The
ethics and rights-based implications of advanced digital technology are wide and varied. Nevertheless, it is
possible to trace several broad categories of debate. This includes the ethical and human rights
implications of these technologies, the breadth of rights engaged, and the impact of predictive approaches
on individuals and communities.
Many contestations point to the effect of these technologies on the rights, welfare and opportunities of
individuals, and to how such technologies may deepen existing social injustices. Yet, within this area of
debate is another tension, that between ethics and human rights. Ethics-based approaches towards
understanding the potential harms of technologies draw from variants of moral and applied philosophy.
For proponents, this approach offers breadth and flexibility to address the range and dynamism of issues
arising from the use of advanced technologies for the governance of the public realm. Human rights
focused approaches tend to emphasize the precision of an existing legal vocabulary capable of bringing
uses of such technologies to account. While variations and differing interpretations abound, international
human rights standards emphasize a three-part test to assess the permissibility of modifying key
fundamental rights: (i) whether the measure had an explicit legal basis (ii) has a legitimate aim, and (iii) is
necessary in a democratic society.
p. 621 ↵ It is generally accepted that law enforcement uses of technology to keep the public safe constitutes a
legitimate aim. As such, most debate centres on the first and third test. One of the challenges when
assessing whether, first, there is a legal basis for advanced surveillance technology is the degree to which it
has an explicit legal basis. A tension arises here in ‘common law’ jurisdictions, such as the UK and the US,
where latitude is given to the police to make decisions over the appropriate means to tackle crime (see
House of Commons 2021). The deployment of some controversial and intrusive surveillance measures,
notably police uses of Live Facial Recognition (LFR) technology, have been justified on the grounds that
the common law offers a source of implicit legal authorization for such uses. Yet such claims have been
successfully challenged through judicial review (e.g. R (Bridges) v South Wales Police (2020) EWCA Civ 1058)
as constituting insufficiently explicit authorization for the deployment of LFR technology (see Fussey and
Murray 2019).
The third test, whether a measure is ‘necessary in a democratic society’ is additionally complex. Necessity
is, perhaps surprisingly, poorly understood by many users of advanced surveillance technologies. Common
here is the erroneous formulation of necessity as ‘necessary to the policing aim’ and the sidestepping of
the ‘in a democratic society’ element of the test (Fussey and Sandhu 2022). Such misreading has precedent
as Bullock and Johnson’s (2012: 637) study of police responses to the Human Rights Act, 1998 reveals. Here,
the authors experienced how police authorizations for intrusive surveillance ‘consistently conflated
necessity with legitimacy’.
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Another dimension of human rights debates concerns the narrow range of rights considered to be engaged
by advanced technology. Focus typically rests on issues of privacy, commonly formulated as ‘Article 8’
rights in the European human rights lexicon or the analogous Fourth Amendment protections in the US
(protection from warrantless searches, see Ferguson 2017). One formulation of this issue is the often-
5
stated—but legally illiterate—‘privacy versus security’ binary. Yet, advanced digital surveillance
technologies can engage a much broader range of rights. For example, we note below that significant
numbers of people may be reluctant to attend events monitored by LFR, as literature on the ‘chilling
effects of surveillance’ would suggest, which could engage the rights to freedom of expression (Article 10)
and freedoms of association and assembly (Article 11) (Fussey and Murray 2019; United Nations Human
Rights Council 2019).
Another key area of debate centres on the discriminatory potential of such technologies, and thus the
prohibition of discrimination (Article 14), one element of which concerns the disproportionate application
of such technologies to marginalized and minoritized groups (e.g. the Metropolitan Police Service trials of
LFR at successive Notting Hill Carnivals in London during 2016 and 2017, see Fussey and Murray 2019).
Another component of the debate around LFR is the scientific fact that facial recognition algorithms
perform differently depending on the subject’s gender and ethnicity (Buolamwini and Gebru 2018).
Algorithmic-based technologies, particularly those implicated in predictive policing practices, have

attracted a range of ethics and rights focused critique. Prominent among these has been their deviancy
amplification potential, and the tendency toward categorical suspicion inherent within their application
(Harcourt 2007). More recently, and in a much-cited work, former Harvard mathematician O’Neil (2016)
rehearses the ‘negative feedback loop’ argument for the digital era, whereby incidences of crime and
p. 622 ↵ disorder in intensively policed areas become overrepresented on law enforcement databases. This
data then informs prediction models, which, in turn, invite further policing attention towards these areas
and reveal further offences. In discovering these additional incidences of reoffending or criminality, the
model becomes validated, and the process starts anew. Non-geospatial forms of law enforcement and
criminal justice uses of predictive techniques that focus on the individual and their likelihood of future
offending have proved especially controversial. Such practices divorce principles of justice from the
offence and instead emphasize the assumed likelihood of what an offender might do in the future. The
management of individuals on the basis of such internal procedural logics, rather than wider aspirations of
justice and fairness, long recognized in criminology (e.g. Feeley and Simon 1994), is reinvigorated and
reinforced through digital practices. Moreover, they offer a lexicon of scientific objectivity to what may
often result in highly speculative practices; a vocabulary that conceals a range of embedded biases and
subjectivities and suggests a higher plane of accuracy than is warranted.
A further issue common across digital policing is that of ‘black-boxing’, the notion that computer
decision-making processes are hidden, potentially indecipherable and, therefore, cannot be audited. While
there is an increasing emphasis on enhancing the ‘explainability’ of advancing technology, particularly in
relation to advanced forms of machine learning (House of Lords 2018: 9), issues such as commercial
proprietary knowledge, intellectual property and semi-autonomous knowledge generation make this
aspiration difficult to fulfil. The limited explainability of digital decision making has numerous
implications for transparency and accountability. In one sense, it limits transparency regarding how
technology reaches decisions, thus reducing accountability and possibilities for legal remedy and redress.
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Some transparency can be brought to such algorithmic decision-making, not by opening the black box, but
by feeding different information into it and measuring variances in outcome. This process, sometimes
known as ‘algorithmic auditing’, has been used to assess bias in predictive policing tools, such as Lum and
Isaac’s (2016) analysis of PredPol algorithms. Nevertheless, one further challenge to the explainability and
transparency of these processes arises when considering the complex human-computer interactions that
result from operational uses of these technologies. Often the algorithm suggests associations or responses
that are then acted upon by human operators. In recognition of this, the need for meaningful human
adjudication of automated processes is reflected in legal and regulatory provisions across the world,
including the UK’s Data Protection Act 2018, EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Law
Enforcement Directive, and New York City’s Algorithmic Accountability Bill of 2018. Yet questions remain
over the degree to which such human scrutiny is ‘meaningful’.
Public opinion and issues of ‘acceptability’

As the discussion above should make clear, new technologies associated with the digital city can be used by
police and other state and non-state security actors to address issues of crime and disorder; and those
same agencies, as well as individual and corporate ‘criminals’, can use those same technologies to threaten
the privacy and indeed security of the public. This is, of course, a central tension in all discussion and
theorization of policing—that it presents both a threat and a promise to the policed (Bowling et al. 2019).
And it immediately raises questions about the sources and consequences of public approval or disapproval
of the kinds of technologies and practices described above, and of the meaning and role of people’s trust
and legitimacy judgements in the context of this rapidly unfolding process of change. In this section we
summarize recent research on public responses to the use of new digital and other technologies by police
and other state actors.
p. 623 ↵ Research has generally found that public support for police use of new technologies is, on the face of
it, high. Respondents in Crow and colleagues’ US sample, for example, tended to have a very positive view
of the benefits of police use of body-worn video (BWV) (Crow et al. 2017; see also Sousa et al. 2015). Similar
findings have emerged from Australia (Clare et al. 2019) and elsewhere. This chimes with research on the
acceptability of CCTV in the 1990s, when studies regularly concluded that public support for what was then
an equally ‘new’ technology was similarly high (Brown 1995; Ditton 1998).
However, such support can be strongly conditioned by the use to which the technology is put, and by
whom. Heen et al. (2018: Table 1) found that support for police use of UAVs among their (non-
representative) sample ranged from 93 per cent for search and rescue operations, 70 per cent for locating
suspects or fugitives, and just 35 per cent for detecting traffic violations. Sakiyama et al. (2017), also
working with US data, report a similar range in support for different uses of UAVs, although the ordering of
the use cases is different. It has also been suggested that, in the US at least, support for drone surveillance
is higher in reactive policing than proactive policing scenarios (Heen et al. 2018). Bradford and colleagues
(2020: Table 3) report that while over 80 per cent of their (again non-representative sample) supported
police use of live facial recognition (LFR) to identify terrorists, this fell to less than 50 per cent if the
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person being searched for was guilty of only nuisance behaviour. Finally, Sousa et al. (2015: 5) recorded far
higher support for police use of BWV (95 per cent) than for use of the same technology by Emergency
Medical Technicians (56 per cent) and neighbourhood watch volunteers (45 per cent).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, privacy issues appear to be uppermost in concerns about many of these
applications, including UAVs (Heen et al. 2018), LFR (London Policing Ethics Panel 2019) and BWV (Lee et
al. 2019). Increased privacy concerns tend, again unsurprisingly, to be associated with lower levels of
support (Bradford et al. 2020; Crow et al. 2017; Sakiyama et al. 2017). It therefore seems likely that when
considering police use of these types of new technologies some people at least are making a trade-off, and
are more willing to accept the loss of privacy when the technology is used against more serious threats
(Bowyer 2004; Davis and Silver 2004).
Research also suggests people may find automated decision-making, such as the use of AI for targeting
and resource allocation purposes (Brayne 2021), troubling in policing contexts. Hobson et al. (2021) used an
online experiment to test whether different decision-making methods, outcomes and scenario types
affected judgements about the trustworthiness and fairness of police decision-making: participants in the
study were more trusting of decisions made by a police officer compared to an algorithm. Similarly, Wells
(2008), found that the automated ‘decisions’ made by speed cameras were often experienced as unfair by
the drivers concerned, in large part because they felt the automated nature of the process precluded their
individual circumstances from being taken into account. By contrast, Saulnier and Sivasubramaniam
(2021) found in a vignette experiment that evaluations of personal treatment, trust, and distributive justice
were higher in a technologically mediated interaction than in an interpersonal one (where passengers at an
6
airport were selected for ‘further screening’ by either an automated terminal or a Customs agent).
p. 624 ↵ These studies in policing contexts broadly correspond with those from other fields that suggest
people tend to prefer human over automated decision-making processes. More weight is often placed on
advice given by a human expert compared to an algorithm or other automated system (Dietvorst, Simmons
and Massey 2015; Önkal, Goodwin Thomson, Gönül, and Pollock 2009). For example, people are more
likely to follow the recommendation of a physician than of a computer (Promberger and Baron 2006), even
if the latter is more accurate (Longoni, Bonezzi, & Morewedge 2019). Longoni et al. (2019) demonstrate a
marked reluctance to use algorithms and artificial intelligence compared to human providers of care in a
variety of medical settings, due to what they term ‘uniqueness neglect’, a perception that AI is less able to
take people’s unique characteristics and circumstances into account.
Trust, legitimacy and ‘acceptability’

Many years of research has demonstrated that trust and legitimacy are founded most importantly in
perceptions of procedural justice (Tyler 2006; Tyler and Huo 2002; Walters and Bolger 2019). Crucially,
respect, dignity and voice are key aspects of procedural justice: and would seem to be precisely those
elements of an interaction or process that are inhibited or even precluded by automation and the removal
of human actors. The drivers in Wells (2008) study, for example, felt disrespected by an automated process
that did not consider their unique circumstances (even if the ‘decisions’ made by that process were
perfectly fair). Moreover, recent approaches have extended procedural justice theory to consider the
Page 16 of 29
importance of police activity remaining within appropriate boundaries and not transgressing limits of
rightful authority by, for example, excessively intruding into people’s private lives (Huq et al. 2017;
Trinkner et al. 2018). If the use of new technology is thought to breach privacy norms, trust and legitimacy
may suffer. It seems at least possible, therefore, that use of at least some new technologies will damage
public trust and police legitimacy, particularly in as much as they are felt to be unfair or overly intrusive. In
turn, lower trust and legitimacy may be linked to greater resistance to (further) empowering police with
new technologies (Moule et al. 2019; Sunshine and Tyler 2003).
Yet, there is also significant evidence that trust and legitimacy are important factors shaping how
developments in policing are ‘read’ and responded to. Crow et al. (2017), for example, found that
perceptions of police performance (an aspect of trust or trustworthiness) predicted views of the ‘benefits’
of police body worn cameras, while Miethe et al. (2019) report that perceptions of police procedural justice,
another aspect of trustworthiness, were associated with support for body worn cameras across a range of
use scenarios. Heen et al. (2018) found that those who granted police more legitimacy (measured as a
combination of trust and perceived duty to obey) were more likely to accept police use of drones. Wider
institutional and political trust has been shown to similarly predict acceptance of the use of surveillance
technology by the state (Trüdinger and Steckermeier 2017; Degli Esposti, Ball, and Dibb 2021).
There are likely to be at least two interconnected reasons for these findings. First, high levels of trust and/
or legitimacy seem likely to mitigate, assuage or render irrelevant privacy concerns. If one trusts the police
(is willing to be vulnerable to their actions, under conditions of risk, based on positive evaluations and
expectations of their competence and good intentions—Bradford et al. 2022) and/or grants legitimacy
(feels that police share one’s own values and operate according to an appropriate normative framework—
Jackson et al. 2012), this seems very likely to lead one to believe their use of new technology will be
p. 625 appropriate, and that it will not impinge inappropriately on ↵ privacy. Bradford et al. (2020) found that
the associations between trust, legitimacy and view of the acceptability of LFR were almost entirely
mediated by privacy concerns, such that those high in trust and legitimacy were much less likely to be
worried about the privacy implications of police use of this technology, and were correspondingly more
likely to accept it.
Second, it seems likely that because people know very little about technologies such as LFR or AI decision-
making, they use trust and a sense of legitimacy as heuristics on which to base their views (Slovic et al.
2002; 2004). As Bradford et al. (2020: 17) argue, when confronted with the fact that police are using a new
piece of technology:
Although they may not know much about the topic under discussion, large numbers of people
[who grant police legitimacy] are inclined to believe police are probably doing the right thing and
are happy to let them get on with it. A somewhat smaller but still significant group—those who
grant the police less legitimacy—are conversely inclined to believe they are probably doing the
wrong thing, whatever it is, and should stop.
Page 17 of 29
The very high levels of support for police use of BWV may therefore be due to the fact that even those low in
trust and legitimacy support this technology, because it increases the apparent visibility and accountability
of policing. Those sceptical of the police may tend to think that, given the greater powers granted to police
officers it is more important to control or at least monitor police activity than that of, for example, medical
personnel (Sousa et al. 2015). The extent to which a technology also affects police, as well as the policed,
may be an important factor generating widespread public support.
Pavone and Degli Esposti (2012) argue that findings such as those outlined above make problematic the
idea the privacy/security trade-off is always a useful way to conceive of public opinion in this area. In their
study of the acceptability of new Surveillance-Oriented Security Technologies (SOSTs) by the government,
they identified two groups of citizens: those with privacy concerns; and those who trusted the government
and believed the SOSTs would enhance security. There was no trade-off, because the former did not believe
security outcomes would be obtained, while the latter did not think about privacy issues. However, it is
hard to imagine that there is no circumstance in which either intrusion becomes so severe that boundary
effects kick in (Huq et al. 2017; Trinkner et al. 2018) and resistance is triggered by a loss of trust and
legitimacy, or security issues become so salient that privacy concerns start to wane and people willingly
accept greater intrusion (Davis and Silver 2004). At least in the area of new technology use by police and
other security actors, there is as yet very little research on where these thresholds and boundaries might
lie, or what are the implications when they are crossed.
Feeling (in)secure in the digital city

The digital city would seem to have two contrasting sets of implications for its residents’ sense of
subjective security. On the one hand, the enhanced levels of objective security promised by smart city
technologies may improve people’s sense of well-being (Elmaghraby and Losavio 2014); moreover, smart
city interventions may make people feel safer whether or not they offer objective security (Ceccato 2020).
This is of course the avowed aim of many smart city systems. On the other hand, increased surveillance—
indeed, the spread of automated monitoring systems into all aspects of life—and the social sorting (Pali
and Schuilenburg 2020) enabled and triggered by that surveillance may damage people’s sense of security
by, for example, making certain areas inaccessible to them.
Considering first the idea that subjective security may be higher in the digital city, Ceccato (2020) recently
p. 626 reviewed the implications for crime and fear of crime of three ↵ groups of urban technologies closely
associated with the smart city concept: lighting, CCTV, and urban features and practices aligned with
principles of CPTED (crime prevention through environmental design, which includes elements such as
the quality of maintenance of public spaces and the separation of passenger flows at transport hubs, as
well as the physical design of public and quasi-public spaces). She concluded that all three features of
urban spaces can and do have positive effects not only on crime per se but also the fear of crime among
those using those spaces. To the extent that smart city interventions improve such features, for example
by making maintenance more efficient, or lighting systems more sensitive and attuned to people’s needs,
then a positive effect on subjective security may well be forthcoming.
Page 18 of 29
By contrast Pali and Schuilenburg (2020) address the exclusionary potential of smart city systems—their
ability to effectively identify, sort and allocate different types of person in and to different parts of the city,
up to and including outright segregation. In this as in many other areas it is impossible to disentangle
‘analogue’ from ‘digital’ systems, and what is often at stake is not the revolutionary aspects of smart
systems but their ability to embed, speed up and make more efficient existing practices and processes. Pali
and Schuilenburg (2020: 783) note, for example, the extensive use of banning orders to combat crime and
disorder (e.g. the ‘Collective Pub Ban’) by smart cities in the Netherlands (see also Schuilenburg 2015). The
‘banishment’ implied by such practices can amount to exclusion from the rights normally enjoyed by
citizens in liberal democracies, such as freedom of assembly and to move through public space unimpeded.
At the very least this would seem to undermine the sense of secure belonging often positioned as the most
positive outcome of security processes and systems (Loader and Walker 2007). More concrete evidence
comes from UK-based work on public views of LFR, which found that around 20 per cent of people would
consider not attending an event monitored by this technology (LPEP 2019). It seems in this case, and
perhaps in others, the line between privacy concerns and feelings of insecurity becomes blurred, if not
non-existent. Contrary to the promises of their promoters, smart city systems may, if experienced as
intrusive, undermine the well-being of some of those exposed to them (Xu et al. 2008; Solove 2006).
Conclusion
Digital innovation has brought profound societal changes. One of the most far-reaching has been the
growing digital ecology of urban spaces, a development that reaches apotheosis in the ‘Smart City’. While
technology has enhanced the flow and efficiency of many urban processes and infrastructures, such
changes hold acute criminological resonance. The growing digitization of human societies and the
interactions of their inhabitants has exposed citizens to new criminal vulnerabilities. At the same time,
these technologies have offered enforcement agencies and urban managers new and unprecedented
capabilities for crime prevention, surveillance, and social control.
However, while the ‘digital revolution’ has indeed brought profound, sometimes transformational,
changes, technology is also implemented into extant material and social contexts. Drawing on
interdisciplinary insights from science and technology studies it is possible to trace how these contexts
shape the potential of technology, and how the technology conditions and influences these settings. This
dual process is important for several reasons. It allows more sober reflection on the potential and likely
p. 627 impact ↵ of much hyped technologies, avoiding the technological determinism that accompanies both
utopian and dystopian (Fyfe 2004) accounts of digital potential. Perhaps more importantly, though,
recognizing the techno-social character of technological outcomes allows deeper reflection on the utility
and adaptability of existing criminological frameworks for understanding digital transformations. Some
things have changed while other concerns persist. The current ubiquity of digital data and the enormous
computational processing power available to analyse it have generated authentic questions over new crime
vulnerabilities, possible responses to them (and to ‘traditional’ crimes), how the world is understood, the
relationships between observers and subjects, and how specialist and privatized proprietary knowledge
can be made accountable. At the same time, the relevance of issues such as public acceptance of policing,
Page 19 of 29
legitimacy and rights, the plurality of power and control and the role of human decision-making in
technological and organizational processes endures. Such criminological preoccupations not only remain
relevant, but the digital revolution has rendered them more urgent and pressing than ever before.

To follow up on some of the wider issues underlying the discussion above, readers could consult Kitchins’ The Data
Revolution (2014), O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction (2016) and Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. More
specific areas of focus include: Ferguson (2017) and Brayne (2021) on ‘Big Data’ Policing’; the Fussey and Murray (2019)
and London Policing Ethics Panel (2019) reports on the Metropolitan Police trials of Live Facial Recognition
technology; Lauf et al.’s (2021) review of the security potential of smart city technology; and Blythe and Johnson’s
(2021) review of crime facilitated by the internet of things.
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Notes
1
‘Big Data’ is a contested concept that implies excessive coherency and interconnectivity between different forms of
data, but, as the name suggests, largely refers to large volumes of information. Many definitions exist but one
foundational version defines ‘big data’ as information comprising the four ‘v’s’ of ‘volume’, ‘variety, ‘velocity’, and
‘veracity’ (e.g. Degli Eposti 2014).
2
Many studies cover the design or at best ‘lab-testing’ of systems, but not their real-world application and evaluation
(e.g. Byun et al. 2014).
3
The reasons for fully downloading survivors’ mobile phone data are complex and varied. Police have argued that this
practice falls under and is justified by their statutory obligation to pursue all reasonable lines of enquiry. Additionally,
in the R v Allan 2017 rape trial, the Metropolitan Police was criticized for not supplying potentially exculpatory digital
evidence from the suspect’s mobile phone to the defence (Crown Prosecution Service 2018). This led to a shift in
practice where all digital data became extracted during the prosecution process. The practice of the ‘digital strip
search’ remains controversial and attempts are being made to introduce safeguards to restrict the practice and elicit
consent through sections 37 and 41 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. However, critics have
pointed to the vague formulation and lack of oversight of these safeguards, and the extended number of agencies able
to request such data (Privacy International 2021).
4
In their most simple form both theories assume a degree of routine and structure to offending behaviour, and
respectively analyse the spatial and temporal dimensions of such activities. Routine activities theories examine how
offending occurs in relation to an offender’s habitual use of space. Repeat victimization research relevant to this issue
assesses how vulnerable people or locations are to revictimization after an offence takes place, and emphasizes how
risks of victimization may be heightened following an initial offence. Geospatial predictive policing tools such as
PredPol assign a risk score to such variables and issue forecasts for future offences on that basis.
5
One of the (many) reasons ‘privacy versus security’ is a problematic framing for understanding the utility and harm of
surveillance is because under most human rights frameworks, including the foundational UN Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, states have a responsibility to uphold both privacy and the security of its citizens.
6
Although, interestingly, in both automated and human actor scenarios the decision was presented to the passenger
and they were sent to the ‘additional screening section without further explanation’ (p. 333). The results observed may
therefore be at least partially due to respondents thinking the human actor could have provided an explanation or a
word of reassurance, but did not, whereas the machine was incapable of doing so, such that the desirability of an
explanation was discounted.
Page 28 of 29
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29. Policing and the police

p. 632 29. Policing and the police

Trevor Jones, Tim Newburn and Robert Reiner
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0029
Abstract
In this chapter we review some of the key themes in scholarly work on policing, one of the major sub-fields within criminology.
The focus is primarily upon the United Kingdom though many of the themes are familiar across all western democracies. We
begin by considering what is meant by ‘policing’, before outlining the emergence of this field of academic research. The
chapter then examines the development of modern policing, and the challenges of establishing and maintaining police
legitimacy. This leads into a discussion of a series of key themes in policing research, including the operation and control of
police discretion, occupational cultures, matters relating to diversity and discrimination, and the politics and governance of
the police. The next section outlines distinctive policing ‘models’ that have emerged in recent times. The policing landscape is
increasingly complex and the chapter concludes by considering two of the most significant developments: pluralization and
transnationalization.
Keywords: policing, discretion, accountability, order maintenance policing, problem-oriented policing, community
policing, intelligence-led policing, pluralization, private security, transnational policing
Introduction
In this chapter we review some key themes in scholarly work on policing, one of the major sub-fields
within criminology. The focus is primarily upon the United Kingdom though many of the issues are
familiar across western democracies. We begin by considering what is meant by ‘policing’, before outlining
the emergence of this field of academic research. We examine the development of modern policing, and the
challenges of establishing and maintaining police legitimacy. This leads into a discussion of a series of key
themes in policing research, including the operation and control of police discretion, occupational
cultures, matters relating to diversity and discrimination, and the politics and governance of the police.
Page 1 of 27
The next section outlines distinctive policing ‘models’ that have emerged in recent times. The policing
landscape is increasingly complex and the chapter concludes by considering two of the most significant
developments: pluralization and transnationalization.
Defining ‘Police’ and ‘Policing’
Early work in the field focused exclusively upon the police; the specialist state agency tasked with crime
control, order maintenance, and emergency response. In recent times, however, the gaze has widened to
include a more extensive range of individuals and institutions involved in those activities we might think
of as policing. This we take to be a subset of social control involving:
organized forms of order-maintenance, peace-keeping, rule or law enforcement, crime

investigation and prevention and other forms of investigation and information-brokering—
which may involve a conscious exercise of coercive power—undertaken by individuals or
organizations, where such activities are viewed by them and/or others as a central or key defining
part of their purpose. (Jones and Newburn 1998: 18–19)
Formalized, bureaucratic state policing emerged in the UK in the early 1800s, though it took much of the
remainder of the century for it to become a fully embedded institution with nationwide coverage. The
complex and contradictory function of contemporary police, as simultaneously embodying the quest for
general and stratified order—‘parking tickets’ as well as ‘class repression’ (Marenin 1983)—is inscribed in
their origins.
p. 633 ↵ The police are required to perform a miscellany of tasks, from traffic control to counter-terrorism.
However, the defining feature of police work is not a particular social function, whether that be crime
control, emergency response, social service, order maintenance, or political repression. Rather, it is that
all demands on the police involve ‘something that ought not to be happening and about which someone
had better do something now!’ (Bittner 1974: 30, emphasis in original) and which they are, in principle,
able to resolve through recourse to their potential power to wield legal sanctions, ultimately the use of
legitimate force. Policing is also closely tied to punishment. The police act as ‘gatekeepers’ to the penal
system and much of what they do—stop, search, arrest, detain—both involves and is often experienced as
punishment (Newburn and Jones 2022). Despite this ‘omnibus’ mandate, it has been widely noted that
‘crime-fighting’ is core to the occupational self-image of many police officers, as well as the wider
representations of policing in media and political debate. However, a long-standing conclusion of policing
research has been that crime-related issues only form a part of what the police are called upon to do
1
(Banton 1964).
Academic research on the police emerged in the early 1960s on both sides of the Atlantic (Newburn and
Reiner 2012). Much of it was based on observational or ethnographic research. Classic studies in the field
identified the very considerable discretion found at the heart of policing, explored the nature and
parameters of ‘police culture’, and offered insight into both the extent of police deviance as well as the
mundane nature of much everyday policing (Newburn 2022). In general, police research has incorporated
both critical and practical concerns. The focus of earlier police researchers on civil liberties was
Page 2 of 27
subsequently supplemented by more policy-oriented concerns with effectiveness. It is arguably the case
that, although both critical and more policy-oriented strands continue to be visible, the latter has now
come to predominate, though the rise of new social movements such as, inter alia, Black Lives Matter and
‘Defund the Police’, may mean that this is beginning to change once again.
Police Legitimation and Legitimacy
Histories of policing vary by jurisdiction reflecting the local circumstances in which they developed. Peel’s
police in England emerged amid considerable controversy and resistance, and despite the claims of
Whiggish histories (Reith 1938), it took much of the nineteenth century for the institution to gain even a
broad level of acceptance. Very considerable practical and ideological effort was required over an extended
period to transform the ‘New Police’ from a once highly contested institution to one that enjoyed high
levels of public approval. The key elements of this are now well-rehearsed: an emphasis on a variety of
policies—bureaucratic organization; subjection to the rule of law; use of minimal force; the impression of
non-partisanship; prioritization of preventive patrolling; and the creation of the appearance of
effectiveness—set against a background of significant social and political changes resulting in the
p. 634 progressive incorporation ↵ of the industrial working class into the body politic (see Reiner 1985, and
successive editions for the full argument).
The success of this legitimation project led to unprecedented levels of public acceptance and apparent
consent—culminating in what might be thought of as the ‘golden years’ of British police legitimacy in the
mid-twentieth century. So regularly was the phrase ‘the best police in the world’ intoned that it came to be
believed as something close to a statement of fact, including by the Royal Commission on the Police in
1962, rather than an ideological claim. As Reiner’s account illustrates, however, the period since that time
has seen public policing face a series of challenges which have progressively fractured the high levels of
trust and confidence established in the earlier era, leading to a process of de-legitimation or
‘desacralization’ (Loader and Mulcahy 2003), albeit followed by attempts at re-legitimation. Political and
economic changes which reversed many of the gains that had been made in relation to social citizenship in
the first half of the century form the structural underpinning of the more immediate challenges that
impacted on police legitimacy. Damage to the police reputation came from a variety of sources. Apparently
unrelenting increases in crime, declining clear-up rates and critical research evidence all undermined faith
in police effectiveness. Corruption scandals and miscarriages of justice led to increased questioning of
police integrity. Public order policing—particularly in connection with industrial disputes and urban riots
—undermined claims of political impartiality and restrained use of force. And police conduct, both
internally and in relation to external communities, raised questions of fair and equitable treatment,
particularly in relation to the experiences of women and black and minority ethnic communities (Reiner
1985).
Page 3 of 27
Key Themes in Policing Research
From its beginnings in the mid-twentieth century police research has become one of criminology’s growth
industries. Here we focus on some of the most prominent themes within this body of work: examining
police discretion, something identified in the very first sociological studies of policing, as was the notion of
‘police culture’ which has remained a staple of the field. We consider, briefly, the uneven or unequal focus
of much policing and conclude by examining the questions of governance and accountability that are
inevitably raised by the existence and operation of police discretion and its lop-sided impact.
Discretion and control

Police discretion has been defined as ‘the leeway that officers enjoy in selecting from more than one choice
in carrying out their work’ (Mastrofski 2004 : 101). Despite efforts to present the police organization as a
rule-bound bureaucracy, governed by the need to enforce the law (Allen 1976), the earliest research in the
field onward identified very high levels of discretion in frontline policework. Discretion is inevitable given
the impossibility of enforcement every law all of the time as well as the need for interpretation of what, in
practice, are the complex and unpredictable situations confronted by officers. Indeed, as James Q. Wilson
(1968: 7) famously observed, a police force has the ‘special property … that within it discretion increases as
one moves down the hierarchy’. Much policing is low in visibility and consequently the regulation of police
discretion raises substantial challenges (Goldstein 1960). The rapid spread of digital recording
p. 635 technologies has, ↵ however, increased the ability of the policed to record and monitor the activities of
the controllers (Wilson and Serisier 2010). Concerns about police use of force have led, in some areas, to
the introduction of body-worn cameras with the aim of both improving police conduct and enhancing
police legitimacy (Wright and Headley 2021).
The significant level of discretion exercised by police officers has, since the inception of sociological
research on policing, focused considerable attention on the extent and nature of influence over such
freedom exerted by informal occupational cultures. These can be defined as beliefs, norms, working
practices, and informal rules that help police officers to make sense of their world (Bowling et al. 2019).
Some studies seek to understand the occupational culture by examining the nature of the individuals that
are attracted to policing as a career (Salters-Pedneault et al. 2010). Much social research on policing,
however, suggests that occupational police subcultures are better understood as a collective cultural
adaption to the everyday realities of policework, rather than being the product of individual personality
traits (Newburn and Reiner 2012). Early studies of policing—many of which were based on observation of
the work of rank-and-file officers—proposed a relatively stable set of dimensions that appeared to
characterize ‘cop culture’. In Skolnick’s (1966) classic formulation, the tensions associated with policing
in liberal societies—notably the constant pressure for results combined with the position of being symbols
of social authority—foster a common set of cultural responses (see also Reiner 2015). The development of
a set of informal rules, rites, and recipes is a collective ‘coping mechanism’ for dealing with such
pressures: a subculture that is transmitted by storytelling, a toolkit of examples for dealing with police
work (Shearing and Ericson 1991). Skolnick identified three main aspects of cop culture: suspiciousness,
internal solidarity coupled with social isolation, and conservatism. Suspiciousness arises from the
Page 4 of 27
pressure to achieve results by catching offenders, and the concern with danger—people and places are
constantly scrutinized for signs of crime or risk. Suspiciousness also encourages prejudiced stereotypes of
potential ‘villains’ and ‘troublemakers’. Internal solidarity and social isolation are mutually reinforcing.
Solidarity is knitted from the intense experience of confronting shared dangers, and the need to be able to
rely on colleagues in tight spots. Isolation results from organizational aspects of the work such as the shift
system, and people’s wariness in interacting with authority figures. Skolnick argued that police officers
become supportive of the status quo through their function of enforcing the law, and their commitment to
this task fosters political conservativism. Later studies added other elements to the standard ‘checklist’ of
features said to characterize ‘cop culture’, including an exaggerated sense of ‘mission’, cynicism/
pragmatism, machismo and racial prejudice (Bowling et al. 2019).
‘Cop culture’ is often discussed in pejorative terms and is usually the first target of political and media
condemnation when shocking examples of police deviance come to light, as demonstrated in relation to
the tragic murder of Sarah Everard in 2021. However, Waddington (2012) argues that extant definitions of
‘cop culture’ flag up a complex ensemble of talk, thought, and action which appear to be connected, but
not in a straightforward causal manner. He questions the distinctiveness of supposed ‘cop’ culture,
arguing that it reflects similar authoritarian and prejudiced traits in the wider population. While this
viewpoint remains contested, most studies of police culture(s) do not support the notion of a freestanding
phenomenon into which successive generations of police are socialized as passive cultural dopes (Charman
2017). The culture is generated and sustained by the problems and tensions of the police role, structured by
legal and social pressures. In the absence of fundamental transformations in the mandate and burdens the
p. 636 police have to deal with, their working cultures are unlikely ↵ to alter dramatically. However, culture
does not determine practice, but is enacted in concrete situations where other factors are important
(Waddington et al. 2017). For example, officers who are racially prejudiced may nonetheless be restrained
from acting in overtly discriminatory ways by clear and effectively enforced rules (Smith et al. 1983;
Waddington 1999).
The formal control of police discretion in Britain had traditionally been limited by the common law
2
doctrine of constabulary independence. As stated by Lord Denning, this holds that a ‘constable … is not
the servant of anyone, save of the law itself’ (R v Metropolitan Police Commissioner, ex p. Blackburn [1968] 2
QB 136). Common law protections of the independence of individual policing agents were the basis for the
evolution of a wider principle of ‘operational independence’ of chief constables, and in particular,
concerns about protecting their professional autonomy from control by partisan political interests.
Though ‘operational independence’ has been much contested (Lustgarten 1986), and been subject to
significant challenges in recent years, this principle remains a powerful one in British policing and is
considered in more detail below.
Many reforms in the last 30 years, have seen the negative aspects of police culture and its influence over
discretionary decisions as ‘the problem’ and tried to address this in three main ways. First, attempts have
been made to increase workforce diversity (as well as preventing recruits with inappropriate views or
behavioural tendencies from joining). Attempts to shift attitudes and approaches of existing officers via
various training programmes have also been made (Fielding 2018). Second, and often in parallel, there
have been reforms which aim to constrain discretion (or render more it more visible for retrospective
review) and thus reduce the room for potential discrimination via ‘rule-tightening’ (Chan 1997). While
Page 5 of 27
there appears to have been progress in controlling overt displays of prejudice (Foster et al. 2005), a body of
recent work has emphasized the resilience of some key aspects of traditional police culture (Loftus, 2009).
Third, a growing body of research evidence appearing under the broad rubric of ‘procedural justice’—the
core of which suggests that citizens who believe those in powerful positions to be acting fairly and to be
treating people with dignity are more likely to see such authority as legitimate (Tyler 2017)—has become
increasingly central to reform efforts. Barack Obama’s Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing
(2015), for example, put ‘Building Trust and Legitimacy’ as the first of its five main targets and described it
as its ‘foundational principle’ (2015: 9). It argued that ‘[d]ecades of research and practice support the
premise that people are more likely to obey the law when they believe that those who are enforcing it have
the legitimate authority to tell them what to do. But the public confers legitimacy only on those they
believe are acting in procedurally just ways’ (2015: 9–10). Encouragement of approaches to police-public
interaction that rest on procedurally just principles: treating people with dignity and respect; giving
individuals ‘voice’ during encounters; being neutral and transparent in decision making; and, conveying
trustworthy motives is increasingly influential in police training (Weisburd et al. 2022) and is held by many
to offer great promise. The great danger, as Sarat (1993) observed, is that by privileging procedural matters
one is potentially diverted from full engagement with issues of substantive justice.
p. 637 Unequal policing

Research across many national contexts has demonstrated that relatively powerless groups are both over-
policed and under-protected. Most police resources are devoted to uniformed patrol of public space, but
the poor spend more of their lives in public space, making them disproportionately ‘available’ for police
attention (Waddington et al. 2004; Lerman and Weaver 2014). Adversarial policing falls disproportionately
on young men in the lowest socio-economic groups, though a range of marginalized sub-groups tend to
find themselves in conflict with the police (see, inter alia, Stuart 2016). While recent research has explored
the relationship between policing and sexualities (Jones 2015), the predominant focus over the past 20
years or so has been ethnicity and gender.
Numerous studies show that police powers are disproportionately deployed against ethnic minorities (Epp
et al. 2014). This results from a complex interaction between police discrimination and social
circumstances that generate disproportionate offending in certain crime categories by young black men
(Reiner 1993, 2010: 159–75). Ethnic minorities are disproportionately victims crime of all kinds (Ministry
of Justice 2015), and often perceive the police response as inadequate (Bowling 1999). Writing in the
aftermath of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the riots that followed, and the emergence
of the Black Lives Matter movement, Soss and Weaver (2017) focus on what they term America’s ‘race-
class subjugated communities’ and the expansion of the police and other control agencies into their daily
lives. For such communities, public spaces have become ‘police-saturated’, making surveillance constant,
and creating vast new opportunities for police-public contact. Indeed, the police, together with courts,
parole agencies and prisons have become the most familiar state-led institutions for many such
communities—‘the only government I know’ as one of their respondents put it (2017: 574). Such
communities display high levels of dissatisfaction with the police and heightened levels of what Sampson
and Bartusch (1998) refer to as ‘legal cynicism’: a cultural disposition in which both the law and those that
Page 6 of 27
are responsible for enforcing it are seen as illegitimate, irresponsible, and poorly equipped to offer safety
and security (Kirk and Matsuda 2011). Bell (2017) takes this further, arguing that a combination of
procedural injustice, ‘vicarious marginalization’ and structural exclusion combine to create ‘legal
estrangement’: ‘detachment and eventual alienation from law’s enforcers … [reflecting] the intuition
among many people in poor communities of colour that the law operates to exclude them from
society’ (2017: 2054).
Although women are significantly less likely than men to be subjected to adversarial police powers, gender
discrimination is far from absent in policing (Newburn and Reiner 2012). There is clear evidence of
discrimination against women in their treatment by the police as victims. Calls to domestic disturbances
have always been a significant part of the police workload, but officers have often been reluctant to use
formal powers even where evidence of assault is present. ‘Domestics’ have traditionally been viewed in cop
culture as messy, unproductive, and not ‘real’ police work (see also Gadd, this volume). In the UK,
insensitive treatment of rape victims was dramatically highlighted by Roger Graef’s TV documentary on
the Thames Valley Police in the early 1980s and has been a source of continuing controversy. Despite
considerable improvements, the treatment of rape victims by police remains highly problematic (Hohl and
Stanko 2015), something confirmed by both national and international crime surveys (Xie and Baumer
2019). Similar broad conclusions have been found in many jurisdictions in relation to domestic violence,
willingness to report, and trust in police (Voce and Boxall 2019).
The issue of unequal policing also includes the treatment of women and ethnic minorities working within
p. 638 police forces. In UK police forces the recruitment of women ↵ officers has increased significantly over
time (by 2021 they accounted for about 32 per cent of police officers) as has their presence in senior ranks.
Several women chief constables have been appointed in the last 25 years and currently 32 per cent of ‘chief
officer’ posts (above chief superintendent) are occupied by women. However, the persistence of gender
discrimination within the service has been widely documented (Brown and Heidensohn 2000; Silvestri
2007) and several recent scandals have highlighted severe and continuing problems. As mentioned earlier,
in 2021 a young woman, Sarah Everard, was abducted in south London and subsequently raped and
murdered. The perpetrator was eventually identified as a serving Metropolitan Police officer who had used
his warrant card to enable him to place Everard in handcuffs, claiming she had broken the COVID-19
regulations that were in force at the time. An official report found significant structural, strategic, and
tactical inconsistencies in the service’s response to violence against women and girls (HMICFRS 2021). In
early 2022 the results of a series of investigations by the Independent Office for Police Conduct into
Charing Cross police station in London uncovered serious problems including ‘bullying and aggressive
behaviour; “banter” used to excuse oppressive and offensive behaviours; discrimination; toxic
masculinity, misogyny and sexual harassment’ (IOPC 2022: 5). These and other problems led the Home
Secretary to argue that it all reflected a wider problem of police culture.
Although police in England and Wales have been much less successful in recruiting from ethnic minorities,
and in retaining and promoting such officers, than has been the case in relation to women, there have
nevertheless been some improvements. By 2021 those identifying as Black, Mixed, Asian or another
minority ethnic group accounted for 7.6 per cent of the police workforce, though under five per cent were
in ‘chief officer’ roles. For decades, recruitment drives of various sorts have been spurred on by policing
controversies where minorities are concerned. These controversies range from the urban riots of the
Page 7 of 27
1980s, the scandal surrounding the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, to more recent events such
as the overt racism uncovered by the Secret Policeman television documentary broadcast in 2003, as well as
the aforementioned revelations from the inquiry into Charing Cross which found evidence of ‘repeated
mocking of non-Christian religions, the Black Lives Matter movement, people with disabilities, racism and
homophobia’ (IOPC 2022: 9).
Governance and accountability

Organizational accountability—the main focus here—concerns the constitutional and institutional
framework for the shaping and monitoring of policing policy or police governance (Lustgarten 1986). The
‘individual’ dimension of accountability refers to legal rules or complaints mechanisms applied to policing
agents as they go about their day-to-day activities. This aspect of accountability in England and Wales was
considered in more detail in previous editions of this book, and space considerations preclude discussion
here (see Rowe (2020) for an up-to-date discussion of different forms of accountability).
The central dilemma for democratic police governance concerns how to ensure an appropriate balance
between effective community influence over policing and the professional expertise of senior police
officers. While much rhetoric in debates about accountability stresses the need for policing to reflect
‘community’ wishes, this is inherently problematic. Community opinions are often divided, and these
must be weighed against the effective protection of minority rights and the prevention of policing from
capture by partisan interests. Different democratic countries have developed contrasting institutional
p. 639 means for addressing these dilemmas, with systems in the USA generally ↵ giving more weight to the
local electoral process, whereas in many western European democracies (for example) such influence is
deliberately constrained. The UK has charted a middle way within this pattern, with distinct differences
emerging between its constituent nations (see papers in Henry and Aydin-Aitchison 2019).
3
Until relatively recently, the formal architecture of police governance in England and Wales set out what
was known as the ‘tripartite’ system of accountability for its 41 provincial forces, comprising local police
authorities, the Home Secretary, and chief constables. In London, the Metropolitan Police had the Home
Secretary as their police authority until 1999, when the Greater London Authority Act created a police
4
authority for the Metropolitan force. The development and operation of this system, and in particular the
long-standing decline in local influence over policing over the course of the twentieth century, have been
the subject of extensive research and analysis (Jones et al. 1994, Rowe 2020). The Coalition government
that took office in May 2010, however, challenged this trend, abolishing national performance targets and
replacing police authorities with Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) in each provincial force area,
elected for a four-year term (Jones et al. 2012).
The responsibilities of PCCs include securing the maintenance of the local police force, ensuring that it is
efficient and effective, as well as holding the chief constable to account for the exercise of her or his duties.
Each PCC must publish a Police and Crime Plan setting out the strategic policing objectives for the force
area. They are also required to work cooperatively with community safety partners and develop joined-up
responses to local crime and disorder problems. They have responsibility for commissioning community
safety services as well as services for victims of crime, and in some areas have been given overall
Page 8 of 27
responsibility for fire and rescue services as well as policing (Police Foundation 2022). Crucially, PCCs
appoint the chief constables and, under specific circumstances, may suspend them or call upon them to
resign or retire. Each PCC is nominally answerable to a Police and Crime Panel comprising local
councillors. This panel has a duty to ‘scrutinize’ and ‘support’ the activities of the PCC, although the
powers of these panels are very limited (Newburn 2012).
There have now been three rounds of elections for PCCs, and they clearly represent a significant shift in the
police governance system in England and Wales. The recent Strategic Review of Policing (Police
Foundation 2022) observed that many of the fears voiced by critics of the reforms at the time of their
introduction—for example concerning the impact of partisan politics on local policing or the election of
extremist candidates—had not come about. However, it should also be noted that the (party) politics of
policing appears to be increasingly febrile. During 2022, for example, there was significant controversy
about the decision-making of the Metropolitan Police and Durham Constabulary about their respective
handling of investigations of gatherings attended by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition
respectively, for alleged breaches of existing COVID-19 regulations. The outgoing Commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick—who resigned after a series of scandals emerged in her force and the
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan informed her that he no longer had confidence in her leadership—warned in
her leaving statement about the dangers from both central and local government of political interference
p. 640 in policing. She said: ‘The current politicisation of policing is a threat not just ↵ to policing but to trust
in the whole criminal justice system. Operational independence from local and central government is
crucial for an effective democracy and is a model respected around the world. We must all treasure and
protect it’ (Guardian 2022).
The introduction of PCCs does appear to have provided a greater sense of clarity and focus, enhanced the
influence of local people over policing policies in their areas, and stimulated local innovations in policing
policies (Home Affairs Committee 2016; Bainbridge 2022; Cooper 2021; Home Office 2022). However, a
number of problems with the PCC system have come to light. These include concerns about the lack of
checks and balances in relation to the PCC power to appoint or dismiss chief constables (Cooper 2020;
Shannon 2021). As the Police Foundation (2022: 155) notes: ‘the concern is that such untrammelled power
in the hands of one person has created job insecurity throughout the Chief Constable rank and this in turn
has led to increased churn and reduced tenure’. There are concerns about growing complexity and overlap
of police governance arrangements in England due to the increasing number of elected mayors. The
decision to transfer the role of the PCC to the elected mayor in some but not all ‘city regions’ (London,
Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire) has contributed to the development of a ‘mixed economy’ of
police governance (Muir 2015). The recent Strategic Review of Policing supported the mayoral model and
recommended further changes in England to ensure that mayors ‘automatically’ become the PCC where
the force area is coterminous with the mayor’s area of responsibility (Police Foundation 2022: 156).
Whilst PCCs were initially presented as a localizing reform, strong central influences remained within the
system (Jones and Lister 2019), and recent changes have arguably represented a further return to
centralized controls. In 2019, the government established the National Policing Board (NPB), chaired by
the Home Secretary and including other ministers, officials and senior representatives of the police
service. The NPB is explicitly intended to provide a mechanism for the Home Secretary to set the ‘long
Page 9 of 27
term strategic direction’ of the police service and to hold the police service to account for the delivery of
key government commitments on policing. Recent years have also seen the reintroduction of national
(England & Wales) performance metrics (Police Foundation 2022).
As highlighted above, police governance arrangements vary within the constituent nations of the UK.
Northern Ireland has long had a single police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (previously the Royal
Irish Constabulary) which had been in existence since the 1920s, being replaced by the Police Service for
Northern Ireland (PSNI) in 2001. The PSNI was created in the aftermath of the publication of the report on
the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland (the Patten Commission) (Independent
Commission 1999). Governance of policing is overseen by the Northern Ireland Policing Board which has
the responsibility for securing ‘an effective and efficient local police service’ as well as appointing and
potentially dismissing chief officers (Ellison and O’Rawe 2010). Since 2013, Scotland has also had a single
national force—Police Scotland—established by the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012 which
replaced the eight previously existing local forces. This force is formally accountable to the Scottish Police
Authority (SPA) comprising appointed rather than elected members. The SPA’s functions include the
maintenance of the Police Service of Scotland, promoting and supporting improvement, and holding the
chief constable to account. The reforms in Scotland—although in line with some other more centralized
European policing systems—have caused significant controversy during their early years, with particular
concerns raised about the erosion of local influences and the lack of checks and balances for central power
(Henry et al. 2019). In Wales, against the recommendations of two official reviews (Silk Commission 2014,
p. 641 Thomas Commission 2019), policing ↵ and criminal justice remain non-devolved matters. Even within
the current settlement, however, there have been signs of the emergence of distinctively Welsh police
governance institutions which both reflect and contribute to a growing divergence between policing in
Wales and England respectively (Jones and Wyn Jones 2022).
Models of Policing
Recent decades have witnessed some important developments in approaches to policing, prompted by a
number of pressures: a combination of rising crime and limited budgets from the late 1950s on; the
‘nothing works’ pessimism of the 1970s and the growing doubts about police effectiveness that derived
from research; the rise of new public management and the growing emphasis on securing ‘value for
money’ and ‘economy, efficiency, and effectiveness’ in public services; apparently poor police-community
relations, particularly where urban-based minorities were concerned; and the broader and widespread
decline in public confidence in policing that also occurred in the latter decades of the twentieth century
(see also Crawford et al., this volume). As a consequence, policing has seen the regular appearance of what
are alleged to be new ‘models’ of police work, each claiming to refashion policing in ways that represent a
significant departure from traditional methods and predicated on varying diagnoses of the failure of
traditional patrol and investigation methods. Many of these have been little more than fancy labels and
promotional devices rather than genuine developments in policing styles and tactics. However, a small
number are worthy of more detailed discussion.
Page 10 of 27
Community policing
Emerging from the growing acceptance that at best the police could often only offer a very partial solution
to the difficulties they confronted, community policing proposes greater citizen involvement in the
identification of the problems that should form priorities for police attention as well as in the responses to
those problems. Skogan (2009: 43) describes it as ‘an organizational strategy which supplements
traditional crime fighting with problem-solving and prevention-oriented programmes that emphasize
new roles for the public’. At heart such developments are focused primarily on overcoming problems with
the legitimacy of policing. Recognition in both the USA and the UK that police–community relations had
deteriorated significantly, community policing initiatives proliferated in the 1980s. Though at the time
research evidence was mixed, ideas associated with community policing became the accepted policing
orthodoxy, at least amongst senior officers (Reiner 1991) in the UK. Indeed, continuing senior police
scepticism about aggressive police patrol tactics was a very significant stumbling block when politicians
began extolling the virtues of ‘broken windows’ and ‘zero tolerance policing’ in the mid-to late 1990s
(Jones and Newburn 2007). So well established has community policing become in the USA that it has been
described as the ‘national mantra of the American police’ (Greene 2000: 301).
The major difficulties with community policing are contained in the term itself. It is sufficiently broad to
allow for almost any policing activity to be included under its rubric (Bayley 1994). Moreover, with its
connotations of inclusiveness, consensus, communication, and consultation, an idea such as community
policing, however difficult to pin down, is almost impossibly seductive (Herbert 2006). It is this, arguably,
p. 642 that has made ↵ it especially attractive to police reformers, particularly those in recent times who have
sought to reform policing in developing democracies and transitional societies (Hinton and Newburn
2009), though research on such efforts has uncovered numerous problems of both conception and
implementation (Robertson 2005).
Problem-oriented and linked policing models

At the heart of many community policing initiatives is the idea of police as ‘problem-solvers’ (Eck and
Spelman 1987). Often considered a variant of community policing, ‘problem-oriented policing’ (POP) is an
explicit attempt to make police work more analytical in the identification of the ‘problems’ to be
addressed, and constructive in the solutions applied to the problems identified (Goldstein 1990). The
underlying assumption is that much policing treats incidents brought to its attention as if they were
discrete, unconnected events. By contrast, POP looks for connections and patterns, with the aim of finding
lasting solutions (Moore 1992). A number of ‘tools’ are associated with this approach, notably the problem
analysis triangle (the PAT, consisting of the offender, the victim, and the location) and the SARA process in
which four sequenced stages—scanning, analysis, response, and assessment—form the basis for
problem-solving (Tilley 2008). Research over many years now suggests that while POP has much to offer
in terms of reducing crime and increasing safety, implementing and sustaining such strategies continues
to be problematic (Bullock et al. 2021).
Page 11 of 27
A focus on problem-solving has given rise to a number of linked policing strategies concentrating on such
patterning as repeat or prolific offenders (Everson and Pease 2001), and repeat victimization (Farrell and
Pease 2001). There is now a growing literature particularly around ‘hotspots policing’. Experimental
studies and meta-analyses regularly show significant, if often small, crime control gains, particularly in
high-activity crime areas, together with limited displacement of crime and some potential for diffusion of
crime prevention gains (Braga et al. 2019). While such approaches, and indeed the wider development of,
what has been referred to as, ‘evidence-based policing’ (Sherman 2013), have both growing research
support and greater professional commitment, considerable resistance remains. The enforcement
orientation in policing is still strong as is the attachment to the excitement and glamour of the flashing
blue lights of emergency response. The more sedate world of data collection and analysis holds fewer
attractions. Despite improvements, it is also something that many police departments are ill-equipped to
deal with. Arguably, it is precisely the identification of such limitations that lay behind the emergence of a
further variation in the UK, ‘intelligence-led policing’ (ILP), defined as an approach which: ‘emphasises
analysis and intelligence as pivotal to an objective, decision-making framework that prioritises crime hot
spots, repeat victims, prolific offenders and criminal groups. It facilitates crime and harm reduction,
disruption and prevention through strategic and tactical management, deployment and
enforcement’ (Ratcliffe 2016: 5). As with POP, its emphasis lies in the search for patterns in offending and
victimization and its fundamental rationale is to increase the efficiency of policing.
More recently, policing has seen the emergence of a further variation—referred to as ‘predictive policing’
or ‘smart policing’—linked to developments in connection with ‘big data’ (see also Bradford and Fussey
this volume). Utilizing software for predictive analysis, the aim is to use historic data to detect spatial and
temporal patterns in crime to identify ‘likely targets for police intervention and prevent crime or solve past
crimes by making statistical predictions’ (Perry et al. 2013). Automated facial recognition (AFR)
surveillance, a variant on such approaches, is increasingly being used and has become one of the more
p. 643 controversial developments in contemporary policing. The technology ↵ involves biometric processing
of video images in the attempt to identify particular individuals, usually in real time, potentially
substantially increasing the surveillance capacity and reach of the police. Its use is predictably contentious,
with various authorities calling for greater and more explicit controls over its operation (UN OHCHR 2018).
The utilization of such new technologies is closely linked to changes in the nature of policing and security
provision in the late modern world. In particular, they mark a temporal shift of emphasis toward the
preventive and pre-emptive in which ‘risk’ is a central organizing feature (O’Malley 2004), together with a
sectoral shift in which ‘responsibility for security against risk falls not only to the State but extends to a
larger panoply of individual, communal and private agents’ (Zedner 2007: 262).
Pluralization
The last three decades have seen significant challenges to the state-centric focus of much policing
research from the growing recognition, on the one hand, that liberal democracies in the twenty-first
century are policed by a diverse array of organizations and individuals (Jones and Newburn 2006a; Bonnet
et al. 2015) and on the other, that globalization, among other influences, is reshaping policing beyond the
state (see Franko, this volume). An increasingly ‘pluralized’ policing landscape is one that includes a
Page 12 of 27
vibrant commercial security sector (Button 2020), new forms of public sector policing auxiliaries such as
local authority patrol forces and municipal wardens (Jones and Lister 2015), the creation of new patrolling
ranks—such as ‘Police Community Support Officers’ (PCSOs) in the UK—within public police
organizations (O’Neill 2019), and the appearance of informal community self-policing forms such as
vigilantism (Johnston 1996; Ralph-Morrow 2019). The pace of such changes led Bayley and Shearing
(1996: 585) to argue that ‘future generations will look back on our era as a time when one system of
policing ended and another took its place’. Such terminology refers not only to security provision, but also
to its authorization or governance (Bayley and Shearing 2001).
Together with public constabularies, private security sits at the heart of an increasingly complex division
of policing labour. Private security personnel far outstrip police in numerical terms, and arguably have
done so for some time (Jones and Newburn 2006). This sector includes staffed services; security
equipment; and investigation. The Security Industry Authority, which licenses security personnel,
estimates that there are over 375,000 active licence holders in the UK and almost 440,000 licences in
circulation (SIA 2021) (there were approximately 149,000 police officers in total serving in Northern
Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales at the same point). The most visible manifestation of the growth of
private security is the provision of staffed security services including guarding and asset protection
services, body-guarding (or ‘close protection’), the escort of cash-in-transit, door supervision for public
houses and nightclubs, debt collection, and alarm monitoring/response services (Jones and Lister 2015).
The most significant growth area in recent times has been in the proliferation of security hardware and, in
particular, the expansion of the use of CCTV (Norris et al. 2004). Many companies now also offer highly
sophisticated integrated security systems including various forms of tracking and recognition technology.
Satellite tracking has emerged relatively recently within the British criminal justice landscape and
provides the potential for continuous electronic monitoring of the position of GPS-tagged individuals
wherever they are, developments which have a number of policing applications (Hudson and Jones 2016).
p. 644 ↵ The increasingly complex nature of the policing landscape requires us to consider how such changes
should be conceptualized, why they have come about, and what challenges they raise, not least in terms of
governance and ethics. Conceptually, the terms ‘pluralization’ and ‘multilateralization’ are among those
more commonly used in an attempt to capture the range of bodies involved in policing, broadly
understood, the sources of their authority and the relationships between them. Shearing (2006, 2016)
turned to the metaphor of networks and nodes, and to a focus on security rather than policing, in his
theorization of contemporary changes—one which explicitly sought to decentre the state in its analysis.
Brodeur (2010: 350) talks of both the policing web and policing assemblage precisely, he argues, to avoid
giving any impression that the patchwork of policing lacks coordination, and that we are some distance
from entering into ‘an era of police fusion’.
What is not in dispute is that policing has become more complex, though it is open to question just how
significant a departure current systems are from previous arrangements (Jones and Newburn 2002; Zedner
2006). Explanations for such change vary. It is clear that increasing demands on public policing have come
at the same time as a degree of financial constraint has been imposed. Arguably, then, the ability of public
services to meet the demands placed upon them has shrunk (Spitzer and Scull 1977) leading to a ‘demand
gap’ (Morgan and Newburn 1997) that can filled by other providers. Changes in the nature of criminal
Page 13 of 27
activity—not least in relation to fraud and cybercrime—pose daunting challenges to the police that require
the development of partnerships that incorporate a range of public and private actors (Levi et al. 2017).
Though less important than sometimes assumed, governmental policies of deliberate privatization have
contributed to the partial or full transfer of some public police functions to other agencies. In 2012, for
example, Lincolnshire Police contracted with G4S to outsource 18 police functions, including custody
services, enquiry officers, force control room, the crime management bureau, and firearms licensing
5
(White 2014). Although at one time this was viewed as presaging major changes in police provision, thus
far this has not proven to be the case. Changes in property relations, the growing privatization of urban
space, the growth of ‘mass private property’ (Shearing and Stenning 1981) have also stimulated
opportunities for private and hybrid provision, heralding, Shearing and Stenning (1983) argue, the arrival
of a ‘new feudalism’.
Just as is the case for public policing, pluralized policing raises important questions of governance and
accountability for several reasons. There are dangers that market pressures stimulate provision that does
little to improve citizens’ safety and security. The commodification of security and the attempt to meet
highly fragmented demands and needs may undermine public trust and civic engagement (Loader and
Walker 2007). The differential ability to pay for ‘security’ may exacerbate existing social inequalities,
shifting resources away from places where risks are greatest. Loader and White (2017) argue that the
literature on regulation has been dominated by two approaches: those that seek to ‘cleanse’ the market by
requiring providers to meet appropriate standards, and those that seek to ‘communalize’ it by increasing
the power of those purchasing services. Both rely on market-based thinking. Consequently an alternative
‘civilizing’ approach is offered which seeks to promote a ‘regulatory space where the non-contractual
public values and commitments of both market and non-market actors can be expressed, deliberated
upon, and (if appropriate) institutionalized’ (2017: 170).
p. 645 Transnationalization
Much criminological literature on pluralization focuses on policing activities within national boundaries,
but an important aspect of growing complexity has related to developments ‘above’ the level of the nation
state (Loader 2000). Cross-national police cooperation has a long history and the increasing visibility of
criminal activities that cross national boundaries has reinforced and helped expand such activities. The
internationalization of policing was given particular impetus by America’s ‘War on Drugs’ and its use of
the military as well as its Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI (Nadelmann 1993), though non-state
actors have also played an important role (Sheptycki 2000). But our focus here is on ‘transnational
policing’—activities undertaken by policing bodies that draw their authority from polities that lie beyond
individual nation states. Here again there is a lengthy history to such endeavours. Early European
initiatives in transnational policing activity date back to the late nineteenth century (Deflem 2002). The
International Criminal Police Commission was established in Vienna in 1923, succeeded after the Second
World War by the International Criminal Police Office or Interpol (Walker 2000). Interpol expanded
significantly and has participating bureaux in nearly two hundred countries. Despite this, and its widening
functional remit (Ling 2010), Interpol is no longer the primary site of transnational policing activity. Very
significant expansions in the area of European transnational police cooperation have taken place in the last
Page 14 of 27
three decades. Two key factors have been significant in stimulating such activity, notably the growing
international reach of US law-enforcement activities (Nadelmann 1993) and, at least until recently, the
expanding power of the European Union (Anderson et al. 1995).
Following the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, Europol was established as the Europe-wide police
intelligence agency that would receive and supply information to the police forces of Member States,
though it did not become fully operational until 1999 (Walker 2003). There has been significant expansion
of European policing activity since that point, not least as the repercussions of the attacks in the United
States on 11 September 2001 were felt across the Atlantic (Andreas and Nadelmann 2006). The European
security agenda driving such developments is now focused primarily on transnational organized crime
(Dorn and Levi 2007) and the threat of international terrorism. In particular, the scale of the terrorist
threat—exemplified by the mass casualty attacks on Paris in 2015 and Brussels in 2016—seems to have
overcome many remaining national concerns about the growing power of Europol and related EU
institutional arrangements. Moreover, the post-9/11 security agenda has vastly increased EU cooperation
with the USA in relation to the exchange of intelligence and personal data and significantly enhanced US
involvement in EU border policing and security planning (Den Boer and Monar 2002).
In the last five years Europol’s mandate has been extended to allow it to support domestic police
investigations of murder, kidnapping, hostage-taking, racism, corruption, unlawful drug-trafficking,
people-smuggling, and motor vehicle crime (Lavranos 2003). European Union sharing of information and
intelligence with the USA has occurred primarily through Europol, but also through the establishment of
Eurojust—the EU inter-governmental institution responsible for judicial cooperation around crime
(Dubois 2002). The European Arrest Warrant (EAW) came into force in 15 member states in January 2004
p. 646 enabling the transnational transfer of accused ↵ persons (Walker 2003). The continued efficacy of
European arrangements was called into question when the UK’s Brexit Referendum was under discussion,
the Director of Europol, Rob Wainwright claiming that a vote for Brexit would seriously compromise the
UK security agencies’ ability to counter terrorism and other cross-border crime (Guardian 22 June 2016). In
practice, after lengthy negotiation, it was agreed that the UK would continue to participate fully in Europol
and Eurojust, and, although the new extradition processes retain the major features of the EAW, meaning
that they are primarily a judicial rather than a political matter, it remains to be seen how this will work in
practice.
To the picture of the expansion of transnational public policing one must also note parallel developments
in the private sector. There has been considerable expansion in the size and scope of both private security
companies and private military contractors on the global stage. Regarding the latter, the post-cold war
world led to the very considerable reshaping of military capabilities in many western countries which,
together with the demands arising out of the ‘new wars’ (Kaldor 2012), have generated an industry that
well over a decade ago was estimated to be generating over $100bn annually (Kinsey 2006). As White
(2016) observes, although there are obvious differences between private security and private military
operations and activities there are also a number of shared characteristics, not least the shared pressures
and ideological underpinnings that have given rise to each, as well as the legitimation activities both
employ—in essence seeking to align themselves with the state—in order to generate continued growth
and establish an even firmer foothold in global ‘policing’.
Page 15 of 27
Bowling and Sheptycki’s (2012) analysis of transnational policing leads them to argue that a new ‘global
policing architecture’ has emerged. The challenge of combatting transnational crime has not diminished.
A combination of wars, ecological disasters, and global economic instability has led to mass population
movement, and a major migration and refugee crisis in various parts of the world. One consequence of this
has been a shift of policing resources to enforcement of border control, both at physical crossing points
and in terms of everyday investigation and enforcement relating to illegal immigration (see Bosworth this
volume). Loftus (2015) demonstrates how contemporary border policing provides an exemplar of
pluralization, in that it involves a range of different state agencies, private actors, and commercial bodies.
It also raises a number of key issues for policing, such as the risks to the human rights of migrants posed
by vigorous enforcement, the involvement of organized criminal networks in people smuggling
operations, and the challenge of accountability within these complex networks of agencies engaged in
border control.
That major changes have taken place is undeniable, but a sense of perspective is also required. It is all too
easy to exaggerate the nature and reach of transnational policing developments (Andreas and Nadelmann
2006), and certainly current European policing changes fall some way short of the emergence of
something akin to a transnational FBI, though it remains possible that this is the direction of travel.
Similarly, while international and transnational policing bodies are increasingly visible, active and,
arguably, influential, it also remains important not to underestimate the ability of local actors to resist and
rework policing forms on the ground (Blaustein 2015). Finally, and importantly, most policework remains
highly local and the bulk of contact between police and public is the result of concerns that are largely
parochial and personal. Local policing may increasingly be permeated by matters whose origin lies far
away but, arguably, we are still some distance from such policing being accurately described as having
been ‘transnationalized’.
p. 647 Conclusion: Futures of Policing
The nineteenth-century architects of the British police constructed a distinctive image—that of a totemic
national symbol of unity and order—partly to counter the widespread social and political opposition to the
establishment of a specialized police institution (Reiner 2010; Emsley 2008; Rawlings 2008). This image
looks increasingly anomalous in a world transformed by fundamental social, political, and cultural shifts.
In particular, the raft of changes associated with neoliberalism have reconfigured the economic and social
framework, globalizing production and consumption and increasing economic inequality, both within and
between countries. The continued dominance of free-market economic policies makes the emergence of a
more inclusive social order unlikely. At the same time, a combination of economic instability, violent
conflict, and environmental disasters in various parts of the world have led to unprecedented levels of
migration, and a humanitarian crisis of historic proportions, something regularly exploited by populist
politicians.
In this context, the British conception of the police as a body with an omnibus mandate, symbolizing order
and harmony, becomes increasingly anachronistic but also more vital to many as the sole remaining
national symbol (Loader and Mulcahy 2003). The increasingly global nature of many crime and security
issues facing the police will continue to stimulate international and transnational developments. Some of
Page 16 of 27
these will involve the private as well as the public sector, with challenges that will include seeking to
mitigate the danger of privileging the security of the wealthy at the expense of those that cannot pay, and
designing systems—and not just contracts—which hold such institutions to account. Notwithstanding
these developments, much policing will necessarily remain highly local and will no doubt continue to come
under growing pressure—from declining public confidence, fiscal retrenchment, and increasing demand
as a consequence of being a public service of last resort. How to make public policing effective is an
ongoing challenge.
As has occurred regularly over the past half century, attempts have once again been made in England and
Wales to review current police arrangements and to recommend reforms that will ‘modernize’ police
services (Police Foundation 2022). While such reviews have much to recommend them it may be that more
fundamental challenges now exist. A growing focus on the problems of police abuse of power and the use
of deadly force, in particular since the killing of George Floyd, have led to protest movements under the
banner of ‘defund the police’. Together with the Black Lives Matter movement, ‘defund the police’
advocates have made demands for much more radical action, arguing that there is now a significant over-
reliance on police authority in various areas of civic life, and that earlier reform initiatives, including those
focused on procedural justice, have failed and potentially distracted from what was required. As a
consequence ‘police abolition’ is now necessarily a matter for serious discussion. Although few go so far as
to recommend the full-scale dismantling of police departments, significant divestment from state policing
is now seriously contemplated, and ‘partial abolition’ is debated not just by activists (Purnell 2021) but by
politicians and academics (Bautista Duran and Simon 2019; Vitale 2017). Given the scale of U.S. police
violence (Zimring 2017) it is perhaps unsurprising that such debates have been much more vocal and
visible in America than has been the case, as yet, in Europe (Fleetwood and Lea 2021). Nevertheless,
demands to ‘defund the police’ have been heard internationally and as reviews closer to home indicate, are
p. 648 ↵ now impossible to ignore. Increasingly it seems it will be necessary to contemplate radical overhauls
of policing systems rather than reforms which modify them but leave them fundamentally the same.

The most comprehensive coverage of policing issues is to be found in the fifth edition of The Politics of the Police
(Bowling, Reiner, and Sheptycki 2019). There are a number of handbooks which provide broad coverage of policing
issues, including: The Sage Handbook of Global Policing (Bradford et al. 2016); The Cambridge Handbook of Policing in
the United States (Rice and Miller 2019); and the Routledge International Handbook of Police Ethnography (Fleming and
Charman 2023). More particular overviews of developments in policing in the UK and Ireland include: Ellison and
Brogden’s Policing in the Age of Austerity (2013); Donnelly and Scott’s Policing Scotland (2010); Donnelly’s The Scottish
Police Officer (2013); Mulcahy’s Policing Northern Ireland (2005); Rae and Masefield’s Policing in Northern Ireland:
Delivering the New Beginning? (2014); and Marsh’s Irish Policing: Culture, Challenges, and Change in An Garda Síochána
(2022).
Page 17 of 27
Online resources

References
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Notes
1
This already broad remit has seen significant expansion in recent years with the police being given more statutory
responsibility for safeguarding children and vulnerable adults, and a de facto expansion of their ‘social service’ roles
related to public expenditure restrictions in other parts of the public sector (eg. demands on the police to respond to
acute mental health incidents in the community) (Police Foundation 2022).
2
Now formalized via The Policing Protocol Order 2011 which states that ‘At all times the Chief Constable, their
constables and staff, remain operationally independent in the service of the communities that they serve.’
3
As established by the Police Act 1964 and the Police and Magistrates’ Court Act 1994, consolidated as the Police Act
1996.
4
The City of London force remains accountable to the Common Council of the City of London (the Aldermen and
Mayor), as well as the Home Secretary.
5
Although significantly the PCC Marc Jones announced in late 2021 that the contract with G4S would not be extended
beyond its original timeframe and it expired in March 2022.
Related Links
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30. Making and managing terrorism and counter-terrorism: The view from criminology

p. 653 30. Making and managing terrorism and counter-terrorism: The

view from criminology
Martin Innes and Michael Levi
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0030
Abstract
This chapter examines how ideas and concepts derived from criminology can inform our understandings of terrorism and
counter-terrorism in insightful and innovative ways. Terrorism is designed as communicative violence that seeks to work by
sending messages intended to influence the views of a wider public. The analysis attends to how terrorism has been
constructed as a social and political problem in the contemporary era; the role attributed to extremism and processes of
radicalization; and the extent to which these influence the framing and conduct of counter-terrorism responses, including
financing terrorism. The particular perspective accents how terrorist campaigns and counter-terrorist responses routinely
develop in interaction with each other.
Keywords: terrorism, counter-terrorism, violence, radicalization, extremism, terror finance
Introduction
Terrorism is a continually evolving and adapting social problem, that reflects and refracts broader and
deeper societal tensions and currents. Most of us tend to focus on terrorism when attacks occur or are
credibly threatened where we live and in other settings we identify with, but there are data available to
help us understand key patterns and trends. The 2022 Global Terrorism Index (IEP 2022), for example,
shows there has been an increase in the number of attacks, but a decline in their lethality and physical
impacts. In 2021, deaths from terrorism fell by 1.2 per cent to 7,142, while attacks rose by 17 per cent,
showing that mass attacks are becoming less successful or are less often attempted. These patterns and
Page 1 of 29
trends are not uniformly distributed: two thirds of countries recorded no attacks or deaths from terrorism
—the most since 2007. But increasing numbers of global cities have experienced attacks, and terrorist
violence is increasingly associated with wider armed conflicts and failing states.
Accompanying these macro-trends, there has also been increasing diversity in the methods and motives of
attack. This is best illuminated by ‘zooming in’ to briefly examine a sequence of five terror attacks that
occurred in quick succession to each other in the UK in 2017. Although this kind of temporal clustering is
unusual, viewed collectively, these events illuminate several key trajectories in the contemporary conduct
of terrorism. Four out of the five attacks were Islamist inspired, but the attack in the vicinity of the London
Finsbury Park mosque was performed by a man with far-right proclivities, exemplifying a general trend of
increasing far-right motivations. Different modes of attack were used, including bombing of the Ariana
Grande concert at Manchester Arena, but also more prosaic modes of attack such as knives (Westminster
Bridge and London Bridge attacks), vehicles (Finsbury Park), and fake suicide explosive vests (London
Bridge). None of them were expensive to carry out.
p. 654 ↵ Such events and the responses to them encapsulate a number of the key themes and issues involved
in understanding the contemporary configuration of terrorism and counter-terrorism, showing how the
attack methodologies of terrorist groups are evolving and adapting in the Global North. Those performing
such acts include highly organized individuals and networks displaying a clear long-term ideological
motivation, as well as more spontaneous and less highly organized lone-actors and small groups (though
retrospective analysis sometimes shows longer term planning and connectivity). Relatedly, some attacks
use sophisticated weapons, but others appropriate ordinary objects, such as kitchen knives and cars, which
are harder to track and prevent without greatly over-predicting risks. Moreover, counter-terrorism
responses to this increasingly diverse array of terrorist threats increasingly blend military and criminal
justice interventions. Most importantly however, these incidents also clearly illuminate how acts of
terrorism and counter-terrorism interweave in what Smelser (2007) views as ‘a rhetorical battle of
symbols’, wherein the violence is important not just for its material consequences, but also for what its
performance signifies.
In this chapter we set out ideas and concepts derived from criminology that provide insights into how and
why terrorist ideologies and acts occur, as well as why responses to these are organized in the ways that
they are. The chapter starts by mapping out the potential domain of criminological knowledge in a space
replete with alternative ‘ways of knowing’, before considering the role played by labels and particular
definitions of the situation. This is followed by a review of how and why people join and support terrorist
campaigns and engage more directly in violence, as well as desist from such activities. We then attend to
processes of social reaction, and the impacts and effects of terrorism, since research on this has developed
significantly. The next section switches focus to engage with what is known about the functions and
organization of counter-terrorism. The concluding section is preceded by a sketched anticipation of some
key emerging threats, that sets up a reflection upon the symbiotic relations that exist between acts of
terrorism and the counter-measures arrayed against them.
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Defining and Knowing Terrorism
As terrorism’s status as a social and political problem has grown in recent years, it has been constructed
through multiple ‘ways of knowing’. It is important to understand where academic discourses and ideas sit
within the plethora of influential ‘problem formulations’ in public circulation. In the years since 2001,
there has been a vast increase in funding directed towards counter-terrorism activity across Europe and
North America. In addition to profits generated for what President Eisenhower called ‘the military
industrial complex’, which now includes private military and cybersecurity companies, this has been
manifestly exploited by a variety of moral entrepreneurs and claims makers who, despite a relatively weak
evidence base, have confidently offered risk mitigation solutions and policy prescriptions. This has also
inflected the social construction of knowledge about terrorism, in that as new risks and threats come to the
fore, displacing earlier concerns, this has a ‘downstream effect’ in terms of promoting and demoting some
theories and perspectives over others. Set against such a backdrop, it is necessary to clarify what the
particular value of a criminological account of terrorism and counter-terrorism is.
The literature on terrorism encompasses journalistic accounts, biographies, and political treatises, as well
as more explicitly research-based contributions. Providing a ‘first cut of history’, several journalists have
p. 655 written richly descriptive accounts of key ↵ geopolitical events and conflicts that have, in many ways,
surpassed in insights more formal academic studies (for example Wright 2006; Burke 2016). At the other
end of the spectrum, there have been a series of explicitly and implicitly politically motivated accounts,
emanating from the offices of government officials, think-tanks, and assorted non-governmental
organizations, where the agenda is to provoke or justify a particular course of action. Layered on top of
these has been a series of (auto-) biographical accounts from individuals in contact with violent extremist
groups (Husain 2007; Nawaz 2012). These often exploit their apparent authenticity to influence policy.
In academia, terrorism has been studied from a multitude of disciplinary vantage points, especially
International Relations, Politics and Psychology, accenting different kinds of epistemological and
disciplinary background knowledge and predilections (Weston and Innes 2011; Paoli and Fijnaut 2022;
Silke 2019). Within this polyphony of voices, criminology is a minor chord (by contrast with, for example,
the study of serial killings not conventionally defined as ‘terrorism’), and it is a relative newcomer.
Nevertheless, a criminologically inflected voice offers something special to how we understand the
dynamics of terrorism and counter-terrorism. This is predicated upon criminology’s disposition to study
the processes of ‘making laws, breaking laws and reacting to the breaking of laws’ (Sutherland and Cressey
1955). As will be demonstrated, these are all critical issues in the study of terrorism and our reactions to it.
A ‘criminology of terrorism and counter-terrorism’ should—we contend—seek to provide a normatively

agnostic position that is led by empirical evidence in its formulation of ‘middle range’ theories. It is
precisely this approach that we seek to model in this chapter, in recognition that this has not often
happened to date. ‘Administrative criminology’ accounts have tended towards ‘abstracted empiricism’ and
have not highlighted enough the ways that state institutions have dictated the boundaries between
categorizations, in terms of how and why some acts are labelled terrorism, but other similar ones are
classified differently. At the other extreme, some studies have been so keen to demonstrate their ‘critical’
credentials and speak truth to power, that they neglect the fact that there is a complex social problem in
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play that instigates relatively indiscriminate violence, harm, and destruction by persons other than the
state, whose target appears to be to terrify the general population and the state, and to inspire others to act
locally and impact globally. It is our intent to navigate a path between these two extremities.
Moreover, criminologists are conceptually especially well-resourced to engage with how criminal justice
agencies have been appropriated to play an increasingly influential role in Western state responses to
terror attacks. Criminology has a tradition of interrogating official classifications of deviant and
transgressive behaviour to show how official definitions shape patterns of response. Finally, there are clear
resonances between terrorists’ vocabularies of motive and what has been learned by criminologists over
the past hundred years about how certain individuals and groups come to acquire their violent
motivations, and act these out.
Knowing Terrorism
The signature attribute of terrorism is the use of communicative violence. Perpetrators of terrorist attacks
are usually described as non-state actors struggling against a more powerful adversary, with the former
invoking extreme violence in an effort to ‘terrorise, polarize and mobilise’ a public audience. Although
terrorist violence is rarely large enough to pose a fundamental (as contrasted with symbolic) existential
p. 656 threat to the ↵ more powerful entity, the latter still need to perform responses that aim to inhibit the
potential for the impacts of terror, group polarization, and mass mobilization to occur. Understood in this
way, many terrorist incidents function as signal crimes—events that demonstrably shift how people,
groups, and institutions, think, feel and act in relation to their security (Innes 2014).
It is evident that the series of terrorist killings from 11 September 2001 onwards in cities across Western
Europe have had profound effects upon the institutional and interactional ordering of social life. This
ranges from the revision and enhanced investment in the counter-terrorist apparatus (Omand 2012), to
the politics of terrorist risk management (Suskind 2008), and patterns of surveillance and social sorting
(Lyon 2006; Gandy 2006; Marx 2016). As part of these recalibrations, the ontologies of a number of
everyday objects have been redefined. Neyland (2008) notes that several hitherto mundane and ordinary
items have been cast as potential terrorist weapons. The most obvious is the list of articles prohibited from
hand luggage on board aeroplanes: liquids, gels and creams can only be carried in small quantities lest they
carry the chemical components of a bomb. Such developments gesture to how, although terrorist violence
and campaigns only rarely accomplish their aims, they nonetheless have wider transformative societal
effects.
Many of those participating in what Black (2004) identified as a form of ‘self help’ against more powerful
opponents refute and resist the idea that what they are doing is ‘terrorism’. Cromer (2001) fruitfully
applied Sykes and Matza’s (1957) ‘techniques of neutralization’ to describe how groups attempt to resist
being defined as terrorists. Depending upon their aims and orientations, those engaging in ideologically
inspired violence deny responsibility; deny injury; deny the victim; condemn the condemners; and appeal
to higher loyalties. Similar techniques appear where nation states implement communicative violence
against their own citizens in pursuit of their own political objectives, causing destruction, fear and panic.
For example, the political assassinations in the UK against the former Russian spies Sergei Skripal
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(attempted) and Alexander Litvinenko (successful), authorized by the Kremlin, were clearly acts designed
to send a political message, and thus arguably fulfil the formal definitional requirements for terrorism.
Authors such as Cohen (2001) have forcefully argued for a comprehensive and coherent definition of
terrorism that encompasses acts sponsored or sanctioned by nation states, as well as lesser entities:
though this would lead us to reject non-state actors as being a necessary component of the definition of
terrorism (see, more generally, Karstedt, 2014). Critics might argue that terrorism serves the interests of
the military industrial complex by generating profits, surveillance and extra powers. The latter
consequences are undeniable, but the deaths and maimings are real, even if Western media and
governments count them unevenly to focus on victims from the Global North, and some Islamic groups
conversely focus on their own injured to inflame co-religionists globally to ‘lone wolf’ or ‘small pack’
attacks. In 2021, Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 48 per cent of total global deaths from terrorism (IEP
2022), though presumably that proportion—if not that number—of deaths would be much lower if the
Global North did not protect itself well against attacks.
Sykes and Matza’s approach was closely aligned with labelling theory in criminology. From this vantage
point, the institutions of law and the processes of criminal justice they embody, create and sustain
particular orders of reality that define certain acts and actors as ‘extremism’ requiring interventions,
whilst other ostensibly similar events are treated differently. Such considerations are directly relevant to
the study of terrorism, reflecting how scholars have wrestled with delineating a politically agnostic
definition of terrorism—one that works independently of and outside the machinations of political
p. 657 ↵ power. Over a third of a century ago, Schmid and Jongman (1988) could list over 100 different
definitions of terrorism, and two decades later there were many more in circulation (Smelser 2007).
‘Meta-distinctions’ seek to group constructs. English (2009) distinguishes ‘analytic’ approaches from
more avowedly practical ones. Crelinsten (2009) groups competing definitions under four broad headings:
(1) ‘Tactical’ definitions that are common in international legal conventions and accent the ‘how’ of
terrorism; (2) ‘Perpetrator’ based approaches that pivot around ‘who’ the individuals and groups involved
are; (3) ‘Motive’ oriented accounts that focus upon ‘why’ terrorist actors do what they do; or (4) a
‘behavioural’ approach that is most concerned with ‘what’ is done.
English (2009) shows terrorist type activities are frequently embedded within the conduct of wars and
other conflicts (Hoffman 2017; Kilcullan 2009), alongside ongoing criminality such as the trafficking of
minerals and diamonds, and other commodities that are illicit (people smuggling/trafficking) or per se
criminal (counterfeits, drugs) (Shelley 2014; Paoli et al. 2022). The way we categorize such acts can
influence whether they are deemed to require a ‘military’ or ‘criminal justice’ response.
Though definitions of terrorism remain contested, there does appear to be something approaching a
consensus that there are at least three necessary conditions for so labelling an act:
Political violence—a key consideration for defining an act as terrorist and thus distinguishing it from
some other forms of violence is that it is conducted in pursuit of a political objective;
Communicative violence—almost all definitions acknowledge that terrorist acts desire to

communicate an intimidatory message beyond the immediate victims.
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Asymmetry of power—terrorist violence tends to arise when a relatively powerless group identifies a
need to mobilize a response to a more powerful adversary. Whilst others contest this, on the grounds
that it makes an unwarranted distinction between the acts of states and citizens (and perhaps fails to
take account of state actor support for rebellions that use terror tactics), an asymmetrical power
dynamic certainly is present.
These issues about how to define terrorism have become more prominent recently because of how the
social problem of terrorism has been evolving and adapting. This is the focus of the next section.
Doing Terrorism
The rapid rise in the study of terrorism reflects the evolving risks and threats for the interests of the Global
North that have been presenting on the world stage. These have been manifest in the initial emergence of
Al-Qaeda as a network of networks (Sageman 2004) and its eclipse by Islamic State (Burke 2016), which in
turn has dissolved after territorial defeat; a resurgence of extreme far-right political violence, reminding
us of the dangers of looking only at the risks from Islamist violence; changes in the preferred attack
methodologies from complex plots against transport infrastructure, towards less sophisticated but no less
brutal violence (Nesser 2014); an increasingly fuzzy boundary (though seldom a complete merger)
between some ‘organized crime’ and terrorist actors, as the latter engage with the networks of the former
to source weaponry and funding (Callimachi 2016; Levi 2022; Paoli et al. 2022); a similar blurring with
p. 658 global ↵ migration, as conflicts around the world trigger large-scale population movements (and large
income flows for people-smuggling groups, some of them affiliated with terror networks); and the
adoption of social media technologies to amplify the impacts of assaults across social space and time, as
well as to facilitate the meeting of minds and bodies.
Thus, terrorism has a simultaneous local and international reach: it is a ‘glocal’ issue (Hobbs 2002).
Militaristic counter-terrorism actions are being undertaken around the world to stop groups expressing
allegiance to ISIS and Al-Qaeda further de-stabilising already fragile states, whilst simultaneously,
domestic policing and criminal justice led responses have seen significant increases in investment and
effort across many nation-states.
The emergence of what Sageman (2004) labelled ‘leaderless jihad’ has meant the ideas, sentiments and
communications these groups propagate serve to inspire other ‘lone actors’, often people with mental
health issues, to autonomously and inexpensively engage in violence (Corner, Gill, and Mason 2015). As in
Nice and in many conflict zones in the Global South, their acts often achieve a capacity for ‘shock and awe’
because of their brutality and apparent unpredictability.
In light of these ongoing shifts, there is an understandable demand for a scaling of risks. Between March
2017 and December 2021, police in the UK claim to have foiled 32 terrorist plots. Of these 18 were related to
Islamist extremism, 12 to extreme right-wing terrorism, and 2 to left-anarchist or ‘single issue’ terrorism.
In the year ending December 2021, there were 186 counter-terrorism related arrests in England and Wales,
with 31 per cent resulting in a criminal charge (Counter Terrorism Policing 2021). Islamic extremists made
up more than two thirds of the 229 terrorists in custody in 2021 and may account for more than 90 per cent
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of MI5’s terrorist watchlist. Global North countries have all begun to take far-right and ‘incel’ extremism
seriously—apparently to the frustration of some UK counter-terrorism personnel—though the reflex
concerns remain with Islamic-related terrorism.
Research shows that there are multiple pathways to radicalization, to which a diverse range of people are
more or less susceptible. This echoes older studies such as Lofland (1966), who conceptualized several
‘involvement sequences’ by which people were indoctrinated into an established cult or religious group.
Recognition of this has been important in de-pathologizing both the people who are radicalized and the
social-psychological processes via which this happens. Both Horgan (2005) and Atran (2010, 2016)
trenchantly argue for the ‘ordinariness’ of most people who engage in, or support terrorist violence. This
is consistent with information about the petty crime records of Belgian and French terrorists. The
acquisition of extremist narratives and grievances is predicated upon well documented techniques of
influence and persuasion.
Sageman (2004) focuses on the role played by social networks in violent extremist radicalization. Likewise,
Atran’s (2010) more qualitative approach enriches our understanding of how social bonds can be
harnessed to recruit and radicalize, and Atran’s (2016) work on the role of social identity and processes of
group identification has been influential. A critical juncture in the acquisition of terrorist motivation is
when ‘I’ becomes ‘we’: an individual subsumes their self-identity into the social identity of a group
espousing violence.
Others however, place markedly more emphasis in explaining radicalization on theology (Lincoln 2006),
Islamic identity politics (Keppel, 2004), and processes of social psychological influence and persuasion
(Horgan 2005). Examining the group Al-Muhajiroun, Wiktorowicz (2006) shows personal crises often
provide a ‘cognitive opening’ in terms of making people more ‘radicalizable’. Developing the concept
p. 659 ↵ of ‘culturing’, Wiktorowicz shows how a blend of theological, social psychological and social devices
are deployed to induce people to commit to the new group, by insulating them from any counter-
influences. This perspective has been adopted in thinking about the role played by online information and
digital technologies. Indeed, an enduring feature of ‘the new terrorism’ is the empathy of Muslims
(including converts) throughout the world towards their co-religionists, and the propensity of some to be
enraged by social media coverage of these perceived injustices and then self-radicalizing.
Richardson (2006: 14) argues that terrorism is grounded in subjective perceptions melding with:
… a lethal cocktail containing a disaffected individual, an enabling community and a legitimizing

ideology … terrorist behaviour can be understood in terms of both long-term political
motivations, which differ across different types of groups, and more immediate short-term
motives, which very different types of terrorists share.
She identifies the presence of ‘a conducive surround’ of active and/or passive public support as a
component of long-term terrorist campaigns. If this explains the inception of a terrorist campaign, then it
is a desire for ‘revenge, renown, and reaction’ that influences individual actors to participate in it. Many
terrorist campaigns involve a division of labour. Only a minority of individuals engage directly in the most
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serious kinds of violence, with greater numbers performing other necessary ‘logistical’ functions such as
financing, recruiting and testing out members, developing and disseminating propaganda, procuring
weapons, and so forth (Nesser 2014). Others may just supply social support (Sluka 1989).
Reflecting this insight, the more compelling and persuasive accounts of radicalization delineate multiple
pathways via which people come to join terrorist groups and networks, and which move them through this
process. To become a terrorist requires more than just the acquisition of motivation. The motivated
terrorist also needs tradecraft to execute a successful attack in order to not arouse the suspicions of others,
avoid detection by the authorities and perform the violence. Small cells in particular require some form of
social interactional competency. These are all elements of the ‘tradecraft’ (Hoffman 2017) that are not
suited to the participation of a wild and errant individual—although such persons can be effective as ‘lone
actors’. Indeed, many terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda may have been quite careful to avoid
recruiting such dysfunctional individuals. Daesh were reputed to be less bothered and indeed, show
converts how to attribute their violence to ‘Islamic State’ (Callimachi 2016), potentially misdirecting us to
an exaggerated view of its tentacles and ‘organization’.
Collins (2008) identifies an important axiom—that contrary to popular expectations, ‘competent’ violence
is difficult to accomplish. Most violence is chaotic and messy, rather than calculating and clinical. This is
particularly so at close-quarters, where a basic ‘confrontational tension’ functions to render violence
difficult. He contends that this is why many terrorist groups adopt ‘confrontation minimising’ tactics. The
use of remote-controlled bombs and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) is one example of this, but more
contentiously, so is suicide bombing. According to Collins, the tactic of suicide bombing enables the
bomber to outwardly maintain the aura of normal appearances until the moment of detonation, thereby
avoiding direct inter-personal confrontation with potential victims. In effect, it keeps them ‘de-
personalized’, cognitively easing the ability to envision their obliteration. (We would add that this
concealment also makes it harder to identify and stop them.)
The process of converting human beings into ‘human bombs’ to combine dying with killing appears to
exert a ‘gravitational pull’ for a number of scholars. Unlike those who commit ‘ordinary’ suicide, 90 per
p. 660 cent of whom are depressed or have diagnosable mental ↵ conditions, suicide attackers do not typically
display such traits. Most bombers are young unmarried men, although not all are—globally around 15 per
cent were female at the time of one study (Pape 2006; see also Brunner 2016), though in the Global South,
there has been a marked increase in the number of women and child suicide bombers. Suicide bombers
tend to be comparatively well educated and from a higher social background within the communities to
which they belong (Gambetta 2005; Pape 2006). In this sense, their actions align well with Durkheim’s
(1952/1897) construct of ‘the altruistic suicide’.
Whilst suicide bombing can be an effective tactic, judged in terms of its capacity to secure public and
political attention, and to elicit fear and fascination, it remains a relatively rare method even today. Other
terrorist methods including kidnap, extortion, assassination, and hi-jacking have been used more than
suicide bombing. In respect of these methods, a frequently overlooked issue is how terrorist groups learn
from each other in terms of ‘what works’, ‘what doesn’t’ and ‘what’s promising’ (to them). There is an
international trade in ‘terrorist tradecraft’. For example, there were contacts between the Basque
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separatist group ETA and Provisional IRA, and the latter were also involved in training FARC groups in
Colombia in the use of firearms and explosives. However, the many conflicting Islamist groups are unlikely
to share much interpersonally, since they have serious cultural and religious conflicts.
There has been a growing interest in patterns of individual and group desistance. Foremost amongst these
has been Cronin’s (2009) cross-national review of how terrorist campaigns end, due to consistent ongoing
pressure upon individuals and their relationships with each other, and a continual risk of implosion
amongst groups, emanating from mistakes, burnout and collapse. Sometimes these stresses are nudged
along by intelligent, carefully targeted pressure from the police or military. Cronin argues that criminal
justice agencies and/or military interventions, especially when they cohere with other trends, can promote
desistance from terrorism, though this is hard to separate out and quantify.
Gary LaFree and colleagues (2009) aimed to test precisely what impacts flow from criminal justice
interventions. Informed by data on six key counter-terrorist interventions conducted in Northern Ireland
between 1969 and 1992, they constructed two alternative hypotheses. The first was a ‘deterrence model’
founded on the belief that assertive policing would deter individuals and groups from future violence. The
second was that such interventions would actually induce a ‘backlash’ and more violence. The analysis
found that only one of the military surges appeared to have deterred violence, whereas three out of the six
interventions appeared to have promoted ‘backlash effects’. All the interventions tested were assertive,
intrusive and coercive. As Wilkinson (2001: 102) contends, since 1969 the conflict in Northern Ireland
exemplified counter-terrorism grounded in ‘the use of military in aid of the civil power’. Whilst distinct
from the full militarization of counter-terrorism seen in other countries, it departs from the view that
criminal justice should always be the default option for liberal democratic polities (English, 2014). The
interventions tested by LaFree and colleagues lacked some of the more ‘soft power’ dimensions that is an
important component of effective counter-terrorism. This leads us to a more detailed analysis of counter-
terrorism responses.
Reacting to Terrorism
Given the fundamental premise of terrorist violence is to induce a sense of profound fear, it is perhaps
surprising that, until fairly recently, the effects and aftermath of attacks were not subject to much
p. 661 systematic empirical study. Certainly, compared with the amount ↵ of analytic attention directed
towards diagnosing the causes of radicalization, and how and why people acquire their violent
motivations, understanding of social reactions to terrorism was relatively neglected. Exceptions were
studies of how journalists and media organizations report such events, and the downstream effects that
the particular ‘frames’ they select have upon their audiences (Altheide 2006; Nacos 2011). Public opinion
surveys tried to capture some of the cognitive, behavioural and emotional impacts of attacks, and there
were some more localized, intensive qualitative investigations.
More recently, a flurry of empirical studies have tracked how public understandings, emotions, and
behaviours evolve and adapt over time, enabled by new data and methods, especially ‘open source’,
publicly available social media data, accompanied by social scientific methods to collect, analyse and
interpret these materials. Social media enable researchers to study public reactions at scale, as well as their
‘streaming’ qualities—how they evolve over time.
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An example is Innes et al.’s (2018) study of social reactions to the terrorist murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in
London in 2013. Having captured the first Twitter post sent by a witness of the attach, the researchers
continuously collected data until the two perpetrators were found guilty of the crime over a year later.
Pivoting around a conceptual framework labelled ‘the ten Rs of social reaction’, the analysis documents
patterns in collective responses to these kinds of atrocities. Developing particular facets of the same
incident, by introducing some theoretical resources derived from Randall Collins’ general sociological
account of predicates of violence, Roberts et al. (2018) provide a detailed account of how far-right
extremists often use terror attacks by their ideological opponents to encourage more violence. Other
studies have also used social media to document how terror attacks stimulate hate crimes (Williams and
Burnap 2016). Innes (2020) shows how reaction patterns can be deliberately manipulated and amplified
and are not just organic: social media accounts operated by the Russian Internet Research Agency were
used to amplify the impacts of the 2017 UK bombings by deploying established disinformation tactics and
techniques.
Synthesizing some of the key findings from studies adopting these data and methods, Innes et al. (2018)
demonstrate evolving challenges for authorities seeking to manage and mitigate the public harms and
impacts of terror attacks. This they dub ‘the minutes to months’ framework. The key phases of this
evolutionary framework can be summarized as follows:
Minutes—The first minutes after an attack are defined by high levels of confusion and uncertainty
about what has transpired. As such, these moments are especially vulnerable to being shaped by
misinformation—that is misleading communications that are not transmitted intentionally to
mislead.
Hours—As time passes misinformation frequently segues into more deliberate disinformation,
propagated by a range of actors. A key challenge for the authorities is influencing what is known by
the public about the incident, and when.
Days—Over the first few days, as well as high levels of media interest in any suspects, there is often
also considerable attention on the progress (or lack of) with the police investigation. It is also
common for material to emerge that the perpetrators have had some past contact with the
authorities, which has to be managed.
Weeks—With greater ‘distance’ from the event, media and public interest wanes, though rituals of
the criminal justice process, such as the arrest or charging of any suspects, can ignite it.
Months—the individual incident is integrated into how members of the public think about and
understand terrorism.
p. 662 ↵ In sum, social reactions to terror attacks constitute an area of study where new data and methods
have combined to support enhanced understandings, e.g. how the digital and analogue aspects of terrorism
are increasingly intertwined, online communications shaping the levels of harm from individual incidents.
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Countering Terrorism
Terrorism studies have paid far more attention to understanding how and why terrorist violence is
performed than to the dynamics of counter-terrorist policy and practice (English 2014). There are several
reasons for this. One is difficulties with securing access to reliable and insightful materials, given security
agency sensitivities about secrecy and protection of ‘tradecraft’. However, Foley’s (2014) comparative
analysis of France and the UK insightfully ponders: ‘why is it that the CT policy and practice responses in
these two countries are so markedly different, given that the profile of risks and threats they face are
broadly similar?’ He traces how before the mid-2000s, the approach in the UK was relatively tolerant of
extremist groups with possible connections to violence, certainly when compared with the more
‘muscular’ French policies and interventions that implemented mass arrests and large-scale initiatives.
This is explicable by ‘deep’ institutional and cultural norms, which frame how the problem of terrorism is
configured and understood, and what kinds of counter-measures are deemed appropriate.
However, these ‘deep structures’ are not immutable, and can shift in the aftermath of high-profile mass
casualty terrorist attacks. As Innes (2014) contends, a series of attacks in Western cities have induced
profound ‘institutional effects’ upon the social organization of counter-terrorism. Since 2001, a
‘legislative reflex’ has come to the fore where, following terrorist atrocities, politicians need to be seen to
be ‘doing something’, frequently in the form of bringing forward new legislation. In the UK, this has
included the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, which allowed for detention without trial (later
overturned by the courts), the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, introducing the ‘control order’ (also
overturned), the Terrorism Act 2006, which extended the detention of suspects without charge from 14 to
28 days, the Terrorism Order 2006, enabling the Treasury to freeze the assets of suspects, the Counter-
Terrorism Act 2008, under which police were permitted to continue questioning suspects after charge, the
Terrorist Asset-Freezing Act 2010, the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, the Terrorism Prevention
and Investigation Measures Act 2011 (as amended 2020) <https://www.legislationline.org/documents/id/
23629>, and the Counter-Terrorism and Sentencing Act 2021 <https://www.legislationline.org/documents/
id/23628>. New laws have become a routinized societal response to terrorist attacks, as they have to other
transnational social ‘bads’, such as anti-money laundering measures to deal with Grand Corruption and
‘organized crime’ (Halliday et al. 2020) and economic sanctions on Russia and Putin’s entourage, seriously
stepped up only after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Accompanying these legislative initiatives, many countries have reconfigured the counter-terrorism
apparatus. Conceptual discussions of counter-terrorism in the academic literature typically distinguish
between ‘intelligence-led’, ‘military’, and ‘criminal justice’ oriented modes (Steven and Gunaratna 2004),
and between ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ postures (Crelinsten 2009). However, the contemporary scene is
marked by the ways that offensive and defensive are being blended into both more proactive and reactive
measures (English 2014).
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p. 663 ↵ Internationally, the mobility of contemporary terrorist groups and actors require far more effective
intelligence-sharing mechanisms between states to respond to the spectrum of risks and threats (Jacobsen
2006), even including multilateral intelligence clearing houses to move data without compromising the
source or agency methods (Ganor 2005; Steven and Gunaratna 2004). However, national intelligence and
police agencies are often reluctant to pool into such ‘fusion centres’.
An even more profound movement may be in the routinized connectivity between ‘high’ and ‘low’ policing
(Brodeur 2010), integrating principles, processes and practices originating in the community policing
tradition into the delivery of local counter-terrorism interventions (Pickering et al. 2008; Innes et al. 2011).
Thacher (2005) described the emergence of joint-terrorism task forces (JTTFs) as an improvized solution
to the problem of getting US local law enforcement agencies to implement proactive and intrusive
counter-terrorism methods, preferring ‘community protection’ strategies grounded in target-hardening
and emergency response. They feared that the kinds of surveillance required would lead minority
communities to question the agencies’ overall legitimacy and crime control mission. Instigating JTTFs was
a way of trying to circumvent such resistance and to join-up the infamously complex policing and
intelligence landscape of North America.
Some commentators, such as Deflem (2010), questioned whether such contemporary configurations are
sustainable, asserting that local domestic policing should stay away from counter-terrorism work, leaving
the latter to specialized central agencies (see also Manning 2010). Taking account of such critiques, it is
worth positing a counterfactual scenario, about what a viable response without community policing style
tactics would look like. In this respect there are important lessons from history. There is compelling
evidence that the intelligence-led ‘hard policing’ style pursued in the 1970s and 1980s in particular,
exacerbated the Northern Irish conflict, increasing rather than reducing levels of social support for
organizations like the Provisional IRA and INLA (Slucka 1989; English 2014).
This is not the only counterfactual possibility for integrating local policing that could be imagined. An
alternative would be more covert technologies to guide and prioritize coercive interventions against
nominated suspects (Lyon 2006; Marx 2016). Surveillance technologies have triggered considerable
critique and consternation, most interestingly from Molotch (2012) who argues that many of the socio-
technological assemblages have made us feel profoundly insecure rather than more secure.
However, these are not mere counterfactuals. Counter-terrorism changes over the past decade and a half
have adopted all three of these approaches (i.e. the co-optation of community policing strategies; the
blending of military and criminal justice responses; and increasingly sophisticated surveillance
technologies). This holistic approach is reflected also in how policy framings have evolved and been
developed.
In 2004, the UK government introduced the cross-governmental CONTEST strategy to provide a

comprehensive and co-ordinated response to international terrorism, organized around four key pillars of
activity: Prepare; Prevent; Protect; and Pursue (H.M. Government 2009, 2016). It is a highly influential
framework that has shaped European policy and also been imported into the UK’s national strategies for
serious and organized crime and cybersecurity. Of the four strands, Protect and Pursue most closely focus
upon the kinds of activity traditionally associated with counter-terrorism. Except for arrests and
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prosecutions (stated to be the preferred option), they tend to be less publicly visible, and are typically led
by the Security Service domestically and the Secret Intelligence Service overseas. In contrast, Prepare and
p. 664 Prevent are more innovative ↵ and public facing. The four strands can be differentiated and defined as
follows (H.M. Government 2016):
Pursue: the investigation and disruption of terrorist attacks
Prevent: work to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism
Protect: improving our protective security to stop a terrorist attack, and
Prepare: working to minimize the impact of an attack and to recover as quickly as possible.
Of all the dimensions of CONTEST, Prevent has been the most public-facing and politically charged: as we
write (during the summer months of 2022), it is awaiting publication of a further review, later published
(Shawcross 2023; Home Office 2023). However, the surveillance and disruption components of Pursue
have also generated controversy.
The many policy commentary and critique studies, and the smaller number of genuinely empirical studies
of CONTEST have stressed how the prevailing posture is precautionary, preventive, and pre-emptive
(Walker and Mckay 2015; Mythen and Baillergeau 2021). Ashworth and Zedner (2014), for instance, cast
this as an inflection of a more general contemporary preventative ‘pre-crime’ policy orientation; while
Heath-Kelly (2013) suggests that the Prevent strategy illustrates the prevalent risk governance discourse.
Innes (2006) notes that some of the tribulations experienced by Prevent stem from a profound uncertainty
about precisely what problem(s) it is trying to solve, which remain in 2023.
The task of preventing ‘violent extremism’ has proven to be the most visible and contentious aspect of
CONTEST. There have been repeated allegations that Prevent institutionalizes a governmental programme
to ‘spy’ upon communities (Kundani 2009), casting Muslims as a de facto ‘suspect community’ (Pantazis
and Pemberton 2009). Innes et al. (2011) reported that despite its ‘toxic brand’ in some quarters, Muslim
community attitudes and perceptions were more subtle: people from Muslim faith backgrounds exhibit
higher levels of trust and confidence in the police than did the general population. Young Muslim men had
marginally more negative perceptions and attitudes than other young men, but nearly 4 out of 10 of them
expressed positive views of policing. It is uncertain that this is still the case, with some evidence of
increasing scepticism and disengagement from Prevent processes and structures by Muslim groups and
organizations (O’Toole et al. 2016; though see Kaleem 2021, for a more refined view).
Prevent has been subject to systemic revisions. In 2008, reform was triggered because CONTEST had not
shifted enough to prevention from ‘Pursue’. The change of government led to revisions in 2011 to
instantiate a much clearer distinction between counter-terrorism, and integration and cohesion work. In
2015, the Conservative administration explicitly widened Prevent’s focus, from violent extremism to all
forms of extremism—though this was never adequately defined; and these tensions remain in subsequent
reviews to the present.
Given the levels of political contestation that swirl around contemporary counter-terrorism policy frames,
it is important that efforts to provide independent and rigorous assessments of these allow researchers to
step outside the categories that policy-makers and practitioners use and to devise a conceptually agnostic
Page 13 of 29
analytic apparatus. However, studying attempts to prevent and inhibit violent and non-violent extremism
‘in depth’ and ‘at scale’ is extremely difficult, and there are relatively few robust empirical studies upon
which to develop such a framework.
p. 665 ↵ One possible alternative is to derive the conceptual base for such a framework from the literature on
general crime prevention. Ekblom and Hirschfield’s (2014) meta-synthesis of key tested and validated
crime prevention mechanisms, which distils these down into eleven ‘principles of intervention’, can help,
1
even though only some work with CT. We can distinguish interventions designed to:
Defend and Discover—these are measures designed to identify the prevalence and distribution of
risks and threats, and then protect specific people, places, events and objects that have an escalated
risk of being targeted, often for symbolic value to the perpetrators.
Deter and Divert—they cover a range of activities to steer individuals deemed vulnerable to
radicalization.
Disrupt and Degrade—for those who cannot be deterred or diverted, this seeks to interfere with their
capacity and capability to act. Disruptions tend to be more immediate and have a shorter time
horizon, whereas ‘degrading’ a group or network adopts a slightly longer-term perspective.
Counter-terrorism efforts to degrade the operational capacity of violent extremist groups and
networks increasingly encompass a range of offline and online activities. This includes economic
measures, discussed later, but also legal proscription.
Detect and Detain—the most targeted, most intensive forms of domestic counter-terrorism
interventions involve the application of criminal sanctions, or attempts to impose these. These focus
upon securing ‘detections’ for specific offences and the physical detention of those committing these
offences.
Figure 30.1 connects these modes to convey how they collectively constitute an over-arching strategic
response to terrorism. Relative to each other, they are increasingly targeted towards fewer and fewer
people, but with the intensity of the intrusion and focus being progressively sharpened.
Page 14 of 29
Figure 30.1 High-level schematic of the counter-terrorism process
p. 666 ↵ Limitations on space prohibit a full and detailed treatment of all these components. Instead, we will
focus upon the use of financial interventions to degrade terrorist groups and networks; disruption; and
detection and detaining suspects, to illuminate how empirical CT research is generating new insights into
the ways terrorist risks and threats are being managed.
Degrading financial capability

Interdictions directed towards ‘threat finance’ (Levi 2010) involve trying to cut off licit as well as illicit
sources of finance by threatening criminal and regulatory penalties plus private non-state civil lawsuits
against financial intermediaries (e.g. banks, lawyers), as well as both state and private legal actions against
those individuals, organizations (including charities), and governments who wish to give money or
facilities directly to terrorists. Anti-money laundering regulations were first operationalized in 1986 as
part of the ‘War on Drugs’. In the aftermath of 9/11, governments adapted these instruments to respond to
‘Islamist terrorism’ and ‘rogue States’ (Biersteker et al. 2016), and then in the current decade, to freeze
existing and incoming funds of domestic dissidents in places as disparate as Canada (anti-vaccination
truckers blockading city centres), Hong Kong (protesters against PRC hegemony diminishing the rights of
locals), and Russia (attacking pro-transparency and anti-corruption media and politicians). There is no
space here to discussion broader economic sanctions that were given impetus after the Russian invasion of
Ukraine in 2022.
Page 15 of 29
There are strong advocates for cutting off the financial lifeblood to degrade the efficacy of terrorist
operations (Gurule 2015; Zarate 2013) and equally passionate (but far fewer) opponents of the social costs
(intended and unintended) of such measures, given the alleged ‘problem inflation’ induced (Hayes 2012;
Mueller and Stewart 2011, 2021; Walker 2014; Wesseling 2014). For example, Daesh/IS’s income was
successfully reduced before being driven out of territory it controlled (leading to claims of victory for
counter-terrorist finance); but a more subtle analysis would suggest that this financial impact was
achieved largely by military attacks on trucks travelling to and from the oil well-heads—a visible area of
vulnerability in which financial system controls had a more modest role.
There is also ambiguity over what the category of ‘terrorist finance’ includes. Operationally, little money is
required to mount a successful terrorist operation: ‘9/11’ cost less than $500,000 to organize; the London
and Madrid bombings less than £10,000; and these are among the more expensive compared with hiring a
truck to kill Nice pedestrians, or slitting the throat of a Catholic priest in rural France. As one Norwegian
study of 40 terrorist attacks (Oftedal 2015: 3) summarized, European terrorists’ financial activities are
remarkably ordinary. Jihadis who have plotted attacks in Western Europe most commonly relied on
funding from the cell members’ own salaries and savings. The vast majority of the cells studied were
entirely self-financed, with only a quarter receiving economic support from international terrorist
organizations such as al-Qaida. Moreover, three quarters of the plots were estimated to have cost under
$10,000. To degrade this sort of funding would be almost impossible unless key suspects or nodes were
already under surveillance, in which case the legislation and increasing public-private cooperation gives
an opportunity for freezing funds. On the other hand, if the counterfactual is how much terrorism would be
financed absent such controls and financial monitoring, it seems plausible that there would be more and
more dramatic terrorist attacks.
p. 667 ↵ Though the pattern of financial support varies—and Daesh was an outlier in its financial capacities
arising from control over large swathes of territory and the ability to extort from business—those
interested in promoting violent extremism can obtain funds via multiple channels:
Licit sources (including ‘rogue states’ as well as wealthy sympathizers, or smaller donations
gathered through registered or informal charities)
Contraband (like smuggled alcohol, fuel, tobacco)
Illicit ‘market offences’ (e.g. drugs, extortion/tribute for permitting smuggling, export of prohibited
goods like oil from sanctioned territories)
Acquisitive property crimes (fraud, robbery, and theft).
The latter three categories are covered by criminal law and proceeds of crime controls. For the most part,
terrorists prefer to source their income from licit-sources, bringing less risk of victim/law enforcement
action against them before they have achieved their objectives. Soudijn (2019) found that it is highly
exceptional for Dutch Jihadi Travellers to be financially independent. Only five percent had sufficient
income from work or employment without making any claims on the government for financial assistance
and were free of mounting debts before they left to fight. Some money is moved to terrorist causes via
Page 16 of 29
charities (where the licensing regime in the UK is stronger than elsewhere in the world) and via Money
Service Businesses (like Western Union and MoneyGram) and by informal value transfers (Passas 2003,
2006).
A key policy movement in operationalizing these financial control instruments has been the
‘responsibilization’ of the banks. They have been required to try to spot funds destined to aid terrorism
and weapons of mass destruction. The expectation of the authorities is that the prospect of being
identified: (a) puts potential donors on notice that they may lose their liberty and their assets for assisting
terrorism; (b) deters them from participation; or (c) leads to their apprehension and prosecution pour
décourager les autres. One unintended side effect of such policies has been that banks have become risk
averse. They have closed the accounts of many Money Service Businesses and smaller banks in developing
countries, with detrimental effects to business enterprises and remittance flows there, risking the
intensification of support for terrorism locally (Artingstall et al. 2016; CGD 2015; El Taraboulsi-McCarthy
2022).
One specific intervention designed to degrade the operating capacity of terrorist organizations is to freeze
their assets. The United States can impose legal sanctions on ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorists’ and
‘Foreign Terrorist Organizations’ (FTOs). 78 terrorist organizations are currently (2022) proscribed under
the Terrorism Act 2000 in the UK, plus 14 Northern Ireland organizations under previous legislation. (See
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/proscribed-terror-groups-or-organisations--2/
proscribed-terrorist-groups-or-organisations-accessible-version <https://www.gov.uk/government/
publications/proscribed-terror-groups-or-organisations--2/proscribed-terrorist-groups-or-organisations-
accessible-version>.) The United States can impose legal sanctions on ‘Specially Designated Global
Terrorists’ and ‘Foreign Terrorist Organisations’ (FTOs). As of 1 June 2015, 59 organizations and under
1,000 individuals were so designated; by end 2020, this had risen to 1,793. In 2022, OFAC’s Specially
Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List <https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-
sanctions/specially-designated-nationals-and-blocked-persons-list-sdn-human> (‘SDN List’) had
approximately 6,300 names connected with sanctions targets, though this includes those sanctioned for
narcotics as well as terrorism (see https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-sanctions/
sanctions-programs-and-country-information <https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/financial-
sanctions/sanctions-programs-and-country-information>). By end 2020, the US Treasury blocked
$63,442,443 in assets relating to designated FTOs, more than a third of which related to Hizballah (three
p. 668 times the figure in 2015); $140 m related to Iran, ↵ Syria, and North Korea (as ‘State sponsors of
terrorism’) (US Treasury 2021). These sums look quite trivial compared with the amounts allegedly
accruing to terrorist groups, especially (at that time) to Daesh (FATF 2015a), much of which is generated
locally and does not require international transfer.
Certainly, there is a need for closer liaison between countries, and public and private sectors if the system
is to work more efficiently. Absent terror finance controls, it seems likely that larger scale terrorism would
be easier, but assessing the counter-factual is challenging. In practice then, controlling ‘threat finance’ is
a modest element in the risk policing and prevention of terrorism, rather than being its core. It is perhaps
unsurprising therefore, that terrorist finance cases are not clogging up the courts or prisons since,
excluding Northern Irish cases, Law Enforcement Agencies across the UK pursue the most serious available
terrorism-related offence. This often results in TF being pursued in the form of a more serious charge (e.g.
Page 17 of 29
preparation of a terrorist act (TACT, s.5) which carries a greater sentence) instead of or alongside a terror
finance (TF)-specific charge (TACT, ss.15–18). From 2012–2017, of the 68 persons convicted of
preparation of a terrorist act (TACT, s.5), one in five were also convicted of a specific TF offence (TACT, ss.
15–18). The UK also pursues standalone TF charges when they consider they need to. Between April 2012
and March 2017, the UK prosecuted 25 persons under the TF-specific offences of the Terrorist Act 2000
(TACT, ss.15–18) resulting in 18 convictions (a 72 per cent conviction rate) (FATF, 2018: Ch.4). However,
these (and asset freezing) are not the only yields. After the event, the pursuit of financial records enables
linkages to be made; and controls may have a chilling effect on donations by the wealthy, whose funds may
be used to support terrorist group activities. But this shows the constraints that apply to the capacities and
capabilities of government, police, private sector, and civil society actions to impact upon terrorist
activities. Terrorist capability may have been degraded somewhat by public and private sector efforts
around the globe. But ‘the threat analysis’ may mislead us into an exclusive focus on the bigger
organizational entities and into missing right-wing, non-Islamist terror threats (though see FATF 2021
for a review of the latter). Determining what the levels of terrorism would have been without the controls
is extremely contentious, but it is plausible that in the absence of financial sanctions, Iran would not have
reduced its nuclear capabilities and that the Irish peace settlement would have happened later.
Disruptions
Disruptions can be divided into two principal types (Innes and Sheptycki 2004). Criminal disruptions
involve prosecuting suspects for offences other than those that they were originally being investigated for.
The logic is that by engaging the criminal justice process against them, it will interfere with their ability to
operate. This is distinct from ‘extra-legal’ disruption, where the intent is to impact upon illegal or
troublesome activities without recourse to criminal law.
In their study of Prevent policing in the UK, Innes et al. (2011) documented that disruption has been playing
an increasingly significant role in the local delivery of counter-terrorism. Confronted by increasing
numbers of ‘subjects of interest’, disrupting their activities provides a way of managing the potential risk
they pose, where there are insufficient police or intelligence resources to mount full criminal
investigations against all individuals who might warrant this. Innes et al.’s study provides several case
studies of how disruption works in practice, including the following:
Another Mosque in (xxxx) rang up one of my sergeants and said we’ve got three guys coming
p. 669 here, and they were doing the proper radicalization thing. They were trying to draw ↵ kids in,
they were trying to have little meetings, they were being quite radical. We’d appreciate your
support if you could come and help us, and speak to these three individuals because we don’t want
them here but we’re a little bit concerned. So [Name]’s gone down, confronted the three
individuals. The Mosque don’t want you here, what are you about? Do you want to talk to me
about it? They didn’t. They went. We know where they went. (Innes et al. 2011: 28)
The concept of disruption has been featuring increasingly prominently in discussions of counter-
terrorism (and organized crime), as the ‘demand’ for counter-terrorism interventions outstrips the
available capacity to ‘supply’ them. Disrupting plots and conspiracies, rather than prosecuting, does
Page 18 of 29
something about troublesome situations which are worrying but perhaps not an immediate priority. But
the recourse to a language of disruption signals something else as well. That is, a recognition of the
limitations of what can be achieved through criminal justice interventions oriented towards opponents
who are profoundly and deeply inspired by ideological motivations rather than by ‘rational choice’ as
commonly understood.
Detect and detain

There is a near absence of independent primary research on the processes and systems of police counter-
terrorism investigations (reflecting a more general lack of research evidence on major crime investigations
more generally). The paucity of research reflects practitioner concerns that enabling research would
decrease their efficacy by providing insights into policing methodologies that can be exploited by terrorist
groups. Trial and media transcripts provide snatched glimpses of this facet of counter-terrorism policing
from which insightful inferences can be drawn. Considerable emphasis is placed upon the use of covert
methods, including intercepts and human intelligence sources, with much information initially being
developed by the Security Service before being passed over to the police to perform the investigative
function and construct a case for prosecution. Significant effort is invested in protecting these sources via
‘parallel sourcing’ of information wherever possible, to avoid them having to be disclosed to the defence
and wider public.
Fundamentally, the ‘pursue’ strand of investigative activity is part of a risk management system. Decisions
and judgements are taken by actors working within the counter-terrorism apparatus about which suspects
and cases to take forward to try to secure a conviction, versus which should be tackled by other
interventions. Serious questions can be asked about the performance of this risk-based diagnostic
approach: nearly all suspects in attacks in Western countries over the past decade and a half have
retrospectively been found to have been ‘known’ to the police or intelligence services. As Nesser (2014)
documents at the European level, this includes individuals who have been convicted and imprisoned for
activities associated with terrorism, who have subsequently engaged in more serious violence.
A review of proactive policing of terrorism by Hasisi et al. (2020) concludes that it is important to focus on
high-risk persons and places and take a balanced approach that includes both carrots and sticks, providing
opportunities for arrest as well as rehabilitation. Proactive strategies must strive to incorporate elements
of procedural justice in order to build community cooperation and legitimacy and avoid the potential to
negatively affect hard-earned relationships.
Of the 35 per cent of people arrested and prosecuted by the police under counter-terrorism legislation and
p. 670 convicted by the courts in the UK, several sources outline ↵ important information about the
management of these individuals (Hall 2022; Home Office 2022; Dean 2014). There remain difficult and
complex decisions about how to manage such people. For example, should they be dispersed throughout
the prison system, thereby limiting the contact between already radicalized individuals, but risking their
influence upon other prisoners unless placed in solitary confinement for years? Alternatively, should they
be located in a single specialist unit, to limit their contacts with ‘ordinary’ prisoners, but acknowledging
that this will make it harder to ‘de-radicalize’ any of those so categorized because they are in constant
Page 19 of 29
contact with like-minded people? Looking across Europe, it is intriguing to see variations in national
responses. The UK has until very recently tended to the former approach, whilst the French have adopted
the latter. Williams and Liebling (2022) illuminate how different prison regimes seek to manage
radicalization risks and how nuanced that process is.
That such differences exist illustrates not just cultural differences, but disagreement about the current
state-of-the-art in respect of countering terrorism. It would be wrong to assert that there is a clear-cut
solution, or established suites of interventions that we can turn to or can be recommended. There is no
correlation between the confidence of ‘expert’ consultants and NGOs and the evidence for effectiveness:
the state of our knowledge is simply not that advanced. Accordingly, our aims and aspirations need to be
more modest. In a situation where the risks of mass-casualty terrorist attacks look like they will be part of
the social organization of the political order for the foreseeable future, we can understand some of the
causes and consequences that flow from these forms of violence, whilst recognizing that this does not
yield total attack prevention capacities.
Forward Guidance
Whilst it may not be feasible to prevent all terrorist violence, that does not mean we cannot develop some
strategic foresight to anticipate likely future patterns and trends. A recurring theme of this chapter has
been how terrorism is a problem that shape-shifts and adapts. Such innovations refract social tensions and
frictions at a particular moment in time, layered over attempts to outwit strategic and tactical counter-
measures put in place by the authorities. Framing the issues in this way has the potential to assist in
predicting and pre-empting some emerging risks and threats that are going to shape the field for the
coming few years.
Most obviously, there is the ongoing increase in far-right violent extremism. For an extended period after
the attacks of 9/11 in 2001, policy attention in the West fixated upon Islamist-inspired terrorism. This
shaped the principal concerns of terrorism studies. More recently however, these has been increasing
awareness of the challenges posed by far-right groups internationally. The validity of such concerns was
brought into sharp relief by the attack on the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. on 6 January 2021 by a
coalition of protestors, including hard right groups such as ‘the Proud Boys’ and ‘Oathkeepers’.
However, the configuration of far-right extremism itself has been evolving. Especially intriguing has been
how, in the aftermath of the global health pandemic, there have been increasing interactions between
adherents of far-right ideologies, with the ideas, discourses and members of groups who believe in
conspiracy theories. Many global cities have experienced violent protest events pivoting around anti-
vaccine, anti-lockdown and anti-mask wearing sentiments; and multiple European countries have seen
p. 671 arson ↵ attacks on their 5G mobile phone mast infrastructures. Medics and public health
communication specialists have reported being subject to violence by individuals and groups claiming
current health surveillance and protection measures are part of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy. The long-term
implications of this blurring between far-right and conspiracy communities are hard to predict, but it is
clearly challenging to the current counter-terrorism apparatus.
Page 20 of 29
A similar level of uncertainty about effects pertains to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. The scale
of the devastation and outrage induced by the Kremlin’s military action will cast a long shadow over the
security situation in Europe over the next decade, and possibly longer. It will not reduce the ideological
radicalization of many—not just young—people, who may be minded to perform violence in pursuit of
political objectives. This would be consistent with the aforementioned trend of terrorist movements and
attacks increasingly being associated with fragile states and armed conflicts.
Conclusions: Interacting Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism
Terrorism is a particular and, in many ways, peculiar kind of violence. As Donald Black (2004) infamously
summarized, it often functions as ‘social control from below’, with a less powerful group engaging a more
powerful one over some politically inflected grievance. The violence invoked is designed to send a message
that will travel beyond the actual physical harm, to impact upon the perceptions of a wider public audience.
This is why the attacks are often so profoundly violent, either in terms of the scale of destruction caused,
or focused intensity. Translated into the vernacular of social science, terrorist violence is as much
‘expressive’ as it is ‘instrumental’.
Until relatively recently, research on terrorist violence was dominated by ideas and perspectives
emanating from the disciplines of International Relations, Political Science and Psychology. Increasing
numbers of criminologists have sought to engage with these issues. Whilst it would be misleading to imply
that there is a coherent ‘criminological voice’ in terms of understanding terrorism, this ‘disciplinary
insurgency’ has disrupted the field of terrorism studies. These developments reflect criminology’s long
tradition of studying different forms of violence, situated across an array of settings. There is also a
considerable track record of studying how individuals join, participate in and disengage from groups
engaging in criminal and anti-social activities. Furthermore, much of the criminological canon has been
concerned with mapping social reactions to crime. And there is a growing consensus within the academic
community, if not the political one, that the most effective and sustainable responses to terrorism occur
when it is treated as a crime, through criminal justice mechanisms which offer greater legitimacy.
A key thrust for this chapter has been to assert that rather than seeing acts of terrorism and counter-
terrorism as discrete, it is more insightful to connect them and subject them to analysis that positions
them as interacting and recursively adapting events and actions. Terrorists and those organized to
interdict and prevent their acts are continually seeking to innovate in ways that give them a temporary
advantage over their adversaries. There is a sequence of point and counter-point, as one side seeks to do
something that their opponent was not expecting.
Attending to these interactional dynamics where terrorist and counter-terrorist strategies and tactics
p. 672 mutually adapt, provides a greater sense of the complexities involved in ↵ analysing the causes and
consequences of terrorist incidents and campaigns. There is certainly evidence to suggest that when
counter-terrorist responses are publicly perceived as overly aggressive and over-reactions, they amplify
social support for their adversaries (English 2014; Sluka 1989). The more effective responses are more
discriminating in using targeted criminal justice interventions against suspects, as opposed to collective
interventions that target whole groups of people indiscriminately (English 2014).
Page 21 of 29
Reviewing the literature on counter-terrorism, a key observation is its relative neglect compared to the
rapid growth in studies seeking to explain terrorism itself. Second, more practically, much of it is
predicated upon anticipatory logics of prediction, pre-emption and prevention. Given the strong tradition
in criminological scholarship of studying criminal justice agencies and the work of social control, this is an
area where a concerted effort might be especially productive and insightful in terms of contributing to
knowledge.
An additionally fecund area of engagement might be in understanding more precisely the connections
between ‘crimes’ and ‘terrorism’. A number of commentators have posited that terrorism should be
treated as ontologically similar to particular types of crime—particularly organized crime. Based upon our
reading of the extant literature, such an approach seems to be both conceptually and empirically
problematic. Some species of terrorism are quite closely aligned with the social organization of organized
crime, but others are not. On occasion, (e.g. post the Irish Peace Agreement), terrorism has transitioned
into organized crime, and vice versa. There are forms of terrorism effectively conducted by individual
actors, devoid of any material support from others; whereas other types of terrorism are nurtured and
supported by a vast array of illicit activities; and others still that are undergirded by entirely legal
behaviours. Some individuals who support or engage in terrorist violence transition from criminal career
pathways into violent extremism, but others do not.
Finally, criminology overall has shown a capacity to blend an engagement with real world problems with
an independent and slightly sceptical viewpoint on the more assertive claims emanating from state
agencies tasked to respond to them. In an intellectual and policy moment where the perceived risks of
terrorism are being presented as highly accentuated, the value of this should not be under-estimated.
Clear-sighted, independent analysis is required if we are to understand how and why such risks and
threats emerge, and what the reactions and responses to them should be and should not be.

The literature on terrorism and counter-terrorism, including both academic and informed comment, has been
proliferating at a considerable rate in recent years. There are now a number of texts giving a general overview of the
field. The best of these are Richardson (2006), Wilkinson (2001), Hoffman (2017), and Silke’s (2019) edited volume.
Nesser (2014) provides a useful documentary record of the plots and attacks that have occurred in Europe over the
past decade. Whilst, Schmid (2018) and Paoli et al. (2022) offer good summaries of how the terrorism/organized crime
relationship has evolved over time and place. The special issue of the International Review of the Red Cross (2022)
gives a fresh set of expert NGO perspectives. For those coming to the subject of terrorism from a criminological
background the collection of articles in the British Journal of Criminology July, 2010 are interesting. For an acute
review of what terrorism has done to the Rule of Law and the trial process in the US, see Abel (2020).
Page 22 of 29
Online resources

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Notes
1
The eleven are: defeat; disable; deter; direct/deflect; deter known and unknown offenders; discourage; demotivate;
deceive; disconcert; detect; detain.
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31. Understanding penal decision-making: Courts, sentencing, and parole

p. 676 31. Understanding penal decision-making: Courts, sentencing, and

parole
Nicola Padfield and Cyrus Tata
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0031
Abstract
This chapter expounds on the understanding of penal decision-making under the critical perspective that understands the
interplay between courts, sentencing, and parole. It examines key issues in the daily realities of the work of sentencing and
parole and their implications for research and policy. Conventional wisdom and popular assumptions about criminal justice
have been led by a preoccupation with the most serious, glamorous cases. The chapter highlights the significance of the
presumption of innocence, citing that cases are judged as unique and criminal justice agencies work autonomously in penal
decision-making. It considers several strategies to reduce the use of imprisonment by promoting community alternatives
Keywords: penal decision-making, courts, sentencing, parole, research, policy, criminal justice, innocence, community
alternatives, imprisonment
Introduction: Aims, Purpose, and Ambit
This chapter examines the knowledge gained from research over the last sixty or more years into
sentencing and parole decision-making. Our focus is not on the highest profile nor gravest offences, nor
the anatomy of institutions and procedures. Instead, we examine key issues in the daily realities of the
work of sentencing and parole, and their implications for research and policy. The central concept of the
chapter is that decision-making is a ‘process’ rather than a momentary formal act. We begin the chapter
with some core definitions, and an overview of how cases flow through the criminal justice system, as
context. This is followed by an explanation of the six essential features of ‘process’. We then examine how
the findings from research challenge five assumptions, prevalent in both professional and popular
discourse, about penal decision-making. These assumptions that we challenge are: that the presumption
of innocence is paramount; cases are judged as unique; criminal justice agencies work autonomously in
Page 1 of 28
penal decision-making; strategies to reduce the use of imprisonment should rely on promoting
alternatives to imprisonment; and that sentencing is a one-off event. Because there is so much still to
discover, we conclude the chapter by offering an agenda for future researchers to pursue.
What is Sentencing, Parole, and Penal Decision-Making?
Core definitions
By ‘sentencing’ we do not mean only the judicial decision as to how to allocate punishment in individual
cases. Decisions on punishment also occur throughout the implementation of a sentence. For example,
where a prison sentence has been passed by a court, decisions are then made as to how that sentence
should be implemented, where it is served, and when and under what conditions a person is released. To
p. 677 cover a range of procedures given different names in different countries and at different times ↵ (e.g.
parole, licence, executive release etc.), we refer to the conditional release of a person from prison to serve
the rest of their sentence outside of prison simply as parole.
While the focus of our chapter is sentencing and parole, it is important to acknowledge that neither can be
isolated from decisions at other points in the criminal justice process. As we shall see, the decisions of
police, prosecuting, and defence lawyers, probation staff, etc. all set the agenda for the official moments of
sentencing and parole decision-making. Moreover, quasi-penal decision-making takes place in other
settings, which are largely beyond the scope of this chapter. For example, police and prosecutors in many
jurisdictions are empowered to impose, what are often officially described as, administrative measures.
Significantly, an increasing number of people are subject to such measures, which are, in many respects in
reality, penal sanctions (e.g. Padfield, Morgan, and Reiner 2012). For example, people may be offered a fine
or some other ‘community resolution’ instead of being prosecuted in court. Although such settlements are
not usually formally classified as ‘convictions’, they may be experienced as punitive, and they have many
implications for the future—appearing on criminal record checks, for example, or involving some form of
on-going registration with the police. This is one area in urgent need of empirical research.
Penal decisions also take place within prison and probation services. In most jurisdictions, prison
authorities (not courts) decide on the categorization and allocation of prisoners to different prisons. Prison
regimes can be more or less punitive in their effects (e.g. Dingwall and Harding 2002; Crewe and Liebling
2023) and have a significant impact on the likelihood (or otherwise) of parole. Likewise, the ways in which
community and financial sentences are implemented vary, affecting the intensity of the penal experience
(Robinson and McNeill 2023). Probation officers play a vital role in bringing people back to prison, through
‘breach’ proceedings for community orders, or recall proceedings for those released from prison. Thus the
fluidity of penal decision-making, as well as its definitional complexity, must be borne in mind
throughout this chapter.
Case flow
To contextualize what follows, here we offer a short and simplified introduction to the basic shape of
criminal justice institutions and how cases flow through the system.
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In most jurisdictions, crimes are investigated by police forces, and then prosecuted by lawyers who are
state-employed but independent prosecutors (the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in England and Wales,
the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) in Scotland, for example). The CPS in England and
Wales often appoints barristers external to the CPS to present cases in court, leaving the state-employed
prosecutors in the CPS to prepare future cases. This police and prosecution work sets the agenda for
sentencing and parole decisions. Generally, police and prosecutors make the decision as to whether or not
to charge a person (i.e. make a formal allegation) with a crime. They may decide to drop the case altogether
—for example on grounds that there simply is not the evidence, or that it is not in ‘the public interest’ to
proceed against a person for that behaviour. Alternatively, and as mentioned earlier, they may decide to
proceed against a person by ‘offering’ the person the option of paying a sum of money (e.g. Fixed Penalty
Notices; Prosecutor Fines, etc.) or some other penalty (e.g. community work) in return for not being
prosecuted through court.
Where prosecutors decide to proceed against someone through court proceedings, they also have choice
(discretion) to decide with which crime to charge the suspect. Additionally, they must decide at which level
of court to bring the case: for instance, in England and Wales in the (lower) Magistrates Court (where well
p. 678 over 90% of court ↵ cases are prosecuted) or at Crown Court level (where more grave allegations are
tried). Overwhelmingly, cases are prosecuted without a jury (in ‘summary’ cases heard in the Magistrates
Courts, or in Scotland in the JP Courts or summary-level Sheriff Courts).
The decision by prosecutors as to the level of court proceedings has a huge bearing on possible sentence.
For example, broadly speaking in Scotland if you are prosecuted at summary (non-jury-triable level) in
the Sheriff Courts (where more than three quarters of cases are heard), the maximum sentence which can
1
be passed is 12 months’ imprisonment. If, however, you are prosecuted in ‘solemn’ (or indictment) jury-
triable proceedings in the Sheriff Court and you are convicted, the maximum sentence is five years’
imprisonment. Meanwhile, the gravest allegations are heard in Scotland’s High Court where, often,
sentencing powers are unlimited.
In terms of parole, a prisoner may be released ‘early’ or ‘late’ in their sentence: the rules in many countries
are complex. For example, in the early days of the Parole Board of England and Wales, in the late 1960s and
1970s, many people were released ‘early’, after they had served only one third of the sentence given by the
court. Nowadays many long-term prisoners are released ‘late’, many years after the minimum term
prescribed by the court (Padfield 2020).
Studying Penal Decision-Making as a Process
The concept of ‘process’ is our starting point for understanding the realities of penal decision-making. It
is one which has, perhaps more than any other, been emphasized by empirical research. By grasping its
meaning, the significance of the rest of the chapter will be easier to digest. Here we outline six essential
characteristics of ‘process’—each of which, as we will show later in the chapter, challenge certain often
taken-for-granted official and popular assumptions about sentencing and parole.
Page 3 of 28
Focus on the reality of decision-making

Criminal ‘process’ is not the same as formal criminal ‘procedure’. Formal procedures, based on rules, are
of course important, but our focus here is the operation of procedures in action. Moreover, official or
formal procedures typically contain ‘gaps’. Bottomley (1973) stated that ‘the penal process in any country
can best be understood not simply by looking at its formal structure and legal basis, but by closely
examining the various pressures and constraints which influence the actual operation (italics in original) of
the process’ (pxiii). In other words, when studying decision-making we should pay at least as much
attention to the informal pressures and constraints which influence the actual operation of the process as
to the formal procedures themselves. Understandably perhaps, much scholarship and attention is focused
on ‘higher end’ cases where crucial normative principles of law are at stake. Although valuable, it is a
different enterprise from studying the everyday reality of decision-making in less glamorous (but
nonetheless important) cases. Debating procedural standards and studying everyday process are different
(albeit complementary) tasks.
p. 679 Focus on the inter-connection between formally separate decision moments

Although the sentencing decision is a formal moment of pronouncement, it is a consequence of an agenda
which has been set earlier in criminal proceedings, largely by police and prosecutors, through charging
decisions, plea bargains, etc. (McConville et al. 1991; Marsh and McConville 2014). Key decisions include
whether or not to record an incident as a crime and whether to offer a non-criminal sanction. The way the
police report the case to the prosecution, the way in which it is framed (e.g. which case facts are presented
and reported) begins the process of agenda-setting for sentencing. As noted above, prosecutors then
decide whether or not to proceed. Should they drop the case on grounds of ‘the public interest’ or
insufficiency of evidence? If they proceed by prosecuting the case at court, they must select which legal
charge/s apply. They decide which ‘facts’ about the case should be included and which should not. Then, as
we will explain, the prosecution and defence may decide whether or not it is possible to reach an
agreement about which charges are accepted and which should be struck out or amended. In all these
decisions, the judicial sentencer has almost no say, yet they all determine the agenda for the official
pronouncement of sentencing.
Recognize that cases are constructed by and transformed through the criminal
justice process
In a range of different contexts, research has observed the importance of agenda setting, cues,
expectations and relationships between formally separate decision moments (e.g. Shapland 1981; Tata
2020). Research shows that practices normalizing, standardizing and typifying cases are routine (e.g.
Emerson 1995; Hawkins 1992, 2002; McBarnet 1981; McConville, Sanders, and Leng 1991; Mulcahy 1994;
Tata 2020). Cases evolve at every point in the criminal process, so that the sharp edges of their unique
reality are, often in subtle ways, smoothed down. In other words, the unique individual criminal incident is
rendered more recognizable, more familiar and more ‘normal’ by the taken-for-granted practices of those
working on the case. This is not to say that criminal justice practitioners simply invent the reality. It is,
instead, to acknowledge that, in common with all professional practices, and often motivated by the best
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of intentions, decision-makers tend to convert the unrecognizable into something more familiar and
manageable (Tata 2020). The reasons for this can be found at both a cognitive/individual level of
simplification and sense-making and at a cultural level of organizations—both within but also between
criminal justice organizations and agencies. These dynamics of case-construction/transformation are
probably inescapable—they seem to occur in all professional work.
Professional culture and group behaviour shape decision-making

Culture in this context means the taken-for-granted habits and ways of seeing, interpreting, acting, etc.
This means the behaviour of criminal justice decision-makers is relatively consistent and predictable. A
shared culture tends to make for ‘efficiency’—everyone more or less knows ‘the script’ of ‘what we do in a
case like this’. It also means that one agency passes clues and cues to another (Tata 2020). For example, a
defendant appearing in court on remand hand-cuffed for sentencing is a visual signal to the court that
others (e.g. other judges, prosecutors, etc.) consider she should, for whatever reason, be held in
p. 680 ↵ detention. A shared culture may be identifiable across broad professional bodies: prosecutors, judges,
magistrates. As we shall see, one of the most important and widespread shared cultural preferences is that
cases should be disposed of with as little conflict as possible. Another cultural preference is for
professionals to see the accused accepting individual responsibility for the alleged offending.
But professional cultures may vary from office to office, court centre to court centre (e.g. Eisenstein and
Jacob 1977; Heumann 1978). Although decision-making power formally resides with individual
professionals (e.g. judges, lawyers, etc.), there is also a collective/collaborative basis (much of the time
implicit) to decision-making and frequently the agenda is largely already set. Researchers and policy-
makers should be sceptical of the assumption that the individual is free simply because they have formal
discretion. Rather, we must watch out for the many signs of intra- and inter-agency/organization, often
ignored by the players themselves.
Discretion is the heartbeat of the process

Discretion is a much-debated concept but, simply put, it is where officials are required to make choices
about how to interpret information and how to apply official rules. It enables rules and case ‘facts’ to be
interpreted and applied to each other. In doing so, discretion animates abstract, inert rules of law.
However, while officially discretion is about choice, empirical research has consistently shown that in its
daily operation, the use of discretion is, in reality, far from the unstructured freedom imagined by abstract
law and policy. Rather, it is shaped in predictable ways by case construction, transformation, intra and
inter-professional relationships etc. (e.g. Hawkins 1992; Gelsthorpe and Padfield 2003; Tata 2020). These
informal, but powerful, dynamics and constraints are, as we explain below, not haphazard or random but
often highly patterned, consistent, and predictable (Baumgartner 1992). Although formally an individual
judge ‘has discretion’ to make a decision, in practice this is not and cannot be arbitrary or whimsical but is
the consequence of various informal constraints. Moreover, as we have seen, although, formally, judicial
sentencers have wide discretion as to the sentence they impose, in reality their decisions are largely
determined by quasi-sentencing work (e.g. police, prosecution, defence, etc.) in building the case. In doing
Page 5 of 28
this work of building (or ‘constructing’) the case, professionals edit and re-edit the case so that it becomes
normalized, more recognizable and more ‘typical’.‘[T]he judicial sentencing decision is provided with a
pre-structured agenda in which cases are necessarily typified and normalised by the criminal process:
cases do not and cannot reflect the uniqueness of human action in an alleged criminal incident’ (Tata
2020: 66). That being so, when we study the reality of discretionary decision-making, we should avoid the
error of concentrating largely on the individual, or aggregates of individuals, as the unit of study, but also
consider shared practices and, above all, on the dynamics of relationships.
One of the intriguing things about discretion is how, when the law is changed to constrain the use and
abuse of discretion, the result is often that greater power or discretion moves from one agency to another.
For example, sentencing guidelines designed to constrain the discretion of sentencers can enhance the
discretionary power of prosecutors in selecting the charges which they feel best fit the appropriate
punishment. Likewise, the decisions of prison administrators on the security classification of a prisoner,
or their allocation to a particular prison, constrain the decision-making of Parole Board members deciding
the release of that prisoner: if the prisoner has not completed certain courses, or has not been ‘tested’ in
open conditions, the Parole Board is unlikely to release them (see Padfield and Liebling, with Arnold 2000,
Padfield, 2020).
p. 681 Focus on the experiences of people subject to punishment and victims

Finally, the study of process entails a focus on the experiences not only of the professionals making
decisions, but also of people subject to punishment, as well as the experiences of victims. As we will
suggest later, although there have been valiant exceptions, much more research is needed in this area.
Testing Assumptions
Informed by the concept of process, we now turn to consider five commonplace assumptions (or claims)
made about penal decision-making and review them in the light of what the research suggests. We explore
the significance of this research and its normative and/or policy implications; and what research still
needs to explore.
Assumption one: the presumption of innocence
The claim
The presumption of innocence is often regarded as the paramount value ensuring the legitimacy of
criminal justice, and perhaps of the overall political order. It is emblematic of the freedom of the individual
against arbitrary state power. The presumption of innocence is a default position: unless the might of the
state can prove its case against the individual by use of reasoned evidence, then that person must remain
‘innocent’. It is, after all, the state which chooses to proceed against the individual and the burden of proof
Page 6 of 28
lies with the state, not the individual. Accordingly, the decision to deny or admit guilt must be made by the
individual as a matter of free and informed choice, without pressure or intimidation of any kind. The
individual must be given a fair chance of defence against the potentially crushing weight of the state.
The research evidence

A fully contested trial before a jury, where the defence and prosecution battle it out until the bitter end, is
the iconic image in popular imagination. However, in UK jurisdictions (in common with other countries
such as Canada, USA, and Australia), a jury trial is in fact, statistically speaking, a remarkably rare event.
As noted above, the overwhelming majority of cases are prosecuted summarily with no possibility of a jury
trial. Moreover, most cases (with or without the possibility of a jury trial) are not fully contested and result
in a guilty plea at some stage. Why is this?
First, the much-vaunted right to trial by a jury is in fact restricted to the most serious allegations, which
are themselves rare. In England and Wales, for example, the most serious crimes are ‘indictable’ and only
2
tried by juries. Less serious alleged crimes are triable ‘either-way’ where the defendant may have the
choice of jury or magistrates. In Scotland, the decision is made by prosecutors and the defendant has no
say. In common with other English-speaking countries, fewer than three per cent of cases prosecuted
through court in Scotland are prosecuted as jury-triable. As in other English-speaking countries, around
p. 682 97 per cent of cases prosecuted through the court are assigned for ↵ ‘summary’ (non-jury triable)
procedure and less than one tenth of these cases culminate in a fully contested trial. Summary criminal
process matters: it may not be the stuff of courtroom movies, but it has real consequences for people called
before it. From the perspective of penal policy, it is central, particularly as it is these cases where a
custodial sentence is possible but by no means inevitable, where many defendants find themselves on the
‘custody threshold’ (see Padfield 2011).
More important than at which level of court a case is heard, is the fact that, even when cases go to court,
the overwhelming majority (well over 9 out of 10) result in a guilty plea, meaning that the evidence about
what happened is not debated in court and the case simply proceeds to the sentencing stage. It is a
fundamental principle of law that the decision as to how to plead belongs to the accused. No pressure
should interfere with that free choice. So why does such a huge proportion of cases result in a guilty plea?
An obvious explanation is that most defendants know they are guilty and eventually admit to being so,
even if it takes being faced with a trial to make them face up to it. However, there are good reasons to
question the assumption that all defendants know they are guilty of the charges. Surely, we might tell
ourselves, defendants make rational and free choices. However, there are six reasons to doubt the
assumption that all defendants plead guilty to charges of which they know they are guilty.
First, many defendants, even where they do not accept the prosecution case, may not feel able to challenge
it with confidence; for example, if the charge relates to events that occurred when they were under the
influence of alcohol or drugs and have only a hazy memory of what happened. Others may not trust the
system, or not believe that their word will be believed against that of the police (see Lammy 2017; Phillips
et al., this volume). So, they may plead guilty due to passive resignation rather than active acceptance of
guilt.
Page 7 of 28
Second, although formally, defendants ‘instruct’ their lawyers, the reality is rather different. Empirical
research ‘has consistently highlighted the relative passivity of most clients’ (Tata and Stephen 2006, p.
732; see also Carlen 1976; McConville et al. 1994; Cheng 2023). The inequality of power in the professional-
client relationship is especially acute in the context of most criminal cases. The weak educational, social,
and personal resources of many defendants can severely limit their ability to instruct their lawyers and
control their cases. (Gormley and Tata 2020)
Additionally, the anxiety and stress brought about by being subject to criminal proceedings (especially if
held in pre-trial detention), and the unfamiliar language of criminal procedure (Rock 1993; Jacobson et al.
2015) hamper the ability of many clients to take firm command of their cases. Some defendants, who may
be experiencing wider personal challenges (e.g. addiction, homelessness, illiteracy, poor mental and
physical health) do not fully understand the charges against them. Even those who do not experience these
difficulties can find proceedings confusing and alienating (e.g. Jacobson et al. 2015; Owusu-Bempah 2017).
Third, research has repeatedly shown that the work of professionals in the lower and intermediate courts
(where nearly all cases are heard) is characterized by a general preference for settlement and the avoidance
of the stress and uncertainty brought about by a trial (e.g. McBarnet 1981; Feeley 1982; Heumann 1978;
Hodgson 2020; Mulcahy 1994; McConville and Marsh 2014; Tata 2007b, 2010, 2020). The expectation that
defendants will ‘plead out’ becomes self-fulfilling in practice: the scheduling of cases by the courts,
prosecutors and defence lawyers depends on a high volume of guilty pleas to enable the expeditious
disposal of cases. The routine ‘overbooking’ of cases in the expectation that most will plead guilty becomes
its own imperative (Gormley and Tata 2020).
Fourth, while it is true that defence lawyers endeavour to promote the best interests of their clients,
p. 683 research shows that defence lawyers also have to be cognizant of ↵ a wider range of personal, financial
and reputational considerations (e.g. Tata 2007b). For instance, they must consider not only the immediate
individual case, but also the interests of the many other clients they will represent in the future. Souring
relations in a few cases must be balanced against the cost to professional reputation as a reasonable and
cooperative practitioner in terms of the many other cases. Longer-term inter- and intra-professional
relationships with other members of ‘the courtroom workgroup’ is also vital to successful defence lawyers
(e.g. Eisenstein and Jacob 1977; Heumann 1978; Tata 2007b). Lawyers not only owe obligations to their
clients, they also owe indeterminate duties to the court. The ‘overriding objective’ of the English and
Welsh Criminal Procedural Rules that criminal cases be dealt with justly includes specific requirements
such as respecting the interests of witnesses, victims, and jurors and keeping them informed of the
progress of the case and dealing with the case efficiently and expeditiously. This applies to all participants
in the trial, including legal representatives. That lawyers must reconcile various potentially competing
interests does not mean that dedicated professionals discard cherished principles for reputational or
monetary gain: professional behaviour is more complicated than that (Tata 2007b). In common with other
professional-client relationships, the range of potentially competing dynamics can lead to professional
strain (e.g. Newman and Walsh 2019), but may also be resolved ethically in adroit plea decision-making
advice (Tata 2007b).
Page 8 of 28
Fifth, some defendants deliberately choose to plead guilty to charges of which they know they are not
guilty. They may feel obliged to plead guilty so that a family member, friend, or co-defendant avoids
conviction. The prosecution may offer to drop related charges against family members of the defendant
who is deemed to be the primary perpetrator so as to extract a guilty plea. Sometimes defendants plead
guilty when they consider it a better option than enduring the costs which the criminal process inflicts,
despite formally regarding themselves as innocent (for example, to avoid being held on pre-trial remand if
a guilty plea can mean immediate liberation) (Cheng 2023; Feeley 1979, 1982; Euvard and Leclerc 2017). As
Alshuler has argued: ‘A misdemeanor defendant, even if innocent, usually is well-advised to … plead guilty
at the earliest opportunity … to minimize the painful consequences of criminal proceedings. (Alschuler
1983, p. 953).
Sixth, and finally, the difference in the potential sentence can be a significant factor. Large sentence
differentials can be seen to conflict with the presumption of innocence as they may amount to
‘institutionalised coercion’ by inducing false admissions of guilt (McCoy 2005, p. 90; see also: Caldwell
2011; Ashworth 2006, pp. 256–7). The question of a ‘sentence discount’ or, as its critics would put it, ‘a
tax’ on exercising one’s right to trial, is highly controversial. The extent to which the plea makes a
difference to the eventual sentence can be difficult to measure. However, what is as important, are the
perceptions of defendants and how, consequently, they may alter their plea (Gormley and Tata 2020).
For these six reasons, we cannot blithely assume that people always plead guilty to offences of which they
are guilty, and indeed, actually know they are guilty (Roberts and Ryberg (2023). Such is the overwhelming
strength of belief in the idea of the autonomous individual making her own free, rational and informed
choice as to how to plead, that it easily trumps evidence to the contrary. It is a remarkable feature of many
common law or adversarial systems that there is, almost always, no independent inquiry into the truth of a
formal admission of guilt (e.g. Field 2023; Hodgson 2006, 2022, 2023).
Herbert Packer’s classic essay (Packer 1964) offers a useful, simple framework which we adaptively apply
to understand these issues. He argued that in the reality of policy and practice there is an eternal dialogue
between two models of criminal justice. The first is ‘the due process model’: a cluster of values and
p. 684 principles emphasizing the need to ↵ protect each individual citizen from the abuse of state power. Due
process is preoccupied with the vulnerability of the individual when confronted by the overwhelming
might of the state. The second is ‘the crime control model’—a cluster of values emphasizing the need for
the state to get through its volume of cases as quickly and efficiently as possible. This crime control or
efficiency model is preoccupied with resource pressures of time and money. Cases should not take up more
time than necessary. Accordingly, where people might end up pleading guilty, they should be encouraged
to do so as quickly as possible, and it is acceptable (even sensible) to encourage pleas of guilty through
rewards and incentives. While the due process model emphasizes the sanctity of the individual’s rights, the
crime control model emphasizes the routine and standard character of cases. Visually, the metaphor of the
due process model is of the state as akin to a hurdler who must clear hurdles to prove guilt in a fair contest.
The central image of the crime control model is of the assembly line in which speed, automation,
standardization and economy are the paramount goals. This simple binary framework helps us to
understand that penal decision-making policy and practice is a dialogue between these two competing
3
models.
Page 9 of 28
Perennially, there is much popular and policy concern about the excessive exercise of defendants’ rights by
lawyers and about how the system may ‘bend over backwards’ to protect defendants. According to the due
process model, this shows the system is working to protect the presumption of innocence.
The significance
One danger with assumptions about the presumption of innocence is that politicians and the media can
misuse them to suggest that a laudable idea has gone too far in protecting the guilty, questioning how the
presumption can be combined with the need for public money to be spent efficiently.
Research has shown, however, that the practice of the lower courts is enveloped in ‘an ideology of
triviality’ (McBarnet 1981) which regards cases as being too insignificant for full due process protection. A
pervasive presumption of guilt gears courtroom workgroups to cooperate to achieve the expected guilty
pleas that enable everyone to get through the business. This does not mean that professionals operate in
some sort of deliberate conspiracy: competition still exists between prosecution and defence within the
overall collegiate approach. However, there is a coincidence of interest around what is expected and
needed.
Rather than supposing that each agency operates independently and separately, there is much
interdependence. We have noted the importance of courtroom workgroups in influencing and limiting the
extent to which defence lawyers can feel able to challenge evidence. In the ‘adversarial’ model (which is
prevalent in much of the English-speaking world and in which the judge has a relatively passive role as
‘umpire’ of the debates and agreement between prosecution and defence), the court has limited ability to
investigate the facts of the allegation and is, in practice, dependent on evidence gathered earlier in the
process. As Feeley (1979) explains:
The presumption of guilt is what makes it possible for the system to deal efficiently with large
numbers, as the Crime Control model demands. The supposition is that the screening processes
operated by police and prosecutors are reliable indicators of probable guilt…. [The presumption of
p. 685 guilt] is simply the consequence of a complex of attitudes, a mood. ↵ If there is confidence in
the reliability of informal administrative fact-finding activities that take place in the early stages
of the criminal process, the remaining stages of the process can be relatively perfunctory without
any loss in operating efficiency. The presumption of guilt … is the operational expression of that
confidence (page 159).
Page 10 of 28
Assumption two: each case is judged on its unique individual facts to which offi
cial rules are applied
The claim
Whether at sentencing, parole decision-making or other moments of penal decision-making, official
policy, practice and law continually emphasize the sacrosanct value of the individual, judged on the unique
facts of each case. Both in case law and in the daily work of the courts, professionals repeatedly insist that
‘each case is judged on its own merits’ or ‘turns on its own facts’.

Research shows, however, that this sentiment is hyperbolic (e.g. Emerson 1995). There are two reasons
why cases cannot be judged entirely on their own terms.
First, judging a case necessitates comparison with other cases. The refrain that each individual case is
wholly unique because it turns on its own facts and therefore one case cannot be compared with another is
illogical. Long ago, Hood (1962: 16) neatly exposed how it contradicts the importance of ‘experience’:
[M]agistrates and judges frequently turn to precedent for their ruling and place particular value
on their experience in sentencing. Now, if this experience is to be of value, then all cases cannot be
unique, they must be comparable at least in some respects; and even if it is agreed that all cases
are unique in some sense, this cannot be decisive in the practice of sentencing, for frequently
decisions are reached with the aid of ‘experience’.
Second, and following from the meaning of ‘process’ discussed earlier, case facts are constructed and
transformed by the criminal justice process. What counts therefore as a case ‘fact’ depends on practices of
selection and assumed relevance by criminal justice practitioners. Case information is selected and
discarded. ‘Facts’ are edited in and out of cases. Criminal justice professionals have to decide how to make
sense of the potentially infinite amount of information they could deal with. They have to decide what is
important and what is less so, and how to create a meaningful ‘story’, which is recognizable to other
professionals, including the sentencing judge. Case facts are not immutable, nor wholly objective (though
they may appear so according to the assumed routines of practitioners).
The significance
It is important to understand and to recognize how decision-making becomes routinized. Following the
precepts of process outlined earlier, Tata (2020: 66) argues,
what comes before the courts is not and never can be a reflection of the range of the actuality of
offending behaviour but is based on the typification of case stories into a limited number of
standardised plots which professionals recognise and rework. For good or ill, cases are
constructed, transformed and standardised by the process itself.
Page 11 of 28
While individual cases are repeatedly normalized and typified, assessments about the seriousness of
p. 686 individual cases are not made in isolation from each other but, rather, ↵ are made relative to ‘streams’
of cases (Emerson 1995; see also: Hawkins 1992; Johansen 2019; Sudnow 1965; Tata 2007a).
Assumption three: criminal justice agencies are separate and ‘independent’ of

each other in a sequential, linear process
The claim
Constitutionally, the principle of ‘the separation of powers’ is central to the legitimacy of liberal states. By
fragmenting the potential concentration of state power, the liberty of individual citizens is thereby
protected. Just as in liberal economies, competition is seen as a virtue (Held 1983): a way of ensuring no
one has too much power. Not only should the separate functions of legislative, executive and judicial
branches of the state be independent of, and compete with, each other, but so too should the criminal
courts be characterized by independence, separation, and competition. By requiring the prosecution and
defence to compete as adversaries arguing fiercely before an independent adjudicator (judge), the truth is
thought to be more likely to emerge.
The evidence
Research nuances this picture of fierce competition between adversaries and the independent separation of
different functions.
Intra-organizational factors are important—different decision-makers make different decisions, which

may be shaped by their place within the hierarchy. The CPS in England and Wales provides a useful case
study, as there was no formal prosecutor before its creation in 1986 (following the Prosecution of Offences
Act 1985). Since then, the CPS has been re-organized and restructured many times and the relationship of
prosecutors with the police and with the judiciary has shifted. For example, there have been times when
CPS staff worked closely with the police within police stations, other periods when they maintained a
deliberate physical distance. Now most communication is digital, creating a different inter-organizational
dynamic. (As noted in our discussion of process above, judges and magistrates too are influenced by the
culture of their own courts.)
The agenda of cases is largely set by a heavy reliance on police evidence. The ways in which police gather
evidence have enormous impacts on on the ways ‘facts’ are interpreted in trials, guilty pleas and
sentencing. A classic example is the use of evidence of confessions. Many legal systems have been reluctant
to rely on confessions made to the police that are later withdrawn, because of the obvious risk that the
original confession was extracted by coercion. Other examples might be taken from the rules on
identification evidence and the use and abuse of video identification, identification parades and similar
procedures (see Heaton-Armstrong et al. 2006). Particularly contentious is the use of undercover police
officers and informants (Bloom 2002 on the US; Dawson and Brown 2020 on recent scandals in England
and Wales; also Jones et al. this volume). These examples reveal how police case construction continues to
dominate the ways in which cases are interpreted by judges and juries.
Page 12 of 28
Implications
One important issue often missed in research is the financial and budgetary pressure which badly affects a
disjointed criminal justice system. Since overwhelmingly budgets are determined by pre-existing annual
spending requirements, the room for manoeuvre is limited, as different agencies compete for often very
p. 687 limited funds. Questions of ↵ ‘whose budget’ can dominate questions of release on parole as well as
prosecution: who will pay for someone to do a particular course in the community, for example. Budgets
are affected by management and performance priorities. An example dates from the 1990s in England
when it was (for a time) a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for probation officers that a judge agreed with
their recommendation—this led to probation officers pre-judging or guessing what a judge would want to
do anyway in order to get the ‘right’ answer.
Furthermore, in nominally adversarial systems the questions of legal guilt and punishment are supposed
to be separate. A cornerstone of the legitimacy of adversarial procedure is the two-stage process: first
examining the question of criminal conduct (whether the person is guilty) and, only if the person is found
4
guilty, a second stage examining questions of character and willingness to change. The two-stage process
may separate out the legal from the therapeutic professional work, but the separation is not quite so sharp.
Research into plea decision-making and the process of mitigation has shown that in reality defendants are
encouraged to think about the consequences of a repeated denial if they are then found guilty at trial and as
a result may disadvantage themselves in terms of community-based or prison-based community
interventions (e.g. Schinkel 2014; Tata 2019). The person who denies factual and/or moral guilt risks
offering therapeutic or ‘corrections’ professionals implementing the sentence ‘nothing to work with’ and
no ‘insight’ (Weisman 2023). Such a defendant is encouraged to anticipate that she will appear to be
‘uncooperative’, ‘in denial’ and ‘unsuitable’ for a therapeutic treatment (Padfield and Liebling, with
Arnold 2000; Tata 2023). By encouraging the admission of culpability, legal questions of guilt and
therapeutic questions of character have to be considered by the defendant simultaneously. In this way,
defendants are encouraged to present themselves as approximating the image of the ‘ideal defendant’ who
willingly and sincerely accepts her guilt and legitimate punishment (Tata 2023; Field 2023; Johansen 2023;
Roach Anleu and Mack 2023).
It will be obvious by now that the criminal justice ‘process’ is not easy for the person subject to it to
navigate. Criminologists have long pointed out the labelling and stigmatizing effects of criminalizing
people, particularly young people (Becker 1963). Reporting the research evidence of ten years’ of fieldwork
conducted by McAra and McVie (2010a) analysing ‘youth transitions’, Burman and McVie (2017: 382)
observe: ‘The usual suspects … become sucked into a repeat cycle of contact with the system and for whom
such contact has damaging consequences in terms of inhibiting desistance from offending’. One might
wonder how anyone ever manages to leave the criminal justice system (e.g. Cracknell 2023). Padfield’s
interviews with those recalled to prison and facing lengthy prison sentences revealed the enormous uphill
battle they face (Padfield 2013). People released from prison often feel set up to fail, with little social or
practical support.
When we get to decisions on release from prison, inter-agency confusion becomes even more evident. In
most countries with ‘parole’ systems, it is often judicial or quasi-judicial decision-makers who decide who
to release. Strenuous and highly restrictive conditions are often attached to release. People end up being
Page 13 of 28
cycled and recycled by the process: a cultivated clientele. Reconviction rates are high, and in some
jurisdictions the recycling starts before reconviction: recall to prison during the supposedly ‘community’
part of a custodial sentence is becoming increasingly common (Weaver et al. 2012; Padfield 2013).
p. 688 Assumption four: the prison population is rising and the best way to tackle the
over-use of imprisonment in less serious cases is by promoting community-
based alternatives
The claim
Over recent decades, prison rates have climbed dramatically (Tonry and Frase 2001; Institute for Crime &
Justice Policy Research 2022), although the trend may have started to turn in many (particularly
continental European) countries since 2013. Even where prison populations are falling, the length of
individual sentences on a like-for-like basis may still be rising. In England and Wales, for example, in 2011,
the average sentence for indictable offences was 16.8 months and by 2021 it had risen to 24.9 months. To
date, the attempt to reduce the use of prison sentencing in relatively less serious cases has relied on a
strategy of seeking to promote ‘alternatives’ to a custodial sentence—most especially community-based
penalties. The thinking goes that rather than sending someone to prison for a relatively minor offence, it
would be more effective (and less expensive) if the person is punished in the community. At the same time
their needs (e.g. physical and mental health, addictions, housing, etc.) which, if not dealt with, may
increase the propensity to re-offend, can be better addressed in the community. So it is that for the last six
decades successive governments and penal reform groups in many countries have sought to ‘sell’ the
benefits of a community-based sentence in place of a sentence of imprisonment. Intuitively, this seems
like an obvious strategy. So, for example, policy has sought to promote the use of pre-sentence reports
about the person’s personal and social circumstances as well as their attitude to the offence as a way of
humanizing the person and so encouraging the court to consider more deeply the benefits of a non-
custodial sentence wherever possible. The general thrust of policy (and indeed penal reform groups) has
been to dissuade judges from passing prison sentences in less serious cases.

It is clear that variations in rates of imprisonment across the world and over time cannot be explained by
rising or falling rates of crime nor by increasing or decreasing seriousness of crime, but are instead
explicable by criminal justice (and other) public policies and practices (e.g. Tonry and Frase 2001).
Similarly, court case-loads do not (and cannot) simply reflect the level of crime, because of the ways such
case-loads are constructed and mediated through earlier processes (see above). Different ‘types’ of
punishment have a marginal impact on rates of crime overall. It is often imagined that punishment deters
people from crime, but for deterrence to work several conditions have to be satisfied: the person must have
calculated rationally the pros and cons of crime versus punishment, as well as the chances of getting
caught (Von Hirsch et al. 1998; Doob and Webster 2003; Durlauf and Nagin 2011). These conditions may
sometimes hold true, for example in driving offences, fraud or corporate crime. However, much offending
is committed while under the influence of drink and drugs (Prison Reform Trust 2022). Even the most
Page 14 of 28
serious violent offences are rarely committed in the light of a cost-benefit analysis. Finally, while there can
be individual exceptions, overwhelmingly, imprisonment tends to fuel factors closely associated with
reoffending. It tends to strain or cut family ties; erase employment or future employment opportunities;
stigmatize the person in practical and emotional ways; and embed the person in criminal identity and
associations (e.g. Maruna 2011; McNeill and Weaver 2010; Maguire and Raynor 2017; Sirdifield and Brooker
2020). And yet for decades the use of imprisonment has been rising steeply.
p. 689 The implications

Attempts to ‘sell alternatives’ to judicial ‘consumers’ may, in fact, be counter-productive (Tata 2018).
Emerging international evidence suggests that community sanctions may not reverse but, instead, fuel the
rise in the use of imprisonment, especially if unchecked by the principles of parsimony and
5
proportionality, (Abei et al. 2015; McNeill 2019; Phelps 2013). It appears that overall community sanctions
have been replacing court fines, rather than imprisonment. Fines are one of the most common types of
sentence, often seen as the lowest rung in the ladder of punitiveness. But the incidence of the use of fines
by courts in Scotland, England, and Wales, and in other countries has plummeted. On individual occasions,
community penalties may replace sentences of imprisonment, but these occasions seem to be
overshadowed by the shift away from the fine to higher-tariff community penalties. While it is true that if
the fine a person is sentenced to is not proportionate to their income this can lead to an inability to pay, a
community sentence also puts the person at a higher risk of imprisonment.
One important reason why people, particularly women (see Burman and Gelsthorpe, this volume, Dominey
and Gelsthorpe 2020), end up in prison even where their offending is relatively minor, is because they are
judged to have failed to comply with the terms of their community sentence (e.g. not attending
appointments). The supervising official may record such failure as a ‘breach’. This may mean the case
returns to court and the person, often because of their chronic health and social needs, may be regarded as
unwilling or unable to comply with the punishment (Hough et al. 2003; Weaver et al. 2020; Tata 2020).
Sentencers reach the end of their tolerance for such breaches and, not seeing any alternative, send them to
prison for a short period. By the time the person is released from prison it is likely that their mental and
physical health, housing, addiction, and other poverty-related problems underlying their original offence
have further intensified (Maruna 2011; McNeill 2019). If and when they come before the court again they
are even more likely to go to prison, if only because they have been there before (e.g. Hester et al. 2020;
Roberts 2010; Tonry 2010).
Paradoxically, the attempt to ‘sell’ community-based penalties to the public and to judges by showing
them to be a robust, no-nonsense ‘alternative’ means a decreased tolerance for failures to comply (Weaver
et al. 2020). In this way, rather than being the replacement for sentences of imprisonment in less serious
cases, community penalties may also work as an unintended way of funnelling more people who have not
committed serious offences into prison. Moreover, there is evidence that community penalties have
become much more punitive. For example, English and Welsh law allows sentencers to attach up to 11
requirements to a community order. An amendment to the law in 2015 instructs the sentencer to ensure
that at least one requirement is ‘punitive’. One concern is ‘condition-loading’ at sentencing or at prison
release: the weightier the requirements imposed, the greater the likelihood of breach.
Page 15 of 28
That those who commit relatively minor offences when suffering social and other disadvantages often end
up in prison could be seen to be surprising, given the thrust of policy approaches over many decades. The
principle that imprisonment must be ‘the last resort’ is, in various ways, enshrined in domestic law and
policy, as well as advocated by penal reform organizations. Tata (2020) argues that while it seems
progressive, the strategy of imprisonment as ‘the last resort’ is in fact counter-productive because it treats
imprisonment as the default:
p. 690 ↵
When nothing else seems to be available, there is always prison. Unlike ‘alternative’ sentences,
prison never has to prove itself; nor show its availability in the instant case. It does not have to be
sold or marketed. It is the backstop, the culturally-central idea which is always ready, dependable
and available, reassuring in its familiarity. As one judge neatly put it: ‘really when I’m imposing
short [prison] sentences, that’s when we’ve run out of ideas!’ (Tata 2020: 164)
Many people who lead seemingly ‘chaotic lives’ end up in prison not because their offending is particularly
serious, but because there does not appear to be anywhere else that can address their chronic physical and
mental health, addiction, homelessness and other often poverty-related needs. Another reason that
imprisonment becomes the default is that community services are over-stretched. This is not to point the
finger at individual professionals (judges, probation officers, etc.) who are often largely powerless to
achieve positive change. Transforming this requires a recognition that these problems must be addressed
systemically by shifting investment away from prisons into community services. Then we would no longer
have to rely on prisons to warehouse people suffering from chronic needs.
Assumption five: sentencing is a one-off event
The claim
Much writing about ‘sentencing’ assumes that the discussion concerns the moment of pronouncing the
sentence in court. People argue about the ‘right’ sentence for a crime. The focus of public discussion is
therefore the sentence imposed, and not what it means in practice.

As highlighted earlier, only recently has research started to discuss sentencing as a continuing process.
This is because most writing on sentencing has been on ‘law’ not ‘practice’. Yet most systems allow some
sort of backdoor ‘resentencing’. This matters for many reasons. We mentioned, when discussing
Assumption Four, that individual prison sentence lengths are increasing. This is even more obvious when
we realize that those serving shorter sentences are much more likely to get ‘early’ release than those
serving longer sentences. Using England and Wales as an example, those sentenced to up to four years
imprisonment are likely to be released at the halfway point, or, at the discretion of the prison authorities,
Page 16 of 28
up to 135 days before halftime with an electronic tag (Home Detention Curfew). Those sentenced to longer
terms may not qualify for consideration for release until they have served at least two-thirds. And life
sentence prisoners often wait many years post ‘tariff’ before being released.
Thus, while trial judges set the parameters by choosing ‘front-door’ sentencing options, these options
often involve different rules on release. In most discretionary systems, the priority appears to be deciding
release on the basis of the likelihood or the risk of re-offending. Decision-makers have to assess risk in the
context of an uncertain world:
Prisoners may have spent decades in a hostile environment (Crewe et al. 2020)
Psychologists and other prison staff will have carried out a ‘difficult balancing act’ assessing risk
(Shingler, Sonnenberg, and Needs 2020)
Probation officers write release plans despite many details of release remaining unknown (Padfield
2017).
p. 691 ↵ While parole and sentencing are said to be separate functions with separate rationales, they are not,
and cannot be, entirely separated. Parole decision-makers are required to make judgements based, not on
penal retribution (censure and denunciation), but instead on maximizing public protection by assessing
risk of reoffending. However, separating these judgements is perhaps easier said than done. Dagan and
Segev (2015) explain how parole decisions are also characterized by an implicit but powerful ‘retributive
whisper’: the urge to resentence can be strong (see also Aviram 2020).
The implications
Once we accept that sentencing is in reality an ongoing process, we must question when it ends. Public
protection concerns have led many countries to continue to monitor offenders, either formally or
informally, even after the completion of their sentence (see, e.g., the English MAPPA or multi-agency
public protection arrangements, for violent and sexual offenders; or ‘post-sentence supervision’). Others
allow civil ‘preventive detention’ (e.g., Germany: see Padfield, van Zyl Smit, and Dunkel (eds) 2010). The
unintended impact of imprisonment (diminished employment opportunities, for example) may also
continue forever.
The consequence of the invisibility of what goes on after the front door sentencing decision is that ‘out of
sight’ can be ‘out of mind’. Indeed, ‘backdoor’ sentencers often have vast powers which can effectively
undermine attempts to develop consistency in sentencing. For example, in England and Wales, Home
Detention Curfew (HDC), can have anomalous results: a person who gets eighteen months, if granted the
full 135 days of discretionary early release, may leave prison after four and half months (9 – 4.5 = 4.5); and
another who gets only twelve months may serve six months, if they are granted HDC—at the ‘discretion’
of the prison authorities. Another example, the extended sentence, is increasingly popular in England and
Wales. The judge imposes an extended period of supervision in the community on a ‘dangerous’ offender:
for example, five years imprisonment plus five years extended supervision. Not only will prisoners be
considered for release at a later stage in their sentence than an ‘ordinary’ prisoner (at the two thirds point,
not half), they are also liable to be recalled to prison if their behaviour in the community causes concern to
their probation officer. They may then spend the rest of the (5 + 5 = 10 year) sentence in custody (Padfield
Page 17 of 28
2013). If due process, the rule of law, accountability and fairness matter at the point of pronouncing a
sentence they should also matter during its implementation. In some countries it is widely accepted that
sentences should be re-organized as time goes on: the juges d’application des peines in France, for example,
have wide powers to change the whole basis of a sentence (see Herzog Evans and Padfield 2015; Padfield,
van Zyl Smit, and Dunkel (eds) 2010).
Towards new research agendas: what do we still need to know?

Although research over the last six decades or so has told us much which affirms, questions, or nuances
popular and formal claims about the reality of penal decision-making, there are still many questions
which research is yet to answer. Here we highlight three issues in urgent need of research.
Experiences of users
Compared to the larger volume of courts, sentencing and parole research seeking the views of
professionals, far less research has been dedicated to comprehending the experiences of those subjected to
p. 692 the courts and punishment (victims, defendants, prisoners, ↵ etc.). Much of what we assume has in fact
been ‘read-off’ from what professionals believe people experience. Such assumptions are not always well-
founded (e.g. Maruna 2001; McNeill and Weaver 2010; Schinkel 2014; Weaver 2016). A fuller understanding
of how people make sense of their experience of criminal justice in the context of, and together with, their
wider life-considerations (e.g. Johansen 2021), can help us understand people’s choices (e.g. about how to
plead) and their ability to comply with the sentences imposed upon them (e.g. Boone and Maguire 2018;
Padfield 2013). It can also help policy-makers and professionals better understand ‘what works’ (see Lyons
6
et al. 2000; HMIP 2020 ). While there have been valuable recent studies (e.g. Jacobson et al. 2015) asking
people about their experiences of criminal proceedings, much more is needed. Research to date has paid
limited attention to people’s experience of waiting (e.g. Carlen 1976: 18–38; Cheng et al. 2018; Feeley 1979).
Longitudinal studies which follow people through criminal justice are invaluable. Ideally, this longitudinal
work (e.g. McAra and McVie 2007, 2010a, b, 2017 on ‘youth transitions’) would also directly relate the
experiences of those accused of crime to the experiences and intentions of the relevant professionals in
those same cases. Of course, designing and carrying out such ambitious research is challenging, but the
results are likely to have profoundly important implications.
The reality of out of court offers of settlement

The dramatic increased in the use of out-of-court ‘offers’ of settlement by the state’s executive branch
(e.g. fines or other requirements issued by the prosecution or police) now means that in some jurisdictions
more criminal cases are being ‘disposed of’ that way than by prosecution (Matthews 2016). Since the
2000s this practice of making out of court offers of settlement has been rapidly expanded to a wider and
more serious range of alleged offences. For instance, in Scotland in 2020-21, 42,500 people were convicted
by a court, in contrast to 72,500 ‘direct measures’ (or other non-court actions, excluding a decision by the
7
Crown to take no action) recorded by the Crown and police over the same period. In England and Wales, in
Page 18 of 28
the year ending March 2022, there were 296,189 charges/summons by the police, compared to 193,864 Out
of Court Disposals (OOCDs) (formal and informal) issued by the police alone. OOCDs were used 65 per cent
8
as much as a charge or summons by the police alone: a significant proportion.
Although their names differ in different countries (e.g. Direct Measures in Scotland), and indeed within
jurisdictions (e.g. England, where there have been cautions, warnings, reprimands, community resolutions
and other labels), out-of-court measures share certain characteristics. They are described as voluntary
agreements in which the police or prosecution (or others) ‘offer’ the person the chance to pay a fine or
carry out unpaid work, etc. in return for not being prosecuted in court. Often the person is deemed to
accept the offer unless they actively say otherwise. Acceptance does not usually result in a formal criminal
conviction. However, as noted earlier, accepted offers of settlement may be searchable by prospective
p. 693 employers, public authorities, border agencies, or the ↵ police, as part of a person’s ‘criminal
history’ (which is much broader than ‘criminal convictions’). Legally-aided (free at the point of delivery)
legal representation is often unavailable.
The huge growth in the use of OOCD offers of settlement (which has occurred under the radar of political
scrutiny or public awareness and justified on grounds of the supposed triviality of cases) demands that
new research is commissioned to address urgent questions. How are decisions reached to make these
offers? In offering someone the chance to pay some money so as not to be prosecuted, how are the
calculations made? How, if at all, are they calibrated to be proportional with the person’s income? Many
are left unpaid. How do people receiving such ‘offers’ interpret them? How do they make decisions?
The role of non-professional, or non-legal, staff in linking up formally separate decision

moments
Finally, we noted earlier that much research has, for understandable reasons of funding, ethics and access,
concentrated mainly on speaking to ‘professionals’. Different professional occupations are, we noted,
formally separate. Yet, it would be impossible for cases to progress from one professional stage to the next
without some interconnection. Here research into the work of ancillary staff gatekeeping and connecting
formally autonomous decision points and professional domains will be fruitful. Reception staff at court
and lawyers’ offices, probation, prison, and security staff in court cells, as well as transport staff and court
ushers have barely been studied. However, their work may well be critical in guiding and subtly influencing
the decisions which defendants and others make. Court and Parole Board administrators, too, may have
significant influence. Research following the work of ancillary staff will enable the study of the loosely
connected interfaces between domains of professional work e.g. between ‘legal’ and ‘therapeutic’ work
(Tata 2023).
Conclusions
Much of our discussion can be seen to challenge the role of ‘law’, indeed ‘the rule of law’ in criminal justice
processes. Sometimes the law is clear, and well set out. Yet, there are many areas where the use of ‘power’
is much more obvious than the rule of ‘law’: prison law in many countries is dense with confusion,
Page 19 of 28
granting wide discretionary powers to the executive. In any case, the law is a blunt instrument. It lays
down only minimum safeguards. And law reform is an empty vessel without the commitment of those who
administer the changes.
Conventional wisdom and popular assumptions about criminal justice have been led by a preoccupation
with the most serious, glamorous cases: the rich, powerful, notorious and infamous. Media and academic
scholarship have also focused, in different ways, on these high-profile instances, which are somehow
meant to serve as exemplars of what happens on a day-to day basis. Yet when we study the daily reality of
courts, sentencing and parole, we are confronted with a different picture. Answers to larger questions can
be better informed and principles can be challenged. We have barely touched on detailed questions of
discrimination (see this volume: Phillips et al.; Burman and Gelsthorpe), and the importance of focusing
on the experiences of vulnerable people as they come face-to-face with the criminal justice ‘system’ (see
this volume Peay and O’Loughlin) is obvious.
p. 694 ↵ In this chapter we have sketched some well-established findings from research into penal decision-
making—which at times confirm, query, disturb or nuance taken-for-granted and assumed principles
such as the presumption of innocence, or the separation of decision points, or ways of reducing
imprisonment through promoting community ‘alternatives’. We have also foregrounded the concept of
decision-making as process as a critical lens through which to understand sentencing and parole. In this
way, we hope that readers will be better equipped to scrutinize claims about what is and ought to be done
in the name of criminal justice.

There are a number of excellent guides to English and Welsh criminal justice processes: The Criminal Process by
Campbell et al. (2019); Text and Materials on the Criminal Justice Process by Padfield and Bild (2016); and Chapter 1 of
Welsh et al.’s Sanders & Young’s Criminal Justice (2021) (e.g. Chapter 1 for a further discussion of ‘models’ of criminal
justice.
Specifically on sentencing, we suggest Ashworth and Kelly’s Sentencing and Criminal Justice (7th ed., 2021) or Tata’s
Sentencing as a Social Process: Re-Thinking Research and Policy (2020).
On parole, there are Padfield’s ‘Giving and Getting Parole: The Changing Characteristics of Parole in England and
Wales’ (2019) and discussion paper for the Howard League for Penal Reform, ‘Parole: Reflections and
Possibilities’ (2018) (https://howardleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Parole-reflections-and-
possibilites.pdf <https://howardleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Parole-reflections-and-possibilites.pdf>).
For those interested in the latest official statistical guides, you can see the quarterly statistics for the criminal justice
system for England and Wales, read about Criminal Proceedings in Scotland in 2019-20, and explore more criminal
justice statistic publications as listed by the Sentencing Councils of England and Wales, and Scotland (https://
www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/research-and-resources/criminal-justice-statistics/ <https://
www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/research-and-resources/criminal-justice-statistics/>), (https://www.gov.scot/news/
criminal-proceedings-in-scotland-2019-20/ <https://www.gov.scot/news/criminal-proceedings-in-scotland-2019-20/>).
Page 20 of 28
Online resources

websites?options=showName> for additional research and reading on this topic.
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Defendant’, in S. Field and C. Tata (eds), Criminal Justice and the Ideal Defendant in the Making of Remorse and
Responsibility, Hart, 213–238.
Tata, C. and Stephen, F. (2006), ‘“Swings and Roundabouts”: Do Changes to the Structure of Legal Aid Remuneration
Make a Real Difference to Criminal Case Management and Case Outcomes?’, Criminal Law Review, 722–741.
Tonry, M. (2010), ‘The Questionable Relevance of Previous Convictions to Punishments for Later Crimes’, in J. Roberts
and A. von Hirsch (eds), Previous Convictions at Sentencing, Hart, 91–116.
Tonry, M. and Frase, R. (2001), Sentencing and Sanctions in Western Countries, Oxford University Press.
von Hirsch, A. et al. (1999), Criminal Deterrence and Sentence Severity: An Analysis of Recent Research, Hart Publishing.
Weaver, B. (2016), Offending and Desistance: The Importance of Social Relations, Routledge.
Weaver, B., Tata, C., Munro, M., and Barry, M. (2012), ‘The Failure of Recall to Prison: Early Release, Front-Door and
Back-Door Sentencing and the Revolving Prison Door in Scotland’, European Journal of Probation, 4: 85–98.
Weaver, B., Piacentini, L., Moodie, K., and Barry, M. (2020), Exploring and Explaining Non-Compliance with Community
Supervision, Brit J of Criminology, 61(2): 434–455.
Weisman, R. (2023), ‘“Remorse Is Not Enough”: Disentangling the Roles of Remorse and Insight in the Construction of
the Ideal Defendant’ in S. Field and C. Tata (eds), Criminal Justice and the Ideal Defendant in the Making of Remorse and
Responsibility, Hart, 127–144.
Welsh, L., Skinns, L., and Saunders, A. (2021), Sanders & Young’s Criminal Justice, 5th edn, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Notes
1
Unlike England and Wales, in Scotland the defendant (known as ‘the accused’) does not have a right to have their
case heard by a jury if she so chooses. There are no ‘either way’ cases and the decision is that of the prosecution
service.
2
In this chapter we refer to the person proceeded against through criminal proceedings as a ‘defendant’. Different
countries use different terms. For example, in Scotland such a person is known as ‘the accused’.
3
There are of course other theoretical models which have developed from Packer’s work: see Bottoms and McClean
1976, and King 1981, for example. See also Macdonald 2008.
Page 27 of 28
4
In many countries, particularly in continental Europe, the court may decide on conviction and sentence in one
process (e.g., the sentence is part and parcel of the French concept of condamnation). There is a small but growing
body of research comparing French and English sentencing systems.
5
Penal parsimony is the idea of that punishment should be used as sparingly as possible. Penal proportionality means
that cases should be punished according to their seriousness. While these might sound like simple principles, they can
be threatened by the well-intentioned use of ‘penal-welfarism’ which uses punishment or control to ‘help’ people or
access services for their needs.
6
The only time that the Sentencing Guidelines Council in England and Wales recommended lowering sentence levels
was after their staff had carried out interviews with drugs ‘mules’ in prison.
7
Such as prosecutor fines, warnings, etc. See: https://www.gov.scot/publications/criminal-proceedings-
scotland-2020-21/pages/3/#Chart1 <https://www.gov.scot/publications/criminal-proceedings-scotland-2020-21/pages/
3/#Chart1>; see also https://www.copfs.gov.uk/media/ohsnz1cw/copfs-statistics-on-case-processing-last-5-
years-2016-21.pdf <https://www.copfs.gov.uk/media/ohsnz1cw/copfs-statistics-on-case-processing-last-5-
years-2016-21.pdf>
8
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1092650/prc-
outcomes-open-data-mar2022-tables-210722-v2.ods <https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/
system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1092650/prc-outcomes-open-data-mar2022-tables-210722-v2.ods>
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Page 28 of 28
32. Youth justice in an age of uncertainty: principles, performance, and prospects

p. 698 32. Youth justice in an age of uncertainty: principles, performance,

and prospects
Lesley McAra
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0032
Abstract
This chapter explores the principles, operational functioning, and impacts of the institutions which have evolved across the
four nations in the United Kingdom to deal with children and young people who come into conflict with the law. A key aim of
the chapter is to assess the social, political, and cultural conditions necessary to sustain more progressive approaches to
youth justice, predicated on the best interests of the child. The chapter begins with a critique of the evolving normative
framings of youth justice, both in terms of the international standards to which UK systems avowedly adhere and the shifting
conceptual underpinnings of research and policy debates on young people who come into conflict with the law. It then
explores the recent history of policy transformation across the four UK nations, a story of both divergent and convergent
dynamics. Following this, the chapter considers the disjuncture which research has found between the ambition osentencf
policy and the cultural practices of institutions which make up the youth justice system, highlighting a persistent tendency to
recycle a client group of young people who are mostly poor, known to systems from an early age and disproportionately from
Black and Minoritized Ethnic groups. The final part of the chapter offers some reflections on the futures of youth justice in a
time of multiple and intersecting crises, and what needs to be done now to nurture and support children and young people: a
holistic and generative approach to justice.
Keywords: youth justice, working cultures, paradigms, policy transformation, identity politics, international standards, best
interests
Page 1 of 34
In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare
institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of
the child shall be a primary consideration. (Article 3: United Nations Convention on the Rights of
the Child)
In designing penal policy we are not simply deciding how to deal with a group of people on the
margins of society … nor are we simply deploying power or economic resources for penological
ends. We are also and at the same time defining ourselves and our society in ways which may be
quite central to our cultural and political identity. (David Garland 1990: 267)
We’re passed along the chain. It’s always like with everyone—teachers, social workers—it’s
always the kid’s fault … never mind the fact that the adults are the ones that have screwed up in
the first place. (Cohort Member, Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime)
Introduction
An exploration of the nature and function of systems for dealing with children and young people who come
into conflict with the law, raises deeper-seated questions about the state’s claims to legitimacy: its right
and authority to rule. International frameworks such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child (UNCRC 1989) aim to provide a touchstone against which the structures and practices of youth
justice can be assessed: holding out the promise of a praxis—a set of normative claims fused with
statements about practical application. History, however, demonstrates that the categories of childhood,
adolescence, and youth are highly contested, culturally specific, and their deployment in policy debate is
closely tied to particular ideological visions for society. In Western liberal democracies, especially,
p. 699 preoccupation with youth crime and justice has often come to the ↵ fore at points of crisis or transition,
to build political capacity in the context of weakened or new governments (Pearson 1983, Hall et al. 1978).
History also shows how progressive policy-making, which adheres to international standards by
promoting the best interests of the child, can be confounded by the dynamics of ‘statecraft’—the ways in
which new regimes shape their identity through differentiation from, or othering of, what went before—
and how policy imperatives are often filtered and repurposed (for good or ill) by the practices of the
institutions involved in implementation (McAra 2017). Moreover recent scholarship on the impacts of
systems on the behaviours and lives of those made subject to their tutelage suggests that even the most
benign of policy intentions can be experienced as exclusionary and punitive (McAra 2017; McAra and McVie
2022).
In the period since the last edition of the Oxford Handbook was published, the wider social, economic and
political environment has undergone profound transformation with, arguably, major consequences for
children and young people. The global pandemic and associated lockdowns have shaped both the
situational contexts of youthful rule transgression and adaptations at the individual level. At the same
time, they have played a role in reinforcing the structural contexts which reproduce and intensify social
harms and concentrated disadvantage, with negative impacts on child development and well-being
Page 2 of 34
(Stewart et al. 2022). And wider geo-political tensions (including, at the time of writing, the war in
Ukraine), the global economic down-turn, the climate and energy emergencies, as well as a major cost-of
living crisis in the UK, have served to create an atmosphere of fragility and uncertainty.
Against this backdrop, this chapter explores the principles, operational functioning and impacts of the
institutions which have evolved across the four nations in the United Kingdom, to deal with children and
young people who come into conflict with the law. A key aim of the chapter is to assess the social, political,
and cultural conditions necessary to sustain more progressive approaches to youth justice, predicated on
the best interests of the child.
In the first section of the chapter, I examine the evolving normative framings of youth justice, both in
terms of the international standards to which UK systems avowedly adhere as well as the shifting
conceptual underpinnings of research and policy debates on young people who come into conflict with the
law. This is followed by a review of policy transformation across the four UK nations, a story of both
divergent and, especially in the last five years, convergent dynamics. The next section considers the
cultural practices of institutions of youth justice which highlight a persistent tendency to recycle a client
group of young people who are mostly poor, known to systems from an early age and (and in the case of
England, in particular) disproportionately from Black and Minoritized Ethnic groups. The final section of
the chapter offers some reflections on the futures of youth justice in a time of multiple and intersecting
crises, and what needs to be done now to nurture and support children and young people: a holistic and
generative approach to justice.
International Conventions and Conceptions of Justice: In the Best Inter

ests of the Child?
International standards
At the global level normative framings of youth justice in late modernity have been characterized by the
search for a universe of discourse—a shared set of narratives with which to promote a sense of common
p. 700 purpose amongst a community of states and to ↵ enable judgements to be made about the moral
efficacy of particular systems of justice. International rights conventions and associated protocols, as well
as the Sustainable Development Goals, are of course exemplars of this cosmopolitan dynamic. For children
who come into conflict with the law these include: the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989); the
UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice (the Beijing Rules 1985); the UN Directing
Principles for the Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency (the Riyadh Guidelines 1990); and the UN Rules for the
Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty (the Havana Rules 1990).
At the heart of these international standards lies a commitment to further the best interests of the child.
This places duties on the state to recognize, inter alia, the rights of the child, to ensure their participation
in decisions made about them, and to enhance their well-being. As indicated above, I use the term
‘progressive’ to capture approaches to policy-making which take these duties seriously. Many of the
international conventions are, however, shot through with compromise, and a close reading reveals a
range of conflicting imperatives, not least the way in which childhood is invoked as a universal category
Page 3 of 34
whilst at the same time cultural norms and political specificity are utilized as delimiting criteria (McAra
2010; Put and Walgrave 2006). The search for a global narrative, acceptable to all signatories has, arguably,
resulted in a degree of vagueness in terms of drafting, leaving some articles open to wide interpretation.
The Beijing Rules, in particular, contain competing imperatives as between the rights of the child and the
needs of society (Rule 2.3). The Rules also highlight the need for interventions to be both parsimonious
(emphasizing prevention, diversion, and community-based programmes with custody as a last resort—
Rules 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 11.1 to 11.4, and 19.1) and proportionate both to the seriousness of the offence and to the
circumstances of the offender (emphasizing here the provision of care, protection, educational, and
vocational skills, Rule 5.1). There is no consideration as to how these imperatives can be balanced. Indeed
the rules acknowledge that, in terms of implementation, cognizance needs to be paid to the ‘economic,
social and cultural conditions prevailing in each Member state’ (Rule 1.5), with the implication that there
may be widespread variation as to interpretation of need or parsimony.
In 2019, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child updated its guidance in an effort to offer greater
precision in terms of state imperatives (General Comment No. 24, 2019). The guidance was based on
emergent knowledge about child development, including from neuroscience on brain development, as well
as research on effective practice. A commitment to diversion is reiterated, with an exhortation that states
should scale-up such measures and use them in the ‘majority’ of cases (p 5), including ‘serious offences
where appropriate’. The guidance also states that the minimum age of criminal responsibility should be at
the very least 14 years, but commends those states where it is at age 15/16 or higher, reinforcing that for
those over the age of criminal responsibility but under 18, the ‘full application’ of the ‘child justice system’
should apply. States are encouraged to set a minimum age below which children cannot be deprived of
their liberty: age 16 is suggested; a final recommendation is that all forms of life imprisonment and
indeterminate sentences for children should be abolished (see Bateman 2019 for further commentary).
The updated guidance, however, still contains points of ambiguity and tension. Thus the principle of
proportionality in decision-making includes the circumstances and gravity of the offence, the personal
circumstances of the child, as well as the long-term needs of the society (2019, p. 12). And whilst the
guidance foregrounds the ‘best interests of the child’ as the core principle in decision-making, again there
is still no clear definition as to what best interests might constitute.
p. 701 ↵ The danger in the lack of specificity is that it enables state actors to find ways of finessing
shortcomings in protections offered to children without seeming to flout particular articles. As evidence,
witness the major variation across signatory states with regard to the age of criminal responsibility: at the
time of writing, age 12 in Scotland, age 10 across the rest of the UK; contrasted with age 15 in Finland and
Sweden (Goldson 2019).
Aside from these ambiguities, the UN conventions and protocols have been criticized because they lack
teeth. The principles of the UNCRC are intended to become legally binding norms and the UN has
constructed a system for monitoring implementation, which includes periodic reporting by state
signatories to which a specially designated UN committee responds. However countries are enabled to
Page 4 of 34
place reservations on whether they take-up particular dimensions of the conventions and the monitoring
committee has minimal powers at its disposal to hold states to account, relying, for the most part, on
shaming or chastising states in its published responses.
In 2020 UNICEF published a review of youth justice across the UK jurisdictions, highlighting a myriad of
concerns, including: the very low age of criminal responsibility; lack of robust data about the impact of
interventions and interactions with youth justice systems; identification in the media of children who
committed offences; potential use of Tasers against children; placement of children in secure care/
detention away from home locations; and the conditions of detention regimes, amongst others.
At the time of writing (summer 2022), the efficacy of the rights framework continues to be under scrutiny
by the UK Conservative government. The government’s manifesto in 2019 included a promise to update the
Human Rights Act, with a Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission. More recently there have been
threats to step away from the European Convention on Human Rights which would put the UK in company
with Russia (which left after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Greece which left temporarily following a
military coup in 1969). Human rights groups have expressed deep concerns about the potential for
weakened protection that such developments may bring (see Bolton 2022).
Deconstructing the shifting paradigms in research and policy debate

The ambiguities and tensions which currently inhere within international conventions and protocols (as
between the rights and interests of the child and the wider public interest) have been a continual feature of
youth justice discourse (both philosophically and in terms of policy) since the inception of specialist
institutions for dealing with children perceived as troubled and/or troublesome from the nineteenth
century onwards. Traditionally this has been conceptualized as a debate between welfare and justice
approaches to dealing with children who come into conflict with the law (McAra and McVie 2015), with the
former asserting that interventions need to be calibrated to the needs of child, and the latter that they
should be proportional to the child’s deeds. The past quarter century (from the late 1990s to the present
day), however, has seen the growing dominance of at least six further policy narratives which have
increasingly shaped debate about the appropriate response to youth offending, some of which have been
embraced in the updated UN guidance described above: restorative, actuarial, diversionary, desistance, a
social harm perspective and, most recently, what I have termed, a neo-positivist paradigm. The core
dimensions of these paradigms are set out in Table 32.1.
Page 5 of 34
Table 32.1 Juvenile Justice Paradigms
Just deserts Welfare Restorative Actuarial Desistance Diversionary Trauma Neo-positivism

informed (Bio-
(social harms) developmental)
Personhood Child as rights Child as bearer Child as bearer Child qualified Child as bearer Child as bearer Child as victim Child as bearer of
bearer of entitlement of entitlements bearer of rights of rights of rights of harms entitlements
Individuals and rights and rights Individuals Individual Individuals Individuals Individuals
constitutionally Individuals a Individuals potentially ‘bad’ identity product product of product of product of
self-interested product of constitutionally of interplay social interplay interplay between
experience ‘good’ between encounters between biology and social
structure and structure and relations
agency agency
Offender as Offender as non- Offender as Offender as Offender as self- Offender adapts Offender Offender as non-
rational and rational, rational and dangerous determining to ascribed qualified self- rational,
responsible irresponsible responsible The commodity The flawed identities determinism, irresponsible
The rational The patient The penitent identity The deviant The traumatized The patient
man status
Social Core Core Core Core Core Core Core Core relationship:
relations relationship: relationships: relationships: relationship: relationship: relationship: relationship: nested model of
contractual, nested model of inclusive—child, adversarial inclusive—child reflexive reflexive state, family, child
State vs. State, victim and community vs. and community regulatory structural,
individual community community potential practices family and
citizen family, child offender shaping relational
individual sense
of self
Page 6 of 34

informed (Bio-
context shape
individual sense
of self
Didactic Transformative Integrationist Protective Redemption Preventative Preventative Protective
Audience: Audience: Audience: Audience: Audience: Audience: Audience: Audience: the

citizens offender and community and public offender and the child child and family child
family victims community
Sensibility: Sensibility: Sensibility: Sensibility: Sensibility: Sensibility: Sensibility: Sensibility:

retribution philanthropy connection rational connection rational compassion compassion
(Vengeance) (Paternalism) (Infliction of calculus (Exclusion) calculus (transference of Diagnostic

shame) (Fear and hate) (Managerialist) blame) (Exclusion)
Intervention Deter and Diagnose and to Support victims, Diminish Support Diminish Support Age graded
punish rescue restore harm, current and recovery and negative effects recovery, public according to
reconnect child future risk, establishment of of regulatory health approach developmental
to community, safeguard ‘real me’ practices and stage
build more victims and identity, build support Diagnose and
cohesive wider effective inclusion support recovery
peaceful community practitioner- from trauma,
community child diminish current
relationships,
asset based
Page 7 of 34

informed (Bio-
risk to safeguard
victims and wider
community,
Proportionality Proportionality Proportionality Proportionality Proportionality Proportionality Proportionality Proportionality to

to deeds, to needs to harm caused to risk to need for value to pernicious to trauma developmental
parsimony change and consequences phase or injury
agentic of agency
rediscovery in impact
context of wider
opportunity
Source: Adapted from McAra (2017).
Page 8 of 34
As shown in Table 32.1, the restorative paradigm conceives children as having both positive entitlements
and rights, with personhood understood as being shaped directly by the community and cultural context
(Zehr and Mika 1998). As with the just deserts paradigm, offenders are considered to be rational, with the
p. 704
702
703 capacity to take responsibility ↵ ↵ ↵ for their behaviour but crucially also acknowledge the
suffering which they have caused. The key problematic for this paradigm is to determine the age at which
young people can be said to have evolved the capacity to understand the consequences of action, but also
its effect on others so that meaningful apology can be made. Victims are a key audience within this
paradigm, and intervention is aimed at restoring the harm caused and reconnecting the child with the
community.
The actuarial model frames the child primarily in terms of his or her capacity or potential for wrongdoing,
with needs constructed as evidence of risk. The nature of intervention deemed suitable in particular cases
is calibrated according to the level of risk posed (in extreme cases such interventions may require to be
indeterminate in nature) with the objective of protecting society and preventing future victimization.
Expert input to risk assessment is needed, to ensure that early intervention is targeted appropriately.
(Justice-involved young people, within this paradigm become a commodity to be assessed, with the
principal audience for intervention being the wider public (see McAra 2010). By viewing the child’s
behaviour and their immediate family and social context as signifiers of risk, this paradigm provides a
justification for intervention even before the child is born and also far beyond the transition into adulthood
(should risk be assessed as high): a life-course approach to offender management.
The diversionary paradigm stems primarily from the work of Smith and colleagues at Lancaster (see Smith
2010), and has been further developed as an ideal type by McAra and McVie (2015). This paradigm is
predicated on labelling theory. Whilst the child is conceived as a rights bearer, their identity and sense of
self is predominantly a product of social encounters. Where such encounters produce negative or ‘spoiled’
versions of selfhood, then this undermines the child’s right to develop in dignity. The deviant status is a
conferred identity, which can be exacerbated by interactions with authority. Regulatory practices always
have consequences in terms of shaping the child’s sense of self and, in evolving a diversionary practice, the
aim is to prevent the emergence and reproduction of deviance as an identity. This involves careful systems
management and rational calculation of the potential for harm in terms of intervention. The key
problematic for the diversionary paradigm is to ensure that both the age of criminal responsibility and the
period of transition to adulthood are managed in non-stigmatizing and non-criminalizing ways: this is
suggestive of greater alignment between these ages than in other paradigms (the abolition of
criminalization of children until they reach the age of majority).
The desistance paradigm (as exemplified in the work of McNeill 2006, see also Weaver et al. 2023 this
volume), views identity as a product of soft-determinism. The emphasis of intervention is to support the
construction of a non-offender identity, to enable redemption (through ‘making good’, Maruna 2001),
with relationships between the practitioner and the child key to personal transformation. However,
opportunities have to be consciously constructed, so that asset-based approaches to intervention, which
build social capital, can be turned into practical action. A key aim of the desistance paradigm is to promote
social inclusion and connection. In contradistinction to the diversionary paradigm, the nature of identity
does not become stuck or transposed by external labelling processes. It is a more fluid conception,
Page 9 of 34
underpinned by a strong sense of self-determination. Intervention is not inherently criminogenic, to the

extent that it can facilitate the process of positive change, enabling offenders to reconstruct flawed
identities and overcome the exclusionary dynamics which may inhere within wider society. As applied to
youth justice, the key problematic for this paradigm is to gauge the age at which the capacity for self-
determination, for understanding the impact of behaviours on others, and to atone for wrong-doing, is
reached.
p. 705 ↵ The social-harm paradigm has something in common with zemiology (see Canning et al. 2023 this
volume) but, as currently deployed within youth justice discourse, it has, arguably, not realized its radical
potential, laying greater emphasis on tackling the relational rather than the structural underpinnings of
adverse childhood experiences (ACES). Rule breaking behaviour is to be understood against the backdrop
of early trauma including such things as physical and sexual abuse, emotional neglect, having a household
member in prison and other aspects of ‘household dysfunction’ (Wolff and Baglivio 2017; Craig et al. 2017).
There are a range of ACE typologies, with some expanding to include community level indicators such as
unsafe neighbourhood (see Cronholm et al. 2015), and most are utilized to create a total adversity score.
The child has qualified self-determinism, to the extent that the adverse experiences are beyond their
control and shape behaviour. A key problematic for the paradigm is, however, the rather crude and
mechanistic way in which scoring of ACES is sometimes conducted, which downplays the fact that
experience even of one of the adversities being measured, for example sexual abuse, can have deep and
long-term consequences for the child’s well-being. Interventions are aimed at mitigating the
retrospective impacts of such experiences on the young person but the fundamental logic of the paradigm
is prevention, with a public health approach beginning to shape debate.
Finally the neo-positivist paradigm is distinctive from the social-harm paradigm as it lays emphasis on bio-
social development, particularly focused on brain development and the ways in which it impacts risk-
taking and decision-making by young people. Here, technologies such as neuroimaging and MRI scanning
have been used to chart individual capacity over the teenage and early adult years, with research
suggesting that full maturity does not come until the mid to late twenties (Casey et al. 2008; Steinberg
2008; Shulman et al. 2016). A further feature is the significance of injury and other traumas (including
ACES) on brain development (see O’Rourke et al. 2020 for an overview). Neuroscientific approaches have
their roots in biological positivism and developmental theory. This approach problematizes the age of
criminal responsibility and the extent to which children and young people can be seen as responsible for
their behaviour. Interventions then need to be graded according to stage in development, but the paradigm
also gives impetus to protective and potentially incapacitative approaches—to safeguard potential victims
and the wider community from those, for example, with brain injury, who are unable to control their
behaviour.
The point of deconstructing the above paradigms is to emphasize the major differences between their
imperatives and demonstrate the potential for tension and contradiction when they are invoked
simultaneously in policy debate. Indeed, as will be demonstrated below, young people today, have to
actively negotiate their way through a tutelary complex which simultaneously holds them to account for
Page 10 of 34
their actions (as per the justice, restorative and desistance paradigms), whilst acknowledging that their
age, stage and circumstance render them vulnerable and lacking in full capacity (as per the welfarist,
diversionary, social harm and neo-positivist paradigms).
History shows us that conflicted narratives can sometimes attain a degree of hegemony, as witness the
longevity of penal-welfarism in the early to mid-twentieth century (see Garland, this volume). Indeed,
there is evidence from a range of jurisdictions that the law and regulatory orders of late modernity seek to
establish authority by deploying narratives of fear and risk at the same time as narratives of intimacy and
connectedness, as states grapple with the complexities of ‘belongings and otherings’ against a backdrop of
global and more localized transformations and pressures (McAra 2010). Importantly, there can be a degree
p. 706 of political pragmatism in the selection and deployment of the ↵ variant paradigms within the tutelary
complex, as much as ideological commitment to their normative underpinnings, and governments often
play on the sensibilities (both negative and positive, see Table 1) that inhere within core paradigms as a
means of asserting the right to rule. What then have been the contexts in which the above paradigms have
been invoked across the UK over the past quarter century? How has youth justice in practice been utilized
as an element of political strategy and with what impacts for progressive policy-making? It is to these
questions that the next section of the chapter turns.
Youth Justice in These Isles: Policy as Central to Cultural and Political

Identity?
From a time in which there was major policy divergence between the constituent nations of the United
Kingdom, the past five years have seen a degree of convergence, with England now following and
embracing—at least at the level of discourse—a number of precepts which were driven initially in Scotland
1
(the Whole System Approach) and more especially Wales (the Children First, Offender Second approach),
and all four nations embracing so-called ‘trauma-informed’ practice. A commonality has been a renewed
emphasis on childhood vulnerability and exploitation and an expanded age range associated with the
concept of ‘youth’—stretching up to ages 24 to 26 rather than terminating at age 18.
The current dominance of diversionary, harm-based, and neo-positivist framings across the UK
jurisdictions is partly a product of academic research influencing policy, but as I will argue, the uptake of
this research has been driven by the wider performative dynamics of ‘governing’, which demand constant
refresh and (sometimes) repositioning. As I aim to demonstrate, the recent history of youth justice shows
how more progressive modes of policy have gained traction (mostly but not always) where there has been
alignment with efforts to build political capacity but more importantly to reinforce cultural distinctiveness
across the devolved nations. However within England, such modes of policy have been nurtured more in
contexts where political attention has been diverted away from the problem of youth, as broader crises
have taken centre stage, and where prison/detention has been decentred from the purview of key agencies.
Taken together, the implication of these dynamics is that the conditions in which progressive policy-
making can flourish are highly contingent, likely to be undercut by counterbalancing efforts to assert
control, and consequently somewhat fragile. I take developments in each nation in turn.
Page 11 of 34
England
The recent history of youth justice in England has been characterized by upheaval and constant change,
beginning with the New Labour years from 1997 to 2010. Here ‘youth justice’ was explicitly deployed as a
centre piece of governance, as a means to build political capital. The New Labour mantra was to be ‘tough
p. 707 on crime, tough on the ↵ causes of crime’. The principal aim of youth justice became to prevent
offending by children and young people, with an emphasis on the 3 Rs: Restoration, Responsibility, and
Reintegration. Innovative institutional architecture included: the Youth Justice Board; local authority
2 3
youth offending teams (YOTs); and youth offender panels.
A raft of new orders and schemes were introduced (such as Anti-Social Behaviour and Parenting Orders),
with risk assessment (through tools such as ASSET) increasingly determining access to services. The reach
of youth justice was widened to include the troublesome behaviour of those below the age of criminal
responsibility (via Child Safety Orders) and a more structured approach to police discretion was
implemented (with the new reprimand and final warning scheme). Controversially the rebuttal
presumption of doli incapax was abolished—meaning that for children between the ages of 10 and 14, the
prosecution no longer had to prove that the young person was capable of forming the intent to commit a
crime, separate from the fact that a crime had been committed.
The complex range of orders was rationalized somewhat by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008
which introduced the Youth Rehabilitation Order as a replacement for other court-based orders, but this
was an order which had 18 different potential requirements! And finally the Youth Crime Action Plan of 2008
set out a target of reducing the number of first time entrants to the youth justice system below the age of
18 by one fifth by 2020, accompanied by a triple strategy of ‘non-negotiable’ support and targeted
interventions for the 110,000 so-called ‘high risk families’ whose children were identified as being most
likely to become prolific offenders.
From the reforming zeal of the New Labour administrations, the new Conservative/Liberal Democrat
coalition government elected in May 2010 instituted a change of direction. Greater emphasis was placed on
diversion (adding it to the panoply of extant paradigms), and there was a loosening of controls on
decision-making practices. For example, the police were given greater discretion, with proposals to
replace the reprimand and final warning scheme with a system of cautioning. At the same time however
proposals were also made to extend curfew hours and the maximum duration of Youth Rehabilitation
Orders.
The coalition government also published a green paper in 2010, Breaking the Cycle: Effective Punishment,
Rehabilitation and Sentencing of Offenders, with a new emphasis on payment by results and proposals for
‘reinvestment grants’ meant to achieve targeted reductions in the use of custody, and to widen the use of
restorative justice. Through such measures the government aimed to install what it termed a
‘rehabilitation revolution’. However, the admixture of rationales in the title of the paper was not
suggestive of simplification in the paradigmatic framing of youth justice, with the document also
containing the familiar refrains of parental responsibilization, early intervention, and prevention for those
at risk.
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From 2013 there were plans to alter dramatically the youth custodial estate, by decommissioning all
custodial units for young women—and a consultation was set in motion (Transforming Youth Custody)
with proposals to develop a new secure estate predicated on education (via secure colleges), with some
residual secure home capacity for those under the age of 12. However, elements of the reform programme
were halted because of budgetary pressures, with the need to make major savings in the overall running
costs: indeed the period of the coalition government was characterized by a major shrinking (of some 50
per cent) in total expenditure on programmes.
p. 708 ↵ The most recent phase of youth justice in England (from 2015 onwards), under a series of
Conservative governments, has seen a gradual diminishing of youth crime as one of the centerpieces of
political debate, supplanted by constitutional issues (notably Brexit) and latterly more globalized issues
linked to geo-political tensions, the global pandemic, and economic crisis.
Over this period, there has been an evolving commitment to embrace a more holistic approach to children
who come into conflict with the law. An early example came out of the youth justice review put in place by
the former Secretary of State for Justice (Michael Gove), calling for educational inclusion and the need for
greater devolution of youth justice to local areas (Taylor 2016). A more rehabilitative ethos was also
reflected in the new resettlement consortia pilots, established in 2015/16 by the Youth Justice Board to
support young people leaving custody, by linking young people with educational or employment
opportunities, ensuring availability of appropriate accommodation and access to coaching and life-skills
training.
A Children First, Offender Second approach found its way into the new national England/Wales sentencing
guidelines (published in 2017), with a shift in terminology from young offenders and youth to children and
young persons. The guidelines laid particular emphasis on the need for judges to take into consideration the
emotional and developmental rather than chronological age of the child as well as to be cognizant of any
early traumatic experiences or brain injury. Whilst deterrence was still cited as a potential ethos in
sentencing, the guidance suggested that it be used for more serious offences, with welfare imperatives to
be given primacy, and greater emphasis on reintegration. The Youth Justice Board also explicitly
committed to Children First, Offenders Second, with a key ambition being to reduce the number of young
people caught up in the youth justice, but also to ensure that those who did come to the attention of the
system had better outcomes (Youth Justice Board for England and Wales 2018).
A further, and critical, change in infrastructure also occurred in 2017 with the establishment of the Youth
Custody Service <https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/youth-custody-service/about> () under the
auspices of HM Prison and Probation services, taking over what were previously the responsibilities of the
Youth Justice Board, and a gradual closure of secure training centres (described by the Independent Review
of Social Care as ‘wholly unsuitable’ for children, MacAlister 2022, p. 124). In 2022, the government
legislated to enable the foundation of Secure Academies for 16 to 19 year olds via the Police, Sentencing and
Courts Act 2022. These Academies are intended to form a therapeutic, albeit secure, environment for
children and young people on remand or subject to a sentence of detention. The first school was chartered
this summer (2022), to be run by Oasis Restore (an evangelical Christian charity) with a promise to provide
‘relentless love’. Worryingly, and counter to its proclaimed ethos, the Academy has been described by the
(then) minister of justice, Dominic Raab, as ‘a school with prison walls’. These conflicting sensibilities of
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care and control can also be seen in other recent reforms driven by concerns about young people made
vulnerable as victims of knife crime, gang violence or county lines, including new Knife Crime Orders, and
amendments to Youth Referral Orders which will increase the daily limit on curfew hours and introduce
mandatory location monitoring.
Reviewing the past quarter of a century of youth justice in England, it is noteworthy that diversionary
paradigms were embraced under a policy regime driven by austerity and efforts to drive costs down, and
that more child (rather than offender) focused narratives emerged during a period in which political
debates were distracted by constitutional questions and later crises, and in which the Youth Justice Board
was freed up from responsibilities for custody. This opened up a space for more progressive dialogue
p. 709 ↵ between academics and civil servants (through the Academic Liaison Network) and, as will be
highlighted below, enabled England to embrace a paradigmatic agenda more closely aligned to Wales,
Scotland, and latterly, Northern Ireland. That more progressive narratives have been grafted onto, rather
than supplanting fully, the principles of control and deterrence, highlights, however, a fragility within the
system, a point to which I will return at the end of the chapter.
Wales
In Wales, devolution was enabled by the passage of the Government of Wales Act 1998. Initially the Welsh
Assembly did not have primary law-making powers and youth justice was not (and, at the time of writing,
is not yet) a devolved matter, nor were other aspects of policing and criminal justice. As such the new
Welsh Assembly inherited the architecture of youth justice that was evolving across England/Wales
(described above). However the New Assembly did have responsibility for the range of services which
would normally partner with youth offending teams in delivering policy including: children’s services,
health and social services, education, and housing.
In an effort to establish authority, the Welsh Assembly made a conscious effort to differentiate itself from
what had gone before: in the words of Rhodri Morgan, to put ‘clear red water’ between Wales and England.
This included the so-called ‘dragonisation’ (Edwards and Hughes 2009) of much social policy. In doing so,
the Assembly embraced more explicitly a child rights perspective, focusing children’s services on
delivering a series of ‘entitlements’, which were universal (rather than targeted) and free at the point of
need (Haines et al. 2013). ‘Extending Entitlement’ was published in 2000 and was followed up in 2004 by a
commitment to integrate the UNCRC into policy-making for children and young people, and the
publication of the All Wales Youth Offending Strategy. The latter marked a major step away from the hyper-
intensive policy activity in England in terms of ethos, underscoring a more holistic (welfarist) approach to
dealing with young people who come into conflict with the law, based on the mantra ‘children first
offenders second’. For the first time concerns were also expressed about the cultural and resettlement
needs of young people from Wales who were remanded or served custodial sentences across the border in
England.
The holistic approach gained further purchase as the devolved arrangements grew in maturity. The Wales
Act 2006 gave the Assembly primary law-making powers over 20 areas of policy. Importantly this included
legislative competence for social services, health and education, which, under the terms of the Crime and
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Disorder Act 1998, were required to contribute staffing and resources to Youth Offending Teams. Indeed,
Drakeford (2010) has estimated that up to 70 per cent of the total budgets for youth offending teams in
Wales has come from agencies which are not under the control of the Youth Justice Board and UK central
government.
While the Youth Justice Committee for Wales has worked closely with the Youth Justice Board to build a
distinctive policy framework for the devolved nation, interrogation of joint documents highlights some of
the difficulties in attempting to follow a more progressive agenda within the architecture of a broader
system. For example, Haines (2009) pointed to the potential for conflict between different dimensions of
the All Wales Youth Offending Strategy. Although the Strategy emphasizes more welfarist imperatives, it also
states a need for balance between the interests of the child and the community, with restorative and
punitive measures being highlighted as core components of that balance alongside ‘supported
rehabilitation’.
p. 710 ↵ From 2008, there was a gradual but marked grafting of the diversionary paradigm onto the wider
child rights ethos (as exemplified by the multi-agency Swansea Bureau Model, see Haines et al. 2013),
along with early intervention programmes (such as Families First) aimed at reducing the numbers of young
people coming into the youth justice system. These developments were followed up by the Welsh
Government Youth Crime Prevention Fund (delivered since April 2013), to resource diversion schemes based
inter alia on education, training, sports, and the arts, and culminating in the publication of Children and
Young People First (Youth Justice Board, Bwrdd Cyfiawnder Ieuenctid 2014). The latter was a joint initiative
of the Welsh Government and the Youth Justice Board re-emphasizing commitments to the needs of the
child, holistic and multi-agency services, as well as early intervention and diversion. It also highlighted
the importance of reducing the harm that may be caused by criminal justice contacts, with further
emphasis on the needs of victims and their capacity to participate in restorative processes. This links too to
the enhanced case management approach piloted from 2013/14, predicated on trauma-informed practice.
More recent developments have served to reinforce the direction of travel with Wales, with the publication
of a number of documents setting out aspirations for the future shape of youth justice. For example, the
Youth Justice Blueprint for Wales, published in 2019, emphasized the significance of taking a ‘whole system
approach’ to maximize diversion. Akin to a systems management approach (Smith 2010), provision was to
be made for diverting young people away from formal measures at each stage of the youth justice system.
It also highlighted the ways in which adverse childhood experiences increased propensity for crime and
later imprisonment, with policy focusing on preventing and minimizing the impact of ACES, including
recognition of intergenerational problems. The blueprint also laid emphasis on the rights of the child and
the need for trauma-informed practice, including, and especially, in secure care (with a commitment to
develop a centre of excellence for mental health, health care education, and training). The holistic
imperative that underpinned the blueprint, is also evident in the attention paid to the enhanced case
management approach, for complex and high-risk cases, and in the explicit alignment of youth justice
with the child-victim services developed as a result of the Violence Against Women, Domestic Abuse and
Sexual Violence (Wales) Act 2015. Finally the Blueprint highlighted again the need to be able to
accommodate children in need of secure provision, in Wales rather than across the border in England.
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Within Wales, the grafting of new paradigms onto the youth justice complex and the consistent attempts
to differentiate approaches from those in England (especially in the early years), has been the result of a
creative and negotiated set of practices, improvising within the delimits of the devolutionary
infrastructure. Arguably, then, the child centric and progressive focus of youth justice became one of the
constitutive elements of Welsh political identity. In keeping with this, the Programme for Government 2021
committed to making Wales ‘a kind and fair society’, with the subsequent Children and Young People’s Plan
2022 stating that Wales should be: ‘a wonderful place to grow up, live and work, now and in the future’.
Northern Ireland
In Northern Ireland, a devolved Assembly was established as result of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement
1998. The Assembly has had a somewhat turbulent history, with various suspensions (between 2002 and
2007; 2017 to 2020; and in 2022) which have impacted on youth justice policy delivery. Importantly, the
p. 711 ethos and architecture of ↵ youth justice has to be seen against the backdrop of the political and
cultural specificities of a post-conflict and traumatized civic society, grafting onto extant structures an
emphasis on restoration and rights.
Prior to the Belfast Agreement, youth justice in Northern Ireland was broadly shaped by the same
legislative and policy developments as in England (McVie 2011). It was primarily a court-based model (see
McAra 2010) with a dedicated youth court for children aged between 10 and 17, although children, under
certain circumstances could be tried in the adult courts. However, under the terms of the Agreement, a
criminal justice review was set up, including a review of arrangements for children who come into conflict
with the law. A particular ambition was to ensure that human rights infused any emergent institutional
frameworks. The recommendations of the review were given statutory footing with the passage of the
Justice (Northern Ireland) Act 2002. This included a set of specified aims for youth justice, the primary one
being to prevent offending (similar to England) but key objectives of the system were also to protect the
public and secure the welfare of the child—a somewhat conflicted framework. The Youth Justice Agency
was set up in 2003 to oversee developments. (Initially linked to the Northern Ireland Office, the Agency is
now based in the Justice Department following the formal devolution of criminal justice in 2010).
A distinctive feature of youth justice in Northern Ireland since the turn of the century, has been the major
focus on restorative justice. This focus on mediation and negotiation partially reflects Northern Ireland’s
distinctive history of conflict and peace-making. The first conferencing service was introduced in Belfast
in 2003 and conferencing was rolled out nationally in 2006. Conferences can be held at different stages of
the youth justice process for example prosecutors are empowered to use conferencing as an alternative to
prosecution and the courts can issue a conferencing order as disposal on conviction.
Further innovations introduced by the 2002 Act, but which were linked more closely to the public
protection and welfare components of the youth justice policy frame, were Community Responsibility
Orders (for low level offenders which would involve instruction in citizenship and practical activities,
followed in 2004 by an anti-social behaviour agenda) and a Custody Care Order to accommodate young
people aged between 10 and 13 in the child care system rather than being held in custody with older
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children (O’Mahoney and Campbell 2006). Diversion also came to the fore with a formal Youth Diversion
Scheme implemented in 2003 as a replacement for the juvenile justice liaison scheme (which had been in
operation since 1975), with specialist officers triaging cases.
From the mid-2000s onwards, a particular trend was an increased emphasis on the more welfarist
dimensions of the policy frame. The Office of the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister published a
ten-year strategy for children and young people in 2006 which was predicated on a holistic approach to
supporting the well-being of children. Both the Strategic Framework for Reducing Offending (Department of
Justice 2013) and the Delivering Social Change document (Northern Ireland Executive), developed these
themes with recognition, respectively, that the root causes of offending generally require interventions
that are beyond the reach of the criminal justice system (e.g., improving the well-being and life chances of
vulnerable individuals), with explicit commitments to tackle poverty, improve health, and install the
UNCRC obligations into frameworks for action. Importantly the demands of the UK government Northern
Ireland Office to implement similar arrangements to England for non-negotiable support for at risk
children and families, were rejected, with a focus instead on the provision of intergenerational support to
build trust and more positive relationships with young people. Following the Youth Justice Review 2011
p. 712 there was a rationalization of youth ↵ custody with all young people to be held in Woodlands Secure
Centre. And greater emphasis was placed on desistance, with a commitment in 2015 by the Justice Minister
to embed desistance theory into criminal justice policy and practice, including youth justice. A further
paradigm grafted onto an already somewhat complex conceptual mix.
The youth justice system, however, faced a number of challenges in implementing the recommendations
of the Youth Justice Review, attributed in part to a lack of effective cross-departmental and intra-systemic
alignment (see Carr and McAlister 2021 for a critical overview). And so yet a further scoping study was
commissioned in 2015 drawing together senior representatives from all agencies involved in youth justice,
with the aim of supporting a move to a wholly child-centred system. A further suspension of the Northern
Ireland Assembly (2017–2020), held up progress in taking forward the proposals of the scoping study.
However, 2022 saw the publication of the Strategic Framework for Youth Justice 2022–27. Informed by a
Children First, Offender Second ethos, the document aims at maximizing diversion at every stage of the
youth justice system, infusing rights-based thinking into youth justice processes with an emphasis on
listening to children and their lived experiences. Trauma informed practice also was emphasized with
custody only as a last resort, highlighting major convergence with developments in the other UK nations. It
remains to be seen whether the most recent suspension of the Assembly in 2022 undermines the
progressive intent of the Framework.
Scotland
Since the Act of Union in 1707, Scotland has always had a separate legal and educational system and the
quasi-state which evolved in the form of the Scottish Office enabled a somewhat autonomous approach to
matters of justice to flourish. Prior to devolution, juvenile justice was characterized by a strong
commitment to welfarism, enshrined in the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968, which set in train the
children’s hearing system and turned over to social work the former remit of the probation service, with a
statutory commitment to promote social welfare. The children’s hearing (lay tribunal) system is, aimed at
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early and minimal intervention focused on the needs of the child, and avoiding criminalization and stigma
(see Kilbrandon 1964). Scotland, however, has always been in an anomalous position by dealing with 16
and 17 year olds mostly in the adult criminal justice system (although supervision requirements from the
hearings can be extended up to the age of 18 and the courts can refer such young people back to the
hearings). Importantly, prior to devolution the children’s hearing system became caught up with identity
politics, symbolic of difference between Scotland and England (particularly when there was a retreat from
welfarism in England from the 1970s onwards, and where such signifiers of divergence within Scotland
became part of a constitutional claim of right for self-determination) (McAra 2011, 2017).
Somewhat paradoxically the early years after devolution were accompanied by greater convergence in
youth justice, with the new labour/liberal democratic coalition government looking south of the border for
inspiration. As with the other devolved jurisdictions, this stemmed from a mode of polity building
predicated on differentiation from what went before. The new era was characterized by major architectural
expansion: over a 100 new institutions were created along with the introduction of national standards and
fast tracking procedures. Youth courts were piloted, with the then Cabinet Secretary for Justice stating that
‘punishment’ was key part of the youth justice process (a statement unthinkable 10 years previously).
Whilst the children’s hearing system remained at the heart of youth justice, a range of competing
p. 713 rationales ↵ were imported into policy including restorative measures (police restorative cautioning),
actuarialism, as well as just deserts. Victims too became an important audience for youth justice and
families of young offenders began to be the object of regulation. Specific examples of borrowings include
the anti-social behaviour agenda from 2004 which introduced ASBOS for under 16 year olds, (only around
15 were ever made); parenting orders (none of which were ever made); and curfews. Stringent targets were
set for reduction in the number of persistent offenders by 10 per cent in two years (from a curiously
specified base-line of 1201!).
From 2007/08, there has been an SNP administration in Scotland, elected (first as a minority government)
on a more progressive social democratic and preventative agenda. This heralded a period of further
transformation in youth justice. Existing targets were scrapped, and the overtly tough rhetoric about youth
crime was replaced by a more nuanced discourse. The publication of the policy document, Preventing
Offending by Young People: A Framework for Action, marked the first major statement of intent. This
contained a multiplicity of conflicted ambitions, including a return to a more welfarist approach with an
emphasis on health and education and a more holistic approach to child development. Victims and the
wider community too were highlighted as key audiences. The document also contained elements of a ‘just
deserts’ paradigm, foregrounding proportionality and responsibilization. Whilst multi-agency
partnership working and early intervention were flagged as key to service delivery, emphasis was placed
on the need to build individual, family and community capacities to address barriers faced. This was
somewhat akin to the desistance paradigm’s asset-based approach, but crucially highlighting individual
responsibilities and duties.
Once the SNP became a majority administration (from 2011–2015), it made further changes to the
architecture of justice, with some degree of centralization, including the construction of a national
children’s panel (previously this was locally based), and the construction of a single national police force.
With this rationalization came greater focus on diversion, with the full roll-out of the Whole System
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Approach (see Preventing Offending: Getting it Right for Children and Young People, Scottish Government
2015). The age of prosecution in the criminal courts was raised to 12 and there was legislative change to
ensure that offences admitted during children’s hearings could be classified as alternatives to prosecution
rather than convictions, to remove stigma (see Children’s Hearing [Scotland] Act 2011). The wider justice
strategy for Scotland was predicated on an inclusive approach—with an overt commitment to the
production of a flourishing society.
Over the past five years, Scotland has consolidated its commitment to the whole system approach, with
continued review and reinforcement of its underlying principles. There has also been extension to concepts
of youth, with Polmont Young Offenders Institution retaining certain young people aged 21 to 23, to
prevent them transitioning to the adult prison system (in cases where release would take place on or before
their twenty-fourth birthdays). Recently published sentencing guidelines (2021) now highlight
rehabilitation as the primary purpose in sentencing young people up to the age of 24, with a requirement
to take into account developmental maturity and the impact of factors such as addiction, trauma, and
adverse childhood experiences.
Two other notable changes in recent years have been the raising of the age of criminal responsibility to age
12 (legislated via the Age of Criminal Responsibility [Scotland] Act 2019); and the efforts made to enshrine
the UNCRC into Scots law via the UNCRC [Incorporation] [Scotland] Bill. Although the Bill passed
unanimously in the Scottish Parliament in March 2021, certain sections were deemed beyond the
p. 714 competence of ↵ the Scottish Parliament in a later review by the UK Supreme Court. Finally, the new
youth justice strategy (2021–2024) highlights some of the thematics we see across the other UK devolved
jurisdictions: participation of young people, an emphasis on rights and maximum diversion, with
aspirations to extend the whole system approach up to age 26. Importantly the strategy also contains an
ambition to abolish the use of custody—either on remand or as sentenced—for all under 18s, and to extend
the children’s hearing system up to the age of 18, with the presumption of no prosecution for this age
group. Moreover there is a commitment to support trauma informed therapeutic environments, with
interventions to be crafted to age and stage in maturation.
Final reflections on policy developments

This short history of policy development across UK jurisdictions, has highlighted how systems have
embraced a multiplicity of ‘criminologies’ linked to versions of the child offender as: penitent, commodity;
a flawed identity; having deviant status, being traumatized; and as a patient.
Youth justice has been deployed to support regime building and political capacity at critical junctures—
especially with the New Labour Government in the late 1990s and in the efforts by devolved
administrations to build a sense of identity and assert their right to rule. That this has not always
supported progressive policy-making is evident from the Scottish experience, with a more punitive
dynamic coming to the fore in the early years of devolution. What is striking, however, is, despite
differences in youth justice architecture, how similar Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland have now
become in terms of the aspirations for their children and young people; that progressive youth justice is
increasingly a core dimension of what it might mean to be Welsh or Scottish, or from Northern Ireland.
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Across England, debates about national identity have become subsumed within a broader populist
narrative, and constitutional debates around Brexit. Paradoxically, this has opened up a space for the
convergent trends described above, through the embracing of the mantra Children First, Offender Second,
and reinforced in a context where youth custody no longer comes under the purview of the youth justice
board.
Taken together these developments highlight the potential fragility of contexts in which progressive
policies can be sustained—dependent as they can be on a national imaginary that places children at its
heart and on the conditions in which particular regimes can build authority and retain legitimacy. A critical
question then becomes, to what extent do these policy imperatives flow through the practices of the
agencies which make up youth justice systems; and how is youth justice experienced by those who come
under its tutelage? These are the questions to which the chapter now turns.
Institutional Cultural Practices: Being Passed Along the Chain?
In this section, I highlight a major dissonance between policy and institutional practice that has emerged
across UK jurisdictions and which undercuts many of the core political ambitions linked to youth justice.
While the past decade or so has seen major reductions in the numbers of young people being drawn into
the youth justice system in all constituent parts of the UK, evidence suggests that those remaining within
p. 715 the system ↵ are the product of decision-making practices shaped by culturally defined signifiers of
risk linked variously to poverty, ethnicity, and prior institutional contact (those already known to systems
from an early age). The longevity of such practices, and their impacts on the lives of young people who
come under their purview, arguably, serve to undermine efforts to implement fully more progressive
modes of policy-making. This section begins with an overview of the trends in system contact, before
exploring the drivers of decision-making and their impacts in more detail.
Trends in youth justice: the characteristics and curation of the shrinking client
group
Recent trends suggest that the ‘captive’ population continues to be in decline across all of the jurisdictions
which make up the UK. Whilst the UK does have an aging population, and the number of young people in
the population has correspondingly reduced, this does not in itself explain the shrinking client group of
youth justice. As shown in figures 32.1 to 32.4, when statistics on youth justice activity are expressed as a
rate per 1000 population, rather than a raw number, the reductions, with only a few exceptions, are both
marked and mostly sustained overtime.
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Figure 32.1 Scotland
Source: Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration statistics and population data from the National Records of Scotland.
Figure 32.2 England and Wales
Source: Youth Justice Board statistics and population data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
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Figure 32.3 Northern Ireland
Source: Northern Ireland Youth Justice Agency annual workload statistics.
Figure 32.4 Comparative custody rates
Source: Scottish Prison Statistics and population data from the National Records of Scotland, Youth Justice Board statistics and
population data from the Office for National Statistics, and Northern Ireland Youth Justice Agency annual workload statistics.
Page 22 of 34
Within Scotland, for example, from the mid-2000s onwards, there has been a major reduction (of 89 per
cent) in offence referrals to the Reporter. The number of first time entrants too has significantly reduced in
England/Wales (also by 89 per cent since 2008) and in Northern Ireland (by 76 per cent from 2011/12, the
earliest years for which published figures are available). Whilst these reductions in both Scotland and
England/Wales did stabilize around the mid-2010s, the most recent figures confirm that the trajectory
overall is down. Custody rates too have declined dramatically, with an 82 per cent reduction in the rate per
1000 population in Scotland, a 76 per cent reduction in England/Wales and a 69 per cent reduction in
p. 716 Northern Ireland. ↵
These figures might be taken as evidence of the success of efforts to divert young people away from youth
justice systems, although it should be noted that the reductions in Scotland predate the Whole System
Approach and within Northern Ireland custody rates were already in decline at the point at which
restorative diversionary initiatives were implemented (see Goldson 2011). They also mirror a ‘crime drop’
that has been evident across a range of European jurisdictions over roughly the same timeframe, many of
p. 717 which were also instituting diversionary policies (McAra and McVie 2019). ↵
System contraction, then has resulted in a smaller group of young people coming into contact with youth
justice systems. Rather than these young people representing a hard-core group of serious offenders,
research suggests that those who enter the system and get sucked furthest into it have high levels of
vulnerability and tend to come from most disadvantaged backgrounds (McAra and McVie 2019). This is the
outcome of selection effects in the critical gatekeeping and decision-making practices of agencies such as
the police, the Reporter to the hearings (Scotland) the prosecution service (England/Wales and Northern
Ireland), and the courts; effects which often run counter to the policy ambitions of government. Here I
highlight three examples of such effects.
Poverty
Research has found that poverty is a signifier of enhanced system contact. Within the Edinburgh Study of
Youth Transitions and Crime (Edinburgh Study), for example, coming from a poor background (as defined
by care giver socio-economic status, or deprived neighbourhood) was found to be a key predictor of being
warned or charged by the police; being made subject to intervention through the children’s hearing
system; making the transition to the adult criminal justice system; receiving a conviction in both
childhood and adulthood and ending up in prison—with early childhood experiences continuing to shape
later interactions with the justice system. This pattern held even when controlling for involvement in
serious offending (McAra 2017; McAra and McVie 2022).
Research on policing in Scotland also highlights the impact of poverty in system decisions. Analysis of stop
and search for 12 to 17 year olds in Scotland, reported in McAra and McVie (2019), found that rates in the
top quintile most deprived neighbourhoods were twice as high as those in the least deprived areas. Studies
of policing, during the pandemic lockdowns, found too that those in the most deprived areas were most at
risk of police intervention (see McVie and Matthews 2021).
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p. 718 ↵ The consequence of such practices is that certain young people, repeatedly coming to the attention of
agencies, are powerless to change the very structural disadvantage that makes them at risk of further
system involvement. Indeed there is evidence from the Edinburgh Study that system contact increases the
4
likelhood of poverty—with children’s hearings referrals being predictive of NEET-status in early
adulthood, even when holding a range of school and family related factors constant. And a history of
poverty in the teenage years is also predictive of absolute poverty at age 35 (McAra 2017; McAra and McVie
2022).
The care to justice pathway: the criminogenic effect of being known to systems
Across England/Wales and Scotland, there has been increased attention to so-called ‘cross-over’ children,
namely those who initially come to the attention of agencies for child protection reasons (for neglect or
abuse) but then who have involvement with agencies as a result of offending behaviour in the teenage
years. Research suggests that this care to justice pathway is exacerbated both by institutional practices in
which being known to systems is treated as a signifier of risk in its own right, and by the risks of
criminalization that experiences of residential care carry for some.
A critical finding from the most recent phase of the Edinburgh Study is the very poor outcomes in early
middle age associated with those who were ‘cross-over’ children. Members of the cohort with care
experience who were interviewed at age 35, highlighted the long-term impacts on mental health, poverty,
and criminal histories of what they perceived as family rejection, poor relationships with foster carers or
residential care staff, with one talking powerfully about consistently being passed along a ‘chain’, with no
one agency taking responsibility for their well-being, and another of the traumatizing impact of
transitioning out of care in the early adult years (McAra and McVie 2022).
The over-representation of care-experienced young people in the justice system, is reflected in survey
research conducted by the Scottish Prison Service as part of updating its Vision for Young People in
Custody (2021). Here, two-fifths of responders in custody reported that they had been in care at some
point in their lives, in a context where looked after children make up less than 1 per cent of the total
population of children in Scotland.
In England/Wales, too, youth justice statistics indicate that more than a quarter of children made subject
to a youth court disposal and just over half of children serving a custodial sentence have been in the care of
the local authority (see Bateman 2021 pp. 139–141, HM Inspectorate of Prisons 2021). Girls in custody are
particularly likely to be care experienced. Research by Goodfellow (2017), for example, found that 60 per
cent of girls in secure training centres were either currently or had been previously looked after and just
over two-fifths had a current or previous child protection plan. This pattern of overrepresentation is also
replicated in Northern Ireland, where latest statistics show that just over a third of young people in
custody had been looked after in contrast to just 1 per cent of the general population of children (Brown
2022).
A key issue in terms of cross-over children is the criminalization of young people in residential care.
Scottish research (Moodie and Nolan 2016) has highlighted the complexities and dilemmas in decision-
making in residential homes about when and whether to involve the police and the ‘blurred’ lines between
Page 24 of 34
challenging and offending behaviours (p. 7). A review undertaken by Who Cares Scotland (2018) shows the
ways in which often quite low level behaviours can involve the police, two examples being an assault
p. 719 charge given to a young person for ‘pinging a boiled carrot at staff member with a spoon’; ↵ and a
charge of criminal damage given to child who had smashed a plate. Understaffing, particularly at night,
lack of staff training, a concentration of children with histories of trauma and multiple vulnerabilities, as
well as poor coordination of services for children dubbed as ‘dual status’ (with care and criminal histories)
are all cited as reasons which exacerbate the risks of further criminalization. Northern Irish research
confirms such findings (McAlister et al. 2022), but also highlights the ways in which a lack of support—
from legal services, an appropriate adult, or family member—impacts decisions made throughout the
youth justice system which in turn make criminalization more likely.
Research in England has additionally highlighted the ways in which Black and Minoritised Ethnic children
and young people may be at greater risk of criminalization in residential care. Hunter (2022) found
evidence of racialized assumptions regarding the behaviour of Black children, with greater likelihood of
escalation and involvement of the police. This was attributed to both the drive for profit in privatized care
homes (linked to insurance claims) and lack of staff training.
Concerns about the criminalization of looked after children and care leavers has led to the publication of
national protocols in England (2018) and in Wales (2022) but their medium to longer term impacts have
yet to be seen. However, a pilot (police/multi-agency) protocol in Dumfries and Galloway reportedly led to
a major reduction in criminalization for low level offences by 62 per cent (Cowan 2020).
Race, ethnicity and discriminatory practices

A final example of selection effects relates to the long-term over-representation of young people from
Black and Minoritised Ethnic populations, including Roma and Traveller groups within the youth justice
system in England/Wales.
Whilst acknowledging that the absolute numbers of young people in the justice system had come down,
the Lammy Review (Lammy 2017) pointed out that the proportion of Black and Minoritised Ethnic young
people making up the numbers had continued to rise. A particularly shocking finding from the most
recently published youth justice statistics is the rate of stop and search amongst young people who identify
as Black or Black British, which stands at 73 per 1000 population—compared with young people who are
White at 14 per 1000 population (the rate for minorities as a whole is more than double that for White
children and young people at 32 per 1000). There is evidence that in spite of efforts over many years to
reform discriminatory practices in stop and search, the degree of disproportionately has increased rather
than diminished. Indeed Shiner et al. (2018, p. 48), argue that rates of stops and of arrests (especially for
drugs and for robbery) amongst Black people are now akin to a ‘locked-in inequality’.
Disproportionality is evident too throughout the wider youth justice system, including numbers in
custody. For example in 2019, rates of custody for young people (between the ages of 10 and 17) who were
Black or Black British were just over eight times higher than for White young people and the rate for those
Page 25 of 34
5
from a mixed ethnic background just over four times higher. And the most recently published youth
justice statistics (2020/21) indicate that 52 per cent of young people in custody are from a minoritized
ethnic background as compared with around 30 per cent a decade earlier.
Research undertaken on behalf of the Youth Justice Board (ZK Analytics 2021) found that patterns of
p. 720 offending, including serious offending, could not fully explain why Black ↵ and Black British young
6
people received harsher penalties than White young people. The research also found that practitioner
assessments may have contributed to differences in likelihood of receiving a harsher outcome: in addition
to being assessed as being at higher risk of reoffending, young people identifying as Black or Black British
were also perceived to be at greater risk of serious harm than the other groups, with significantly more
concerns expressed about their safety and well-being (p. 9). It is troubling that such vulnerabilities still
resulted in more severe penalties.
Surveys carried out by HM Prisons Inspectorate indicate that ethnicity can impact the treatment of young
people in custody. The most recent report (HM Inspectorate 2021) found that in comparison with White
young people, fewer Black and Minoritised Ethnic young people felt staff cared for them or that staff had
helped them to reach their goals: a higher proportion of Black young people also reported experience of
physical restraint than other groups.
Taken together, these patterns indicate long standing practices which critically shape the experience of
young people across the justice system, and potentially have longer term and deleterious consequences. Of
particular note is the way in which young people are not able to control some of the key factors which lead
to greater youth justice system involvement—poverty, care experience, racialized conceptions of
behaviour and ethnicity. This may serve to delegitimize agencies in the eyes of young people, but critically
also highlights a disjuncture and cultural dissonance, between these selection effects and the (sometimes
progressive) intent of youth justice policy and associated paradigmatic framings.
The Futures of Youth Justice
Given the contingent nature of policy-making and the cultural practices of agencies, what then of the
future of justice for children and young people who come into conflict with the law? In this final section, I
consider the likely longer term and confounding impacts of the pandemic and the broader constellation of
crises besetting the UK, and offer some reflections on the prospects for youth justice.
A critical finding from research is the disruption that contemporary crises, including the pandemic, is
having on child development and the well-being of young people, with likely increased risks of violence
and self-harm.
International research, including a range of UK studies, has demonstrated the negative impacts of
lockdown on adolescent mental health (Newlove-Delgado et al. 2021; Magson et al. 2021). For example a
Scottish-based study found that rates of moderate to severe depression in school pupils had increased
five-fold from pre-pandemic levels and anxiety almost doubled, whilst around one in three of the young
people surveyed met the screening threshold for post-traumatic stress disorder (McCluskey et al. 2021,
Stewart et al. 2022). Importantly, the research found that those who had already been identified by
Page 26 of 34
agencies as vulnerable, were the most likely to report a deterioration in their mental health over lockdown,
especially those in receipt of mental health support pre pandemic, those with additional educational
support needs, and those with poor relationships with caregivers. Research is also beginning to highlight
p. 721 the adverse impacts ↵ of lockdowns on child development by lack of socialization over a critical time
frame, loss of education, and impacts on language development (see Education Endowment Fund 2022,
Rao and Fischer 2021). The effects of increased parental stress and rates of domestic violence (see Gadd
this volume) are also likely to have negative consequences for the well-being of children.
The pandemic lockdowns also have had a particularly negative impact on low-income families, now
exacerbated by the wider economic and energy crises which the UK is facing. Child poverty remains at a
high level, with Action for Children (see Stone 2022) reporting child poverty rates of 34 per cent in Wales,
29 per cent in England, 21 per cent in Scotland and 24 percent in Northern Ireland. The most recent Joseph
Rowntree report on Poverty in Scotland (Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2022, p. 2) reports ‘a bleak picture of
a society in crisis’, with one in five families on low incomes going hungry and cold, and over a quarter of
families with children cutting back on food and heating. Being able to eat well is a critical part of
educational attainment (Audit Scotland 2022). Poverty too is associated with stigma and victimization
from bullying. The Report of the Independent Care Review in Scotland (2020) highlights powerfully the
ways in which poverty acts as a key driver of system contact for child protection, and persistent poverty
interacts with the care system to create what it terms ‘intergenerational trauma’ (Independent Care
Review 2020, p. 18).
The most recent phase of the Edinburgh Sudy highlights a strong and enduring relationship between
violence, poverty, depression, and self-harm—inter-dependencies which in our cohort, continue to have
negative effects over a twenty-year span. Our findings suggest that the lasting impact of contemporary
crises might be increases in dual forms of harm amongst young people– namely harm to self and violence
to others—and increased poverty and extremely poor mental health over the longer term (as youngsters
mature into adulthood) (McAra in press).
One of the main lessons of the pandemic and subsequent crises, is that if we deal with the impact of such
issues primarily through the lens of youth justice, there is both a risk that we understate the intersectional
and structural dynamics which are driving the contexts of vulnerability, and a risk that a new moral panic
about youth crime emerges. Here then there is potential for tension between the holistic, child-centred,
more progressive narratives of the convergent policy framings across the UK (described in the second
section above) and the performative, political capacity-building role that youth justice so often is required
to play. And whilst diversionary measures have often found favour in the context of economic crises and
austerity (especially in England), the intensification of poverty today, is likely to draw more young people
into the justice system (not least because of the cultural practices of agencies, set out in the third section
above). Overcoming such tensions will require courage and vision on the part of politicians and policy-
makers, not only to work across portfolios (education, health, economy, and more), but also to understand
and treat violence as a signifier in itself of deeper-seated vulnerabilities. Fundamentally the multiplicity of
crises underscores the need for progressive policy-making but at the same time may serve to undermine
its current hold on the political imagination: the futures of youth justice will be determined by how this
contradiction is negotiated.
Page 27 of 34
Conclusion
This chapter has explored the paradigms, performance and future prospects for, systems of justice for
children and young people coming into conflict with the law. As I have argued, the concept of the best
p. 722 interests of the child and the duties it places upon the ↵ state are fundamental dimensions of
progressive policy. That these are challenging to put into practice, is reflected in some of the compromises
evident within international standards—diluting key imperatives in the attempt to provide a universe of
discourse. The deployment of youth justice as a means of building political capacity, bears out Garland’s
assertion, set out at the head of the chapter, that youth justice is about ‘defining ourselves and our society’.
This renders the contexts in which progressive policy making can be sustained somewhat fragile, as
debates on youth justice get caught up in identity politics, nation building, and the performance of
governing itself. The entrenched working cultures of the agencies within the system themselves add to this
fragility, serving to reproduce a client group of the most poor, dispossessed and discriminated against
young people: children who are consistently passed along the chain (as per the quote from the Edinburgh
Study cohort member). Systems are often experienced by the young people subject their tutelage as
exclusionary and punitive even although policy and practice may have benign intentions. Indeed the wider
constellation of crises which young people are living through now, are likely to intensify vulnerabilities,
with risks of violence and self-harm. We need to learn from this history of the present in order to deliver
justice—so that the first instinct is not more control, nor deterrence nor punishment. A generative
approach to justice which builds social solidarity and frames offending as a product of wider disadvantage
beyond the control of the child, is a necessary first step.

The Oxford Handbook series constitutes a major archive of research on youth justice in its own right, with important
essays by Pearson, Youth, Crime and Society (first edition, 1994); Newburn, Youth Crime and Youth Culture (fourth
edition, 2007); Morgan and Newburn, Youth Justice (fourth edition, 2007); and Youth Crime and Justice: Rediscovering
Devolution, Discretion and Diversion (fifth edition, 2012).
The specialist journal Youth Justice: An International Journal (Sage publishing), contains a wealth of articles based on
original research on aspects of youth crime and justice across the UK jurisdictions and internationally. Each edition
contains an overview of policy, research and practice developments curated by Tim Bateman, and commentary on
legal developments by Nigel Stone. Also recommended is Goldson’s edited collection Juvenile Justice in Europe (2019).
Finally readers should always be encouraged to go back to classic texts on crime and punishment. Particular
recommendations are: Stan Cohen’s Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classification (1985); David
Matza’s Delinquency and Drift (1964), Geoff Pearson’s Hooligan. A History of Respectable Fears (1983); and David Thorpe
and colleagues key text on diversion, Out of Care: The Community Support of Juvenile Offenders (1980).
Page 28 of 34
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Youth Justice Board, Bwrdd Cyfiawnder leuenctid (2014), Children and Young People First: Welsh Government/Youth
Justice Board Joint Strategy to Improve Services for Young People for Wales at Risk of Becoming Involved in, or in the
Youth Justice System,
Youth_Justice_Strategy_English.PDF <https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/
attachment_data/file/374572/Youth_Justice_Strategy_English.PDF>
Zehr, H. and Mika, H. (1998), ‘Fundamental Concepts of Restorative Justice’, Contemporary Justice Review, 1: 47–55.
ZK Analytics (2021), Ethnic Disproportionality in Remand and Sentencing in the Youth Justice System: Analysis if
Administrative Data, Youth Justice Board.
Page 33 of 34
Notes
1
This phrase is a shorthand for approaches which focus on the child’s needs rather than seeking to frame responses
initially in terms of the offending behaviour (see Haines and Case 2015).
2
Enabled by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998.
3
Enabled by the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999.
4
Not in Education, Employment or Training.
5
Rates calculated from Youth Justice Statistics and ONS statistics on age, sex and ethnicity in the population of
England/Wales.
6
The likelihood of receiving a ‘first tier’disposal (absolute or conditional discharge; bind over; fine; action plan,
compensation, referral, reparation orders) rather than an out of court disposal was 2 to 10 percentage points higher
for Black and Black British young people, and of receiving custody rather than an alternative disposal was 2 to 8
percentage points higher.
Related Links
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Page 34 of 34
33. Restorative justice in the twenty-first century: Making emotions mainstream

p. 725 33. Restorative justice in the twenty-first century: Making

emotions mainstream
Meredith Rossner
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0033
Abstract
This chapter explores recent developments in restorative justice theory, research, and practice. It examines reasons why it has
been challenging to define restorative justice and offers a definition that articulates the relationship between values,
processes, and outcomes. It then explores the main theoretical traditions that seek to explain how and why restorative justice
‘works’ as a response to crime: shame theories, procedural justice theories, and ritual theories. Following this, it reviews the
empirical evidence on how offenders and victims experience restorative justice compared to court, and whether it can reduce
reoffending. It concludes by surveying select debates and tensions that arise as the practice continues to evolve.
Keywords: restorative justice, victims, offenders, rituals, emotions, restoration, reparation, reoffending, criminal justice
policy
Introduction
Although we are fed a steady diet of ‘courtroom drama’ in popular culture, the reality of court is rather
more banal. Jury trials are rare, most offenders plead guilty, and cases are routinely processed with
bureaucratic and administrative gusto. If emotions are expressed, they generally take the form of
seemingly contrived indignation of judges and lawyers during a sentencing hearing. Victims are
sometimes invited to give impact statements in select cases, offenders rarely speak at all.
This chapter will explore a very different type of justice encounter, one that puts the emotional
1
expressions of victims, offenders, and community members at the centre of the interaction. Restorative
justice involves bringing together people who have been affected by a crime to take part in a discussion
Page 1 of 29
around what happened, how people were affected, and how to make things better. Implicit in this approach
is a model of justice that reconceptualizes crime as an offence against a particular person or community,
rather than simply a violation of state law (Christie 1977). If crime is about people as well as law, then
justice should be about repairing relationships between those people in addition to more abstract notions
of criminalization and desert.
Restorative justice has been around since at least the 1970s in Western justice systems, though it arguably
has roots in more ancient forms of dispute resolution and some Indigenous justice practices (Braithwaite
p. 726 2002a). Once conceived of as a ‘new lens’ ↵ through which to view justice (Zehr 1990), it is increasingly
seen as a complementary part of wider criminal justice (Hoyle 2012; Shapland et al. 2006). Today
restorative justice practices can be found across most of the world. In England and Wales, where much of
the restorative justice practice is managed through Police and Crime Commisioners, most police forces
report practicing restorative jutsice in some form, and the overwhelming majority report having good
working relationshpis with other arms of criminal justice, include prisons, probation, and community
rehabilitation (Keeling 2019). Scotland also has a robust approach to restorative justice, with a 2019 Action
Plan that seeks to enable restorative justice across Scotland by 2023, with relevant policies that will allow it
expansion across youth and adult justice (Scottish Government 2019, Maglione et al. 2022). Northern
Ireland has an integrated and entrenched system for restorative justice, with the 2002 Justice (Northern
Ireland) Act providing a statutory basis for the use of restorative justice for nearly all types of youth
offences (Jacobson and Gibbs 2009; Payne et al. 2010) and in 2022 launched a restorative justice strategy
for adults (Department of Justice 2022).
Elsewhere around the world restorative justice has gained momentum with legislation, government
initiatives, and NGOs providing some form of restorative justice across Australia and New Zealand, Europe,
Asia, and North America (Gavrielides 2016; Larsen 2014, Maxwell and Liu 2007, Silva and Lambert 2015;
Zhang and Xia 2021). Restorative justice and other peace-building initiatives also have a history in the
Pacific Islands, the Middle East, and parts of Africa (Braithwaite 2002a; Braithwaite and Gohar 2014;
Braithwaite and Zhang 2017; Maxwell a Hayes 2006). There has been a proliferation of international
instruments on the use of restorative justice, including from the Council of Europe, the European Union,
the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, and the Organization of American States, suggesting a
growing consensus on its applicability in criminal matters (Marder 2020).
Restorative justice has proven enormously compelling to criminologists, activists, and politicians. A
particular strength is that it can appeal to both the political Right and Left, to victims’ organizations and to
abolitionists. This is perhaps because it can suit various, and at times conflicting, justice and political
objectives: to empower victims and communities, to hold offenders accountable, to reduce offending, to
save money, and to reduce incarceration. It also stands out as a process that focuses on emotions and
building social bonds in a criminal justice system that is increasingly bureaucratized and depersonalized
(Garland 2001). Indeed, its popularity may stem from the fact that it provides a veneer of social cohesion
that masks more oppressive criminal justice practices (Bottoms 2003; see also Maglione 2021). Alongside
this momentum, there is a danger that as the practice is institutionalized and mainstreamed, it will come
to serve institutional goals of efficiency or compliance, rather than meaningful restoration or healing
(Aertsen et al. 2006; Pavlich 2005).
Page 2 of 29
The rise of restorative justice in different contexts to suit different issues and ideologies has led to a
significant amount of confusion and debate about what it actually is, and what it purports to do. One source
of this confusion is that restorative justice is at times conceived of as a normative theory of how justice
ought to be and at other times as an explanatory account of a specific process (Braithwaite and Pettit
2000). This chapter seeks clarity. It examines competing definitions of restorative justice, the principles
and normative assumptions that underpin it, the explanatory theories that seek to account for its
successes and failures, and the empirical research surrounding it. It concludes by surveying select debates
and tensions that arise as the practice continues to grow.
p. 727 What is Restorative Justice?
The term restorative justice has been used countless times as something of an omnibus term to describe
various innovations in criminal justice. Practices include activities such as victim–offender mediation,
family group conferences, restorative conferences, restorative cautions, sentencing circles, and
community reparation boards. Given this diversity, it is not surprising that it has proved difficult to reach a
2
consensus about its definition (Doolin 2007; Johnstone and Van Ness 2007).
One source of confusion is that restorative justice has been defined at times as a set of values and other
times as a practice (Braithwaite 2002b; Marshall 1999; Wright 1991). It has been referred to by some
scholars as ‘more of an idea, philosophy, set of values, or sensibility than a single and uniform set of
practices of processes’ (Menkel-Meadow 2007: 179). This approach is attractive in that it creates a wide
umbrella for restorative practices. For this reason, Johnstone (2011) argues that those who seek to define
restorative justice should focus on ‘the range of goals and values embodied in the practice of restorative
justice’ rather than viewing restorative justice ‘simply as a new technique for controlling crime’ (2011: 5).
From this perspective, the goal for the future of restorative justice is to ‘cement a common core of values
and ethics’ (Shapland 2014: 124).
Other scholars seek to define restorative justice as a specific practice or a procedure (McCold 2000). They
argue that while it is important to articulate its underlying values and aspirations, restorative justice needs
to be defined in concrete terms and ‘not [as] an alternative to retributive justice, not a new way of thinking
about crime and justice, and not a set of aspirations for social change’ (Daly 2016: 5). One reason for this
approach, most relevant to criminologists, is that defining it as a practice allows it to be subject to
empirical inquiry.
This approach is taken in the widely used definition by the Home Office researcher Tony Marshall:
Restorative justice is a process whereby all the parties with a stake in a particular offence come
together to resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the offence and its implications
for the future. (Marshall 1999: 5)
This definition appears in most books and articles on the subject. The key element of this definition is that
it is a practice (people ‘come together’ to ‘deal’ with something). It also includes a forward-looking
3
element (dealing with ‘implications for the future’). However, Marshall prefaces his definition by stating
Page 3 of 29
that restorative justice ‘is not any particular practice, but a set of principles which may orientate the
general practice of any agency or group in relation to crime’ (1999: 5). This conflation of practice and
principle has confused many.
Embedded in Marshall’s definition is a second source of confusion about restorative justice. It has been
variously defined as a process or an outcome (or both). A process-based definition stresses dialogue and
p. 728 cooperation. However, Marshall’s defintion also ↵ suggests that such a process will lead to an outcome.
This commonly includes an agreement to ‘repair the harm’ of an offense through apology, forgiveness,
repayment, or some other symbolic or material reparation (Retzinger and Scheff 1996).
Restorative justice that focuses on outcomes is perhaps more inclusive, as it could include cases where
victims are not willing to consent to a restorative justice process (Dignan 2003). But a danger of including
outcomes in a definition of restorative justice is that there is no clear reason why certain outcomes will be
reached in all cases, particularly when the process is dominated by the unique needs and desires of
different people in specific contexts. As restorative justice is mainstreamed there is a danger that a focus
on on outcomes will come to dominate (Shapland 2014), and lead to a one-size-fits-all model. For
instance, offenders could be compelled to apologize, or victims to forgive, presenting a danger to the
integrity of the practice.
Daly (2016) has suggested that restorative justice is best defined as a justice mechanism:
Restorative justice is a contemporary justice mechanism to address crime, disputes, and bounded
community conflict. The mechanism is a meeting (or several meetings) of affected individuals,
facilitated by one or more impartial people. Meetings can take place at all phases of the criminal
process, pre-arrest, diversion from court, pre-sentence, and post-sentence, as well as for
offending or conflicts not reported to the police. Specific practices will vary, depending on
context, but are guided by rules and procedures that align with what is appropriate in the context
of the crime, dispute, or bounded conflict (Daly 2016: 14).
4
This is a rather useful and precise definition. Here, restorative justice is a practice and a process, not a value
or an outcome. Certain values underpin the practice, and those values can and should be debated and
adjusted in different contexts. Similarly, restorative justice processes are likely to have some kind of an
outcome, but this will depend on the legal, procedural, and cultural context in which it takes place.
Potential values and outcomes expand and contract in different situations; elements of the process remain
5
the same.
Furthermore, one can identify the core elements of the restorative justice mechanism. These core elements
are: lay encounters, expressive narratives, and ritual dynamics.
Page 4 of 29
Lay encounters
A unique element of restorative justice practices is that they empower lay people—victims, offenders,
families, friends, and community members—to actively participate in some kind of deliberative forum. In
p. 729 a well-known and enduring critique of ↵ contemporary criminal justice, Christie (1977) famously
pointed out that through criminal law and criminal procedure the state ‘steals’ conflict, and the power to
deal with conflict, from those most affected by it. A criminal justice system that is dominated by
professionalization and bureaucratization is less able to address the direct needs of victims, offenders, and
6
communities (Garland 2001). Restorative justice, on the other hand, is expressly designed to be a bottom-
up encounter, where lay people interact with each other to address the specific impacts of a particular
criminal offence or conflict. The main forms that this encounter can take include victim–offender
mediation, family group conferencing, restorative justice conferencing, and circle sentencing.
Victim–offender mediation involves an encounter between victim and offender, convened by a neutral
third-party facilitator. This model has evolved from various approaches across North America and Europe.
Family group conferencing and restorative justice conferencing arose out of practices developed in New
Zealand and Australia and involve a larger circle: victims, offenders, and direct stakeholders such as
family, friends, and respected community members. Circle sentencing, generally found in North America,
Australia, and New Zealand, is a restorative justice practice that is normally embedded in a criminal
sentencing process, particularly in communities where First Nations peoples are overrepresented in crime
and criminal justice. This usually involves an encounter between a number of different stakeholders,
including the offender, victim, families, community elders, judges and other criminal justice officials
7
(Johnstone 2011).
While lay people are at the centre of the restorative justice encounter, professionals always have, and will
continue to have, an important role in the process. Restorative justice processes can include roles for
facilitators, service providers, social workers, probation officers, and police. Professionals also participate
‘outside the circle’ with a complex web of criminal justice staff supporting the integration of restorative
justice into the courts or other institutions. A burgeoning literature on ‘democratic professionalism’
suggest that professionals serve a vital role in meeting the needs of lay participants, but that effective
collaboration requires a clear delineation of roles and tasks as well as an explicit set of shared goals (Dzur
2008; Rossner and Bruce 2016).
Narrative/expressive elements
The second defining element of a restorative justice mechanism is that it involves the development of a
narrative that articulates the voices of lay people. Indeed, restorative justice encounters are carefully
designed and managed so that specific types of narratives emerge. Most processes rely on a variation of a
‘script’ where a facilitator first asks the offender to describe the events leading up to the offence and the
details of the offence. Then the victim and other participants speak about how they have been affected
p. 730 ↵ by the offence. After a dialogue, the facilitator will often return to the offender and ask how they have
been affected by the offence and by what they have heard.
Page 5 of 29
This structure allows for intertwining narratives of accountability and harm to emerge (Rossner and Bruce
2018). A narrative of harm allows the victim and other stakeholders to articulate the impact of an offence
in their own words. A narrative of accountability allows the offender to acknowledge the harm that has
been caused, accept responsibility, and express remorse. In these narratives, a range of emotions can be
expressed, including anger, fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, remorse, and hope. This expressive dimension,
articulated through these narratives, is a particularly compelling part of restorative justice (Freiberg 2001;
Sherman 2003). Indeed, the emotional element of restorative justice may be its defining characteristic.
The types of narratives found in restorative justice encounters are rather different from the ‘hegemonic
tales’ that dominate courtroom interactions (Ewick and Silbey 1995). While victims may be allowed to
speak in court when providing a victim impact statement, this is not the same as a narrative that is co-
produced, challenged, and negotiated over the course of an interaction, and some reports of these events
suggest that they may prove to be unsatisfactory encounters (Rock 2010). Offenders and community
members are largely excluded from courtroom narratives. When they do speak, they are obliged to use
words and phrases foreign and unfamiliar to them (Carlen 1974; Ericson and Baranek 1982). In restorative
justice everybody speaks, and facilitators are trained to encourage the expression of emotion. Restorative
justice, then, is a mechanism where victims, offenders, and other stakeholders are empowered to tell their
story. While this is a significant strength of the practice, it also has its limitations in that narratives may be
constrained by particular normative or moral ideals (Birkbeck and Smith 2022; Hoekstra 2022; Pemberton
et al. 2019).
Ritual dynamics
A final distinguishing feature of restorative justice concerns its ritual dynamics. It is widely acknowledged
by sociologists and anthropologists that rituals play an important role in social life (Durkheim 1995;
Douglas 1984). As Durkheim pointed out over a century ago, rituals are important because they help one to
make sense of a society’s collective values, morals, and symbols, and give structure, order, and dignity to
otherwise shapeless social events. They also produce ‘collective effervescence’ or feelings of solidarity
with others. In other words, rituals can help to create and sustain belief in a moral order (Collins 2004).
Criminologists have noted that most criminal justice systems have developed increasingly sophisticated
‘degradation rituals’ to mark the guilt and punishment of an offender (Garfinkel 1956). However, unlike in
other social institutions (such as education, the family, the military), criminal justice fails to provide
corresponding ‘reintegration rituals’ that welcome an offender back into a moral community (Maruna
2011; also Llewellyn and Hoebel 1941). Restorative justice proponents have long suggested that it is a
unique form of ritual that runs counter to the dynamics of other criminal justice interventions
(Braithwaite and Mugford 1994; Zehr 1990).
Theoretical perspectives on why ritual dynamics can account for success in restorative justice will be
discussed later in this chapter. For now, it is useful to identify some elements of a restorative justice ritual
that make it unique. This includes its staging, choreography, casting, scripting, and symbols.
Dramaturgical metaphors abound in restorative justice, and provide a useful way of articulating the ritual
p. 731 elements. First, restorative ↵ justice has physical boundaries: participants usually sit in a circle, with
Page 6 of 29
no hierarchy and with clear delineations between who is part of the circle and who is an outsider. This sets
it apart from an adversarial staging of a court. Second, facilitators make an effort to design a seating
arrangement that both supports vulnerable parties and maximizes interaction (Rossner 2013). Third, in
many forms of restorative justice, particularly conferencing models, much effort goes into identifying and
encouraging a ‘community of care’ (McCold 2004). Facilitators are tasked with identifying the ‘right
people’, a particularly challenging job in urban anomic environments (Shapland et al. 2011). The scripted
nature of the practice means that most encounters follow roughly similar trajectories. Finally, the process
usually results in some kind of agreement that reflect the consensus of the participants and detail steps the
offender will take to ‘repair the harm’. They are usually written down and signed by all present.
When restorative justice is viewed as a justice mechanism marked by lay encounters, narratives, and ritual
dynamics, this can allow for both consistency and variations within the process, to suit the needs and the
contexts of particular conflicts and particular people (Shapland 2014). For instance, a restorative justice
conference between a perpetrator and victim of sexual assault (Miller and Iovanni 2013) or homicide
(Walters 2015) may look and feel very different from a conference between a juvenile offender and a local
shop owner in a theft case. There will be variation in the process in terms of the amount and type of
preparation, the staging, and the way that risk is assessed. But the restorative elements remain the same—
a ritualized staging of lay people speaking to each other with room for emotional expression.
Restorative Values, Principles, and Standards
While restorative justice may be defined as a justice mechanism, it is clear that certain values, principles,
8
and standards underpin the process (Braithwaite 2002b; Johnstone 2011; Roche 2003; Van Ness 2003).
Braithwaite articulates a comprehensive framework for identifying different types of standards and
principles that ought to permeate a restorative justice practice (2002b), distinguishing between procedural
standards and outcome standards (Strang and Braithwaite 2000).
First, Braithwaite identifies constraining standards, such as empowerment, non-domination, and

9
accountability. These standards form the basis of any restorative practice and must be honoured as
‘fundamental procedural safeguards’ (Braithwaite 2003: 8).
The second category consists of maximizing standards, including restoration of relationships, emotional
10
restoration, and the prevention of future injustice, often interpreted as the reduction of offending. These
p. 732 are consistent with what victims and offenders ↵ say they want out of such a practice (Strang 2002).
While constraining standards must always be honoured, achievement of maximizing standards is
conditional on the contexts, desires, and capabilities of the parties. If appropriate they should be
encouraged, but not mandated.
The final category consists of emergent standards, including remorse, apology, censure of the act,
forgiveness, and mercy. These principles are no less important than the maximizing standards, but they
differ in key conceptual ways. While maximizing standards can be actively encouraged during a restorative
Page 7 of 29
justice encounter, emergent standards should only arise organically. For instance, a victim of crime should
never be required to express forgiveness just as an offender should never be compelled to show remorse, as
this would violate the constraining standards of non-domination and empowerment.
Figure 33.1 demonstrates the relationship between the restorative justice mechanism and restorative
justice standards. Constraining standards are at the base of the pyramid and they are what every
restorative justice encounter is built upon. The restorative justice mechanism is a specific practice and its
key elements are encounters between lay people, an emphasis on expressive narratives, and ritual
dynamics. Outcomes of restorative justice are maximizing and emergent standards, such as restoration,
prevention of future injustice, expressions of remorse and forgiveness, and others. A restorative justice
mechanism will not guarantee these outcomes but advocates hypothesize that such standards are more
likely to be met in a restorative justice process than other criminal justice processes.
Figure 33.1 Defining restorative justice
Page 8 of 29
Taken together, these standards help shape a normative theory of restorative justice. Normative theories
p. 733 articulate certain principles about how justice ought to be done. ↵ Explanatory theories, and associated
empirical evidence, explain how restorative justice works in practice. In this way, normative and
explanatory theories are integrated: we progressively refine restorative justice values as we do more
empirical research (Braithwaite 2003). Braithwaite’s principles and standards can be understood to reflect
normative theories of justice that centre around freedom and non-domination (Braithwaite 2022,
Braithwaite and Pettit 1990), Empowerment (O’Mahony and Doak 2017), and Relationality (Llewellyn
2021).
Braithwaite (2022) has argued that both crime and justice can be experienced as forms of domination. He
sets out a theory of justice that is based on freedom as foundational in the fight against domination.
Freedom is conceived not just as a liberal concept that values the rights of individuals to make their own
choices. Rather, freedom is located within a republican conception that is respectful, inclusive, and
intolerant to all forms of domination. In a complementary vein, O’Mahony and Doak (2017) centre a theory
of restorative justice around the concept of of empowerment, and its constitutive elements of agency and
accountability.
Restorative justice principles also reflect a deeply relational way of doing justice (Llewellyn 2011, 2021, see
also Zehr 1990). Relational theory posits a theory of justice that is committed to just relations,
characterized by relationships that are grounded in respect, care, and digity (Llewellyn 2011). This is
inspired by a long history of both Indigenous and feminist ways of seeing and knowing the world, and that
takes as a starting point the social fact that we live in relationship with others. As such, a normative
commitment to maintaining and transforming just relationships, on both micro and structural levels, is
paramount. Restorative justice, then, is a model for responding justly to both a particular instance of harm
and a method of transforming structurally unjust relations (Llewellyn and Morrison 2018).
Freedom, empowerment, and relational theories set out a vision for justice. They also have explanatory
elements, in that they can be used to develop a theory of how restorative justice works. The next section
explores explanatory theories and associated empirical research. Explanatory theory provides a framework
for researching and refining the practice of restorative justice in order to meet normative ideals of justice,
however imperfectly.
Explanatory Theories of How Restorative Justice Works
A number of criminological theories attempt to account for some of the claims made by restorative justice
advocates. Three include: shame theories; procedural justice theory; and ritual theories.
Shame theories
As explored earlier, one of the key elements of the restorative justice mechanism is the expression of
emotion in narrative form. While a range of emotions are relevant to restorative justice theory, such as
guilt, remorse, and empathy (Harris 2003; Harris et al. 2004; Van Stokkom 2002), shame is the central
emotion around which most theory is built. Braithwaite’s reintegrative shaming theory is the most well-
Page 9 of 29
known theoretical foundation for restorative justice. Though mention of restorative justice does not
p. 734 appear ↵ in Braithwaite’s ground-breaking Crime, Shame, and Reintegration (1989), practitioners,
advocates, and scholars quickly embraced the book’s central concepts, such as the now-classic distinction
between stigmatic and reintegrative shaming. Braithwaite demonstrates how most criminal justice
processes and sanctions shame an offender in a way that is stigmatizing, condemning not just the
wrongdoing but the individual herself. Reintegrative shaming, on the other hand, is a respectful process
where disapproval of the criminal act is expressed but offenders are given a chance to express remorse and
can then be welcomed back into a moral community. While stigmatic shaming can have long-term
negative impacts on an individual, reintegrative shaming will strengthen social bonds and internally build
a conscience that prevents future wrongdoing. This theory has been widely used by academics and
practitioners to explain the mechanisms of restorative justice. In later works, Braithwaite connects
reintegrative shaming theory to a restorative normative framework, identifying reintegrative shaming as
an explanatory dynamic that can explain how remorse, apology, forgiveness, censure, mercy and other
values may arise in restorative justice (2002a). In particular, forgiveness seems to carry unique
transformative potential for victims and offenders (Forsyth and Braithwaite 2020; Rossner 2019).
Other scholars shift the focus from the external act of shaming to the internal process of feeling ashamed.
Scheff and Retzinger (1991) argue that shame is a repressed emotion in contemporary society and can
often go unacknowledged. This leads to further shame about feeling ashamed, resulting in a cycle of
aggression, anger, dysfunctional patterns of communication, These negative consequences can simply be
avoided if shame is acknowledged. A restorative justice conference, for example, is theorized to bring
shame to the surface in a way that redirects aggressive emotions. When offenders and victims are both able
to acknowledge any shame they might feel, this can lead to symbolic reparation and reintegration, usually
through the expression of remorse and forgiveness (Retzinger and Scheff 1996). In later works,
Braithwaite and colleagues incorporate elements of unacknowledged shame into a broader theory of
restorative justice, shaming, ethical identity, and shame management (Ahmed et al. 2001; Harris and
Maruna 2006).
Procedural justice theory

Shame theories imply that shame needs to be coupled with respectful treatment. This is the heart of
procedural justice theory, which asserts that if citizens feel that their treatment at the hands of authority
figures is fair, inclusive, and respectful, they are more likely to obey the law (Tyler 1990; Tyler and Huo
2002).
Defiance theory incorporates elements of reintegrative shaming, unacknowledged shame, and procedural
justice to argue that similar criminal sanctions have different effects for offenders in different social
situations (Sherman 1993). Defiance, which can result in a rejection of the law and future offending, occurs
when an offender views a sanction as illegitimate, has weak bonds to the sanctioning agent, or denies his
or her shame in the offence. Deterrence, on the other hand, can result if the sanctions are regarded as
legitimate, offenders express shame for their actions, and they have strong bonds with mainstream
society.
Page 10 of 29
The voluntary nature, deliberative structure, and encouragement of stakeholder participation in

restorative justice can lead to increased perceptions of fairness, legitimacy, and social bonding (Tyler
2006). A large body of empirical research demonstrates the relationship between procedural justice theory
and restorative justice practice (Barnes et al. 2015; Miller and Hefner 2015; Van Camp and Wemmers 2013).
p. 735 Ritual theories

Procedural justice and shame theories make claims about how the process of restorative justice will lead to
desired outcomes. However, they do not specify precisely how feeling shame, fairness, or trust brings
about such outcomes. A final theoretical perspective focuses on the micro-level elements of producing a
successful ritual. Ritual theories draw on a long tradition in sociology and anthropology arguing that one’s
sense of morals, community bonds, and the self are a function of the rituals in which one partakes, both
sacred and profane (Collins 2004; Durkheim 1995).
The restorative justice ritual brings together victims and offenders, their emotions, and their stories to
produce solidarity and other conciliatory emotions (Rossner 2013). In particular, when bringing people
together in a face-to-face encounter with clear barriers to outsiders and a shared focus of attention, a
certain rhythm will build up between participants as they become more in sync with each other’s emotions
and perspectives. This rhythm leads to entrainment—people are focused on and feel connected to each
other, akin to Durkheim’s notion of ‘collective effervescence’ (Collins 2004). Solidarity and shared
emotion may then be demonstrated through expressions of apology and forgiveness, and symbolic
integration through handshakes, eye contact, and hugs (Rossner 2011). This is a particularly striking type
of ritual when one considers the asymmetrical degradation rituals of court (Carlen 1976; Rock 1993). In
theory, the micro-level production of solidarity and shared emotion provides restorative justice with the
unique power to achieve its standards and goals. O’Mahony and Doak (2017) draw on this tradition and its
associated empirical base to explain the mechanism through which empowerment, agency, and
accountability ‘work’ in restorative justice.
Consistent with both the narrative element of restorative justice and ritual theory, Bolitho (2017) draws on
the concept of memory reconsolidation to explore how restorative justice can help victims. Through the
ritualized act of telling one’s story, within the supportive and structured confines of a restorative justice
circle, a victim may ‘re-write’ a harmful emotional memory, substituting it with the positive emotions
experienced during the restorative encounters.
While these theories can help explain why restorative justice might achieve successful outcomes, they can
also account for its failures. A worry is that restorative justice can become another form of degradation
ritual, marked by stigmatic shaming, unfair processes, and coercion (Braithwaite and Mugford 1994). As
theoretical, empirical, and normative accounts of restorative justice develop, an examination of both what
works and what does not can help to clarify theory, improve standards, and enhance practice.
Page 11 of 29
Empirical Research
Restorative justice has been subject to an enormous amount of empirical research, perhaps more than any
other criminal justice innovation in recent history (Strang and Sherman 2015). Much of the research
examines restorative justice as a diversion or a supplement to court and focuses on outcomes such as
restoration, fairness, legitimacy, and future offending, largely mapping onto the maximizing and
emergent principles articulated by Braithwaite. Whereas early research tended not to include a control
group or to utilize matched controls, a growing body of research now draws on randomized controlled
p. 736 trials (Sherman et al. 2015b). Responding to calls for more in-depth ↵ analysis of the process and
dynamics of restorative justice (Braithwaite 2002a), there is also a sizable qualitative literature drawing on
observations and interviews that looks more closely at the actual practices of restorative justice. This
research includes a focus on facilitation and staging (Bruce 2013; Bolitho 2015), power (Cook 2006),
emotions (Bruce and Bolitho 2019; Rossner 2011, 2019), language (Hayes and Snow 2013, Willis 2020), and
others.
Participant experiences with restorative justice

Braithwaite’s constraining standards include respect, accountability, empowerment, and non domination.
His maximizing and emergent standards include concepts such as restoration, apology, and forgiveness.
Extant research suggests that all of these are experienced, on average, in greater quantities by participants
in restorative justice conferences compared to those whose cases end up in traditional courts.
Research from the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada suggests that both offenders and
victims perceive restorative justice as fairer, more satisfying, and more legitimate than that which is
offered in the courtroom. Offenders who participate in restorative justice have a better understanding of
what is happening, are more actively involved in their case, and are more likely to report that they are
treated with respect and fairness (Barnes et al. 2015; Morris and Maxwell 1998; Tyler et al. 2007).
Restorative justice conferences can also result in a higher frequency—and larger amounts—of restitution
paid to victims (Strang 2002; Umbreit et al. 2004).
In a comprehensive study of restorative justice for British offenders, Shapland and colleagues (2007)
reported that the large majority of victims and offenders found their conferences to be useful, felt a sense
of closure, and were more satisfied with their procedures than those who went to court. Notably, those
whose offences were most serious were significantly more likely to find their conference useful compared
to those who committed less serious offences.
Research from Australia examining the role of shame in restorative justice reports that offenders who
participate in restorative justice conferences experience both reintegrative and stigmatic shame in higher
quantities than offenders who go to court (Ahmed et al. 2001). This suggests that while restorative justice
can maximize positive emotions, it can also provide a space for more harmful processes. All emotions,
both positive and negative, have the potential to be amped up in such encounters.
Page 12 of 29
Healing victims
There is clear evidence that restorative justice is beneficial to victims of crime. Symbolic reparation,
generally in the form of an apology, is often important to victims’ satisfaction levels. Victims who meet
their offender and receive an apology are more forgiving, feel more sympathetic towards the offender, and
are less likely to desire physical revenge (Sherman and Strang 2011). Similarly, Poulson’s (2003) early
review of restorative justice evaluations illustrates a range of positive psychological outcomes for victims.
Randomized trials in Great Britain which built on Strang’s (2002) work provide strong evidence of
increased well-being for victims who meet with their offender, compared with victims who do not
(Shapland et al. 2007; Strang et al. 2006). This is confirmed by Angel et al. (2014) who analyse Post
Traumatic Stress (PTS) symptoms in victims of crime randomly assigned to a restorative justice
conference or a control and find significantly reduced levels of PTS symptoms immediately following a
conference.
p. 737 ↵ A minority of victims and offenders feel worse after a conference, specifically when they reported not
being involved or disrespected when reaching an outcome (Morris and Maxwell 1993; Strang 2002).
Similarly, Shapland et al. (2007) found that the minority of participants that were unhappy with their
conference pointed to instances where they felt they were not being taken seriously, or that they felt
uninformed or not included in a follow-up after the conference. Finally, Choi et al. (2012) point out that
when victims are unhappy with their experience of restorative justice it is often when they feel little
attention has been paid to the process and most of the focus is on developing suitable outcomes for the
offender. Although such cases are a minority, they highlight the links between the conference dynamics,
procedural justice, and subsequent satisfaction. Victims and offenders do not always feel that they can tell
their story, develop rapport, or achieve solidarity. When elements of the process go wrong, participants
can leave the interaction feeling worse. These findings point to the importance of maintaining high
standards of training and practice in order to preserve the integrity of the process.
Reducing reoffending
The best research on restorative justice and reoffending shows a modest but consistent positive effect on
recidivism reduction. Due to the many challenges of adequate implementation and evaluation, much
research on restorative justice and recidivism has been hindered by the lack of an adequate comparison
group, little statistical power, or other methodological issues (Weatherburn and Macadam 2013). The most
rigorous evaluations of restorative justice employ either a randomized or matched control group for
comparison and suggest that restorative justice can reduce future injustices by both reducing reoffending
and saving money.
Eary reviews of the evidence on restorative justice resulted in cautiously optimistic conclusions about its
effectiveness (Braithwaite 2002a). Since then, a number of meta-analyses and systematic reviews have
attempted to address some of the methodological limitations of previous research by pooling data to look
at trends in results (Bonta et al. 2006; Bradshaw et al. 2006; Latimer et al. 2005). Though the impact of
restorative justice on recidivism varies by degree, all studies conclude that restorative justice, compared to
court, results in a modest reduction in offending. There is also evidence of secondary deterrence in a
Page 13 of 29
reduced desire for revenge by victims, thus potentially preventing future retaliatory crimes (Strang 2002).
Strang et al. (2013) report on a systematic review of the most rigorous randomized controlled trials of
restorative justice. Across 10 experiments, they found an overall positive impact on the frequency
recidivism. Furthermore, the analysis indicated that restorative justice may be more effective for violent
crime than for property crime, and for adult offenders compared to young offenders. While the effect sizes
of these analyses are not large, they are contrary to conventional wisdom and standard practice, which
frames restorative justice as most suitable for low-level, juvenile property crimes (Sherman et al. 2015a,
see also Wood and Suzuki 2016). This finding is supported by Rossner (2013) who finds that individuals
with more, and more serious, previous convictions are more likely to benefit from restorative justice
conferences than first time offenders.
There is also strong evidence to suggest that restorative justice conferencing is a cost-effective approach
to reducing crime. Shapland and colleagues (2008) utilize innovative measures to examine the cost of
crime and the impact of restorative justice, finding significant savings (in terms both of criminal justice
processing costs and of the costs of reconvictions) for every £1 spent on delivering restorative justice
conferences.
p. 738 ↵ Like most criminal justice innovations, restorative justice suffers from a ‘heterogeneity
problem’ (Braithwaite 2014), as not all restorative justice processes can be guaranteed to meet the high bar
of maximizing and emergent standards. Indeed, a major flaw in much of the thinking around restorative
justice is that it ‘holds out the promise that these things should happen most of the time when research
suggests that these things can occur some of the time’ (Daly 2003: 234). As such, it is useful to compare not
only restorative justice to court, but to examine variations within restorative justice conferences. An
analysis of within-conference variations shows that offending is less likely when offenders were
remorseful and the outcome agreement was decided by general consensus (Hayes and Daly 2003).
Similarly, Shapland and colleagues (2008) report that decreases in offending are most likely when
offenders reported that the conference helped them realize the harm done, that they found it was useful,
that they wanted to meet the victim, and when they were observed to be actively participating in the
conference. Hipple et al. (2015) report similar results: conferences that observers reported to be
‘restorative’ resulted in less offending, both in the short and long term. Rossner (2013) analyses the ritual
dynamics of restorative justice conferences, comparing the reoffending frequencies for offenders who
participated in emotionally intense and high solidarity conferences with offenders who participated in less
intense conferences, finding that offenders in the former category offended at a much lower frequency,
even five years after their conference (see also Sherman et al. 2015b).
To conclude, the research on restorative justice conferencing and reoffending suggests that it is right to be
optimistic about this process. However, there are important caveats to be made. First, restorative justice
seems to be most effective when it meets constraining, maximizing, and emergent standards. Not all
conferences achieve restoration, reparation, or reductions in offending and we should not expect them to.
Second, these principles are most likely to be met in cases with more serious crime, with adult offenders,
and where the emotional intensity is high. Such conferences are harder to organize, more time consuming,
11
more politically risky, and more expensive, but may be the most effective. Third, the evidence base is
largely limited to tests of the conferencing model, including face-to-face meetings between victims,
Page 14 of 29
offenders, and other stakeholders (Sherman et al. 2015a). One should be cautious about generalizing these
findings to less intensive interventions. For instance, a common practice for police in the UK is to deliver a
‘street level restorative justice’, where a person might be cautioned in a restorative matter by a police
officer on the spot after being apprehended. The offender might be asked to think about harm and making
amends, and there is evidence that the process is an improvement over traditional cautions (Hoyle et al.
2002). However, victims and other stakeholders are not usually involved, and offenders are given little
opportunity to engange deeply with with the process (O’Mahony and Doak 2017; Hoyle et al. 2002;
Paterson and Clamp 2012). While practices such as restorative cautioning might meet some of the
standards and values set out by Braithwaite (2002b), their effects have not been rigorously measured and
the evidence suggests that they are limited in their restorative potential. There is a danger that research
about restorative conferencing is being used as an evidence base for related but fundamentally different
models operating under the same ‘restorative’ banner (Strang and Sherman 2015). This seems especially
p. 739 evident where restorative justice is mainstreamed in a way that largely ↵ focuses at the ‘shallow end’ of
the criminal justice system. Such practices risk the integrity of restorative justce practice, particularly
where they cannot deliver a meaningful restorative interaction.
Beyond the empirical questions about the effects of particular models of restorative justice, there continue
to be lively debates about its normative and practical value. This includes ongoing scholarship about
whether restorative justice should be a diversion or supplement to prosecution (Gavrielides 2008), where it
belongs in the criminal justice system (Shapland et al. 2011), its use for prisoners serving long sentences
for serious crime (Bolitho 2015; Miller 2011), its use in cases of sexual violence and family violence (Daly
and Stubbs 2006; Keenan and Zinsstag 2022), whether it meets retributive aims of criminal justice (Daly
2012; Duff 2003; Walgrave 2008), and its relationship to Indigenous justice (Daly 2002; Tauri 2016).
Conclusion: The Future of Restorative Justice
Restorative justice has been a part of criminal justice in England and Wales for a number of years, with
provisions set out for youth justice, probation, and prisons (Crawford and Newburn 2003; Hoyle 2012). In
recent years, it seems that restorative justice may be having another revival. There has been a flurry of
statements, action plans, and legislation indicating support for the integration of restorative justice in all
stages of the criminal justice system (Collins 2015; Ministry of Justice 2014). In England and Wales, a 2014
Action Plan for restorative justice was paired with a commitment to invest £29 million, channelled
through local Police and Crime Commissioners, into the provision of restorative justice at the local level. At
the same time, the Crime and Courts Act 2013 provides limited statutory support for restorative justice at
the pre-sentence stage, allowing courts to defer sentence to allow restorative justice to take place. While
this ambitious set of strategies is promising, its current implementation has been more piecemeal (Wright
2015). Even with significant investment in restorative justice schemes, case flow remains relatively low
and support can be lukewarm (Shapland et al. 2011; Wigzell and Hough 2015). In England and Wales,
despite the 2014 Action Plan and significant enthusiasm in some parts of the country, there seems little
co-ordinated commitment at the national level and significant variation among Police and Crime
Commisioners regarding resourcing (Keeling 2019). Although the 2020 Code of Practice for Victims of
Page 15 of 29
Crime in England and Wales specified that all victims have a right to learn about Restorative Justice
(Ministry of Justice 2020), recent national statistics indicate that only 5.5 per cent of vicims were actually
offered a meeting with their offender (CSEW 2020).
From this example, one might conclude that the rise of restorative justice is more hype than substantive
reform. This would be a mistake. Restorative justice practices are expanding and diversifying, both within
and outside the formal criminal justice system. Top down policy and legistlation is complemented by a
groundswell of activism that is opening up restorative justice across a broad array of areas, including
sexual violence (Rossner and Forsyth 2021; Keenan and Zinsstag 2022), hate crime (Millington 2021;
Walters 2014), environmental harm (Forsyth et al. 2021, White 2014), healthcare (Lokugamage et al. 2017;
Carrol and Reisel 2018), and decarceration and the movement for racial justice (Davis 2019, Sered 2019).
Indeed, it is useful to conceive of restorative justice as a ‘street-level meta-strategy’ (Braithwaite 2021)
p. 740 that is flexible and adaptable in ↵ different regulatory contexts, with policing or other criminal justice
mechanisms being one such context. It also seems important to attend to the normative theories of both
Braithwaite (2022) and Llewellyn (2021) which remind us that restorative justice is a tool for both micro
and macro level transformation.
To conclude, there are four observations to be made about the growth and increasing mainstreaming of
restorative justice. First, the current mood is one in a long cycle that sees the popularity of, and the
resources for, restorative justice ebb and flow in many jurisdictions. Restorative justice has been on the
verge of ‘taking off’ since at least the 1980s and needs sustained support in order for this to be achieved.
Second, as restorative justice practices expand, attention should be paid to the empirical base, which
suggests that restorative justice conferences are more effective when they are emotionally intense
encounters, with victims and stakeholders present, and for more serious crimes with adult offenders. The
best research to date has focused on the conferencing model, and caution should be advised when
generalizing from this model to different restorative practices, particularly those located at the ‘shallow
end’ of the criminal justice system. Marshall warned of this, with much foresight, when he concluded:
It is its ability to absorb many different concerns that gives it appeal, and it is its grounding in
successful practice that gives it persuasive justification. In this lies its strength and weakness.
There is a grave danger that Restorative Justice may end up being all things to all men and women,
concealing important divergences of practice and aim. (1999: 30).
Third, research into restorative justice has shown that it can be a success, but significant hurdles first need
to be overcome. These include: maintaining referrals and case flow, ensuring cooperation between services
(especially when it comes to data sharing), and upholding standards for training and practice to ensure
high quality and consistent service. There is a particular worry that standards for training and practice will
be sacrificed as restorative justice practices become more integrated into justice systems.
The final point returns to the tension around institutionalization and mainstreaming. By and large,
jurisdictions that have seen the most growth and sustained restorative justice practice have adopted a
statutory basis for the practice. Notable examples of this can be found in New Zealand, Australia, Northern
Ireland, Belguim, and Norway. In each of these jurisdictions, restorative justice is well-integrated into
Page 16 of 29
state or national justice systems. The cases of New Zealand and Northern Ireland provide striking
examples of the value of a strong legistlative basis (Shapland et al. 2008, 2011). In these jurisditions
restorative justice is widely available for young people but support for adults is weak. One reason for this is
the different way restorative justice is incorporated into legislation. In New Zealand, the 1989 Children,
Young Persons, and Their Families Act effectively mandates restorative justice as a first option of all young
offenders. In the case of adults, support for restorative justice appears in three different acts (the
Sentencing Act 2002, Parole Act 2002, and the Victims’ Rights Act 2002), but only encourages its use in
vague terms. The story is similar in Northern Ireland. Originating out of community restorative justice
schemes developed to deal with paramilitary violence, the Justice (Northern Ireland) Act 2002 legislated
restorative justice conferences for all young offenders, either as a diversion or as part of a court order. For
adults, there are select schemes run through probation and victims’ services and a 2022 commitment to
expand access across the country. However, without a legislative basis the implementation and
development of restorative justice relies on the leadership of local judges, legal professionals, and
community activists. This is not enough to sustain its growth. In both New Zealand and Northern Ireland,
p. 741 restorative justice has experienced significant support and success ↵ when it has a statutory basis.
When it does not, as is the case for adults in both countries, its implementation is less impressive.
At the same time, too much integration within criminal justice can undermine the strength of restorative
justice as a flexible and neutral justice mechanism, as well as leading to net-widening, abuse, and co-
option. Empirical research has revealed some truths to these concerns (Bolivar 2015; Gavrielides 2016;
Suzuki and Wood 2017; Zernova 2007). As noted by Gavrielides (2016, p. 85), ‘[Restorative justice] is not
delivered at national and abstract levels. It is a concept that takes meaning and gains significance only
when it has addressed the needs and the imbalances that have been distorted at the individual level.’ A
balance needs to be struck between institutionalization and innovation to ensure continued support and
resourcing for restorative justice while at the same time allowing for flexibility and creativity in service
delivery to meet the actual needs of offenders, victims, and community members.

The best readings that provide comprehensive analysis of theory, research, and debates in restorative justice include
Braithwaite’s Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation (2002a); Johnstone’s Restorative Justice: Ideas, Values,
and Debates (2011); Cunneen and Hoyle’s, Debating Restorative Justice (2010); O’Mahony and Doak’s Reimagining
Restorative Justice (2017); Von Hirsch et al.’s Restorative Justice and Criminal Justice: Competing or Reconcilable
Paradigms (2003); Van Ness et al.’s Restoring Justice (sixth edn, 2022); and Dignan’s Understanding Victims and
Restorative Justice (2005). Readings that include original empirical research on restorative justice can be found in
Strang’s Repair or Revenge: Victims and Restorative Justice (2002); Shapland et al.’s Restorative Justice in Practice
(2011); Rossner’s, Just Emotions: Rituals of Restorative Justice (2013); Ahmed et al.’s, Shame Management Through
Reintegration (2001), Roche’s, Accountability in Restorative Justice (2003); and Miller’s, After the Crime: The Power of
Restorative Justice Dialogues Between Victims and Violent Offenders (2011).
Page 17 of 29
Online resources

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Notes
1
This chapter uses the terms ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ as a shorthand and avoids a deeper discussion of the complexities
of these terms and these roles. It is worth noting, however, that ‘victim’ and ‘offender’ can be viewed as legal terms
that may not be appropriate in some legal and extra-legal contexts. Some restorative justice advocates also seek to
challenge the victim/offender binary, noting the significant overlap between these two statuses in the lived
experiences of many who come in contact with the justice system. Increasingly many restorative justice practitioners
are adopting terms such as ‘person who has been harmed’ and ‘responsible person.’
Page 27 of 29
2
This debate goes well beyond the scope of this chapter. I am taking the relatively narrow conception of restorative
justice as it is commonly used in domestic criminal justice contexts. There are also restorative justice agendas in other
organizational settings, most notably educational institutions, social services, and workplaces (Johnstone 2008).
Restorative justice is also a concept associated with political reconciliation and transition in post-conflict societies,
such as truth commissions and other peace building programmes (Clamp 2013).
3
For a thorough critique of this definition, see Dignan (2005).
4
Note that this definition excludes practices that are sometimes included under the restorative justice umbrella, such
as Indigenous courts, problem solving courts, and truth commissions. It also presents a challenge to contemporary
practices that might have been termed ‘partly restorative’ by McCold and Wachtel (2003), such as some forms of
restorative cautioning and community justice panels. See Paterson and Clamp (2012) for more on this. Strang et al.
(2013) similarly excludes these types of practices in their systematic review of restorative justice, as very few of them
have undergone rigorous evaluations.
5
An important caveat is that this process does not replace adversarial fact-finding. Some threshold of responsibility is
a prerequisite to all restorative justice. This can mean that an offender pleads guilty or is found guilty in court, or in
diversionary schemes it can mean that they admit responsibility prior to the restorative justice encounter (in New
Zealand, the offender must ‘decline to deny’ the offence in order to be eligible). The starting point of restorative
justice is a discussion of what happened, the details of which may or may not be contested, but this is substantively
different from an examination/cross examination to determine ‘the facts.’
6
Alternatively, one can interpret this ‘theft’ as relieving a burden. Victims are a diverse group, and some may not want
the responsibility of dealing with the conflict or may be relieved that the state has stepped in.
7
Note here the distinction between circle sentencing and the broader concept of ‘Indigenous courts’ or ‘Indigenous
justice’. Circle sentencing is a particular justice practice arising in collaboration with First Nations communities in
North America, Australia, and New Zealand. As it is a part of a formal sentencing process, it may be seen as outcomes
focused, surely, but the unique justice mechanism (a dialogue and deliberation with defendants, victims, community
elders, and criminal justice professionals) is designed to be a restorative process. The larger concept of Indigenous
justice may contain elements of restorative justice. See Daly and Marchetti (2012) for more on this.
8
Although a value, a principle, and a standard are all slightly different concepts, they tend to be used interchangeably
in the restorative justice literature.
9
The full list of constraining standards includes: non domination; empowerment; honouring upper limits on
sanctions; respectful listening; equal concern for all stakeholders; accountability; appealability; and respect for
fundamental human rights as outlined in international declarations and conventions.
10
The full list of maximizing standards includes: restoration of human dignity; property loss, safety, damaged
relationships, communities, the environment, freedom, compassion or caring, peace, a sense of duty as a citizen;
emotional restoration; provision of social support to develop human capabilities; and the prevention of future
injustice.
11
Maxwell and Morris (2001) have similarly argued that since high quality restorative justice is so resourceintensive,
practices should focus on persistent serious offenders.

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Page 29 of 29
34. Punishment, victimhood, and social control: towards a criminology of transitional justice

p. 747 34. Punishment, victimhood, and social control: towards a

criminology of transitional justice
Kieran McEvoy, Ron Dudai and Cheryl Lawther
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0034
Abstract
This chapter explores the intersection between criminology and transitional justice. It explores a range of debates related to
the punishment of offenders in the circumstances of post-conflict or post-authoritarian societies, including the role of
prosecutions, amnesties, the reintegration of former combatants, and the role of restorative justice. The chapter next
considers the social and political construction of victimhood in transitional contexts including competing notions of the
‘idealized’ victim. The relationship between transitional justice and social control is then examined including the importance
of countering denial, the relationship between deviance and memory and the particular contribution of efforts ‘from below’ to
counter elites-level narratives on past abuses. The chapter concludes that a criminology of transitional justice provides the
basis for revisiting some of the foundational questions on responding to crime and justice in the most challenging of settings—
a sobering but intellectually rich research agenda for years to come.
Keywords: transitional justice, punishment, victims, social control
Introduction
The notion of Transitional Justice comprises the full range of processes and mechanisms
associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in
order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation. It consists of both judicial
and non-judicial processes and mechanisms, including prosecution initiatives, facilitating
initiatives in respect of the right to truth, delivering reparations, institutional reform and national
consultations.
(United Nations Security Council 2004: 4)
Page 1 of 28
While transitional justice has only really emerged as an area of inquiry in the last 30 years, it has very
quickly acquired all of the trappings of academic ‘respectability’ (McEvoy and Mallinder 2016). Originally
viewed as a sub-specialism of political sciences which focused on the political transition from conflict or
authoritarianism (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986, Arthur 2009), it now attracts serious scholarship from
lawyers, anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and of course criminologists. There are numerous
academic books and articles, university courses, two specialist journals, book series’, major research
grants, and all of the other accoutrements of a vibrant area of study.
The field is also a lively one for policy and practice. Transitional justice attracts the interests of politicians,
policy-makers, the UN, the World Bank, many local and international civil society actors, and other
important players which cumulatively amount to what McCargo (2015) has called a ‘transitional justice
industry’. The arguable ‘swagger’ which characterizes elements of this field is underpinned by the
enormous expenditure of resources involved and the popularization of some of the key elements of the
transitional justice toolkit. The creation of ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the
International Criminal Court (ICC), and hybrid courts (involving a combination of domestic and
1
p. 748 international law) in places like Sierra Leone and Cambodia have ↵ cost billions. Almost all post
conflict or post authoritarian countries have reparations programmes designed to help victims and
2
survivors and these too have become increasingly expensive. In addition, ‘rule of law’ programmes are
now seen as central to almost all democratic reform, peace-making, or economic liberalization processes
—often, for example, being a precondition for loans from the Word Bank and other institutions—and thus
3
securing huge amounts of resources from the international donor community (May 2014). In addition,
elements of transitional justice have become increasingly well-known in popular culture. High profile
international trials of former presidents (e.g. Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, Charles Taylor) and
the work of the International Criminal Court in particular have meant that, for example, former world
leaders such Tony Blair are regularly the subject of calls in the press or social media that he should be ‘tried
4
for war crimes at the Hague’—regardless of the legal impossibility of such proceedings ever taking place.
Similarly, such has been the spread and popularization of processes such as truth commissions (over 40 in
the last three decades) that settled democracies have increasingly adapted such mechanisms to deal with
5
their troubled histories, drawing explicitly from the transitional justice experience (Niezen 2013); Truth
commissions, especially the South African one, have also filtered into popular culture, becoming a topic of
6
films and novels. In short, serious people spend a serious amount of money on transitional justice and the
field has at least some purchase on the popular imagination—both contributing to a degree of self-
importance in the area.
Almost two decades ago one of the authors suggested the need for a criminology of transitional justice
7
(McEvoy 2007). In part, that call was informed by a perception that some of the more hubristic traits
evident in the field was due to the dominance of lawyers in transitional justice. Identifying a number of
p. 749 features including the seductive ↵ qualities of legalism, the oversold triumph of human rights and a
tendency towards seeing like a state, that paper sketched out briefly (in one subsection) how criminology
could provide something of a buttress against the negative consequences of these features. In particular,
because of its status as what David Downes famously described as ‘rendezvous subject’ between different
disciplines, it was suggested that criminology could provide the prism through which to ask more
Page 2 of 28
philosophical questions about what is transitional justice for as well as who is was intended to benefit which
would, in turn, provide some benchmarks to make practical assessments as to whether not it could be
deemed to be working.
While there has been increased serious and engaged criminological work on war, mass violence, genocide,
terrorism, and of course state crime (e.g. Jamieson 2014; Walklate and McGarry 2015; Rafter 2016;
Ruggiero 2006; Green and Ward 2006), we would contend that criminology also has much to offer the
analysis of the transition from violence and authoritarianism (see also McEvoy and Newburn 2003,
Braithwaite et al. 2010, Weber et al. 2016). Although as was noted above, the breadth of academic
disciplines now working in transitional justice is impressive and challenging the dominance of legalism
has arguably become normalized in the past 10 years, few would contest the continued power and influence
of lawyers in the area. Bearing that in mind, the particular power of criminology as an interdisciplinary
bulwark against legalism in the field remains strong.
We have therefore taken this opportunity to expand on the utility of a number of familiar criminological
themes to the particular contexts of transitional justice—namely the punishment of offenders, the
construction of victimhood, and the broader intersection between transitional justice and social control.
Punishment and Restoration in Transitional Justice
In this section we wish to focus on those who have been involved in acts of violence or other human rights
abuses—the ‘offenders’ or ‘perpetrators’—in our exploration of what transitional justice is for. Of course, as
we discuss in greater detail below with regard to victimhood, the notion that one can easily divide the
world into ‘guilty perpetrators’ and ‘innocent victims’ sometimes does not match the messy reality of
transitional contexts. For the moment, however, we will concentrate our attentions on wrongdoers.
Broadly, the transitional justice approach to offenders is to try to punish at least some of them through
retributive trials, provide some with an amnesty and/or related efforts to shift them away from violence,
and engage them in broader social and communal efforts of peace-making and reconciliation. We will
argue that some of the strengths and limitations of these approaches can be seen much more clearly by
examining such processes through a criminological lens.
With regard to punishment of offenders in transitional contexts, certainly at the international level, it is
clear that much of the focus is upon what Henman has described as ‘predominantly retributive and
marginally deterrent’ (2004: 36). In Hegelian terms, ‘the criminal has done, so it should be done to
him’ (Hegel 1952: 71). Judges at the international tribunals often focus on retribution and deterrence as the
primary goals of sentencing, ‘dismissing any significant consideration of rehabilitation or social
reinsertion’ (Schabas 2011: 348). Given the heinous nature of some crimes involved—including
p. 750 ↵ genocide, war crimes, torture, sexual violence as a strategy of subjugation—retribution being visited
against those deemed most responsible is an obvious intuitive response, coupled with the desire to deter
other would-be offenders from engaging in similar acts of horror (Roberts 2003; Drumbl 2007). In seeking
to examine the force of the predominant retributive thinking regarding the reasons for doing transitional
justice, a number of features come to the fore, particularly with regard to issues of legality,
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proportionality, and selectivity; and the expressive functions of punishment. In addition, we shall also
examine briefly some of the key elements of deterrence which are, as noted above, often grouped with
retribution.
For those who view retribution as perhaps the key role of punishment, law is at the very core of the
punishment project. From such a perspective, crime is viewed as ‘law-breaking’ and therefore the
response must be ‘lawful’—a reassertion of the primacy of law (Golash 2005). Many of those who argue for
retribution in transitional justice, particularly human rights lawyers, argue that states are legally bound to
punish perpetrators because of the ‘duty to prosecute’ the most serious of international crimes—namely
genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity (Orentlicher 1991; Mills 2015). In practice, as McEvoy
(with Mallinder 2013) has argued in greater detail elsewhere, there are significant divergences in law and
practice about how all-encompassing the duty to prosecute is even in such extreme circumstances.
For example, with regard to the crime of genocide, the duty to prosecute is often described as
‘absolute’ (e.g. Jackson 2007). However, in practice, the definition of genocide presents quite a high
threshold to trigger the duty to prosecute. Under the Genocide Convention of 1948 genocide requires that
violent actions are taken with ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group’. Thus, murder campaigns directed against political groups—such as, for example, ‘communists’ or
‘subversives’ in South America’s ‘dirty wars’—could place such mass killings beyond the scope of the
Genocide Convention. Similarly with regard to war crimes the duty to prosecute (under the Geneva
Conventions of 1949 and Additional Protocol of 1977) refers to ‘grave breaches’ committed during
international conflict—thus ruling out the numerous internal armed conflicts of the last seven decades.
Moreover, as is discussed further below, the Geneva Conventions and the reality of state practice in post-
conflict societies for hundreds of years mean that the granting of amnesties remain a key element of the
transitional justice toolkit. In sum, therefore, using law and legal obligations as the key rationale for
punishment in transitional justice is mitigated by the fact that there are often competing interpretations of
law, its meaning, applicability, and consequences. The so-called ‘human rights as trumps’ perspective?
(Ignatieff 2003) only takes one so far.
Other difficulties for retributivists in transitional justice relate to questions of selectivity and
proportionality. In contexts where thousands or indeed hundreds of thousands of individuals have been
involved in serious violence or human rights abuses, prosecutions will inevitably be selective (Cryer 2005).
Much has been written about the range of political factors which led to the creation of the tribunals to deal
with the crimes of Rwanda and Yugoslavia but not in other contexts (e.g. Schabas 2012). Once
international, hybrid or, indeed, local trials are established to deal with past abuses, decisions have to be
taken regarding who to prosecute and for what crimes. Often prosecutors seek to indict senior people—
those deemed ‘most responsible’ but such a focus may in turn offer de facto impunity to thousands of
middle and lower level individuals who were enmeshed in the most brutal elements of past violence and
human rights abuses (Takemura 2007). Similarly with regard to the issue of proportionality, another
p. 751 central ↵ component of retributivist thinking, devising lawful punishments which match the nature of
the crimes committed in many of these contexts is a very significant challenge. As Hannah Arendt has
famously argued with regard to Nazi atrocities, ‘For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough’ (1992:
54) and any search for real proportionality with such crimes is ‘inadequate and absurd’ (1973: 439).
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Finally it is worth exploring in a little more detail the closely linked position of deterrence as a reason for
punishment in transitional justice. Needless to say, deterrence has long been a politically popular element
of the philosophy of punishment (Bentham 1830; Brooks 2012). Whether it is geared towards specific or
general deterrence, the basic assumption is that one of the reasons for punishing an offender today for a
particular offence or offences is the knowledge that a similar punishment will feature in the decision-
making of future offenders (Von Hirsch et al. 1999). Variations of this premise are reproduced as a key
rationale for prosecutions in multiple UN documents, preambles to the establishment of the ICTY, ICTR,
and indeed the Rome Statute which established the International Criminal Court.
Lawyers, judges, and policy-makers involved in international justice regularly invoke deterrence for doing
what they do. However, as Schabas has remarked, many of these pronouncements are ‘marked by
amateurishness … driven more by intuition than anything else’ (2011: 349). The great caution about over-
stating the effectiveness of deterrence—which is such a strong feature of the criminological literature
regarding determining which offenders may be deterred from committing which crimes in which
circumstances in settled democracies (e.g. Tonry 2008; Jacobs 2010)—has clearly not yet permeated into
the world of international criminal justice. That confidence in deterrence within international criminal
justice is in our view misplaced.
Notwithstanding the developments outlined above, the fact remains that the statistical chances of being
successfully prosecuted in the post-conflict or post-transitional contexts under review remains very slight
(UNSC 2004: para 26; Drumbl 2007). A combination of a lack of resources, lack of evidence, corrupt or
inefficient local justice systems, a lack of political will or indeed local amnesties will often ensure that only
a tiny fraction, if any, former human rights abusers will be brought to justice. In addition, the applicability
of deterrence theory to such contexts is further undermined by its explicit assumption that the actors
involved will make rational calculations regarding risk before engaging upon campaigns of mass violence.
While that may be true of some elite leaders (Akhavan 2001; Rosenberg 2012), they will of course be
reassured by the low risks of ever being prosecuted. Moreover, often those involved in directing the worst
kinds of genocidal violence are inherent military and political risk-takers. For example, Ku and Nzelibe
(2006) examine the deterrent effect of international tribunals by looking at what happened to those
leaders who tried to achieve political ends by violence across 17 countries in Africa through 348 coups or
attempted coups. 28 per cent were executed or otherwise murdered and 22 per cent were exiled or
imprisoned. Despite these very daunting life prospects, many of these individuals appeared undeterred by
a 50\50 chance of being killed or imprisoned by their own state. To assume that they would be deterred by
the perhaps more abstract threat of international prosecution is ‘highly debateable’ (Ku and Nzelibe 2006:
831). For those on the ground, the relevance of deterrence theory may be even more dubious. If one is
seeking to affect the behaviour of genocidal fanatics in Rwanda, abused or coerced child soldiers in Uganda
or Congo, radicalized jihaddists in Syria or Iraq—easy assumptions about the efficacy of deterrence are
arguably of limited utility.
We would like now to consider two other important and interrelated elements of the transitional justice
p. 752 toolkit with regard to offenders—amnesties and Disarmament, ↵ Reintegration and Rehabilitation
(DDR) programmes. Again our own views on these topics have been heavily influenced by criminological
theory and practice—in particular those emanating from restorative justice.
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At first blush, amnesties would appear to be the polar opposite of any attempt to try to render an offender
accountable through punishment. An amnesty is the formal negation of an individual’s or group of
individuals’ criminal (and often civil) liability for past crimes or human rights abuses (Mallinder 2008).
Originating in the power of the sovereign to ‘show mercy’ in the wake of such conflicts, amnesties have
8
been a key element of making peace for centuries and remain remarkably popular. Historically, the scope
of such amnesties were as broad as the state or sovereign in question wished them to be (Joinet 1985).
However, with the developments in international human rights law since the end of the Second World War
and in particular the importance afforded to ‘the fight against impunity’, the shape of amnesties has
gradually changed. In the 1970s, sweeping ‘blanket amnesties’ were often a central demand of outgoing
military dictators and other authoritarian regimes as a condition of handing over political power. Perhaps
inevitably, amnesties became synonymous with impunity for many activists and were often seen as a
denial of the rights of victims to the versions of justice discussed above (Laplante 2008). However, such
unconditional amnesties have gradually been whittled away by domestic and international legal
challenges, pressure from victims and other civil society groups, and a general reluctance by key
international institutions such as the United Nations to countenance such measures (Freeman 2009;
Collins 2010). It is now much more common to see amnesties or amnesty-like measures linked to or indeed
conditional upon other transitional measures such as participation in truth recovery processes,
disarmament and demobilization, reparations, or forms of acknowledgement to victims (Du-Bois Pedain
2011; Jeffery 2014).
It is easy to see how amnesties became synonymous with impunity and a failure of accountability.
However, the increased linkage of such measures with these other transitional justice processes above
mean that many commentators now argue that amnesties should instead be viewed through the lens of
restorative justice rather than simply as evidence of the absence of accountability (e.g. Braithwaite 2002;
McEvoy and Mallinder 2013). For example, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
explicitly drew upon restorative justice as an explanatory rationale for its use of amnesties in exchange for
truth recovery. Responding to criticism that the amnesty amounted to a denial of justice, the TRC final
report argued that amnesty or sentence reduction could be viewed as a form of justice if justice is conceived
not as retribution, but restoration. The report stated ‘… that amnesty in return for public and full
disclosure (as understood within the context of the Commission) suggests a restorative understanding of
justice, focusing on the healing of victims and perpetrators and on communal restoration’ (SATRC 1999:
para 55).
In some instances, such as Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, or more recently the 50 plus years conflict in
Colombia, it would arguably have been impossible to have successfully concluded peace negotiations
without some form of an amnesty being part of the peace accord. Combatants or prisoners imprisoned for
politically motivated offences are often important constituencies of armed groups (non-state and state)
and bringing such constituencies ‘over the line’ in reaching a peace deal is often a key challenge for those
p. 753 seeking to make peace (McEvoy 2001). Moreover, as transitional societies seek to deal ↵ with their
violent past through the establishment of a truth commission, it is unlikely that those previously involved
in violence will tell the full truth if they may face prosecution as a result. Therefore, the ‘trade-off’ of full
disclosure for non-prosecution (as in South Africa) has become increasingly normalized in transitional
contexts (Hayner 2011). Taking the need for proper truth recovery as a given, Braithwaite has suggested
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that amnesties may be compatible with restorative justice provided that they contribute to ending a war,
all stakeholders are given a voice in the amnesty negotiations, and that those who will benefit are willing
to ‘show public remorse for their crimes and to commit to the service of the new nation and its people and
repair some of the harm they have done’ (2002: 203).
It is possible for amnesties to fulfil Braithwaite’s criteria of a restorative amnesty. Of course amnesties
were historically crafted to suit the interests of the political or military elites with little heed for victims.
However, in recent years, meaningful participation by victims and affected communities has become much
more common. For example, in Northern Ireland, the version of limited immunity which resulted in the
return of 13 of the 17 people murdered and disappeared (mostly by the IRA) came about because of pressure
from the affected families (Dempster 2016). In Uganda, the Amnesty Act of 2000 again came about
following a campaign by religious, cultural, and political leaders from the region worst affected by the
conflict between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) (Khadiagala 2001).
Similarly, victims’ voices have been a powerful force in the design of the reduced sentencing arrangements
as part of the Colombian peace agreement between the Colombia government and FARC in Havana Cuba
(Government of Colombia FARC Joint Communiqué 93, 2016).
Braithwaite also asked the question whether an amnesty can ‘contribute to ending a war’ (2002: 203) in
determining whether or not it can be adjudged restorative. We have interpreted this to mean not just is the
amnesty part of process that brings violent conflict to an end, but also does it ‘work’ in terms of providing
proper truth recovery to victims and also ‘identifying paths to prevention’. It isn’t enough in a transition
to simply remove the threat of prosecution. Former combatants also need to be able to avail themselves of
programmes designed to facilitate their reintegration—sometimes (controversially) also referred to as
9
‘rehabilitation’. Of course offender reintegration has long been a key objective of restorative justice in
settled democracies (Bazemore and Maruna 2009; Bazemore and Dooley 2015). The argument that
offenders need to be helped to take responsibility themselves for desisting from offending is all the more
compelling in transitional societies (McEvoy et al. 2022).
Such work with former combatants is normally approached through the framework of disarmament,
demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programmes that entail removing and/or destroying weapons,
disbanding armed groups, and returning individuals to civilian life (Patel et al. 2009; Kahl 2011). Huge
amounts of resources are spent on these programmes. By way of illustration, in the year 2007 $1.599
billion was spent on DDR programmes across 19 countries in the world, nine of which were amongst the
lowest-ranked countries in socio-economic development (Camares/Sanz 2008). In one programme which
ran for seven years, the World Bank and other partners were working across seven countries in the Great
Lakes region of Central Africa assisting with the demobilization of over 300,000 ex-combatants at a cost of
$450,000 million (World Bank 2010).
p. 754 ↵ In reviewing the literature on such programmes, the challenges with regard to DDR programmes
mirror some of the debates over reintegration, desistance, and rehabilitation studies in general. For
example, there is the tentative emergence of a ‘what works’ movement in transitional justice which is
seeking to adjudge value for money and effectiveness of transitional justice measures such as DDR by
reference to a range of indicators including levels of violence and ex-combatant recidivism rates (Van der
Merwe et al. 2009; Dancy 2010; Hamber et al. 2010)—but it is very underdeveloped. Amongst the studies
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which detail the difficulties for demobilized ex-combatants in getting jobs, issues with family relations,
mental health, drug and alcohol abuse, and in some instances involvement in ‘ordinary crime’, one sees a
different emphasis upon structural, cultural, political, and individualized arguments between why such
projects succeed or fail (e.g. Gear 2002; Humphreys and Weinstein 2007; Rolston and Artz 2014; Banholzer
2014). Elsewhere, McEvoy (with Shirlow 2009) has offered a strong critique of some of these programmes
drawing explicitly from the criminological desistance literature arguing that the assumed passivity of the
offender or ex-combatant in such programmes is a central weakness. An assumption that DDR is
something that is done to or for ex-combatants fails to grasp the central role of agency amongst such ex-
combatants and indeed their capacity to provide leadership in the transformation of deeply entrenched
cultures of violence precisely because of their previous involvement in violence. Adjudging therefore
whether an amnesty process or a DDR programme can be adjudged restorative by helping in ‘ending a war’
requires that the individual ex-combatant is given space to exercise individual agency and where
appropriate, leadership.
Finally with regard to both amnesties and DDR programmes, there is the complex and challenging issue of
offender ‘remorse’. As noted above, Braithwaite has argued that for an amnesty to be considered
restorative, offenders should show ‘public remorse’ as well as commit to the service of the new nation. Our
own instincts on this issue are that acts of apology and remorse need to emerge organically from
organizations and individuals who have been involved in past acts of violence rather than being ‘forced’
from them in return for concessions if they are to be viewed as genuine by victims and affected
communities. Certainly in the context of the early release of prisoners in Northern Ireland, McEvoy (with
Gormally 1995) argued strongly that such a process could not be conditional upon an expression of
remorse from the prisoners. In fact a series of apologies have been forthcoming from both Republican and
Loyalists groupings (and the state) during the Northern Ireland peace process, but these have largely
emerged organically, either to coincide with anniversaries or as a result of truth recovery efforts
10
concerning the events (Healing Through Remembering 2016). As noted above, the restorative component
of amnesties may be used to incentivize ex-combatant participation in such truth recovery processes.
Transitional justice scholars and activists commonly argue that such truth recovery is important for
preventing a repetition of crimes and contributing to the healing of victims and society (Hayner 2011;
Wiebelhaus-Brahm 2010; Kovras 2014). However, it may also help ex-combatants. Participation in truth
recovery may also enable ex-combatants to ‘tell their own story and allow them to gain back the control
over their position and their role in the conflict, and later also their place in the community’ (Parmentier et
p. 755 al. 2008: 347). Furthermore, through publicly answering for their actions, offenders ↵ are arguably
been subjected to thicker and more complex versions of accountability (Mallinder and McEvoy 2011).
Remorse may of course form part of the process of truth recovery, or it may emerge organically after such
a process. Regardless, for truth recovery to be effective, it requires ex-combatant participation.
In sum, in looking at the applicability of criminological theory and practice to better understand ‘what is
transitional justice for’ with regard to offenders, there are significant limitations regarding the utility of
either retribution or deterrence as explanatory constructs for the punishment focused variants of
transitional justice. Instead, as is discussed further below, we are more persuaded about the place of
punishment as one element of broader social control strategies and as an important element of censure in
establishing or re-establishing a meaningful attachment to the rule of law in post-conflict or post-
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authoritarian societies. In addition, we believe that there are compelling arguments to view offender-
related work in transitional justice through the prism of restorative justice. Whether in the guise of
amnesties, usually linked to truth recovery processes, or DDR programmes designed to assist ex-
combatant reintegration, it is possible to design processes which privilege ex-combatant agency and
responsibility in seeking to ‘make good’ in Maruna’s terms—putting behind their violent past ‘as a
necessary prelude to a productive and worthy life’ (Maruna 2001: 87) and trying to repair some of the
damage they have done and to restore relations with victims and communities who they have previously
wronged.
Victims and Victimhood in Transitional Societies
In this section we wish to explore question of victims and victimhood in addressing the question of what
and who is transitional justice for. The importance of victims and victimhood to transitional societies has
been the subject of significant scholarly and policy attention in recent years. What Walklate (2007) has
called the ‘imagined victim’—the innocent, vulnerable victim who is deserving of justice—has provided
justification for the more abstract aims of transitional justice (e.g. securing justice, deterrence, upholding
the rule of law, and seeking truth about the past etc.) as well as the creation of the range of transitional
justice mechanisms discussed above (e.g. international criminal tribunals, truth commissions, and
community-based or ‘bottom up’ programmes (Clarke 2009; Hayner 2011; McEvoy and McGregor 2008).
Indeed, victims serve a key practical and symbolic role in what Barker (2001: 6) has termed the ‘self-
legitimation’ of almost all of those who work in the field of transitional justice.
Again our views on victims and victimhood in transitional societies have been heavily influenced by
criminological writings regarding the treatment of victims in more settled democracies (McEvoy and
McConnachie 2012, 2013; Dudai 2012a, 2012b, 2022; Lawther 2014). While space does not permit an
exhaustive examination of the criminology/victimology literature, key themes which have shaped our
views have included the historical rise of the victim in Western criminology scholarship and policy-
making, the politics of victimhood, and the creation of binary oppositions between victims and
perpetrators (Garland 2001; Simon 2007). Accordingly, we look more closely at the extent to which
transitional justice lives up to the promise that it is ‘for’ victims, the ways in which victims and victimhood
are sometimes politically appropriated in transitional contexts, the particular constructions of victimhood
p. 756 ↵ in transitional justice which bifurcates the world into ‘innocent’ victims and ‘guilty’ perpetrators—a
process which not only obscures the complexity of conflict but which also helps dubious hierarchies of
victimhood.
As is much discussed, as the field of transitional justice has evolved, it has increasingly been described as
‘victim centred’ (Robins 2011). Victims are often offered as the legitimizing basis for prosecutions, truth
commissions, reparations, memorialization, and the plethora of other measures deployed in transitional
justice contexts (see, e.g., Fletcher 2015; Hayner 2011; Waterhouse 2009). In particular with regard to
retribution in transitional justice, victims are often deployed as the central symbolic justification for the
enormous financial, political, legal, and psychological effort to deal with the consequences of past violence
in many of these societies. More broadly, victims make real what might otherwise be rather abstract
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justifications for transitional justice—securing justice, deterrence, establishing the ‘rule of law’,
determining the ‘truth’ about the past—all of these might appear rather ethereal without the tangible
suffering personified by victims.
The impetus towards doing transitional justice in the name of victims is of course premised upon a series
of assumptions concerning what victims want or should want. As occurs in settled democracies, the
imagined victim can all too easily become a political tool used to justify and legitimize particular political
or policy agendas. For example, while victims are often cited as the raison d’être of international criminal
tribunals, Schabas (2010) has argued that at the ICTY and ICTR at least, justice has been ‘in the name of
victims’, but with little recognition that victims are individuals with needs and a legitimate interest in the
process. Such instrumentalization constitutes a classic version of what Christie (1977) described as the
‘theft’ of conflict, whereby victims’ voices are picked out, appropriated and re-presented to suit the aims
of politicians, policy-makers, lawyers, and other elite-level actors (Madlingozi 2010). Such appropriation
of victims’ voices may also strip victims of their agency (Weinstein 2014). Equally, truth commissions,
particularly the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, have been criticized on the grounds
of prioritizing those victims’ voices which fitted with the demands of the political landscape and the
project of national reconciliation. In South Africa, the voice of the ‘forgiving’ victim was eulogized and
large sections of the TRC report were devoted to ‘exemplary’ accounts of seeking and granting forgiveness
(Wilson 2001; Moon 2008; Hamber 2009). Victims may in some instances be victimized twice—once by the
original incident and second by their political compatibility/incompatibility with the prevailing socio-legal
and political mood of the transitional justice process in which they are engaged (Lawther 2021).
Inherent to the danger of the capturing and instrumentalization of victims’ voices in transitional justice is
the way in which victimhood is often constructed around competing notions of ‘innocent’ and ‘guilty’
victims. For Christie (1986), the ‘ideal victim’ is innocent, vulnerable, and engaged in responsible
behaviour when victimized. In contrast, the ‘wicked’ perpetrator is evil, uncivilized, and deserving of
punishment or reciprocal violence (Moffett 2016). On one level, an emphasis on innocence is often a
natural and expected reaction to traumatic loss, competition over victimhood, and strong emotions such
as fear, anger, hurt, and loss that may be associated with past suffering (Enns 2012; Ferguson et al. 2010).
However, such dynamics are arguably more potent in transitional contexts where victimhood is used to
claim legitimacy and justification for past actions and where innocence becomes a symbol around which
contested notions of past violence and suffering are constructed and reproduced (Cohen 2001; McEvoy and
McConnachie 2013).
p. 757 ↵ By implication, to be outside this categorization of victimhood is to be aligned with notions of guilt,
illegitimacy, and complicity. Victimhood hence becomes competitive, and innocence and guilt mutually
dependent—the positioning of the guilty perpetrator is required to satisfy and exempt the innocent victim
(Lawther 2014). These dynamics are readily identifiable in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, South Africa,
Argentina, Spain, and a range of other transitional sites in which we have worked. To take one example, in
Northern Ireland, pro-state politicians and some unionist victims groups have repeatedly claimed to be
the ‘real’ and ‘innocent’ victims of the conflict and have refused to countenance the victimhood of ‘the
other’. Any effort to contest such starkly polarized definitions of ‘innocent victims’ and ‘guilty
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combatants’ is dismissed as creating a ‘moral equivalence’ between terrorists and their victims and
somehow justifying or legitimating past Republican (and sometimes Loyalist) actions. Victimhood
becomes the terrain on which the political contests of the past are fought.
As in non-transitional contexts, an attachment of innocence to the notion of ‘true’ victim status can in
turn help create hierarchies of victimhood (Carrabine et al. 2004; McAlinden 2014; McEvoy and
McConnachie 2012). Such a distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘non-deserving’ victims turns on a
politically calibrated notion of suffering and legitimacy (Walklate 2011). As McAlinden (2014) points out,
such hierarchies cannot easily accommodate ‘deviant’ victims or ‘vulnerable’ offenders who lie in the
middle ground between the polarities of accepted victim and offender status. While criminal justice and
transitional justice discourses inevitably make frequent reference to ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ as ‘reified
and distinct’ categories, not least for ease of reference (as we have done here), such neat categorizations
often do not match the real world. Often former combatants themselves have been tortured or lost family
or community members so that in reality they may have inflicted and endured suffering at different stages
in their lives (McEvoy and McConnachie 2012: 527). In such contexts, as Bouris (2007: 10) has argued, we
should make space for the notion of complex victimhood where ‘a victim who is no longer chained to
characteristics of complete innocence and purity, but remains a victim nonetheless’. Adhering to rigid
hierarchies of victims misses the complex and messy reality of conflict and the personal, social, and
political contexts in which victimization and involvement in conflict occurs (Lawther 2022).
Another important variable in transitional justice constructions of victimhood is the notion of blame. In
designating individuals as ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ victims, it also establishes a template for the
allocation of blame and the absolution of those considered ‘blameless’. As Tilly (2008: 11) has contended,
blaming has a particularly strong resonance in post-conflict conflicts and he identifies key elements of the
transitional ‘tool box’, such as truth commissions as forums, in which a line is ‘drawn between worthy and
unworthy citizens’. One sees clear evidence of a linkage between victimhood (our victimhood), denial (of
the victimhood of the ‘other’) and blame of that other for all of the ills of the past in Israel/Palestine, the
Balkans, and of course Northern Ireland. This version of blame allocation, and the parallel claiming of
innocence is part of the age-old tradition of scape-goating (Girard 1977, 1989) whereby locating blame in
the ‘other’ also absolves ‘us’ of any semblance of guilt or responsibility. Unless carefully managed,
transitional justice processes such as trials, truth commissions, or even reparations programmes run the
risk of reifying such scape-goating (McEvoy et al. 2022).
In sum, all of us who work in the field of transitional justice would say that we are doing this work in order
to try to help those who have been previously harmed in conflict zones or former authoritarian regimes. In
trying to navigate this complex and controversial terrain, again we have drawn significant guidance from
p. 758 the rich ↵ criminological literature on the politics of victimhood. Encouraging an empathetic but where
necessary critical understanding of victims and victimhood—particularly when it is used to underpin
politically exclusionary, racist, sectarian, or other analogous reactionary practices—is sina qua non for a
more grounded understanding of what transitional justice is for.
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Transitional Justice and Social Control
Having examined the role of both offenders and victims in responding to the question what is transitional
justice for, we would now like to shift our gaze to the communal and societal level. Again we will draw
explicitly on criminological frameworks, in particular the concept of social control. As will become
apparent, our thoughts on this topic have been heavily influenced by the inimitable Stan Cohen. While
Cohen was among the key scholars to deconstruct and criticize social control (1985), the later phase of his
work, informed by his work on the denial of human rights violations (Cohen 2001), suggested that perhaps
11
social control mechanism can have a positive impact in that context (Cohen 2011). Elements of social
control– the classification of certain acts as deviance and the deployment of control tools to stigmatize,
regulate and punish them (Innes 2003)—can sometimes be put to positive uses as a bulwark against
conservative or reactionary discourses which often deny or otherwise attempt to minimize past wrongs.
Many aspects of transitional justice policies can therefore be fruitfully conceptualized as forms of social
control (Dudai 2018). This is the prism through which we wish to explore the social purposes of
transitional justice.
Prior to a political transition, past regimes invariably contest claims that they have committed human
rights violations—such as extrajudicial killings, torture, rape, disappearances, or genocide—by either
denying them outright or else try to reshape public understandings of such abuses (Cohen 2001). At a
societal level, a key task of transitional justice is therefore to counter such denial, to assert that such
events happened, to locate them with the broader social or political context in which they occurred and to
mark them as deviant. To explore the ways in which this is done we want to look in particular at truth
recovery as a retroactive version of social control, then look at the role of celebration of ‘heroes’ in
transitional justice and finally at the role that civil society can play in advocating for a variant of social
control from below in transitional contexts.
First, we should expand a little on the notion of denial. Cohen (2001) distinguished three forms of denial.
The first is what he termed literal denial: ‘nothing happened’ (e.g., no one was killed). The second form is
interpretive denial (‘what happened is really something else’), where through denial of responsibility,
isolation and other techniques, those responsible reject the interpretive framework placed on events (e.g.
someone was killed but it was unauthorized, isolated, or not by a state agent). The third form is what he
termed implicatory denial, when the facts are accepted but their implications minimized: i.e. this did
happen but ‘it was justified’. Implicatory denial may include arguments that what happened was
p. 759 ‘necessary’ or should be seen in the context of higher ↵ loyalties (e.g. someone was killed but it was a
justified response to subversion threatening the nation) (Cohen 2001, esp. 103–112). These overlapping
versions of denial are a constant thread in transitional contexts, part of what Cohen termed ‘memory
wars’ (Cohen 2001: 241) over how to frame, present and re-present the past.
If we view the common thread running through transitional justice mechanisms as countering these
different forms of denial, then the function they serve is often that of a political, judicial, social and
cultural reclassification of how past events should be categorized. In essence, it means categorizing as
deviant the actions and policies (torture, the murder of political opponents, systemic discrimination,
arrests without trial etc.) which before the transition may have routinely been accepted, authorized,
Page 12 of 28
normalized or unacknowledged. This has broader and deeper manifestations and meanings than punishing
offenders or a public recording of the facts: it involves acknowledgment that the past regime involved
deliberate suffering and not just mistakes or misplaced idealism (Cohen 1995: 39). Innes and Clarke (2009)
have offered a pertinent variant of what they term ‘retroactive social control.’ In the context of cold-case
reviews of homicides in ordinary policing, they argue that retroactive social control captures a process
wherein ‘a previously authored official “definition of the situation” is challenged and subsequently
revised’ (Innes and Clarke 2009: 544). Something similar happens, on a larger scale, in transitional justice
contexts. The version of social control we are postulating here refers then not only to efforts to control a
society or community but to help shape how such societies think about the past, how they see their own
history.
Almost all versions of transitional justice mechanisms have a role to play in such social control processes.
For example, an explicit part of the function of the post-World War II trials at Nuremberg or the
international tribunals after the horrors of Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia was to ‘make public memory
publicly’—to use law to document and place the reality of past abuses ‘on the record’ (Osiel 1999).
Similarly, the work of truth commissions and similar bodies in transitional contexts means more than
establishing ‘factual’ truth (countering ‘literal denial’ in Cohen’s terms), it is also required to address
interpretive and implicatory denials. The challenge is not just to uncover new details and facts but to alter
how events and policies are socially understood and remembered (Wilson 2001, 2011). Truth commissions
investigating human rights violations such as torture, often frame specific incidents as part of a wider
pattern or of a formal policy, a symptom of broader structural problems, or indicative of many more
unacknowledged similar incidents (Gready 2011). At times they are required to re-designate responsibility
for crimes. For example, murders or other crimes which had previously been viewed as the responsibility
of a paramilitary organization may in fact be reinterpreted as the responsibility of the state which was
colluding with or otherwise using such proxy organizations for its own purposes (Jamieson and McEvoy
2005; McGovern 2016). Putting together the mosaic of past atrocities, framing them in terms of the
broader causes, context, and consequences of those past abuses and re-framing the ways in which such
events were either misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted are central elements of any transitional
society in trying to take control of its own past.
Another important and complex intersection of social control, truth, and transitional policies in this
regard is the phenomenon of ‘memory laws’. Such laws aim to regulate historical discussion and collective
memory through law, making ‘legal intervention into the marketplace of historical ideas’ (Belavusau and
Gliszczynska-Grabias 2017). Such laws may prohibit, and sometimes criminally punish, the denial of past
events, especially in the context of holocaust denial and genocide denial (Cohen 2001: 268–269); they can
also posit a ‘duty to remember’ past atrocities through mandating new national days of
p. 760 ↵ remembrance and official commemorations. By classifying certain interpretations of the past as
deviant and regulating and punishing the groups that express them, memory laws exert social control
(Gutman and Tirosh 2021). These powers can assist in inculcating human rights norms and combat denial;
they can also be repressive, violating freedom of expression and being used to silence critique. In any case,
their growing popularity indicate the importance of social classification of past events as a fundamental
arena for struggle in transitional societies.
Page 13 of 28
Transitional justice may require not only redefining as deviant acts previously treated as normal but also
reclassifying some deviants as heroes. As Brogden (2000) has argued, to maintain social control societies
need to rely not only on social censure but also on ‘social celebration’: an exultation of virtues and an
elevation of the ‘good’. Such social celebration complements the censure of opponents, together creating a
political imagery which produces saints as well as sinners. The ‘celebration of heroes’, assigning—and re-
assigning—prestige, is a common means of social control (Goode 1978). Yet it can become particularly
important in transitional regimes, which may struggle to instil a respect for human rights, democracy and
the rule of law where societies and communities have little experience of such values. Thus, the politics of
praise and the use of exemplary stories and positive role models can be more profound in transitional
contexts.
For example, the eulogizing of those involved in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa has been
described as key to the process of constructing a ‘new nation’ (Marschall 2006, Baines 2007). The
ambivalences associated with these and other contexts of the involvement of such heroes in armed
struggle—and the suffering and violence that accompanied that involvement—are a common theme in
many post-conflict contexts.
Less familiar however is the focus in some transitional contexts on ‘rescuers’: individuals who acted to
protect members of an opposing ethnic or national group during genocides and ethnic conflicts such as,
for example, Hutus who saved Tutsis in Rwanda (Rosoux 2006), or Serbs who protected Muslims in Bosnia
(Moll 2019). As part of their efforts ‘to deal with the past’, some transitional societies have commemorated
and praised the actions of such rescuers, in efforts to create public education for new values in the
aftermath of identity-based conflicts (Dudai 2012b). Such acts of rescue were outlawed or socially
disapproved prior to transition (Dudai 2012b: 8); their use as role models after transition, with a social and
political ‘celebratory imprimatur’ (Brogden 2000: 29), aims to signify the change in norms. This type of
social reclassification provides transitional societies with ‘narratives of altruism and intervention’,
demonstrating ‘an alternative set of motivational accounts to be encouraged’ (Cohen 2001: 267) in the new
post-transition social landscape. Moreover, such celebrations of rescuers and of internal ‘resisters’ to
repressive regimes (Leebaw 2013) may also serve as an implicit censure of passive bystanders who stood by
and did nothing.
Finally, the lens of social control—which involves both formal, and judicial mechanisms, and informal
activities—enables us to perceive the role of civil society organizations in advancing the goals of
transitional justice. While transitional justice can have a tendency to focus on top-down, state-like
processes and institutions, the role of human rights organizations, social movements, victims groups, and
others has also been identified as a crucial component in transitional justice policies and practices
(McEvoy 2007; Gready 2011; Wallis and Kent 2020). Such groups often complement the activity of formal
transitional institutions such as truth commissions, through outreach work and making commissions
accessible to local communities—filling in the granular details of broader social control efforts initiated
from above.
p. 761 ↵ Yet in many other transitional cases civil society groups have acted in opposition to or independent of
formal interventions, filling the gap in the context of state inaction and neglect. In this sense, they exercise
a form of ‘social control from below’ (Baumgartner 1984). In this vein, the perspective of ‘transitional
Page 14 of 28
justice from below’ (McEvoy and McGregor 2008) draws attention to bottom-up projects and
interventions by civil society groups which challenge the state-centred policies and discourses. These
efforts include, for example, advocacy and protest by victims’ groups, which view the actions of post-
transition regimes in addressing past abuses as unsatisfactory and continue to apply pressure for profound
steps toward redress. The activities of the South African Khulumani Support Group, challenging the post-
apartheid governments for their failure to provide meaningful reparation and accountability; the Madres
de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, protesting post-transition governments’ failure to resolve the
‘disappearances’ issue; or Colombian groups which contest the official discourse of transition from civil
war and claim that reconciliation rhetoric hides the lack of truth and justice (Diaz 2008; Moon 2012), all
illustrate this practice.
At other times, and perhaps most intriguingly in the context of social control from below, civil society
groups have acted to fill the gap in the absence of state action. A compelling illustration is the
establishment of ‘unofficial truth commissions’ or ‘truth projects’ by civil society groups: these unofficial
bodies, inspired by the establishment of official truth commissions elsewhere, seek to expose truths and
fight denial when the state is unwilling or unable to establish an effective truth commission. They have
operated in relation to diverse contexts such as Brazil or Cambodia (Bickford 2007). In the USA, a non-
official truth commission was established in Greensboro, North Carolina, to examine the legacy of racism
and violence in the area, triggered by the unresolved legacy of a 1979 incident in which Ku Klux Klan
members killed several participants in a civil rights march (Williams 2009). Similarly, in Northern Ireland,
a nationalist community concerned by the official efforts to focus primarily on IRA and Loyalist violence
and airbrush the experiences of victims of state violence established its own unofficial localized
documentation initiative, challenging official post-conflict discourses and narratives (Lundy and
McGovern 2008). It engaged in ‘popular memorialisation’ as a form of protest against state failure to fully
acknowledge past abuses (Rolston 2020).
Other modes of informal truth-seeking mechanisms include informal ‘courts’, especially ‘women’s
courts’ which focus on abuses against women, for example in relation to the war in Bosnia (Clark 2016).
Subversive commemorations of past abuses, carried out by oppositional civil society groups in Israel
(Dudai and Cohen 2010) or Serbia (Simic and Daly 2011), which are often designed to invert official
commemorations, have similarly aimed to push the state into accepting responsibility and ending denial of
abuses, again speaking to the role of social control from below. Finally, a radical form of social control
from below in this context is the practice of public ‘outings’, shaming and denunciation of former
perpetrators who enjoy impunity, which has taken place in several Latin America countries. Known as
‘Escraches’ in Argentina, and often combining protest, activism and public art, it seeks to break the
anonymity, normality and often comfortable lives former perpetrators enjoy, and generate social
disapproval, stigma and community condemnation, and thus create bottom-up social control to counter
lingering official denial of past atrocities (de León 2018).
To recapitulate, at the communal and social level, transitional justice mechanisms and interventions can
be viewed as engaging in a version of the key social control task of reclassifying the past (Dudai 2018). This
process may also involve an effort to posit an alternative progressive set of norms and values as key to
p. 762 underpinning a new society ↵ for the future. For criminology more generally, these backward and
forward-looking variants of social control in transitional justice may be seen as illustrative of broader
Page 15 of 28
efforts to move the term away from some of its primarily negative associations and connotations about the
capacity of the powerful to dominate the powerless. As Innes and Clarke (2009: 559) have noted, contests
over the past and its contemporary meaning ‘can articulate and animate changes in the architecture of
power relations in the present … altering conditions for how social control can be imagined and practiced’.
Transitional justice processes are by definition such spaces of contest and resistance.
Conclusion
As argued above, the ways in which post-conflict or post-authoritarian societies respond to ‘system
criminality’ (Nollkaemper 2009)—crimes against humanity, war crimes, and mass human rights
violations—has until recently remained beyond the remit of conventional criminology. As a result, the
empirical and theoretical insights developed by criminologists remained under-used in the transitional
justice field. While that gap has started to be filled, we believe that there is much further potential
criminological scholarship to be done in the field.
The push-and-pull of ‘ordinary’ rule of law and ‘exceptional’ transitional mechanisms will likely remain
as a key area of enquiry animating the theory and practice of the criminology of transitional justice.
Transitional societies have often seen the ‘rule of law’ held out as panacea for all ills. Indeed, the early days
of transitional justice were characterized by the then bold claim that the ordinary categories of crime, law,
and punishment should be applied to what had hitherto been seen as ‘political’ questions to which
ordinary law enforcement does not apply (Cohen 1996). While the potential of rule of law as a remedy has
certainly been ‘over-sold’ to such societies by Western elites (McEvoy 2007), there is no doubt that
criminal justice reforms are key elements in the broader process of rebuilding transitional societies. Thus,
for example, policing, an institution which is intimately concerned both with pre-transition human rights
violations and post-transition re-imagining of national ideals (Loader and Mulcahy 2003), has been a key
issue in transitional reforms in places such as South Africa or Northern Ireland (Lawther 2010). Other
criminal justice reforms, for example decisions to abolish—and at times to retain—the death penalty in
post-conflict countries (Futamura and Bernaz 2013), likewise reflect how such societies imagine
themselves and the lessons they draw from the past, expressing their responses to crises through the
idiom and framework of rule of law.
At the same time, it appears that in more and more cases established democracies respond to crises of
legitimacy by appealing to the forms and the idiom of the ‘exceptional’ transitional justice mechanisms.
Canada’s decision to establish a truth commission to address its treatment of ‘First Nations’ is a
compelling illustration of an appreciation in the global North that ordinary rule of law mechanisms—even
in the most advanced democracies—are insufficient to address a legacy of structural abuses. In what is a
further interesting intersection of criminology and transitional justice, the crises of mass incarceration
and policing violence in the US has led to calls to establish a truth commission there (Souli 2020). If
transitional societies seem to have often had a misplaced optimism in the power of US-style rule of law, it
may be that we witness now an ironic reversal in which Americans and others have an equally
p. 763 ↵ optimistic view of the power of South African-style truth commissions. At any case, these
Page 16 of 28
developments again demonstrate that as much as transitional justice scholars can no longer ignore
criminological insights on punishment and restoration, those interested in addressing the crisis of
criminal justice would do well to explore the insights of transitional justice scholars.
Beyond the questions already pursued in this chapter, a research agenda for a criminology of transitional
justice could also involve a systematic revisiting of some of the familiar foundational questions on
responding to crime and justice, while applying them to the context of mass atrocities and their legacies.
What would Durkheim have made of an International Criminal Court? How would Foucault have assessed
the work of truth commissions? How can transitional justice be interpreted by enthusiasts of Norbert Elias
as a ‘civilizing process’ framework? Engaging in such analyses can not only bring to the fore the often-
overlooked social, cultural, and governmental functions of transitional justice mechanisms, but also open
up for refinement and reinterpretation some basic criminological tenets—a challenging two-way process
which should keep those of us interested in both fields engaged for a few years to come.

For those interested in the historical applications of transitional justice,’s Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective
(2004) is a great starting place. Teitel’s Transitional Justice (2000), although by no means an easy read, remains a
classic in the field—particularly to explore the intersection between law and politics in a political transition. Lawther
and Moffet’s (eds) (2023) Research Handbook on Transitional Justice (2nd edn) covers all of the key debates in good
detail. For an optimistic account of the power of human rights in transition, Sikkink’s The Justice Cascade (2011) is the
‘go to’ source. On specific key aspects of transitional justice, Mallinder’s Amnesty, Human Rights and Political
Transitions (2008), Hayner’s Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions (2nd edn,
2011), and De Greiff’s Handbook of Reparations (2006) are all excellent sources for understanding amnesties, truth
recovery, and reparations respectively. Finally, for critical readings of transitional justice theory and practice, see
Roht-Arriaza and Mariecurrena’s Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century (2006), McEvoy and McGregor’s
Transitional Justice from Below (2008), and Palmer, Clarke, and Granville’s Critical Perspectives on Transitional Justice
(2012).
Online resources

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Notes
1
For example, the annual running costs for the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (established in 1993)
varied from $180 million in 2014–15, $250 million in 2012–13, $286 million in 2010–11. See http://www.icty.org/en/
about/tribunal/the-cost-of-justice <http://www.icty.org/en/about/tribunal/the-cost-of-justice>, accessed 19 April 2023.
By 2014, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (established in 1994) had cost over $2 billion in its two
decades of operation. See BBC (14 December 2015, Rwanda Genocide: International Criminal Tribunal Closes https://
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-35070220 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-35070220>). The
International Criminal Court, operating since 2000, has an annual budget of $148 million https://asp.icc-cpi.int/sites/
asp/files/asp_docs/ASP19/ICC-ASP-19-Res1-ENG.pdf <https://asp.icc-cpi.int/sites/asp/files/asp_docs/ASP19/ICC-
ASP-19-Res1-ENG.pdf> accessed 19 April 2023.
2
Estimates concerning the comprehensive reparations programme in Colombia have suggested that the costs will be
in excess of $30 billion. See further Sanchez and Rudling (2019).
3
In 2006 the World Bank estimated that it had supported 330 ‘rule of law’ programmes in over 100 countries at a cost
of $3.8 billion—see further Santos (2006).
4
‘Outrage as War Crimes Prosecutors Say Tony Blair will not be Investigated over Chilcot’s Iraq War Report—but
British Soldiers could be’, Daily Telegraph, 2 July 2016, accessed 19 April 2023.
5
Indeed on 2 March 2009 the New York Times ran an editorial asking the question, ‘A Truth Commission for the Bush
Era?’ with regard to the actions of US forces during the War on Terror. President Obama ultimately concluded that
such a commission should not be established. ‘No Truth Commission on Torture, says Obama.’, Irish Times, 25 April
2009, accessed 19 April 2023.
6
Red Dust, Gillian Slovo’s novel on the South African Commission, also turned into a film starring Hillary Swank, is one
of many such examples.
Page 27 of 28
7
The ideas developed in this chapter also emerge from a number of comparative and jurisdiction specific transitional
justice projects in which the authors have been engaged in over a dozen countries. These projects have variously been
funded by The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC AH/E008984/1 Beyond Legalism: Amnesties, Transition
and Conflict Transformation, AH/J013897/Amnesties Prosecutions and the Public Interest and AH/N001451/1 Voice,
Agency and Blame: Victimhood and Imagined Community in Northern Ireland); and the Economic and Social Research
Council (ES/J009849/1 Lawyers, Conflict and Transition and ES/N010825/1 Apologies, Abuses and Dealing with the
Past). See also Dudai 2012a, 2012b, 2022.
8
In her seminal overview of world-wide amnesties Mallinder (2008) reviewed 529 amnesty laws in 138 countries and
suggested that on average there continue to be approximately a dozen amnesties introduced world-wide per year.
9
Many ex-combatants view the term as appropriate for ‘ordinary’ criminals but not those engaged in politically
motivated violence (see further Shirlow and McEvoy 2008).
10
For a discussion on a range of state and non-state actor apologies in other transitional justice contexts see further
McEvoy and Bryson (2023).
11
For example, Cohen explored the notion of ‘good moral panics’, which can ‘overcome the barriers of denial,
passivity and indifference that prevent a full acknowledgment of human cruelty and suffering’ (2002: xlii).
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35. The punishment-welfare relationship: history, sociology, and politics

p. 771 35. The punishment-welfare relationship: history, sociology, and

politics
David Garland
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0035
Abstract
The relationship between ‘punishment’ and ‘welfare’ is by now a well-established topic of theory and research in historical,
sociological, and comparative studies of punishment. In recent years that relationship—and in particular the balance between
penal and welfare approaches—has also become a focal point for social movements working to transform criminal justice, and
more generally for activists seeking to shift power and resources away from police and prisons towards social service and
public health approaches to crime control. This chapter discusses the punishment-welfare relationship as a matter of history,
sociology, and comparative social policy, summarizing what we know, identifying promising lines of research, and
commenting on key areas of contention. As a theoretical matter, it is argued that future research ought to view penal and
welfare policies in relation to the underlying social problems these policies purportedly address and also in relation to the
larger social and economic structures that shape these social problems and the policies that deal with them. By way of
political commentary, some considerations are noted that should be borne in mind by activists pressing for a wholesale shift
from penal to welfare modes of crime-control.
Keywords: punishment, welfare, penal-welfarism, welfare states, neoliberalism, political economy, social problems, social
control
Introduction
The relationship between ‘punishment’ and ‘welfare’—or more precisely, between a jurisdiction’s penal
practices and its welfare state institutions—is by now a well-established topic of theory and research in
historical, sociological, and comparative studies of punishment. In recent years that relationship—and in
particular the balance between penal and welfare approaches—has also become a focal point for social
Page 1 of 29
movements working to transform criminal justice, and more generally for activists seeking to shift power
and resources away from police and prisons towards social service and public health approaches to crime
control. This chapter will discuss the punishment-welfare relationship as a matter of history, sociology,
and comparative social policy, and will conclude with a note on current politics, summarizing what we
know, identifying promising lines of research, and commenting on key areas of contention. As a
theoretical matter, I will argue that future research ought to view penal and welfare policies in relation to
the underlying social problems these policies purportedly address and also in relation to the larger social
and economic structures that shape these social problems and the policies that deal with them. By way of
political commentary, I point to some of the considerations that should be borne in mind by activists
pressing for a wholesale shift from penal to welfare modes of crime-control.
I begin by discussing the relationship between punishment and welfare as it features in current research
and the scholarly literature. I then turn to the question of how penal and welfare policies relate to the social
problems they purport to address and to the political and socio-economic structures within which they
operate. Finally, I consider the ways in which these issues are implicated in recent demands to defund the
police, abolish prisons, and re-imagine public safety.
Historical Studies
One well-established account of the punishment-welfare relationship takes the form of a historical thesis
about the rise and subsequent retrenchment of welfare states and the impact of these welfare state
p. 772 developments on penal policy and criminal justice. ↵ Historical monographs such as Punishment and
Welfare (Garland 1985) and City of Courts (Willrich 2003) describe how the emergence of welfare states in
the UK and the US at the start of the twentieth century reshaped ideas of crime causation and criminal
responsibility and prompted the development of ‘penal-welfare’ practices, the most important of which
were the juvenile court, probation, social inquiry reports, social work with offenders, indeterminate
1
sentencing, rehabilitative prison regimes, and parole. In France, works by Michel Foucault and his
collaborators Jacques Donzelot and Francois Ewald—most notably Discipline and Punish (1977), The
Policing of Families (1980) and L’Etat Providence (1986)—drew attention to similar shifts in the nature of
legal judgment and penal control: shifts that these authors associated with the emergence of the ‘human
sciences’ (medicine, psychiatry, criminology, psychoanalysis, etc.) and the rise of ‘the social’ with its new
2
forms of tutelage, supervision, and expert-led relations of power-knowledge.
Since the 1990s, it has been the retrenchment of the welfare state and the impact of that retrenchment on
criminal justice that has drawn renewed attention to the penal-welfare nexus. Simon’s Poor Discipline
(1993) and Garland’s Culture of Control (2001) analyze how the penal-welfare practices of mid-twentieth
century America and Britain were revised in the 1980s and 1990s as the political forces of the New Right
harnessed the effects of economic and cultural change to attack the welfare state and its associated
practices. In the penal sphere, this rightward movement resulted in a shift of emphasis from social
causation to individual blame; a downgrading of offender-centered welfarism; a renewed stress on
traditional penal purposes such as retribution and incapacitation; and most recently, the emergence of
what Page and Soss (2017 and 2021) call ‘predatory justice’—the imposition of fees and charges on
3
offenders and their families in order to offset the increased costs of criminal justice. Studies of
Page 2 of 29
neoliberalism and penality—notably Wacquant’s Punishing the Poor (2009) and Harcourt’s The Illusion of
Free Markets (2011)—view the emergence of punitive sentencing and mass incarceration as one aspect of a
hegemonic neoliberalism that seeks to reinforce a precarious, low-wage labour market by restricting
4
welfare benefits and extending penal controls. More recent studies, such as McNeil (2020), note that in
both penal and welfare domains, ‘conditionality’—the imposition of disciplinary requirements and
degradations on clients and offenders—is becoming more common; as are public-private partnership
arrangements that outsource correctional tasks to non-state agencies (Page and Soss 2017). Within
neoliberal regimes, penal states and welfare states are increasingly marketized and commercialized.
Central findings of the historical literature include the claim that a specific style of penal practice—
p. 773 variously described as correctionalism, rehabilitation, the treatment ↵ approach, or penal-welfarism—

is a concomitant of welfare state government and that the ‘penal-welfare’ aspects of criminal justice rise
and fall in tandem with the broader social policies of the welfare state. Stated in these bald terms, the
punishment-welfare connection seems like an obvious one but it has often been overlooked—probably
because of the disciplinary division between the ‘social policy’ literature (which generally excludes crime
policy and criminal justice) and ‘criminology’ (which neglects other areas of social policy and social
control).
Elizabeth Hinton (2016) describes how crime-control initiatives of the ‘War on Poverty’ period in the
1960s resulted in the involvement of police departments in community agencies, welfare centres and
youth service bureaus. This blending of welfare and policing functions is a theme that has become
prominent again today as neoliberal governments seek to scale back public assistance and discourage
individuals from applying for welfare support. In both America and Britain there has been a pronounced
tendency for means-tested welfare benefits to become more conditional and more disciplinary; for a
greater emphasis to be placed on the pursuit of welfare fraud; and for welfare recipients to become
increasingly subject to sanctions (such as loss or suspension of benefits) for the violation of benefit
conditions and procedures (Gustavson 2011; Soss et al. 2011; Goddard 2012; Kohler-Hausmann 2015; Adler
2016; McNeil 2020; Brydolf-Horwitz and Beckett 2021).
This process of blending and blurring reminds us that the distinction between punishment and welfare is
5
more easily drawn in the abstract than in practice. Long before the rise of the modern welfare state, penal
sanctions such as imprisonment provided some minimal forms of welfare—a basic diet, a modicum of
healthcare, evangelical prison visits, help with resettlement, etc.—especially for ‘deserving’ inmates such
as juveniles or female offenders (Morris and Rothman 1995). Even the rituals of capital punishment
generally provided some minimal care for the condemned in the form of medical supervision, an elaborate
final meal, a pastor to administer the last rites, and so on (Garland 2010). Perhaps only monetary penalties
appear altogether devoid of welfare elements, though courts may permit a fine to be paid by installments
in order to limit hardship and improve the prospect of compliance.
If we turn to welfare measures—and particularly to means-tested assistance for the poor (as opposed to
6
insurance-based entitlements or corporate welfare )—we find, conversely, that welfare provision is often
accompanied by onerous conditions and disciplinary elements of various kinds. Whether we consider
nineteenth century workhouses, twentieth century AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), or
Page 3 of 29
twenty-first century ‘workfare’, in each case the provision of aid to the poor—and the application
procedures required to access such aid—generally involve some measure of stigma, humiliation, and hard
7
treatment. Penal practices flow into, overlap with, and merge together with welfare practices.
This hybridity is encapsulated in the concepts of ‘penal-welfare’ and ‘penal-welfarism’ that refer to the
p. 774 adoption of welfarist goals in the criminal justice context and to penal ↵ practices designed to promote
these welfarist ends. Penal-welfare measures are penal sanctions that contain some kind of ‘welfarist’
element—whether it be educational, therapeutic, medical or the provision of services. A penal-welfare
regime is thus a hybrid form of criminal justice involving welfare as well as punishment—with penal-
welfare measures operating alongside more straightforwardly penal forms of sentencing and punishment.
In such systems, the rehabilitative treatment of needy, reformable, and deserving offenders is generally
accompanied by the heightened control or incapacitation of others deemed incorrigible or dangerous—
both modalities being facilitated by indeterminate sentencing, classification processes, and the reduced
concern for ‘proportionality’ that are essential elements of penal-welfarism.
‘Penal-welfarism’ should be distinguished from a purely welfarist or social approach to crime control. In
contrast to penal-welfare, a welfarist approach would not operate primarily in the context of criminal
justice or the penal system. Rather than intervene in the process of punishment, welfarist practices
prevent crime by means of policies such as family support, education and training, employment, and social
inclusion; their aim being to support at-risk families and communities and generally promote social and
8
economic integration. Ironically, welfarist crime controls of this kind are not an effect of crime control
‘policy’ as such: they are rather the unplanned side-effects of integrative welfare state institutions
9
designed to promote economic stability and security.
Welfare provision and penal control frequently encounter the same underlying problems and pathologies
—mental illness, addiction and drug abuse, joblessness, destitution and homelessness—though they
10
address these problems in different ways and with different effects. And similar debates and dilemmas
emerge in both domains:
Practices of punishment and welfare always raise questions of culpability and responsibility: Are individual
offenders and claimants to blame for the circumstances they find themselves in? Are they helpless,
blameless victims of large-scale social forces or responsible agents whose uncoerced choices led them into
crime and poverty? In each domain we find contrasting explanatory accounts that stress either structural
or individual causation. And in both domains, moral questions of desert are mixed up with practical
concerns to enhance deterrence and minimize dependency. Punishment and welfare both raise issues of
reciprocity—giving people what they ‘deserve’ is a form of quid pro quo—and they each entertain the
possibility of compassion in the form of charity, forgiveness, and mercy. They both involve elements of
stigma and humiliation that can make individuals feel outcast and degraded, thereby intensifying their
deviance or dependency (Matza 1966). They utilize common techniques such as incentives and
disincentives, normalization and discipline, reporting and responsibilization. They draw upon similar
p. 775 discourses of personal responsibility, dependency, and desistance ↵ (Seeds 2012; Haney 2004). And in
both domains, opinion is sharply divided between progressives who blame the social system and take a
compassionate view of clients and offenders, and conservatives who hold individuals responsible for their
Page 4 of 29
own fate and treat them accordingly. Debates about freedom versus determinism and desert versus
deterrence are recurring features in both domains, and over time they display parallel histories that shift
from individualism to collectivism and back again (Garland 2001).
Comparative Studies
The punishment-welfare relationship also features prominently in the research literature of comparative
penology, though here the empirical connection is a slightly different one. The association being observed
is not between penal and welfare modes of governmental thinking and acting, nor is the focus the
emergence of hybrid penal-welfare measures. Instead, comparative inquiry has centred on an observed
inverse relationship between the size and generosity of welfare states on the one hand and the size and
severity of penal systems on the other. A growing body of work has converged around a negative
correlation thesis in which nations (or sub-national states) with more generous welfare states tend to
exhibit lower per capita imprisonment rates and more lenient and humane penal systems, while
jurisdictions with smaller, meaner welfare states are prone to higher rates of imprisonment and more
11
severe sentencing. It should be said that this punishment-welfare correlation is not an unvarying one:
results vary across time periods (Beckett and Western 2001) and the association is more significant with
respect to extreme cases (such as the US and Norway) than it is in the middle range (Cavadino and Dignan
2006). But on the basis of what we currently know, the correlation seems empirically robust and
conceptually plausible.
As this comparative research programme unfolds, there are three issues that stand in need of further
development: (a) data and metrics; (b) the operative conceptions of ‘welfare state’ and ‘penal system’; and
(c) the causal mechanisms that are assumed to underpin the empirical correlations of punishment and
welfare.
Data and metrics

The first issue to consider is the question of the appropriate data and metrics to be used in comparative
analyses. Most commentators acknowledge that single dimension metrics such as ‘rates of imprisonment
per 100,000 population’, or ‘levels of social expenditure as a proportion of GDP’ are too crude to get at the
character of a penal system or a welfare state, but these easy-to-access metrics continue to form the basis
for many studies.
Comparisons that rely on a one-dimensional metric are inadequate because they fail to reflect the
complexity that is characteristic of penal systems. If the penal systems being compared are internally
p. 776 heterogeneous—and all of them are—then any single ↵ metric will gloss over important variation. In
the early 1970s, Scottish criminal justice was characterized both by the notorious Segregation Unit in
Inverness Prison known as ‘the Cages’, where unruly inmates were subjected to shockingly harsh and
degrading conditions and also by a radically welfarist, community-based, non-custodial approach to
juvenile offenders, as embodied in the Children’s Hearing System (Boyle 1984; McAra 2006). A comparison
that focused exclusively on the system’s rate of imprisonment would miss both of these aspects, and hence
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much that was significant about the system. And if small systems are mixed in this way, how much more
heterogeneous are larger, federated systems such as that of the US, where the imprisonment rates of some
states are four times as high as others and where quite different authorities are in charge of federal
12
penitentiaries, state prisons, and local jails?
A further reason why such measures are inadequate—to be discussed later in this chapter—has to do with
the problem-environment in which penal policy develops. Comparisons between penal systems are
decontextualized and distorted if penal measures are discussed without reference to the patterns of crime
and violence that trigger penal processes and (indirectly, to some extent) shape penal policy.
Commentators frequently assume that nations exhibiting higher levels of penal sanctioning are more
‘punitive’ without discussing the underlying conduct being addressed by penal measures. The possibility
that differences in penal sanctioning are, in part, a function of differences in crime levels (or violence
levels) is less often considered.
The same problem of non-uniformity applies to the analysis of trends and patterns of change. A 2015
Sentencing Project report noted that the recent, widely discussed trend towards reduced rates of
imprisonment in the US is, in fact, an aggregation of several more varied state-level trends, with two
thirds of the states showing modest reductions and the other third continuing to increase their prison
populations. Moreover, as Christopher Seeds (2022) has pointed out, the recent trends towards
decarceration in American states are themselves complex, since legislative reforms that reduce
incarceration for ‘shallow-end’ offenders are often offset by new laws that increase the tariff for more
serious offenders—a bifurcation that decreases the overall numbers in prison while increasing the time
that some offenders spend there.
Reductive, single-dimension comparisons are consequently of limited use, providing little more than a
starting point for analysis. On the other hand, more in-depth, qualitative measures such as the ten-
dimensional analysis of penal ‘harshness’ developed by Whitman (2003) in his comparative study of the
US, France and Germany are difficult to operationalize for large-scale international comparisons. What
then are the appropriate research strategies?
One approach is to adopt the method of in-depth, small-N comparison along the lines of Downes (1988),
Barker (2003), Whitman (2003), and Pratt and Eriksson (2013), a method of inquiry that is most effective
13
when motivated by patterns and puzzles suggested by large-N comparisons. Alternatively, one might
persist with the examination of a large number of cases while expanding the set of variables that forms the
basis of comparison, as in the important work of Sutton (2004) and Lacey and Soskice (2017).
p. 777 ↵ These data and metric issues are ones most fields of comparative analysis encounter in the early
stages of their development. Similar problems characterized early work in the comparative sociology of
welfare states. Like the sociology of punishment, comparative social policy began with single-factor
explanations, pointing to processes of industrialization (Wilensky 1965) or of modernization (Flora and
Alber 1976) as the causes of welfare state growth, and using single-metric data—typically government
social expenditure as a percentage of GDP—as a basis for comparison. It then entered a phase of
theoretical divergence and dispute, notably the contest between ‘functionalist’ theory—which assumed
that welfare states were pragmatic responses to the new economic and social needs of modern society—
and ‘power resource’ theories of class action—which viewed welfare policies as the outcome of struggles
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between social classes or political groups (Korpi 1983; Myles and Quadagno 2002). Eventually, a more
sophisticated, multi-dimensional approach emerged, using multiple methods, large-N and small-N
studies, and comparative, historical and quantitative data (Baldwin 1990). And in other work drawing on
comparative political economy, welfare states came to be viewed as an aspect of larger production regimes
and ‘varieties of capitalism’ and were studied within that larger framework (Hall and Soskice 2001). There
is every reason to expect that the sociology of punishment will develop in similar ways, with the
emergence of theoretically-informed comparative, historical and quantitative analyses that situate penal
practices in relation to the relevant problem environment as well as to the larger political process and
socio-economic structures that shape the penal system’s development and functioning.
Conceptions of the welfare state

‘Punishment and welfare’ studies do not always exhibit a clear or consistent view of what exactly we mean
when we talk about ‘welfare’ or ‘the welfare state.’ And while there is no need for all scholarship in this
field to work with the same conception, a greater level of precision and consistency in the use of key terms
and concepts would improve analysis and help avoid confusion.
As a proxy for welfare state spending, some penal-welfare researchers use data on means-tested benefits
for the poor, even though these benefits constitute only a very small part of overall welfare state effort and
expenditure. When this is done without acknowledgement, the effect is to reproduce a narrow, misleading
and somewhat ideological conception of ‘welfare.’ So for example, when Wacquant (2009) and Beckett and
Western (2001) discuss ‘welfare’ levels and correlate these with rates of imprisonment, the welfare
policies they refer to are AFDC, Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and food stamps—all of
14
them means-tested benefits as opposed to social insurance entitlements. As a consequence, the
associations they discover are between punishment and public assistance rather than between punishment
15
and ‘welfare’ more broadly defined.
The overlapping impact of punishment and welfare—and their shared function of governing the poor—
has prompted the observation that the ‘welfare population’ and the ‘penal population’ are, at least in
p. 778 neoliberal America, drawn from the same ↵ socio-economic groups—i.e. poor, urban communities of
16
colour, with the men in prison, the women on welfare. However, it is important not to conflate welfare
clients and prison inmates. In the US (and elsewhere) it is the elderly, women, children, whites, and low-
earning working people who are the chief recipients of means-tested benefits recipients—and these are
not the demographic groups that compose the majority of the prison population. By contrast, the working
age, able-bodied men who are typically sent to American jails and prisons are generally ineligible for social
17
welfare benefits—and were not eligible even prior to the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s (Shannon 2013).
And of course being in need of welfare support and being convicted of a criminal offence are not equivalent
statuses, however much the two may, in practice, overlap.
Some writers give the impression that between the 1960s and the 1990s, the social state was displaced by
the penal state, the implication being that the impact of neoliberalism has been to more or less abolish the
welfare state (Wacquant 2009). But even in neoliberal America, the welfare state continues to be
committed to major insurance-based programmes such as Social Security and Medicare and to extensive
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corporate welfare transfers, most of which are hidden in the tax code (Garland 2016; Mettler 2011). It is
welfare for the poor—above all, social services and support for families with dependent children—that has
been most thoroughly recast and retrenched by neoliberal policies: the core institutions of the larger
welfare state have remained firmly in place (Soss et al. 2011; Shannon 2013; Garland 2016; Brydolf-Horwitz
and Beckett 2021).
Other writers, notably Cavadino and Dignan (2006), utilize a broader conception of welfare regimes that
encompasses the institutions of social insurance, social welfare, and labour market regulation, and
distinguish between ‘neo-liberal’, ‘conservative corporatist’, ‘social democratic corporatist’ and ‘oriental
corporatist’ regime types. Here the emphasis is on regime variation and on mapping differences in
national rates of imprisonment and severity of sentencing onto the different ‘worlds of welfare’ identified
by comparative social policy research (Esping-Andersen 1990). Scholars such as Sutton (2004); De Giorgi
(2006); Lacey (2007); and Lacey and Soskice (2017) work with a yet broader conception, focusing on the
ways in which welfare regimes function as one institutional complex within the larger socio-economic
structures of political economy and ‘varieties of capitalism.’ Here the concept of ‘welfare state’ includes
not just welfare for the poor, social insurance, and corporate welfare but also the institutions of economic
management, collective agreements, corporatist processes, labour relations, and vocational training.
This broader analytic frame has been used to great effect in comparative research on economics, labour
p. 779 relations and government, but it remains to be seen whether it can be ↵ effectively deployed in respect
of penal policy—not least because it begs the question of how well integrated penal systems are with
respect to mainstream economic processes. A focus on political economy takes us quite far away from the
most important and most proximate determinants of penal outcomes—such as sentencing law and
practice; prosecution policy, early release practices, etc.—making it all the more important to specify the
linkages between these two realms. The ‘varieties of capitalism’ literature was developed to explain the
impact of production regimes and styles of economic management on outcomes such as growth, GDP,
employment levels, and inequality. But these processes and relationships are not necessarily so
illuminating for understanding the fates of people outside the labour market, as individuals sent to prison
tend to be (Western 2006). The analysis of economic and social stratification—particularly the systematic
exclusion from job markets, housing, higher education, and marriage—is undoubtedly important for
understanding patterns of crime and poverty and their concentration within specific demographic groups
(Wilson 2011; Sampson 1987; 2012; Western 2006). What remains to be discovered is whether these
18
production regimes and styles of economic management also shape punishment and welfare policy.
Causal mechanisms
We currently lack a clear and settled conception of the mechanisms and processes that produce the
observed correlations between welfare states and penal outcomes. What exactly is it about generous
welfare states that appears to promote low rates of imprisonment and humane penal practices? Are
generous welfare systems and lenient penal systems a joint expression of an underlying culture of
inclusion and solidarity, as Pratt and Eriksson (2013) suggest? Are generous welfare states an outgrowth of
solidaristic civil society institutions—families, communities, churches, and trade unions—that serve to
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prevent crime and thereby reduce the need for penal controls (Garland 2016)? Do extensive welfare states
—such as Sweden or the Netherlands—empower public sector professionals who use their authority to
promote social ideologies and resist punitive policies (Pratt and Eriksson 2013; Downes 1988)?
Conversely, why are market-oriented, residual welfare states—such as the US and the UK—prone to high
levels of imprisonment and harsh sentencing? Is it because market individualism is associated with low
levels of trust and solidarity? Because economic and social insecurity generate higher crime levels and
more punishment? Or does expenditure on corrections crowd out welfare spending targeted on the poor
(Ellwood and Guetskow 2017)? These are questions that remain unanswered. But if we are to move beyond
the impressionistic claim that harshness or generosity in one policy sphere is somehow replicated in
others, we will have to discover more about the causal processes underlying the observed associations.
Analysts such as Loic Wacquant (2009), view punishment and welfare as conjoined aspects of a single
governmental strategy, designed to shore up low-wage labour markets by removing alternatives to
19
employment such as living off criminal activities or claiming welfare benefits. This analysis deals with
the causal question of how welfare policy determines penal outcomes by insisting that punishment and
public assistance are, in effect, conjoined modes of governing the poor that form a single strategy.
p. 780 ↵ So instead of explaining how penal policy, with its multiple determinants and intrinsic purposes
(Garland 1990) comes to be aligned with welfare policy—which is, if anything, even more complex in its
aims and dynamics (Garland 2016)—this approach assumes away the causal question by positing a single
strategy (and presumably a single strategist) directing both penal and welfare policy in a coordinated
manner. The two policy domains co-vary because they are not in fact separate: they are two aspects of a
single governmental undertaking—the government of neoliberal insecurity.
The problem with this approach is that there is little empirical evidence to support its central thesis
(Guetzkow 2020). Wacquant insists that the same political actors who pressed for free-market, small
state, ‘neo-liberal’ policies were responsible for the movement towards ‘hyper-incarceration’ but he is
unable to provide empirical evidence of this joint authorship or to explain away the fact that neo-liberal
principles are implacably opposed to the build-up of a large, expensive state sector, whether devoted to
20
punishment or to anything else. Harcourt (2011) is similarly vague in respect of the causal processes that
explain the link between ‘free market’ economics and ‘despotic’ forms of punishment such as mass
incarceration—a link that he believes to be a historically recurring one.
The problem of specifying causal mechanisms also affects the important work of Lacey and Soskice (2017)
who theorize penal systems as corollaries of the political economies, production regimes and electoral
systems that characterize the nations in question. Drawing on the ‘varieties of capitalism’ literature—
developed by David Soskice and his colleagues (Hall and Soskice 2001)—they hypothesize that countries
with ‘coordinated market economies’ (such as Germany or Sweden) will be less inclined than
uncoordinated ‘liberal market economies’ (such as the US or the UK) to deal with offenders by means of
exclusionary penal measures and more inclined to create pathways to employment, education or training.
In keeping with their political economy approach, Lacey and Soskice suggest that the key variable in the
relationship between welfare states and penal outcomes is public investment in human capital and that the
causal process at work is the patterned action of decision-makers who seek to protect these sunk social
21
costs. The causal inference is that coordinated market economies—in which educational pathways and
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employment outcomes are closely coordinated by corporatist agreements—will be less inclined to use
exclusionary penal measures and more inclined to deal with offenders by creating opportunities for ‘re-
entry’ or ‘re-insertion’ via employment, education or training. On this account, America’s mass
incarceration is an effect of the paucity of supply-side policies that invest in human capital and promote
social integration.
There is much to be said for this way of framing the issues. Both welfare states and criminal justice
institutions are nested within larger political economies and are structured by them to some extent. And it
p. 781 is certainly plausible to suppose that governments ↵ that invest heavily in human capital will be
disinclined to waste that investment by consigning masses of working-age citizens to penal institutions—
particularly since prisons are known to de-skill inmates and reduce their potential for gainful employment
(Western et al. 2004; Clear and Rose 1998). But even on this more developed account, the supposed causal
mechanism is open to doubt. Most of the people who repeatedly appear in criminal courts—even in
relatively well-integrated societies such as Germany and Sweden—are not those who have benefited from
human capital investments but rather those who have dropped out of school and out of lawful
employment. So, if the authorities hesitate to imprison and exclude these people, this may not be because
of sunk costs and preserving public investments but because of other factors such as a cultural disposition
to value human worth and potential; a negative view of the effectiveness of prisons; or a wish to minimize
social divisions and marginalization. If that is the case, the causal processes may have more to do with
culture than with political economy (for a more detailed discussion, see Garland 2021).
A final approach to the linkages between punishment and welfare might be described as the cultural
causation thesis. In several studies (Downes 1988; Whitman 2003; Pratt and Eriksson 2013) correlations
between high levels of welfare and low levels of punishment are interpreted as cultural effects, brought
about by the prevalence of a culture of tolerance, respect for dignity, or by theories of individual causality
and responsibility. On these accounts it is the underlying culture and the shaping of official action by
embedded values that explains the distinctive character of welfare and punishment in any specific nation.
Like the ‘conjoined strategy’ approach discussed above, this cultural account relocates the causal question
away from welfare-penal relations to a more basic, third factor—national culture—that is assumed to
22
cause both.
The extent to which public authorities deliver punishment or welfare to people, and the harshness or
generosity of these policies, are, in part at least, an expression of the relationship between citizens and the
state and between social groups with one with another—a measure of the range and depth of social
solidarity and respect for human dignity. We might therefore suppose that in societies where communal
sentiment, fellow-feeling, ethnic identification or shared citizenship extend to the poor and the marginal,
these sentiments will make for a more lenient penal system and more generous welfare. And it also seems
plausible to suppose that societies with deep racial, religious, or class divisions—or divisions between
nationals and immigrants—will tend to treat outsiders more harshly and minimize their receipt of public
resources. The fact that increased immigration to Western European nations has coincided with
increasingly severe penal policies may be viewed as evidence of this tendency (Downes and Swaaningen
2007).
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Cultural processes may, however, be insufficient by themselves to explain temporal or cross-national

variations in penal (or welfare) law and practice. Cultural values and legal policy are not always in close
alignment. What the public believes and what state officials do are not necessarily consistent; especially in
complex heterogeneous societies. Cultural currents and social values have an impact on official action only
to the extent that they are translated into law and policy by means of political and institutional processes.
And, depending on the structure of the relevant political institutions, the impact of specific cultures and
values may be muted or amplified, thereby enhancing or minimizing their effect on penal and welfare
p. 782 outcomes. Explanations of policy that are phrased in terms of ↵ ‘culture’ or ‘public attitudes’ are
therefore obliged to describe how these social attitudes are, in fact, translated—or not translated—into
laws and penal practices.
To this end, writers such as Barker (2009) and Garland (2013, 2020) have pointed to the structures and
capacities of state institutions as shaping forces in the exercise of penal power, focusing on the nature of
the penal state and its relation to other sectors and characteristics of state government. In contemporary
societies, penal policy is enacted and administered by a network of governmental institutions that together
form the penal state—just as welfare policy is enacted and administered by the complex of agencies that
make up the welfare state. And these penal state institutions vary along a number of dimensions such as
their levels of autonomy; their control of the power to punish; their preferred modes of penal power; and
the capacities and resources available to them. In considering the causal processes shaping penal or
welfare policy—and, therefore, the relations, affinities and alignments that connect these two domains—
we ought to give due attention to the proximate, system-specific causes that enact and enforce policy, as
well as the social background causes that shape these actions.
Choices about the use of penal measures are shaped by ‘supply side’ factors as well as ‘demand side’ ones
—by what the penal state is capable of doing, and in the habit of doing, as well as what the public wants it
to do (Garland 2020). So, for example, penal states in nations with extensive welfare systems are likely to
have more non-penal forms of influence, management and social control available to them than do penal
states in nations with minimalist forms of welfare provision. A jurisdiction’s penal capacities may be
conditioned, in part, by the character and capacities of the welfare state institutions alongside which its
penal system operates. The fact that American city and county jails contain large populations of mentally
ill, addicted, and homeless persons who, in northern European nations, would be the recipients of social
services rather than prison inmates (Gottschalk 2015) is a case in point. And recall that the penal
institutions of nations such as Norway are able to utilize the resources of an extensive welfare state
infrastructure of social assistance when they choose to manage offenders in the community or resettle
them following a period of confinement (Pratt and Eriksson 2013; Lappi Sepalla 2017).
The existence of a dense network of social agencies and welfare practices can provide a platform for the
exercise of positive, non-penal control by the state, acting through schools, community centers, welfare
bureaus, social work departments, and so on. An extensive welfare state provides criminal justice
authorities with ways of acting at a distance, with forms of soft power, and with an infrastructure of
normative controls they can deploy to manage deviance and respond to social problems. In nations with a
poorly developed social state these methods of extending, projecting and softening penal power do not
exist to the same extent. To deal with problems of crime and violence such nations rely more exclusively on
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police, prisons and penal control (Garland 2016a). Welfare states shape penal policy ideologically—by
establishing cultural conceptions, aims and values—but also substantively—by providing an operational
infrastructure and a rich array of controls.
Punishment, Welfare, and the Problems They Address
In thinking about ‘punishment’ and ‘welfare’ it is important to consider their societal operation and
functioning. The punishment of offenders is not a stand-alone undertaking: it operates as one element
p. 783 within a larger set of ordering practices that also ↵ includes policing, crime control, and the
maintenance of public order. In the same way, public assistance is a constituent element of a larger world
of welfare provision that includes not just social insurance and public services but also non-state sources
of welfare such as employment, family, and community. And while the institutions of state punishment
and public assistance each have their own distinctive policies and practices, their overall direction and
dynamics are shaped by the larger systems of which they form a part.
Viewing the punishment of offenders as one aspect, among others, of social ordering; and viewing social
welfare as one aspect, among others, of economic and social security, helps locate these policies in their
proper frameworks and connect them with more mainstream processes. These mainstream social and
economic processes are, in fact, doubly determinative of both punishment and welfare. In the first
instance, they generate the rates and patterns of crime and poverty that form the problem environments
addressed by punishment and welfare. And in the second instance, these same social and political
processes shape the policies and activities of penal and welfare agencies.
Viewing matters more broadly also reminds us that large shifts in the nature of social governance—such as
the shift from the laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth century to the welfare states of the twentieth
century, the rise of neoliberalism, or the emergence of social investment policies in the early twenty-first
century—will impact the character and conduct of penal and welfare policy. Punishment and welfare are,
in vital respects, practices of governing, even if this aspect of their functioning is obscured by their
signature institutional aims of ‘doing justice’ and ‘meeting need.’ As a consequence, contrasts in, or
transformations of, the nature of political economy, class relations, and modes of social and economic
governance will impact the status of the poor and the forms of government to which they are subjected—
including the treatment they receive from penal and welfare agencies (Garland 1985; Piven and Cloward
1993; Wacquant 2009).
If penal and welfare policy are modes of governing individuals, they are also, in some measure, problem-
solving policies. But it is vital to bear in mind that problems of crime and poverty are not reducible to
‘problem individuals’. Penal sanctions and public assistance target those who fall through the cracks of the
mainstream processes of social ordering and social provision. Public assistance addresses problems of
indigence and hardship created by the unequal distribution of employment, resources, and life chances.
And although individual-level factors play a part in the incidence of poverty, its prevalence in any specific
time or place is a consequence of labour-market processes and the redistributive effects of the state’s
employment regulations, tax system and social provision. In much the same way, although criminal
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involvement by individuals is influenced by their specific characteristics and choices, a society’s rates and
patterns of crime result from the operation of social institutions such as schools, families, neighborhoods,
and labour markets, as modified by policies of prevention, policing, and punishment.
Most studies of punishment and welfare connect the two policy realms directly, interpreting their
commonalities as a matter of policy congruence or elective affinity (Guetzkow 2020). On this account,
penal policies and welfare policies exhibit common characteristics and co-vary across time and place
because the same policy ideas, social values, or political strategies are being applied in different policy
domains. No doubt these ideational affinities are part of the story. But neither penal policy nor welfare
policy operates independently of socio-economic structures nor of the problems of physical and economic
insecurity to which these structures give rise. Policy-makers are not free to design any policy they choose:
they are constrained by the need to address the problems that penal and welfare institutions are expected
to ameliorate and control. Policies that fail to manage these problems in ways that are regarded as
p. 784 tolerably effective by ↵ political and public audiences will, sooner or later, be subject to demands for
change. Ideologies of crime-control and poverty-reduction, and the expectations to which they give rise,
are, in that sense, real constraints on the institutions that claim to be operating in accordance with them.
Of course, ‘social problems’ do not exist as such outside of the social processes that construct them
(Spector and Kitsuse 2001). The phenomena of crime, poverty and insecurity become ‘social problems’—or
not—in ways that are partly determined by the policy-making agencies that define, measure, classify, and
address them. And these definitional interactions (between policy and problem) are ongoing and
contested. But the phenomena of crime and poverty have external, objective correlates and real-world
effects that are relatively independent of the policy response, assuming some minimal level of agreement
about what is to count as a crime or an instance of poverty. So, we can, at least in principle, know on the
basis of independent empirical evidence when a policy is failing (because more people experience criminal
victimization or impoverishment) and when it is succeeding (because fewer people become crime victims
or fall below the poverty line). Data on these issues will always be subject to dispute. And all sorts of
reporting and recording mediations will affect the numbers and the salience they achieve in the public
sphere. But the point I want to stress is that policy-makers cannot define issues as they please. Nor can
they persuasively claim to be effectively dealing with perceived problems in the face of widespread public
experience and evidence to the contrary. The upshot is that any analysis of punishment or welfare needs to
pay attention to the problem environment in which these policies operate and to the structural processes
that generate these problems.
Both punishment and welfare ought to be viewed as being, in some part, remedial: each one existing to
manage a set of problems, variously conceived as crime, violence and lawbreaking or poverty, insecurity,
and exclusion. But it also follows that these underlying problems can never be fully controlled by the
practices of punishment and welfare because the economic and social processes that generate these
problems—crime and poverty—are barely addressed by after-the-fact remediations. The prevalence of
economic insecurity is an effect of property laws, labour markets, and the distribution of life chances
created by the larger political economy. The prevalence of crime and violence is an effect of the
(dys)functioning of families, schools and communities, and the mainstream processes of socialization,
23
social integration and social control. Penal sanctions and public assistance are post hoc remediations that
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manage the fall-out from these structures without tackling the underlying processes that generate the
problems. Precisely for that reason, they are always destined to fail to a greater or lesser extent (Hirst
1986; Garland 2016).
To understand the policy options clearly, and to establish reasonable expectations about their
effectiveness, we ought to view penal policy and welfare policy as remedial practices nested within broader
sets of social and economic institutions. And in thinking about punishment and welfare, we ought also to
be considering a more fundamental set of questions—about the relationship between penalty and crime;
about the relationship between state welfare and poverty; and about the social and economic causes of
p. 785 ↵ crime and poverty. We tend to think of the effect of the welfare state on punishment in terms of the
involvement of social workers or rehabilitative programmes in criminal justice institutions. But the biggest
impact that welfare states have on penal policy often goes unremarked: it being the tendency of effective
welfare state policies to make punishment less central to the repertoires of state control. Welfare states
that ensure work, limit inequality, secure families, and support communities are less prone to high levels
24
of crime, which in turn, reduces the need for punishment.
From Punishment to Welfare? The Politics of Re-Allocation
The research I’ve been discussing up to this point is mostly concerned with analytical and explanatory
questions. But there are also normative and political questions to be asked about the relations between
punishment and welfare, and recent events in the USA bring such questions very much to the fore.
In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, social movement activists
and elected officials mobilized around the demand that the aggressive policing, mass incarceration,
collateral consequences, extortionate fines and fees, and generalized racism that characterize America’s
penal state should be ended and replaced by alternative methods of controlling crime and promoting
public safety. Though the demands were not phrased in these terms, it is clear that this radical project is
fundamentally about the relationship between the penal state and the welfare state and the possibility of
reallocating social functions from one to the other.
Demands to ‘defund the police’ and ‘abolish prisons’ are, in effect, demands for a structural
transformation of criminal justice that minimizes the use of police and prisons and maximizes non-penal
forms of social ordering and remediation. This ‘abolitionist’ project aims to end the aggressive use of
penal power which has dominated American policy for the last fifty years and move towards a more
welfarist mode of maintaining order—one that invests in communities, empowers social services, and
responds to deviance using restorative and reintegrative processes. Such a project assumes that political
actors can realistically hope to transform American crime-control from an emphatically penal approach to
25
an avowedly welfarist one. But is this the case? And if so, what are the constraints within which such a
transformation would operate?
I noted above that different nations exhibit very different mixes of punishment and welfare, so clearly
there is a range of functional possibilities. But in any specific jurisdiction, the range of possibilities
depends on the nature of the political economy within which political action takes place and the nature of
the underlying problems being addressed.
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p. 786 ↵ We should bear in mind that shifting a problem behaviour or population from one domain to another
is a familiar reform project, usually with left-leaning reformers seeking to replace penal measures with
26
welfare measures and right-wing reformers aiming to do the reverse. Responsibility for ‘juvenile justice’
and the management of young offenders has moved back and forth between penal authorities (adult
criminal courts) and welfare authorities (family or juvenile courts) at various points in the history of
criminal justice in the US (Sutton 1988; Kupchik 2006; Feld 1999) and the UK (see Morris and McIsaac 1978
on the emergence of Scotland’s welfarist ‘Children’s Hearings’). In parts of the USA in the 1960s, drug
addiction was regarded as a matter for public health authorities (Fortner 2015) before the ‘war on drugs’
shifted towards a decidedly penal approach. And according to some accounts, the recent onset of an ‘opioid
epidemic’ has prompted a shift in the reverse direction, allegedly because the affected population is
predominantly white (Exum 2019). A domain shift in the opposite direction—from welfare to punishment
—occurred in the 1970s when a deinstitutionalization movement succeeded in closing down America’s
state asylums but without instituting the promised provision of community care. The eventual
consequence was that large numbers of mentally ill people ended up living on the streets, where they
became subject to police management, had their conduct criminalized, and revolved in and out of penal
institutions (Harcourt 2006 and 2011).
In America at the current moment, a network of progressive social movements is pressing a broader, more
radical version of this re-allocation project. These movements talk of ‘defunding police’, ‘abolishing
prisons’ and ‘re-imagining public safety’ but the basic demand is that a crime control strategy based on
aggressive policing and mass incarceration be replaced by a welfarist regime based on alternatives to
incarceration, health and social services, community-based wellness programs and initiatives to reduce
27
violence, and economic investment (Kaba 2021; Bell, Beckett and Stuart (2021).
Compared to other advanced nations, America is an extreme outlier in the extent to which it deploys penal
rather than welfare institutions to deal with social problems (Garland 2020; Reitz 2019). In the US it is
primarily the police, together with local jails, who deal with people who are mentally-ill, the homeless,
and the drug-addicted—not because the police are well-trained to deal with them, and certainly not
because jails are appropriate settings for their care, but because so many people are failed by America’s
28
welfare state. Because mental institutions have closed and community care is scarce; because housing is
unaffordable and homeless shelters are unsafe; and because addiction programs are mostly unavailable to
p. 787 people without insurance, people whose problems ↵ would elsewhere be dealt with by welfare state
agencies come to be administered by America’s penal state. The masses of people who fall who through the
holes of America’s threadbare safety net all-too-often become candidates for criminalization and end up
in jail or prison.
In America today, police and jail are the go-to agencies for all sorts of problems that would elsewhere be
dealt with by social service, educational, or housing agencies—an arrangement that generally aggravates
the difficulties experienced by needy individuals and leaves the underlying structural conditions
completely untouched. Millions of people are caught up in the machinery of mass incarceration and the
mechanisms of punishment and social exclusion that follow on from it, with little welfare provision for
those released from custody (Western 2006 and 2018; Alexander 2010). Given this background, current
demands for a radical re-allocation of functions from punishment to welfare—using social services rather
Page 15 of 29
than armed police to respond to mental health emergencies or regulate minor nuisances; using ‘violence
interrupters’ and community outreach to address gun violence by counseling and mediating; replacing
criminal courts with restorative justice processes; ending pre-trial detention; utilizing diversion schemes
and alternatives to prison; removing cops from schools; abolishing the use of armed police to patrol traffic
or collect fines—are hardly surprising.
It is too soon to guess what impact these new social movements might have. In the short-term, they have
certainly raised public awareness about the problematic character of America’s penal state. And they have
succeeded in introducing a current of penal-state criticism into Democratic Party politics for the first time
since the 1980s when figures such as Bill Clinton and Joe Biden persuaded the party to join Republicans in a
bipartisan commitment to law-and-order politics.
On the other hand, the widespread expectations of structural change that were raised in the months after
May 2020 have been mostly disappointed; partly because the US electorate reverted to its more
conservative attitudes towards law enforcement, mostly because big city homicide rates trended sharply
upwards during the pandemic, prompting new fears about public safety after a decade of relatively safe
cities when tough-on-crime sentiments had receded. In the national elections in November 2020 and local
elections the following year, proposals to defund the police proved an electoral liability and progressives
frequently lost out to more centrist or rightwing candidates who promised to enhance policing and
29
criminal justice rather than defund or abolish them.
But in the longer term, who knows? The massive, nation-wide uprising that followed the killing of George
Floyd has introduced a series of profoundly critical ideas into the politics of public safety and has
persuaded many young people that America’s penal state is fundamentally unjust and unnecessary. These
seeds may bear fruit in future years.
The emergence of these radical themes has prompted scholars to reflect on the politics of reallocation and
the practical problems a movement from punishment to welfare would encounter, even assuming that the
political obstacles currently blocking such a development could somehow be overcome (see Barkow 2023
for an overview). Some of these considerations have a more general theoretical significance inasmuch as
they qualify the assumption that punishment and welfare are functional alternatives that allow the
substitution of one for the other.
The most interesting observations that emerge from this new scholarship are not those concerned with
p. 788 fundamental questions such as the possibility of abolishing ↵ imprisonment (aren’t there some
offenders who represent a serious risk to the public and do have to be incarcerated?); the possibility of
doing without punishment altogether (doesn’t group life always involve normative imperatives, violation
of which is wrongful and subject to condemnation and sanction?); or the possibility of regarding offenders
as being in need of help rather than deserving of hard treatment (weren’t Kant and Hegel correct to insist
that such an approach de-humanizes and degrades offenders by denying them reason and agency?). These
are issues that have been taken up by philosophers in the past and there is little that is new in recent
writing (Duff and Garland 1994). More interesting, because more novel and more pertinent, are insights
Page 16 of 29
that have been developed about questions of comparative cost, institutional capacity, temporality of
impact, transitional risks, and the vexed American problem of maintaining order in a society awash with
firearms.
Critics of the criminal legal system frequently decry the costs of policing and prisons and suggest that a
shift from punishment to welfare would produce fiscal cost savings as well as improved social outcomes.
On this account, penal state costs and welfare state costs are roughly equivalent, so a reallocation of
functions from one to the other can be cost neutral or even a net reduction. But recent analyses have shown
this is far from the case.
Critics of imprisonment estimate that the average cost per prisoner per year in the US is somewhere in the
region of $35,000 and argue that non-custodial alternatives would reduce the costs of crime-control while
improving its quality (Brennan Center 2016). But as Pfaff (2018) and others have pointed out, the great
bulk of prison costs go to staffing and buildings, and the marginal cost of each incarcerated person is
closer to $4,000 per year. Fiscal savings from reallocation only occur when penal institutions are closed
down and staff laid off. By contrast, the marginal costs of income support for needy individuals grow
roughly in line with the numbers receiving the benefit, making welfare approaches much more expensive
than penal ones.
Similarly, the recent movement to ‘defund the police’ has demanded a reallocation of funds from police
budgets to social service agencies in the belief that this will facilitate an alternative route to public safety.
But there is reason to question the comparative cost assumptions that underpin that strategy. Local police
budgets in the US have markedly increased over time both absolutely and relative to other local
government expenditures (Urban Institute n.d.; Badger and Bui 2020), making them appear generous in
comparison to local spending on social services and public assistance. But the nation-wide pattern is very
uneven. Police departments are local government institutions—there are more than 18,000 of them—and
there is huge variation between a large force such as the NYPD, which has 36,000 officers, 19,000 civilian
employees, and an annual budget of more than $5 billion and the average force, which has fewer than 60
sworn officers (Walker and Katz 2018). Police departments are mostly funded by local taxes, and many
departments are required to raise revenue—from traffic fines or fees levied on offenders—in order to
supplement their budgets (U.S. Dept of Justice 2015). Compared to other developed nations, America
actually has fewer police per capita despite the fact that it has more serious crime (Clegg and Usmani 2019)
and spends much less on training and salaries. Similarly, social spending on welfare provision and income
support for the poor (which, unlike policing, are mostly funded by federal and state rather than by local
government) is much lower in the US than in other affluent nations.
The project of shifting from a penal crime-control strategy to a welfare public safety strategy has much to
recommend it, but it ought not to be conceptualized as a cost-neutral shift of funds from police (or
corrections) budgets to social service budgets. As Clegg and Usmani (2019) point out, policing and
p. 789 correctional costs are targeted ↵ to the relatively small part of the population that come into contact
with the criminal justice system, whereas welfare state expenditures—on education, healthcare, housing,
employment, or income support—are more general and much more costly than targeted criminal justice
Page 17 of 29
spending. Nor is likely that a substantial shift of policy towards a more supportive, more generous welfare
state would be undertaken as a result of concerns and social movements focused on crime and
30
punishment.
Improving the criminal legal system will not be a cost-reduction exercise or a matter of moving funds
31
from one budget to another. There is no neoliberal solution to the problem. On the contrary, tax-
resistance, limits on social spending, and a failure to build an adequate welfare state are part of what
caused the American crime-and-punishment problem in the first place. If the US is to substantially shift
the balance between its penal state and its welfare state, it will only be able to do so by means of a more
progressive tax code, massive federal government support for local urban investment, and a more
generously redistributive welfare state. In other words, any large-scale shift from punishment to welfare
will require a concomitant transformation in the structures of political economy.
A policy shift from a predominantly penal approach to crime control and public safety to a predominantly
welfare approach would also have to take account of the different temporalities involved in these two
strategies. Addressing the crime problem by arresting masses of offenders and sentencing them to long
terms in prison certainly has serious drawbacks and social costs, but it can be more or less immediate in its
impact. By contrast, a welfarist policy of preventing crime by investing in families and communities,
improving education and employment, reducing inequality and promoting social inclusion is a long-term
undertaking, the positive effects of which are likely to unfold over decades rather than days. When, in the
face of rising rates of crime and violence, the public demands that something be done, the relevant
timeframe is always the immediate one, even when the limits of a police-and-prisons strategy are
recognized and longer-term preventive policies might otherwise be preferred.
Similar considerations apply to more modest forms of reallocation, such as shifting the management of
the mentally ill, or the unhoused, or people with substance-use disorders from the police to social service
agencies—a policy proposal that has recently been prominent in American progressive politics. In cost
terms, it seems unlikely that simply moving funds earmarked for policing to other social services will
enable the latter to take over functions that the police previously discharged. The main reason why
America’s police have become all-purpose emergency responders dealing with all sorts of social problems
is that the nation’s welfare services tend to be minimal, underfunded, and limited in capacity. The notion
that these other agencies could effectively substitute for the police, given a transfer of funds from one to
the other is quite implausible. According to former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton ‘The NYPD goes on an
emotionally disturbed person call every 4 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year’ (Bratton
2021: 456). To equip social service agencies to take over this function—and make them ready to operate on
a 24/7 basis—there would need to be a very substantial investment of resources in staff, in training, and in
operational capacity.
Even if such investments were to be made, it is not clear that welfare agency staff would be prepared and
willing to face the dangers that emergency first responders have to deal with in American society, given
p. 790 the background fact that there are 400 million ↵ firearms in circulation and homicide rates are many
times higher than those of comparable nations. Most people who are mentally ill, or homeless, or addicted
are not ‘dangerous’; nor, for that matter, are most of the individuals convicted of criminal offences. But
some are. And the prevalence of guns in US society means that policing is necessarily more laden with risk,
Page 18 of 29
since a first-responder never knows whether or not a suspect is armed. American police kill many more
civilians than do the police of other affluent societies but American police officers are also killed and
injured at much higher rates. And the likelihood of a suspect—even a motorist in a routine traffic stop—
being armed and dangerous is very much greater than in comparable nations, making the risk of death or
serious injury a palpable feature of US policing in a way that it isn’t elsewhere (Kirkpatrick et al. 2012:
Zimring 2017).
Reallocating certain functions from the penal state to the welfare state might well reduce the frequency
with which emergency response situations become conflictual and devolve into an exchange of gunfire.
Social service staff may be better able to de-escalate fraught situations and pacify disturbed individuals.
But the background danger of a society awash with guns will not disappear, and that danger seriously
complicates the transfer of tasks from the penal to welfare state.
Conclusion
Penal systems are shaped by, change with, and flow into systems of social welfare provision. And analyses
of relations between the two domains have proven interesting, important, and politically timely. This
chapter has argued that an additional question we need to ask is how the overarching political economy
works to shape labour markets, the distribution of life chances, and recurring patterns of crime and
poverty—while simultaneously shaping the policy responses to these problems that go by the name of
punishment and welfare?
The original insight behind the study of the penal-welfare connection is a recognition that both
punishment and welfare are modes of control that are intimately and jointly involved in governing the
poor (Rusche and Kirchheimer 1969; Garland 1985). But these institutions are merely the front-line,
street-level modes of governing. A more fundamental form of governing the poor—and everyone else—
operates at the level of political economy and the political decisions that shape labour markets, property
laws, tax codes, redistributive policies and the collective rights of workers and corporations (Hacker and
Pierson 2010; Gilens 2012). In our concern to appreciate the fate of those caught up in penal and welfare
processes, and in our efforts to shift the policy emphasis from one domain to the other, we ought not to
forget the larger processes that shape and manage that collective experience.
Selected further reading

As an antidote to the ideological distortions that often characterize contemporary discussions of ‘welfare’ and the
‘welfare state’, readers should consult Garland’s The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction (2016). On the rise of
welfare states and their implications for punishment and criminal justice, see Donzelot’s The Policing of Families
(1980) and Garland’s Punishment and Welfare (1985). For comparative surveys, see Downes and Hansen’s ‘Welfare and
Punishment in Comparative Perspective’ (2006) and also Beckett and Western’s ‘Governing Social Marginality’ (2001).
Garland’s Culture of Control (2001) traces how (and why) these two domains were simultaneously transformed in the
p. 791 late twentieth century; as does Wacquant’s ↵ Punishing the Poor (2009)—a critical account that owes much to the
Page 19 of 29
classic work, Piven and Cloward’s Regulating the Poor (1993). Haney highlights the gendered aspects of penal and
welfare policies in ‘Gender, Welfare, and States of Punishment’ (2004) and Fraser and Gordon, in their classic article, ‘A
Genealogy of Dependency’ (1994), trace how gendered power relations suffuse the surface of welfare estate practices.
Online resources

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Stucky, T., Heimer, K., and Lang, J. (2005), ‘Partisan Politics, Electoral Competition and Imprisonment: Analysis of
States over Time’, Criminology, 43(1): 211–248.
Sutton, J. (1988), Stubborn Children: Controlling Delinquency in the United States 1640–1980, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Books.
Sutton, J. (2004) ‘The Political Economy of Imprisonment in Affluent Western Democracies, 1960–1990’, American
Sociological Review, 69: 170–189.
Urban Institute (n.d), ‘Criminal Justice Expenditures: Police, Corrections and Courts’ https://www.urban.org/policy-
centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/criminal-justice-
police-corrections-courts-expenditures <https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-
local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/criminal-justice-police-corrections-courts-expenditures>.
U.S. Department of Justice (2015), Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, US Government: Washington, DC.
Wacquant, L. (2009), Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Governance of Social Insecurity, Durham NC: Duke University
Press.
Walker, S. and Katz, C. (2018), The Police in America: An Introduction, New York: McGraw Hill.
Western, B, (2006), Punishment and Inequality in America, New York: Russell Sage.
Western, B. (2018), Homeward: Life in the Year after Prison, New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Western, B., Weiman, D., and Patillo, M. (eds) (2004), The Impacts of Incarceration on Families and Communities, New
York: Russell Sage.
Whitman, J. Q. (2003), Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe, New
York: Oxford University Press.
Wilensky, H. (1965), Industrial Society and Social Welfare, New York: Russell Sage.
Willrich, M. (2003), City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, W. J. (2011), ‘Being Poor, Black and American: The Impact of Political, Economic and Cultural Forces’,
American Educator Spring, 10–23.
Page 25 of 29
Zimring, F. (2017), When Police Kill, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
I am grateful to my NYU Law School colleague, Rachel Barkow, and research assistant Maya McDonnell for help with
this chapter. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Filomen D’Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Research
Fund of NYU School of Law.
Notes
1
See Note (2022) for the claim that progressive prosecutors in the US are increasingly adopting a ‘welfarist
prosecution’ model that aims to provide ‘some of the lost social services made inaccessible to the criminal justice-
involved by the shrunken welfare state’ (at 2152).
2
In the Foucauldian literature, the concept of ‘the social’ refers to the power-knowledge complex or ‘dispositif’
formed by the powers and practices of welfare state agencies together with philanthropic and private forms of social
support and intervention (see Curtis 2002 for a discussion).
3
Katzenstein and Waller (2015) note that the extraction of resources from poor offenders and their families is the
welfare state in reverse.
4
Shamas (2018) argues that neoliberal developments have prompted increasingly punitive carceral policies in
Norway.
5
Brydolf-Horwitz and Beckett (2021) describes how individuals caught up in the ‘murky middle’ (where penal and
welfare practices overlap) are subject to a thick web of surveillance, discipline, and control that includes elements of
support as well as punishment.
6
For a discussion of the different kinds of practices and institutions that compose ‘the welfare state’ see Garland
(2016).
7
See Haney (2018), Bach (2019), Natapoff (2019), Bugnon et al. (2020), Hamlin and Purser (2021), and Brydolf-Horwitz
and Beckett (2021) for ethnographic accounts of this blurring and hybridity.
8
An example of a welfarist approach to crime control is the Mobilization for Youth projects of the early 1960s that
aimed to address crime and delinquency by expanding economic opportunity and providing remedial education, job
training and social services (Kohler-Hausmann 2015; Hinton 2016). As the 1967 President’s Crime Commission put it,
‘Warring on poverty, inadequate housing, and unemployment, is warring on crime’.
9
For evidence that generous welfare states are associated with lower rates of violence than minimalist welfare states,
see Garland (2020).
Page 26 of 29
10
Lappi Seppala (2017) notes that ‘welfare states … provide workable alternatives to imprisonment’ (p. 20) and
‘extensive and generous social service networks often function … as effective crime prevention measures’. Gottschalk
(2006) notes that extensive welfare states provide important criminal policy options—such as victim compensation
and support, criminal injuries compensation, etc.—that are not available in more market-oriented nations such as the
US.
11
See for example Cavadino and Dignan (2006), Lappi-Seppala (2017), Pratt and Eriksson (2013), Lacey and Soskice
(2017), Sutton (2004), Downes and Hansen (2006), Beckett and Western (2001), Stucky et al. (2005), and Shannon
(2013).
12
For a graphic depiction of the complexity of US incarceration, see the Prison Policy Initiative’s image of the ‘whole
pie’: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html <https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html>.
13
Small-N studies examine a small number of theoretically-selected cases, using detailed description and qualitative
methods. They enable in-depth understanding but their results are of limited generalizability. Large-N studies
examine a large number of cases and use inferential statistics to identify generalizable patterns. See Kohn (1987).
14
Beckett’s more recent work—see Brydolf-Horwitz and Beckett (2021)—takes care to clarify these issues. Downes and
Hansen (2006) measure welfare by reference to a nation’s social spending as a proportion of its GDP.
15
In most welfare states, the primary beneficiaries of welfare state transfers and social insurance entitlements are
middle-class and upper-class employees and their families—see Garland 2016.
16
See for example, Wacquant (2009: 98–9): ‘[T]he social silhouette of AFDC beneficiaries turns out to be a near-exact
replica of the profile of jail inmates save for the gender inversion … the primary clients of the assistantial and carceral
wings of the neoliberal state are essentially the two gender sides of the postindustrial working class.’ While there is
reason to suppose that, at the state and local levels, there is a trade-off between welfare spending and correctional
spending, it is unlikely that there is a transfer of people from one institutional setting to another because penal and
welfare institutions by and large deal with different age and gender demographics (Guetzkow 2006; Shannon 2103).
For important discussions of the gender issues raised by research on punishment and welfare, see Haney (2004, 2010)
and McCorkel (2004).
17
Able-bodied working age men without child dependents in the US are ineligible for the main form of US welfare
support—Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (similarly, before 1996 they were ineligible for AFDC). They may be
eligible for food stamps and for general assistance but these are discretionary, means-tested, locally administered,
and not available in every state. In the US there is no equivalent of the UK Jobseekers’ Allowance and associated
forms of income support for which such men would be eligible in Britain.
18
See Garland (2021) for a detailed discussion of Nicola Lacey’s work on punishment and political economy.
19
Here Wacquant is following in the wake of Rusche and Kirchheimer (1969) and Piven and Cloward (1993). For critical
discussions, see Lacey (2010) and Abbott (2011).
20
To say, as some writers do, that ‘real-world neoliberalism’ disregards these fundamental principles and produces
policy outcomes at odds with them comes close to negating the value of ‘neoliberal’ as an analytical category.
Moreover, the emergence of the campaigning group ‘Right on Crime’ and its neoliberal critique of big penal
government confirms the implausibility of viewing the build-up of a penal state as an aim of neoliberal strategy,
Page 27 of 29
properly so-called. See Garland (2001) and Western (2009) on the role of neoconservative forces in driving the build-up
of the penal state; and on the alliance between neoconservatives and neoliberals within the US Republican and UK
Conservative party coalitions.
21
‘Human capital’ is a measure of the economic value of an employee’s skill set. The term is used more generally to
describe the stock of skills, knowledge and experience accumulated by individuals in a population. Human capital
investments are resources spent by governments, employers, families, etc. to improve these individual capacities and
enable individuals to produce greater economic value for themselves and others. See Becker (2008).
22
A similar analytical move is involved when welfare and penal policies are explained by reference to underlying social
or demographic conditions such as ethnic and religious homogeneity or solidaristic social relations (Sorokin 1937).
23
For example, in the US more than 60 per cent of black males who fail to graduate from high school spend a period of
their lives in prison. The failure of America’s public schools to retain and educate poor black men is thus a major factor
in the generation of mass incarceration. So too is the failure of the US labour market to find employment for so much
inner-city black youth. Social failures generate criminal involvement which in turn feeds the growth of penal
populations.
24
See Johnson et al. (2007) for an analysis of the crime prevention effects of welfare spending during the Great
Depression of the 1930s; and Shannon (2013) for an analysis of the effects of public assistance on crime levels.
25
For some abolitionist writers, the ideal of ‘abolition’ is less an immediate expectation than a guiding aspiration and
a basis for distinguishing between reformist reforms (which serve to enhance or legitimate the current system) and
abolitionist reforms that dismantle it, piece by piece. On this distinction, see the classic work by Thomas Mathiesen
(1974).
26
Occasionally, this political coding is reversed: as when left-wing activists press to criminalize certain behaviours—
such as domestic violence or sexual harassment (Gottschalk 2006) while right-wing reformers protest the
criminalization of corporate malfeasance (Coffee 2020).
27
Slogans such as ‘Care not Cops’, ‘Invest-Divest’, or ‘Defund the Police: Rebuild our Communities’ convey this
punishment to welfare impulse. Of course, the practices motivating the abolitionist movement go well beyond the
ones highlighted here. Police shootings of civilians is a key issue; as are ‘no knock’ warrants; arbitrary stop and search;
militarized policing; police in schools; mass incarceration; the predatory justice of fines and fees, and the racialized
character of the criminal legal system more generally.
28
Although the police are a vital element of the penal state, most of the research literature excludes them, focusing
instead on punishment, penal sanctions, and above all, rates of incarceration. I expect that, in the near future, we will
see a merging of scholarship on punishment with scholarship on policing under the rubric of research on the penal
state. On America’s welfare state, see Garland (2016).
29
The election of former police captain Eric Adams as New York City’s mayor was a case in point, as was the defeat of
defunding initiatives in Minneapolis—the city where George Floyd had been killed.
30
For a summary of research on the causes of welfare state formation and development, see Garland (2016).
31
In the US, social spending is mostly a matter for state and especially federal government, whereas police and jail are
local government functions primarily paid from local taxation.
Page 28 of 29
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Page 29 of 29
36. Criminology, punishment, and the state in a globalized society

p. 794 36. Criminology, punishment, and the state in a globalized society
Katja Franko
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0036
Abstract
Questions of criminal law and criminal justice are increasingly becoming international, overcoming the confines of traditional
jurisdictional constraints. This chapter traces these developments in order to examine what relevance criminology has had
and may hold for understanding contemporary global issues. It examines, among other things, the impact of global
interconnectedness on the nature of state sovereignty, particularly in light of challenges such as international terrorism,
irregular migration, and transnational organized crime. By doing so, the chapter does not simply chart a demise of the state, as
is sometimes assumed within studies of globalization. Instead, it proposes a more subtle, analytical, and imaginary
disconnection between crime, penality, and the nation state. Finally, the chapter addresses the rise of international forms of
justice, particularly those articulated through human rights regimes, as well as the emerging challenges to them.
Keywords: globalization, state sovereignty, nation state, transnational organized crime, human rights, terrorism
international criminal justice
Introduction
We live in a world marked by profound social transformations, instability, and crisis—of humanitarian,
economic, health, ecological, security, and other kinds. Many of the social and political issues that capture
contemporary research imagination are transnational, rather than simply local and national in nature,
from the covid-19 pandemic, terrorism, organized crime, sex trafficking to environmental degradation
and irregular migration, to name a few. Contemporary societies are, as Zygmunt Bauman observed, ‘faced
with a need to seek (in vain, it seems) local solutions to globally produced problems’ (2004: 6; italics
original). What has been criminology’s contribution to addressing these pressing questions?
Page 1 of 24
Through much of their history, criminal justice and criminal law have been inherently territorial and tied
to individual national states. Criminal justice has been conceived and imagined as, what Nancy Fraser
(2008) terms, ‘normal justice’; a type of justice which is practiced territorially, as a domestic relation
among fellow citizens where ‘parties frame their disputes as matters internal to territorial states, thereby
equating the “who of justice” with the citizenry of a bounded polity’ (Fraser 2008: 54). Today, however,
questions of criminal law and criminal justice are increasingly becoming international, overcoming the
confines of traditional jurisdictional constraints. Issues such as the death penalty, police violence, and the
combating of terrorism, are not simply a question of how individual states use power over their citizens,
but have become issues of world-wide politics and engage a global audience. For example, the Black Lives
Matter movement against police violence in the United States has resonated across a variety of
jurisdictions and has led to numerous protests and debates across the globe. Today, terms of
imprisonment in Europe are not determined solely by individual states, but also by an expending body of
European prison law and related monitoring institutional arrangements (Van Zyl Smit and Snacken 2009).
p. 795 Moreover, we live, as Paul Knepper observes, ‘in the age of ↵ international crime’ (2010: 1), where the
social parameters of crime, social harm, and their regulation are increasingly gaining a transborder reach.
Nor can it be any longer assumed that the ‘who of criminal justice’ today are only citizens of a given state.
Numbers of foreign prisoners in most Western European countries are well above 20 per cent, reaching a
1
staggering 70.8 per cent in Switzerland and 59.8 per cent in Greece. Contemporary penal regimes process
not only nationally marginalized populations, but are increasingly engaging in a series of strategies to
control globally marginalized populations (Franko 2020b).
In order to be able to address and study these developments criminology needs to be able to engage with
issues of global interconnectedness and expand the geographical reach of its research topics and
imagination. However, like criminal law and criminal justice, criminology has also been, traditionally, in
numerous and subtle ways, implicitly tied to the national state. Throughout the discipline’s history these
ties have often been supportive (in terms of sharing the state’s objectives of crime reduction,
rehabilitation, and the like), or highly critical (of its punitive and oppressive nature, class bias, and
democratic deficits). Nevertheless, the national state—with its prerogatives of criminalization,
punishment, policing, and the use of force, as well as its extensive data and knowledge production—has
been the essential precondition for thinking about modern crime and punishment and a backdrop without
which criminology, as a discipline, would hardly have been thinkable.
The growing body of studies on contemporary global connectivity has pointed out the need to challenge
this natural and self-evident framing of previous scholarship. It has suggested that to fully understand the
dynamics of crime, criminalization, and punishment in a global perspective, we need to challenge the
established habits of thought, methodological pathways, and theoretical and conceptual assumptions,
which have made the national frame of understanding ‘the normal’ also within criminology (see, inter
alia, Morrison 2006; Nelken 2011; Pakes 2012; Franko 2020a). Moreover, there is a need for growing
awareness of the global North-South divides that shape not only the dynamics of international crime and
criminalization, but also criminology as a discipline (Carrington et al. 2016).
Page 2 of 24
This chapter traces the arguments of this line of scholarship in order to examine what relevance
criminology has had, and may hold, for understanding contemporary global issues. By doing so, the
chapter does not simply chart a demise of the state, as is sometimes assumed within studies of
globalization. The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, has forcefully shown both the persistent salience of
the national state in tackling global problems, as well as the force of global risks and interconnectedness.
Consequently, the chapter proposes a more subtle analytical and imaginary disconnection between crime,
penality, and the nation state. In order to be able to capture and address contemporary global
interconnectedness, the state needs to be relieved of what David Held (2010) terms its ontological
privilege, particularly if criminological scholarship is to hold relevance for understanding developments
beyond the confines of the relatively pacified global North. A globally sensitive approach thus brings our
attention to issues of global inequality, colonial history, and economic and cultural inter-connectedness,
while keeping in mind the continued salience—at times even strengthening—of the national frame of
understanding.
p. 796 ↵ In the reminder of this chapter we shall examine how global perspectives challenge and re-draw the
national frame of understanding of issues of crime and punishment. In particular, we shall focus on the
question of the changing nature of state sovereignty and its components—territory, authority, and rights.
Destabilizing the National Frame
The global, as Ana Tsing (2005) observes, ‘needs to be imagined in order to exist’. However, traditional
imaginations of globalization have often been marked by two misleading and unproductive assumptions.
The first is that we are dealing with a historically new phenomenon and that we are, due to the
profoundness of technological and social change, even seeing a dawn of a new era. The focus has been on
novelty and change. The second is a belief that engagement with the global involves researching
phenomena which are somehow spanning the globe, or at least inhabiting a space which is clearly above
local and national contexts. Consequently, globalization has had a fair share of critical observers, who have
doubted both its usefulness as an analytical concept as well as the profoundness of its impact.
With regard to the first assumption, the growing body of knowledge within historical criminology has in
recent years brought to attention the long historic roots through which crime and its control came to be
seen as international issues (inter alia, Knepper 2010, 2011). Particularly since the second half of the
nineteenth century, concerns about white slavery, international migration, alien criminality, and the
international underworld that stretches ‘across every city of the world’ came to dominate the public
agenda, and coincided with intensified international scientific and police cooperation on these issues
(Deflem 2002; Knepper 2010). Spurred on by innovations in the means of transport and communication,
the internationalist view of crime was also encouraged by the growth of the British Empire (Knepper 2010).
Contemporary global processes and concerns are therefore by no means novel but are happening through
institutional and conceptual architectures that are already in place and are also ‘profoundly linked to the
histories of colonialism and post-colonial aspirations’ (Kenway and Fahey 2009: 20). These historic
connections have created deep roots which continue to inform the contemporary social, cultural, and
political mechanisms of punishment and the ways we pose the criminal question (Aliverti et al. 2021).
Page 3 of 24
The second assumption has, on the other hand, promoted a view of globalization as a process towards the
creation of planetary uniformity, be it in terms of cultural similarity, the spread of neoliberalism, policy
transfers, and the like. These approaches have often operated at high levels of generalization and
abstraction and have conceptualized global interconnectedness primarily as a trend towards universality
and convergence. The focus has been, for example, on the mobility of criminal networks and the speed
with which they take advantage of the fragility of global economic systems and of new modes of
communication (Miklaucic and Brewer 2013). Particularly the early stages of globalization research were
marked by a tendency to ‘zoom out’ to the planetary level and to conceive of the global as a scale which is
distinct and above the local and the national. This conceptual and methodological dichotomy has been
often supported by an accompanying normative view of the local as ‘good’ (and invested with ‘real and
earthy’ attributes) and global as ‘bad’ (Kenway and Fahey 2009: 73).
More recent scholarship has pointed out, however, the heterogeneity of forms through which
p. 797 contemporary globalization is taking shape. Mafias and organized crime groups ↵ do not seamlessly
operate across national borders, but are still deeply entrenched in local contexts, even when having a
transborder reach (Varese 2011; Hobbs 2013). Similarly, youth gangs, although altered by processes of
globalization, remain ‘rooted to fundamentally local processes’ (Fraser and Hagedorn, 2018: 57). While
involving the formation of clearly global and transnational phenomena, such as for example the
establishment of the International Criminal Court, many, and often the most profound impacts of global
interconnections, are to be found in national and local contexts. ‘These constellations and networks do not
engender planetary social uniformity unfolding to some inherent logic, but form particular milieus that
vary historically and geographically’ (Ong in Kenway and Fahey 2009: 89). Global policing today involves
not only working with transnational formations, such as Interpol and Europol, or participation in UN
missions and international networks of liaison officers (Goldsmith and Sheptycki 2007; Bowling and
Sheptycki 2012), but also radically transforms the nature of local policing. Police officers in Oslo, for
example, cooperate with their Romanian counterparts in efforts to control poor migrant populations in
their local environments (Gundhus and Franko 2016). Contemporary local policing is in numerous contexts
a deeply globalized phenomenon, addressing issues and populations which, although locally and
nationally marginalized, are fused with transnational connectivity and shaped by global inequality and
conflict.
Researching globalization therefore demands not only attention to overarching global structures and
phenomena, but also ‘faith in single sites with an attention to motion’ (Appadurai in Kenway and Fahey
2009: 48). While sometimes requiring methodological innovation, such sites are nevertheless often still
accessible through traditional criminological approaches and knowledge which is grounded and embodied.
Prison ethnography has thus offered a wealth of insights into the nature of imprisonment in a globalized
world (Kaufman, 2015; Ugelvik and Damsa 2017; Liebling et al. 2021). Although by their nature territorially
separate and local, contemporary sites of confinement are marked by increasing diversity and are being
profoundly reshaped by the regimes of global connectivity and exclusion. Norgerhaven—a transnational
prison situated in the Netherlands but contracted to house Norwegian prisoners—thus raises a number of
challenges not only in terms of legitimacy but also in terms of methodological approaches (Liebling et al.
Page 4 of 24
2021). Studying such phenomena demands that we transcend the ubiquitous opposition between the local,
national, and global, and are able to detect ‘the presence of globalizing dynamics in thick social
environments that mix national and non-national elements’ (Sassen 2007: 5).
Globalization therefore demands an eye for the less visible and involves a process of destabilization and
breaking down of what, earlier, seemed to be stable categories. Certain assumptions and habits of
academic thinking thus become unproductive, particularly the privilege which had traditionally been
accorded to the national frame of understanding. As suggested earlier, for most of modernity the national
frame has been the natural category of practice of domestic criminal justice systems, underpinning the
imagery of homogeneous, territorially bounded nation states. Globally aware approaches, on the other
hand, challenge the national order of things as the normal or natural order of things (Franko 2020a). They
build on a critique of so-called methodological nationalism which, as Ulrich Beck (2002: 51) describes:
equates societies with nation-state societies, and sees states and their governments as the
cornerstones of a social science analysis. It assumes that humanity is naturally divided into a
limited number of nations, which on the inside, organize themselves as nation-states, and, on the
outside, set boundaries to distinguish themselves from other nation-states.
p. 798 ↵ As we shall see later, methodological nationalism builds its world view on a perception of social
phenomena as bordered, and issues of governance as tied primarily to the nation state. There is, moreover,
a clear distinction between inside and outside of the state—an understanding which is commonly
described as the Westphalian order. This order—named after the 1648 treaty of Westphalia—was based on
clear delineation between international and internal affairs of the state and was marked by adherence to,
as a fundamental principle of, modern world order.
In the following sections, we shall see how contemporary dynamics of criminalization, crime, and harm
production challenge this predicament. Phenomena such as transnational terrorism, migration control,
and global prohibition regimes have in the past decades destabilized the established boundaries between
internal and external security, between policing and soldiering, warfare and crime control (Franko 2020a).
For example, in several Latin American countries, deaths caused by cartel violence easily exceeds the
common 1,000-battle deaths-per-year criterion of civil war (Lessig 2018). These developments demand
that we, as Loader and Percy (2012) suggest, bring the ‘outside’ in and the ‘inside’ out and, ultimately, also
bridge the academic divides between the domains of criminology, criminal law, international criminal law,
security studies, and international relations. In what follows, we shall look more closely into these
dynamics, particularly as they pertain to issues of state sovereignty and our understanding of statehood in
a globalized society.
(Illicit) Globalization and State Sovereignty
A much-rehearsed argument in popular debates about globalization is the idea of a weakening of state
sovereignty, partly due to the spread of international regulations and transnational governing bodies, as
well as the growing influence of licit and illicit, non-state actors. Their activities, such as various forms of
smuggling, piracy, counterfeiting, and exploitation, create social conditions of violence and lawlessness,
Page 5 of 24
and mark an inherent demise of state power and create large spaces of private authority, particularly in the
Global South. Illicit activities have been described as the dark underside which is undermining the global
economy and is a source of permanent and growing security instability (Miklaucic and Brewer 2013;
Shelley 2014; Lessig 2018). In 2016, the so-called Panama Papers revealed large amounts of money that
were moved to offshore locations by a variety of licit and illicit actors, and the inadequate reach of state
and criminal justice authorities in pursuing them (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
2017). These and other examples within the field of finance, and global governance have invited claims
that global interdependence inevitably saps state sovereignty. Nation states are seen as losing control and
authority to the supranational level, as well as to private corporate actors such as Google and Facebook.
2
While often difficult to substantiate, such prognoses nevertheless invite an examination of
transformations of state sovereignty under conditions of globalization as an issue of core criminological
interest.
While of central importance to issues of punishment, the concept of state sovereignty, however, has
received relatively scarce criminological attention. This may be partly due to a more general trend in which
p. 799 the concept, as Kalmo and Skinner observe (2010: 1), ↵ brings up ‘connotations of absolutist forms of
government that a more moderate age, committed to international law and increasingly enmeshed in a
web of global interdependence, simply has no use for’. More importantly, criminology has been heavily
indebted to Michel Foucault’s invitation to ‘cut off the King’s head’ in the social sciences (1980) and to
focus on forms of power and governance, which are capillary and dispersed throughout society, rather
than centred in the state. Due to this ‘theoretical anti-statism’ (Dean 2013: 52), much attention has been
paid to the institutional production of docile, disciplined bodies and prudent, self-governing individuals,
far less to the nature of state authority and its defining elements (although see Wacquant 2010; Loader and
Walker 2007; Garland 2013). Nevertheless, Foucault, in his later work (2009: 11), distinguished between
discipline, bio-politics, and sovereignty as distinct modalities of control: while the former is exercised
over bodies of individuals, the latter is both marked by the ability to decide on issues of life and death as
well as focused on controlling the territory. Sovereignty is preoccupied with management of circulation,
including international circulation, and about distinguishing between desirable and undesirable mobility
(Salter 2015). There is a growing body of criminological scholarship which demonstrates how this this type
of control is increasingly relevant for understanding contemporary penal regimes particularly when it
comes to issues of borders and migration control (Aas and Bosworth 2013; Barker 2018; Franko 2020b).
Globalization, with its perceived threat of eroding state power, therefore demands that we examine the
concept of state sovereignty as it pertains to issues of punishment, crime control, and criminalization and,
importantly, that we do so from an international perspective. In such a context, having an international
perspective implies not simply an analytical ‘jump’ to the global level, but also attention to the level of
inter-state relations and the positions of states within the international order. Which states have the
3
power to define the international agenda of crime prohibition and function as moral entrepreneurs in the
international arena (Jakobi 2013)? Which states have the power to engage in extra-territorial interventions
in other states, be it in the name of controlling drugs, terrorism, or migration (Franko 2020a)? For
example, it is countries in the global North, such as the European Union or the United Kingdom, that are
able to offer ‘penal aid’ to African countries and shape their policies and practices to stop irregular
migration flows to their territories (Stambøl 2021). An understanding of contemporary transformations of
Page 6 of 24
state power requires a conceptual apparatus about what a state is (which allows us to describe the qualities
that are supposed to be under threat or at least in retreat), as well as a language about relations between
states (which allows us to analyse how states and other actors influence each other in terms of global crime
governance). It also demands a historic awareness of how the nature of state sovereignty and relations
between states have been (and continue to be) shaped by the legacies of colonialism and imperialism
(Aliverti et al. 2021; Stambøl 2021).
Much of existing criminological scholarship has been marked by a tendency towards examining the
‘inside’ of the state, its internal organs, so to speak. It has been particularly centred on two archetypical
models of statehood: the carceral state and the welfare state (Gottschalk 2006; Garland 2016). Several
influential accounts (Wacquant 2009, 2010) have suggested that we have been seeing, under the influence
p. 800 of neoliberal policies, a process of expansion of the carceral state and mass imprisonment at ↵ the
expense of the welfare state. While this trend has been particularly pronounced in the United States, some
countries—most notably Scandinavian—have been able to retain the less punitive and more inclusive
welfare penality (Pratt and Eriksson 2013). However, despite essentially standing at the opposite ends of
the punitive spectrum and having different economic and institutional contexts (Cavadino and Dignan
2006; Lacey 2008), both the welfare and the carceral state have in common that they represent what might
be described as examples of ‘strong statehood’. While it is open to debate whether excessive use of carceral
power can be understood as a sign of state strength, both the carceral and the welfare state are
nevertheless built on a premise of effective legal sovereignty, where the state exerts control over a given
territory and a population in the name of the will of the people.
Critics have pointed out though that from a global perspective these forms of statehood are, in fact, an
anomaly rather than the rule (Hansen and Stepputat 2006). In Latin America’s largest countries, such as
Brazil and Mexico, drug-trafficking cartels openly challenge the state and its monopoly on violence
(Lessig 2018). As Müller (2012: 11) suggests, unlike in the West, ‘states in “most of the world” are—and
have always been—characterized by the existence of areas of limited statehood’ and have been crucially
marked by processes of political negotiation, bargaining, and accommodation between the central state
power holders and strong (licit and illicit) regional and local actors. These constellations have their origins
in early colonial times, which were characterized by a top-down process of state building and co-option of
local strongmen into the colonial rule, while leaving them considerable autonomy. In much literature on
the global illicit economy such arrangements tend to be described as symptoms of state failure, while
criminological scholarship has been conspicuously silent on the subject. Yet, if we are to grasp the nature
of the darker sides of contemporary global interconnectedness—and move beyond the simplistic
predictions of state demise—we need to gain a more nuanced understanding of the historically and
geographically varied nature of state sovereignty. Seeing the state through a historically aware and
international lens opens an insight into the global varieties of statehood, as well as the unequal power
relations between them (Franko 2020a). Some states are, as Dauvergne (2008) observes, more sovereign
than others.
Moreover, while for some states combating illicit flows may be a great challenge, for others it may do quite
the opposite and offer an opportunity for expansion of state power. As Peter Andreas’ illuminating study
Smuggler Nation reveals, historically, illicit trade has greatly empowered the American state by expanding
the policing authority and reach of the federal government as well as its transformation into a global
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policing superpower. Smuggling, Andreas (2013: xi) contends, ‘has been as much about building up the
American state as about subverting it’. The relationship between (illicit) cross-border flows and state
power is therefore far more complex than may appear at first glance. It is not a zero sum game where one is
losing at the expense of the other (Sassen 2007; Franko 2020a), instead some states (or parts of the state)
may in fact be strengthened and reasserting their authority, while others come under challenge. The
quality of the debate about the impact of global interdependence on state sovereignty would be therefore,
as Kalmo and Skinner (2010: 6) observe, enhanced if sovereignty was not simply equated with
independence and we, instead, developed a more discriminating vocabulary to describe the ‘deepening of
its complexity’. For this purpose, Saskia Sassen (2007: 51) suggests that we examine specific components
of national states—namely, territory, authority, and rights (see also Sassen 2006). Rather than assessing
the faith of the state as a whole, each of these categories is undergoing context-specific transformations
p. 801 ↵ under conditions of global interconnectedness. For analytical purposes, these three categories shall
also form the frame for our further analysis in the remaining parts of this chapter, where we shall examine
how each is being transformed in the field of crime control and criminal justice.
Territory, Crime, and Justice
While Anthony Giddens notably described the state as a ‘bordered power container’ (1995), much of
globalization scholarship has stressed the challenges that globalization presents to the idea of a bordered
nation state. Under conditions of globalization, cross-border mobility becomes a central feature of social
relations, including those pertaining to issues of crime and justice. Although the modern state has been
marked by a territorial logic, globalization strengthens, and even privileges, non-territorial formations
(Strandsbjerg 2010), particularly those of the network.
This development was influentially articulated in Manuel Castells’ trilogy on the information age (2000).
Castells applied the imagery of transnational networks to the field of organized crime by claiming that
national and local organized crime groups have gone through a process of internationalization.
Resembling business networks, these groups are now able to link up with criminal groups in other
countries and establish international networks for the production, management, financing, and
distribution of their products and services. The usefulness of the concept of the social network lies in its
flexibility and it has been applied to a variety of diverse social phenomena, such as terrorist associations,
networks of hackers, and drug trafficking syndicates (Morseli 2009; Décary-Hétu and Dupont 2012; Bright
et al. 2015). Networks are seen as flatter and less hierarchical than traditional organizations, as well as
capable of—with the help of modern communication technologies—achieving a transnational, even global
reach and representing a serious security threat (Miklaucic and Brewer 2013). They have, allegedly, the
ability not only to escape prosecution at the national level, but also to infiltrate the law enforcement,
judicial, and political systems of several countries, as well as to penetrate the global financial systems
(Shelley 2014).
The changing spatial dynamics of risk and harm are visible in phenomena such as environmental harm
(White 2014) and became particularly clear in the debates about international terrorism in the aftermath of
9/11 attacks. Alluding to Castells’ space of flows, Bauman (2002) described the fallen Manhattan towers as
the most potent symbolic reminder of the end of the era of space and the annihilation of the protective
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capacity of space. Violence and devastation, that before seemed to be banished to the outskirts of the
prosperous West (or at least to the hidden pockets of its poverty-stricken ghettos), now moved inside and
attacked its very symbols of power and prosperity. Foreign policy is thus no longer properly ‘foreign’, as
external conflicts often have an almost immediate impact on national and local security strategies (Franko
2020a). It is important to stress though that such dynamics do not necessarily indicate an objective growth
in risk, but rather its changing spatial aspects, which expose the relationship between globalization and
systematic risk (Goldin and Mariathasan 2014). This is particularly evident when it comes to issues of
environmental crime, an understanding of which, as White (2012: 15) observes, ‘leads the analytical gaze
to acknowledge the fusion of the local and the global, and to ponder the ways in which such harms
transcend the normal boundaries of jurisdiction, geography and social divide’ (see also Ellefsen et al. 2012;
p. 802 White 2011, 2014). Global ↵ interconnectedness is contributing to the growing complexity of social
relations as well as increasing mutual vulnerability and fading boundaries between the global North and
South.
When it comes to terrorism, trying to control this complexity and interconnectedness has led states in the
global North to vastly expand their surveillance powers, as well as lowering the thresholds of engagement
against emerging threats, whether through the means of preventive criminalization (Ashworth and Zedner
2015) and military and technological intervention, most notably drone attacks (Wall and Monahan 2011;
Zavrsnik 2016). The latter are also a symptomatic example of the growing scope of extra-territorial
interventions and security strategies through which states in the global North are expanding their law-
4
enforcement activities and their sphere of influence. However, the ‘exceptional’ nature of international
terrorism can easily be overstated due to extensive media and political attention. There are, moreover,
sharp geographical divisions in terms of actual exposure to risk. According to some estimates, we have
since 2014 seen a marked decline in the number of deaths from terrorism and the majority of those did not
occur in the West. Between 2002 and 2018, South Asia, MENA and sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 93 per
cent of all deaths from terrorism (GTI 2019). This security inequality between the Global North and South
relates not only to terrorism but also to other types of risk and harm and is a pervasive feature of
contemporary societies, which shall be addressed further in the next section.
The above discussion indicates the changing spatial dynamics of contemporary risk and the growing
transborder reach of illicit activities. This is not to suggest that borders have become irrelevant, quite the
opposite. There has been an unprecedented investment in border control in the post-9/11 era, particularly
by the states in the global North. Moreover, the increasing networked connectivity has been also a salient
trait of activities of state agencies and actors. The past two decades have been marked by an increasingly
transborder reach of crime control agencies, when it comes to transnational police cooperation (Bowling
and Sheptycki 2012), judicial cooperation, and development of mutual legal assistance (Mitsilegas 2009) as
well as export of unwanted populations (Franko 2020b). While this development has been particularly
pronounced in the European Union, it has also marked international crime control efforts, including by the
5
UN and individual states. The United States has, for example, been working multilaterally through FATF,
and has been able to make financial institutions across the globe adopt a series of anti-money laundering
measures (Jakobi 2013). What is of particular interest here is that these cross-border cooperation
structures not only represent a different spatial dynamic from that of a territorial nation state, but also a
different type of sovereignty, described by Slaughter (2004) as ‘networked sovereignty’. Instead of being
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defined by a negative capacity to fend off external interference and preserve autonomy, this new type of
sovereignty is concerned with augmenting state power by increasing its ability to participate in
international cooperation. This co-operation involves also private actors. Looking at the case of money
laundering, the global efforts to combat it combine the work of the United Nations, the implementation of
FATF recommendations, individual states’ Financial Intelligence Units, and importantly, the cooperation
of banks, which are increasingly forced to share their data with tax authorities (Jakobi 2018).
p. 803 Authority, crime, and criminal justice

The diverse assemblage of transnational, intergovernmental, private entities, and national state actors,
described above, brings forth the changing nature of contemporary order of crime governance. As Held
observes, a ‘new regime of government and governance is emerging which is displacing traditional
conceptions of state power as an indivisible, territorially exclusive form of public power’ (Held 2010: 37).
The authority to police, criminalize, investigate, prosecute, punish, and shame, is not vested only in state
agencies, but is being dispersed to a growing array of other actors above, below, and outside the state. For
European countries, the final decision on the nature of a penalty or on the terms of imprisonment lies
today with the European Court of Human Rights rather than individual states (Van Zyl Smit and Snacken
2009). Nor are agents of the state as easily awarded immunity from prosecution, due to the expansion of
international criminal justice.
However, several historic and contemporary analyses have pointed out that internationalization of
criminal justice and policing has been often marked by partiality. What is illegal, and how it is policed,
often depends on the political interests of certain states, most notably the United States and Western
Europe (Andreas and Nadelmann 2006; Franko 2020a). This has been particularly evident in the
international efforts to combat drug trafficking (Bowling 2010). In their comprehensive study of global
policing Andreas and Nedelmann (2006: 10) argue that ‘international crime control is one of the most
important—and one of the most overlooked—dimensions of U.S. hegemony in world politics’. Historically,
Western powers have, through international prohibition efforts (against slavery, piracy, drugs,), exported
their own definitions of crime, not only for political and economic reasons, but also to promote their own
morals to other parts of the world. While the US may have been the most vocal actor in the field of drug
policy, the EU has in recent years gained momentum, particularly when it comes to exporting its migration
control objectives (Stambøl 2021). Indeed, as Andreas and Nadelmann (2006: 10) observe: ‘the models,
methods, and priorities of international crime control are substantially determined and exported by the
most powerful states in the international system’.
Such actors, who have the ability to shape and influence the nature of global prohibition regimes, can be
described as transnational ‘moral entrepreneurs’ (Jakobi 2013). While moral entrepreneurship can usually
be encountered on the level of domestic crime policy, its dynamics are shaped, on the international level,
by the unequal power relations between states in the international community. As Hurrell (2007: 20)
observes, ‘the language of “international order” or “global governance” is never politically neutral.
Indeed a capacity to produce and project proposals, conceptions and theories of order is a central part of
the practice of power’. The observation can serve as an important reminder of ‘the particularity of globalist
projects’ (Tsing 2005: 76). Moreover, the case of FATF, mentioned above, reveals the important role that
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intergovernmental and non-state actors, such as NGOs and other agencies play in the emerging system of
international governance (see also Lohne 2019). These arrangements are part of a broader spectre of
privatized authority that has been one of the hallmarks of globalization. Through the growing strength of
privatized and supranational authorities, we are witnessing an evolution of ‘a parallel institutional world
for the handling of cross-border operations’ (Sassen 2007: 41); a world which can be, ‘extremely partial
rather than universal’ and ‘not fully accountable to formal democratic political systems’ (ibid.: 39). Global
p. 804 governance today is thus a complex ‘multilayered, multidimensional and ↵ multi-actor system’ (Held
2010: 31), where national actors interact, participate in, and cooperate with transnational governmental
and non-governmental ones.
While criminologists may have been late-comers to these debates, classical criminological insight has
much to offer to the understanding of the emerging global order of governance, where issues of security
and crime are of central importance. Criminalization is a phenomenon which cannot be simply taken for
granted, but rather something that needs explanation and there is much to be gained in examining the
global processes of production of illegality. How are goods, substances, services, and people made illegal at
the global level (Dauvergne 2008; Jakobi 2013)? How and why have certain activities come to be
criminalized, and why do other forms of social and ecological harm still remain legal (White 2011, 2014)?
Moreover, how are the global patterns of criminalization shaped by histories of colonialism and pervasive
global inequality (Aliverti et al. 2021)?
Much of the popular discourse on illicit globalization, promoted particularly by politicians, law
enforcement agencies, and popular culture, has focused on ‘bad’ actors and has, explicitly or implicitly,
had a moralizing undertone rather than looking at economic and other imperatives behind these activities.
However, critics have pointed out that part of the failure of the war on drugs, for example, lies in the fact
that prohibition regimes in themselves are essential for maintaining the profitability of the illicit markets
which they, in turn, try to abolish (Global Commission on Drug Policy 2011; Gilman et al. 2011).
Consequently, there are strong arguments that we should stop thinking of surveillance, intelligence, law
enforcement, and punishment as elements of a war that is winnable (Lessig 2018). The strength of illicit
actors lies in the unequal global economic development and the pervasive global inequality which
underpins the growth of the illicit economy and puts into question the viability of various militant law-
enforcement practices and prohibition regimes. Rather than seeing illicit or deviant globalization as a
‘removable cancer in an otherwise healthy global economy’, Gilman et al. (2011: 5) argue that the ‘truth of
the matter is that deviant globalization is a massive permanent phenomenon that is central to the lives of
hundreds of millions of people.
The economic strength of illicit entrepreneurs, and their political influence, is thus intrinsically connected
to the mainstream globalization and the deep social divisions it helps to produce and maintain. Through
activities such as human smuggling and trafficking, illegal trade in wildlife, drug trafficking, and
trafficking in organs, illicit actors are meeting a range of unfulfilled demands of predominantly Northern
consumers. Resonant of Merton’s work on anomie, but not directly drawing on it, Gilman et al. (2011)
argue that deviant globalization represents a form of ‘survival entrepreneurship’ for those without easy
access to legitimate market opportunities, through which the globally excluded are able ‘to find a space to
be innovative, a space in which the rules of the game have not already been stacked against them’ (ibid.:
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274). This is well illustrated in Henrik Vigh’s ethnographic study (2012) of Guinea-Bissau. Designated as
‘Africa’s first narco state’, Vigh’s study shows that the drug trade represents an opportunity for many
young men living in Guinea by offering them a potential escape from poverty and a lack of positive
prospects, as well as a possibility of meeting their social obligations towards others (ibid.: 224). Although
aware of the dangers of the trade, for many, the choice of becoming a drug mule seems self-evident. The
issue brings to our attention the centrality of global inequality and state fragility for understanding the
dynamics of contemporary crime control and security challenges (Franko 2020a). By creating conditions of
permanent economic competition and precariousness, and by substantially weakening the capacities of
states to provide public services, the neoliberal mantra has opened up a space which is being filled by other
—often illicit—actors and activities.
p. 805 ↵ The above development is a good example of the weakening of the state and globalization’s ability to
perforate state sovereignty. Sometimes criminal networks and other violent non-state actors are perceived
to be so powerful that they, to use Carolyn Nordstrom’s (2000) famous term, represent ‘shadow
sovereigns’. These actors, pose de facto sovereignty and, as Graham Denyer Willis (2015: 10) shows in his
illuminating study of security in Sao Paolo, may ‘carry an ability to kill, punish, and discipline with near
impunity, in the absence of (or defying) sovereignty grounded in formal ideologies and structures of rule
and legality’ (see also Lessig 2018). The growing influence of violent non-state actors in the post-Cold war
era can be seen as yet another testimony to the fragility of the Westphalian order, discussed previously.
These actors include not only organized crime groups and terrorist organizations, but also national
liberation and insurgent guerrilla movements, as well as private military firms (Mulaj 2010). While violent
non-state actors may not be in themselves intrinsically ‘good’ or ‘bad’—some of them do, if successful,
become legitimate state power holders—they are nevertheless marked by the ability to employ large-scale
violence in the pursuit of their goals, a capacity which is traditionally seen to be the state’s prerogative. As
such, these actors operate in, and contribute to, the conditions of limited statehood in the societies in
which they operate. These conditions in some countries come close to state collapse, where the state lacks
a functioning central government and is unable to provide basic services to its citizens. One such example,
which has received academic attention, is Somalia, where due to the existence of large unregulated,
‘stateless’ areas, its coast for a period became the most pirate-infested shipping lane in the world
(Townsley et al. 2016). The UN Security Council passed several resolutions authorizing member states to
enter Somali territorial waters and use ‘all necessary means’ to interdict and deter piracy (Menkhaus 2010:
357). Consequently, military vessels from NATO and EU countries, the US, China, Russia, Japan, and India,
as well as armed private security companies became involved in patrolling the Somali waters and extended
their interventions also to the mainland.
The discussion shows the vast differences in the nature of state sovereignty globally. There are varieties of
statehood which diverge from the Weberian ideal of statehood which has so far received most attention
within criminological scholarship. However, academic observers have pointed out that while in these
states, sovereignty—in the classical, Weberian sense of monopolizing violence—is clearly limited or
fragmented, it is by no means absent, but marked by the fact that ‘state and non-state actors co-exist,
conflict, and cooperate tacitly and implicitly’ (Richani 2010: 32). The condition is well captured in Müller’s
(2012: 37) analysis of Mexico and his concept of the ‘negotiated state’, which is marked by the fact that
state rulers, facing the large scale existence of autonomous power centres inside the territory, create a
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state space as a space of appropriation as well as to enhance the ‘reach of the state’. Violence, which
particularly characterizes many Latin American societies, does not signify an outright defeat of the state,
but exists in an intricate ‘political economy of violence’, which crucially depends on the availability of
various ‘political entrepreneurs that lend tacit or implicit support to these groups for political and
economic returns’ (Richani 2010: 32). The condition is captured in Arias and Goldstein’s (2010: 4) notion of
‘violent pluralism’ which denotes a condition of endemic violence in the society ‘with states, social elites
and subalterns employing violence in the quest to establish or contest regimes of citizenship, justice,
rights, and a democratic social order’. This ‘dirty togetherness’ between a state and other organized
sources of violence necessarily departs from a perceived ideal (Willis 2015: 11) but can nevertheless be
encountered in numerous countries across the world. Moreover, as Lisa Miller shows (2016), examining
p. 806 the economy of violence can be a productive starting ↵ point for understanding penal regimes in
countries of the global North, such as the U.S. ‘Security from violence is a basic human need, a legitimate
state interest, and a core public good’ (Miller 2015: 186) and provides and important context for the
politics of punishment and state legitimacy.
What is of interest at this point, though, is that there are substantial global varieties in terms of
institutional provision of security (Loader and Walker 2007). Security is an unevenly distributed good and
there exists vast security inequalities mainly between countries in the Global North and Global South, but
also within these countries themselves. Until the recent outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Europe has been
the most peaceful region in the world and in stark contrast to North Africa, the Middle East, and Latin
America, which are marked by deteriorating levels of security. The Global Study on Homicide (UNODC 2019),
for example, reveals dramatic regional variations. While the homicide rate in Europe has declined by 63 per
cent since 2002, and is now 3.0 per 100,000 population, in contrast, the homicide rate in the Americas is
17.2 victims per 100,000 population, the highest recorded in the region since reliable records began in
1990. Mexico and several other Latin American countries have seen a dramatic rise in drug-related levels
of violence (Lessig 2018). Security inequalities reflect, and are co-related with, pervasive income
inequalities as well as deprival of the rule of law. Moreover, these are not only inequalities between states,
but also within them. Contemporary landscapes of security are patchy rather than based on unified
territories. They include distinct zones with often radically different levels of presence and absence of
violence and the rule of law, and different types of security providers. Questions such as ‘what kind of state
do you live in?’ and ‘what state are you a citizen of?’ are crucial for answering how secure you are.
Moreover, ‘what is your purchasing power’ becomes an additional aspect contributing to the pervasive
security inequality at the global level. As a large and productive body of criminological scholarship has
shown, private security orders lead to unequal protection and function as ‘club goods’ (Loader and Walker
2007). These patterns of inequality are particularly pronounced at the global level (O’Reilly 2015), where
6
private security companies such as Control Risks are helping their clients to ‘succeed in a volatile world’.
The discussion above reveals that the answer to one of the most basic questions of human life: ‘Who
provides protection and decides on issues of life and death?’ is no longer simply the nation state, if it ever
has been. Sovereign states are built on violence and exert violence, with varying levels of legitimacy and
rule of law protection (Sarat and Culbert 2009). However, sovereignty as the right over life—both in terms
of protection as well as killing—is increasingly also held by other actors. These arrangements have created
a large ‘“disposable” population that states allow to be preyed on’ (Willis 2015: 12); lives which are
unprotected by states, whose deaths are not investigated by state agents and not counted in official state
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statistics. One such example is, as Weber and Pickering (2011) show, the lives of migrants lost at the
borders of the affluent world. These deaths are, for example, not part of official statistics of the European
border control agency, Frontex, nor of individual member states despite the fact that thousands of people
have died in the Mediterranean Sea, making it the most dangerous border in the world (IOM 2017; Franko
2020b).
Criminal justice, membership, and rights
In this patchy landscape of security arrangements a central question arises about the meaning and
relevance of rights and legal protections. The existence of persons in limbo, outside of the law and its
p. 807 sphere of basic protections, is not only a matter of ↵ weak or undemocratic states but has been also one
of the consequences of the war on terror a (Cole 2004) and the increasingly stringent system of border
controls in the global North. There is, consequently, much evidence to confirm Giorgio Agamben’s (1998)
popular writing on Homo sacer, whose life is marked by precariousness and bareness, as well as Zygmund
Bauman’s (2004) gloomy prediction about ‘human waste’ as being an inevitable by-product of the spread
of global modernity. On the other hand, although excluded from the nation state’s articulated systems of
rights and protections, protection of ‘bare lives’ has in recent decades become the objective of an
influential global discourse of solidarity, governance, and justice, namely, humanitarianism (Fassin 2011).
Humanitarianism is, among other things, a cluster of sentiments and a set of laws and moral imperatives
to intervene, which focuses on alleviating suffering and saving lives in times of crisis and emergency
(Feldman and Ticktin 2010). It has produced an increasingly influential set of new actors, such as
humanitarian NGOs who, as representatives of the so-called global civil society, increasingly also have the
ability to shape issues of crime and punishment on the international arena (Lohne 2019).
The globalizing process, therefore, not only demands new methods and frameworks of understanding, but
significantly, also offers new possibilities for social justice and political action. It is now possible to put an
issue on the global agenda, even though nation states are unwilling to put it on the national agenda.
Transnational mobilization has thus been central in combating certain types of crimes such as corruption.
Traditionally, governments perceived the problem of combating corruption as a matter of national
sovereignty. Now, on the other hand, with NGOs such as Amnesty International and Transparency
International, action on the global level is making an impact and becoming an important driving force for
national change. Moreover, civil society actors and NGOs are not only influential in shaping the agenda of
international organizations but are also gaining a central role in the production of statistics and knowledge
about various forms of global crime (Merry 2011), visible in the growing influence of global indexes,
benchmarks, and indicators (Nelken 2019).
The acknowledgement that ‘justice must transcend the territorial limits it has operated within
modernity’ (Morrison 2006: 2), has driven a series of social mobilizations against environmental crime,
state crime, and human rights violations (see also Brisman and South, this volume). This of course is by no
means an historical novelty. In the late 1700s, anti-slavery campaigns found people in Britain, and later
other countries, politically engaging in issues at the far side of the world at a time when the social meaning
of distance was much greater. Interestingly, the campaigners used some distinctly modern forms of
political pressure and mobilization, such as political lobbying, celebrity endorsements, and consumer
Page 14 of 24
boycotts of sugar, thus revealing an awareness of the intertwining of global issues and local actions
(Franko 2020a). Today, international mobilizations have had an impact on numerous criminologically
relevant domains from global anti-domestic violence campaigns and struggles for better prison conditions
to anti-death penalty activism and environmental crime, to name just a few (Hood and Hoyle 2008; Goyes
and South 2016).
Moreover, there is growing acknowledgment that ‘[s]trict adherence to the principle of national
sovereignty is no longer acceptable, and institutions must be considered through which the international
community can effectively intervene’ (Savelsberg 2010: 3). We have thus in recent years seen pronounced
tendencies towards the criminalization of mass atrocities and human rights violations, most notably
represented by the establishment of the International Criminal Court, as well as growing criminological
interest in these topics (see, inter alia, Savelsberg 2010; Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 2009;
p. 808 ↵ Schabas 2011; Braithwaite et al. 2010; Lohne 2019). Here criminology enters a complex
interdisciplinary terrain which demands an engagement with findings from political science, history,
human rights and international criminal law, social psychology, and other social science traditions. The
recent interest in the field of mass atrocities has been strongly related to the growing salience of human
rights as well as the dynamic developments with the international criminal law (see also Aydin-Aitchison
et al. this volume). Through the progressive articulation of the global civil society, certain crimes and
violations of rights are being established as issues to be addressed at the global level, a matter of common
responsibility in a perceived shared space of humanitarian consciousness (Lohne 2019).
These developments are part of a broader transformation in the nature of the contemporary world order
which has been marked by ‘a dramatic and sustained move towards more and more far-reaching
international institutions and an exponential increase in the scope, range, and intrusiveness of
international rules, norms, and institutions’ (Hurrell 2007: 5). This move has, in the field of punishment,
been most visible in the growing influence and emphasis placed on human rights (Van Zyl Smit and
Snacken 2009; Savelsberg 2010). The jurisprudence of international courts, most notably the European
Court of Human Rights, challenges national sovereignty on a diverse set of issues such as prison
conditions and conditions of detention centres for immigrants, prisoners’ voting rights, the right to a fair
trial, anti-terror measures, etc. What is important here is that, for a long time, the power to punish has
been primarily vested in the nation state as a prerequisite of its sovereignty, but we are now seeing this
power curtailed and shaped by transnational and international actors; not only international courts and
UN bodies, but also human rights organizations, NGOs, and various inter-governmental bodies. These
actors operate on the international stage, and even though they may frequently be representing national
and local interests, they contribute to the normative convergence of contemporary criminal justice, which
is slowly taking shape above the nation states, and at times against their interests.
However, we should be careful about overstating the salience of these developments which remain in
several ways aspirational and partial. Even for an institution such as the European Court of Human Rights,
as Marie Bendicte Dembour’s (2015) study shows, the human rights of certain groups, particularly
migrants, tend to take second place to the sovereignty principle. Although important progress has been
made on several issues, the primacy of state sovereignty places much of migrants’ suffering outside the
Page 15 of 24
court’s area of concern (ibid.: 503). Moreover, in several European countries, such as the UK, limiting the
influence of the European Court has become an important political issue and a way of attracting electoral
support.
Conclusion
Through the rise of human rights, the establishment of the International Criminal Court, transitional and
environmental justice, and growing salience of humanitarian discourses, we are witnessing the emergence
of new modes of criminal justice and governance which are moving beyond the Westphalian, sovereignty-
based, pluralism of states and reveal the contours of the constitution of a different international society.
However, it is easy to overstate the historical novelty and social potency of these changes (and
globalization scholarship has not always been able to resist the temptation). For as much as the past two
p. 809 decades have given evidence of a gradual formation of a global ↵ polity, formed around common
perceptions of justice and overriding considerations of state sovereignty, there have been also forceful
counter trends. The covid-19 pandemic forcefully revealed the parallel trends of intense
interconnectedness of risks and the salience of state responses grounded in nationalism and sovereign
control. The enormous investments in border control and surveillance that have been taking place in the
past two decades are a testimony of a renewed importance of state sovereignty, if not in its material and
functional forms, at least in its symbolic forms. By building walls and fortifying their borders, states, as
Wendy Brown (2010: 25) observes, theatrically project ‘power and efficaciousness that they do not and
cannot actually exercise’. They attempt to reinvigorate certain forms of identity and security and produce
subjects ‘defended against worldliness’ (Brown 2010: 40).
Therefore, far from being irrelevant, the nation state has gained a renewed importance in terms of
membership, identity, and belonging as, among other, forcefully exemplified by the UK’s Brexit vote.
There is a growing body of scholarship about how these trends are also shaping the nature of
contemporary penality and criminal justice (Aas and Bosworth 2013; Melossi 2015; Barker 2018). Policing,
today, is thus also a question of ‘patrolling the boundaries of entitlement and belonging’ (Weber 2013:
173), and imprisonment is not simply a penal measure, but also about expelling the unwanted (Ugelvik and
Damsa 2017; Kaufman 2015; Franko 2020b). The objectives of border controls are thus increasingly
inscribed into discourses about crime and punishment and into everyday practices of contemporary penal
regimes. Such forms of ‘bordered penality’ (Franko 2020b) both try to revitalize national identity and keep
out the foreign and culturally different, as well as fend off those who wish to make claim on resources, and
protect welfare rights for citizens (Barker 2018). Contemporary deportation regimes (De Genova and Peutz
2010) surpass those at the height of the colonial era. While an estimated total of 167,000 convicts were
transported from Britain to Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Eurostat reports that, in
2017 alone, 188,905 non-EU citizens were ‘returned outside of the EU’ (Franko 2020b: 128). These
practices not only confirm the continued importance of nation states and state sovereignty but also the
enduring relevance of colonialism and global North-South divides (Carrington et al. 2016; Aliverti et al.
2021). They show contours of the global which, although interconnected, is also deeply divided. The lines
of demarcation between the global North and South are, of course, far from simple. ‘The north these days,
contains much south’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: 18) and it is precisely this inversion of borders, of the
internal and the external spaces, which makes greater knowledge of southern realities all the more urgent
Page 16 of 24
(Carrington et al. 2016; Aliverti et al. 2021). Contemporary societies are defined by a growing ability of the
margins to define the centre. Due to the proliferation of spaces of colonial difference in the midst of the
prosperous west, Martha Nussbaum’s observation (in Harvey 2000: 531) that a society unable to look at
itself through the lens of the other is, as a consequence, equally ignorant of itself, is today more salient
than ever. Here lies also an imperative for criminological scholars to engage with global transformations.
This involves not only an understanding of global interconnectedness, but also a greater awareness of
global divisions, of geopolitical context, as well as critical self-reflection about the potential universality
of our own knowledge production.

There is a booming scholarly literature on globalization in several disciplines. McGrew and Held’s Globalization Theory:
Approaches and Controversies (2007) gives a good presentation of the concept of globalization as well as the debates
p. 810 surrounding it; while Kenway and ↵ Fahey’s Globalising the Research Imagination (2009) offers an off-the-beaten
track approach, based on a series of interviews with leading globalization scholars about what it might mean to
globalize research imagination.When it comes to criminological literature, Franko’s Globalization and Crime (2020a)
provides a useful introduction to the field, as does Pakes’ edited collection Globalisation and the Challenge to
Criminology (2012). Comparative criminal justice has in recent years become a burgeoning field. Nelken’s Comparative
Criminal Justice and Globalization (2011) offers in-depth debates on the topic. There are of course extensive literatures
on individual aspects of global justice, such as eco-global crimes, human rights violations, and responses to mass
atrocities. For the former, see White’s (2011, 2014) extensive body of work, while Savelsberg’s Crime and Human
Rights: Criminology of Genocide and Atrocities (2010) provides an accessible overview of the latter. Recent years have
also seen a vibrant criminological critique of colonilalism and global North—South divisions. For an overview, see K.
Carrington, R. Hogg, J. Scott, and M. Sozzo’s (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South as well
as Cuneen and Tauri’s (2016) Indigenous Criminology.
Online resources

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Notes
1
World Prison Brief available at: http://www.prisonstudies.org/map/europe <http://www.prisonstudies.org/map/
europe>, accessed 21 February 2022.
2
For a discussion of measurement issues related to the global illicit trade, see Andreas and Greenhill (2010) and Picard
(2013).
3
Moral entrepreneur is a term popularized by Howard S. Becker’s (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of
Deviance. The term denotes individuals or groups who create rules in a society (i.e. rule creators) or who take on a
responsibility to enforce them (i.e. rule enforcers).
4
Australia, the US, and the European Union have also, in the past two decades, progressively expanded their policing
activities into the international domain thus externalizing their ‘domestic’ control functions and exporting their
migration control agenda (Weber and Pickering 2011; Franko 2020b; Stambøl 2021).
5
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF)—an inter-governmental body for the combatting of money laundering.
6
https://www.controlrisks.com <https://www.controlrisks.com>.
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37. Border criminology and the changing nature of penal power

p. 814 37. Border criminology and the changing nature of penal power
Mary Bosworth
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0037
Abstract
This chapter describes the field of ‘border criminology’, which examines the growing convergence between criminal justice
and immigration control. It starts with an overview of the global immigration and asylum context before outlining key ideas
and areas of scholarship within border criminology. It then turns to look more closely at penal power, drawing on fieldwork
and policy analysis to explore the methodological and epistemological implications for criminology of examining citizenship
and migration. It ends by arguing for greater engagement with the challenges and effects of mass mobility. As the impact of a
decision to arrest in any street in Britain may be felt in countries far away, it is time for criminologists to take into account
more explicitly the global nature of criminal justice and reflect on its implications for how and what we study.
Keywords: border criminology, immigration detention, migration, incarceration, race, globalization
Introduction
1
This chapter sets out the field of ‘border criminology.’ Building on existing scholarship about criminal
law, policing, courts, and punishment, border criminologists focus on how states around the world have
put the criminal justice system to work in managing mass mobility. In their discussions of the
criminalization of immigration violations, novel policing responsibilities at the border and within, and the
changing numbers and treatment of foreign nationals in prison, border criminologists argue that the
criminal justice system has been systematically reoriented around matters of citizenship (Bosworth 2016b;
Aliverti 2013; 2021; Stumpf 2006; Kaufman 2015; Kaufman and Bosworth 2013). At the same time, their
research makes clear that familiar problems remain. The primary targets of intervention in border control
and the criminal justice system are economically precarious (De Giorgi 2010), racialized, ethnic minority
Page 1 of 22
men (Philips and Bowling 2003; de Noronha 2020). New criminal justice powers and responsibilities have
not, in other words, entirely replaced older tasks and justifications, but rather intersect, inform, and are
shaped by them.
This chapter starts with an overview of the global immigration and asylum context, before outlining key
ideas and areas of scholarship within border criminology. It then turns to look more closely at penal power,
drawing on fieldwork and policy analysis to explore the methodological and epistemological implications
for criminology of examining citizenship and migration. It ends by arguing for greater engagement with
the challenges and effects of mass mobility. As the impact of a decision to arrest in any street in Britain
may be felt in countries far away, it is time for criminologists to reflect on the implications of the global
nature and effect of criminal justice for how and what we study.
p. 815 Immigration and Criminal Justice: The Context
An unprecedented number of people are on the move, worldwide. Figures released by the United Nations
Refugee Agency, UNHRC, at year-end 2021 reported that globally, one in every 95 people was either a
refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. There were 82.4 million men, women, and children
displaced by the end of 2020, nearly one third of whom (26.4 million people) were refugees (UNHCR 2021).
In addition to these people, who have been compelled to relocate either within their country or abroad due
to conflict and persecution, a far larger sum emigrate for education, work, and family reunification. Within
this second group, the International Organisation of Migration (IOM 2022: 1) counted an estimated ‘281
million international migrants,’ most of whom were born in countries in the Global South. According to
the report (IOM 2022: 4):
As has been the case for the past 50 years, the United States of America remains the primary
destination for migrants, at over 51 million international migrants. Germany has become the
second most prominent destination, with nearly 16 million international migrants, while Saudi
Arabia is the third largest destination country for international migrants, at 13 million. The
Russian Federation and the United Kingdom round out the top five destination countries, with
about 12 million and 9 million international migrants respectively.
While the response to refugees in most countries should be guided by international human rights
agreements, many of which were brought in after WWII, such frameworks have become increasingly
contested, a development labelled by Alison Mountz (2020) as the ‘death of asylum’. As states around the
world have brought in new national and local laws and practices in a bid to govern and regulate the
growing sum of arrivals, many have turned to the criminal justice system for help. Strategies have included
new criminal offences for immigration violations and for aiding those who assist irregular entry of asylum
seekers (Aliverti 2013; Stumpf 2006; Home Office 2021a). So, too, the police have been given additional
roles and responsibilities in determining the nationality of criminal suspects and in enforcing immigration
law within the border and beyond (Aliverti 2015; Aliverti 2021; Eagly 2017; Weber 2013). Immigration
officers are now present in prisons in many jurisdictions to identify foreigners and facilitate their
deportation, while some countries, including England and Wales, the US, and Norway, have opened all
Page 2 of 22
foreign-national prisons (Kaufman 2015; Kaufman and Weiss 2015; Tuck, Damsa, and Kullman 2022).
Adjacent to such institutions, immigration detention centres are used to facilitate the deportation of
former offenders (Bosworth 2014; Ugelvik and Ugelvik 2013).
Such developments are widespread. In the United States, for example, immigration-related prosecutions
outnumber all other federal criminal prosecutions, including those for drugs and weapons, while
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the largest investigative arm of the US Department of Homeland
Security (United States Sentencing Commission 2021). In Europe, national and transnational police forces
routinely intercept irregular migrants at the border and within national territory (Mutsaers 2014; Aas and
Gundhus 2015). Across the continent, foreign populations represent on average 20 per cent of all prison
inmates, reaching extraordinary highs in counties such as Luxembourg (73.0 per cent), Switzerland (71.4
2
p. 816 per cent), Greece (59.8 per cent), and ↵ Belgium (43.8 per cent). Countries everywhere have
criminalized at least some aspects of immigration, making it harder for people to arrive legally and
remain. They have also established networks of immigration detention centres in-country and offshore,
while extending their powers to deport (Wong 2015; Hasselberg 2016).
As more foreigners end up in prison and as states vigorously pursue additional forms of confinement and
deportation, the distinct justifications of punishment and administrative penalties have blurred (Franko
2020; Aas and Bosworth 2013; Bosworth, Franko and Pickering 2018). Under these circumstances, it is
important to ask whether criminological explanatory concepts, terminology, and methods work (Fili et al.
2021). What about the secondary literature on which we draw? Are our traditional analytical strategies fit
for purpose, or must new approaches be forged to understand these developments? These questions
animate this chapter and much of the wider field of border criminology.
Citizenship, Sovereign Power, and Criminal Justice
Until recently, with a few notable exceptions, criminologists were not particularly interested in matters of
citizenship. In large part, their indifference stemmed from the fact that criminal justice is usually meted
out within one jurisdiction bounded by the nation state (Aas 2007). Like the laws and practices
criminologists examine, the dominant framework of analysis in our discipline has been territorial. More
critically, given that most of those subject to border control are from the Global South the lack of
engagement with citizenship in British criminology at any rate, has been exacerbated by a related lack of
interest in race and ethnicity (Philips, Earle, and Parmar 2020).
Yet, it would be an overstatement to claim that no previous scholars have examined citizenship, or that
none have take a comparative or transnational approach (Bowling and Sheptycki 2012). Indeed, it is worth
remembering that the first criminological studies produced by the Chicago School sociologists focused on
immigrant communities. For these scholars, migrants were distinctive in the ways in which they were
bound to their earlier cultures and mores, yet anxious to integrate and succeed in their new homeland. New
arrivals created separate communities within the city, some of which, these early sociologists argued, were
more prone to social disorganization (Shaw and McKay 1942). Once individuals and groups integrated,
they usually moved on. Some never left (Wirth 1928).
Page 3 of 22
From these ethnographic origins, a more quantitative tradition in US criminology developed, focusing on
the criminal activities of immigrant populations and their descendants (Tonry 1996; Bucerius and Tonry
2014). In this body of work, authors provide statistical evidence of lower crime rates among the foreign
born (Mears 2011). They also examine connections in the policing of migrant and ethnic minority citizen
communities (Hagan and Palloni 1999; Tonry 1996).
So, too, a large body of transnational and comparative criminology can be found. In the field of prison
studies, in particular, international comparisons of prison populations (Cavadino and Dignan 2005) and
p. 817 penal practices (Pratt and Eriksson 2014) have ↵ generated important insights into local practices,
while in the policing literature studies of transnational practices and global policing have shown
significant interconnections between countries in their pursuit of security (Bowling 2010; Bowling and
Sheptycki 2012; Bradford et al. 2016). Comparative legal scholarship (Van Zyl Smit and Snacken 2009) has
likewise been a fertile and illuminating area of analysis.
Border criminology engages with and owes much to these areas of scholarship. It also diverges from them.
In contrast to the predominantly quantitative US literature on migration, for example, border criminology
is more usually qualitative, theoretically engaged, and interdisciplinary. While sharing a number of
methodological and intellectual roots with the transnational and comparative literature, its focus on the
intersections between criminal justice and migration control leads to different topics and techniques of
analysis. Authors in this field explore the constitutive relationship between borders, migration control,
and criminal justice. They concentrate on how and why certain activities like human smuggling (Sanchez
2014; Baird 2019), sex work (Pickering and Ham 2014), or document fraud (Aliverti 2015) have been
criminalized, while exploring fresh forms of coercive state power (Bosworth 2014; Aas 2014; Barker 2011,
2016). Most draw on concepts from a range of disciplines including feminist theory, refugee and
immigration studies, postcolonial studies, human rights, immigration and refugee law, politics, and
international relations.
In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC in September
2001, migration was conceptualized in much government policy and legislation as a potential security
threat. While such fears and rhetoric have yet to abate, they have been joined, and often amplified, by new
language around and concerns about Modern Slavery, trafficking and smuggling. Together, asylum and
labour migration have been recast as possible ‘routes in’ for foreign terrorists and criminal gangs, firmly
embedding both forms of mobility in discussions of and policies about national security (Bigo 2006;
Bosworth and Guild 2008). In making sense of these developments, border criminologists draw on
literature and ideas from the sociology of punishment and security studies (Pickering, Bosworth, and Aas
2015). Work by Foucault on governmentality (1991) and biopolitics (2004), Bauman on modernity (2001) as
well as Agamben’s (2004) notion of the ‘state of exception’ have been particularly influential (see, e.g. Aas
2007, 2013; Eriksson 2016). Elsewhere, Ahmed’s account of ‘the stranger’ (2000), and Butler’s (2004)
consideration of why some people are considered ‘grievable’ while others are not, have been used to
illuminate aspects of current policy and public attitudes (Bosworth 2014).
Finally, in recognition of the racialized nature of most border controls (Bhui 2016), border criminologists
increasingly integrate issues of race and ethnicity in their analysis (see, inter alia, Bowling 2013; Sanchez
2014; Parmar 2019; Bosworth, Parmar, and Vázquez 2018). Most of those subject to border controls were
Page 4 of 22
born in countries in the Global South. Many are from former colonies of the country they seek to enter.
Under these conditions, Hall’s (2001) notion of colonial amnesia and Gilroy’s (2002, 2006) study of
Empire have been particularly productive (Kaufman 2015; Bowling 2013; El Enany 2020). More
descriptively, considerable efforts have been made to document the racially disproportionate impact of
legislation (Vázquez 2011; Chacón 2012) and penal practice (Mehta 2016; 2021; Tuck 2022; Bhui 2016;
Hernandez 2012).
In deploying this conceptual literature, border criminologists revisit the relationship between state
sovereignty and criminal justice (Garland 1996; Simon 2007). It is not just crime that the sovereign state
cannot fully control, authors in this subfield point out, but also mobility (Bosworth 2008; Aas 2007; Barker
2017). While nations strive to limit their obligations to resources, security, and justice, citizenship offers a
p. 818 flexible new means of ↵ allocation. As Barker succinctly puts it, in this global, mobile world,
‘membership matters most’ (Barker 2013; Aas 2014).
Under these circumstances it is unsurprising to find that foreigners no longer receive the same treatment
as citizens in the criminal justice system. From policing to imprisonment, the emphasis on immigration
status has affected all parts of the criminal justice system. These days, in many countries, police may hold
foreigners not for criminal activity, but for immigration violations (Weber 2013; Aliverti 2021). This same
logic propels the police across their territorial border, to other zones altogether, to prevent irregular entry
of the foreign born—even those who seek to make humanitarian claims for protection (Aas and Gundhus
2015; Bowling 2010). In the courts, too, nationality is becoming ever more pertinent as judges and
magistrates may add a deportation order to a criminal sentence (Aliverti 2016; Stumpf 2013). Although
their numbers remain small in England and Wales at least, foreigners face conviction for a range of
immigration offences, that by definition, citizens do not. At the most extreme end, and thus in smaller
numbers still, a handful of individuals found guilty of terrorist-related offences may lose their citizenship
altogether, even, in the UK, if they do not hold another (Zedner 2016). In 2021, the British Home Secretary,
Ms Priti Patel, announced plans to widen such powers considerably, to include people whose actions met
the far lower legal threshold of being ‘unconducive to the public good’. The Nationality and Borders Act,
passed early in 2022, also criminalzes humanitarian aid to those seeking to enter the UK irregularly (Home
Office 2021a).
In all these ways, practices and notions of justice and due process as well as ideas about punishment have
been trumped by identity, identification, and belonging (Zedner 2010; Stumpf 2013). Over the next
sections, I will map out these developments in the field of incarceration, demonstrating how national
prisons have changed (Kaufman 2015) while novel forms of incarceration in immigration detention
centres, and exclusionary practices of deportation have been set up (Kanstroom 2012; Golash-Boza 2015;
Barker 2017). As I will show, immigration detention and deportation are characterized by high levels of
uncertainty as well as racial disproportionality. The state is both present and absent, working with and
through the private sector, NGOs, international agencies, other governments and, sometimes, different
arms of itself.
Page 5 of 22
Mass Migration and Penal Power
Prisons
As of June 30, 2021, there were 9,812 foreign citizens in custody, representing 12 per cent of the total prison
population (Ministry of Justice 2021: 6). Until 2006, foreign offenders rarely figured in public debates
about crime or punishment. Yet, that year, following extensive coverage in the British tabloid press, then
Home Secretary Charles Clark lost his job when it was discovered that, over the previous decade, 1,000
foreign prisoners had not been considered for deportation, but simply released into the British community.
Despite this relatively small sum number, public and media outcry was shrill. Foreign offenders, they
claimed, posed significant threats to public safety. They were difficult to locate in the wider community of
migrant residents. Why were they still in Britain?
In the media coverage and subsequent political debates, familiar, racialized concerns over young men of
p. 819 colour merged seamlessly with narratives about terrorism and ↵ radicalization, both upheld by
enduring fears about economic migration. In so doing, both were subtly altered, as groups previously not
marked out as targets of criminal justice, like young Asian men, became recast as potential terror suspects
or ‘illegal immigrants’ and thus appropriate targets of stop and search and incarceration (Parmar 2016).
Legislatively, the response to the prisons crisis was swift and decisive. The UK Borders Act 2007 mandated
deportation for all offenders from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who had been sentenced to
12 months (or whose sentences over the previous five years add up to this total) unless there were human
rights protections. EEA offenders face the same outcome for sentences of (or adding up to) 24 months.
For those already incarcerated, the experience of prison also began to change. Perceived as an escape
threat, foreign offenders now face considerable barriers to open conditions. Destined for deportation, they
may be excluded from certain prison programs as limited resources are not to be wasted on those who will
not remain (Kaufman 2015; Warr 2016). Some are gathered together in foreign national only
establishments, where they are offered a distinct regime designed to prepare them for return (Bosworth,
3
Hasselberg, and Turnbull 2016). Finally, alongside such local initiatives, the British government, like
others elsewhere, has actively pursued voluntary and mandatory prisoner transfer agreements offering a
variety of incentives in assisted voluntary returns schemes and sentence reductions (Bosworth 2017; Van
Zyl Smit and Mulgrew 2012).
In all these developments, prisons have been fundamentally altered. Penal establishments in England and
Wales must now determine the citizenship of each new arrival. Unless prisoners arrive with a passport,
such matters are not always straightforward. As a result, prison officers rely on dubious, racialized
markers, including accent and appearance to generate a list for the immigration authorities, whose task is
then to determine whether or not to apply a deportation order.
Several studies have documented how prison life for foreign national prisoners diverges from that of
citizen prisoners. Some matters, like communication, maintaining family contact and cultural practices,
are longstanding (Bhui 2007). Yet others are more recent, shaped by the insistence on deportation. For
Page 6 of 22
most foreign offenders, even those without a mandatory deportation order, prison life is far more
unsettled and uncertain, since they simply cannot be sure what will happen at the end of their time behind
bars (Kaufman 2012; Boe 2016; Warr 2016; Hasselberg 2016).
Notwithstanding the government’s desire to move from prison to plane, for those subject to deportation, a
period of imprisonment is typically followed by time in an immigration detention facility. Despite such
clear ties to the prison, immigration detention centres have received scant criminological attention as they
officially sit outside the criminal justice system (Bosworth 2014; Aas and Bosworth 2013; Gerlach, 2023;
Fili 2013). In the following section, I describe these administrative sites and explore their implications for
criminological understanding of penal power. I also consider the methodological challenges they present.
Immigration detention
Britain, like most countries, has long had the power to detain foreign nationals under immigration act
powers. Whereas many nations detain those who arrive without legal documents, in the UK, detention is
p. 820 primarily used at the end of a person’s migration, as ↵ a means to facilitate their expulsion. In this task
the state is only minimally successful, with statistics revealing that only half the detained population are
forced to go.
Following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, in March 2020, the numbers of people detained in
immigration removal centres in the UK fell precipitously to just 992 people at the end of June 2021. Indeed,
during the pandemic, the Home Office closed two of the IRCs, converted a third into a ‘short-term holding
facility’ for asylum seekers who had crossed the channel from Calais, and temporarily re-roled a fourth
establishment into a bail hostel. The numbers dropped, in large part, as the focus of British border
enforcement changed to focus almost exclusively on processing the people arriving in Dover on small
boats, and on attempting to deport ex-offenders. Thus, over the same period the number of foreigners
held post sentence in prison, under immigration powers rose, from 320 in June 2020 to 558 at the end of
June 2021 (Home Office 2021b).
In 2021, the five most common nationality groups in detention were India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria,
and Albania. These ties to the Commonwealth date to the 1969 Immigration Appeals Act, which ushered in
the contemporary immigration system including the first purpose-built immigration detention unit at
Harmondsworth in 1970 (Bosworth 2014). Though at the time heralded as a liberal response to the duties
Britain owed to its former subjects (Bosworth 2014), its racialized effects on the immigration system
attract today considerable critique from those who are detained (and some staff). ‘When the British went
4
around the world’, Jonas exclaimed, ‘they did not apply for visas or residents permits. They just went in
and took what they wanted … This is modern slavery’, he concluded, angrily. (Uganda, IRC Tinsley House,
cited in Bosworth 2014: 105).
Although, at the time of writing, matters are in some flux, the scale and design of the British immigration
detention estate continues to be shaped by decisions made in the new millennium, when the New Labour
governments of Blair and Brown passed numerous pieces of legislation about immigration and asylum that
significantly expanded the population subject to detention and deportation. As the previous Conservative
government had with prisons, so, too, Labour relied on the private sector to build and open new detention
Page 7 of 22
sites quickly. Each centre is run under contract for the Home Office. Whereas previously a range of
companies and HM Prison Service were involved, at the time of writing all seven facilities and the
5
deportation contract are run by just two companies: Serco and Mitie.
In 2001, British detention centres were renamed ‘immigration removal centres’ (IRCs), to more clearly
signify their intent. Notwithstanding this promise of a brief stay, however, nearly all facilities opened since
that date have been built to Category B high security prison design or have been situated in former penal
establishments run as IRCs under contract by HM Prison Service. These are secure institutions. They are all
located behind razor wire, with considerable interior surveillance (closed circuit television) and security
(drug dogs, patrols, room searches, surveillance, and so on). Detainee Custody Officers (DCOs) within them
wear uniforms and carry keys. Senior staff who run them have all worked in the prison service.
The implications of these matters are hard to avoid. People in detention and staff often feel they are held or
work within a prison. These are not sites of removal, such views imply, but of punishment.
p. 821 ↵ Many are worried about the similarities between the two institutions. ‘They shouldn’t lock the door
on us’, Innocent exclaimed. ‘We’re not prisoners!’ (Rwanda, IRC Colnbrook). Officers are usually more
ambivalent in their assessment (Bosworth 2016a). While some believe IRCs should be run more like
prisons, others are less sure. ‘I don’t think personally that anyone detained should have to live in wings’,
Alisa stated, ‘because they’ve only broke the law of paperwork haven’t they really?’ (DCO, IRC Tinsley
House).
Some detainees are glad of the differences between IRCs and prisons. For them, access to a mobile phone
and the internet, along with regular visits, and more time out of their locked rooms, mitigate their
experience of custody. Many, like Innocent, are keen to mark out their non-criminal status. Most,
however, interpret their confinement with reference to the prison. Without it, detention makes little sense.
From those arrested at work, to others who had been signing on at the Home Office, the lament is the
same: ‘This place is worse than prison’, Ala complained (Kashmir, IRC Yarl’s Wood).
For Ala, the problems inhere in the building and regime. ‘There is nothing to do’, she moaned. ‘This place
needs more relaxing, how the building is designed, living room, living rooms look like waiting rooms.
Don’t feel comfy and cosy, just cold’ (Kashmir, IRC Yarl’s Wood). For Giv, however, who had served a four-
year custodial sentence, the distinction between the two establishments and the reason why IRCs were
worse, sprang from its unclear purpose. ‘Some privileges like mobile, like visits, things like that, you get
more, you know. Okay, that’s okay’, he acknowledged. ‘But … the mentality in the prison, you set your time
up. Is routine there, regime is there … Is routine there, is law working there and you have to respect the
law. Either officer or prisoner have to respect that law. Is routine there. Okay, they all banged up, that’s
why you a prisoner because, you know, so that’s something you get on with it, you know. And, but here
first of all, you think is why I’m locked up—detention, why?’ (Iran, IRC Colnbrook). For most people,
confinement for immigration matters is hard to understand.
It is not just detainees who wonder about the purpose of detention. Officers also search for explanations of
their job yet rarely settle on anything particularly consistent or persuasive (Bosworth 2019b). Some
characterize their jobs in caring terms, suggesting they are social workers, or even a medical professional.
‘I’m here to look after their welfare’, Azima asserted, ‘just like doctors are there to save people’s lives, in a
Page 8 of 22
different way’ (Detainee Custody Officer, IRC Harmondsworth). For Joyce, the appropriate comparison is a
boarding school: ‘To me, you know, there’s people held here. They’re learning stuff. They’ve come from all
different backgrounds. You’re kind of thrown together like you would be in a school, with people you might
get on with, you might not get on with’ (Detainee Custody Manager, IRC Colnbrook).
At the same time, most staff recognize the impact of the built environment and the institutional policies.
In a lengthy reflection on the relationship between the two kinds of institutions, Saul begins by denying
the similarities. ‘I’m not a Prison Officer’, he baldly asserts, ‘cos the guys that we look after are not
prisoners, they are detainees and there is a difference’. A few moments later in the conversation, however,
he changes tack. ‘Lets not beat around the bush here’, he admits, ‘You’ve got metal fencing with razor
wire, you’ve got bars at the window, you’ve got locks, bolts on doors, okay, so yes, it is theoretically, a
prison environment’ (Detainee Custody Officer, IRC Harmondsworth). Mishal, at IRC Colnbrook next door,
agrees. ‘I think it is prison’, she acknowledges, ‘in a sense. Because everything else is exactly like prison
apart from the fact that they can keep their phone and have their visits all the time’ (Detainee Custody
Manager, IRC Colnbrook).
p. 822 ↵ Legally, of course, IRCs are not prisons. Before the Pandemic at least, the vast majority of those
detained had not been found guilty of a criminal offence. Nobody is (still) serving a sentence, although
some of those with criminal convictions may be on parole. In short, notwithstanding its punitive effect, a
period of immigration detention is not, officially, a punishment.
For staff, such contradictions raise ethical and practical questions. Many are uncomfortable with the lack
of judicial oversight. Few support a totally open-ended period of confinement. Such concerns, it is
important to note, are not necessarily driven by moral concerns or philosophical values. They are often
animated by more pragmatic factors. It is difficult to work in institutions that look and feel like prisons
without the rules, regulations, coercive powers, and thus legitimacy, of formal punishment (Bosworth
2013; Sparks, Bottoms, and Hay 1996). ‘Although it looks like a prison’, Mishal pointed out, ‘it’s not run
like a prison. We don’t have the power that prison officers have. So we have to really, really work hard with
our interpersonal skills to keep the place safe and calm and it just takes a few members of staff to rock that
and cause a mess for the rest of us’ (Detainee Custody Manager, IRC Colnbrook).
For those who are detained, issues are more personal and, consequently, more painful (Bosworth 2021).
The system of administrative law offers them far fewer protections and detainees have little agency over
their treatment. Many will not have been to court and thus will have had no opportunity to communicate
his or her side of the story. While a deportation order may be handed down as part of a criminal sentence,
the decision to detain is an administrative one. Unless a person applies for bail to an immigration tribunal,
6
the grounds for his or her confinement will be subject to minimal judicial oversight. Instead, immigration
caseworkers in offices around the country make decisions based on files and paperwork (HMIP and ICIBI
2012).
Most women and men are not detained for long. Reflecting the increased focus of the system on recent
arrivals from Calais, during 2021, nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) of people left detention within 7 days, as
they were dispersed into other forms of housing. That figure was up from 38 per cent in the preceding year
Page 9 of 22
(Home Office 2021b). For the remaining third, the duration of confinement varies widely because, in
contrast to the rest of Europe, there is no statutory upper limit to the period of detention in the UK
(Bosworth and Vannier 2016). A small number in each IRC will have been held for over a year.
All these aspects of immigration detention differentiate it from penal confinement. Yet, IRCs remain
associated with the prison by those within and outside. As a result, considering them through the lens of
prison sociology can be illuminating. To the extent that there are some similarities with experiences in the
highsecurity prison estate, IRCs have wider relevance for thinking about penal power more broadly.
At the same time, however, the exercise of administrative power demands its own framework of analysis
(Bosworth 2019a). It is far easier to deprive people of their liberty on the basis of citizenship, than for a
criminal offence. This aspect alone has profound implications for how we might judge the purpose and
nature of these sites. As I have written elsewhere, questions of legitimacy, used so effectively to critique
imprisonment, have little traction or application to this method of confinement (Bosworth 2013).
IRCs defy easy explanation. Although designed to encourage removal, they are not particularly effective in
getting people to go. While many support them, particularly those who would reduce net migration to the
UK, IRCs also attract considerable criticism. Their inefficiency in managerialist terms, their economic cost,
p. 823 and their impact ↵ on human rights, attracts ongoing critique. Nonetheless states around the world
remain committed to this form of border control.
The contested and unclear nature of IRCs affects the research field. The politicized nature of confinement
for immigration purposes means that the state and the private companies guard research access to them
jealously. Such strictures shape the kind of evidence available. Most of what is published about detention is
produced by NGOs, and government agencies, or gleaned from interviews conducted with former detainees
or over the phone (Griffiths 2014). A considerable amount of work is conducted surreptitiously in visit halls
(Godshaw 2020). Institutional ethnographies, the mainstay of much prisons research, are rare (Hall 2012;
Bosworth 2014; Gerlach 2023).
Gaining formal access is only the start of the challenge. Once inside, detention centres are particularly
complex. First, there are multiple layers of governance with conflicting goals and responsibilities.
Although run by private custodial companies, the state is not totally absent. IRCs house onsite immigration
agents from the Home Office whose job is to pass information between detainees and offsite case workers,
while monitoring the contract with the company. Since 2014 the NHS has managed healthcare in
detention, by contracting it out, rather than providing it. Before then healthcare was delivered by the
custodial company. IRCs, like prisons, are inspected by the Prison Inspectorate (HMIP) and monitored by
local Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) teams. They are also each serviced by a local support group,
who offer social visits to those within.
In all these figures as well as in the person of the detainee, IRCs draw together otherwise distinct legal
frameworks of refugee law, immigration law, and criminal law, and, for those detainees with children,
family law as well. Making sense of this range of roles and responsibilities, not to mention the
relationships between these different systems and their impact is difficult. Power flows in many
directions, not all of it directed towards expulsion.
Page 10 of 22
Conducting research with people in detention poses distinct challenges. Most obviously, although most of
those confined speak some English, few are totally fluent. Criminologists, however, are often monolingual;
language instruction is not part of our postgraduate training. The sheer cultural, religious, and ethnic
diversity of this population can also be confusing. Spending time in an IRC requires a quick study of
geography and world religions. Once again, such matters are usually absent from the criminology
curriculum, and from most publications.
The temporal uncertainty of detention further compounds matters. Most detained people are profoundly
anxious and depressed (Bosworth and Kellezi 2013b). ‘What we doing here?’ Ayesha cried out one day. ‘I’m
just eating and sleeping and just thinking: “What happen next, what happen next?”’ (Pakistan, IRC Yarl’s
Wood). Research with people in pain has to proceed carefully. Communication difficulties hamper attempts
to garner trust, to soothe or comfort, as well as understanding (Bosworth and Kellezi 2016).
More practically, those who have agreed to be interviewed may be suddenly removed, released, or
transferred, making interviews difficult to plan. A fieldnote from May 2011 illustrates the point: After
driving 90 minutes to IRC Brook House, parking, being searched, and then walking over to the legal
corridor, I note in an exasperated tone, ‘my first interviewee did not show up. UKBA [the Home Office]
transferred him yesterday to Tinsley House. You might have thought they would have known that earlier
on, i.e. yesterday, when these arrangements were made’ (Fieldnotes, IRC Brook House, 10 May 2011).
Sampling is shaped by this temporal uncertainty. So too, is the nature of the testimonies. Gathered in
haste, across a language divide, stories are often fragmented.
p. 824 ↵ People in detention are not alone in the uncertainty they face. Long-term prisoners experience some
of the same factors. They also find it hard to make plans, and are likely to feel hopeless, anxious, and
depressed (Liebling 2014; Vannier 2021). However, the nature and ubiquity of the uncertainty of detention
is distinct. Its duration and various outcomes are impossible to predict. Will they be deported or removed?
What about release? If they are bailed or offered temporary admission, how long before the state seeks to
remove them again?
Migration control reaches into the future as well as the past, erasing people’s aspirations, while also, by
insisting people leave the country, negating their previous experiences. Time spent in the UK, children,
work-experience, tax, all of it is deemed insufficient justification to remain. ‘My whole life is going to
erase’, Tahir notes sadly, ‘Just imagine that! You know when you erase old numbers from your mobile
phone? Just imagine if your whole life was erased just like that?’ (Sudan, IRC Campsfield House) (cited in
Bosworth 2014: 177).
Above all, the rationale for the loss of liberty is indistinct in immigration detention. Many simply do not
understand why they are locked up. As Innocent observed, they are not prisoners. Why then are they held
in places that look like prison?
Together these factors create environments where, even those who are held for lengthy periods tend to
have their attention trained elsewhere, usually on their immigration case. Despite being places of bricks
and mortar, IRCs are just staging posts. Internal matters, like regimes and relationships, so pivotal to
understanding the prison, do little to illuminate these sites of confinement. Instead, like those whom they
study, researchers must take a wider view, looking beyond the institution to make sense of life within.
Page 11 of 22
Deportation
Although most of those who are detained are released, at least temporarily, back into Britain, deportation
7
and removal loom large for all who are confined. For nearly everyone in IRCs, the prospect of forced
return is unwelcome. Many speak of it as a form of humiliation. They are embarrassed to return without
gifts, having failed in their life abroad. Some fear a more terrifying outcome. In either case, few look
forward to ‘going home’. Instead of re-entry and reunification, with their implicit promise, however hard
to achieve in practice, of the possibility of a new beginning, removal or deportation are experienced and
understood as further punishment (Hasselberg 2016).
The criminal justice system plays an important role in facilitating deportation and other forms of
administrative expulsion (Brotherton and Barrios 2011; Kaufman and Weiss 2015). Sometimes expulsion is
triggered by a particular length of custodial sentence. At other times, no conviction is necessary. In the UK
and the USA, police run fingerprints of suspects through the immigration database (Parmar 2019; Aliverti
2021). Even if the police drop the criminal case, migrants may be held on immigration detainers pursuant
to their expulsion (Manuel 2015).
Notwithstanding the range of mechanisms available to the government, forcing people to go can be
difficult (Gibney 2008; Bosworth and Singler 2022). Like detention, expulsion is often contested. Those
p. 825 asked to leave can delay their departure for some ↵ time by refusing to go, ‘losing’ their passport, and
even resisting on the plane. These are all desperate strategies and ones that are dangerous for the
individual. Ultimately, they will be ineffective in the face of state power.
While scholars like Gibney (2008) in political science focus on the challenges in forcing out long-term
residents or asylum seekers, a criminological lens directs our attention to the contradictory impact of this
administrative penalty on the logic of criminal justice. Deportation is an additional consequence that
cannot be meted out to citizens and, as such, undermines the expectation of equal treatment before the
law. It is not necessarily subject to judicial oversight, despite its profound impact on those subject to it. In
the UK, while judges and magistrates may add a deportation order onto a criminal sentence, civil servants
can also decide to enforce departure.
For those forced to leave, deportation hollows out the promise of rehabilitation and reintegration that had,
at least in part, justified their punishment. Waldo, who had served numerous sentences for drug-related
crimes, explains. ‘When I went to prison’, he said, ‘I done numerous courses, and then obviously I’ve
realised what I was doing wrong, and where I went wrong when I end up in jail … at that time I thought to
myself, “look, I have to do something, innit? Because I can’t keep going in and out of prison”. So I started
doing the course that will help me to, like, better myself for when I get released and that, so that I don’t go
back to certain things that I used to do, you know. But while I was about to get released, that’s when they
came in with this deportation order’ (Ghana, IRC Brook House). Deportation also fits uneasily into ideas of
deterrence or just deserts. While politicians currently assert that tough immigration laws make Britain
‘hostile’ to irregular migrants and foreign offenders, immigration numbers rise and fall unconnected to
criminal justice policy.
Page 12 of 22
Conclusion
As mass migration continues to shape all aspects of society, it is not surprising to find that the criminal
justice system has been affected as well. These days, the impact of imprisonment stretches far beyond
institutional walls, not only seeping into the community in which it is based but reaching across the world.
In so doing, the prison joins with other, putatively non-penal institutions and practices like immigration
detention and deportation in the service of border control and regulation of foreigners on national soil.
Criminologists are well placed to explore these developments, as we can capitalize on our existing ties to
the criminal justice system to gain access to these more hidden sites and practices. Border criminologists
can also learn from existing studies. As criminal sentences lengthen, for instance, prisoners report
growing levels of hopelessness and distress (Liebling 2014; Vannier 2016; Vannier 2021). Uncertainty is a
consequence of more than just border control. Criminologists have also long documented the retreat of the
state and the growing involvement of the private and voluntary sector (Garland 1996; Tomczak 2014). This
scholarship is relevant to these new forms of state power as well (Bosworth and Zedner 2022).
These points of commonality are important to acknowledge. Yet, border criminology offers more than just
‘new wine in old bottles’. In shifting the frame of analysis, to take account of the global in the local, it
offers a fresh perspective that highlights the relevance of citizenship, race, and ethnicity and reinterprets
the role and nature of sovereignty and power (Franko 2020; Barker 2017).
p. 826 ↵ In a global, interconnected yet profoundly unequal world, the nation state is both vulnerable and
increasingly muscular. Deploying the logic and the practice of criminal justice for the purpose of border
control allows for the expansion of state power offshore and out of sight. Such developments destabilize
many of the core principles of criminal justice, while also altering the nature of migration control and even
international aid and development. They also shift the expectations we have about accountability and
efficacy. The state seems to have more leeway to experiment and expand in coercive actions taken against
foreigners than it does with citizens.
All these matters raise important and urgent questions about the kind of society that is being constructed
at home and abroad. What does it mean for a multicultural country like Britain, with its long tradition of
immigration, to prioritize exclusion for so many within? What are we to make of the ties to the colonial
past? Given that, as this chapter has demonstrated, the state faces a number of barriers in its bid to expel,
how are we to reconcile the symbolic role of its extensive powers with their practical effect?
It is not just that laws passed against foreigners have a habit of being applied to citizens, as David Cole
(2007) once observed about terrorism laws in the United States, but also that they are entrenching
practices in societies through which certain members are denied the same rights and protections of others.
History is littered with examples of the perils of this logic. In drawing these issues into the discipline,
border criminology seeks to reanimate moral and political debate about justice, inclusion, and exclusion.
What kind of society do we live in and where is it heading? Who belongs in it, and how far will we go to
secure it? These are the questions of our time, and ones that deserve greater reflection.
Page 13 of 22

For those interested in exploring immigration detention in more depth, see Bosworth’s Inside Immigration Detention
(2014), Flynn and Flynn’s (2017) Challenging Immigration Detention: Academics, Activists and Policy-Makers, Canning’s
(2019) Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System, and Gerlach’s (2023) Dignity, Women, and
Immigration Detention for a range of perspectives on this form of custody. For those interested in policing and border
control in the UK see Aliverti’s Policing the Border Within (2021). Conceptually, the edited collection, Katja Franko’s
(2000) book The Crimmigrant Other maps many of the changes referenced in this chapter. Students who wish to follow
the most up-to-date research in this field should consult Border Criminologies’ blog. The global detention project
provides up to date statistics and reports on detention systems around the world.
Online resources

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Notes
1
Often referred to in a plural form as ‘border criminologies’, this field is also sometimes known as ‘the criminology of
mobility’ (Pickering, Bosworth, and Aas 2015).
2
See https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/foreign-prisoners?field_region_taxonomy_tid=14 <https://
www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/foreign-prisoners?field_region_taxonomy_tid=14> Last accessed 11 February
2022.
3
Other countries have created similar establishments (on Norway, see Ugelvik 2012; on the USA, Kaufman 2019 and
Tuck 2022).
4
Not his real name. Participants have been allocated pseudonyms.
5
Globally the use of the private sector varies. In Australia, for instance, all the sites of detention are contracted out to
one company (currently Serco). The US relies on a number of companies, as well as leased spaces in state, local, and
federal correctional institutions. Many other countries, however, eschew the private sector altogether, with nearly all
EU member states staffing their detention sites with border police instead (Bosworth and Vannier 2016).
6
The Immigration Act 2016 passed through various amendments, introducing mandatory judicial oversight after four
months of detention.
7
In UK law, ‘deportation’ refers to removals enacted on the basis of Section 5 of the 1971 Immigration Act, which
allows for the deportation of individuals whose removal is ‘conducive to the public good’ such as foreign criminal
offenders. The basis for ‘administrative removals’ is Section 10 of the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, and this
category refers mainly to the enforced removal of individuals in breach of the Immigration Rules.

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Page 22 of 22
38. Reconfiguring and reimagining penal power

p. 831 38. Reconfiguring and reimagining penal power

Ben Crewe and Alison Liebling
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0038
Abstract
This chapter examines changing forms and consequences of power in contemporary prisons in England and Wales. It begins by
discussing the ways in which power has been treated within the penological literature, critiquing the tendency among some
scholars to focus on its most coercive forms. It goes on to consider the connections between prisoner experiences and the use
of authority by prison staff, detailing the different textures that result according to the specific ways that staff exercise their
power. The chapter then considers the implications of these differences with regard to matters such as ‘respect’ in prison, the
centrality of staff professionalism to prison life, the self-legitimacy of prison officers, and ‘good’ uses of penal power. After
detailing recent transitions in the prison system in England and Wales, the chapter explores the consequences of these
changes in relation to prisoner behavior, power-sharing between staff and prisoners, and other staff practices. It concludes by
identifying the connections between different modes of penal authority, order and legitimacy.
Keywords: penal power, use of authority, legitimacy, order, staff culture, prisoner experiences
We do not dissent from the plain truth that incarceration implies force, at least in ‘the last
instance’. Prisons are dominative institutions. [But] we would also argue that an account that
places its whole emphasis on the imposition of order by relentless force glosses over many
important complexities of prison life and effaces some significant variations in the social
organization of different prisons. One aspect of such difference … concerns the extent to which the
staff of different prisons succeed or fail in legitimating their deployment of power and authority
and the techniques and strategies which they deploy in seeking to secure such legitimacy.
(Sparks, Bottoms, and Hay 1996: 35)
Page 1 of 29
Introduction
In their book on legitimacy in high-security prisons, Prisons and the Problem of Order, Sparks, Bottoms, and
Hay (1996) sought to counter the view shared by ‘radical pessimist’ and ‘conservative pragmatist’
penologists that prisons were entirely non-legitimate institutions. For radical pessimists, whose writings
had highlighted blatant abuses of power in British prisons in the 1970s and 80s (Fitzgerald 1987; Scraton et
al. 1991), the essence of imprisonment was coercive, and its characteristic features were conflict and
antagonism. For conservative pragmatists, the non-legitimate nature of prisons was such that they
required firm control to inhibit their in-built tendency towards disorder (DiIulio 1987).
As the quote above makes clear, Sparks et al did not dispute that all forms of incarceration were founded on
the use of force, and that ‘the social order of the prison is imposed and enforced’ (1996: 300). However, in
noting that some prisons generated more conflict and resentment than others, they sought to emphasize
that some were more successful in legitimating their own practices and generating some level of consent
among the governed. As they noted, prison staff operated with an acute—if often tacit—understanding
p. 832 that they needed to ‘tailor their actions, demeanour, and demands in recognition of ↵ prisoners’
customary expectations’ (Sparks et al. 1996: 303). To focus solely on power’s most coercive forms was to
ignore the possibility that different institutions met these expectations to a greater degree than others, on
the basis of modes of authority that went beyond force and threat. As their analysis demonstrated, within
high-security prisons in England and Wales in the late 1980s, there was considerable divergence in the
strategies adopted to generate order, the degree to which prisoners assented to these regimes, and the
social consequences of these different models of order.
Sparks et al.’s call for ‘more nuanced and appropriate conceptions of the links between order, power and
legitimacy in penal relations’ (Sparks and Bottoms 1995: 52) changed the terms of penal scholarship
significantly. However, few penal scholars have conceptualized or evaluated differing forms of penal
power and order (although see Kruttschnitt and Gartner 2005). In part, this reflects an enduring tendency
to regard power as inherently damaging, and therefore not to look beyond its more egregious features. As
McMahon (1992) argues, this position sees the exercise of penal power ‘as always, and everywhere,
involving only more social control, repression, domination, and subjection’ (1992: 218). Often, it finds its
expression in descriptions of prison officers as agents of state power or brutal thugs (e.g. Cohen and Taylor
1972; Sim 2008). While such descriptions are not always unjustified, they are highly reductive, overlooking
the range of attitudes and behaviours that prison officers express and exhibit, and the full range of
functions they perform. Most problematically, absolutist cynicism about the nature of penal power and
order makes it impossible to identify which forms of penal authority are more oppressive, destructive or
unreasonable than others, with what consequences for prisoners. It also makes it unlikely that dangerous
absences of power—increasingly a feature of contemporary prisons—are properly understood. These
omissions are surprising, given that prisoners are sensitive and well-informed evaluators of their own
circumstances. Even a brief conversation on a prison wing reveals that prisoners can identify regimes that
are more respectful, fairer and safer than others, articulate how both the presence and absence of power
‘feel’ in such establishments, and describe the impact of different regimes on their psychological security,
well-being, opportunities for self-determination and everyday behaviour.
Page 2 of 29
Our aim in this chapter is to conceptualize changing forms of power in contemporary prisons in England
and Wales, and the impact of these changes on staff culture, staff-prisoner relationships, and prison order.
In doing so, we re-visit an earlier attempt to characterize the texture of penal authority, before describing
how, even in the last few years, this texture has been reconfigured, as cuts to prison staffing levels and
lower levels of staff experience have reshaped how prison officers use their power on the landings and
engage with prisoners as moral agents. While politicians have come to recognize the problems of high
levels of drug use and declining levels of safety, policy developments have been hindered by an
impoverished understanding of how order and legitimacy in prisons are established, maintained, and lost,
as well as the role of prison officers in these dynamics.
Penal Power
It is clear from the literature that prisons can have different configurations of power and that there is
usually a gap between the ‘official’, intended model and what happens in practice. The balance of power
between prisoners, staff (and unions), governors, headquarters and, increasingly, politicians, alters as
p. 833 policy intentions and ideologies shift. ↵ Different configurations of power are regarded by prisoners as
more or less legitimate, and these evaluations have a direct impact on their experiences and behaviour.
The assumption that prison staff are all-powerful is questionable. In this regard, there is considerable
divergence between two of the classic studies of prison life. In his study of a US maximum security prison,
Sykes (1958) highlighted the ‘defects in total power’ and ‘cracks in the [institutional] monolith’,
emphasizing the various ways that the seemingly total power of prison officers was, in practice,
compromised. Any recourse to force was hazardous. Officers were outnumbered, and were dependent on
prisoners (to appear competent, and to discharge a range of daily tasks). Some subsequent studies, such as
McEvoy’s (2001) account of paramilitary imprisonment in Northern Ireland, are consistent with Sykes’s
portrayal of this power balance. In McEvoy’s study, prisoners were cohesive, organized, and ideologically
hostile to their captors, regarding themselves as political captives and questioning the legitimacy of state
authority. Able to communicate with organizations outside the prison, and highly disciplined within it,
they exerted exceptional levels of pressure on prison staff, to the extent that the wings were in effect run
by prisoners themselves.
In contrast, Mathiesen (1965) described prisoners within a medium-security, treatment-oriented

correctional institution in Norway as feeling highly dependent on staff. Atomized and divided, from their
position of weakness, they engaged in a form of ‘censoriousness’, challenging prison staff not on the basis
of an alternative value system, but for failing to correctly implement their own rules. Studies of imprisoned
sex offenders have generally reported similar findings: such prisoners exhibit little collective solidarity
and challenge staff authority mainly through recourse to institutional norms and regulations, and legal
challenge (Sparks et al. 1996). As Bottoms (2005) notes, these divergent descriptions in part reflect the lens
through which power is observed. Sykes’s account assumes the perspective of prison officers, while
Mathiesen writes from the position of prisoners. Other studies (e.g. Ben-David 1992) have described
political and even romantic affiliations between staff and prisoners and the risks these affiliations pose to
the conventional split between staff and prisoners (see also Ben-David and Silfen 1994). The types of
power that prison officers can use (e.g., coercive, expert, referent or personal, legal, and reward), or are
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regarded as acceptable, vary and are linked to the kinds of relationships they have with prisoners (see
Hepburn 1985 and Liebling, Price, and Shefer 2011) as well as to the kinds of social relationships and
hierarchies that develop as a result (Street 1965). Very little research in recent years has sought to trace
this chain of authority.
Penal Power and the Weight of Imprisonment
In a 2014 article (Crewe, Liebling, and Hulley 2014a), we argued that the concept of the ‘weight’ of
imprisonment had been under-theorized. First conceptualized by David Downes (1988) (initially labelled
‘depth’) to convey the degree to which imprisonment was ‘damaging and repressive’, the term was
subsequently reframed by King and McDermott (1995) to convey the burden of the sentence: the pressure
it imposed on the prisoner, according to such matters as how staff used their power, relations with other
prisoners, material conditions, rights and privileges, and the nature of the regime (including access to
work and education).
Little attention had been given to the ways that different ‘weights’ and formations of penal power might
p. 834 be damaging and dangerous or, conversely, reasonable and ↵ supportive. Prisons and the Problem of
Order (1996) was a notable exception. Of the two prisons featured in Sparks, Bottoms, and Hay’s analysis,
Albany was more controlled and oppressive, delivering a predictable regime, but at the expense of what we
would call ‘harmony’ values, such as humanity and respect. In Long Lartin, staff used their discretion to
provide a more flexible and ‘open’ regime, which was in some ways more relaxed than Albany, and
provided prisoners with more autonomy. Compared to Albany, Long Lartin exhibited a lower level of
protest, disobedience and non-compliance, and generated fewer disciplinary infractions. However, higher
levels of self-determination and freedom of movement among prisoners ‘gave rise to opportunities for
trouble and predation’ (p. 318) and enabled a greater degree of serious ‘backstage violence’ arising from
deep, protracted and extensive conflicts brewing between prisoners over time.
Sparks et al.’s analysis brought to light a number of issues. First, even among prisons with similar
functions, the means of accomplishing order varied considerably. Second, legitimacy was complex and
multi-dimensional. Securing the approval of prisoners with regard to some of its key elements could
diminish their approval in relation to others. So, while Sparks et al. asserted that Long Lartin’s ‘more
“social” crime prevention style gave its captive population cause to confer greater legitimacy on the
prison’ (p. 322), they recognized that ‘some aspects of Albany’s “situational control” genuinely reduced
opportunities for trouble’ (p. 322). Third, then, there were negative consequences for prisoners both when
the authorities asserted power too rigidly and forcefully, and when they did so too lightly. Fourth, there
was not consensus among prisoners as to which establishment was preferable: as Sparks et al. noted, some
older prisoners preferred Albany’s austere stability to Long Lartin’s risky autonomy.
Our previous contribution to debates about such issues stems from a comparative study of public and
private sector prisons, in which we sought to analyse different forms of authority within the two sectors
(see Crewe, Liebling, and Hulley 2014a, b). All five private prisons within our study were described by
prisoners in terms that we summarized as ‘light’. For example, custody officers in the private sector more
often called prisoners by their preferred name and less often perceived them negatively than their
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counterparts in public sector prisons, who tended to be more punitive and morally judgmental. Yet
prisoners in the public prisons evaluated their quality of life more positively than those in three of the
private sector prisons, in domains such as interpersonal treatment, as well as safety, policing, and staff
professionalism. In other words, prisons that were somewhat heavy were in some ways deemed preferable
to those that were unduly light.
In the less good private prisons, prisoners complained that interpersonal courtesy was less important to
them than the forms of staff experience in the public sector that enabled their questions to be answered
and their requests to be met. Private sector custody officers were described as ‘nice’ but rather ineffective,
while public sector prison officers were considered less pleasant, but more knowledgeable, and better able
to run a safe and predictable regime. In the less good private prisons, weaknesses in the use of authority,
and the inconsistent use of power, created regimes that felt under-controlled—‘like a council
estate’ (prisoner, private sector). Prisoners wanted uniformed staff to exude authority, and to use it
judiciously and consistently, so that they ‘knew where they stood’ and could be confident that incidents
would be handled quickly and confidently. They also wanted officers to provide ‘supportive limit
setting’ (Wachtel and McCold 2001)—a combination of boundaries, clarity, and care—that protected them
not only from other prisoners but from environmental temptations (e.g. drugs and violence), to which they
recognized they could be attracted.
p. 835 ↵ The study helped us describe some characteristic differences between the sectors in terms of culture
and practices. While the very good private sector prisons were rated more positively than the public sector
establishments in terms of overall quality of life, they too exhibited some weaknesses with regard to
matters such as policing and security. The public sector prisons delivered well-oiled regimes, in which
prisoners generally felt safe, but did so without a great deal of care. Many of these differences reflected
levels of staff experience: in the private prisons, turnover was higher, and a greater proportion of frontline
staff had worked in prisons for under three years, meaning that ‘jailcraft’ on the prison landings was
lacking. In the public prisons, low turnover created different problems: many experienced staff were
‘trapped’ in a job they did not enjoy, but which paid them reasonably well, making them cynical and jaded.
To account for our findings, we combined an axis ranging from ‘heavy’ to ‘light’ with another ranging
from ‘absence’ to ‘presence’ (see Figure 38.1, in which we have included prisons from a range of studies,
including three that we refer to later). Absence and presence denoted the availability of uniformed staff on
the prison landings, the depth and quality of their engagement with prisoners, and the degree to which they
imprinted their authority on the environment, through action (such as policing) and competence (using
authority well). Lightness was desirable only when combined with staff presence (a term we return to
later). When combined with an absence of authority, it was highly undesirable, creating an environment
that was under-policed, unsafe, and unpredictable. The private prisons were located within this quadrant,
with those that were particularly poor performing in its far corner. In such establishments, deficits in the
exercise of confident authority meant that the wings were chaotic, ‘run’ as much by prisoners as by staff,
with power flowing from ‘below’, and from prisoner to prisoner, in relatively unregulated ways. Prisoners
p. 836 lived in a state of insecurity, due to inconsistencies in the use of ↵ staff authority (sometimes
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excessive, sometimes insufficient, and often unpredictable) alongside disorganized regimes. This state
was exacerbated by drug dealing and predation, which prospered in the absence of adequate policing and
supervision.
Figure 38.1 Heavy–light, absent–present
In contrast, the public sector prisons in our study sat in the ‘heavy-present’ quadrant. Power was imposed
on prisoners based on staff attitudes that were often punitive or regressive, creating an atmosphere that
was somewhat austere and oppressive. At the same time, the availability of staff, their confidence and
experience, and their ability to maintain a predictable regime, gave prisoners a degree of security and
certainty about rules and boundaries, their own safety, and their routes to release. At its best, this was
combined with a problem-solving orientation and more benign and constructive attitudes towards
prisoners. This was ‘traditional-professional’ authority: less heavy but clearly present.
The two remaining positions within the diagram also require description. Heavy-absent is most starkly
embodied by supermax prisons in North America, in which order is achieved through extreme situational
control, where staff manage prisoners at a distance and implement control and restraint procedures rather
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than form meaningful relationships (King 1999; Rhodes 2004). Super-max prisons eliminate the need for
relational dynamics in establishing order and control. Interactions between prisoners and staff are
discouraged and staff discretion is minimized in favour of strict rule application. Prisoners are, in effect,
entombed. Their almost total segregation means that they are relatively safe from their peers, but the
corollary of their isolation is profound relational and sensual deprivation (Haney 2006).
A less acute version of heavy-absent was found within some high-security and other prisons in England
and Wales in the 2010s (see Liebling and Price 2001; Liebling, Arnold, and Straub 2011). In such prisons, the
oppressiveness of the environment resulted from restrictive security measures combined with a culture in
which uniformed staff had retreated from prisoner engagement, due to a lack of cultural affinity with
young, ethnic minority prisoner groups, anxieties about how to respect prisoners’ claims to religious
expression or disillusionment with the job. Such establishments had not suffered the kinds of staffing cuts
seen elsewhere in the prison system but had lost a good deal of staff experience and ‘jailcraft’. Staff-
prisoner relationships were characterized by mutual mistrust and cultural distance, rather than the
professionally confident form of ‘heavy-present’ power found in the same establishments in 1998–9.
While officers continued to exert power, they did so through formal mechanisms, such as intelligence
reports and notes on prisoner files, rather than interpersonal engagement. Likewise, security tasks were
carried out without the cordial approach that might have made them less aggravating to prisoners.
Such features were mirrored within an increasingly violent and fractured prisoner subculture. As in light-
absent private prisons, the under-use of staff authority opened up space for prisoners to exert power on
their peers, with tensions resulting from competing assertions of cultural practices. The withdrawal of
staff from interaction and engagement allowed a visible and assertive Muslim sub-group to exert
considerable influence on some wings and determine acceptable forms of conduct among prisoners
(Liebling, Arnold, and Straub 2012), in turn producing resistance and resentment among a sub-group of
non-Muslim prisoners. Prisoners described being in this social world as ‘swimming in a shark
tank’ (Liebling and Arnold 2012, p. 420).
The appeal of Islam to many prisoners was complex, but included the need for safety and fraternity, forms
of anger and alienation generated by ‘life-trashing’ sentences (Simon 2001) and unsympathetic
p. 837 treatment, and the attraction of a narrative expressing ↵ broader forms of social and penal resentment
(Liebling, Arnold, Straub 2012). That is, relevant factors included significant deficits in official governance
(see Skarbek 2020), the broader, more punitive sentencing regime, and feelings of ‘misrecognition’. We
return to this concept below.
Forms of imprisonment that combine heaviness with absence are arguably its least legitimate variety.
Whereas establishments that are heavy–present provide prisoners with a level of support and protection,
and those that are light-absent offer some degree of humanity and autonomy, prisons that are ‘heavy–
absent’ combine the oppressiveness of weight with the insecurity of absence. Power is imposed
overbearingly without enhancing aspects of prisoner wellbeing. In contrast, prisons that are ‘light’ but
‘present’ represent the most legitimate quadrant within our diagram. In such establishments, power
undoubtedly flows, but it does so almost imperceptibly, because of the relational manner in which it
operates. Staff ‘know their prisoners’: they understand their moods and preoccupations, allowing them to
use their discretion effectively. They generate compliance through practices that are procedurally fair or
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via normative commitment and produce safety through a form of ‘dynamic authority’—based on being
visible, interactive and quietly authoritative—that rarely requires power to be deployed in its coercive
mode (see Liebling, Shefer, and Price 2010; Liebling 2011). They are challenging without being
antagonistic, supportive without being over-directive, and convey confidence without being domineering.
The prisons that most resemble this model tend to be well-staffed small units or prisons with a formal,
therapeutic orientation. As described in a range of literature (e.g. Bottomley, Liebling, and Sparks 1994;
Stevens 2013), such places exhibit staff-prisoner relationships whose density and intensity represents a
positive fusion of care and control. For example, in her study of HMP Grendon—a prison run as a
democratic therapeutic community—Stevens (2013) documents the quality of trust and support that runs
both through staff-prisoner and prisoner-prisoner relationships. These include the ‘open-door’ policy
which gives prisoners ‘constant, “legitimate”, informal access’ (p. 93) to officers, and practices like
communal dining, which provide ‘opportunities for gaining social confidence and for expressing
responsibility and care’ (p. 95). At the same time, prisoners are made to take responsibility for their daily
conduct, through public challenges at small group and community meetings which force them to account
for their behaviour. The description of such meetings as ‘gruelling’ (p. 116) is telling, for while these
meetings are far more democratic, supportive and transparent than disciplinary mechanisms in most
prisons, the term points to the ways that power is still exercised upon prisoners, through psycho-
therapeutic discourse and the norms of the prison ‘community’. This form of power can operate
coercively, but on balance, prisoners prefer it and engage with it positively. Indeed, as Stevens explains,
normative bonds to the therapeutic community, and ‘social, informal controls’ (p. 119), form the basis for
prisoner compliance and the prison’s model of crime prevention. That is, authority is exercised
relationally, in a form that generates commitment and comparatively high levels of legitimacy. Despite the
risks of ‘therapeutic ideology acting as power’, prisoners rate the ‘moral quality of life’ at Grendon higher
than almost any other establishment (see NOMS 2014; Liebling assisted by Arnold 2004, and Table 38.1
below. For a non-therapeutic example, see Liebling et al. 2019).
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Table 38.1 Mean quality of prison life scores for each prison
Prison A Heavy-absent Prison B Light-absent Prison C Heavy-present Prison D Light-present
Harmony Dimensions
Entry into custody 2.72 2.69 2.85 3.74
Respect/courtesy 2.99 3.21 3.23 3.99
Staff-prisoner relationships 2.80 3.07 3.20 3.93
Humanity 2.74 2.93 3.01 3.86
Decency 2.60 2.80 2.83 3.90
Care for the vulnerable 2.84 2.87 3.13 3.80
Help and assistance 2.83 2.97 3.15 3.73
Professionalism Dimensions
Staff professionalism 2.81 2.99 3.37 3.79
Bureaucratic legitimacy 2.30 2.53 2.77 3.26
Fairness 2.46 2.65 2.86 3.53
Organization and consistency 2.14 2.31 2.89 3.60
Security Dimensions
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Prison A Heavy-absent Prison B Light-absent Prison C Heavy-present Prison D Light-present
Policing and security 2.51 2.57 3.26 3.45
Prisoner safety 2.91 3.06 3.45 3.69
Prisoner adaptation 2.88 3.17 3.41 4.07
Drugs and exploitation 2.05 2.14 2.70 3.33
Conditions and Family Contact Dimensions
Conditions 3.45 3.48 3.48 4.20
Family contact 3.33 3.23 3.35 3.71
Wellbeing and Development Dimensions
Personal development 2.60 2.76 2.97 4.11
Personal autonomy 2.75 2.76 2.97 3.78
Wellbeing 2.34 2.54 2.83 3.17
Distress 3.19 3.16 3.45 3.60
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Achieving this form of legitimate relational authority is all the more difficult with some prisoner sub-
groups. In women’s prisons, for example, while staff-prisoner relations often appear positive (i.e. close
and informal, and lacking the edge and distance that can be found in some men’s prisons), female
p. 839
838 prisoners often report significant ↵ ↵ legitimacy deficits with regard to their treatment (Bosworth
1999; Auty, Liebling, Crewe, and Schliehe 2022). Many such complaints relate to carelessness in the ways
that prison staff both over- and under-use their authority. In the absence of immediate threats to order
and secure custody, some officers police female prisoners rather lightly, leaving them to resolve their
issues themselves, but enabling vulnerable prisoners to be manipulated or exploited. Conversely, the
sincere aspiration, in recent years, to establish ‘closer’ relationships generates considerable unease among
female prisoners, many of whom have been subjected to erratic and abusive forms of power in their lives
prior to imprisonment and therefore feel considerable discomfort with a lack of clarity about appropriate
boundaries (Crewe, Schliehe and Przyblska 2022). That is, while female prisoners express a strong desire
for care and compassion, their experiences of relational trauma make them wary of attempts to befriend or
build premature intimacy.
Female prisoners also complain about the inconsistent use of power, in which the application of rules and
regulations is highly variable. The loose interpretation by staff of formal procedures sometimes represents
a ‘lighter’ use of power but can make the prisoner experience more stressful. It can also generate
perceptions of favouritism and differential treatment, in which staff are very hands-off with some women,
and over-involved with others, including those considered ‘challenging’ as well as vulnerable. Accounts of
women’s imprisonment have consistently noted that female prisoners are monitored and disciplined
unduly by penal authorities (e.g. Carlen 1983; Howe 1994), in ways that can feel invasive and infantilizing.
Yet, while the policing of their friendships and intimate relationships is experienced as needlessly
intrusive, it represents an attempt by prison officers to minimize the exploitation of an especially
vulnerable sub-section of the prisoner population. That is, much of the risk in women’s prisons lies within
interpersonal relationships, making them an area that is particularly fraught and complex with regard to
staff policing staff (Crewe, Schliehe, and Przyblska 2022).
The same is true in prisons holding men convicted of sexual offences, where interpersonal and sexual
relationships between prisoners are sometimes highly exploitative. Yet, in contrast to women’s prisons,
where such dynamics are somewhat over-regulated, Ievins (2022) found them to be largely ungoverned by
prison officers. Officers ‘reported feeling unconfident and insecure when dealing with anything related to
sexuality or offending’ (Ievins 2022: 182), including sexual relations between prisoners and discussions
with prisoners about their own offences—areas where prisoners sought more rather than less
intervention.
In these examples, then, both policing and engagement were considered by prisoners to be in some
respects inadequate. In contrast to female prisoners, men convicted of sexual offences wanted
relationships that were closer: it was officers who were concerned about being manipulated, and who were
therefore ‘stand-offish’ in their interactions and inflexible in administering the rules. Yet in other ways,
‘emboldened by the fact that they faced fewer direct threats to their authority’ (Ievins 2022: 181–2),
officers exerted considerable control over these prisoners’ lives, for example, in relation to the ways they
were allowed to arrange cell furniture. Such findings are consistent with Sparks, Bottoms, and Hay’s
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(1996) account of the Vulnerable Prisoners Unit in HMP Albany, where prisoners’ collective powerlessness
enabled officers to over-use their authority illegitimately. Yet Ievins’s account points to a more complex
configuration of power, in which staff were perceived as simultaneously ‘petty’ and indifferent, focused on
trivial issues (e.g. minor comments to staff; the presentation of cells) rather than matters of greater
practical and normative significance—that is, not only aspects of prison life that were consequential (e.g.
p. 840 sexual exploitation, trade in medication) but aspects of ↵ engagement that related to important
matters of selfhood: prisoners’ personal histories, their concerns about their own and others’ offending,
and recognition of the complexity of their identities and interpersonal relationships.
It should therefore be clear that ‘absence’ and ‘presence’ relate not just to the use of authority, but the
extent to which staff engage with prisoners as moral agents. One of the ironies of imprisonment is that the
reason why prisoners are there is rarely the focus of sustained and personal attention: it is uncommon for
prison staff to engage with prisoners in discussions of any real depth about the acts that brought them to
prison, the longer back-story that explains their plight and problems, or the kinds of biographical
experiences that shape how they orient themselves to the prison authorities. As Schinkel (2014) found in
her research with men serving life sentences in Scotland, many prisoners crave ‘sustained professional
attention’ (p. 37) and ‘individual input’ (p. 38) that might help them deal with problems such as addiction
and poor coping, but find offending behaviour courses insufficiently attuned to their individual
circumstances. Some other jurisdictions appear more successful in embedding a relational culture in which
staff engage with prisoners about their past offending and hopes for the future in a way that feels tailored
to their sense of self (see Crewe and Ievins 2021).
One reason, therefore, why many prisoners push back against penal power through assertions of identity
(e.g. ‘as a mother … ’, Bosworth 1999; see also Ugelvik 2014) is that prisons fail to recognize who they are,
or actively ‘misrecognize’ them, seeing them only through a lens of risk or dangerousness. The
consequences of doing so can be significant. In high-security prisons, we have found considerable
variation with regard to such matters, with some prisons conceiving of prisoners as ‘experienced
objects’ (what we could call I-It relations) and others approached as ‘experiencing subjects’ (I-Thou
relations) with very different outcomes relating to levels of violence and ‘political charge’, or anger and
alienation (see Liebling 2015; Williams and Liebling 2021).
All of this helps to explain why establishments holding some prisoner sub-groups are hard to
conceptualize in terms of the framework we provide above. In women’s prisons, and prisons holding men
convicted of sexual offences, staff are light-absent (i.e. distant, disengaged) in some respects, but heavy-
present (i.e. invasive, over-bearing, excessively punitive) in others. As in ‘light-absent’ prisons with
inexperienced staff groups, officers sometimes exhibit a ‘stand back, jump forwards’ mode of authority, in
which prisoners are given a considerable degree of autonomy, but are also subject to reactive disciplinary
practices, and forms of policing that feel trivial or petty. Such ‘hard edges’ are common in establishments
where authority is weak, unclear and inconsistent, and therefore needs to be shored up through measures
that are sudden and disproportionate.
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Implications: The Organization of ‘Good Authority’
Our work seeks to make some empirically derived inferences about prison culture, authority and the
prisoner experience. First, our findings indicated the need to broaden the definition of ‘respect’ beyond
conventional understandings of ‘getting on well’ with officers, or interpersonal courtesy (Hulley, Liebling,
and Crewe 2012). Niceness and friendliness may not always be valued by prisoners if perceived as ‘fake’ or
superficial; they constitute only a portion of respectful treatment, alongside staff responsiveness, being
able to obtain answers to questions about entitlements or progression through the system, and having
p. 841 one’s emotional, practical, and interpersonal needs taken seriously ↵ (Sennett 1993: 52). This broader
form of ‘organizational respect’, reflecting bureaucratic responsiveness, fair expectations and
transparency—and closely related to moral recognition—is more difficult to achieve than the thinner form
of ‘interpersonal respect’ and constitutes a stronger test of legitimacy.
Second, staff professionalism is central in shaping prisoner outcomes, but here we find a key distinction
between staff attitudes and staff behaviour. In the private prisons in the study, the orientation of uniformed
staff was progressive, humane and relatively rehabilitative (if sometimes naïve). However, deficiencies in
staff competence, confidence, knowledge and experience meant that frontline staff were unable to deliver
the kinds of outcomes for prisoners that reflected their positive sentiments. The lack of basic
professionalism functioned as an inhibitor on benign intentions. Conversely, in the public prisons, staff
attitudes were generally less caring, trusting and rehabilitative. In one of the public prisons, of the
uniformed staff who returned surveys to us, none agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘most
prisoners are decent people’ (compared to 19 per cent in the private sector comparator). As in many other
public sector establishments, staff subscribed to a ‘safety plus entitlements’ philosophy, in which the
model of safety was defensive, based on maintaining control and discipline, rather than relational or
dynamic, while the vision of decency was narrow and austere, based on a view of prisoners as morally
undeserving. To quote one officer:
[We’re being] pushed to say ‘Mr’, which has no bearing whatsoever in my book on treating them
decently. If you give them exactly what they’re entitled to … and as safe an environment as you
can, that’s being decent.
However, high levels of basic professionalism in this sector—the ability of staff to deliver a smooth
regime, their knowledgability, and a contractual or paternalistic provision of care (see Tait 2011)—
protected prisoners somewhat from these ‘edgy’ dispositions and ensured that their quality of life was
reasonable. Basic professionalism served as an insulator. While private sector staff could not fully deliver
on their attitudes, public sector staff delivered to some extent despite theirs.
Third, staff professionalism both varies and matters: dimensions like ‘organization and consistency’,
‘fairness’, and ‘bureaucratic legitimacy’ contribute significantly to variations in prisoners’ overall quality
of life, their personal development and reoffending outcomes (Auty and Liebling 2020). Where such factors
Page 13 of 29
are lacking—i.e. in prisons where staff are ‘absent’—prisoners either have insufficient ‘headspace’ to
engage in change (Blagden, Winder, and Hames 2016) because life is too chaotic, or—i.e. in prisons that
are ‘heavy’—they feel too defiant in the face of unfairness and indecency to do so.
Our analysis was an attempt to think through the different ways in which authority could be organized and
experienced in general in contemporary prisons, and to reconsider the terms of penal power. As implied in
Sparks et al.’s elaboration of Albany’s strengths, power in prisons can be protective as well as repressive.
The majority of prisoners do not desire an absence of power any more than staff do (Liebling assisted by
Arnold 2004). Insufficient attention has been given to the potentially positive consequences of the use of
‘good’ power in prison and the negative consequences of its under-use, yet it should be clear that there is a
threshold point at both ends of the spectrum: not just when staff are resistant and cynical, and too eager to
use their power, but also when they are powerless or naïve, and are too reluctant to employ it. Prisoners
recognize that the use of power in prison is necessary, desirable, and can be legitimate, even when it is
used ‘against’ them, e.g.:
I think for everything to run properly there has to be rules, and those rules to a certain degree
p. 842 have to be kept, right? If somebody asks you to do something here and you say ‘no ↵ I’m not
doing it’ … then they should be able to have the power and weight behind them to actually enforce
it. (Prisoner, private sector)
Comments of this kind draw our attention to the benefits that prisoners recognize in being protected from
some of their own inclinations. Under-policed environments offer temptations that many are keen, but
unable, to resist (see Shapland and Bottoms 2011). Where drugs are easily available and there is a wider
illicit subculture, prisoners recognize the ease with which they can be drawn into activities they would
prefer to avoid:
There’s no structure. There’s no rules. It’s a free-for-all and staff barely exist … I’m involved in
more criminal activity in here than I was on the out. That’s not good, is it? I don’t think that’s
what prison should be for. (Prisoner, public sector prison)
As suggested here, structure, boundaries and the imposition of certain types of authority can all have
positive effects.
Penal Power in Transition
In the years since we undertook fieldwork for the study that informed this argument, prisons have
undergone significant transition. Much of this transformation has been driven by the combination of
resource reductions linked to the spectre of private sector competition. Whereas an earlier phase of private
sector competition was partly motivated by an ambition to accelerate progressive culture change in public
sector prisons, this aim has been superseded by an almost purely economic rationality of cost reduction
(Liebling and Crewe 2012). The drive to privatize large numbers of prisons has been halted, but on the basis
of promises made by public sector senior managers to emulate private sector costs (which have also been
Page 14 of 29
reduced). Budget cuts have been savage and have inevitably been felt most keenly in relation to staffing
levels. Between 2010–16, the prisons budget, and the frontline staff workforce, were reduced by around a
quarter (Table 3, Ministry of Justice 2018; Prison Reform Trust 2022), during which time the prison
population was relatively stable. Prisons moved from high-resource to low-resource institutions; public
sector prisons increasingly resemble, or even out-compete, their private sector counterparts financially;
and the terms and conditions of work within the two sectors have been on a downward trajectory, with
only recent efforts to build recruitment back up. There was waste and management laxity in an earlier era
(see Liebling and Crewe 2012) but now ‘grip’ and accountability, combined with austerity, mean greater
demands placed upon governors with fewer resources. The key administrative changes have been
reductions in the regime (in particular the number of hours per day that prisoners are unlocked), a
benchmarking exercise reducing staff (including senior manager grades) to a minimum, reductions in the
availability of work, education and courses, and new restrictions on the availability of temporary release.
These drastic reductions in contact and activity have been exacerbated by restrictions brought in during
the COVID pandemic, and resistance by some staff to ‘build back better’ as the rest of the world opens up
(see PRT 2022; Maruna et al. 2022).
These longer-term changes have reconfigured penal power in significant ways, whatever happens ‘post-
COVID’. In what remains of this chapter, we want to reflect on these transitions, including the ways they
are being manifested in staff-prisoner relationships, matters of penal order and legitimacy, and the
prisoner experience. We do this by drawing on findings from three ‘MQPL +’ research exercises carried out
p. 843 in prisons shortly ↵ after the starkest austerity changes in England and Wales (in 2015–16). For these
exercises we spent time, as a team, researching staff and prisoner quality of life through survey methods,
informal conversations and interviews, and focused observations (see Liebling et al. 2015; Liebling et al.
2019). While not representative (they were all prisons of some ‘operational concern’), these
establishments provide insights into some of the general changes in prison life in England and Wales over
recent years (see also Kant 2023).
In Prison A—a public sector, medium-security training prison—we found staff and prisoners in despair.
Many prisoners were too fearful, despondent or frustrated with regime inconsistencies to leave the wings
to attend training or education. Staff had ‘checked out’ psychologically, reflecting an indifference towards
their duty of care towards prisoners. On one wing, prisoners pointed to a sign quoting the Prison Service’s
statement of purpose and spoke indignantly about the gap between its modest aspirations and their
treatment. Uniformed staff were frequently heard shouting and swearing at prisoners and responding
aggressively to reasonable complaints and requests. In ways that were resonant of prisons three decades
ago, some officers were found drinking tea together in offices rather than unlocking or engaging with
prisoners. With regard to staff culture and attitudes, then, the prison was ‘heavy’. There were few
indications of violence, but a negative and unsympathetic attitude towards prisoners, and a cynical view
about the possibility of rehabilitation (‘they’re never going to change—we’ll see ‘em back here in a few
months’; ‘most don’t want to be rehabilitated – this is fun to them’), gave the prison an oppressive feel.
At the same time, power was largely ‘absent’, both in terms of a lack of interactive engagement with
prisoners, and an under-use of authority, with staff preferring to stay in and around wing offices (where
they felt safe) rather than patrol and police the wings (where they felt vulnerable, and were bombarded
Page 15 of 29
with prisoner requests, due partly to long periods of ‘bang-up’). To quote one officer, ‘You don’t police,
because you daren’t’. While some prisoners expressed a preference for this laissez-faire model of
authority, they welcomed ‘hands off’ policing mainly because it enabled them to engage in drug use, drug
dealing, and the exploitation of other prisoners. Prisoners who were less able to cope or did not carry
power were left feeling helpless and fearful. This state of affairs is not dissimilar to the ‘liberal’ regime at
Long Lartin described by Sparks et al. (1996), but its causes and consequences are quite different. Like
prisons in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, staff were demoralized and felt vulnerable and powerless. This
left prisoners with considerable unchecked power.
Prison B—a modern, local private prison, mainly holding prisoners on remand or serving short sentences
—exhibited different characteristics. Staff were very rarely to be found hiding in wing offices. Instead, they
engaged with prisoners constantly in an attempt to meet their needs, albeit in a rather haphazard manner.
The orientation of uniformed staff to prisoners was relatively benign (‘I’m not here to make their lives a
misery’), although levels of violence, disorder, and constant requests were putting these positive attitudes
under strain. Such problems reflected the relative inexperience of uniformed staff, their low numbers, and
their lack of confident authority. The environment was chaotic and insecure, relationships were lax and
sometimes neglectful, and prisoners were able to swear at staff or push past them at prison gates without
being challenged.
Staff were therefore somewhat ‘absent’ in terms of their use of authority, but the staff culture was light
rather than ‘heavy’. Prisoners felt angry, frustrated and neglected, but noticed that staff were attempting
to do their best for them and were not acting in ways that reflected moral disregard: ‘They treat us like
we’re human and we’re in their care. They treat us like we’re here as punishment, not for – that gives you
p. 844 hope’. Staff and ↵ prisoners expressed mutual sympathy for each other’s plight: ‘They’re run off their
feet – we can see that’ (prisoner); ‘I wish we could offer more. They should have courses and
purpose’ (officer). Overall then, the prison was ‘light-absent’—light because staff were not ‘pressing’
negative attitudes on prisoners, and tried hard to respond to their many requests, but ‘absent’ because
there were simply too few of them, with little experience.
Prison C, another local prison, was the best prison of the three, largely because it had retained relatively
high numbers of longer-serving staff. Discipline staff complained that they were too busy delivering the
basic regime to do person-based work (they were ‘chasing the day’; and it was ‘hard to find time to do a
favour for a prisoner’), and frequent cross-deployment to cover shortfalls on other units compounded this
problem. Some staff had unhelpful and negative attitudes towards prisoners and their work, and, reflecting
a common characteristic of a ‘traditional culture’, some stark differences were found in the quality of life
experienced by different groups of prisoners. However, on the whole, prisoners evaluated their treatment
considerably more positively than in Prisons A and B. Compared to these establishments, it had a greater
proportion of experienced and knowledgeable staff, in part because its geographic location meant that its
pay was competitive within the local jobs market but also because the prison had served many distinct and
specialist functions in its past, where the long-serving officer body had previously worked, and there were
fewer staff shortages.
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With regard to staff authority, the establishment was very ‘present’. Staff-prisoner engagement on the
landings was limited, and prisoners perceived some staff as distant, but experienced staff got out among
prisoners, and engaged them in banter and conversation. Staff displayed considerable pride in the prison,
and loyalty to each other. They felt duty-bound to make the ‘bare-bones’ benchmark settlement work and
were committed to the preservation of their role in the public sector (which had been threatened). As in the
public sector prisons in our earlier study, although the prison had some heavy cultural habits, including
some uniformed staff who over-used their power, staff were delivering a reliable and reasonably safe
regime, and many prisoners were able to spend their time constructively (for a similar account of another
older local prison, see Kant 2023).
Table 38.1 shows the means scores on our Measuring the Quality of Prison Life dimensions for each of
these prisons. It also includes an establishment that we have previously characterized as ‘light-
present’ (Prison D), which routinely scores extremely well on the MQPL survey. Scores of 3 and above (on a
5-point scale) are positive and are in bold in the Table. All dimensions are scored positively, so a 2.05 on
drugs and exploitation mean that prisoners are strongly agreeing that there are major problems of drug
availability and exploitation among prisoners in the prison.
These scores vary significantly between the prisons, in ways that reflect our qualitative characterizations.
First, it is telling that Prison B outperforms Prison A on ‘harmony dimensions’: here, heaviness is
manifested in lower scores for dimensions such as ‘respect/courtesy’, ‘staff-prisoner relationships’, and
‘humanity’. But it is also striking—and consistent with our theorization—that Prison C outscores Prison B
on these dimensions. That is, even when staff attitudes are somewhat ‘heavy’, the presence and
professionalism of experienced officers means that prisoners experience a greater level of respect and care
than in an establishment where frontline staff are benign but professionally ineffective. Second, the
‘absence’ of power is reflected in lower scores for the security dimensions, particularly ‘policing and
security’, which manifests most directly the outcome of staff under-using their power, whether through
fear, inexperience, or indifference. As Table 38.2 shows, well over 50 per cent of prisoners in Prisons A and
p. 845 B agreed with the item ‘Supervision of prisoners is poor in this prison’, compared ↵ to 29 per cent in
Prison C and 19 per cent in Prison D. Third, the clear step-change in scores within the table, from left to
right, confirms our overall argument about the relative legitimacy of different modes of penal authority. As
a result of recent reductions in staff numbers and experience, prisons in England and Wales increasingly
resemble models A and B. We return to this argument at the end of the chapter.
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Table 38.2 MQPL item results
This prison is run by prisoners rather than staff.
Mean % SA/A % SD/D % SA %A %N %D % SD
Prison A—Heavy-absent 2.61 50.7 23.2 17.4 33.3 26.1 17.4 5.8
Prison B—Light-absent 2.67 46.0 26.7 20.0 26.0 27.3 20.7 6.0
Prison C—Heavy-present 3.85 11.7 67.6 4.8 6.9 20.7 33.8 33.8
Prison D—Light-present 3.23 29.9 46.7 10.3 19.6 23.4 29.9 16.8
In this prison things only happen for you if your face fits.
Supervision of prisoners is poor in this prison.
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This prison is run by prisoners rather than staff.
In this prison, there is a real ‘pecking order’ between prisoners.
Note: Bold and shading indicate a ‘score of 3 or above’, that is, a positive evaluation (on a 5-point scale).
Page 19 of 29
p. 846 The Outcomes of Penal Power
The primary consequences of the changes we have observed (especially in prisons A and B, but also to
some extent in C) are threefold. First, environmental conditions are reshaping prisoner behaviour in ways
that are mainly undesirable. Chaotic, unpredictable, and indifferent regimes mean that feelings of
resignation and demoralization predominate (‘I don’t try to do anything anymore – it’s pointless’;
‘there’s no consistency, so people just give up’). Many staff use the same language of apathy and de-
motivation (‘I’ve given up trying—I just show up for the pay cheque’). Yet prisoners also report that, in
their daily interactions with prison staff, the most successful means of gaining attention involves drastic
action, because more measured approaches can be overlooked or ignored by staff, whether they are
overwhelmed or apathetic: ‘The only way to get attention from the screws is to kick off or you slice up
[engage in self-harm]’; ‘you have to make a protest to even get a TV’. ‘The lads who are disruptive get
more than the lads who are complying’. The suggestion in the last quote that non-compliance is (in the
short term) beneficial, and is encouraged by the daily climate, is significant. Prisoners consistently point
to the impact of the regime not only on their behaviour and compliance with the regime, but also on the
kind of person they are inclined to be:
The rules are clear on paper, but not in practice. It can drive you crazy. You do what you’re told,
follow the rules, and you don’t get anywhere. You see others swear, kick off, and then get
Enhanced or moved on … I want to progress, but this is a game. Rules don’t matter. It makes me
not want to comply. It makes me angry. (Prisoner)
I was Enhanced before I came here. I was the second servery worker on my wing. But there’s no
reason to apply yourself here, no motivation, no payoff. (Prisoner)
In many respects, such establishments feel like custodial warehouses, with little sense of purpose beyond
containing prisoners in the present (‘We’re just vegetating’). However, such terminology underplays the
degree to which these establishments cause prisoners damage, rather than simply hold them in stasis. To
quote one prisoner:
They say I’m supposed to be addressing my ‘offending behaviour’ in here. How am I supposed to
do that when the prison is providing me with things that get me into trouble? I’m using [drugs]
more in here. I’m selling more. I’m fighting more … They’ve set me up to fail. (Prisoner)
Second, because of cuts to staffing levels, there is an increasing degree of power-sharing between staff and
prisoners. In some establishments, such as Prison C, authority is actively and carefully delegated to trusted
prisoners, who work in roles (such as providing information to new arrivals or distributing application and
complaint forms) that free up staff to focus on other duties. In such arrangements, prisoners are
integrated into the wing management structure, and are carefully overseen. In other establishments, such
as Prison A, power is handed to selective prisoners in more informal, collusive and unaccountable ways.
Officers use powerful prisoners to ‘sort out trouble’, in return for significant perks. Alternatively, as in
Page 20 of 29
Prison B, power-sharing is more haphazard. Prisoners claim power from staff, as a way of managing the
chaos around them. On some wings, prisoners volunteer to help staff persuade other prisoners to go to
their cells at times of ‘lock-up’ and assist new staff by telling them how the regime functions.
p. 847 ↵ We therefore find three differing outcomes of a low-cost model of penal provision, each reflecting a
particular configuration of authority. In prisoners’ language, Prison C was ‘a screws’ nick’, and this was
reflected in the manner in which power-sharing was carefully controlled and overseen. Staff contracted
out aspects of their own influence, but did not relinquish it. By contrast, in both Prisons A and B, new and
inexperienced staff felt ‘overwhelmed’, and unsure of how best to use their power. In both, they
consistently overlooked rule infractions, from low-level infringements, such as smoking on the landings
or walking around wings semi-naked, to more serious violations, such as the open use of mobile phones,
cell robberies, and abusive behaviour. However, the distributions of power in these establishments
differed. Prison B was a ‘cons’ nick’, where power was in the hands of the prisoners, and staff had little
control over this arrangement. Prison A was summarized as ‘a screws’ prison, but prisoners run it’, a
phrase which signaled the way that staff were competent and authoritative in terms of capability but were
choosing to contract out their authority to prisoners rather than activate it themselves. As the results for
the MQPL item ‘this prison is run by prisoners rather than staff’ demonstrate (see Table 38.2), these
differences in how power-sharing was managed were extremely significant. In Prison C, under 12 per cent
of prisoners agreed or strongly agreed that ‘this prison is run by prisoners rather than staff’, compared to
around 50 per cent in prisons A and B. In all three establishments, and in Prison D, the regime functioned
only because of the involvement, in some form, of the captives, but the overall balance of power between
1
prisoners and staff varied considerably across these different models. In Prisons A and B in particular, the
attrition rate of (especially new) staff was high.
Power-sharing was the basis of prison order described by Sykes, in his classic (1958) study of Trenton
maximum-security prison, New Jersey. It was a model that Sykes saw as inevitable, given the ‘defects in
total power’, including the lack of a ‘duty of compliance’ among prisoners. Staff were required to
accommodate prisoner power and overlook certain rule infringements, because they were outnumbered
by, and in many ways dependent on, them. Order was accomplished via the prisoner hierarchy, so that men
who had credibility both with staff and their peers were given influential work assignments, and allowed or
allocated perks, which enabled them to exert influence over the rest of the prisoner population. In the
years that followed Sykes’s study, other scholars disputed what appeared to be a rather romantic view of
power-sharing and challenged the idea that it was the only means of effective governance: Crouch and
Marquant (1989) described a semi-formalized system in the Texas prison system whereby control was
maintained through some prisoners being sanctioned by the administration to commit brutality against
others; Jacobs (1977) detailed how the emergence of a more politicized prisoner culture led to a breakdown
of ‘accommodations’ between prison guards and prisoner leaders, with gangs replacing the prisoner elite
as the source of material and psychological ‘buffering’ from institutional deprivation. That is, gang
membership became a more effective way of obtaining a reasonable quality of life than seeking out
positions of power within an administratively sanctioned hierarchy. DiIulio (1987) described power-
sharing as a ‘corrupt alliance’ (p2), which authorized violence and exploitation, and instead advocated a
mode of governance based on assertive authority, regime delivery and due process.
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p. 848 ↵ For our purposes, the return of power-sharing to prisons in England and Wales is significant chiefly
because it represents a reconfiguration of penal order. Prisoners and prison staff often refer to the
sociological cliché that order relies on the consent of prisoners, in the sense that prisoners could almost
always take temporary control of a wing given their numerical advantage over staff. However, the active
incorporation of prisoners into aspects of administrative delivery and control represents a considerable
re-setting of the balance of power within prisons from a period, from 1994 onwards, in which control was
deliberately returned to staff, following an earlier period of liberalization after the Woolf inquiry, through
a range of policies and practices (such as the incentives and earned privileges scheme), to one in which
prison managers and administrators recognize the virtual impossibility of running establishments without
prisoners in some way assisting them. This current ‘shared powers’ model is rather different in practice
and reasoning from the model that Lord Woolf, User Voice, staff in special units, and other proponents of
‘democratic deliberation’ would advocate.
Such a return to a shared powers model (by accident rather than design) means that the experience of staff
authority varies a great deal between prisoners, with some having their needs met much more actively
than others (‘all we have time for are the naughty boys, and not the good lads who want to change’,
officer). The quality of the prisoner experience is increasingly dependent on the prisoner’s position in the
hierarchy, and this hierarchy is reinforced by the ways that staff distribute their attention and authority. In
some establishments, influential prisoners are granted greater time out of cell, freedom of movement, and
access to staff than their peers, while prisoners who are weaker, more vulnerable and less vocal are scared
to circulate on or beyond the wings or are left neglected in their cells (‘The only thing they do for you if
you’re vulnerable is lock you behind your door. I don’t think anyone noticed when I harmed myself
recently’). Some prisoners exist on the wings with very little interaction with or care from staff: ‘staff here
have got too much to do. They’re concerned about the day to day running of the prison, not about our
individual needs’. The experience among prisoners is therefore highly differential, reflected in the scores
for the items ‘In this prison, things only happen for you if your face fits’ and ‘In this prison, there is a real
“pecking order” between prisoners’ (see Table 38.2). Here, the marked differences between Prisons A and
B and Prisons C and D emphasize the outcomes of deficiencies in staff authority: a steeper prisoner
hierarchy, and a less fair distribution of staff attention.
In many prisons, in the UK and elsewhere, weaknesses in official governance have also led to forms of
extra-legal governance (Skarbek 2020) that sit almost entirely outside a framework of power-sharing.
Rather, organized crime groups from the community wield increasing influence, dominating drug markets
and commissioning violence, often as a means of recovering drug-related debts. As Gooch and Treadwell
(2020: 1270–71) note, ‘The dominance of some prisoners benefitted prison officers’, in that some forms of
disruptive behaviour were suppressed by ‘influential prisoners who did not want any (or too much)
“trouble” on the wing—behaviour that might invite staff attention, management scrutiny and additional
security searches’. But this form of order is almost wholly illegitimate, concealing acute exploitation,
amplified by the use of new technologies which allow practices of victimization to be recorded and
uploaded onto social media sites. For Gooch and Treadwell, the broader context for such developments,
including both the demand for drugs and the failure of the authorities to stem their flow, is the new moral
and material legitimacy crisis in prisons, characterized by impoverished regimes, poor conditions, and
reduced staffing levels (House of Commons Justice Committee 2015).
Page 22 of 29
p. 849 ↵ Meanwhile, recent shifts in staff behaviour problematize the way that we have conceptualized
‘heaviness’, ‘lightness’, ‘absence’, and ‘presence’. In our initial description, we emphasized that presence
was only partially literal, that is, to do with staff ‘being there’. It now seems more obvious that there is an
important difference between officers being physically present but un-engaged relationally (due to
demoralization or indifference), as in Prison A (occupying space, but doing little, or using their authority
reactively rather than dynamically), and being largely absent but highly active when available (that is,
willing to engage, but overwhelmed) as in Prison B. In some public sector prisons, a threshold has been
breached, so that uniformed staff have retreated physically and stopped using (or found themselves unable
to use) their professional competence productively. They are present in person but absent in practice. In
these contexts, ‘getting through the day’, which Liebling and Price (2001) described as an active process of
using and under-using power to ‘keep the peace’, comes to mean ‘fire-fighting’ and ‘survival’. The
difference here lies, first, in the way that authority and jailcraft are either activated or, in effect, withdrawn.
A second difference relates to the orientation to time. When officers work hard to enable the day to pass
peacefully, they do so in a way that provides a foundation for prisoners to ‘work on themselves’, their
lives, and their futures. If their mode of activity is instead passive—muddling through the day, merely
containing prisoners—or wholly reactive—the institution loses any orientation beyond the present, and
fails to recognize and address prisoners as people of moral worth.
Concluding Comments: Re-Imagining Penal Power
Our attempt to describe the ways in which power is being reconfigured in contemporary prisons is
informed by our continuing research presence throughout the 1990s and 2000s, during which we were able
to observe significant improvements to penal order and practices motivated by genuine concerns to make
prisons ‘decent’ and to improve outcomes (for example, in relation to suicide prevention, safety and
decency, and education provision), and then a tragic decline. The current era is especially troubling
because some of these ameliorative priorities have been subsumed (as they have in many public services)
by a need to make savings, and to deliver more ‘efficient’ and less visionary models of imprisonment. The
alternative method of cost-cutting—reducing the size of the prison population, whilst holding on to (or
improving) moral quality (and therefore outcomes)—has not been seriously considered for political
reasons. As we write, a new emphasis on ‘rehabilitation’, whilst welcome, looks wholly aspirational. The
conceptual model of ‘rehabilitation’ in use has no model of ‘order’, or concept of legitimate penal power,
underlying it. This is despite significant advances in research.
We are starting to understand ‘staff professionalism’—a ‘light-present’ model of competent authority—

and its links to order and legitimacy at a time when both are getting harder to achieve in practice (see
Liebling 2022). Legitimate authority lies in the mean between excess and deficit along several dimensions.
The tendency in prisons is for forms of order to veer towards the far ends of each dimension rather than
find the ‘stable point’ between repression (or over-use) and laxity (or under-use) or between safety and
freedom.
In our most recent research, we have seen the extremes at both ends in single prisons. In light-absent
p. 850 prisons, we find a ‘stand back/ jump forwards’ use of authority, ↵ as inexperienced and under-
resourced staff struggle to enforce their power for the majority of the time, and then go overboard in doing
Page 23 of 29
so because of their lack of confidence, or the knowledge that they have ‘let power go’. In many such
establishments, the solution to the problem of order is to provide incentives that commit prisoners to the
institution in a non-relational bind. In others, order is maintained through the coercive edges of the
regime, such as highly restrictive units for prisoners deemed to be non-compliant or—as in Long Lartin in
the late 1980s—the threat of being transferred to more oppressive prisons (Sparks et al. 1996). Some
prisons attempt both. In ‘heavy-absent’ prisons, staff ‘stand back’ not because they cannot use their
authority, but because they choose not to mobilize their relational power, either because of a lack of
motivation, or because situational and coercive measures do much of their ‘control work’ for them. When
they jump forwards, they do so with excessive zeal and confidence. In both types of establishment—
absent-light and heavy-present—prisoner compliance rests less on the legitimacy of the regime, and
more on feelings of despondency, helplessness, and resigned fatalism.
The new low-resource model may turn professionals into cynical avoiders (see Lerman and Page 2016;
Muir 1977; Liebling and Kant 2016), or it may, on lower pay scales and with an incomplete understanding
of what makes a good prison officer, lead to the recruitment of naive reciprocators who lack sufficient
training or experience to combine their helpful orientation with the ‘dynamic use of authority’. As we have
shown in this chapter, the consequences of these configurations are highly significant in the lives and
experiences of prisoners.

The best starting points for almost any sociological study of prison life are Gresham Sykes’s (1961) Society of Captives
and Erving Goffman’s (1961) Asylums, which explore the deprivations of imprisonment and the ways that prisoners
adapt to the pains and problems of prison life. Alison Liebling’s (2004) Prisons and their Moral Performance and Ben
Crewe’s (2009) The Prisoner Society provide contemporary accounts of many of the issues that were of concern to
earlier theorists. For a good overview of debates about prison privatization, and for an earlier elaboration of the
argument made in this chapter, see Crewe, Liebling and Hulley’s (2014) ‘Heavy-light, absent-present: rethinking the
weight of imprisonment’, in the British Journal of Sociology. Three good first-hand introductions to life in prison are A
Life Inside by Erwin James (2005) The Invisible Crying Tree by Tom Shannon and Christopher Morgan (1996) (letters
between a life-sentence prisoner and his penfriend) and The Prisoner by Ben Crewe and Jamie Bennett (eds). David
Ramsbotham’s (2003) Prisongate gives a perspective on the prison system from the point of view of a former Chief
Inspector of Prisons. The journal Punishment and Society publishes high-quality articles on prisons and punishment,
while The Handbook on Prisons, edited by Jewkes, Bennett and Crewe contains chapters by a range of scholars and
practitioners on various aspects of penality and prison life.
Online resources

Page 24 of 29
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Notes
1
Prisoners evaluate prison D very highly on MQPL surveys conducted by HMPPS. It remains of interest to us as prison
scholars that even in times of austerity and turbulence, some prisons manage to be outstanding in the eyes of
prisoners.
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Related Links
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Page 29 of 29
39. Punishment in the community: Evolution, expansion, and moderation

p. 853 39. Punishment in the community: Evolution, expansion, and

moderation
Gwen Robinson and Fergus McNeill
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0039
Abstract
This chapter examines the development and expansion of community sanctions and measures in the UK since the
introduction of probation in the early twentieth century. After introducing the main types of punishment in the community
(supervision; unpaid work; treatment and other activities; restrictions and prohibitions), it considers their evolution in relation
to four main rationales: rehabilitation, reparation, management, and punitiveness. The chapter then reviews some key
sociological perspectives on punishment in the community, focusing on work inspired by Foucault, Durkheim, and Marx.
Finally, it provides an introduction to recent research on punishment in the community in other jurisdictions, particularly
Europe and the USA. The chapter presents two main conclusions: firstly, that there is now substantial international evidence
to suggest that the expansion of punishment in the community has failed to deliver reductions in the use of imprisonment; and
secondly, that arguments for penal moderation should take into account the ‘painful’ character of community sanctions and
measures.
Keywords: community sanctions, community measures, probation, parole, rehabilitation, unpaid work, supervision,
reparation
Introduction
Many jurisdictions have, in recent years, seen the diversification of forms of punishment in the
community, as well as their expansion, such that increasing numbers of people are subject to these forms
of punishment. Yet, despite their development and growth, community sanctions have attracted little
serious scholarly attention, particularly when compared with imprisonment (Robinson 2016a; McNeill
2018a). Indeed, it may be surprising to some that in many jurisdictions there are far more people subject to
Page 1 of 25
forms of punishment in the community than are currently in custody. In June 2021 in England and Wales,
1 2
230,578 people were under probation supervision; the prison population at that time was 81,749. In
Scotland, caseload data is not routinely collected across the 32 local authorities delivering Justice Social
Work (JSW) services, but by comparing order lengths and new order numbers (see McNeill, 2018a: 66), we
3
can surmise that in recent years, JSW caseloads have been around 20,000. In the same period, the Scottish
annual prison population has fluctuated between 7,552 (in 2016–17) and 8,198 (in 2019–20). In other
words, in both jurisdictions there are very many more people under supervision than in custody.
In this chapter we set out to explore the changing contours of these forms of punishment with particular
reference to these two UK jurisdictions (England and Wales and Scotland) and with more limited attention
to Northern Ireland. That relative neglect reflects our recognition that we know just enough about
Northern Ireland to realize that we know too little to do justice either to its complexities or to its
importance. In particular, the history of punishment in the community in Northern Ireland, especially
p. 854 ↵ throughout the period of conflict referred to as ‘the Troubles’ and since devolution and power-
sharing, represents a uniquely instructive example of the importance of the relationships between a state
with disputed legitimacy, a divided civil society, and a probation service carefully navigating its way both
through these conflicts and through the communities it served (see Carr and Maruna 2012; Carr 2016).
Although these three jurisdictions remain (for now at least) neighbours in a single United Kingdom, they
present a very varied set of arrangements for, and developments of, community punishment (Robinson
and McNeill 2016).
One of the particular challenges faced by researchers in our field concerns terminology: finding a label on
which all can agree and which captures an increasingly diverse range of sanctions and other disposals is an
ongoing problem (Robinson et al. 2013; Raynor 2012). As we acknowledged in our edited collection
(Robinson and McNeill 2016), our choice of punishment in the community has no more universal appeal than
the alternatives, but for us it has two principal advantages. The first lies in its explicit reference to the
penal character of a wide range of sanctions and measures which share in common a restriction on their
subjects’ liberty through the imposition of behavioural conditions and/or obligations. Whilst other
scholars may prefer the more neutral, legally oriented terminology of community sanctions and measures
4
(CSM) adopted by the Council of Europe (1992), we maintain that it is important to acknowledge the fact
that CSM—even when intended to be constructive—are always underwritten by the threat of other
(typically more punitive) sanctions in the event of non-compliance. We shall also argue (see later) that the
penalization of community sanctions and measures—that is, the bolstering of their punitive credentials—
is one of the most important developments in the field in the last 30 years or so.
A further strength of our chosen terminology (which it shares with the term CSM) is that it captures
periods of supervision which are properly conceived as elements of custodial sentences: that is, in
conjunction with a suspended sentence, or a period ‘on licence’ in the latter part of or in addition to a
custodial term. Several alternative labels—such as probation, alternatives to custody, and community
penalties fail in those terms and arguably begin to look all the more limited considering the growing use of
supervision as an adjunct to imprisonment. This is particularly the case in England and Wales since the
implementation of the 2014 Offender Rehabilitation Act which has extended mandatory post-custodial
Page 2 of 25
supervision to short prison sentences of under 12 months (Cracknell 2018). We therefore defend our choice
of terminology, whilst accepting that it is not the preferred one among scholars or practitioners
internationally, or even—as will become clear—in all parts of the UK.
Until comparatively recently, much research in this area tended to be preoccupied with questions of
effectiveness or utility, even when laudably directed at normative ends such as minimizing the harms of
imprisonment through developing suitable alternatives. In this chapter, while still addressing these
important questions, we want to delve a little more deeply into punishment in the community. Our primary
intention is not to explore whether or not these sanctions ‘work’ towards particular formal goals; rather,
p. 855 we ↵ aim to explore why punishment in the community has evolved in the ways that it has.
Effectiveness and utility are a part of that story, but only a part.
In this chapter, we adopt a broadly social constructionist approach, proceeding from the basic idea that the
part of the penal field which interests us has emerged in specific contexts and has subsequently been
vulnerable to a range of influences which have shaped its evolution. It should be no surprise then that
when we consider punishment in the community across jurisdictions, we see both similarities and stark
contrasts. Across time and space, forms of punishment in the community have faced challenges to their
legitimacy and have striven to adapt accordingly (see Robinson and McNeill (2016) for a more developed
discussion of our broad approach).
Types of Punishment in the Community in Historical Perspective
The history of punishment in the community is, in part, a history of penal innovation. In the UK,
inspiration for innovative approaches for dealing with offenders in the community has tended to be found
in the USA and brought to England and Wales and (sometimes separately) to Scotland (see McNeill and
Whyte 2007). The available types of punishment in the community have proliferated significantly in recent
years, culminating in a complex range of options which can be combined in different ways by sentencers.
For example, in England and Wales, the first statutory community-based measure made available to the
courts—the probation order—remained the sole option for several decades after its introduction in 1907.
In the early twenty-first century, it was displaced by a community order which consists of 13 possible
5
requirements that can be used in various combinations. Probation emerged and developed a little more
slowly in Northern Ireland, becoming formalized in 1950 when the Probation Act (Northern Ireland) was
passed. Community service legislation followed in 1976, a few years after England and Wales (Carr 2016).
As well as arrangements for post-release supervision, the two traditional community sanctions remain in
place. In addition, the Criminal Justice (Northern Ireland) Order 1996 introduced both the combination
order (combining probation and community service) and the custody probation order, which allows the
imposition of a period of imprisonment followed by probation supervision. More recently an Enhanced
Combination Order has been introduced, which includes an increased level of intervention and court
oversight (Doran 2017).
Page 3 of 25
Supervision
The probation order was the first example of a statutory measure enabling its subject to remain in the
community but nonetheless requiring him or her to submit to supervision by a court-appointed probation
officer for a specified period of time, under threat of returning to court for sentencing in the event of
p. 856 further offending or failure to ↵ comply with supervision. Conceived as an alternative to a formal
sanction, the probation order involved a voluntary agreement between the court, the probationer, and a
court-appointed probation officer, whose role was to provide guidance and practical assistance aimed at
preventing recidivism. The origins of contemporary forms of punishment in the community are thus,
somewhat paradoxically, found in a system which was established explicitly as an alternative to
punishment, inspired at least in part by a desire to save those individuals thought to be deserving of a
second chance from the harms of imprisonment (Robinson 2016b). Partly inspired by a system of
probation established in Boston in the late nineteenth century, probation in UK jurisdictions consolidated
the ad hoc practices of ‘reformative diversion’, which some sentencers had been using since the 1820s,
initially with juveniles. In his influential study of Punishment and Welfare, Garland (1985) argued that the
establishment of probation at the turn of the twentieth century was evidence of a penal system that was
newly alive to ideas about the possibility of reforming offenders through a combination of practical help
and moral influence. However, Garland also observed that the new regime of probation represented not
just a more humane response to crime, but also a more extensive and subtle network of control.
The practice of penal supervision also has a long history in relation to released prisoners: the earliest
incarnation of a system of conditional release or parole in England and Wales dates back to the 1850s,
when imprisonment had become the sanction of first resort for the majority of major crimes, and released
prisoners were subject to a ‘ticket-of-leave’ system which required them to report to the police at regular
intervals, maintain a steady job, and avoid association with other offenders (Klingele 2013; Shute 2003).
Subsequently, forms of conditional release from prison have developed and expanded, and are often
characterized as the ‘safety valve’ of penal systems needing to relieve the pressures associated with high
rates of imprisonment (Cavadino et al. 2020).
Unpaid work in the community

Following on from the development of supervisory measures, the next innovation in the community
context was unpaid work or community service, again based on experience in America (Advisory Council
on the Penal System 1970; Harding 2013). Introduced in England and Wales in the mid-1970s and in
Northern Ireland and Scotland a few years later, community service was the first explicit form of
punishment in the community. Retributive, reparative, and rehabilitative qualities have been claimed for
this type of sanction, rendering it an attractive option for sentencers and politicians with divergent views
about the ‘proper’ purposes of punishment.
In some respects, the Community Service Order (CSO) marked a radical departure from probation, not only
in that it was constructed explicitly as a sanction (i.e., as a form of punishment rather than a suspension of
it), but also because it was conceived as a direct alternative to custody. This was certainly not the first time
that policy-makers had sought to use community sanctions to reduce the use of imprisonment; that had
always been part of their logic. But it was the first time in the UK jurisdictions that, in theory if not always
Page 4 of 25
in practice, sentencers were asked explicitly to divert to community sentences those whose offences were
seen as meriting custodial sentences. It also differed in its explicit connection with a reparative penal
philosophy: that is, the idea that people should make amends for the harms caused by their offending not
by deprivation of liberty but rather in the form of unpaid work for the benefit of the community. Prior to
the revival of rehabilitation later in the decade, Bottoms (1980) suggested that penal systems were likely to
take a ‘reparative turn’, not least because of a growing victims’ movement which was raising
consciousness about victim-oriented solutions to harmful actions in both civil and criminal spheres.
p. 857 Compulsory treatment and other required activities

More recently, the UK has seen a proliferation of types of punishment in the community, which Bottoms et
al. (2004) characterize as a ‘new generation’ of options situated on the ladder (or tariff) of penal severity
between custodial and financial penalties. These include, firstly, forms of compulsory treatment that can
be prescribed as part of a community-based sanction or measure. Typically tailored to an assessment of
offending-related needs, packages of treatment may target drug or alcohol misuse; mental health
problems; or specific types or patterns of offending, such as sexual offending or domestic violence. They
may comprise psychological and/or medical interventions and may in some cases involve residence at a
treatment facility. Among the range of types of punishment in the community, it is these treatment
options which most often raise questions about the importance of the subject’s consent and cooperation,
which are not necessarily easy to resolve (Canton 2014). Other requirements or activities which people can
be compelled or encouraged to undertake include testing for alcohol or illicit substances, and residence at a
specific address, such as a hostel, with its own regime of surveillance and/or support (see Marston and
Reeves 2022 forthcoming).
Restrictions and prohibitions

When thinking of the forms that punishment in the community can take, it is easiest perhaps to think
about things people are required to do, such as attending supervision appointments, doing unpaid work in
the community, and so on; and, traditionally, this has been the dominant model. However, in recent
decades many jurisdictions have also begun to introduce restrictions and prohibitions to the arsenal of
community-based options: that is, things that people are required not to do (in addition, of course, to not
reoffending). These may be spatial: that is, places or areas which the person may not enter (‘exclusion
zones’); or they may combine spatial and temporal elements, as in a curfew which requires a person to stay
at home or in another specified place for specific periods of the day or night. Spatial restrictions are
increasingly reinforced with electronic monitoring devices that can track movements or otherwise detect
non-compliance (Nellis et al. 2012). All three UK jurisdictions now have legislation that permits electronic
monitoring as part of community sentences in certain circumstances, and all three have contracted with
private sector organizations to provide and deploy the technology. Other developing technologies allow for
the monitoring of abstinence from alcohol, and (subject to the person’s consent) an ‘alcohol abstinence
and monitoring’ requirement is now available as part of a community sentence in England and Wales.
Finally, offenders may be subject to prohibited activities that include foreign travel, attending football
matches, and entering licensed premises.
Page 5 of 25
Evolving Rationales for Punishment in the Community
It is a relatively easy task to chart the development of types or forms of punishment in the community, but
it is rather more challenging to elucidate their rationales or justifications in such a neat, chronological
order. Particularly in looking to the recent past, the canvas becomes rather crowded, such that rationales
p. 858 overlap and jostle for position, and ↵ it becomes more difficult to ‘periodize’ such developments
(Robinson et al. 2013). In this section we consider four contemporary rationales or narratives for
punishment in the community in UK jurisdictions, and some of the tensions between them.
Rehabilitation
Ever since the emergence of probation at the turn of the twentieth century, the rehabilitation of offenders
has formed part of the narrative scaffold around community-based punishment, but its importance has
fluctuated, as have its various meanings and the practices associated with it. Historical accounts of
probation as a penal innovation (e.g. Vanstone 2004; Garland 1985) have emphasized the particular social,
political, and cultural shifts which coalesced at that time and brought the welfare or reform of the
individual—formerly the preserve of philanthropists and charitable bodies—into the domain of state
responsibility. Subsequently, the early decades of the twentieth century witnessed the transformation of
probation practice as ideas about moral reformation gave way to a more pseudo-scientific discourse
centred on diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation (Bottoms 1980; Garland 1985, 2001).
Rehabilitation continued to be the dominant rationale for probation until the 1970s. At that time, the
collapse of the so-called ‘rehabilitative ideal’ (Allen 1981) in America and in England and Wales reflected a
crisis of legitimacy which was the outcome of a three-pronged attack exposing serious weaknesses in
rehabilitation’s theoretical base, its ethical credentials, and its effectiveness in terms of reducing
reoffending (Raynor and Robinson 2009). Some commentators forecast the death of rehabilitation and/or
the institution of probation which had been founded on rehabilitative zeal, but such forecasts have proved
to be overly pessimistic. Not only did probation find new rationales to support it (considered later in the
chapter), but there also followed, in the 1990s, a revival and reformation of correctional rehabilitation, in
the form of a ‘What Works?’ movement led mainly by North American correctional psychologists. This
movement gradually gained momentum among British researchers and senior practitioners, and later won
government support with its promise of programmes (informed by cognitive-behavioural psychology)
capable of delivering significant reductions in recidivism (see Raynor 2012).
However, the so-called ‘new rehabilitation’ had to adapt to a changed social and political context which
meant de-emphasizing the welfarist and humanitarian rationales of the past, in favour of an emphasis on
the ‘responsibilization’ of ‘offenders’ and the utilitarian value of rehabilitative interventions as crime
reducing measures. David Garland (1997: 6) was among the first to observe this important realignment of
rehabilitation in England and Wales with the needs and interests of victims and the protection of the
public, when he stated that ‘It is future victims who are now “rescued” by rehabilitative work, rather than
the offenders themselves’. Rehabilitation in and after the 1990s also came to be seen less as a generic
Page 6 of 25
prescription for individuals subject to supervision, and instead as an expensive resource, to be carefully
rationed in line with new evidence about its impact on offenders with different profiles of risk and
‘criminogenic needs’ (Robinson 2008).
In this context, attention to broader understandings of rehabilitation—as a process of social reintegration

into the community or as the removal of criminal labels—have tended to disappear from official discourse,
except where these other aspirations could be justified as being inextricably linked to the more politically
acceptable ends of reducing reoffending and protecting the public. Good examples of this in England and
p. 859 Wales are the current emphasis on the resettlement of ex-prisoners, and the recent reform of ↵ the
1974 Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. In Scotland, reintegration (sometimes cast as ‘social inclusion’) has
endured as a formal priority of policy and practice. Even if the last two decades have witnessed the
emergence of a much sharper focus on reducing reoffending and public protection, Scottish policy and
practice discourse has tended to link these objectives, arguing that reintegration is necessary in order to
secure reduced reoffending (see McNeill 2016; 2018a).
Reparation
Rehabilitation’s crisis in the 1970s coincided with growing concern among policy-makers about the
problem of a growing prison population (Home Office 1977), and this was to provide fertile ground both for
the development of new community-based sanctions and measures and new rationales for the existing
‘probation’ apparatus. The community service order (CSO) was an innovation which encapsulated both
such developments. Reparation (‘making amends’) has continued to feature as a rationale for punishment
in the community, most obviously within the context of community service. However, the prominence of
reparation as a rationale varies greatly across jurisdictions. Scotland has recently stressed the reparative
dimension of community punishment, passing legislation in 2010 which attempted to enshrine a
reparative logic for almost all types of community punishment, rebranding them as ‘community payback
orders’ (McNeill 2016, 2018a). Meanwhile, in England and Wales, reparative activities have come to be
rebranded in more punitive terms: a Cabinet Office report published in 2008 suggested that unpaid work
should be unfulfilling and unpleasant, and that people doing it should wear high-visibility vests
identifying them as offenders (Casey 2008; Harding 2013). Whilst the latter development was ostensibly in
the interests of building public confidence in community punishment by enhancing its visibility, it has also
been interpreted as an exercise in stigmatizing and shaming the people involved (Maruna and King 2008).
More recently however, England and Wales has seen something of a reparative turn in the form of strong
government support for restorative justice interventions which involve direct or indirect communication
between those who have offended and their victims. This has included funding for the experimental use of
restorative justice between conviction and sentence (Kirby and Jacobson 2015). Like community service,
however, restorative justice is consistent with penal philosophies besides reparation (including
rehabilitation), hence its potential appeal to a variety of audiences (Robinson and Shapland 2008). In
Northern Ireland, restorative justice has been thoroughly integrated in the development of youth justice,
and has played an important part in the wider dynamics of the peace process, but its development within
Page 7 of 25
the statutory system for adults has been slower (Eriksson 2009; McLaughlin 2021). In Scotland, the
government has recently committed, for the first time, to nationwide provision of restorative justice by
6
2023.
Management
A managerial rationale underpins a number of inter-related developments that have affected punishment
in the community since the 1980s. Among these has been a growing emphasis on the systemization of
criminal justice and the contributions of each of the system’s parts to the cost-effective management of
risks posed by people under supervision (Bottoms 1995; Garland 1996). In the community punishment
p. 860 context, this ↵ first became evident in the language of alternatives to custody which emerged in the
1980s to justify the continuing provision of probation and community service following the crisis of
rehabilitation. It signalled a lowering of expectations about the impacts of penal sanctions of all kinds. At a
time of rising imprisonment rates, the promotion of community-based sanctions and measures as credible
alternatives to custody afforded them systemic legitimacy: that is, it emphasized their value in serving the
needs of a penal system which was under strain (Raynor 1988). Subsequently, the gradual extension of
post-custodial supervision in conjunction with early release from prison has performed the same
legitimizing function for community punishment.
Meanwhile, some of the features of the ‘new penology’ described by Feeley and Simon (1992) in the
American context have become evident in the UK—most notably in the development and spread of
sophisticated assessment tools for the classification of their subjects according to profiles of risk. Recent
decades have also witnessed the growing popularity of other technologies associated with what Feeley and
Simon call ‘management in place’, such as electronic monitoring and drug testing. These are forms of
surveillance that are less oriented toward rehabilitation than to the management or containment of risks,
and as such are examples of a general lowering of expectations about the propensity of any form of
punishment to change either people’s dispositions or their situations. Rather, the aim is to deliver cost-
effective external control.
More generally, ‘management’ has become an established part of the discourse of community
punishment, especially in England and Wales. For example, 2005 saw the introduction of an Offender
Management Model (OMM) which was accompanied by a rebranding of probation staff as ‘offender
managers’. Integrated Offender Management (IOM) was also developed, offering a model in which teams
comprising police and probation staff work together to manage the risks posed to communities by those
whose offending is prolific (Wong 2013). IOM teams also exemplify a move toward increasing partnership
working across statutory criminal justice agencies and with third sector providers, particularly in respect
of high-risk groups, in the pursuit of shared goals centred on public protection. The most prominent
example of this is the formal Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) (Kemshall and
Maguire 2001) which have developed to deal with those deemed high risk in respect of violent and sexual
offences. Both MAPPA and variants of IOM schemes have spread from England and Wales to Scotland and
to Northern Ireland.
Page 8 of 25
Punitiveness
As we have already noted, early community-based disposals enjoyed the legal status of alternatives to
punishment and were justified by concern with the welfare and reform of the person and the well-being of
the community in mind. However, particularly in England and Wales, there has been a growing tendency to
emphasize and enhance the punitive credentials of community sanctions and measures. There are several
explanations for this, beginning with the introduction of a desert-based sentencing framework in the early
1990s, once again mirroring developments in the USA. Although driven by liberal intentions to encourage
sentencers to use custody less, this policy development necessitated presenting all penalties with reference
to their retributive qualities, and it was in this context (following the 1991 Criminal Justice Act) that
probation and the community service order came to be rebranded as forms of ‘punishment in the
community’: that is, ‘middle range’ sanctions offering restrictions on their subjects’ liberty (alongside
their other, more constructive qualities) (Worrall 1997).
p. 861 ↵ The other important driver of a punitive rationale for community punishment has been the
politicization of crime and criminal justice—again, especially in England and Wales—and the increasing
resort on the part of policy-makers and politicians to what Bottoms (1995) has called ‘populist
punitiveness’ (see also Newburn 2007). In this context, punishment in the community has suffered
relentless criticism for being too ‘soft’ or closely aligned with the needs and/or interests of its subjects, to
the alleged detriment of victims and the so-called ‘law abiding majority’ (Home Office 2006). As a
consequence, there have been numerous attempts to ‘toughen up’ such sanctions, which have included
abolishing the requirement for probation officers to hold a social work qualification; the abolition of the
traditional requirement of consent to supervision (Raynor 2014); the rebranding of specific sanctions to
emphasize their punitive credentials (e.g. see Harding 2013 on the case of community service); the creation
of more ‘intensive’ and surveillant types of sanction (e.g. see Mews and Coxon 2014; Doran 2017); and a
less tolerant approach to the enforcement of punishment in the community (Robinson and Ugwudike
2012). In 2013, legislation was introduced in England and Wales requiring courts to include a ‘punitive
requirement’ in all community sentences for adults or combine such an order with a financial penalty. A
press release announcing this development described it as ‘a move to improve public confidence in
community sentences’ (Ministry of Justice 2013), although no evidence was produced to show that public
confidence in such sentences was low (Maruna and King 2008). Drawing in part on such evidence, in the
Scottish context, attempts to enhance the credibility of community punishment have focused more on
enhancing its effectiveness (in terms of reducing reoffending) or on highlighting its reparative
possibilities (Scottish Prisons Commission 2008; McNeill 2016).
Punishment (in the Community) and Society
Analysis of these various adaptations of punishment in the community, which we have cast here and
elsewhere (Robinson et al. 2013) as related to a struggle for the legitimacy of related institutions and
practices, speaks to the question of the broader relationships between punishment (in the community) and
society. In the last 40 years or so, scholarship on the relationships between punishment and society has
expanded rapidly. The early 1980s brought the publication both of The Power to Punish (Garland and Young
1983) and of Punishment and Welfare (Garland 1985). Although both books paid significant attention to
Page 9 of 25
probation and other forms of community punishment, the subsequent development of the academic field
of ‘punishment and society’ has focused mainly on prisons and imprisonment. Yet, some scholars now
argue that this is an era not just of ‘mass incarceration’ but also of ‘mass probation’ (Phelps 2013a) or
‘mass supervision’ (McNeill 2013, 2018a; McNeill and Beyens 2013). Neglect of these developments in
favour of a focus on incarceration means that the evolution of punishment in the community has been
relatively under-theorized. In consequence, not only is punishment in the community poorly understood
in and of itself, but also wider theses about ‘punishment and society’ will remain incomplete until this
neglect is remedied (see Robinson 2016a, McNeill, 2018a).
Of course, there is a great deal of extant scholarship on punishment and society that can help to analyse
punishment in the community, and we have referred to some of this literature in the previous section. For
p. 862 example, Garland’s (2001) influential account of ↵ the emergence of a late-modern Culture of Control,
despite discussing probation and parole only in passing, has much to offer and has been much cited by
probation scholars. Garland (2001) develops what he calls a ‘conjunctural account’ of late-modern penality
that takes account both of constraining social structures and of the choices and contingencies that
nonetheless shape penal adaptation. Summing up his work, he explains:
I have tried to show how the field of crime control and criminal justice has been affected by
changes in the social organization of the societies in which it functions, by the distinctive
problems of social order characteristic of that form of social organization, and by the political,
cultural and criminological adaptations that have emerged in response to these distinctive
problems. (Garland 2001: 193)
The resources for this kind of conjunctural explanation of penal evolution were reviewed in Garland’s
(1990) earlier work Punishment and Modern Society, which considered the contributions of Marx,
Durkheim, Weber, and Foucault (among others) to the sociology of punishment. We have previously
attempted to follow Garland’s lead in sketching out how these thinkers might account for punishment in
the community’s emergence and development as a penal institution and as a set of connected penal
discourses and practices (McNeill and Robinson 2016). Centrally, we were concerned to understand the
social, cultural, and political conditions that gave rise to and subsequently have shaped the development of
community punishment.
We began with Foucault’s work because it has undoubtedly been most influential amongst those seeking to
understand punishment in the community as a social and a penal institution. Foucault’s work exposes the
spread of a particular mode of power—disciplinary power—throughout the social body. At the core of
disciplinary power are the principles of individualization and constant visibility (famously characterized
by Bentham’s eighteenth-century ‘Panopticon’ prison design) which work in tandem to produce
compliant subjects who habitually behave in the required manner. In the context of punishment, discipline
is a way of exercising penal power and control which is less punitive than it is corrective: its primary
objective is ‘normalization’—that is, a re-adjustment of the individual toward the ‘norm’ of what Foucault
terms ‘docility-utility’ (1977: 137), but which today might be called habitual compliance (see Bottoms
2001).
Page 10 of 25
Foucault’s concept and characterization of ‘discipline’ has proven to be useful for probation scholars, both
in analysing the origins of probation as a mode of regulation, and in making sense of more recent
developments. For example, Garland’s (1985) Punishment and Welfare draws heavily on Foucault in
analysing the birth of the modern penal complex in Britain. Jonathan Simon’s (1993) study of the
development of parole in California similarly locates the formal/legal origins of parole in the context of the
social, political, and cultural shifts which coalesced around the turn of the twentieth century to inaugurate
a specifically modern form of penality: one that brought the welfare/reform of the individual into the
domain of state responsibility and, in that process, extended the reach of disciplinary power. Both scholars
show how the pursuit of ‘normalization’ (or correction) was transformed in the early decades of the
twentieth century as ideas about moral reformation gave way to a more ‘scientific’ discourse centred on
diagnosis, treatment, and ‘rehabilitation’.
However, the collapse of confidence in rehabilitation in Britain and the USA ignited intense debate among
scholars working within a primarily Foucauldian framework. The early 1980s saw some British scholars
predicting the demise of disciplinary power, and with it traditional probation supervision, in favour of an
expansion of ‘non-disciplinary’ disposals which did not aim to correct or transform their subjects, such as
p. 863 the (then ↵ relatively new) sanction of community service (Bottoms 1980). These analyses went
against the grain of other accounts that emphasized an extension of discipline in the context of both formal
and informal domains of social control. The so-called ‘dispersal of discipline’ thesis was elaborated in
Cohen’s (1985) seminal book Visions of Social Control, in which the focus was the gap between, on the one
hand, the rhetoric of decarceration and diversion and, on the other, the reality of an expanding deviance-
control system which Cohen thought was emerging at that time. He utilized a much-cited ‘fishing net’
analogy (in which ‘deviants are the fish’ (1985: 42)) to describe the increasing extension, widening,
dispersal, and invisibility of the (non-carceral) social control apparatus as he observed it. It is from this
source that scholars adopted the concepts of ‘new widening’ and ‘mesh thinning’, metaphors that have
become staples in analyses of community punishment—and sentencing trends more generally—over the
last 30 years.
The idea that the proliferation of forms of social control beyond the prison should be seen as an inherently
positive development was heavily criticized by Cohen, who was quick to point out that more and different
community-based sanctions and measures did not necessarily imply less (or less intensive) control; nor
did they inevitably lead to a reduction in the use of imprisonment. Indeed, this argument has received
support from recent empirical analyses of rates of punishment in the community in Europe which have
provided, for the first time, convincing evidence both of significant growth in such sanctions and measures
and of their failure to displace imprisonment (Aebi et al. 2015). Likewise, some scholars have criticized the
drift away from the use of ‘simple’ suspended sentences to suspended sentences with conditions, partly
driven by renewed confidence about ‘what works’ in rehabilitation. Typically, the additional conditions
have a disciplinary character and their imposition increases the penal demands on their subjects and
thereby the risks of breach and incarceration (van Zyl Smit et al. 2015).
The fate of disciplinary power in the wake of the collapse of the ‘rehabilitative ideal’ (Allen 1981) was also
the subject of the highly influential ‘new penology’ thesis which has been hotly contested over the last 30
years across jurisdictions (Simon 1993; Feeley and Simon 1992). The new penology thesis essentially
Page 11 of 25
contends that late modern societies have moved on from the dominant disciplinary modes of control
described by Foucault, in favour of managerial, risk-based strategies. Jonathan Simon has described a
decisive shift, starting in the mid-1970s, from a ‘clinical’ model of practice (centred on the normalization
of ex-prisoners) to a ‘managerial’ model, characterized by significantly lowered expectations and
functioning as a mechanism for securing the borders of communities by channelling their least stable
members back to prison. We have already discussed the related ‘management’ adaptation of community
punishment above, noting the development of the preoccupation with risk management that is now part of
both criminological and correctional common sense. That said, whether the dominance of risk discourses
and practices has been at the expense of more ambitious objectives of reform and rehabilitation continues
to be the subject of much debate (e.g. Hannah-Moffat 1999; Garland 2001; McNeill et al. 2009; Robinson
2002, 2008; Goodman et al. 2017). Foucauldian concepts have also informed studies of the rise and
proliferation of surveillance technologies, including the electronic monitoring of offenders which is an
increasingly significant element of community sanctions and measures throughout and beyond Europe
(Hucklesby et al. 2016; Nellis 2020).
Foucault’s influence on probation and parole scholarship has been so great that it seems fair to say that the
potential contributions of other social theorists have been relatively neglected. That said, McNeill and
Dawson (2014) have offered an initial Durkheimian reading of probation’s evolution. Durkheim’s
p. 864 influential account of penal ↵ evolution placed its emphasis on the cultural contexts of penal change.
His analysis of the transition in more complex societies to more organic forms of social solidarity based on
moral individualism (Durkheim 1958) suggested a shift in modern punishment towards more humane and
restitutive approaches and away from the punitive and repressive measures associated with mechanical
solidarity in less developed societies (Durkheim 1973). Nonetheless, Durkheim argued that, at the turn of
the twentieth century, the institutionalized forms of restitutive (rather than repressive) punishment
appropriate to organic solidarity had failed to emerge, meaning that punishment was failing to fulfill its
cultural functions in expressing and reinforcing shared beliefs around moral individualism.
Given that this was the historical moment of probation’s emergence in the UK, it seems odd that
probation’s historians have not more often looked to Durkheim for inspiration. After all, probation’s legal
architecture (in the UK at least) was a contract or bond between the subject and the court that allowed
people to avoid repressive punishment if they proved worthy of the trust that the bond implied. This was to
be demonstrated through good conduct and (sometimes) temperance in which probationers made
restitution through self-improvement.
In examining punishment in the community today, McNeill and Dawson (2014) argue that a Durkheimian
analysis might serve to clarify how and why:
probation’s future development—like punishment’s—may depend less on evidence of its

‘effectiveness’ or ‘quality’ and more on shifting forms of social organization; on their expression
in terms of changing moral sensibilities; and on the changing dynamics of political or
governmental authority … (McNeill and Dawson 2014: 12)
Page 12 of 25
Such an analysis of community punishment could perhaps help us to understand the limits of ‘evidence-
based’ reform in the field; limits that often vex probation scholars. It can also help to make sense of the
development of the punitive adaptations of community punishment referred to above.
That said, though Durkheim’s ideas might enable scholars to add a cultural account to Foucauldian reading
of punishment in the community, neither elucidates probation and parole’s relationships to political
economy. In essence, Marxist historians and sociologists of punishment have analysed penal systems as
social institutions of capitalist societies; rigged in favour of the property owners and against the
dispossessed. As De Giorgi suggests, such analyses
… contend that penal politics plays a very different role than defending society from crime: both
the historical emergence of specific penal practices and their persistence in contemporary
societies are structurally linked to the dominant relations of production and to the hegemonic
forms of work organization. In a society divided into classes, criminal law cannot reflect any
‘general interest’. (De Giorgi 2013: 41)
Despite the potency and popularity of Marxist critiques of punishment, they have been used only very
rarely in making sense of the evolution of probation (though see McQuade [2019] for a neo-Marxist
analysis of contemporary decarceration and its relationship to the ‘security state’ in the USA). Although far
from being a Marxist analysis, Maurice Vanstone’s work, focusing on practice-related discourses, has
significantly challenged and revised the traditional story of probation’s origins as an essentially altruistic
endeavour, characterized by humanitarian impulses linked to religious ideals. As Vanstone (2004) notes,
Young’s (1976) earlier account of the history of probation stressed the role of charity in maintaining the
p. 865 position of the middle classes. Woven into the supposed ↵ benevolence (and beneficence) of these
activities was implicit confirmation that, where ‘unfortunates’ failed to capitalize on the opportunities
that charitable endeavours provided, this was the result of intractable individual degeneracy, deflecting
attention from broader economic or political analyses of social problems. Amongst a broader range of
philanthropic activities, probation emerges in this account as a class-based activity that justifies the
existing social order and defends it through its mechanisms of persuasion, supervision, and control (see
also Mahood 1991; Garland 1985).
This brief resume of just three critical perspectives on the evolution of punishment in the community
perhaps begins to reveal some of the inter-relationships between structure, culture, and power in that
evolution. More recent Punishment and Society scholarship, building critically on the work of Garland
(2001) and others, has provided a more granular understanding of these inter-relationships. For example,
Goodman et al. (2017), in their book Breaking the Pendulum, argue that rather than seeing penal
development as swinging between punitive excess and welfarism, the challenge is to recognize and analyse
the centrality of contestation within the penal field, and to map its causes, contours and consequences.
‘Pendular logic’, they argue, tends to exaggerate ‘ruptures’ in the penal field (Page 2013); it treats criminal
justice as a machine driven by wider social-structural forces; and—as we noted above—it over-
generalizes about penal change, usually at the national level. Inspired by Bourdieu, the logic of their
‘agonistic’ perspective stresses instead the centrality of struggles within the field between actors with
Page 13 of 25
different types and amounts of capital (whether economic, symbolic, cultural and/or social). The outcomes
of these struggles are profoundly influenced by structural, cultural and political factors, but they are not
determined by them.
Drawing mainly on the conceptual resources discussed in this section, McNeill’s (2018a) synthesis
suggests that, in order to make sense of supervision’s historical and contemporary development, we will
need to develop several forms or layers of analysis; clarifying the distal influences on the field (from the
changing nature of its structural, cultural and political contexts), but also examining the more proximate
influences found in specific (but varying) ways of ordering penal states and systems; variations which
shape how penal power is generated and circumscribed, governed and deployed. A close examination is
also required of state-level political and institutional dynamics, infrastructure and resources, law and
policy, organizational structures and professional organizations and unions, and wider civil society
engagement in the penal system. However, we will also need to zoom in still further, to discern local
influences that might moderate and mediate distal and even proximate pressures. Ultimately, punishment
in the community is realised through the socialized dispositions and habits of local actors (e.g., not just
probation and parole staff, but also judges and prosecutors) and shaped by the resources that are at their
disposal or denied them.
Comparative Perspectives and Contemporary Challenges
The development of comparative perspectives on criminal justice has emerged as one important means of
refining the sort of conjunctural account of the emergence of the ‘Culture of Control’ that Garland (2001)
offers. Some suggest, for example, that his analysis over-states, over-generalizes, and sometimes under-
evidences the changes he identifies within the USA and the UK. In particular, it has been suggested that
p. 866 many ↵ of the social and cultural changes he relies upon to explain how penality has evolved in these
two countries have also occurred in many other jurisdictions where a ‘culture of control’ has not emerged,
or not to the same extent (e.g. Snacken 2010). Thus, some scholars have stressed the importance of re-
examining differences in political systems (Gottschalk 2013) and in ‘varieties of capitalism’ (Hall and
Soskice 2001) in order to explain differences between states subject to broadly similar social and cultural
pressures (Lacey 2008).
These kinds of critique have helped identify the importance of ‘proximate’ influences (McNeill 2018a)
discussed in the preceding section, and they have also encouraged the development of comparative
analyses of criminal justice—and of community punishment. Between 2012–16, in a COST Action (research
network) on Offender Supervision in Europe spanning 23 countries, we worked with many colleagues in
developing new approaches to and methods for comparative research on offender supervision (e.g.,
McNeill and Beyens, 2013). For example, we worked with colleagues to explore the adequacy of the four
narratives discussed earlier (rehabilitative, reparative, managerial, and punitive) as a means of explaining
the evolution of community punishment in 11 jurisdictions (Robinson and McNeill, 2016). We found that
while these four narrative adaptations had significant value in making sense of developments across these
jurisdictions, specific social, cultural, and political contexts affected their relative importance; and, in
some places, suggested the need for other adaptations to be added to our explanatory frameworks. For
example, in Northern Ireland and Scotland, changing constitutional arrangements required us to consider
Page 14 of 25
the role of punishment in the community in two quite different projects of ‘state-building’ (see Carr 2016;
McNeill 2016), and in Romania pressures for ‘Europeanization’ (from both within and outside the country)
were of critical importance (Durnescu 2016). Across all of the jurisdictions, we noted that the ideas and
practices that seemed to travel best (like community service and electronic monitoring) did so because
they offered putative solutions to systemic and political problems rather than because they promised
‘effectiveness’ in rehabilitative terms (McNeill and Robinson 2016).
As already noted above, other European colleagues have produced statistical analyses that tend to confirm
the importance of studying the evolution of ‘mass supervision’ in comparative terms. Aebi et al. (2015)
showed that the numbers of people subject to offender supervision have grown significantly (if unevenly)
in almost all European jurisdictions in recent years. Of the 29 countries in their review, 17 now have more
people under supervision than in prison. Perhaps more importantly, this expansion of supervision cannot
be explained by crime rates and, crucially, it has not led to a reduction in the use of imprisonment, despite
the hopes of probation advocates. Indeed, seven of the countries with the highest probation rates are
simultaneously among the top ten in terms of rates of imprisonment. Aebi et al.’s (2015) work therefore
suggests that the expansion of these forms of sanction has led to widening of the net, sweeping more
European citizens into diversifying forms of penal control (Cohen 1985).
Looking beyond Europe, similar work by Michelle Phelps (2013a) has explored the relationships between
mass incarceration and what she terms ‘mass probation’ across the 50 states of the USA, between 1980 and
2010. She found that two main features determine the nature and impact of the probation-prison link. The
first is the extent to which probation diverts individuals from imprisonment or draws cases under greater
supervision. The second is the extent to which probation really provides opportunities for rehabilitation
that succeed in reducing future imprisonment, or merely acts as a pathway to deeper entrenchment in the
p. 867 penal system. A later paper, Phelps (2017), ↵ further develops her analysis, arguing that probation
rates may be shaped not so much by broader historical and sociological influences as by more proximate
state-level institutional variations in judicial and correctional structures. In some states, the drift into
mass probation, she suggests, may have been occasioned by myopic efforts to tackle prison growth that
failed to see the risks inherent in probation growth.
As well as seeking to make sense of probation’s development, in the COST Action we also sought to develop
new ways of exploring variations in its impact, focusing on supervision as a lived experience. Our initial
review of existing research concluded that the nature of such experiences is highly variable and contingent
upon the nature and quality of relationships between supervisor and supervisee (Durnescu et al. 2013).
Moreover, we found that such research is bedeviled by methodological weaknesses associated with its
typical routes of access, with associated selection effects (leading to the probable over-sampling of people
with positive experiences) and with its reliance on accounts rather than observations of supervision. These
weaknesses in the research base concerned us, not least because of other evidence that paints a much less
benign picture. In the USA for example, some studies suggest that there are intermediate sanctions that
surveyed prisoners equate with prison in terms of punitiveness. For some individuals, intensive forms of
probation ‘may actually be the more dreaded penalty’ (Petersilia and Deschenes 1994: 306; see also Payne
and Gainey 1998; May and Wood 2010). Beyond these surveys, a number of rich ethnographic studies had
also begun to provide even more compelling evidence of the dominating, intrusive, and sometimes
Page 15 of 25
capricious power of supervisory authorities, and of the (perceived) illegitimacy of their ‘responsibilizing’
practices, as well as of how supervisees often try to subvert and resist their subjugation (see Cox 2011,
2017; Miller 2014; Werth 2011, 2013).
In Europe, scholars like Durnescu (2011) turned their attention to the ‘pains of probation’ which, in
Romania, he found included deprivations of time and the other practical and financial costs of compliance,
and limitations on autonomy and privacy. Probationers also reported the pain of the ‘forced return to the
offence’ and the pain of a life lived ‘under a constant threat’ (of revocation). Hayes’ (2015) study of 20
supervisees and supervisors in an English probation trust revealed somewhat similar ‘pains of
(supervised) community penalties’: pains of rehabilitation (related to shame and to the efforts associated
with changing one’s life); pains of liberty deprivation (loss of time, money, and freedom); pains associated
with penal welfare issues (accommodation, finance, employment, etc.); pains associated with external
agencies’ involvement in supervision (related to the intensification and sometimes hostile nature of their
interventions); process pains (linked to the legitimacy or illegitimacy of actions by police, courts, and
probation services); and pains associated with stigma (from family members, friends, strangers, and in
job-seeking processes). Hayes’ painstaking analysis shows that the pains of stigma, of criminal justice
processing, and of external agency involvement are usually unaffected by the supervisory relationship.
While that relationship often serves to ameliorate the pains of penal welfare issues, it tends to exacerbate
the pains of rehabilitation and liberty deprivation.
Within the COST Action, two pilot projects were developed to develop tools for comparative analyses of
experiences of supervision. One sub-group developed and pilot-tested the ‘Eurobarometer on
Experiencing Supervision’ survey (Durnescu et al. 2018), covering eight domains of supervision;
supervision as a human service, the supervisee’s perceptions regarding the supervisor, the relationship
between the supervisor and the supervisor, supervision and practical help, supervision and compliance,
breach practice, supervision and rehabilitation and the supervisee’s involvement and participation.
p. 868 ↵ They concluded that the tool was promising but that further research was required to develop and
demonstrate its full potential.
In the Supervisible project, a second sub-group explored similar issues but using visual methods; we asked
people with experience of supervision in England, Germany, and Scotland to take photographs
representing their experiences (see Fitzgibbon et al. 2017). These photographs were then discussed in
interviews and focus groups. The resulting analysis suggested that while the experience of supervision was
sometimes associated with growth or personal development, it was also commonly represented via images
of constraint, of time lost or suspended, of waste, and of judgement and stigmatization. The first four of
these themes contained elements of ambiguity; growth could be painful, time suspended could be time out
from difficult circumstances, and waste could be expelled and processed. The last theme—the powerful
feeling of being judged negatively and/or stigmatized was unambiguously negative.
Though these pilot studies were too small to reach credible conclusions based on comparative analyses,
they did succeed in suggested that comparative penological work could and should extend far beyond
comparisons of statistical data. They also stimulated conceptual and theoretical development. For
example, in subsequent work developed from the Supervisible project, but also employing further creative
methods, McNeill’s (2018b) analysis of how one life-licence parolee experienced and represented
Page 16 of 25
supervision led him to develop the concept of the ‘Malopticon’; meaning a supervisory-penal apparatus
that sees its subjects badly, that seems them as bad and that projects this negative appraisal, with both
symbolic and material effects. The Malopticon, he argues, disperses degradation and disqualification as
much as discipline, diminishing its subjects’ civic standing and rights, and thus the state’s responsibilities
to and liabilities for them. Thus the penal conditionality that supervision entails mirrors increasing
conditionality in welfare systems (McNeill, 2020). However, McNeill (2018a) also argues that that both
legitimacy (in the process of being placed under supervisory authority and in the manner in which that
authority is exercised) and utility (or helpfulness) may allow supervision to become more productive and
less painful, particularly where it is also time-limited.
Conclusion: Penal Moderation in the Community
In this chapter, we have explored the expanding range of forms of punishment in the community and their
evolution and development in the UK. In the preceding section, we looked beyond these borders both to
mainland Europe and to the USA in order to suggest the importance of comparative work on community
punishment. By expanding our gaze we brought two key issues into sharper focus. Firstly, there now seems
to be compelling evidence that, despite its diversifying forms, punishment in the community, for the most
part, has failed to deliver the reductions in the use of the imprisonment that have been one of its key
rationales in most jurisdictions. The numbers of people subject to community-based forms of punishment
have expanded rapidly but this has produced little appreciable positive effect on prison populations.
Secondly, and equally importantly, recent research tends to confirm the penal (i.e., painful) character of
these measures and sanctions, even when and where they have been cast in rehabilitative or reparative
terms. As Hayes argues:
… this is not to say that efforts at promoting rehabilitation [through supervision] are any less
p. 869 desirable (much less effective). Rather, it is to note that, whether at the level of policy ↵ or of
individual practise, we must recognise supervised community penalties as systems of ‘pain
delivery’, however benevolent the intention (Christie 1981: 18–19). Whether one is concerned with
calibrating the pains of (supervised, community-based) punishment or with minimising them,
and whether at the level of policy or practice, we should recall Christie’s (1981: 11) admonition that
we should ‘look for alternatives to punishment, not only alternative punishments’. (Hayes 2015:
99–100)
We argue therefore that arguments about moderation (Snacken 2015; Loader 2010) both in the volume and
intensity of punishment must extend to punishment in the community as well as imprisonment. Whether
we take a reformist or an abolitionist approach to the penal system, we need to bring community
punishment into our consciousness not (only) as part of the solution but (also) as part of the problem. To
that end, the final report of the COST Action on Offender Supervision in Europe advocated adherence to two
core principles in the future development of probation and parole systems:
1. Since supervision hurts, decisions about imposing and revoking supervision must be bound by
considerations of proportionality. No one should be subject to more demanding or intrusive
supervision than their offending deserves.
Page 17 of 25
2. Supervision must be delivered in ways that actively minimize unintended and unnecessary pains
both for those subject to supervision and for others affected by it (e.g. family members) (McNeill
and Beyens 2016: 9).
In relation to the second principle, the report also suggests that efforts to improve the practice of
supervision should attend carefully to its legitimacy and helpfulness in the light of strong evidence that
these qualities support engagement, minimize pains, address needs, and thereby support desistance and
reintegration.
Of course, the uptake of these principles depends in large part on the sorts of social, cultural and political
conditions that we discussed in the middle of this chapter. In that context, it may be that liberal restraint is
an inadequate and insufficient response to the emergence of mass incarceration and mass supervision;
indeed, liberal restraint has been a driving rationale for the expansion and legitimation of probation and
parole since their inception, more often than not resulting in penal expansion rather than contraction. If
we are to find alternatives to punishment then, it follows that a much more radical revision or even
replacement of traditional criminal justice itself may be required (McNeill 2019).

For those interested in the emergence of probation in England and Wales, we recommend Vanstone’s Supervising
Offenders in the Community (2004), or, for a more wide-ranging historical account of the changing contours of penality
around the turn of the twentieth century, Garland’s Punishment & Welfare (1985) is excellent. Garland’s The Culture of
Control (2001) is also indispensable for those who wish to understand developments in community punishment in the
context of more recent shifts in the social and penal landscapes. On the history and development of parole in the USA,
Simon’s (1993) Poor Discipline (1993) is not to be missed, and Cohen’s Visions of Social Control (1985) is also highly
recommended as a classic Foucauldian analysis of the dispersal of punishment (including punishment in the
community). Focusing mainly on Scotland and the USA, but also drawing on other UK and European work, McNeill’s
(2018) Pervasive Punishment: Making Sense of Mass Supervision is perhaps the most complete contemporary analysis
of community punishment, in terms of its historical development, its scale and distribution, its legitimation and its
p. 870 impact. ↵ For those wishing to explore other jurisdictions, Robinson and McNeill’s Community Punishment:
European Perspectives (2016) includes essays from 11 European jurisdictions. McNeill and Beyens’ Offender Supervision
in Europe (2013) is also useful in that it provides overviews of European research on a number of themes relevant to
offender supervision. For insights into the use of electronic monitoring in a variety of jurisdictions, Nellis et al.’s
Electronically Monitored Punishment: International and Critical Perspectives (2012) is also excellent. For recent
discussions of the uses of probation in the USA, we recommend the work of Michele Phelps (2013a, 2013b, 2017b,
2018). Reuben Miller’s (2021) brilliant book, ‘Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration’,
must also be considered essential reading. Finally, both The Probation Journal and the European Journal of Probation
are great sources for articles on a range of topics in this field.
Page 18 of 25
Online resources

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Notes
1
See https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2021/
offender-management-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2021 <https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-
management-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2021/offender-management-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2021>,
accessed 25 January 2022.
2
See https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/prison-population-figures-2020 <https://www.gov.uk/government/
statistics/prison-population-figures-2020>, accessed 25 January 2022.
3
For more details, see https://www.gov.scot/publications/criminal-justice-social-work-statistics-scotland-2020-21/
pages/1/ <https://www.gov.scot/publications/criminal-justice-social-work-statistics-scotland-2020-21/pages/1/>
accessed 23rd February 2022.
4
Community sanctions and measures are defined by the Council of Europe (1992) as those ‘which maintain the
offender in the community and involve some restriction of his liberty through the imposition of conditions and/or
obligations’. In this chapter we restrict our focus to those sanctions and measures which are imposed by the criminal
courts upon conviction, either as a sanction or in lieu of one: thus we do not consider those community-based
measures that may be imposed prior to a conviction, such as supervised alternatives to pre-trial detention, which are
included in the Council of Europe’s definition of CSM.
5
For a full list of requirements see, https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/sentencing-and-the-council/types-of-
sentence/community-sentences/ <https://www.sentencingcouncil.org.uk/sentencing-and-the-council/types-of-
sentence/community-sentences/>, accessed 25 January 2022. Scotland’s community payback order (despite sounding
as though it may be focused on community service or unpaid work) takes a broadly similar form, with sentencers
choosing from nine possible requirements. See: https://www.scottishsentencingcouncil.org.uk/about-sentencing/
community-payback-orders/ <https://www.scottishsentencingcouncil.org.uk/about-sentencing/community-payback-
orders/>, accessed 23 February 2022.
6
See: https://www.gov.scot/publications/vision-justice-scotland/ <https://www.gov.scot/publications/vision-justice-
scotland/>, accessed 23rd February 2022.
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Page 25 of 25
40. Why prison architecture and design matter to our understanding of the limits of punishment and
rehabilitation

p. 873 40. Why prison architecture and design matter to our

understanding of the limits of punishment and rehabilitation
Yvonne Jewkes
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0040
Abstract
In the last decade, perspectives from criminology, environmental psychology, healthcare studies, and human geography have
offered new ways of understanding the prison environment and the ‘affective’ potentials of carceral space which foreground
the connections between place, space and what it is to be human and to survive imprisonment. Drawing on these
interdisciplinary perspectives, this chapter examines the extent to which the limits of punishment, rehabilitation, and hope
may be understood in the context of prison architecture and design. Drawing on the author’s experience as a consultant
advisor on the design of two new prisons at different ends of the penal spectrum (a maximum-security men’s facility in
Auckland, New Zealand and a women’s prison in Limerick, Ireland), the chapter argues that claims that ‘people-change’ (that
is, rehabilitating offenders through design of prisons) may be over-ambitious in the context of incarceration. However,
‘context-change’ (in the sense of offering people in prison an alternative context in which to imagine their futures) may be an
achievable goal. Context-change also includes the society in which any new prison is conceived and built.
Keywords: prison architecture and design, legitimacy, normalization, rehabilitation
Introduction
This chapter will explore the architecture and design of the prison, and why it is fundamental to the
experience of incarceration and to our understanding of it. The study of prison architecture has, until
recently, been sparse and disparate. Academics were arguably most vocal about the inadequacy of penal
design in the 1960s when the austerity of nineteenth century panoptic prisons was found to be out of step
with modernist visions of treatment and rehabilitation (indeed, one of the very early issues of the British
Journal of Criminology in 1961 was dedicated to ‘prison architecture’; see Jewkes and Moran 2017). As
Page 1 of 16
rehabilitation
criminology has developed, historians have had much to tell us about why prisons evolved in the way they
did and have also revealed the deleterious effects of well-meaning, as well as not so well-meaning,
experiments in penal architecture. Meanwhile, the autobiographical accounts of ex-prisoners have left
readers in little doubt that prison design matters.
But it is only in the last decade that new perspectives from criminology, environmental psychology,
healthcare studies, and human geography have highlighted issues of understanding the prison
environment and the ‘affective’ potential of carceral space in ways which highlight the connections
between place, space, and what it is to be human and to survive in conditions of coercive confinement.
From these interdisciplinary perspectives, we can start to try and unpack concerns that have wider
criminological and socio-legal resonance—including the limits of punishment and rehabilitation—in the
context of what prisons should look like and feel like. As the chapter unfolds, ‘hope’ will emerge as an
important concept too. Borrowing architectural theorist Charles Jencks’ notion of an ‘architecture of
hope’, the chapter will consider what such an architecture looks like in practice for people who have much
cause to despair.
p. 874 ↵ Much of the commentary in the UK concerns the increasingly dilapidated Victorian prison estate, but
the recent surge of interest in penal design has also been piqued by the government’s announcement in
August 2019 that 10,000 new prison places were planned. These are in addition to the new prisons that had
already been announced at Wellingborough and Glen Parva, which provide a further 3,360 prison beds, and
will be run by private company G4S. New buildings are also being added on the sites of five current female
facilities in England to provide 500 extra beds in both closed and open conditions. The Ministry of Justice’s
template for these new prison buildings embodies none of the design cues that could be interpreted as
enlightened, or hopeful, and even the expansion of the female estate is highly contentious as it has been
explicitly and spuriously linked the to the government’s announcement that 20,000 new police officers are
to be recruited.
The awarding of contracts to private companies remains another controversial subject and assessments of
privatization are mixed (Crewe, Liebling, and Hulley 2011). There can be little argument that private
companies have led the way in modernization in areas such as prisoners’ access to information technology
but many critics have lingering concerns that short-term innovation simply improves long-term
efficiency by drastically reducing staffing costs. One of the most contentious outcomes of private sector
involvement in the prison estate is the size of new penal facilities. Like its predecessor, HMP Five Wells is
for medium-security adult males, but it is considerably larger, holding 1,680 men as opposed to the 650
beds in the old HMP Wellingborough. Still under construction at Glen Parva, HMP Fosse Way, another
Category C men’s establishment, will be of a similar size.
Although not as large as the previous two prisons opened in England and Wales (HMPs Oakwood and
Berwyn both accommodate 2,106 men), the government’s commitment to building large custodial
facilities defies all the research evidence showing that smaller prisons are better at housing prisoners in
safe and secure conditions, providing them with meaningful work, education and training, encouraging
purposeful activity, and fostering healthy relationships between prisoners and prison staff (Liebling with
Arnold 2004; Liebling 2008; Johnsen, Granheim, and Helgesen 2011). It also demonstrates the vagaries of
political policy in penal matters. In 2009, the incumbent Labour Government announced that it was
Page 2 of 16
rehabilitation
shelving its plans to build so-called ‘Titan’ prisons and, a year later, Conservative Secretary of State for
Justice, Kenneth Clarke promised a ‘rehabilitation revolution’, which led to some hope that money would
be diverted instead into smaller prisons and community-based alternatives, similar to that which Scotland
is now undertaking. But the Titan has returned in all but name (Prison Reform Trust 2014), and successive
ministers have been persuaded by the fictions that not only do very large establishments offer much-
needed economies of scale, but they have the added benefit of providing jobs and financial growth in parts
of the country that have suffered during the economic downturns exacerbated by the global COVID-19
pandemic.
In Scotland, meanwhile, the tender has gone out for the replacement of HMP Barlinnie, the country’s
largest prison, which was built in 1882 to hold 987 men and later extended to allow for 1,019 individuals,
but which operates well in excess of this capacity and currently holds approximately 1,350 prisoners.
Barlinnie’s replacement, HMP Glasgow, is due to open in 2024 and will have a capacity of 1,200. Inverness
Prison is being replaced by the new HMP Highland which will hold approximately 200 prisoners, almost
doubling the capacity of its predecessor. Scotland is also constructing new women’s prisons to replace the
former national facility at Cornton Vale. The Scottish Prison Service’s approach to the design of prisons is
different to, and arguably more enlightened than that of the Ministry of Justice and His Majesty’s Prison
p. 875 and Probation ↵ Service in England and Wales, especially in respect of the women’s estate. Following
an Inquiry headed by Dame Elish Angiolini QC, it was announced that a more radical and ambitious
approach to female offenders in Scotland was to be pursued; one that would attempt to divert women away
from prison rather than creating new institutions for their confinement. Consequently, the plans for HMP
Inverclyde were abandoned.
Always mired in controversy, because 300-beds for a national female prison population of around 400
would come with all the attendant problems associated with location and visiting, Inverclyde was
nonetheless ground-breaking in many aspects. The design team were unusual in bringing together several
senior prison service personnel and architects who worked together to create a therapeutic, trauma-
sensitive and imaginative prison environment. Underlining its commitment to rehabilitative ideals, the
Scottish Prison Service has taken these values and the design cues that communicated them and
incorporated them into five regional 20-bed Community Custody Units and the new 50-bed national
facility for women due to open in 2022.
As the number of new prisons in the UK and around the world grows, with many prison services and
corrections departments stating their commitment to innovation and progressiveness in design, this
seems an opportune moment to consider the role of architecture in lived experience during and post-
imprisonment. This chapter will describe two new prison planning and design projects that I was involved
with—Auckland East men’s prison and Limerick women’s prison—to explore the proposition that a well-
intentioned and well-designed prison can improve the quality of life for those held in it.
Page 3 of 16
rehabilitation
On Shifting Sands
Increasingly, I find myself on shifting sands in the debate about whether ‘good design’ is good for
prisoners (Jewkes 2022b). While certain kinds of carceral design may appear (to an outsider) more
oppressive or progressive than others, the extent to which prisoners feel oppressed, or otherwise, is an
empirical question which sometimes yields surprising responses (Jewkes and Laws 2020). Several times in
my career, I have visited a brand-new prison which appears to be modern, well-resourced and reasonably
non-institutional in appearance, only to be told that everyone preferred the old Victorian-era gaol that
they have all transferred from (Jewkes forthcoming).
Most commentators who have not undertaken first-hand research to better understand the roles of
architecture, design, and aesthetics tend to make two false assumptions. First, they imagine that their own
assessments of a prison’s architecture—which might range from ‘relatively nice for a prison’ all the way
1
through to ‘looks like a boutique hotel or ‘university campus’ —are shared by those who are incarcerated
in it. Secondly, they often regard prisoners as a homogeneous group who will all respond in similar ways to
thoughtfully designed custodial environments. This misguided conclusion neglects to acknowledge that
even those prisons universally held to be among the best designed in the world may be experienced as
profoundly painful by those who inhabit them, many of whom have had violent, chaotic lives characterized
p. 876 by many types of social exclusion, ↵ including poverty, poor educational attainment, time spent in
care, substance misuse, and mental illness. It is unfortunate, then, that in recent years, well intentioned
penal architecture and design have become regarded as symbolic indicators, not only of rehabilitative
aims, but of rehabilitative outcomes. The conflation of these is unhelpful and potentially dangerous.
Even more worrying is the fact that the social value of new prisons tends to be assessed via the blunt
instrument of recidivism rates (Bradley and Lulham 2022) and exaggerated claims are frequently made by
architects and academics about the role that the built environment can play in contributing to desistance
from offending, as well as positively shaping the experience of coercive confinement. Sadly, good
intentions do not automatically result in good outcomes, and the capacity of architecture to carry, sustain
and nurture hope, and give any individual in prison a future orientation (surely pre-requisites of
rehabilitation), is limited by all the social and structural disadvantages they face. Terry Eagleton (2015)
notes that sometimes individuals’ hopes will come to nothing, simply because the force of the past proves
stronger than the pull of the future. In this context, even the most empathetically and imaginatively
designed prisons may be experienced as places of hopelessness for those who have multiple reasons to
despair.
For example, Norwegian prisons have become shorthand for rehabilitation-by-design, partly because they
tend to appear relatively ‘normal’ and, in some cases, are held up as exemplars that epitomize Nordic
exceptionalism in their design; and partly because reoffending rates in Norway are said to be
approximately half those of the UK. The common-sense assumption is that a facility as thoughtfully
designed as, say, Halden prison in southern Norway, must do a better job of rehabilitating offenders than
its less enlightened counterparts in jurisdictions such as England and Wales. However, reoffending rates
tend to be rather loosely deployed. Institution-specific recidivism rates do not officially exist in Norway
and, given that there is a significant degree of prisoner movement between facilities, the idea of
Page 4 of 16
rehabilitation
attributing rehabilitation (in the sense of desistance from crime over time) to a particular prison—
especially a high-security one from which hardly any prisoners are released directly back into the
community—is misleading. Added to that, Halden’s population includes around 40 per cent foreign
nationals, which would make it impossible to track recidivism, especially longitudinally.
Underlining Eagleton’s point (although not made about prisoners per se), it must also be remembered that
offenders come to Halden with a reasonably ‘typical’ profile for a high-security establishment, including
70 per cent who were unemployed at the time of their conviction, 60 per cent substance abusers, 50 per
cent with one or more chronic health problems, 40 per cent with only the most basic level of education, 40
per cent living below the poverty line, 30 per cent who have had contact with child welfare services before
the age of 16, 30 per cent with diagnosed mental disorders, and 30 per cent who have had family members
in prison (Jewkes 2022a). Yet still, Halden is fetishized by commentators, many of whom have never
visited the prison, or who have only been given an ‘official’ tour by the prison director.
Furthermore, a prison’s imaginative architecture may be little compensation for perceived problems of
staffing, regime, and culture. I have argued, in fact, that facilities like these may inflict a kind of double
punishment, and that the high-quality designs, and lofty claims made about them, themselves generate
pain and frustration—an unfulfilled promise of something other than coercive confinement. It may be that
an aesthetically pleasing public ‘face’ simply does a more effective job of masking pain within, bringing its
own ‘insidious form of control’ as it camouflages the fact of deep-end incarceration (Hancock and Jewkes
2012: 613). As architectural historian Tom Wilkinson (2018) notes, ‘However humane its approach, penal
architecture is essentially cruel’.
p. 877 ↵ This is not to say that we should not strive to build prisons that embody values such as humanity,
decency, and respect, rather than vengefulness, carelessness, or casual brutality, as often feels the norm.
For several years I have championed countries that have experimented with designs which are explicitly
linked to efforts to rehabilitate prisoners, including attractive landscapes, colourful interiors, living spaces
that approximate normal, domestic settings in which prisoners can cook for themselves and each other,
and workshops where meaningful work provides transferable skills for use in the community on release. I
have introduced numerous prison services and corrections departments around the world to concepts such
as ‘trauma-informed’, ‘gender-sensitive’, ‘biophilic’ and ‘salutogenic’ design. I have praised individual
architecture practices that have tried to create imaginative, inspiring prison spaces, that exploit the
classical link between beauty and civilisation. I have also lamented the fact that when such plans have been
submitted to prison design competitions, they have frequently lost out to proposals that look more like
conventional penal institutions (Jewkes 2018).
At the same time, I have written about the problems inherent in the architecture and design of new prisons
constructed in England and Wales. I have been critical of their size, geographical remoteness, bland
external visual appearance, corporate aesthetic, and excessive security paraphernalia. I have argued that
the restriction of space for architectural creativity and the managerialist, regulatory and risk-averse
context of prison procurement has meant that even the most benign and well-intended design decisions
can get vetoed at an early stage or be severely compromised in the construction (Jewkes and Moran 2017).
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I am also increasingly becoming aware that good design on the architect’s drawing board (or computer
software package) does not necessarily translate to good design in practice. Indeed, even when prison
architects succeed in creating healthier and more humane custodial environments, which stand a good
chance of having positive impacts on the people who live and work in them, these successes may not have
longevity. As Melissa Nadal (2022) argues, penal ideals change, sometimes quite rapidly, which means that
attempts to design and construct something that ‘works’ as a humane, salutogenic environment, even if
successful in the short term, may elide into something that does not work, as thinking evolves, priorities
change and the goals of punishment take on ever more punitive guises in many jurisdictions. Changing
priorities as risk averse attitudes overcome initially progressive ambitions can occasionally happen even
within the planning and design process. I was involved in one such project, where initially optimism gave
way to resigned fatalism. It is a cautionary tale.
Auckland East: A Cautionary Tale
In 2014, I was engaged by New Zealand construction company Fletcher to work with them and the New
Zealand Department of Corrections on a new maximum-security prison in Auckland, which was to replace
a hulking penal institution that had a fearsome reputation and a shameful record of violence and suicide.
The original Paremoremo Correctional Facility was designed in the 1960s by JRP Blake-Kelly, an architect
who favoured the Brutalist style and was inspired by early super-max prisons in the United States,
especially the maximum-security prison near Marion, in southern Illinois, which itself replaced the
notorious Alcatraz in San Francisco. By the time it was closed in 2018, Paremoremo had long since been
declared unfit for purpose. I was asked to help to design a humane, forward-thinking replacement
p. 878 maximum-security facility that would ↵ ‘create lasting change by breaking the cycle of
reoffending’ (EIO briefing day, 2014). The ambitious goal, in fact, was to design and build a prison that
would reduce reoffending rates by 25 per cent by 2017. The new facility, which was to be called Auckland
East, would, like its predecessor, hold 260 men.
The ethics of designing a maximum-security establishment are obviously deeply contentious and initially
I had misgivings about being involved in the project, but I was somewhat reassured by the New Zealand
Department of Corrections’ ambitions for Auckland East, as expressed in the early tender documents. They
were not, they said, seeking to replace like with like. The 1960s design of the existing facility reflected an
operating model focused solely on the containment of difficult prisoners, and while safe and secure
constraint was to remain a critical requirement of the new facility, they were now seeking:
a flexible and innovative design that will encourage and provide for meaningful engagement
between prisoners and staff, greater prisoner participation in rehabilitation, education, and
employment activities, and a multi-disciplined approach across the custodial, health and
psychology staff working within the facility (New Zealand Department of Corrections, 2013: ii).
Ultimately, I considered it better to be involved than not, and I believe that the team benefitted from
having someone with a prison research background and criminological expertise though, in fact, the
consortium (which included lead architects from Mode Architects in Brisbane) were several steps ahead of
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where I thought they’d be in their thinking about progressive architectural design. The team were keen to
be pushed further though, and I felt I had the experience and expertise to do this. I was encouraged by their
assurance that I was not engaged to merely critique the architects’ ideas. I was expected to be closely
involved in the design process and was encouraged to develop a relationship with the project team based
on trust and openness. My job was to assist them in considering creative solutions that were not part of
their current practices and bring examples of best international practice, especially from northern Europe.
The old Paremoremo was by far the most oppressive and volatile prison I have ever visited and the
opportunity to replace it with something that looked rather more like, say, Halden prison, seemed too
important not to participate.
The need for a new facility with a healthier environment and dedicated mental health treatment unit had
been evident to the Department of Corrections for some time, so the team was optimistic that we would be
able to push them as far as possible in imagining a custodial environment incorporating plenty of
innovative, ‘healing’, and aesthetically pleasing design cues. It seemed that there was a strong
commitment to ‘people-change’, in the sense of both giving prisoners hope of a better life, and enabling
prison staff to regard them as people with assets that could be nurtured, rather than simply as risks to be
managed. I shared my research findings about the effects of prison design and my knowledge and
understanding of the sociological prison literature and we designed a masterplan for a prison that could
justifiably be described as a humane, ‘open’ and therapeutic environment (in a holistic as well as clinical
sense) within a secure perimeter.
The plans included staff work stations that were accessible to prisoners and were not so comfortable that
officers would be tempted to stay within them, rather than coming out from behind their desks to talk to
prisoners. It had bright, open-plan spaces at the end of wings for association and plenty of day rooms for
prisoners and staff to relax and chat, play board games, or watch TV together. There was to be a
therapeutic garden and abundantly planted outdoor spaces for reading, one-to-one chats, or quiet
contemplation. We also incorporated well-equipped rooms for education, art, work and training, plus
p. 879 numerous flexible spaces that could be used for multifarious purposes. As far as we ↵ could, in every
part of the prison, we incorporated design cues that would instil hope, not fatalism (see Jewkes 2022b and
forthcoming, for further description of the plans for the prison).
Unfortunately, the courage and creativity shown by the architects was matched by the risk aversion and
security obsession that pervaded the New Zealand Department of Corrections. Context-change proved
impossible as senior corrections personnel were unable to endorse an architecture of hope because their
perception of maximum-security prisoners was essentially hopeless. The narrative that prisoners in New
Zealand are especially violent is a peculiar but powerful trope that is deeply embedded in NZ Corrections
and the entrenchment of this view leads to a shocking overuse of solitary confinement in prisons across
the country. In the year to 30 November 2016 there were 16,370 recorded instances of segregation in New
Zealand. With an average prison population of 9,798 people, this equates to 167 instances of isolation per
100 prisoners. To put it in perspective, England and Wales, itself a high user of segregation, has a rate of 37
instances per 100 prisoners, meaning that, on average, New Zealand segregates prisoners over four times
more often than England and Wales (Jewkes forthcoming).
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Every design innovation was a battle that had to be won, but nonetheless I always believed that we would
get our innovative plans over the line. The process was one of consultation with the Department of
Corrections throughout, and it felt as if we were all moving roughly in the same direction. Ultimately,
however, although they appeared to be on board with a design that would lower violence, reduce self-
harm, nurture pro-social relationships, and diminish a sense of institutionalization, when presented with
the drawings, the Department decided that what they wanted was simply a newer, shinier version of the
supermax they already had. So, the plans were undone and the architect delivered what the client asked for.
A crushing sense of defeat was shared across the design team.
The new prison opened in December 2018 and it immediately became apparent that the problems that had
beset Paremoremo were being imported into the new facility. For example, in the second half of 2019, there
were 55 uses of staff force at Auckland East, over a quarter of which involved pepper spray. Twenty-two
incidents involved four prisoners. Three of those prisoners had mental health concerns and were being
managed in the Special Needs Unit (Jewkes forthcoming). During a visit to the new facility a few weeks
after it opened, I discovered many compromises in the original design. For example, the open workstations
for staff in the middle of the accommodation units that we had designed to promote interaction and
conversation between prisoners and officers, have been encased in toughened glass at the request of staff
who said they feared violent assault. The communal day rooms where prisoners and staff were intended to
be able to relax, chat and play boardgames were being kept permanently locked because, again, staff said
they felt unsafe using them. In the timber-clad visiting hall, wooden chairs for visitors had been designed
to ‘soften’ the space. Why, then, were the seats that the prisoners had to sit on during visits, small, hard,
metal stools? A senior officer said without a trace of irony, so they know they’re second-class citizens.
Worst of all, the therapeutic garden I had pressed for was not open to prisoners because a water feature
had been declared a health-and-safety hazard. The fear was that prisoners could hurl themselves at the
rough-hewn stone base, splitting their heads open in deliberate acts of self-harm. But, once again, the real
problem was that officers had refused to escort prisoners into the garden because they said they felt
2
p. 880 unsafe. For me, ↵ all these examples demonstrate the real harm of the rhetoric of violence that
pervades NZ Corrections. It has become desperate, despairing and, worst of all, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The experience at Auckland demonstrated to me that even if they think they are ready to embrace new and
more enlightened penal philosophies and invest in the notion of people-change, prison services and
corrections departments tend to be deeply conservative organizations in which security considerations
usually trump humane innovation.
Architectural Utopianism: The Case Against
Sometimes, it is more mundane operational challenges that can severely compromise the successful
outcomes of a well-designed prison. One prison that opened to much fanfare and is still widely praised by
external commentators, is Storstrøm Prison in Falster, Denmark. In interview, the lead architect from C.F.
3
Møller <https://archello.com/brand/cf-moller-architects> in 2016, told my co-researcher Dominique Moran
and I of his ambitious aims to produce something approaching the architecture and atmosphere of an
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urban environment that would be familiar to the mostly young men from cities who would be held there,
but at the same time would feel like a pleasant and even aspirational place to live. Elsewhere, he has
expanded on the innovate philosophy that underpinned the design:
We wanted to create an architecture of phenomena, with details that would cause surprises, an
architecture that wouldn’t be foreign to the eye, which prisoners could identify with because the
sensations are recognisable. The prisoners can move around almost like those not incarcerated,
with a controlled degree of informality. It was about creating a normality that was basically
connected to the world outside the prison. (Hansen 2018)
The promise was short-lived, however. Storstrøm opened in December 2017 to global media reports
heralding it the world’s most humane high-security prison. But it has since reportedly suffered many
problems, including chronic staff shortages, meaning extended periods of lock-up, poor prisoner-staff
relationships, and lack of meaningful activity for prisoners, and is consequently experienced with
ambivalence by its occupants.
Another issue that is frequently overlooked is that ‘showcase’ prisons such as Halden and Storstrøm tend
to present their best face to the world. But every high security prison contains spaces—usually those
dedicated to the reception of prisoners, to those on remand, or to those in segregation—which are far less
aesthetically pleasing than the association areas, multi-faith centres and music studios that tend to
dominate media reporting. Halden and Storstrøm inflict all the constraints on autonomy and freedom that
one would anticipate finding in any high-security setting (Shammas 2014). Whatever opportunities are
offered to help prisoners cope with life in confinement, including through attractive, aesthetically pleasing
architecture, my research has found that removing another human’s liberty, autonomy, and choice are
still near-universally felt as traumatizing, eviscerating acts, however superficially pleasant the
surroundings. As one man reported during fieldwork, entering Halden was horrible … I felt like I was raped
by the system when I first arrived (see Jewkes 2022a, for further examples of prisoners’ antipathy towards
Halden prison).
p. 881 ↵ Segregation is a particularly contentious subject. Even architects who believe they can be a force for
good, and who create aesthetically pleasant living and working environments for the majority of a prison’s
occupants appear to have less success—and less interest in—designing progressive or ‘normalized’
environments for those individuals held in solitary confinement for their own protection or as
punishment. The only prison design that I’ve come across where an attempt had been made to ‘civilize’
segregation was once again at HMP Inverclyde. Here, the ‘Separation and Reintegration’ unit had a
mixture of ‘timber effect’ floors and carpets, together with a feature wall with a decal graphic of a bluebell
forest, intended to calm prisoners as they entered. One must wonder, though, whether this would alleviate
the stress of what, for many, would be a traumatizing environment whatever colour it was painted. The
‘rehabilitative’ prison may thus be an oxymoron or even a smokescreen for the pains that all incarceration
inflicts (Hancock and Jewkes 2012).
We should guard against being idealistic about prison architecture, then. Warning against the seduction of
‘sanctified, Zen-like principles of toleration, respect and understanding’, Joe Sim says that the often
‘physically grim, psychologically lacerating and spiritually withering reality of prison life is quite different
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from the imaginary, inclusive prison’ (Sim 2008: 143). This bleak but accurate assessment underlines the
problem of striving to design and build an experience of incarceration that overturns traditional notions of
punitive punishment. Mindful of prison scholar Pat Carlen’s (2008) notion of ‘imaginary penalities’, I have
seen the concepts of ‘rehabilitative cultures’, ‘normalization’ and ‘trauma-informed’ gain speedy traction
within prison circles, only to fall out of favour when they don’t quite live up to their heady promise. They
fail not because they don’t make a difference to the quality of everyday life, but because there is little that
they can do to address the broader, long-term, structural conditions that make rehabilitation and
understanding of trauma necessary (Jewkes et al. 2019).
In Defence of Architectural Utopianism: Limerick Women’s Prison
The discussion so far has underlined that prison environments can be punitive in subtle as well as obvious
ways, but to what extent can they be rehabilitative, including in their design? The question is contentious;
particularly in the context of trying to cohere the UK Government’s arguably mutually incompatible goals
of punishment and reform. For criminologists, rehabilitation is underpinned by ideas about self and
identity, choice and autonomy, and power and powerlessness. Virtually no research supports the notion
that imprisonment per se can be rehabilitative and it seems, on the face of it, paradoxical that the concept
of rehabilitation is even evoked in describing prison objectives (Cullen, Jonson, and Nagin 2011).
Yet the thought persists that one way in which prisons may be able to assist in the rehabilitation process is
by striving to be more ‘normal’ in the way they look and feel. Broadly speaking, normalization has three
components. On an individual level, it recognizes the prisoner as a social being with many facets to their
identity, and on a communal level, it is concerned with offering services as similar as possible to the
collective services and community agencies provided on the outside. But it is the environmental aspect of
normalization—making prison conditions approximate normal living and working conditions in society as
far as possible through the application of architectural design and interior décor—that the principle has
p. 882 gained most traction. Numerous prison governors ↵ in England and Wales have refurbished cells and
visiting rooms, given corridors a new coat of magnolia paint, and planted tubs of flowers in the prison
grounds, while making grandiose claims about their establishments becoming more trauma-informed. I
am sceptical about most of these efforts, but in the following section, I describe a new prison that I was
involved in the planning of. Taking the design away from the traditional and institutional was key to the
competitive tendering process and the award of the contract.
Built to replace one of the oldest operating prisons in Europe, the new Limerick women’s prison, will open
in July 2023. In the ‘old’ Limerick prison, cellular accommodation is poor, with all prisoners held in
catacomb-like cells, with tiny, heavily barred windows and inadequate ventilation. Access to natural
daylight is scarce and the exercise yards are small concrete spaces enclosed by high walls topped with
razor wire. Following a 2003 Irish Inspectorate report, which described the environment and
accommodation as ‘deplorable’, the Irish Prison Service (IPS) undertook to refurbish the women’s unit,
installing toilets in cells and replacing double-bunks with single beds. But the wisdom and humanity of
having an open toilet within a few inches of the pillows on which female prisoners at Limerick rest their
heads at night was always a source of embarrassment and contention, and IPS were welcoming of the idea
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of incorporating innovative thinking into their plans for a new women’s unit that would take the
accommodation from 24 cells to 50, thus easing the pressure not only on Limerick but on Ireland’s other
women’s facility, the Dóchas Centre in Dublin.
I was asked to advise on several projects for IPS in 2017 and 2018, after the Director General of the Irish
Prison Service heard me give a keynote lecture at an ICPA (International Corrections and Prisons
Association) conference in 2015. I was engaged as a consultant on extensions and/or refurbishments to
Limerick men’s prison, Wheatfield, Clover Hill, Mountjoy, and the Dóchas Centre—but the brand-new
Limerick women’s prison was to be my main focus. I persuaded IPS to hold a design competition, as used
to be common in northern Europe. Four consortia of contractors were shortlisted and I presented my
research at several specially convened workshops that also included IPS managers and prison governors at
Portlaoise Prison Staff College and in Cork. At Limerick, I attended mid-tender clarification meetings
hosted by IPS, at which the competing contractors presented their preliminary design schemes. Along with
the personnel on the assessment team, I provided each consortium with detailed feedback to assist them in
fully meeting expectations regarding architectural innovation in their final design specifications. I sat on
the Quality Assessment Panel (which also included personnel from the procurement and project
management company, IPS managers, the Governors of Limerick prison and the Dóchas Centre, and a
prison project manager from Scotland) for the final evaluation, in which each of the four competing
consortia presented their design schemes. We scored them against a list of criteria and selected the
winning contractor—PJ Hegarty. The successful proposal for Limerick women’s prison is a radical
departure for IPS and was, highly unusually, the second most expensive submission shortlisted,
underlining that it was design, not cost, that was prioritized.
The ‘winning’ design, conceived by PJ Hegarty and architects Henry J Lyons, includes many of the cues I
encouraged the consortia to incorporate. The colour palette is similar to that of the unbuilt Inverclyde with
pale (but not insipid) shades of lilac and blue in the living spaces. Getting away from the institutional feel
of long straight corridors and sharp corners with their inevitable blind spots, the architects have
introduced as many curves into the structure as possible. There is a large oval skylight that allows natural
light to flood into the social spaces in the middle of the accommodation units in the manner of some of the
architecturally striking Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres, including one designed by dRMM Architects in
p. 883 Oldham in which a mature birch tree grows up ↵ through the centre of the building, and another by
Foster + Partners’ in Manchester, where natural light and abundant greenery set the tone.
Maggie’s, as they are universally known, pioneered the ‘architecture of hope’; a concept that was
embraced by the architects of Limerick who went to great efforts to design a prison that looked more like a
high-quality student hall of residence. Like Maggie’s Centres, the furniture in Limerick prison is domestic
—sofas and armchairs—and bedrooms are decorated in neutral colours and furnished simply but
comfortably, with sofa bed and study area. There are no bars on any of the large windows. All the bedrooms
look on to a garden full of mature trees, lush planting, and lots of seating. The visiting room, reached via a
welcoming reception area, is bright and avowedly ‘normal’ in feel. The visits room also has outdoor space
including a play area with climbing frame and slide for children.
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As a result of my involvement in Limerick women’s prison, I was awarded the ESRC Celebrating Impact
Prize in 2020, which highlights the ‘real world’ societal impact of academic research that has been
supported by the ESRC. As part of the award, a short video was made about my research, which entailed a
visit to the construction site with a filmmaker in October 2020. The prison was about two-thirds built at
the time and was little more than a concrete shell with no roof. Nonetheless, it was genuinely exciting to
see the building coming to realization because, quite simply, it did not feel like a prison. When Limerick
opens, I will go back and conduct further research, this time to evaluate the experience of prisoners and
staff in the new facility. I hope to find that the new environment gives the women held there a decent
quality of life, emotional wellbeing, support in managing their health problems, meaningful work and
education opportunities, and an aspiration to live independently on release. Even more fundamentally
than that, though, I hope it provides feelings of sanctuary and safety, and is simply a nice place to be. I
once showed a group of women held in the Dòchas Centre in Dublin the architects renders for HMP
Inverclyde, the Scottish women’s prison that was never built. The women gazed in disbelief and delight at
the calm, pastel-coloured bedrooms with sofa bed, study area and large windows with unencumbered
views of the Scottish countryside, saying things like ‘That’s the nicest room I’ve ever seen’, and ‘Wow, that’s
nicer than my bedroom at home’.
It is fair to say that I am somewhat biased in thinking that Limerick is a good design. However, I am
conscious that many compromises will be made in the construction process, and the completed buildings
may not look quite as attractive or non-institutional as the architects’ renders. In the case of Limerick, and
all female prisons, the reality of life outside prison may be sufficiently impoverished and hopeless that the
built environment is rendered almost immaterial, and prison simply provides a place of safety and respite
(Jewkes and Laws 2020). ‘Normal’ for many women who end up in prison is poverty, addiction, sexual
abuse, violence, an absence of resources outside of the prison, and the penal system’s failure to encourage
or enable them to imagine a secure, fulfilling and law-abiding future. In other words, well-intentioned
architecture and design initiatives might make the people who implement them feel better than the people
on the receiving end of them.
Nonetheless, whatever the outcome, it is hard to argue that prisons like Limerick and the replacement for
Cornton Vale in Scotland (and HMPs Five Wells and Fosse Way, for that matter) are not significantly more
civilized environments in which to hold people who have been convicted of crimes than their predecessors.
Still, when the logic of ‘better design makes people better’ is applied to the architecture of incarceration it
becomes problematic. Put simply, it is a tough ask of the built environment to change a person’s outlook
and sense of their own capabilities and prospects.
p. 884 Conclusion
My intention in this chapter has not been to argue against progressive, humane prison design. For many
prisoners, a normalized, imaginatively created prison may be a more enriching experience in numerous
ways than a more conventionally ‘institutional’ facility; or at the very least it may be, in some ways, less
painful than life would be in other prisons. I have argued, however, that ‘people-change’ is a lofty aim.
Context-change may be a more realistic goal, not least because good prison design has wider, societal
repercussions. Radical reform of criminal justice and punishment is never likely to happen as long as
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prisons are ugly, spartan and over securitized, because they communicate to the public that people in
prison are dangerous ‘others’. When a prison conveys positive attributes (e.g., decency, trust, empathy,
respect), the design challenges the cultural stereotype of what a prison is and who prisoners are, and it
becomes considerably harder to hold the view that prisoners deserve to be held in brutal conditions
(Jewkes and Moran 2017).
However, I worry that making generalized assumptions about the positive effects of a well-designed
environment inhibits us from interrogating the distinctive ways in which particular individuals or groups
of prisoners experience confinement. It is impossible to say with any certainty that humane, progressive
custodial architecture has positive effects on its occupants because it is virtually impossible to isolate an
individual’s surroundings from everything else that makes up their identity, internal world, and the
narratives they create about themselves. At the same time, designing ‘better’ prisons can create a kind of
false consciousness whereby the pains of imprisonment are masked, and the imagined ‘progressiveness’
and ‘attractiveness’ of these thoughtfully designed prisons somehow become part of the justification to
build yet more prisons. In this respect, context-change—a policy of decarceration—not people-change
through environmental design, is the goal which must be prioritized.

A new Palgrave Handbook of Prison Design edited by Dominique Moran, Yvonne Jewkes, Kwan-Lama Blount-Hill, and
Victor St John will be published in 2022. It includes chapters from academic researchers, professional-practitioners,
prisoners, and people who work in prisons in many jurisdictions, and is an eclectic and informative examination of the
many facets of prison design. I have written extensively on the topic, including several articles and chapters that you
can find in the References. I am also currently writing a book for a non-academic audience that tells the stories of my
career researching prisons and prison architecture. It is provisionally titled Beneath the Yellow Wallpaper: A Memoir of
Prison and Home and will be published by Scribe in 2024. Iona Spens’ Architecture of Incarceration (1994, Academy)
remains a pictorially beautiful and informative collection. The volume edited by Fairweather and McConville, Prison
Architecture: Policy, Design and Experience (2000, Architectural Press) contains contributions from some of the leading
experts in prison design from the worlds of architecture, the Prison Service, the Inspectorate, and academia. Although
primarily focused on prisons in North America, Richard Wener’s The Environmental Psychology of Prisons and Jails:
Creating Humane Spaces in Secure Settings (2012, Cambridge University Press) discusses principles of architecture and
environment that have universal application, and is an erudite yet accessible compilation of thirty years of research by
one of the world’s leading scholars of penal design and its effects. The special issue of the British Journal of
p. 885 Criminology ↵ (1961: 1, 4) devoted to ‘prison architecture’ that is briefly referred to in this chapter is a fascinating
snapshot of expert thinking about prison design at the time of the last major expansion programme, and is a pertinent
reminder of the perils of not learning from past mistakes (see also Jewkes and Moran 2017).
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Online resources

References
Bradley, K. and Lulham, R. (2022), ‘Administering the Social Contract: Future Orientations for the Design of Carceral
Environments’, in D. Moran, Y. Jewkes, K.-L. Blount-Hill, and V. St John, (eds), Handbook of Prison Design, London:
Palgrave.
Carlen, P. (2008), Imaginary Penalities, Devon: Willan.
Crewe, B., Liebling, A., and Hulley, S. (2011),‘Staff Culture, Use of Authority and Prisoner Quality of Life in Public and
Private Sector Prisons’, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 44(1): 94–115.
Cullen, F. Jonson, C.L. and Nagin, D.S. (2011), ‘Prisons Do Not Reduce Recidivism: The High Cost of Ignoring Science’,
The Prison Journal Supplement to 91(3): 48S–65S.
Eagleton, T. (2015), Hope Without Optimism, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
Fairweather, L. and McConville, S. (eds) (2000), Prison Architecture: Policy, Design, and Experience, Elsevier: Oxford.
Hancock, P. and Jewkes, Y. (2012), ‘Penal Aesthetics and the Pains of Imprisonment’, Punishment & Society, 13(5): 611–
629.
Hansen M. M. (2018), in Merrick J. ‘Prisons of Conscience: Storstrøm Prison in Gundslev, Denmark by CF Møller’, The
Architectural Review, 13 June 2018, available at https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/prisons-of-
conscience-storstrom-prison-in-gundslev-denmark-by-cf-moller <https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/
prisons-of-conscience-storstrom-prison-in-gundslev-denmark-by-cf-moller>. Accessed 27 September 2022.
Jewkes, Y. (2018), ‘Just Design: Healthy Prisons and the Architecture of Hope’, John V. Barry Endowed Memorial
Lecture, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology [by invitation of the editors], 51(3): 319–338.
Jewkes, Y. (2022a), ‘“An Iron Fist in a Silk Glove”: The Pains of Halden Prison’, in B. Crewe, A. Goldsmith, and M. Halsey
(eds), Power and Authority in the Modern Prison: Revisiting the Society of Captives, Oxford: Clarendon Press’.
Jewkes, Y. (2022b), ‘What Works Least Worst? A Personal Account of Two New Prison Design Projects’, in D. Moran, Y.
Jewkes, K.-L. Blount-Hill, and V. St John, (eds) Handbook of Prison Design, London: Palgrave.
Jewkes, Y. (forthcoming), Beneath the Yellow Wallpaper: A Memoir of Prison and Home, London: Scribe.
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University Press.
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Prison Size and Prison Culture in Norwegian Closed Prisons’, in European Journal of Criminology, 8(6): 515–529.
Liebling, A (2008), ‘Titan Prisons: Do Size, Efficiency and Legitimacy Matter?’ in M. Hough, R. Allen and E. Solomon
(eds), Tackling Overcrowding, Bristol: Policy Press.
Liebling A. with Arnold, H. (2004), Prisons and Their Moral Performance: A Study of Values, Quality, and Prison Life,
Nadal, M. (2022), ‘Defining the Mechanisms of Design: An Interdisciplinary Approach’, in D. Moran, Y. Jewkes, K.-L.
Blount-Hill, and V. St John (eds), Handbook of Prison Design, London: Palgrave.
Prison Reform Trust (2014), Titan Prisons: A Gigantic Mistake, PRT, London.
Shammas, Victor Lund (2014), The Pains of Freedom: Assessing the Ambiguity of Scandinavian Penal Exceptionalism
on Norway’s Prison Island, Punishment & Society <https://journals.sagepub.com/home/pun>, 16(1).
Sim, J. (2008), ‘Pain and Punishment: The Real and the Imaginary in Penal Institutions’, in P. Carlen (ed.) Imaginary
Penalities, Devon: Willan.
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Wener, R.E. (2012), The Environmental Psychology of Prisons and Jails: Creating Humane Spaces in Secure Settings,
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essays/typology/typology-prison <https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/typology/typology-prison>.
Notes
1
See, for example, these media reports BBC (2019) ‘How Norway turns criminals into good neighbours’, 7 July 2019.
Available https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-48885846 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-48885846>; Guardian
(2012) ‘Inside Halden, the most humane prison in the world’, 18 May. Available https://www.theguardian.com/society/
2012/may/18/halden-most-humane-prison-in-world <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/may/18/halden-
most-humane-prison-in-world>
2
This was still the case in 2020 when the Chief Ombudsman’s report said the sensory garden was ‘spacious, well
maintained and well stocked with a variety of plants’ but the Inspectors did not observe the sensory garden being
used.
3
https://archello.com/brand/cf-moller-architects <https://archello.com/brand/cf-moller-architects>
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41. Confronting state power: dissenting voices and the demand for penal abolition

p. 886 41. Confronting state power: dissenting voices and the demand for
penal abolition
Joe Sim
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0041
Abstract
This chapter discusses dissenting voices and demands for penal abolition in line with confronting state power. It starts with
the call for defunding prisons being central to the abolitionist praxis in England and Wales, which correlates to George Floyd's
brutal murder by a police officer. Additionally, prosecutions add another layer to the abolitionist critique of the dangerous
prisoner. Since 1970, abolitionists in England and Wales have demonstrated that another penal and social world is possible
through contestation and resistance. The chapter notes the historical movement's idealistic commitment to building a better
world, based on a collective, compassionate sense of social justice.
Keywords: voices, penal abolition, state power, prison, abolitionist praxis, England, Wales, social justice, George Floyd
Introduction
The ultimate expression of law is not order—it’s prison. We have hundreds upon hundreds of
prisons, and thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace
(Jackson, 1972: 95).
In May 2020, George Floyd’s brutal murder by a police officer graphically illustrated the deadly
normalization and traumatizing impact of state-sanctioned, institutionalized racism on black lives in
America. For Angela Davis, ‘[t]he millions of people who poured on to the streets in the aftermath of [his]
lynching constituted a force that was so much more powerful than any political party’ (cited in
Hattenstone 2022). The righteous anger of the protesters propelled the slogan ‘defund the police’ into
popular and political debate. The abolitionist organization, Critical Resistance, defined defunding as a:
Page 1 of 33
… strategy toward abolishing policing … Defunding policing must happen alongside

decriminalizing communities that are targeted by policing and imprisonment, and investing in
solutions that actually prevent, interrupt, and transform harm (Critical Resistance 2020: 15).
Defunding also became a popular and political issue in England and Wales (Elliott-Cooper 2021) and was
linked to a broader, abolitionist ‘radical agenda’ designed to ‘ … erode the power of policing and prisons as
we know it and invest in communities instead’ (Adam Elliott-Cooper, cited in Sarah Parker Remond Centre
2021: Transcript).
Defunding prisons through ‘redirecting the prison and criminal justice budget’, has been central to
abolitionist praxis in England and Wales for decades (Sim 2009: 142). This chapter returns to the
implications for prison abolitionism below. It is divided into four parts.
p. 887 ↵ First, it focuses on the case for abolition through considering the flow of often-vulnerable,
overwhelmingly destitute, and disproportionately black and minority ethnic people, mortifyingly, and
often-brutally, ‘churned’ yearly through the criminal justice system (Sawyer and Wagner 2020). In
contrast to the state’s focus on the average daily prison population (ADP), analysing who is ‘churned’
generates a very different understanding of the processes of punishment (Matthews 2003).
Second, it discusses the history of the abolitionist movement in England and Wales and outlines the key
theoretical, political, moral, and policy issues raised, and the interventions made by the movement since
1970.
Third, it analyses the challenges faced by contemporary abolitionists against the background of an
intensification in the state’s power to punish. What Stuart Hall called the ‘Iron Times’ of the Thatcherite
1980s and 1990s (Hall 1988: vii) was mutating into a ‘new moving right show’ in the twenty first century
(Knott 2020).
Finally, it considers demands for radical change built on an ‘abolitionist imagination’ linked to an ‘ethics
of empathy, dignity and life’ (Scott 2020: 207). Underpinning these demands is the vision of a safer society
which does not rely on prisons which have failed, often catastrophically, to deliver individual safety and
collective security (Critical Resistance 2021).
Abolitionism and Deconstructing Penal Myths
Between 1900 and 2018, the ADP quadrupled. In November 2011, it was over 88,000, its highest level. In
mid-February 2022, it was 79,774 (Ministry of Justice 2022a). Taking the ADP as a starting point, prisons
appear to be mainly populated by dangerous individuals. In June 2021, 30 per cent of those in adult custody
were incarcerated for violence against the person. Sexual offenders (18 per cent) made up the second
highest category (Sturge 2021: 11).
However, as the abolitionist Ruth Morris noted, ‘[the] greatest fraud perpetrated by our retributive justice
system, is that it exists to protect us from the dangerous few’ (cited in Whynacht 2021: 26). Focusing on
the numbers ‘churned’ yearly through the system, it is clear that prisons are not teeming with
Page 2 of 33
stereotypically, dangerous people. Rather, they are decaying dustbins filled with those pejoratively labelled
as ‘social trash’ scraping out an often-desperate, marginalized existence in a grossly unequal and unjust
society: the unemployed and never employed; the sexually abused; the psychologically traumatized; the
homeless; those with drug, alcohol, and mental health issues; pupils disproportionately excluded from
school; and those with physically traumatic brain injuries (Prison Reform Trust 2022). They also contain a
disproportionate number of individuals who have tried to kill themselves, been through the social care
system, and who have observed domestic violence. Women prisoners are overrepresented in the majority
of these categories (Prison Reform Trust 2022: 26). In short, ‘prisons aren’t eliminating crime—they’re
disappearing vulnerable people’ (Cradle Community 2021: 20).
Prosecutions add another layer to the abolitionist critique about the dangerous prisoner. Between 2010 and
1
2019, there were 15,000 prosecutions for begging, resulting in 12,493 convictions (Cromarty et al. 2021). In
p. 888 2017, Marie Baker, described as ‘fragile ↵ and vulnerable’ was sentenced to six months for begging for
50 pence. She could not read or write and had no legal representation as she was unable to receive legal aid
(Peat 2017). In contrast, in 2019 alone, over 55,000 rapes were recorded yet resulted in only 1659
prosecutions and 702 convictions. In July 2020, there was a 1 in 70 chance of a rape charge being brought
(The Centre for Women’s Justice et al. 2020). By February 2022, convictions had reached a ‘record
low’ (Syall 2022).
What about the numbers ‘churned’ through prisons? (Sawyer and Wagner 2020). In the first half of 2021,
the majority of the 41,000 people sentenced to prison had committed a non-violent offence. Two out of
five were sentenced to six months or less (Prison Reform Trust 2022: 10). Another 28,349 were remanded
before trial. The majority—53 per cent—were accused of non-violent offences involving theft and drugs
(ibid.: 16). Experiencing the pains of remand can be devastating. Those remanded do not receive financial
support when they are released, nor do those acquitted receive compensation. In 2020, they accounted for
28 per cent of self-inflicted, prison deaths (ibid.).
In 2017, 30 of women were prosecuted for non-payment of TV licences (Sakande 2021). In 2020, 72 per
cent were sentenced for a non-violent offence: ‘ … more women were sent to prison to serve a sentence for
theft than for violence against the person, robbery, sexual offences, drug offences and motoring offences
combined’ (Prison Reform Trust 2022: 38). The majority of women remanded in custody are not sent to
prison. ‘ … in 2019, seven in 10 women (70 per cent) remanded by the magistrates’ court and nearly three-
fifths (59 per cent) tried by the Crown Court didn’t receive a custodial sentence’ (ibid.). Women can lose
their jobs and their homes while their children can be taken into care and can experience a ‘deep and
debilitating sense of loss’ (Howard League for Penal Reform 2020: no page number) while their life
chances can be badly curtailed as a result of their mother’s imprisonment (Beresford 2018).
‘Churning’ operates in four other ways. First, there is ‘the far larger universe of people whose lives are
affected by the criminal justice system’ (Sawyer and Wagner 2020). In September 2021, nearly 235,000
people were under probation supervision (Ministry of Justice 2022b: Part 4). Second, between July and
September 2021, 5,699 people were recalled to prison. The majority were recalled not because they had
committed further offences but for failing to follow the state’s often-oppressive rules: ‘about 39%
involved a charge of further offending, 72% involved non-compliance, 30% involved failure to keep in
touch, and 25% involved failure to reside’ (ibid.: Part 5). Third, there is the ‘care-to-prison
Page 3 of 33
pipeline’ (Ribeiro-Addy 2021). In 2021, just under 81,000 children were in care. And while they formed less
than 1 per cent of the population, they comprised a quarter of the homeless and prison populations (ibid.).
Finally, there are thousands of people detained in other institutions: young offender institutions; secure
training centres; secure children’s homes; military prisons; and psychiatric hospitals. In March 2020,
23,000 asylum seekers were held at different sites (Burnett 2022: 41). Therefore, the prison is merely the
tip of a punitive iceberg. This key point:
… allows us to focus on the most important drivers of mass incarceration and identify important,
but often ignored, systems of confinement. The detailed views bring these overlooked systems to
light, from immigration detention to civil commitment and youth confinement. In particular,
local jails often receive short shrift in larger discussions about criminal justice, but they play a
critical role as ‘incarceration’s front door’ and have a far greater impact than the daily population
suggests (Sawyer, and Wagner 2020).
The chapter now turns to the genesis of the abolitionist movement in England and Wales.
p. 889 Abolitionism 1970–2000
In 1970, Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP), the first abolitionist group, was formed. In 1972, it was
followed by the Preservation of the Rights of Prisoners (PROP) (Ryan 1978; Fitzgerald 1977). Abolitionism ran
parallel with other new, radical movements calling for social justice for those whose experiences had been
ignored or treated with patronising contempt by the state: demanding an end to male violence, abolishing
racist power structures, ensuring environmental protection, and building world peace through ending
militarization (MacKay 2021). These movements represented an ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’,
knowledges which, in the past, ‘had been buried … [and] disqualified [as] hierarchically inferior’ (Foucault
2003: 7).
In mobilizing prisoners’ subjugated voices, RAP and PROP supported ‘ … direct action to defend [their]
interests … ’ (Ryan and Sim 2016: 715) such as supporting prisoners involved in the disturbances which
erupted throughout the 1970s and 1980s as they raged against the coruscating alienation of the prison
machine (Fitzgerald and Sim 1982). For both organizations, ‘prisons were incapable of being reformed …
the only strategy was to work for their abolition’ (Ryan and Sim 2016: 715). The prison did not ‘have a
defence, [it was] a fiasco in terms of its own purposes’, meaning it failed to realize its official goals of
rehabilitation, deterrence, prevention and incapacitation. This begged the question, ‘why do we have
prisons at all?’ (Mathiesen 2000: 141). The answer lay in ‘the social functions’ the institution performed,
namely its role in defending the unjust and unequal social order of advanced capitalism (Mathiesen 1974:
76).
RAP and PROP critiqued the occupational culture of prison staff. Based on capricious discretion, its
detrimental impact had been virtually ignored by traditional prison reform groups (Fitzgerald and Sim
1982). Staff demanded acquiescent supplication from prisoners trapped in a permanent state of
uncertainty which generated further trauma and distress (Sim 2019). They were protected by a culture of
Page 4 of 33
immunity and impunity leaving them free to dominate and subjugate prisoners languishing on the bottom
rung of the ladder of penal power (Fitzgerald and Sim 1982; Sim 1990). Democratic accountability was
virtually non-existent.
In the early 1980s, INQUEST (formed in 1981) and Women in Prison (WIP) (formed in 1983) were established.
Their goal was to make the invisible issues of deaths in custody and women in prison, visible. As with RAP
and PROP, their core membership involved ex-prisoners, grassroots activists, families and critical
academics. WIP’s early campaigns included:
… increasing the public awareness of the harsh regimes characteristic of the women’s prisons; the
plight of women held in extremely close confinement or under brutally harsh disciplinary regimes
e.g. the inmates of Durham Prison H-Wing; the difficulties facing women upon their release from
prison (Carlen 2005: 1).
Its members engaged in direct action through:
demonstrating outside Holloway against the deaths of women in prison; producing a book
Criminal Women based on the autobiographies of 4 ex-prisoners; innumerable briefings for
journalists, students, MPs, and other campaigning groups; media interviews, public lectures,
political lobbying and provision of information and support to women coming out of prison …
From the outset, WIP was very aware of the disproportionate numbers of women prisoners from
ethnic minority groups, and the need for liaison with organizations catering for black and foreign
women in prison (ibid.: 1–2).
p. 890 ↵ In Foucault’s terms, these four organisations were concerned with ‘hounding power into a
corner’ (cited in Macey, 1993: 350). They contested the state’s ‘truth’ about the grim reality of life inside.
This ‘truth’ included: denying the brutality inflicted on prisoners, especially Black and Irish prisoners,
after demonstrations at Hull and Wormwood Scrubs; rejecting the prison’s role in deaths in custody;
asserting that prison health care was equivalent to health care outside; and claiming that regimes for
women were benevolent when the rates of self-harm were devastatingly high (Sim 1990).
The chapter now turns to six issues highlighted by abolitionists between 1970 and 2000 which provided a
radically different perspective to that articulated by the state, liberal academics, and prison reform groups.
Abolitionist Issues
Punishment and historical continuity

First, abolitionists argued that the prison’s emergence at the end of the eighteenth century was not a sign
of humane progress. Rather, it reflected the exponential growth in the state’s capacity to punish: more
police; more state agents; more community penalties; more surveillance; and more professional groups
such as criminologists and psychologists. These groups judged, often mercilessly, who was ‘normal’ and
Page 5 of 33
‘abnormal’, who should be punished and who should not. The devastating impact of these ‘expert’
judgments was particularly potent for institutionalized women. They legitimated physically brutal and
psychologically withering regimes in asylums, including raping ‘deviant’ lesbian and unmarried women in
order to return them to their ‘normal’, heterosexual state (Ussher 1991).
For two centuries, prisons had failed to reduce crime and recidivism rates, generated delinquency and
criminality due to their punitive regimes, encouraged loyalty amongst prisoners, educated first-time
offenders in criminal behaviour, stigmatized ex-prisoners and pushed prisoners’ families into destitution
(Foucault 1979: 264–270). They had been dominated by a convulsive cycle of crisis/reform/crisis/reform
(Sim 2019). State agents, liberal academics, and media commentators supported a reform-led response
which alleviated the immediate crisis until a new one erupted. For Foucault (1979):
[w]ord for word, from one century to the other, the same fundamental propositions are repeated.
They reappear in each new, hard-won finally accepted formulation of a reform that has hitherto
always been lacking … So successful has the prison been that, after a century and a half of
‘failures’, the prison still exists producing the same results (270 and 277).
Given this ‘failure’, why did the institution persist? For abolitionists, the prison was not a failure, it was a
success. As David Garland (1990) noted:
… the prison has always been a failure in penological terms, but … it achieves important political
effects at a wider social level … which is why it has never been abandoned … [Foucault] asks what
interests could be served by the production of delinquency, recidivism and a criminal milieu and
could these ‘interests’ so act as to perpetuate these apparent defects … the prison does not so
much control the criminal so much as control the working class by creating the criminal, and for
Foucault, this is the unspoken rationale for its persistence (149–150).
p. 891 Liberalism’s failure

Second, abolitionists challenged liberal claims that reforms would deliver the ideal, rehabilitative prison as
being theoretically and politically delusional. Abolitionists argued that the policies and research advocated
by liberals legitimated the state’s oppressive practices (Ryan 1978). They had been ‘defined-in’ through
adopting the state’s language and research agenda (Mathiesen 1980: 287). Like blotting paper, the state
had absorbed them.
Social divisions—social class, gender, ‘race’, sexuality, ability/disability and age, which decimate lives and
destroy psyches—had been effectively ignored by liberals who had promoted the ‘stultifying idea that
nothing lies beyond the prison’ (Davis 2003: 20). The institution’s existence was never challenged. Instead,
a form of criminological omerta—institutionalized silence—prevailed. The prison was ideologically and
materially untouchable, despite its often, abject failure to fulfill its official goals (Mathiesen 2000). A world
without prisons was not on the reformers’ agenda, nor on the agenda of the major political parties as they
pursued authoritarian law and order strategies throughout the 1970s, and beyond (Sim 2009). In the face
of endless, misinformed criticism, abolitionists argued that it was not them but:
Page 6 of 33
… liberal defenders of reform who should be asked to justify their position. Can they imagine
continuing with prisons, and other institutions, given their malignant capacity for destroying
rather than rebuilding lives? … [I]t is the prison reform industry that needs to make the case for
retaining penal institutions in their present form. With over two hundred years of futile history
behind it, the bankrupt nature of that reformist defence remains undiminished (Ryan and Sim
2016: 730, original emphasis).
To paraphrase Karl Marx, liberals had only interpreted the prison, for abolitionists, the point was to
radically change, and eventually, abolish it.
Breaking the already broken

Third, abolitionists reject the state’s claims about the purpose of imprisonment. Since 1895, the state
claimed that rehabilitation was central to the prison. For abolitionists, this claim mystified the grim reality
of life inside. Prisoners were often subjected to bleak, retributive, unforgiving regimes, built on systemic
indifference, which delivered pain and punishment. Prisons were debasing places of terror and trauma,
degradation and humiliation, dread and foreboding which differentially impacted on Black, Asian and
minority ethnic prisoners, women and girls as well as younger, older and LGBTQ+ prisoners. For
Mathiesen, the institution did not ‘rehabilitate … it … dehabilitate[d]’ (Mathiesen 2000: 53, original
emphasis). Prisoners literally rotted in institutions where decay ‘was a problem’ when it touched the lives
of the allegedly respectable but, it was ‘ignore[d] when it touched[d] the untouchables’ like them (Kohn
2021: 144). The wretched and compassionless environment broke the already broken. Furthermore, given
the background of those ‘churned’ through the system, the very idea of rehabilitation was problematic:
… re-integration, re-settlement or re-entry are often used instead of re-habilitation. Yet all of
these terms, with their English prefix ‘re’, imply that the law breakers or ex-prisoners, who are to
be ‘re-habilitated’/‘re-integrated’/‘re-settled’ or ‘re-stored’, previously occupied a social state
or status to which it is desirable they should be returned. Not so. The majority of prisoners
worldwide have, prior to their imprisonment, usually been so economically and/or socially
disadvantaged that they have nothing to which they can be advantageously rehabilitated (Carlen
2012: no page number).
p. 892 Prisons, the state and social order

Fourth, prisons performed an ‘expurgatory function’ through regulating and punishing the destitute,
often-vulnerable, individuals grimly scratching out precarious lives on the political and economic margins
of a deeply unequal society (Mathiesen 1974: 77). They supported the maintenance of a lacerating social
order and were intimately tied to the often-brutal exercise of parasitic, state power (Fitzgerald 1977;
Fitzgerald and Sim 1982).
Page 7 of 33
In 1979, the state’s power intensified following the election victory of the Conservative Party. Prisons were
central to the Thatcher government’s law and order drive. In 1983, Leon Brittan, the Home Secretary,
announced a raft of punitive measures, including the biggest prison building programme of the twentieth
century. Funding for law and order ‘services’ followed the trajectory which had been uncritically pursued
for decades. In 1985/86, the prison budget was £638 million, up 156 per cent in cash terms from 1978–79.
Between 1979/80 and 1985/86, law and order and defence expenditure increased by 27 per cent and 23 per
cent respectively, while expenditure on housing decreased by 68 per cent, on industry, energy, trade, and
employment by 26 per cent and on other environmental services by 18 per cent (Sim 1987).
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the major political parties engaged in a remorseless race to introduce
policies which intensified the authoritarian criminalization of the poor. In January 1997, Jack Straw, New
Labour’s future Home Secretary, boasted that his party had not ‘opposed a criminal justice measure since
1988’ (Straw cited in Sim 2000: 168). In 1998, the prison population increased to 65,298, the highest in
Europe, apart from Portugal. Between 1992 and 1997, it jumped by 33 per cent, similar to the jumps in
Russia, America and South Africa. Black, Asian, and minority ethnic prisoners make up 13 per cent of the
prison population, despite constituting only 4 per cent of the general population (Home Office, cited in
ibid.: 175). In government, New Labour intensified the attacks on those pejoratively labelled ‘welfare
scroungers’:
… the unemployed would be called for interviews in job centers at variable times during the day,
and those not responding would face benefit cuts. A ‘two strikes and you’re out’ welfare policy
had already been announced, whereby those convicted of two counts of benefit fraud would have
their welfare payments stopped (ibid.: 175).
In contrast, the corrosive, socially harmful crimes committed by the powerful were essentially ignored.
Here, the prison performed a ‘diverting function’, distracting attention from:
… the really dangerous acts committed by those in power. This diverting function is well
supported by the press and other mass media; by presenting the prisoners as much more
dangerous than they really are, mass media constitute a selective filter between those who are
imprisoned and public opinion (Mathiesen 1974: 78).
As Barbara Hudson noted, ‘serious crimes and crimes which are taken seriously are not necessarily the
same … seriousness of law enforcement … does not relate to seriousness of crime if the latter is to be judged
by any rational calculus of harm as suggested by more liberal justice model theorists’ (cited in Sim 1994a:
280).
The authoritarian ‘statist’ strategy pursued to punish the poor ran parallel with an ‘anti-statist strategy’
which left crimes by the powerful untouched (Hall cited in Sim 2000: 170). Its impact was clear:
Page 8 of 33
[i]n areas such as deaths at work, deaths in state custody, income tax evasion, and racial, gender,
p. 893 and homophobic violence, the capacity and indeed motivation of the state and ↵ its servants to
intervene, police, and punish these activities were legally and ideologically severely circumscribed
(ibid.).
This dual strategy raised a number of questions. Who had the power to define which individuals, and what
activities, were dangerous? Which individuals, and what activities, were not dangerous? Which groups
were policed and punished and why? Which groups were not policed and punished, and why not? Finally,
how useful was the term ‘crime’ where unimaginable social harms were being committed by the powerful
but which were being effectively ignored? (Hillyard and Tombs 2004).
The symbolism of the prison

Fifth, abolitionists argued that prisons performed a ‘symbolic function’. Prisoners were socially
constructed as the only criminals in the society—dirty, dangerous, degenerate and irredeemable—while
the non-criminal ‘normals’ outside, ‘ … regard ourselves as all the better, more correct, more
harmless’ (Mathiesen 1974: 78). This binary was legitimated by ‘stigma power’ operating as a
‘governmental strategy which functions through the amplification of stigmatizing forms of
difference’ (Tyler 2020: 267). For Tyler:
Stigma machines are the mechanisms through which power penetrates bodies; machines of
inscription set in motion through concerted efforts in order to immobilize, wound, humiliate and/
or dehumanize those caught within their grasp (ibid.: 260).
The sheer extent of crime challenges this crass binary and is reflected in Thomas Gabor’s (1994) book,
Everybody Does It! Crime By the Public. This suggests that ‘. … most people whether on the street, at work, at
home or elsewhere, will in their life-span commit one or more criminalizable acts’ (Coyle and Piche 2021:
346). Given this:
Criminalization can be seen for what it is: an interpretation of human behaviour that is unable to
come to terms with—much less address—the ubiquity of transgressive (‘criminal’) acts. It is here
that the penal project is exposed as preoccupied with the management of only some transgressions
and thus only references attempts of dominance by certain persons over others (ibid., original
emphasis).
For abolitionists, the state’s relentless focus on prisoners ignored, (and still ignores), law breaking
amongst those labelled, and who have labelled themselves, as law abiding. In short, distortion,
mystification, and hypocrisy prevailed.
Page 9 of 33
Abolitionist interventions
Finally, the state responded to abolitionist demands by attempting to ‘define [them] out’ of the prison
debate by labelling them as ‘irresponsible … wildly rebellious. … theoreticians, remote from life’ (Mathiesen
1980: 288–289, original emphasis). In contrast, state agents were regarded as:
… the carriers of ‘objective truth’. This is seen more clearly in the penal system than anywhere
else … The system representatives inform, the opponents of the system argue and are polemical, or,
what is worse, they are political (ibid.: 291–292, original emphasis).
Abolitionists were labelled as being pro-crime and anti-victim, who wanted to free every prisoner,
irrespective of their crimes (Sim 2009). These offensive caricatures were untrue. Given the rampant
criminality, and non-punishment of the powerful, it was politicians and state agents who were
p. 894 unconcerned about crime. And given the appalling ↵ response to violence against women and girls, and
to racist, homophobic and transphobic violence, it was hypocritical to claim they were concerned about
crime victims. Since 1970, victims had, in fact, been cynically exploited by law-and-order obsessed
politicians (Dubber 2002). Politicians supported victims, but, crucially, only those victims, or their
relatives, who demanded retribution. Those who expressed compassion, even after terrible crimes had
been committed against them, or a family member, were ignored (Sim 2009).
As to freeing every prisoner, for some abolitionists, the reverse was the case. They believed in detention, it
was the nature and philosophy of this detention which was the issue. They supported institutions such as
the Barlinnie Special Unit (BSU) and Parkhurst C Wing (PCW). Alongside Grendon Underwood, (which
remains operational), these institutions detained men, the majority of whom had committed serious
crimes of violence. However, unlike the traditional system, their praxis was based on ‘collective support
and individual empathy’ designed to fundamentally change them (ibid.: 137).
‘Hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 1987) had been (and remains) the elephant in the corner of the prison.
Challenging the ferocity of its debasing, destructive power, which dominated the overlapping cultures of
prisoners and prison officers, was central to their praxis. In treating ‘men as prisoners rather than prisoners
as men’, the traditional system reinforced the devastating impact of masculine behaviour inside and
outside (Sim 1994b: 101, original emphasis). Incapacitating the few men convicted for violence, in a highly
masculinized, often misogynistic environment, did little, if anything, to radically transform their
behaviour.
Institutions such as the Special Unit, C Wing and Grendon signified that another penal world was possible.
The pejoratively labelled prisoner ‘animals’ could radically change in a non-judgmental, supportive
environment which challenged their masculinity and emphasized individual and institutional
accountability (Boyle 1984; Boyle 2016; Davies 1994; Stevens 2012). This made them dangerous not because
of the prisoners but because they highlighted the traditional system’s abject failure to rehabilitate
prisoners. However, these ‘abolitionist alternatives’ (Davis 2003: 109) were not welcomed by the state. The
BSU and PCW were simply closed down (Sim 2009).
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For women, Pat Carlen, a founder member of Women in Prison, and an abolitionist, demanded that
patriarchal sentencing should be replaced by practices based on ‘feminist jurisprudence’ and a ‘women-
wise penology’ (Carlen 1990: 109). Women’s prisons should be abolished for five years while 100 places ‘for
female offenders convicted or accused of abnormally serious crimes’ should be retained (ibid.: 121, original
emphasis). The choice was clear. The state could continue:
… to squander millions of pounds on prisons or tak[e] bold steps to stop legislators and sentencers
seeing the prisons as being the ultimate panacea for all political, social and penal ills. Abolishing
women’s imprisonment for an experimental period might be one small step towards giving the
criminal justice and penal systems the thorough shake-up they so desperately need (ibid: 125,
emphasis added).
Furthermore, abolitionist groups did have an impact. Their campaigns generated policy changes including
the closure of the notorious, sensory-deprivation based Control Units, the abolition of the prison medical
service, and shifting the narrative around self-inflicted deaths through highlighting the state’s often
lamentable failure to fulfill its duty of care. They also impacted hegemonically through dragging liberal,
reform organizations onto a more radical terrain. Arguably, if they had not existed, then the unquestioning
belief in reform, and the state’s broader ‘truth’, would have prevailed (Sim 1994a). Abolitionists,
p. 895 therefore, changed social policy and altered perceptions about ↵ prisons. For James Baldwin, this was
crucial for instituting radical change: ‘ … if you alter even by a millimeter the way people look at reality,
then you can change it’ (cited in Sim 2014a: 63).
Approaching the twenty-first century, abolitionists faced a number of different challenges as the state’s
relentless, punitive power intensified, at least for the powerless. For the powerful, it was ‘business as
usual’, as their rampant criminality continued unabated with little, or no, consequences (Tombs 2016: 51).
The chapter now considers five of these challenges.
Into the Twenty-First Century
Intensifying carceral expansion

In England and Wales there has been another ‘incarceration binge’ (Trega and Larmour 2009) represented
by ‘the largest prison-building programme in a generation’. (Hansard, 27 October 2021: col. 277). This
includes: 18,000 additional places, costing £4 billion; constructing four new prisons adding to the 117
institutions already in operation; and creating 500 new places for women. Between 2016 and 2021, 4,000
prison officers were recruited. The daily prison population was predicted to rise to almost 100,000 by 2026.
Two senior civil servants were appointed to ensure the new institutions were delivered on time and on
budget (Hymas 2021; House of Commons Library 2021; Ministry of Justice 2021a).
Expenditure followed the same regressive pattern as before. Between 2015/16 and 2019/20, prison
spending was over £18 billion (HM Treasury 2021, Table 10.1). In 2019/20, the overall cost per prison place
was £44,640 (Sturge 2021: 29). More generally, between 2015/16 and 2019/20, nearly £122 billion was
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spent in England alone on Public Order and Safety, amounting to £463 per head of the population in the
latter year. In contrast, spending on housing was £180, on environmental protection £162 and on
recreation, culture and religion £100 (HM. Treasury 2021: Tables 10.1 and 10.5). Additionally, between 2010
and 2019, funding for domestic violence services was cut by a quarter, despite the fact that, in 2018 alone,
domestic homicides, involving overwhelmingly female victims, reached a five year high of 173 (Sisters
Uncut 2019).
As ever, the uncritical support for more law and order was bi-partisan. For the Labour Party’s leader:
The [Johnson] Government have now become soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime … The
Conservative Party can no longer be called the party of law and order … We’re strong on crime, and
the old phrase, ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ is one that I’ll be using over and
over again (Starmer, cited in Madeley 2021).
This expansionist strategy implied that restoring prison expenditure to its pre-cuts level would ensure
prisoner rehabilitation. However, this claim ignored the abolitionist history outlined above. Prisons have
never rehabilitated even when they were well-funded. The old, penal ‘normal’ was traumatizing and
deadly, as the dire levels of self-harm and self-inflicted deaths illustrated (Sim 1990). Budget cuts had not
caused the crisis. Rather, they:
intensified an already bleak penal situation … Focusing solely on the cuts allowed the debate about
the crisis to be conducted on a narrow, reductive terrain where the old normal was valorised as
something to be achieved, despite the systemic harm it engendered (Sim 2018a: 171, original
emphasis).
p. 896 ↵ Other sites of state confinement, including immigration detention and removal centres, were
consolidated further. They were sites of punitive degradation, and extreme distress, manifested in self-
harm and deaths. Between 2000 and 2021, there were 38 deaths, 16 of them self-inflicted (INQUEST
2022a). These centres illustrated the ‘shifting contours of the carceral state’ demonstrating how:
… the carceral state neither begins or ends within the walls of institutions of confinement …
against a backdrop of newly arrived migrants being interned temporarily in containers and
defunct, derelict army camps, what is clear is that a retrenchment and in some contexts
downward trend in the use of immigration detention itself could, and can, coalesce with the
emergence of different forms of confinement and the intensification of other forms of control
(Burnett 2022: 153 and 156).
While the names of the institutions might change, their practices were the same. In dehumanizing
prisoners, they generated ‘psychic corrosion’ through ‘a deadly combination’ of:
… punitive degradation, lacerating callousness, systemic indifference and managerial expediency

[that] ensure that the detained are treated as less than human, with … often devastating
consequences (Sim 2022: 116).
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For abolitionists, what was required was an expanded definition:
… of what is to be abolished, to think about carceral abolition and address the use of confinement,
and the systematic deprivation of liberty in spaces outside and adjacent to the penal system, as
traditionally conceived (Piche and Larsen cited in Ryan and Sim 2016: 722–723, original
emphasis).
In the 1980s, they linked prison expansion to an intensification in the authoritarian power of the state
(Sim 1987). This development had ‘much in common’ with the repressive, special powers developed in
Northern Ireland in the 1970s (Hillyard 1987: 308) and continued into the twenty-first century. Under the
Johnson government, legislation such as the Covert Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill and the
Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans Bill) would give state agents, working domestically and
overseas, immunity from criminal and civil liability, even if they engaged in torture and murder (Webber
2021). The Nationality and Borders Bill, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, and the draconian state
response to those protesting against the latter Bill, through what appeared to be ‘the biggest use of riot
charges since the mid-1980s’, illustrated the authoritarian intensification in the state’s power (Wall
2022). In March 2022, 13 protestors were sentenced to over 55 years. (Anderson 2022). This authoritarian
drive was reinforced by other changes including:
… the proposed requirement for voter ID, which could deter 2 million potential electors, most of
whom are poor and marginalised; the planned curtailment of the Electoral Commission; the
assault on citizens’ rights to mount legal challenges to government policy; and the proposed
“civil orders” that could see journalists treated as spies and banned from meeting certain people
and visiting certain places (Monbiot 2021).
In its first year, Johnson’s government, on the back of the Covid pandemic (Sim and Tombs 2022) had:
… shown a frightening and steady disregard for civil liberties; a piecemeal but systematic
dismantling of fundamental legal safeguards for such liberties; a process of muzzling or
domesticating any institution whose remit is to safeguard the individual against overweening
executive power; and media-assisted vilification of those who challenge that power (Webber
2021).
p. 897 Punishing the contemporary pauper

As noted above, prisons have perennially punished those on the political and economic margins of
capitalist societies. This process has not changed (Melossi et al. 2018). Rather, it has intensified in societies
dominated by dispossession, pauperism, and destitution. Nationally and internationally, there is an
increasingly desperate social detritus of surplus bodies, targeted for regulation and punishment involving:
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… policing, punitive, military and security apparatuses, mobilized to monitor, discipline and
punish those troublesome populations at risk of turning into Hegel’s ‘rabble’ … States are
increasingly called on to select, eject and immobilize (Shammas 2018: 415, original emphasis; see
also Foster 2019).
For Vegh Weis (2017), there has been ‘continuity in the functioning and features of crime control from the
th
15 century to the present’ (p. 289). In the twenty-first century, contemporary paupers continue to be
systematically over-criminalized by the state (Vegh Weis 2017: 226). Building on Spitzer’s insight into the
social control of those labelled as ‘social dynamite’ and ‘social junk’ Spitzer 1975), she argues that the
latter category should be expanded to include those who:
… facing a highly competitive labour market … can only survive on charity, the scarce remnants of
social assistance, sporadic jobs and subsistence self-employment … social junk has been the
target of bulimic over-criminalization as a result of the perpetration of minimum-harmful
behaviours: mostly, criminalized survival strategies and the absorption of social assistance into a
criminal logic that turns it into what may be called punitive welfare (Vegh Weis 2017: 226, original
emphasis).
The intensification in the state’s coercive capabilities to punish the ‘social junk’ thrown up by the brutal
insecurity generated by contemporary neoliberalism, has been reinforced by technological surveillance
focused on poor neighbourhoods, welfare recipients, parolees, and sex offenders and is built on
reasserting sovereign power and reaffirming the ‘punitive containment’ of the poor (Wacquant 2009:
299). In an age of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff 2019), new technologies such as CCTV have added
another authoritarian, anti-democratic layer to this control. They are integral to a ‘surveillance
continuum’ which ‘along with the coercive apparatus at the state’s disposal are being refined within neo-
liberal strategies of rule’ (Coleman and Sim 2000: 637). Databases concerned with ‘gang’ affiliation,
constructed around racist profiling, legitimate the further criminalizing of Black, Asian, and minority
ethnic young people (Williams and Clarke 2016). Finally, the emerging ‘biometric state’, based on
technologies used by European border forces and police, is likely to further intensify ‘existing problems
with racist policing and ethnic profiling’ (Statewatch 2022).
Interlocking penal and welfare punishment

Penal and welfare systems are becoming increasingly calibrated, further intensifying the ‘criminalisation
and punishment of the behaviour of the poor and the dispossessed … ’ (Ryan and Sim 2016: 723–724). Both
systems are now built on:
… deterrence, surveillance, stigma, and graduated sanctions to modify conduct. Welfare revamped
as workfare and prison stripped of its rehabilitative pretension now form a single organizational
mesh flung at the same clientele mired in the fissures and ditches of the dualizing metropolis
(Wacquant, cited in ibid.: 724).
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p. 898 ↵ This calibration is manifest in the ‘reduction of the social state and the expansion in the rates of
imprisonment’ which ‘are joint strategies by governments’ (Cummins, 2021: 13). Between 2010 and 2018,
five million sanctions were issued to welfare recipients. In 2013, more sanctions were imposed than fines
by the criminal justice system. At the same time, ‘3,700 people were employed to investigate benefit
claimants, often for modest sums, compared with 700 revenue staff for investigating tax
avoidance’ (Lansley 2022: 218–219). In the decade up to 2019:
[f]or every tax fraudster prosecuted in the UK … 23 benefit claimants were prosecuted … This is
despite tax fraud costing the economy nine times more than benefits fraud: in 2018/19, tax fraud
cost the Treasury an estimated £20bn, whereas benefit fraud cost just £2.2bn (Chakelian 2021).
The impact on benefit claimants has been devastating. A 59-year-old diabetic, despite finishing two
periods of unpaid work, was sanctioned for missing two appointments. He was caring for his mother who
had dementia:
… and was waiting to hear about a job application. He was later found dead at home. He had £3.44
in his bank account, and with his electricity cut off, the fridge where he kept his insulin was no
longer working. He died from diabetic ketoacidosis, caused by a lack of insulin (Lansley 2022:
219).
Between 2011 and 2018, under the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), there were over 34,000 cases,
often involving disabled people who had:
… died on the DWP’s watch … They died either waiting for the DWP to sort their claims or after it
said they were well enough to work or start moving towards work. Moreover, in 2018 alone there
could have been 750 (if not more) people who took their own lives while claiming from the DWP.
But across five years, the department only reviewed 69 cases of people taking their own lives
(Topple 2021).
The punitive, welfare discourse had also generated ‘social murder by destitution’: deaths of the homeless
on the streets and in temporary accommodation; deaths from malnutrition and deaths from lack of
heating due to benefit cuts. These preventable deaths, and the profound social harms experienced by the
families of the deceased, brutally illustrated ‘the long-standing association between poor material
conditions and social murder’ (Grover 2019: 347).
Privatizing punishment
While prison privatization started in 1987, by October 2021 the majority of prisoners remained in the state-
run system. Only 13 prisons—11 male and 2 female—were managed by private sector companies (House of
Commons Library 2021). For abolitionists, the discussion about which system worked ‘best’ was
immaterial. Whether they were detained in private or public institutions, prisoners were drawn from the
same fraction of the population from which they had always been drawn: the vulnerable and destitute.
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The state-run system had never been a model of democratic accountability but private companies added
another level to the difficulties of holding staff accountable. Companies were accountable to their
shareholders and not to ‘those who are most affected by their activity: overwhelmingly the poor and the
socially marginalised’ (Fitzgibbon and Lea 2020: 165). Thus:
… the public-private assemblage governing the poor, spectacularly illustrated in England by

privatized probation and prisons and by the treatment of migrants and asylum seekers,
p. 899 ↵ points to the growth of an ‘authoritarian periphery’ of the coercive management of the poor,
harking back to the nineteenth century and the view of the poor not as citizens but as the
‘dangerous classes’ (ibid.: 166).
Contracting out services traditionally carried out by the state has resulted in ‘control by neglect’ whereby
private companies show ‘no interest’ in rehabilitation. Instead:
[as] long as there is no change in behaviour there is no need for intervention … There is no interest
in the individual. The final stage is to find the environment—some combination of the prison and
the urban zone—which can serve as a warehouse (ibid.: 169–170).
The state has also retained control over third sector organizations working in the criminal justice system
by dividing those ‘with which government can do business from dissenting communitarian
voices’ (Corcoran 2001: 34). Neoliberal discourses also dominate their work in women’s centres through
extending the ‘transcarceral surveillance and control of the most vulnerable in the community … ’ (Elfleet
2021: 18). Ultimately, the networks and partnerships these organizations have developed, have not
decentred or diminished the power of the ‘integral state’. Instead, they have reinforced, refashioned and
extended its power still further (Davies 2011: 105–108).
Reaffirming rehabilitation
Finally, as noted above, rehabilitation has legitimated the prison’s existence since 1895 and has been
‘repackaged’, appearing in different guises, since then (Scott 2018: 89). Contemporary politicians continue
to use it as a selling point for building new, differently designed, gleaming institutions. The Johnson
government’s Prisons Strategy White Paper, published in December 2021, noted that:
We’re carrying out the biggest prison building programme in more than 100 years to meet
demand as we bring in tougher sentencing rules and the courts clear the backlogs brought about
by COVID-19. Prisons keep people safe by taking dangerous criminals off our streets, but they can
only bring down crime and keep the public safer in the longer-term if they properly reform and
rehabilitate offenders … (Ministry of Justice 2021a: 3, emphasis added).
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These claims ignore the abolitionist critique of rehabilitation, outlined above, and its role in mystifying the
pain, punishment, domination and subjugation at the centre of the everyday life of many prisoners who
have ‘nothing to expect but a hiding … [This is] the permanent lesson that penitentiary institutions have
been teaching’ (Melossi, cited in Ryan and Sim 2016: 726, original emphasis).
As noted above, for Foucault, prisons have been in a state of crisis since the end of the eighteenth century
(Foucault 1979). In the twenty-first century, they were gripped by yet another, twin-pronged ‘crisis of
safety and decency’ (House of Commons Justice Committee 2019: 5). The chapter now considers how
abolitionism has responded to this crisis.
The Never-Ending Crisis
A ‘crisis of safety’
Prison safety is built on the dominant narrative that prisons overwhelmingly contain dangerous prisoners
which makes them unsafe for staff and other prisoners. This narrative has been incessantly articulated by
p. 900 politicians, and the Prison Officers Association ↵ (POA), operating as moral entrepreneurs, and
uncritically endorsed by the majority of the media. It is centred on three interrelated themes: the conflict
between prisoners over the internal drugs market; the volatile nature of the prison population which puts
staff at risk who are consecrated and sanctified as perfect victims (Sim 2021); and cuts to the prison budget
are leading to increasing levels of violence. How would abolitionists respond to this narrative?
First, concentrating on illegal drugs misses a key point. Less discussed is the role of legal drugs in prison
deaths due to prisoners not receiving their prescribed medication (INQUEST, cited in ibid.: 123). The state’s
failure to fulfill its duty of care is effectively ignored through the amplified focus on illegal drugs.
Second, the number of days staff lose at work because of assaults by prisoners is small compared with the
days lost due to health conditions such as depression, anxiety, stress, and musculoskeletal problems (Scott
and Sim 2018). The assault statistics themselves are debatable. In one prison:
… most assaults were minor and some incidents against staff had been recorded inaccurately, as
they had not been actual assaults, which made the levels of violence appear much higher than they
actually were (HM Inspectorate of Prisons for England and Wales 2019: 22, emphasis added).
Third, compared with other occupations, the chances of staff dying at work is lower (Scott and Sim 2018).
Since 1850, fewer than ten fewer than ten prison officers have died at work (Scott 2018: 154). In contrast,
between 1978 and March 2022, 6,891 prisoners died, 2,785 (40.4 per cent) of these deaths were self-
2
inflicted (INQUEST 2022b; Ministry of Justice no date). In the 12 months to December 2021, 371 prisoners
3
died—more than one death a day—the highest number ever recorded (INQUEST 2022c). Eighty-six
deaths were self-inflicted, ‘an increase of 28 per cent from the previous 12 months’. Another 250 deaths—
up 13 per cent from the previous year—were due to ‘ “natural causes,” though INQUEST[‘s] casework and
monitoring shows many of these deaths are premature and far from “natural.”’ Furthermore:
Page 17 of 33
… even without accounting for Covid-19 related deaths, this year and the past five years have seen
the highest ever numbers and rates of deaths in prison. Since the pandemic began in March 2020
to 31 December 2021, [the latest Safety in Custody statistics note] that 177 people in prison died
within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test (ibid.).
Prisons are dangerous but not because of the prisoners. Institutionalized dehumanization, state violence,
neglect and contempt, systemic indifference and the abject failure of the state to fulfill its duty of care
makes the institution a ‘death machine’ for prisoners (Foucault, cited in Sim 2020: 237).
Incidents of self-harm further illustrate the dangers the prison poses. Due to the specific, traumatizing
p. 901 impact of prison on women, self-harm is highly gendered ↵ (Atkinson et al. 2023). In the 12 months to
June 2021, there were 53,290 incidents—146 a day. In men’s prisons, while the number decreased by 16 per
cent in women’s prisons, it ‘increased by 2 per cent from 11,950 in the previous 12 months to 12,140’. The
rate per 1000 women was an astonishing 3,808 (Ministry of Justice, 2021b). Furthermore, self-harm:
… increased during the pandemic to record levels … In some months during the COVID-19
restrictions, the rate of self-harm for women has been seven times higher than for men (HM
Inspectorate of Prisons for England and Wales 2022a: 3).
In Foston Hall, there were ‘about 1,000 calls each month’—one every hour—to the Samaritans.
Importantly, ‘[T]here was no strategy to reduce self-harm and some critical recommendations from
Prisons and Probation Ombudsman investigations had not been implemented’ (HM Inspectorate of
Prisons for England and Wales 2022b: 8).
Safety, and the links to social justice, raise profoundly important questions for abolitionists. For Brown
and Schept (2017), safety needs to be radically redefined:
[s]afety … is not simply about those who have harmed or been harmed, but a movement beyond
disciplinary neoliberal frames of responsibilization and internalization to community and state
accountability, a kind of insurrectionary safety … operating within an abolitionist habitus … How
can we organise our communities to be safe? What should we do when various kinds of harm, with
different kinds of needs, occur? What are the collective ways and forums in which we can pursue
this work? (pp. 449 and 454).
One answer lies in connecting prisoners’ lack of safety (and those detained in other state and privately run
institutions) with the lack of safety, and often preventable deaths, generated by poverty, hunger, air
pollution, misogyny, racist and homophobic violence, ageism, medical negligence, homelessness, welfare
cuts, disablism, and the lack of health and safety at work (Sim 2021). Linking prisoners with the outside
was a key strand in early abolitionist thought. It remains as important as ever for developing the safe
community, based on the abolitionist principles, to which Brown and Schept refer. It links into broader,
abolitionist concerns about building a society based on compassion, security and social justice for all.
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Male violence against women and girls graphically illustrates the abject failure of the state’s claim that the
prison can ensure their safety. According to Reclaim the Streets, the brutal abduction, rape and murder of
Sarah Everard in March 2021 was ‘a watershed moment’ in an ‘epidemic’ of this violence (The Canary, 27
February 2022). Following Sarah’s death, in the year up to 3 March 2022, another 125 women and girls
were in the UK (Laville 2022). At the end of June 2021, there were over 846,000 ‘domestic-abuse related’
offences—over 1 every minute—up 6 per cent from the previous year. There were over 164,700 sexual
offences, including 61,158 rapes—nearly 7 an hour—‘the highest ever recorded annual figure to
date’ (Crime Survey for England and Wales, cited in the Office for National Statistics 2021, Section 7). How
should abolitionists respond to this systemic violence?
For Ardath Whynacht, they need a ‘position on domestic homicide that takes our safety
seriously’ (Whynacht 2021: 29). Therefore, while prisons:
… are so overcrowded with members of our community who are incarcerated for non-violent
p. 902 crimes that could have been prevented through better funding of addiction and ↵ mental
health services, it is easy to forget that there are some incarcerated people who are tremendously
dangerous to our individual and collective safety (ibid.).
However, a ‘system that never addresses the why behind a harm never actually contains the harm
itself’ (Kaba cited in ibid.: 118, original emphasis). Imprisoning men for domestic violence, and domestic
homicide, does not answer the why question. This would involve considering the complex interrelationship
between wider structures of heteropatriarchal power, the devastating role of hegemonic masculinity in
reinforcing these structures and the agentic choices men make to kill and harm women (Cameron and
Frazer 1987). Imprisoned men are disposed of as ‘worthless or beyond saving when they cause harm’.
Prisons are sites where:
… we can banish those who commit harm without asking questions about why they harmed in the
first place … [A] refusal to acknowledge the causes of violence allows us to scapegoat individuals
for forms of violence that are taught and maintained in everyday life (Whynacht 2021: 118,
emphasis added)
Furthermore, even on its own terms, the state was failing to respond to violent men in any meaningful
way. In March 2022, ‘less than 1 per cent … [were receiving] any form of intervention … ’ (Hansard, 2 March
2022: col. 1067).
However, with respect to domestic violence, ‘abolitionist alternatives’ have been developed. Programmes
based on feminist principles which recognize the ‘issue of gender power and domination’ have
successfully challenged and changed perpetrators’ behaviour (Dobash et al. 2000: 180). Nonetheless,
despite their positive impact, they remain, at best, marginal, and, at worst, ignored by the state which
continues to rely on tried, tested and failed law and order responses. Recognizing ‘sexual violence as a
continuum’ (Kelly 1988) requires a continuum of pro-feminist responses to replace the over-reliance on a
heavily masculinized prison system which is having little or no impact in ensuring the safety of women
Page 19 of 33
and girls. For abolitionist feminists, the prison reinforces the individualistic discourse of male violence
through concentrating on the dangerous predator while distracting attention from the systemic and
widespread nature of this violence. For one abolitionist survivor of sexual violence:
[o]ur cultural imagination misrepresents most people behind bars as rapists and abusers, and
most rapists and abusers as being behind bars, when in reality, it seems likely neither is true …
justice certainly isn’t using those who have experienced sexual violence as a go-to, politically
convenient shield to defend police and prisons—not when these institutions are inextricably
rooted in survivors’ trauma and harm (CheungJun 2020).
Generating radical change, therefore, lies in establishing solidarity between those ‘working for social
justice’ which will:
… prevent harm through building a better society. By bringing together groups and organizations
… we strengthen the links between prison abolition and struggles for housing, health, education
and environment; and for economic, racial, gender, sexual and disability justice (Abolitionist
Alternatives, no date).
A ‘crisis of decency’
Confining prisoners in cesspool conditions has been central to the prison’s retributive role since the late
eighteenth century. Like the workhouse, the institution was a ‘place of punishment for misery’ (Marx,
p. 903 cited in Sim 2014b: 23). Two centuries later, over a ↵ quarter of prisoners were detained in prisons built
in Victorian times (Garside 2021). Reports by the Prison Inspectorate, published between 2018 and 2022,
detailed gruelling levels of degrading dehumanization and mortification. Liverpool prison was dominated
by regime failure, including a lack of health and safety for prisoners; poor family contacts; the
disproportionate use of force; using unofficial punishments; the disproportionate suffering experienced by
Black, Asian, and minority ethnic prisoners; and a lack of governance and accountability. These failures
underpinned the ‘aching desolation’ prisoners experienced (Sim 2019: 41). In Nottingham and Exeter,
prisoners were:
… bereft, confronted, as they were, by a haunting, punitive structure of penal power which
unrelentingly stigmatised them as perennially undeserving based on a contemptuous indifference
towards, and withering disregard of, their pain. It was a structure which callously and casually
rubbed away at their lives generating a searing invisibility about who they were as human beings,
their desires, fears and hopes, a mortifying process which psychologically crushed and physically
bled them … (Sim 2018b).
In Exeter, inspectors observed ‘ … many examples of a lack of care for vulnerable prisoners which … were
symptomatic of a lack of empathy and understanding of the factors that contribute to suicide and self-
harm’ (cited in ibid., emphasis added). This lack of compassion, alongside ‘unacceptably poor’ living
conditions, made the regime toxic. Inspectors were ‘shock[ed] to see the way in which cell bells were
Page 20 of 33
routinely ignored by staff’. This was ‘inexcusable. [They] saw bells going unanswered even when staff were
doing nothing else’ (ibid.). Importantly, the prison was not short staffed. This point challenges the
dominant narrative, popularized by the Prison Officers Association, that staffing cuts are the single cause
of the prison crisis. The situation was so dire in Wormwood Scrubs that an elderly prisoner sued the prison
service for the post-traumatic stress disorder he experienced due to rats running across his body. When he
complained, he was told the prison was not ‘a hotel. You know. You’re here to be punished’ (cited in Taylor
2019, emphasis added).
The final part of the chapter considers how abolitionists have attempted to radically change prisons
through the interventions they have made and continue to make.
Demanding Radical Change
Since 1970, abolitionists have exploited the ‘silent tremors’ in prisons (Foucault 2002: 48). Following
Gramsci, they have attempted to turn penal ‘common sense’ into abolitionist ‘good sense’ (Simon 1982:
63–4). Their interventions have shown that ‘[penal] hegemonies are never completed projects: they are
always in contention. There are always cracks and contradictions—and therefore opportunities’ (Hall et al.
cited in Sim 2014a: 61). Like their predecessors, radical demands by contemporary abolitionists are
reflected in the demands for social justice from other, progressive, grassroots organizations ‘ … addressing
the climate crisis, reinvigorated feminism in many parts of the world, antiracist and human rights
campaigns focused on specific groups and issues. [P]rotest is a force running through everything—and
running against a lot of things … ’ (Solnit 2019: 7).
Direct action remains central to abolitionist praxis such as the interventions made by the ‘network of
grassroots groups’ operating under the umbrella, Community Action on Prison Expansion Campaign (CAPE)
which rejects:
p. 904 ↵
… the myths that prisons, surveillance and policing can solve social and economic problems. We
seek alternatives that keep our communities safe and achieve real social justice (Community
Action on Prison Expansion 2022).
Direct action has also involved ‘shareholder activists’ protesting against ‘state-corporate power’ such as
the protests by the Reclaim Justice Network at G4S’s Annual General Meetings which forced the company to
withdraw ‘from its controversial delivery of child detention in Israel’ (Scott 2020: 179). Sisters Uncut
occupied Holloway Prison’s Visitor’s Centre demanding that the prison, closed in 2016, should be used for
survivors of domestic violence: ‘[w]e are reclaiming the former prison, a site of violence, to demand that
public land is used for public good. Prisons are an inhumane response to social problems faced by
vulnerable women—the government should provide a better answer’ (Sisters Uncut 2017).
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Other interventions have included INQUEST’s family-led campaign demanding that bereaved families
should be eligible for non-means tested legal aid. The inequality in funding legal representation at
inquests was stark, leaving many bereaved families ‘in desperate financial situations’ while publicly
funded state lawyers did not face the ‘same financial scrutiny and obstacles … ’ (INQUEST 2019a: 7). In
2021, this campaign finally succeeded. The implications were profound:
… bereaved people facing Article 2 inquests will no longer face an intrusive and protracted means
test application process. It will make funding available to more families who previously faced
paying huge costs towards legal representation (INQUEST 2021).
Abolitionists have also highlighted the ‘accountability void’ in prisons (Coles and Shaw, no date: 25). Staff
are protected from scrutiny by an insidious culture of immunity and impunity. For prisoners, the
complaints system is discredited (Prisons and Probation Ombudsman 2022). Additionally, in failing to
implement recommendations from the Prison Inspectorate, the state was not living up to its own rhetoric:
‘ … 2018–19 was the third year running that fewer recommendations were achieved than not
achieved’ (House of Commons Justice Committee 2019: 65). Peter Clarke, the former Chief Inspector of
Prisons, noted:
[w]hen you look at the five prisons [now six] that have so far been subjected to the urgent
notification process, one of the common factors is an utterly appalling response to
recommendations in the past. How that was allowed to happen for so long is still something of a
mystery to me, but I hope that in the future transparency and accountability is seen as a strength,
not a weakness, on the part of the Prison Service (ibid.: 65–66).
The abolitionist demand that staff should be democratically accountable would also involve using the
Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 to prosecute those involved in contentious prison
deaths (INQUEST 2019b: 16). Importantly, demanding democratic accountability does not compromise
abolitionism’s vision. Quite the reverse: ‘we need a definition of democracy that makes determinate
demands on institutions; that we can use to criticise … capitalism and the state and use to guide their
process of replacement’ (Raekstad, cited in Sim 2020: 247).
Democratizing state institutions is one abolitionist demand, amongst many, which include shifting away
from retributive, ineffectual, sentencing policies introduced by successive governments; introducing a
moratorium on prison building; closing institutions; defunding the criminal injustice system and
redirecting resources towards well-funded radical, decarceration policies; radically transforming staff
culture; rejecting punishment and retribution; humanizing prisoners; building grassroots activism; and
p. 905 ↵ abolishing the lacerating social divisions of neoliberal capitalism, and the parasitic, violent state
institutions, which legitimate and defend them (Sim 2009: Chapter 7; Scott 2018: Chapter 9). For
abolitionists, implementing these changes would radically transform a system based on cruelty and
injustice to one based on compassion and social justice.
Page 22 of 33
Conclusion
In 2003, Angela Davis wrote that abolitionism requires imagining:
… a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the
prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society … we would try to envision a
continuum of alternatives to imprisonment—demilitarization of schools, revitalisation of
education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care for all, and a
justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance
(Davis 2003: 107).
Nearly two decades on, David Scott captured the essence of this point by reiterating the moral as well as the
political basis for abolitionist interventions which:
… can help foster a politics of inclusion based on shared humanity and highlight the abnormality of
prisons and the dehumanizing context of poverty and social inequalities … Most significantly of
all, abolitionist praxis is essential in the creation of an alternative power base that can be used to
challenge the role, function and legitimacy of the penal apparatus of the Capitalist State and the
unequal society it upholds (Scott 2018: 228–229, original emphasis).
Since 1970, abolitionists in England and Wales have demonstrated that another penal and social world is
possible through contestation and resistance, a point captured by the feminist, science fiction writer
Ursula K. Le Guin: ‘[w]e live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable—but then so did the divine right of
kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings’ (Le Guin 2014). Le Guin’s words
reflect abolitionism’s restless spirit of resistance over the last five decades. At this unforgiving, historical
moment, the movement’s idealistic commitment to building a better world, based on a collective,
compassionate sense of social justice, without the prison’s crushing, malevolent presence, remains
undiminished.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Kym Atkinson, David Scott, and Steve Tombs and to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments
on an earlier draft. Thanks also to Shadd Maruna for his support.

Carlen’s Alternatives to Women’s Imprisonment (1990) remains the classic statement on why women’s prisons should
be abolished. She outlines policies which would radically transform the criminal injustice system for women.
Coyle and Scott’s edited collection The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition (2021) discusses
contemporary, abolitionist praxis illustrated by prisoners’ voices from the inside.
Page 23 of 33
p. 906 ↵ Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) raises profound questions about the relationship between abolitionism and
the racialization of punishment, an issue which has intensified since her book was written.
Mathiesen’s Prison on Trial (2005) outlines the case for abolition through critiquing. the traditional defences of the
prison, such as deterrence, rehabilitation and incapacitation.
Scott’s Against Imprisonment: An Anthology of Abolitionist Essays (2018) discusses the development of abolitionist
praxis and resistance and the need to replace punishment as a justification for prisons.
Whynacht’s Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide (2021). Written from a feminist, abolitionist position, she
analyses one of the most profound questions facing abolitionists, what should be done with violent offenders?
Abolitionism involves grassroots direct action. The websites of INQUEST , JENGbA and Women in Prison outline their
radical campaigns around deaths in custody, joint enterprise and women in prison.
Online resources

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Notes
1
These figures have been calculated from the table on Page 2 of Cromarty et al. (2021).
Page 32 of 33
2
These figures have been calculated from the website and publication above.
3
It is also worth noting that from 1990 until 6 September 2022, there were 1,832 deaths in police custody or otherwise
following contact with the police. Within this figure, ‘Black, Asian and Minoritised Ethnicities … die disproportionately
as a result of use of force or restraint by the police’ (inquest.org.uk). These were the figures at the time of writing. They
will have been updated since then and are constantly updated as another death occurs. For daily updates, see
(https://www.inquest.org.uk/deaths-in-prison <https://www.inquest.org.uk/deaths-in-prison>).
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Page 33 of 33
42. Convict criminology without guarantees: Proposing hard labour for an unfinished criminology

p. 911 42. Convict criminology without guarantees: Proposing hard labour

for an unfinished criminology
Rod Earle, Danica Darley, Bill Davies, David Honeywell and Ed Schreeche-Powell
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0042
Abstract
This chapter examines the key concepts of convict criminology. It explains that convict criminology is largely involved with
criminological and penological research produced by people who combine first-hand experience of imprisonment with
criminological training and insight. Moreover, convict criminology offers an alternative perspective on criminological issues
grounded in lived experience while reshaping the degraded image of the prisoner in the public imagination. The subfield
subverts the abject status of the convict or prisoner as an object of suspicion circulating darkly in the social depths. The
chapter mentions that convict criminologists should be wary of the reductionist convenience of their social position to their
epistemological position
Keywords: convict criminology, imprisonment, criminological training, lived experience, public imagination, prisoner,
social position
Introduction
The subfield known as ‘convict criminology’ is difficult to define but largely involves criminological and
penological research produced by people who combine first-hand experience of imprisonment with
criminological training and insight. It’s aims are to promote prisoners’ voices and experience to redress
their general absence within the discipline. In doing so it offers an alternative lens on criminological issues
grounded in ‘lived experience’ (Darke et al. 2020; Ross and Richards 2003; Booth and Harriot 2020). Until
relatively recently convict criminology has been almost exclusively associated with criminology in the USA.
In this chapter we sketch those origins in the USA and seek to demonstrate how they have been extended in
the UK. We start with a brief excursion into the pre-history of convict criminology to demonstrate that
while this approach to research is a relative ‘youngster’ in formal academic terms, it has roots that reach
Page 1 of 25
deep into the history of the discipline. As a collective endeavour by people who have been imprisoned and
are active in convict criminology in England, we present some of its emerging forms of practice. The
chapter concludes with a sustained and critical engagement with the question of lived experience as a
source of knowledge for criminology and as the defining feature of convict criminology.
Early Days and Debts: Peter Kropotkin and Frank Tannenbaum
Although convict criminology was only formally launched in the last decade of the twentieth century
(Gaucher 1999; Ross and Richards 2003), the first study of prisons that combines social scientific methods
p. 912 and personal experience of incarceration ↵ is probably Peter Kropotkin’s In Russian and French Prisons,
published over 100 years earlier in 1887. Between 1882 and 1886, Kropotkin was confined in a ‘model’
French prison. Building on his previous incarceration in a Russian prison between 1874 and 1876,
Kropotkin seizes ‘an opportunity of obtaining a personal insight into the results achieved by
detention’ (Kropotkin 1887: 21). This, in so many words, is what is involved in convict criminology.
Kropotkin suggests that to see through the veils thrown over the darker parts of prison life, or to get
around the obstructions placed in the researcher’s path, there is a remedy: ‘To know the reality, one must
oneself have been a prisoner’ (Kropotkin 1887: 63). This is the basic premise of the convict criminology
group first launched in the USA over 100 years later.
Prisons fascinate Kropotkin not because they demonstrate the efficacy of deterrence—they do not—but
because his personal experience reveals the resilience of the humanity they contain. He notes how a prison
‘kills all the qualities in a man which make him best adapted to community life’ (Kropotkin 1975: 45). He
makes clear he is not just talking about prisoners. Prison guards are victims of a prison’s corrupting power
as well: ‘it is the institution which makes them what they are—petty, mean persecutors’ (ibid.: 56). Many
of us in convict criminology know the penetrating truth of this observation from bitter experience, as
Kropotkin did himself, even while we concede there are many who do not fit this description.
As the prototype convict criminologist who combined his experience of imprisonment with innovative
research methodologies, Kropotkin made substantial contributions to criminological thinking and the
political philosophy of anarchism. This philosophy connects the nineteenth century of Peter Kropotkin to
the twentieth century and the second progenitor of convict criminology, Frank Tannenbaum. Many of
Kropotkin’s books and pamphlets would have been found in the New York offices of the magazine Mother
Earth where its anarchist editor, Emma Goldman, encouraged a young, Jewish émigré, Frank Tannenbaum
to mobilize the homeless workers of New York. Tannenbaum’s efforts were rewarded by prosecution for
‘unlawful assembly’ and he was sentenced to one year of penal custody on New York’s notorious
Blackwells Island.
Tannenbaum’s 12 months in prison were no easy ride. Yeager’s (2011) invaluable archive research reveals
that Tannenbaum spent two months of his sentence in punitive solitary confinement for his agitation with
other prisoners against prison conditions, mistreatment, and neglect. His subsequent articles about his
imprisonment in which he describes, at the beginning of the twentieth century, men dying of tuberculosis
being locked up with healthy prisoners, bears disturbing comparison to prison conditions during the
Covid-19 pandemic of the early twenty first century (Maruna et al. 2022).
Page 2 of 25
At the heart of Tannenbaum’s (1938) influential analysis of crime is the nature of social conflict, reaction,
and social interaction. His work with young men and boys involved in street level illegality had revealed to
him how potent their reaction was to being seen as problematically different. He identifies both the moral
loading and glamourous appeal that the descriptive vocabulary of crime carries with it and the forceful
authority with which it is applied to the young person. He outlines what in the 1960s would be re-theorized
as ‘secondary deviance’ and ‘deviancy amplification’:
The process of making the criminal, therefore, is a process of tagging, defining, segregating,
describing, emphasising, making conscious and self-conscious; it becomes a way of stimulating,
suggesting, emphasising, and evoking the very traits that are complained of (1938: 20).
p. 913 ↵ Tannenbaum, who had felt the force and lasting consequence of a criminal conviction, presents the
basic principles of labelling theory, perhaps the most enduring and influential set of ideas associated with
critical criminology:
The person becomes the thing he is described as being … the emphasis is upon the conduct that is
disapproved of … The harder they work to reform evil, the greater the evil grows under their hands
… The way out is through a refusal to dramatise the evil (1938: 20).
Tannenbaum could triangulate his theoretical formulations with what he saw and felt as a prisoner, with
what he knew of the way prison was perceived by those outside, and how it was presented by those
invested in its workings. Tannenbaum was convinced the labelling effect of criminal justice contact ‘plays
a greater role in making the criminal than perhaps any other experience’ (1938: 21). This juxta-positioning
of intimate experience and intellectual effort lies at the core of convict criminology and resurfaced in the
life and career of John Irwin, the pivotal scholar behind its origins and development in the USA in the
1990s.
Launching with Attitude: The Invention of Convict Criminology in the USA
In 1952, aged 23, John Irwin robbed a petrol station in Los Angeles and was sentenced to five years in
prison. During some of that time he developed a taste and an aptitude for learning and started to study
through a university affiliated extension programme. On release he began an undergraduate degree in
physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) before being persuaded, by the eminent US
criminologist Donald Cressey, to switch to sociology, with a major in criminology. Irwin was unsettled and
surprised that he could not recognize his experiences of imprisonment in the prevailing academic
literature on prison life:
I was introduced to the sociology of the prison, particularly to some of the new theories about the
inmate social system. I considered the theories, tested them against information that I could dig
out of my memory, and discovered they did not fit. Extended discussions with Professor Cressey
eventually led us to interview many ex-convicts and revise the current theories (Irwin 1980: xxi).
Page 3 of 25
Thus conceived is the project and method of convict criminology in a nutshell: how can direct, first-hand
experience of imprisonment correspond with its theorization and academic representation in criminology.
It led to the development of a conceptual model of prisoner’s social relations, the importation model,
which has become a mainstay of penal theory (Irwin and Cressey 1962). Rather than Gresham Sykes’s
(1958) ‘Society of Captives’ model of prisoners’ identities being formed primarily through solidarity with
each other’s common predicament as prisoners, Irwin and Cressey showed how prisoners bring their many
cultural habits and social bonds into the prison to shape their identity in prison instead of leaving them at
the gate as Sykes had proposed.
John Irwin never concealed his criminal convictions and although his successful academic career preceded
the formation of the US convict criminology group in 1997, his outstanding academic reputation and status
meant that his endorsement and support for the movement was instrumental to convict criminology’s
emergence. Reviewing the structural contexts for this emergence, Ross (2021) identifies the major
p. 914 significance of ↵ the massive growth of incarceration in the USA during the 1970s and 80s, heavily
fuelled by a crackdown on drug use and accompanied by the aggressive and predatory policing of African-
American communities. Several individuals caught up in this carceral expansion emerged from their
sentences and followed Irwin’s path into academic study. Like Irwin, they quickly became disillusioned
with the criminology courses they had studied and were now starting to teach at university. Meeting with
Irwin in the mid-1990s and comparing their more recent experiences to his, they reported their sense of a
discipline obsessed with intrinsic criminal difference: ‘many criminologists … see [criminals] as less than
human, as inferior or evil deviants’ (Irwin 2013: xix). Alongside an anthropological fascination with ‘exotic
specimens’ in the booming and restructured US university system, criminology seemed to ‘tolerate or
participate in the inhumane and counterproductive treatment’ (Irwin 2013: xix) of prisoners by fostering
an ideology of pathological, essential difference.
The toxic implication of much conventional US criminology was that prison is where ‘monsters’ are kept
away from ordinary folk and trained to be less ‘monstrous’. By contrast, what these ex-convicts knew as
scholars was that most prisoners were people quite like themselves, but they found this knowledge
counted for almost nothing. In US criminology departments, some said they felt themselves compromised
by having to teach an approach to crime they did not believe in and could not reconcile with their own
experience. Having been through a variety of criminal justice procedures, culminating in imprisonment,
their knowledge of its shortcomings, injustices, and idiocies combined with their experiences of its
pervasive and enduring stigma (see Tietjen and Kavish 2021) should be welcomed by the discipline, not
rejected, Irwin told them. Inspired by their sense of collective potential, this group of scholars resolved to
announce themselves to the 1997 American Society of Criminology annual conference. Their panel
‘Convicts Critique Criminology: The Last Seminar’ was the first time a group of self-declared ex-criminals,
ex-prisoners or ex-convicts presented themselves as academics with something distinctive to say about
the discipline and criminal justice. A larger alliance of supportive non-convicted criminologists
(sometimes referred to as ‘non-cons’), such as, among others, Jeffrey Ian Ross, William S. Treaga and
Barbara Owen, emerged from the 1997 ASC panel and in 2003 the first anthology of explicitly articulated
convict criminology was published (Ross and Richards 2003). This foundational collection established the
academic viability of the model and the credentials for its originality. Combining inputs from convicted
and non-convicted academics has since become a hallmark of convict criminology, demonstrating the
Page 4 of 25
potential of working across the penal divide. Ross and Stephen Richards subsequently guided Convict
Criminology along two principal forms of activity: collective publishing projects and teaching or
mentoring ex-con graduate students into professional positions. Along with other core members of the
founding group, such as Rick Jones, Alan Mobley, Chuck Terry, and Greg Newbold, Ross and Richards have
devoted substantial resources to correspondence, teaching, support and co-ordination. As a direct result of
their work, convict criminology in the US has grown and flourished. Much of this work is invisible and does
not register in conventional metrics of academic performance but without it there would be no convict
criminology (Richards et al. 2018; Tietjen 2019).
Since 1997, convict criminology in the US has made its presence felt in each of the subsequent annual
gatherings of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) by organizing panels and roundtable discussions.
In 2020, this work achieved recognition when the Convict Criminology Division of the ASC was formally
established. This secures convict criminology as a distinctive current and influential collective presence in
p. 915 the ↵ largest association of professional criminologists in the world. This work has been supplemented,
and in some senses pre-figured, by the establishment in Canada of the Journal of Prisoners on Prison (JPP) in
1988. The JPP embodies many of the principles that convict criminology promotes. It publishes prisoners
accounts and analysis of imprisonment, crime and punishment in a regular peer-reviewed journal format.
It’s formation and survival is testimony to the vitality of prisoner and ex-prisoner voices.
As the criminal justice system in the USA has created the largest convict population on the planet, it is
understandable that convict criminology has been an academic movement mostly associated with
criminology in the USA. However, the field has started to grow across parts of Europe and South America.
In Italy, through the work of Elton Kalica, Francesca Vianello, Alvise Sbraccia, Simone Santorso,
Alessandro Maculan, and others at the Universities of Padua and Bologna, convict criminology has begun
to establish itself. In 2019 an international conference of convict criminologists was hosted by the
University of Padua resulting in another significant milestone—the publication of the first largely
European collection of convict criminology (Ross and Vianello 2021). It includes contributors from the USA
and South America and succeeds in establishing the diverse scholarship emerging in Italy. It demonstrates
the potential for convict criminology to become more widespread across Europe.
While there is little evidence that convict criminology has gained any traction in Africa, Asia or the
Caribbean, in South America, particularly in Argentina and Brazil, there are positive indications that
convict criminology perspectives and practice are starting to emerge (see Ross and Darke 2019). South
America has some of the highest rates of incarceration in the world and large prisoner populations.
Alliances are being developed with a radical university sector that combines prisoners’ eagerness to learn
with a distinctively South American practice of prisoner self-organization (Weis 2021; Darke 2018). It is
starting to produce distinctive potentials.
However, unless convict criminology is to remain a Northern and androcentric perspective, it will need to
adapt and respond to a multitude of local and global challenges. Among these are the tendency of convict
criminology to be composed of and reflect men’s experiences of incarceration. These contexts and issues
form the basis of the next two sections and are followed by a detailed engagement with the methodological
and epistemological issues of lived experience around which convict criminology stakes its claims.
Page 5 of 25
Just Boys Doing the Business? Women’s Challenges in, and to, Convict
Criminology
The historic tendency of convict criminology to consist mostly of white men has been subject to critical
scrutiny (Belknap 2015). Belknap’s intervention in the USA prompted both a vigorous defence of convict
criminology’s efforts to be meaningful to marginalized and oppressed groups and a redoubling of those
efforts in the USA. Convict criminology in the USA is now formally recognized as a Division of the American
Society of Criminology and women occupy several leading roles on the executive board of the Division. A
sub-group of feminist convict criminology reflects and consolidates their presence (Ortiz et al. 2022).
Similar gender dynamics prevailed on the formation of convict criminology in the UK, which was also
p. 916 almost entirely composed of white men. ↵ So this section of the chapter focuses on why women may
‘struggle to stick their heads above the parapet and label themselves as convict criminologists’ (Darley and
Earle 2022). Darley draws from her experiences of ‘outing’ herself as a convict criminologist to insist on
the merits of ensuring the voices of female academics who have experience of the criminal justice system
are heard loud and clear.
As president of the American Society of Criminology, Belknap (2015) raised some of the concerns she had
about the Convict Criminology movement in the USA. Specifically, she criticized convict criminology for its
predominantly white and male make-up. Belknap suggested that the network often misses the academic
contributions of people from marginalized or oppressed groups who have experience of the criminal
justice system. These arguments in the USA beg questions about why the number of female academics who
are involved with convict criminology in the UK, convicted or otherwise, is so low. Why might women who
have experienced the inside of a prison cell not feel they can identify with, contribute to or benefit from
involvement with the convict criminology movement in the UK? One response is to present it as a numbers
game. Ross et al. (2016) adopt the ‘available population’ thesis and suggests that fewer women align
themselves with convict criminology than men simply because both the UK and US prison populations are
predominantly made up of men. As a result, the pool of women for convict criminology to draw from is
relatively small.
The gender dynamics that generate massive gender differentials in rates of incarceration in which 90–95
per cent of the global prison population is made up of men are the result of disparities in social and
personal power, relative privilege and patriarchal hierarchy—they reflect the violence and iniquities of the
prevailing gender order (Connell 1987). Given convict criminology’s preferences for qualitative and
experiential methodologies, it is to the meanings of such experience rather than the numbers of a prison
population that convict criminology should turn. Ross et al. (2016) go on to argue that women may also be
less likely to go to university after leaving the prison system than men and therefore don’t acquire the
academic credentials that may lead them to identify as convict criminologists. In the UK, the Prison
Reform Trust (2017) suggests that for many women who go to prison, the realities of rebuilding a family
torn apart by a custodial sentence often takes priority over their own development. Even in the twenty first
century this is not necessarily the case for men who are less likely to shoulder the daily responsibilities of
child raising and may thus find themselves more available for a university education. In the UK, women in
convict criminology are just beginning to expose and examine these issues (Bozkurt et al. 2021).
Page 6 of 25
The way women experience crime, criminalization, victimization and prison is also very different to the
way they are experienced by men (Masson et al. 2021). Just one, small but indicative example: in the UK
women are much more likely to be serving short sentences for less serious and less violent crimes than
men. More than 70 per cent of women entering prison in 2016 in the UK were sentenced to six months or
less (Prison Reform Trust 2017). Accordingly, there are not many women who spend long enough in prison
to engage meaningfully (if at all) with prison-based education programmes offered to them, hence their
educational development is much less likely to start there than it is for male prisoners. However, the
reason Darley thinks many women might choose not to identify as a convict criminologist is the particular
stigma that having a conviction can bring for a woman. She herself sincerely believed she would face
judgement and stigmatization as a woman who has served time in prison by stepping up to receive her
convict criminology badge. These feelings are theorized within feminist criminology as the price women
p. 917 pay for being ‘twice damned’ as doubly deviant, transgressing against ↵ both the law of the land and
the conventions of femininity in a white, hetero-normative, patriarchal society. The ‘good old boys club’
that tore her away from her role as a mother and wife and punished her excessively harshly, led to her
feeling she was a failure both to her family and to society. Like many women, she spent years hiding that
part of her identity from even those closest to her and it was difficult to get over those hurdles and finally
‘own her past and her mistakes’. The presence of convict criminology makes that task more possible. This
is not to say that men in convict criminology do not also face and feel stigmatization, but that these
feelings are as powerfully differentiated by gender as they are by class and race (Tyler 2019). Convict
criminology is uniquely well placed to attend to these differences if it does not deny them.
As Miller et al. (1986), Owen (1998), and Gonnerman (2005) argue, men and women respond differently to
prison. Research has shown that many women who have served custodial prison sentences have had more
experience of trauma and inequality in larger numbers than in the general population (Karatzias et al.
2018) and, often, in different forms from men. After leaving prison, women are also subjected to particular
forms of stigmatization, judgement and many barriers whilst trying to get their lives back on track
(Schnittker and Bacak 2013). This can often lead to women feeling hopeless and resistant to change.
(Maruna et al. 2004; Gålnander 2019). If convict criminology is to be relevant to women in the UK, it needs
to consider the implications of these experiences more thoroughly and more widely.
Buck et al. (2021) suggest the individual, emotional and structural implications of activating any lived
experience in a public forum or platform require careful consideration. It is essential for the development
of our knowledge of women’s experiences of the criminal justice system that we consider how the academy
might more meaningfully and supportively engage with those with lived experience. Involvement in the
academy when you hold a criminal conviction can include many shame-inducing moments, with all their
accompanying distress and destabilization. Darley’s own experiences of disclosure and exposure of her
convictions within academia are varied. She says she’s received shrugs, hugs, sympathy and applause and
on one memorably telling occasion, was totally ignored. Given what we know about adverse childhood
experiences and traumatic situations that women have often experienced prior to going to prison, coupled
with societal conditioning that has taught women to keep their heads down and put up with their lot in life,
it’s maybe not surprising that women don’t want to build a career around something that may involve
Page 7 of 25
them reliving their criminal justice system experiences over and over again. However, acting on this lived
experience through criminological practice can shine a much-needed light on more of the gendered
nuances of the way the criminal justice system operates on women.
Brene Brown (2006: 45) writes eloquently about the role shame plays in women’s lives, and importantly
about how it is internalized and experienced. She defines shame as ‘an intensely painful feeling or
experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging’. She contrasts
shame with guilt, which she defines as a feeling that results from behaving in a flawed or bad way rather
than someone being flawed or bad themselves. Shame, like so many things, is constructed socially. It is
generated from social and cultural expectations that are reinforced by individuals and groups and often
consolidated by media representations of ‘criminal women’. For women, shame is felt more acutely when
it concerns appearance, body image, sexuality, family, motherhood, parenting, professional identity and
work, mental and physical health, ageing, religion, speaking out, and surviving trauma. (So, not many
things that women are affected by in going to prison then!)
p. 918 ↵ Imogen Tyler (2019) makes vital connections between individual shame and stigma and the way that
stigma serves our political and societal machines. Tyler reminds us that stigmatization arises in contexts
that are shaped by unequal relations of power, and that penal systems and wider criminal justice systems
are functional to those relationships. Tyler’s work (2013; 2019) shows how stigmatization is increasingly
employed as a device to procure consent for punitive policies directed at those living at the bottom of the
class structure. It is not simply a by-product of neoliberal ideologies and policies, not an unfortunate form
of collateral damage, but integral to securing the affective architecture of neo-liberal governance. In short,
stigma is a tool that guides people’s emotional investments in ‘self-improvement’ by generating and
endorsing forms of contempt for those whose investments appear insufficient or unworthy. These feelings
of stigma and being stigmatized are particularly keenly felt by women who find themselves on the wrong
side of the prison fence. And there must be a place for these women in convict criminology. The potential
of a feminist convict criminology that can create this space for women has been demonstrated in the USA
and has begun to make itself felt in the UK (Bozkurt et al. 2021; Ortiz et al. 2022; Darley and Earle 2022).
Take Off in the UK: Taking Prisoners to Criminology and Students to Pris
oners
The politics and cultural resonance of crime and punishment in the UK have their own dynamics that differ
considerably from those in the USA. The scale of the US carceral complex dwarfs that of the UK, and indeed
every country on earth. The prison population in the USA is nearly 30 times larger than that of England and
Wales. Prisons and prisoners in the UK occupy a different place in the public imagination shaped by our
specific history, struggles for reform, and varying political institutions. Although the racial differentials in
the UK prison systems match and at times exceed that of the US system (Phillips 2012), the different scale
and particular colonial histories of the two states mean comparisons must be drawn with care. In this
section we plot the distinctive ways in which convict criminology has emerged in Britain as it seeks to build
a profile in different prisons and universities and among prisoners and ex-prisoners. This work started in
2011 when the first convict criminology panel was convened at the annual conference of the British Society
Page 8 of 25
of Criminology (Earle 2011; Aresti 2012). This led to a number of developments including a symposium of
criminologists, students and prison activists meeting in London in 2017. In 2018, the British Journal of
Criminology published an account of interviews conducted with many of those present about their
perspectives on convict criminology in the UK (Earle 2018).
The development of convict criminology in the UK has been led by criminologists with experience of
imprisonment and supportive non-imprisoned academics (i.e. ‘non-cons’) who have forged partnerships
within their respective universities that reach into prisons. For convict criminologists, higher education
programmes linked to prisons are particularly significant because their transformative potential is well
established in theories of desistance (Honeywell 2021; Darke and Aresti 2016) and corresponds to their
own experiences. Several UK-based convict criminologists have themselves emerged from such
programmes and are now involved in developing more. These are often built around criminology modules.
At the University of Westminster in London, for example, a mentoring scheme was launched in 2013 to
p. 919 support men and women in ↵ prison studying social science (Darke et al. 2020). Westminster based
convict criminologists have developed higher education courses at HMPs Pentonville, Grendon, and
Coldingley. A distinctive feature of these courses has been to connect ‘inside learners’ (prison students),
with ‘outside learners’ (university students) at a similar level of study. The Making Links programme at
HMP Pentonville is coordinated with José Aguiar, an award-winning educational consultant attached to
the prison. Making Links introduces the ‘inside students’ to the discipline of criminology with a specific
focus on prison and post-prison experience.
Many of the ‘inside learners’ in UK prisons are already studying degrees with The Open University (see
Earle and Mehigan 2020). The Open University has provided higher education to people in prison since
1971. A dedicated Open University team operates a complex delivery and support system called Students in
Secure Environments (SiSE) in recognition of the small number of students in secure settings subject to
mental health rather than criminal sanction (MacFarlane and Pike 2020). Almost 2000 students per year
choose courses from an Open University prospectus but there is, as yet, no dedicated convict criminology
option.
In 2015, Dr Bill Davies of Leeds Beckett University secured the support of his department to develop a
Learning Together programme that would take third year Leeds Beckett criminology undergraduates to
study with prisoners in a high security prison, HMP Full Sutton. The programme was able to mobilize
around conventional students’ interest in prison and prisoners, and prisoners’ long-standing frustration
at not being able to access face-to-face higher education courses.
Supported by Ruth Armstrong and Amy Ludlow from the Learning Together team at Cambridge University
(see, Ludlow, Armstrong, and Bartels 2019), the programme started in January 2017, with crucial input
from members of the prison management team. An underpinning tenet of the Leeds Beckett/HMP Full
Sutton Learning Together programme was parity of access and achievement. It was education for all or
education for none. The fundamental principle guiding the project is that all students accessing the course,
from the prison or the university, would be eligible for equal university credits upon successful completion
of the module (20 Level 6 CATs) and that there would be no consideration of the type of conviction of a
prisoner during the application process.
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In 2019, the delivery of the criminology education programme at HMP Full Sutton secured the support of
the Ministry of Justice through an open tender system. That Davies, an ex-prisoner turned criminologist,
had won a government contract to deliver education in HMPPS was a significant milestone for convict
criminology. Dr Davies insists that although his contribution has been significant, it could not have
happened without supportive non-convicted colleagues at Leeds Beckett and elsewhere. These forms of
support and solidarity are a key feature of convict criminology. Pushing against the constraints imposed by
prison systems and universities is a characteristic of convict criminology. With colleagues at Leeds
Beckett, Davies has expanded the range of study options and developed plans for a prison-to-college
pathway. This will allow students to register to study at Leeds Beckett while on temporary release from the
custodial element of their sentence. Other initiatives in the prison have also grown from the simple
ambition of a convict criminologist to give something back to the prisoner community he emerged from
(Davies 2018). Leeds Beckett university donated fifteen computers to HMP Full Sutton to use within the
educational provisions; over 300 books have been donated to the Libraries at HMP Full Sutton and HMP
New Hall, and each of the prison libraries now has an academic section. In 2023 Davies ensured an
p. 920 imprisoned Leeds ↵ Beckett PhD student successfully completed their viva, possibly the first PhD thesis
to be developed and defended in an English high security prison.
Peer support remains another important element of the way convict criminology has developed in the UK.
This derives from a basic understanding of peer support as being the embodiment of values of mutual
reciprocity, shared problem solving, empathy and experiential exchange (Buck 2022). This typically
involves an assumption about the possibility of sharing experience taken from the similarities in prison
sentences, yet it is also a far more complex proposition. This complexity starts from the contention of
what or who a peer is: what and who constitutes a peer is subjective and might include close friends,
associates, other people in a shared environment or task. However, as Shiner (1999: 557) indicates ‘the
question remains what makes somebody like us?’. It leads into tricky issues of essentialism, identity and
culture. People construct and mould identities in relation to an array of characteristics which can emanate
from a range of sources. Shiner (1999) suggests these can include the roles social actors take on, group
categories they feel attachment to, and experiences that they have. In the prison environment, or for
someone with lived experience of prison, a peer could be identified through being someone who belongs to
the same group category of the mentee—a prisoner or ex-prisoner who has the experiences of
imprisonment (Schreeche-Powell 2019). This implies a real possibility that some of the experiences and
challenges that the mentee will be experiencing are familiar to the mentor from their own personal
experience.
Peer mentoring in prisons is developing momentum and influence (Buck 2022). It involves the
establishment of a relationship between two individuals with some aspects of lateral symmetry. A mentor
may operate as a role model or experiential authority figure who has successfully navigated the path the
mentee will soon take. Knowledge of some of the difficulties in recognizing the path or negotiating the
obstacles allows the mentor to support the progress of the mentee. In the prison environment this
relationship is often related to narrow instrumental goals surrounding effective resettlement, social
inclusion and desistance. However, mentoring may also improve mental health outcomes and the
wellbeing of the participants (Buck 2022).
The final part of this section offers a case study illustration of what convict criminology can look like.
Page 10 of 25
Case study: From prison cell to prison research and the making of a convict
criminologist
Dr David Honeywell is a co-investigator on a large-scale prison suicide prevention study. The aim of the
study is to create a talking therapy tailor-made for prisoners with suicidal thoughts and behaviours. David
Honeywell was recruited initially as a full-time ‘service user’ researcher on the project. During the study’s
early stages he was tasked with leading ‘service user involvement’ in the project. Public and patient
involvement has become increasingly mainstream and expected in health service research and service
development. For this study, the research team wanted Honeywell’s input because he could offer lived
experience of suicidal ideation and behaviours during various periods of imprisonment and the necessary
academic credentials to develop research designs and methodologies. Almost uniquely, Honeywell could
offer to draw from his own experiences of being in prison with mental health issues as a young man as well
as his academic and research training. Unlike many people conducting academic research he knows what it
is like to be left in prison struggling with mental health issues and without access to support or
p. 921 interventions. He hopes the study will help generate ↵ services that correspond more appropriately and
sensitively with the needs of people in prison because of his input.
Although Honeywell’s prison experiences are now in the distant past, his memories and insights are
available to inform his teaching and research. He finds it easier to revisit memories of prison from inside
the seminar room and lecture theatre than in the prisons where these memories were made because being
in a prison always leaves a hidden emotional and psychological impact. Since becoming a university
lecturer, Honeywell has taken groups of students into the same prison where he was himself a prisoner.
Doing so involves a mix of emotions ranging from anxiety to pride but he finds the more sustained
research immersion in prison environments more challenging.
Honeywell’s contribution to the suicide prevention study has been more restricted than he would have
liked because although all the prison officials and academics backed his involvement, other institutional
obstacles could not be overcome. David Honeywell says that ‘funding bodies who insist on service user
involvement in research studies urgently need to work with the criminal justice system and government to help
create a smoother passage for prison researchers with lived experience to gain access into prisons.’
David Honeywell’s struggles to bring his experience of imprisonment into the production of criminological
knowledge are intensely personal. In the last part of the chapter, we explore the dilemmas, implications
and potentials of his, and others’, efforts to make their experience count for something in criminology.
Experts by Experience, Lived Experience and Convict Criminology
The promise of convict criminology is to offer the wider discipline something vital it needs and is lacking.
As one prisoner put it ‘prisoners, although they understand what is wrong with the system better than any
criminologist, judge, cop or outsider, have the credibility of elves’ (St. John 1999). All the authors of this
chapter have felt the grip of the state tighten its hold on them in ways those who have not been imprisoned
can only imagine. It can be crushing, it can be caring, and includes the vastness that lies between, but it is
usually more of the former than the latter. As hard as it is to get to know this experience, it is pretty much
Page 11 of 25
impossible to forget. The afterlife of a prison sentence casts a very long shadow. One is continually
reminded how long and how dark this shadow is when required to complete application forms for various
social institutions from banks to universities or need to travel from one nation to another. One’s future is
never entirely one’s own because a part of one’s past is owned by the state (Titjen and Kavish 2021). The
shadow means that a prison sentence renders a person property of the state.
The more critical currents in criminology try to avoid the consideration of crime and criminals as essential,
fixed categories. They are recognized as social constructions we are all complicit in maintaining rather
than inevitable, unchanging categories of experience or personhood (Aliverti et al. 2021). There is thus a
self-created paradox for convict criminology in embracing critical criminology’s problematization of
crime and the criminal as viable categories of analysis. It means embodying a contradiction that appears to
accept and naturalize those classifications—crimes, criminals—by adopting the convict status in the name
convict criminology, while also embracing the proposition that crime has no essential or ontological
reality.
p. 922 ↵ The Russian philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, used to insist that the mark of failure as a poet, and
thus also as a human being, was to accept someone else’s description of oneself. The convict criminology
group in the USA invented the name in the 1990s with all its labelling connotations, contradictions, and
alliterative convenience. More recently, it has embraced a critical disaggregation by exploring a diverse
terminology that refers explicitly to the politics of being convicted or otherwise enmeshed in criminal
justice. These include ‘formerly incarcerated’, ‘system impacted’ and ‘system involved’ (Ortiz et al. 2022)
as well as ‘people with convictions’ (Buck et al. 2021).
More positively, the convenient couplet of ‘convict criminology’ also has a useful subversive resonance
that challenges the assumed dichotomy that some people study crime (criminologists) while other people
are convicted of it (criminals). The convict criminologist is self-evidently a bit of both. The image and idea
of a person with criminal convictions who is also a criminologist disrupts the prevailing image of the
convict as a disparaged, pathological object. It implicitly connects a coercive institution of confinement at
the base of the social hierarchy (prison) with another institution at its apex designed to open and extend
human potentials (the university). The convict is the exemplar of exclusion and low social value, an abject
pariah marked out for contempt; ‘the professor’, by contrast, is an exemplar of social value, inclusion and
institutional belonging (at least in theory, if not always in practice). As such, when these two worlds
coincide in the identity of the convict criminologist, the effect is troubling—or refreshing. Convict
criminology is thus implicitly a critique of mainstream criminology from the standpoint of a theory of
experience.
As convict criminologists, our relationship to criminology is complicated because it is personal and direct.
The feminist assertion in the 1960s and 1970s that ‘the personal is political’ propelled the women’s
movement into connecting the daily realities of women’s lives with social structures, political power, and
historical process. Similarly, in the 1990s, critical race theory (Delgado and Stefancic 2012) emerged from
Black people’s experiences of law in US criminal courts, noting the difference between what the law
promised in theory and what it delivered in practice. In a comparable fashion, for convict criminology, the
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criminology is personal because it involves finding our criminology not just in books and research but in
our own experiences of criminal justice. Lived experience of crimes and punishments does not replace
theoretical abstraction and conventional research, but conditions and supplements both.
That everyone in prison ‘does their own time’ is part of the received wisdom of prisoners but Bernard
Stiegler (2008) points to some wider and potentially profound implications of this experience. He was not
a convict criminologist but a French philosopher who served five years in prison (for bank robberies,
1978–1983) during which time he encountered an unexpected philosophical education that propelled his
subsequent career to the heights of the French academy (Earle 2021). Stiegler mentions the ‘après-coup’—
a French term from Freudian psychoanalysis that refers to something an individual experiences at a
certain time but makes sense of only later. Just as a hard blow to the head may produce the delayed effects
of concussion, so ‘after the blow’ (après-coup) of imprisonment, there can be a reckoning with it beyond
the familiar pains of penal concussion. It is an experience that leaves traces that may be gathered together
to be made sense of, after the event, after a necessary period of time.
Stiegler explains the connections he found between his life, his work and his prison cell like this:
I thus discovered what one calls in philosophy the phenomenological epokhe–the suspension of the
p. 923 world, of the thesis of the world, that is, of the spontaneous belief in the existence ↵ of the
world, which constitutes in Husserl’s language the natural attitude –what I previously called
ordinary life. I discovered this philosophical theory and practice by chance and by accident, long
before studying it in the works of Husserl: I deduced it from the situation … [imprisonment].
Stiegler’s removal from the natural world of ‘ordinary life’ by his imprisonment brought aspects of it into
view that would otherwise remain invisible, taken for granted. For the convict criminologists the ‘après-
coup’ is the process of integrating and analysing the experience of imprisonment along the axis of
criminology, perhaps some years after release. The singularity of this personal experience may be
relatively finite and particular to the individual but, as Walter Benjamin (2015: 198) argues ‘a remembered
event is infinite because it is a key to everything that happened before and after it’. The specific particulars
of the penal experience—loss of liberty, enforced co-habitation, regime imposition, forceful and
sometimes despotic authority accompanied by the pervasive threat of violence—make the experience
powerfully significant to anyone living in a liberal democracy where the ideology of the ‘free individual’
choosing how to live every detail of their life reigns supreme.
Lived Experience and Critical Encounters
The recent growth of interest in lived experience of imprisonment in criminology, penal policy formation,
and activism derives from a broader and growing sociological concern for what social exclusion actually
‘feels like’. Jewkes (2012: 14), for example, argues that the lived experience of incarceration has been
‘flattened by the overarching dominance and disproportionate power of quantitative methods’ and that
‘bald statistics conceal complex lives and important stories’. Writing with a group of imprisoned women in
Page 13 of 25
the USA, significantly, Bosworth et al. (2005: 259) put their collective finger on the issue: ‘Criminologists
tend to present their analysis of the prison in the form of inhuman data. As a result, prison studies have
become cold, calculated, surgical … Why? So no one will care. Keep it statistical, inhuman, no compassion’.
While recent criminology in the UK has been more invested in sensitive and insightful prison
ethnographies, Booth and Harriot (2020: 199), two women with experience of incarceration, policy
activism, and academic qualification, throw down a gauntlet to criminologists: ‘Where are the authored
pieces of research by those that have lived it; indeed where are the co-authored pieces with you?’ They
recount their variable experiences of contributing to research as subjects and of being treated with varying
degrees of neglect by powerful institutions (universities) that gain from their contribution but give little
back:
Our interaction with academia as individuals within the system, has, in the first instance, been
about pure and power-laden ‘expert’ extraction of knowledge. You ask us, we tell you; our identity
and role as mere lived experience of the topic under review, our lives reduced to snippets of
anonymous quotes used to build a premise, a position (p. 207).
Harriot and Booth advocate for more inclusion of people with lived experience of criminal justice
interventions to be included as active partners in research. This appeal for more, and more egalitarian, co-
production, they suggest, will help to generate better research questions and new methodologies. In
p. 924 pursuit of these methodologies Harriot ↵ and Buck have embraced and developed wider co-
productions (Buck et al. 2021) by adopting a reflective storytelling approach that draws critically from
other policy fields where ‘experiential and academic knowledge; lived experience as well as research
findings… reconnect policy to the world in which it operates and to the reader’ (Beresford et al. 2016: 3).
Allan Weaver’s account of his desistance co-authored with Beth Weaver, remains an unusual and
exceptionally powerful example of synthesizing lived experience and criminological knowledge (Weaver
and Weaver 2013). By bringing a singular autobiography into correspondence with wider empirical
research and critical theory, the authors develop an example of co-production that can engage ordinary
practitioners, service managers, policy-makers and academics (see also Brierly 2019).
A recent initiative in the UK, the Centre for Knowledge Equity, seeks to ‘reboot the DNA of
leadership’ (Sandhu 2017) by insisting on the vitality of lived experience leadership in organizations
seeking change. Sandhu’s manifesto for the wider recognition of lived experience calls for a redistribution
of ‘knowledge equity’ that recognizes more explicitly the way actual experience of oppression and
exclusion are so rarely co-terminous with academic knowledge of oppression and exclusion. Drawing
inspiration from social movements around race, gender, social class, mental health and disability,
Sandhu’s claims resonate powerfully with developments in Southern criminology (Carrington et al. 2019)
that assert the ‘classical roots’ of criminology anchor and confine its scholars to power structures that
skew their vision and narrow their methods.
As a critical criminology, convict criminology can draw strength from the history of such movements,
particularly the decarcerative struggles in mental health against the use of asylums to define and segregate
certain people from the general population. The strength of this movement in the 1970s in Italy and the UK
Page 14 of 25
is particularly instructive. Franco Basaglia’s achievements in building an alliance of inmates, practitioners

and radical anti-psychiatrists that effectively transformed the mental health system in northern Italy by
closing down its notorious asylums and establishing non-carceral alternatives, demonstrates what can be
achieved (Foot 2015). It is an approach that mobilizes around slogans like ‘nothing about us, without us’
and ‘those closest to the problem are closest to the solution’ (see Maruna 2017). In the USA the ‘Leading
with Conviction’ group goes so far as to assert that ‘the movement to end mass incarceration will not get
across the finishing line’ unless it is ‘led by formerly incarcerated people’ (Martin 2017).
One drawback of relying on such inspiration to establish the case for convict criminology is that convict
criminologists are not seeking to be accepted ‘as criminals’, or for their supposed ‘criminality’ to be better
appreciated for ‘what it really is’. No convict criminologist (as far as we are aware) takes pride in their
conviction or is oppressed by the absence of such recognition. They may contest or accept its legitimacy
but the basis of convict criminology is not identarian in that there is no attempt (or motivation) to embrace
and champion ‘being a criminal’ in the way that mental health and disability movements, gay liberation,
black liberation or women’s liberation movements have claimed their identity as a mobilizing feature of
their project (see Táíwò 2022).
Radical mental health activists in Canada and elsewhere have started to develop critiques of the trend, as
they identify it, for management consultants to colonize the discourse of the lived experience movement
for the short-term gain of particular individuals and against the prospects of long-term transformation
(Beresford 2020; Byrne and Wykes 2020). Voronka (2016) warns of the risks of essentializing lived
experience without heeding the lessons developed by critical theorists on the dangers of strategic
essentialism. Drawing from post-colonial theory and a close reading of Joan Scott’s (1991) canonical
p. 925 feminist essay ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Varonka outlines the ↵ drawbacks that accompany the
careless deployment of lived experience. Speaking without irony from the lived experience of lived
experience work she declares ‘I have learned through trial and error both the benefits and the drawbacks of
deploying lived experience as a universalising subject-position to authorise my knowledge’. The risks of
reifying notions of difference rather than considering how and why differences are produced are often
neglected in favour of what appear to be short term and narrow gains. As she points out, the
epistemological and ontological arguments about the crisis of representation that accompany such
strategies have animated and divided social movements and postcolonial scholars for over fifty years.
Convict criminology can attend to, and engage with, these arguments to develop a more robust case for its
distinctive contribution to the discipline. It cannot neglect them or pay lip service to them and thrive as a
critical movement.
The sociological challenge to assemble concrete accounts of how we live, how we labour and how our social
practice shapes society is both the bread and butter of social inquiry and a relatively mundane existential
constant of life as a social scientist. It refers to ‘the profundity of the lived’ (Sartre 1957: 165), the
extraordinary richness of human capacities to live with the messiness of being in the world and the vitality
of our attempts to impose order on it and make sense of it. The recent turn in criminology toward sensory
experience and aesthetics (Herrity et al. 2021) is significant but complex, and while convict criminology
might embrace and reflect the trend, it should also be subject to critical scrutiny. Without addressing the
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long-standing and important issues about the epistemological significance of experience, convict
criminology risks proceeding more by insinuation than sound argument. A contribution to this critical
scrutiny and argument is outlined here.
Risks of Living and the Dangers of Lived-Experience
Contemporary interest in lived experience can easily be presented as a simple innovation, something ‘new’
‘urgent’ or ‘fresh’ but it also has a darker side. It might, for example, reflect a kind of fatalistic exhaustion
(or exasperation) with evidence-based, positivistic social science and specifically the persistent failures of
penal reform to curb the growth of imprisonment or mitigate its harms. It is an interest that coincides
neatly with a politically promoted (and motivated) scepticism toward ‘experts and evidence’ and all they
might be assumed to represent in terms of a contempt for the common sense values of ‘ordinary people’.
As such, the renewed interest in the value of lived experience may actually represent a profound pessimism
that is easily exploited by calculating political opportunists, as much as it does a new dawn of critical
inclusion. On the one hand, convict criminology might be embraced as a significant riposte to the
dominance of the risk factor paradigm in criminal justice and its mechanistic intellectualism that tends to
represent people’s lives as aggregates of data. On the other hand, it might be recognized as another of the
anxious symptoms of modernity’s crisis of confidence.
Lived experience is often considered to be a form of unarticulated, inviolable practical consciousness

which is implicitly authentic. As Phillips (2000: 313) argues, the more authenticity is championed, the
more it risks becoming ‘an unconscious parody of honesty. It coerces us into believing that there is a way
of being that takes the difficulty out of truth-telling’. Experience is complicated. As the cultural theorist
p. 926 Raymond ↵ Williams (1977: 132) points out ‘[p]ractical consciousness is almost always different from
official consciousness … for it is what is actually being lived rather than what it is thought is being lived’.
For Williams, ‘experience’ encompassed a pre-linguistic field which included all the factors shaping a
social reality, including unarticulated emotions and feelings beyond rational calculation. Existing at the
‘edge of semantic availability’ (Williams’s telling phrase) some experience may only be understood in
feelings that remain unspoken.
Williams was specifically concerned by the various ways working-class experience featured in, or was
excluded from, contemporary cultures of writing and representation. The complex realities of working-
class life were denied visibility, or were reduced to caricature in conventional social science almost as
much as they were in literary fiction. His work around popular culture’s ‘structures of feeling’ was
designed to redress this misapprehension of working-class experience. For Williams, literature, in the
form of the novel in particular, is the test of a language’s adequacy to experience, demonstrating the
means by which someone has the capacity to reflect on social and personal experience and make it
accessible, communicable and shareable. He describes structures of feeling as ‘not feeling against thought,
but thought as felt and feeling as thought; practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and
interrelating continuity’ (Williams 1977: 132). Williams’ formulations of ‘structures of feeling’ represent
both a potential theoretical tool and an intellectual tradition that can help convict criminology to make
Page 16 of 25
better sense of what is beyond the reach of conventional penal theory. Specifically, the sense that prisons
are not properly understood and that convict criminologists’ access to ‘lived experience’ can help account
for the gap between what they are imagined to be and what they actually are.
Reactionaries of Experience and Conservative Thinking
However, any tendency toward thinking of experience as raw and authentic, completely free of the artifice
and endless, empty innuendos of social construction, must be handled with caution. It is an argument that
has rumbled through social science, and beyond, for much of the last 100 years. To ignore those arguments
would be academically and intellectually negligent. There can, for example, be something politically
conservative in the focus on lived experience that should be anathema to critical and progressive
criminologists. For the conservative philosopher, Roger Scruton, the political rationale of conservatism is
focused on the way the world is much more than the way it should or could be. Conservatism is always
concerned with, and speaks most fluently to, ‘the surface of things’ (Scruton 1984: 45). Conservatism, as a
political project, invests mostly in the status quo and the way people live in the present rather than taking
much interest in any underlying realities or mysterious forces propelling change. Perhaps that is why the
British Conservative Party has successfully dominated UK politics for over 200 years. British Conservatism
likes to avoid the taint of ideology and presents itself as simply the natural party of government driven by
pragmatism, tradition, and ‘common sense’.
Conservative scepticism toward ‘grand theory’ or ‘meta-narratives’ is also recognizable in an intellectual

movement familiar to many critical criminologists: postmodernism. As with some variants of
postmodernism, Conservatism also has an abiding faith in bodily sensation as the principal vehicle of truth
(Ireland 1995). As the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton (1995) explains, ‘since I know where my left
p. 927 foot is at any ↵ particular moment without needing to use a compass, the body offers a mode of
cognition more intimate and internal than a now much scorned enlightenment rationality’. For
Conservatism, the simple truths of the body, of the senses, can be less disputed than the endlessly revised
evidence of science, the convolutions of historical materialism, or the apparent relativism of post-
modernism. Keep it simple. Keep it real. Lived experience is an accessible truth with no need for theory. An
expert-by-experience needs no further qualification.
The overwhelming force of contemporary capitalism’s insistence that ‘there is no alternative’, that there is
no escape from its relentless, increasingly timeless, logic of market individualism, ‘results in the
development of a nostalgia for different forms of immediacy that expresses itself in the longing for
authentic experiences and for the concrete life’ (Nilges 2020: 128). In the UK, particularly England, this
feeds, and feeds on, a potent nostalgic post-colonial melancholia that is forever looking backward with
unresolvable longing for a past that might replace the growing absence of a future (Gilroy 2004). Without a
horizon to move toward and a history it cannot recreate, political and cultural life in the UK, particularly
England, is dangerously stuck in the past.
As Southern theory and its variants within criminology expose the experiential contradictions at the core
of neoliberal racial capitalism (Connell 2007; Carrington et al. 2019), convict criminology will need to
attend to a wider literature and vision of the human subject and sociality. It might be noted, for example,
Page 17 of 25
that Achille Mbembe (2019) and Franz Fanon (1967), theorizing from beyond Europe’s narrowing
enclosures and colonial optics, insist on the viscerality of experience, of the vital exposure of one being to
another that colonial violence has fatally fixed to a necropolitics of endemic war, latent hostility, and the
persistent individuation of divisive racial logics. Convict criminology has much to gain from attending to
post-colonial theory and is well-placed to contribute to contemporary demands in universities to de-
colonize the curriculum, open their doors wider and reimagine their future (Earle and Mehigan 2020). As
Mbembe insists, it was Fanon’s direct engagement with therapeutic practice and the racism reproduced in
conventional psychiatry that made him an exemplar of the kind of activist scholar the world needs and
many convict criminologists aspire to be: ‘Fanon attended closely to people’s experience of surfaces and
depths, of lights and reflections, and of shadows’ (Mbembe 2019: 7).
Given the relevance of lived experience to the rationale of convict criminology, there is much to be gained
from revisiting the critical literature around lived experience that propelled the growth of cultural studies
in the 1980s. Stuart Hall (2021a 2021b), for example, was dismissive of the ‘experiential paradigm’,
famously clashing with the historian E. P. Thomson and others associated with the New Left, such as
Raymond Williams, over the issue. Hall’s scepticism is based on a concern that any faith in the untheorized
agency of people in under-specified historical conjunctures was likely to have only short-lived benefits. A
focus on feelings and experience could become little more than a self-authenticating tautology. For Hall, it
was not so much the feelings themselves that mattered but the way they were produced and interacted
with particular political referents and contexts. By radically under-estimating the complexity of social
struggles, not least around questions of race and racism, Hall argued that some of Williams and
Thompson’s Marxist analysis offered false hope and hopeless guarantees of triumph. By way of historical
example, Hall recalls the way the Narodniks (from the Russian ‘narod’ for ‘people’) of pre-revolutionary
Russia preferred to place their faith in the apparently organic instincts of the Russian peasantry rather
than the increasingly ‘scientific’ revolutionary programme of the Bolsheviks. Notwithstanding the
p. 928 alignment of most (but ↵ not all) peasants with the Tsarist regime and their affection for dynastic
succession over socialist revolution, Narodniks were convinced that the voice of the peasants was
inherently progressive because their lived experience of agriculture and nature was thought to be closer to
a universal human essence. As such, for Narodniks, the role of socialists and revolutionaries was simply to
amplify it or give it a platform. Convict criminologists may adopt this role in relation to prisoners, but they
can, and must, go further.
Notwithstanding his criticisms, Hall’s meticulous political arguments are themselves, however, almost
always couched in terms that value, articulate, and reflect feelings, emotions, and affect (Haider 2021).
Their enduring power and extraordinary intellectual range remain painfully relevant to criminology and
social science more generally, even though they draw from the beginning of the twentieth century to
theorize the politics of its closing phases under Thatcher’s neo-liberal influence. His arguments then,
about the role of social scientists as well as socialists, fell largely on deaf ears. His analysis of how people
have come to understand the costs of their profound separation from the lived, everyday experience of
working people under capitalism resonate as powerfully with the politics of the second decade of the
twenty-first century as they do with the prospects of convict criminology. The renewed convergence of
Page 18 of 25
interest in lived experience, populist politics, and conservative hegemony should alert convict
criminologists to the need for critical circumspection. Any tendencies toward an uncritical vitalism that
simply foregrounds experience at the expense of critical theory should be discouraged.
Conclusion: Are You Experienced?
Convict criminology responds to a basic challenge posed by Harcourt (2001) on what it might take to
reshape the degraded image of the prisoner in the public imagination. By its very existence it subverts the
abject status of the convict/prisoner as an object of suspicion circulating darkly in the social depths and
elevates it to one of the most venerated of social institutions. It declares ‘convicts can become professors’,
‘convicts can teach’, ‘convicts can be public intellectuals, authors, researchers, students’. This subversion
is valuable and inspiring but there are recurring tensions in convict criminology between the ontological
and the epistemological—the extent to which it is a struggle for self-realization, to become a
criminologist against the odds, and a struggle to use these particular experiences as resources to make new
knowledge about prison and crime. Convict criminologists must be wary of the reductionist convenience
that their social position corresponds in a mechanical and inherent way to their epistemological position.
As generations of diverse Black experience highlight, it is usually a mistake to simply collapse the social
position of a person into the epistemic position (Grosfoguel 2021).
Stuart Hall offers guidance that there are no guarantees in experience but there are almost infinite
possibilities. Here, in an interview conducted shortly before his death, he refers tellingly to his experiences
of both racialization and academic celebrity that resonate helpfully with some of the predicaments of
convict criminology:
But this experience of, as it were, experiencing oneself as both subject and object, of encountering
oneself from the outside, as another—an other— … is uncanny. It is like being exposed to a
serialised set of embarrassments. And I want just to draw from that experience a first thought
about thought. I think theory – thinking, theorising – is rather like that, in the sense that one
confronts the absolute unknowingness, the opacity, the density, of reality of the subject one is
trying to understand (cited in Haider 2021).
p. 929 ↵ Hall’s words recall Tannenbaum’s prescient concern for the effects of being made ‘conscious and
self-conscious’ of a criminal identity. He warns, however, that ‘the world is fundamentally resistant to
thought, I think it is resistant to “theory”. I do not think it likes to be thought … It is not something that
simply flows naturally from inside oneself’. This difficulty and its relationship to convict criminology is
neatly captured by a former prisoner, Oscar Wilde (1891/1990: 1018): ‘It is much more easy to have
sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought’. As convict criminology moves through
its third decade, that work of thinking harder about what it is and developing theoretical insights cannot
be neglected but the hard labour Hall refers to is now more widely shared and beginning to flow. Scholars
in the USA have inspired work to commence in the UK and there is evidence of heavy lifting in other parts
of Europe and South America. Things are picking up. Convict criminology is growing. Like a pharmakon, it
is both a sign of the troubling well springs that feed it (prison expansion) and the inspiring resistance
prisons produce to their guilty vision of humanity.
Page 19 of 25

The first book-length exploration of convict criminology by a single author, is Rod Earle’s Convict Criminology—Inside
and Out (2016). It provides analysis of the history and pre-history of convict criminology and offers an account of some
of its’ key influential figures and the potentials it has for widening the criminological imagination. Grant Tietjen’s
Justice Lessons: The Rise of System-Affected Academics (2023) offers a comprehensive and contemporary account of
the ways that ‘system impacted’ people are organizing and developing ideas that challenge the criminal legal system
and expose its shortcomings. It is international in scope, theoretically ambitious and empirically underpinned. Many
convict criminology resources take the form of peer-reviewed articles and discrete chapters in edited collections.
Many are listed in the references. Stephen C. Richards, Jeffrey Ian Ross, Greg Newbold, Michael Lenza, and Robert S.
Grigsby’s chapter, ‘Convict Criminology’ in the Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology (2018) is a useful overview of
developments. The best single academic source for prisoner’s and ex-prisoner’s perspectives on, and analysis of,
penal issues is the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. The journal regularly commissions and promotes articles and
special issues about convict criminology.
Online resources

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The authors would like to extend their appreciation to the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Criminology for their
inclusion in this edition, and particularly to Shadd Maruna whose work behind the scenes in the UK and the USA has
helped to sustain convict criminology. His support in developing this chapter has been characteristically invaluable.
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Page 25 of 25
43. Criminological engagements

p. 933 43. Criminological engagements

Alison Liebling, Fergus McNeill and Bethany E. Schmidt
https://doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198860914.003.0043
Abstract
This chapter considers the relationships between criminology and the worlds of penal policy, practice, and activism. It focuses,
in particular, on the day-to-day interactions the authors of the chapter forge in their research lives and on their effects and
failures as engaged criminologists. The chapter supports forms of criminological engagement that are subtle, long term, and
relational rather than occasional, mechanical, linear, or instrumental, and proposes that these forms of engagement improve
understanding but require constant reflection and negotiation. This chapter argues that knowledge-generation is slow and
cumulative; it takes time to ‘read a situation’ in complex human and social environments and it should be an iterative process
with those in research, in practice, or with lived experience teaching and learning from each other every step of the way. For
knowledge to ‘do good’, it needs to be (qualitatively) ‘good’. It should be produced through patient, honest, rigorous, and
disciplined, but also deeply engaged, forms of enquiry. This chapter suggests that our institutional structures often fail to
support this model of research.
Keywords: research methods, knowledge, power, engagement, I-thou relations, penal reform
Introduction
This chapter considers the relationships between criminology and criminal justice policy, practice, and
activism. We deliberately focus less on the standard questions of how, why, and when research informs
policy, and more on the day-to-day interactions we have experienced and reflected upon throughout our
research activities, and on their implications for theory, research, practice, and policy development. We
draw substantially on our own work and on some specific examples, but also on the work of those around
us and elsewhere, and we take stock of our intentions, our aspirations, and frustrations, and our ‘impacts’
as engaged criminologists, for better or worse. Since our work is mainly at the penal end of the criminal
Page 1 of 24
justice process, that will be the main locus of our discussion, but much of what we have to say has broader
relevance for those interested in the role of research in crime prevention, community safety, policing, and
the courts.
Two of us are ‘mature’ academics, with reputations (whether good or bad) for high levels of engagement
with practitioners, policy-makers and activists, mainly in two different jurisdictions (England and Wales,
and Scotland). Sometimes we work with official sources of funding and/or by invitation from within the
penal systems we seek to influence. At other times, we do work that is separate, externally funded, or
unfunded and theoretical. Borrowing Aristotle’s distinction between constitutive and productive ends (or
goods), we believe in the generation of knowledge as a constitutive end; as something that we can and
should pursue for its own sake, but we also see social scientific knowledge as a productive end. In other
words, we think that the knowledge we strive (with others) to create and employ can and should contribute
to ‘the good society’. More specifically, we think that criminological knowledge can play a part in
supporting the development of more legitimate and effective responses to state-sanctioned crime, where
the term ‘effective’ means functioning in ways that might support rather than damage the development of
a just social order. But, of course, for knowledge to do good, it needs to be (qualitatively) ‘good’—in the
sense that it should be produced through the patient, honest, rigorous and disciplined forms of enquiry
that research requires.
The third voice in our chapter is an established ‘new generation’ criminologist who, despite facing greater
p. 934 insecurity as an earlier-career academic (without tenure), ↵ nonetheless has also taught us much
about the possibilities of establishing an influential research presence in formerly unchartered territories
for criminology (e.g. in Tunisia). She has fewer taken-for-granted orientations towards the status quo,
and our conversations on this topic have benefitted significantly from her different (and sometimes less
habituated or tolerant) experiences and insights. Whatever our career stages, we three are all still learning
our craft, and about the ways in which an authentic and connected analysis of our social world might help
in the search for justice.
In this chapter, we explore our hopes for and fears about doing engaged criminological research. We reject
both the ‘radical critical’ (wholly oppositional) and the ‘detached theoretical’ positions, arguing for forms
of criminological engagement that are often subtle, long-term, and relational (even if often also
opportunistic) rather than occasional, mechanical, linear, or instrumental. Our use of the term ‘critical’ in
relation to social science, drawing on the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, means not ‘judging
unfavourably’ but rather ‘the art of examination’, involving a thorough and balanced interpretive analysis
of the qualities and character of a setting or practice; a ‘correct reading’. We argue that engagement
improves understanding, even if it also creates risks of collusion or co-option. Together, we take issue both
with arguments that ‘relevance’ must mean ‘subordination’ and also with current narrow conceptions of
‘impact’. We argue that a variety of ‘criminological engagements’ is desirable and possible, but that some
of our best experiences of engagement have been rooted in or begin with particular epistemological and
methodological positions and commitments. Our model suggests that ‘influence’ can be accomplished,
sometimes unintentionally or unplanned, at every stage of the research process, including several years
after particular studies have ended, and away from the political life cycle.
Page 2 of 24
The Origins and History of British Criminology: Engaged Professionals

and Social Reform
British criminology’s origins lie in the action-oriented disciplines of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, medicine
and law (see Garland 1988 and Rock, this volume). The clinical exploration of the individual personality (or
—following the Lombrosian tradition—the body) and the search for better forensic treatment, often in
prison and by medical officers, aligned criminology with government institutions, but also institutional
reform, from the outset. ‘Engaged professionals’ offered both systematic investigation and (sometimes)
radical critique (Garland 1988: 136). The Reverend W. Douglas Morrison, for example, a ‘pioneer in
criminology’ (Robin 1964), became a prison chaplain at Wandsworth prison in the 1890s. His ‘radical
criticisms of the system helped provoke the appointment of the Gladstone Committee in 1894’ (Garland
1988: 136–7). In his many published accounts of the failings of late Victorian prisons in The Daily Chronicle
and elsewhere, Morrison argued:
[I]mprisonment so far from serving the purpose of protecting society adds considerably to its
dangers. The casual offender is the person to whom crime is merely an isolated incident in an
otherwise law-abiding life. The habitual criminal is a person to whom crime has become a trade;
he is a person who makes his living by preying on the community. The prison is the breeding
p. 935 ground of the habitual criminal. The habitual offender is the casual ↵ offender to begin with.
But the prison deteriorates him, debases him mentally and morally, reduces him to a condition of
apathy, unfits and indisposes him for the tasks and duties of life; and when liberated he is
infinitely more dangerous to society than when he entered it. It is not sufficiently recognized that
punishment may be of a character which defeats the ends of justice (Morrison 1898: 69).
His critique in a series of articles (‘Our Dark Places’) was savage. Morrison spoke of a ‘slow torture’ which
made the prison ‘a machine for State-produced murder and insanity’ (Housden 2006: 12). The official
response to his writings by the then Commissioner Du Cane was hostile and defensive, but following an
unsatisfactory rebuttal of his critique, Home Secretary Herbert Asquith set up a departmental committee
of inquiry under Herbert John Gladstone MP. The Report of that Inquiry was to become a landmark in
British penal policy and would ‘play a vital role’ in the future development of the British penal system
(Radzinowicz 1939):
We think that the system should be made more elastic, more capable of being adapted to the
special cases of individual prisoners; that prison discipline and treatment should be more
effectually designed to maintain, stimulate, or awaken the higher susceptibilities of prisoners, to
develop their moral instincts, to train them in orderly and industrial habits, and whenever
possible to turn them out of the prison better men and women, both physically and morally, than
when they came in. (Prisons Committee [Gladstone Report] 1895: 7)
Page 3 of 24
Growing statistical and methodological expertise, clinical experience, and the engaged practical concerns
of insiders working in criminal justice lent criminology an ‘administrative’ role for which critics have
admonished it throughout its development as a discipline. Radical criminology of the 1970s and 80s
attempted to challenge this disposition. But as Rock argues (this volume), even radical criminologists had
to eventually engage in the empirical exploration of real crimes of violence—in the home and among the
impoverished—as well as showing links between or challenging these forms of violence and State power.
Our point is that criminology has conservative, liberal and radical lineage and that there is nothing
inherently ‘legitimating’ for the state about empirical criminological research. There are, of course, always
important questions to be asked about ‘the nature of a knowledge which is linked so closely to forms of
institutional power and policy’ (Garland 1988: 144). On the other hand, sometimes engaging with those
forms of institutional power strengthens our independent and critical theorizing and the prospects of
securing change. Research done well can make ‘facile gestures’ from any political perspective more
difficult and less defensible (Rock 2014). Whilst acknowledging the many political choices we make in
selecting subjects, methodologies, and audiences, we remain firmly of the view that we can provoke
change by ‘right description’ (Liebling 2015), partly because radical critique is implicit and immanent in
authentic accounts of the real information that is in the world or ‘what is really the case’ (see Murdoch
1971: 37).
Forms of Engagement
We noted above that we have chosen in this chapter to focus less on the standard questions of how, why,
and when criminological research might inform criminal justice policy. We begin this section by
elaborating some of the problems of assuming that criminology (or indeed any social science) should seek
p. 936 to exercise influence, or to generate ↵ ‘impact’ at all, principally by this route. Figure 43.1 seeks to
illustrate the much more complex set of relationships, engagements, and directions of influence that exist.
Page 4 of 24
Figure 43.1 Criminological engagements
If, for example, we examine the typology of forms of criminological engagements discussed by Loader and
Sparks (2011), we find the research-policy relationship implicitly prioritized in the first three forms. Thus,
the ‘scientific expert’, associated mostly with notions of evidence-based policy, takes no normative
position (beyond a commitment to empiricism) but aims to use scientific findings to shape more adaptive
policy (and thereby practice) responses to crime-related problems. The ‘policy advisor’ and the ‘observer-
turned-player’ work to bring a somewhat wider range of criminological and criminal justice knowledge to
bear on how executives and parliaments develop and change law and policy (and thereby practice). The
‘social movement theorist/activist’ works differently—perhaps with users, stakeholders and communities
of interest—to generate more collective pressures on political processes. The ‘lonely prophet’ is cast as a
disengaged but nonetheless important voice, berating the abuses and failings of the system and of those in
power. S/he shouts because her commitment and vocation demand it, not because s/he expects anyone in
power to listen. If s/he has influence, it will not usually be with policy-makers; rather, it will rest in
removing scales from our eyes, arousing our resistance to or revolt against an unjust status quo.
From our perspective, none of these forms of engagement seems an accurate or satisfying description of
what we do or how we try to do it. Moreover, we think there are flaws in the assumptions that lie behind all
of them. Exploring these flaws may help to clarify our position.
The first problem is one of implicit hierarchy. By this we mean that it is assumed in most of these positions
that to secure change criminologists should seek to influence those ‘at the top’—the politicians, senior
civil servants and executives that make up what Garland (2013) refers to as ‘the penal state’—those who
have the power to change how the system is constituted, resourced, governed, and regulated. While we do
not dismiss the importance of these forms of penal power, it is wrong to assume that the penal state
determines the nature and impact of the penal system. An analysis of penal change (or stability) that
privileges ‘policy-makers’ within the penal state neglects, for example, the ways in which power,
authority, and influence are distributed within penal systems. In particular, it underestimates the extent to
p. 937 which practitioners at all levels contest and ↵ realize penality (see Goodman, Page, and Phelps 2017).
Hence, we suggest that direct criminological engagements with practice, as well as with or through policy,
may be of critical value.
Consider the role of practitioners in penal innovation. The progenitors of probation, for example, both in
the USA and in the UK, were neither policy-makers nor researchers (at least understood in the usual
senses): they were judges who developed imaginative responses to practical problems. They may have thus
become policy-makers—first locally, then nationally and internationally—but they were not insiders in
the penal state (Garland 2013) when they first imagined and developed probation. They may also have
become researchers in the sense that they studied the impacts and effects of their innovations, but their
innovations were not (in the first place) ‘evidence-based’ or ‘research-driven’. So, the direction of
influence in this case (see Figure 43.1) is, in important ways, non-hierarchical or ‘bottom-up’.
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Equally, we could disrupt the implicit hierarchy in linear research-policy thinking by making the point
that penal policy-making does not exist in a vacuum. Garland (2013) notes that the relative autonomy of
any given penal state reflects its degree of insulation from external (political) pressures. In a situation of
relatively low autonomy, ideological congruence with a particular government’s wider political agenda will
matter more for the prospects of a particular penal policy than criminological evidence of ‘effectiveness’ or
‘legitimacy’. Conservative-led UK Governments’ support for privatization within the penal system is an
obvious example here, since the enthusiasm of its advocates both precedes and exceeds any empirical case
that can be made for its effectiveness in improving penal outcomes (see Hedderman 2013). But equally,
privatization might be successfully resisted ‘from below’ through public, professional or union opposition,
at least where privatization advocates find themselves in a weak position in the penal field (Page 2011).
Recognizing the exposure of (some) penal states to ideological and political forces therefore suggests that
criminological engagements beyond the penal state—with civil society and with the wider polity—may
have the potential to be as influential as penal policy engagements, particularly in democratic societies.
Although some scholars have argued for the development of mechanisms to protect penal policy from
party and electoral politics (Lacey 2008), we agree with Loader and Sparks (2011: 117) that the path to a
‘better politics of crime and its regulation’ runs through criminological engagements that improve the
quality of democratic debate. It is perhaps here that the ‘social movement theorist/activist’ and the ‘lonely
prophet’ do their work.
However, even if we challenge the hierarchical assumptions that lend priority to engagement with policy-
makers, and stress instead the significance of engagements with practitioners, people with lived
experience, other stakeholders and civil society, a second problem relates to implicit assumptions about
‘who knows best’ about punishment and penal reform. We might term this a problem of epistemic privilege.
In different ways and for different reasons, all five of Loader and Sparks’ (2011) characters seem to think
that they know best how to change (or indeed abolish) the penal system.
The ‘scientific expert’ assumes they know ‘what works’ on the basis of randomized control trials or meta-
analyses, thus rooting their privilege in a particular set of claims about methodological rigour. Through
the appliance of science, a ‘solution’ to the policy challenge has been engineered and tested; the problem
reduces to one of ‘technology transfer’ (Bourgon et al. 2010) or implementation—and we now have a
‘science’ specifically for implementation too. The ‘policy adviser’ and the ‘observer turned player’ draw on
a wider range of forms of evidence and may sometimes integrate normative analyses and arguments into
p. 938 their prescriptions—but implicitly they also claim an epistemic ↵ privilege based on their
criminological expertise. Rather than offering ‘expert solutions’, the ‘social movement theorist’ and the
‘lonely prophet’ are perhaps more likely to locate their analyses of the failures and injustices of the penal
system in the context of broader socio-structural injustices; they will certainly weave normative claims
into these analyses. But, even if they reject selling criminological remedies for social problems, they
nonetheless trade on their own cultural capital as scholars to endow their critique with a particular status.
In different ways then, these various dispositions might sometimes quieten or silence other knowledge
claims rooted, for example, in direct lived experiences of, and reflection upon, being punished, or of being
a penal practitioner, a penal policy-maker or politician. Of course, some criminologists have such lived
experiences. As Earle (2018; and Earle et al., this volume) has argued, greater engagement with ‘convict
Page 6 of 24
criminologies’ holds the potential to broaden the criminological imagination and to develop
1
methodological innovations. In and through engagements with lived experiences, researchers (whether or
not they themselves have shared these experiences) often amplify certain of these voices within public
discourses about punishment but, to extend the metaphor, sometimes amplification can be instrumental
and exploitative, and sometimes it can cause distortion. The question of which voices academics choose to
quieten and which to amplify often reflects their own commitments, partialities and interests (Collinson
Scott and McNeill 2021). Indeed, even the notion that academics can and do make choices about quietening
and amplifying reflects the epistemic privilege and social position that academics sometimes occupy.
Raising this issue throws into sharp relief the need for criminologists to clarify the particular value of their
knowledge as gained through study and research. Conventionally, academics tend to defend the value of
research and scholarship in two ways; one related to method and one related to theory. In relation to
methods, we argue that the disciplined nature of our inquiry leads to the production of knowledge of
special standing; knowledge that is qualitatively different from reflection on ‘lay’ experience, for example.
In relation to theory, we argue that our ability to observe, analyse and interpret the social worlds we study,
and to synthesize scholarship or to refine arguments about them, is based on an unusual (and hard-won)
command of cognate ideas, or of methods of reasoning-with-evidence. Methodological rigour is required
to aggregate potentially diverse lived experiences competently, for example, avoiding risks of over-
generalizing one person’s or one group’s experiences of the penal system. To summarize, academics might
see things more clearly, or be better placed to ask certain kinds of questions, if (and only if) they have
learned to look at things with particular kinds of care, if they have learned to be reflective and self-critical
in the process, and if they have a body of knowledge that enables them to make more careful sense of the
available data.
p. 939 ↵ As committed social scientists, it is hardly surprising that we have much sympathy with these claims.
But our experience of criminological engagements suggests we moderate them significantly. Our preferred
position might be summed up thus: we are able to see things with a certain sort of clarity because we have
specific skills that enable us to gather varied forms of evidence together in order to look at social problems
or phenomena in particular ways. Moreover, because of our (cumulative) knowledge, values and skills, we
are well placed to work with others in making sense of what we see—and then in figuring out (together)
what to do about it. No certainties are possible even in the best kinds of social science; only the gradual
development of better accounts of social phenomena, and corrections of misunderstandings about them.
Smith (2010) calls this perspective ‘epistemological humility’.
We will say more about this position later, and illustrate it, but we recognize that for some colleagues our
account so far may raise questions about independence. For some scholars, academic freedom requires
independence from non-academic ‘interference’ in research. While submission to academic peer review
and to professional-collegial self-regulation is necessary, any external influence upon knowledge
production is viewed with suspicion, since it risks importing biases and interests that might distort
research processes, thus tainting the knowledge produced.
We have some sympathy with this position too, not least because we have at times suffered the subtle and
sometimes overt forms of political interference in the conduct and dissemination of research against
which defenders of academic freedom protest. However, some claims about academic independence are
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themselves problematic. For example, it is almost impossible to imagine any form of empirical research
that can be conducted without establishing some degree of interdependence with others. Negotiating
funding, access and collaboration all entail the creation of relationships of reciprocal exchange; securing
the data typically depends at the very least on promising to meet the requirements of funders and showing
some sensitivity to the legitimate interests and needs of the research site. For us, this does not inherently
compromise the independence of our analyses, even in projects where analysis itself is collaborative, but it
does compel us to act ethically in honouring the terms of engagement that all parties agree. This is not to
cede control of the research agenda. Indeed, in our experience, we have usually been able to expand and
reframe research questions from the (sometimes) more narrowly conceived questions our funders or
gatekeepers started out with. In practice, they have most often welcomed the additional insights these
‘extra-curricular’ or more theoretically informed questions bring (see Bottoms 2003). Equally, as will
become clear later, sometimes our research collaborators or participants have taught us that we were the
ones asking the ‘wrong’ questions.
More significantly, some visions or versions of academic independence come close to setting up the
exploitation of research ‘subjects’. Such exploitation is implicit in a model of independence that treats ‘the
field’ as a place we visit merely to extract data with which we hasten back to our ‘ivory towers’ in order to
expertly conduct analyses. Indeed, the metaphors of ‘tower’ and ‘field’ are interesting (and mutually
insulting) ones. The tower is pristine, safe and defended; it offers a privileged view of the landscape and its
lofty construction implies esteem. The field is messy and dirty. Those in it lack both perspective and status.
At the same time, it is impossible to see, hear, smell, taste, touch and feel what is going on in the field from
the tower. Perhaps most relevant to this chapter, the perspective that the tower allows might help us to see
things differently—and to notice things that cannot easily be seen from within the field. But the opposite
is also true: to try to reform the field without being in it would be foolhardy and probably dangerous,
unless one’s intention is simply to fire projectiles from the tower to reshape the field. That would be
‘impact’ to be sure, but not of the sort we would seek or endorse.
p. 940 ↵ Instead, criminological engagement for us implies constant movement between the ‘tower’ and the
‘field’. While we recognize the privilege and the value of having a place for refuge and reflection—a site
where independence of mind can be developed and refreshed, or the wisdom of colleagues can be sought (if
indeed, that is an accurate depiction of the contemporary university; see Back 2016)—we also recognize
that reflection and analysis happens continuously in the field. We recognize too that there is much to be
gained in enabling people from the field to leave it in order to spend time of their own engaged in reflection
and analysis (with or without us). Knowledge production and exchange is going on all the time within and
outwith the penal sites we visit. Our distinctive contribution is not to trump or displace these processes,
disrespecting our non-academic partners’ skills, capacities or ethics en masse. However, it is our task to
bring our methodological and theoretical knowledge and skills to bear in respectfully challenging,
developing, supplementing or re-imagining knowledge and its uses in policy, practice, and activism. It
follows that, paradoxically, we must maintain critical perspective at the same time as narrowing the gaps
between theory, research, policy, practice, and activism. Put another way, we need independence of mind
and thought, as free as possible from the influence of ‘interests’ that might distort research processes and
findings, but we also need to respect, recognize and manage the practical interdependencies and existing
expertise that meaningful engagement requires.
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More generally, we recognize that our field is ‘intrinsically and unavoidably entangled with power and
justice’ (Khaitan 2022: 1). Working out, for ourselves, ‘the appropriate relationship between scholarship,
power, and justice’ (ibid.: 2)—the extent to which our work entitles us, stimulates, or is driven by, the urge
to act in the world—is an ongoing and often contested question. The pursuit of knowledge, and the pursuit
of ‘specific material outcomes’ through scholarship, or social justice activism, involve different ‘role
moralities’ (p. 2), motives (at its simplest, ‘truth-seeking’ versus certainty and ‘reform’), and timescales
(short vs. long). These may conflict. Our choice of topics, dissemination strategies, and our methodologies,
take us in different directions along these—let’s call them—trajectories. There are no prescriptions here,
but impact-driven research funding overlooks some of the risks posed to the values of independent
scholarship. As Khaitan suggests, we should at the very least sharpen our awareness of the choices we
make, and their implications, as we carry out our professional work.
To flesh out the discussion of ways of conceptualizing and negotiating criminological engagements, we
now provide some illustrations and reflect on what they taught us.
Three (Positive) Experiences of Engagement
Trust and relationships in high security prisons

Two examples arose in two ‘accidental-longitudinal’ studies of high security prisons by the first author,
2
with others. The first is the use of a Dialogue group in the early stages of ethnographic work in prison: a
weekly afternoon-long session with a regular group of prisoners to discuss matters of mutual interest,
p. 941 sometimes with literature distributed ↵ in advance, to stimulate discussion. The sessions were difficult
and time-consuming to arrange in a high security prison and took up a full day of our research week, but it
had no other purpose than to ‘get to know you and the prison’, and ‘for you to get to know us’. It
transformed our project. Time spent talking, meeting, discussing ideas, and being present, brought an
authenticity and degree of insight to the research we did not anticipate. It made our project more
‘collaborative’. We had requested the Dialogue group as a way of ‘re-entering’ the field after a long gap
between ethnographic projects in Whitemoor prison, and because there had once been a Dialogue group in
the prison, which we had been invited to attend, the first time around (Liebling and Price 1999). Running
the group ourselves was challenging (Liebling, Arnold, and Straub 2015). But it was valuable, and so much
appreciated, that when the third ethnography came around—in a different high security prison altogether,
two prisoners who had participated in our Whitemoor Dialogue group came to welcome us in the prison’s
library asking, ‘are we going to have a Dialogue group, then?’ So, we did. These groups became places of
deep conversation and relationship building, as Cohen and Taylor powerfully demonstrate in their 1970s
version of collaborative research with long-term prisoners, published as Psychological Survival (1972).
There was scope for emotional content, critique of us and of research (lively conversations which always
lead to greater understanding and commitment to research among our participants, despite the clear
limitations in ‘helping them now’ that we always acknowledge), and for deep understandings to develop.
These relationships got us invited into some of the darkest corners of the prison, but also made us more
aware of how far prison life was also infused by trust, love, and constructive survival strategies as well as
anger and power. Our Dialogue participants eventually became our first interviewees, and the meaning-
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making that went on in these interviews was deeply satisfying, to us as researchers and to our participants.
These criminological engagements felt insightful, respectful and ‘right’. Such forms of engagement can
equally be created with prison staff (see, e.g. Arnold 2005) or with those in higher positions of power (see,
e.g. Liebling and Crewe 2012; 2016). They can be appreciative (see Liebling, Price, and Elliott 1999) and
generative (see Liebling 2015). This does not make them inherently uncritical or one-sided.
The ‘return to Whitemoor’ study led to a follow up project funded by the Economic and Social Research
Council (ESRC) on the location and building of trust in two other high security prisons, selected for
contrast (see Liebling et al. 2015). As we had anticipated given the experience above, studying trust took us
further than studying the ‘presenting problem’ of risk; because exploring trust built trust. We were
painfully aware of the centrality of risk in such deep end penal settings, but we needed to penetrate the
‘distrust paralysis’ framing life in prison, in order to find out what was ‘really going on’ in each
establishment. As a result of our slow and trust-oriented methodology, we were able to describe some
important differences in the shape and tone of prisoner social organization in these prisons. We found a
link between our methodological approach and our emerging data. Where trust in the prison in general was
lowest, and staff kept a distance from prisoners, the prisoners organized themselves hierarchically,
asserted narrow, polarized and politically charged identities, and sometimes appointed religious leaders
on their wings. In other words, faith and power were more likely to coexist in low trust climates, and faith
identities were more inclined to be adopted, or used strategically to gain advantage or intimidate staff and
other prisoners. Where trust was higher (albeit still ‘guarded’), and prisoners were approached as
‘experiencing subjects’, rather than ‘experienced objects’ (see Liebling 2015), the social organization of
prisoners was flatter and more fluid, growth and change was more likely, faith practices and explorations
p. 942 had ↵ more to do with meaning, religious doubt was permissible, and risks were contained, managed
and reduced as a dialogue took place about how to reduce or give up violence. On the wings where trust was
‘placed intelligently’, whatever identity mattered most (e.g. faith, ethnicity, or geographical location)—
Muslim prisoners, Christians, Mancunians, or Scousers, interacted. They were on food boats together, they
learned things from one another, and they invited each other to festivals or ceremonies. Some described an
‘uneasy’ truce, but it was more of a norm to cooperate rather than to compete or struggle for power (see
Williams and Liebling 2022). We learned that recognition and misrecognition, ways of knowing and not
knowing, of understanding or misunderstanding others, were processes with outcomes. This is an important
lesson for us as research scholars.
Prisoners in both of our main research sites decided that it was so important to talk about trust that they
carried on doing it without us after we left. They described ‘awakenings’ in letters to us, as they created a
mood in which it was possible to ask questions about faith, faith practices, cultural practices, and
individual experience. They invited staff to attend. An incoming Governor supported them in their trust-
building work. We were invited back for meetings, as well as onto various local and national working
parties to help transform practice in this area of work. Methods, findings, theory and developing practice
became inter-connected. Our growing confidence that we understood some of the problems of high
security prisons made us credible and better-informed critics of its current use and form. Long-term
prisoners became full participants in the study, as thinkers, allies, critics, and supporters.
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Desistance, reintegration and change

Similar processes (and outcomes) have been experienced in quite different settings by the second author of
this chapter. Between 2011–12, he worked with several academic colleagues (Steve Farrall, Claire
Lightowler, and Shadd Maruna) to develop and coordinate the ESRC-funded project Desistance Knowledge
Exchange <http://blogs.iriss.org.uk/discoveringdesistance> (DesKE) (RES-189-25-0258). The project was
conceived in response to demands from policy-makers, practitioners and others for a clearer articulation
of the implications of desistance research for probation practice or (more broadly) ‘offender
management’. Rejecting the notion of prescribing a desistance ‘programme’ or manual, the ‘investigators’
instead designed a process of ‘knowledge exchange’ that would offer a forum for the kind of reflexive
dialogue that seemed necessary. They brought people together who had different forms of knowledge
about desistance, rehabilitation, and reintegration (academic, professional and personal), setting up a blog
3
site (as a forum and repository for the dialogue ), making a film together, and then using the film to
stimulate dialogue in ‘appreciative inquiry’ workshops to generate propositions for changes in the penal
system.
Perhaps precisely because the forms of knowledge that were exchanged extended beyond the academic, the
propositions that emerged ranged far beyond the initial focus of the investigators on practices of
supervision. In many respects, they underlined and focused on the importance of work not to change
4
people who had offended but rather to better engage both the State and civil society in re/integration. In
simple terms, the DesKE project led the second author to realize (and to argue) that re/integration is
p. 943 profoundly affected by the reception of the returning citizen and that, since the development ↵ of
rehabilitation has focused so much on developing methods for changing individuals, it has been seriously
underdeveloped in both theory and practice (McNeill 2012, 2014; Kirkwood and McNeill 2015).
That realization necessarily prompted a change in the second author’s research agenda and in his
approach to engagements with penal reform. Searching for a way to engage and change civil society led
him into new collaborations using creative and collaborative practices and community development
approaches to enable a richer dialogue about punishment and to explore new practices and processes of re/
integration. To these ends, he helped to establish an organization—Vox Liminis—that brings artists,
academics, practitioners, justice-affected people (with lived experience) and others together (McNeill and
Urie 2020). Between 2017–21, he led the ESRC/AHRC-funded ‘Distant Voices: Coming Home’ project (ES/
P002536/1) with co-investigators, Jo Collinson Scott, Oliver Escobar, and Alison Urie, and with Research
Associate, Phil Crockett Thomas, and PhD researcher, Lucy Cathcart Frödén. The project blurred
boundaries between creative practice, research, knowledge exchange and public engagement to explore
crime, punishment and re/integration, primarily through collaborative song-writing and sharing.
Through these practices and others, the project also sought to develop integrative communities. Beyond
the ‘research team’ listed above, Distant Voices was guided by a ‘core group’ of people with different forms
of lived experience and expertise, and it was hosted within Vox Liminis (for more on the project’s methods
and findings, see Urie et al, 2019; Crockett Thomas et al. 2020; 2021).
Once again, this project has changed the second author and the direction of his work (and indeed his life).
Despite 30+ years of criminal justice involvement, first as a volunteer worker, then as a social worker and
then as a criminologist, being part of Distant Voices (and of the wider community that Vox Liminis created
Page 11 of 24
and sustains) enriched and complicated his understandings of punishment and re/integration. It also
changed how he engaged with and felt about them. Listening to people’s stories as mediated through
songs, he was confronted much more forcefully with the ways in which criminal justice simplifies,
flattens, and distorts those stories, and with the myriad ways that punishment alienates, marginalizes and
excludes people. He also learned more about how people nonetheless resist, subvert, and survive these
processes (Crockett Thomas et al. 2020, 2021).
Some of the most important learning has been practical. He witnessed, time and again, how a commitment
to a belief in everyone’s ability to make something good, enacted in conditions that enabled people to
become vulnerable and to risk creativity, allowed them to co-produce beautiful, moving, revealing and
challenging songs. In the process, people also made (or remade) themselves and each other; they made or
remade the connections between them; and they made or remade community. Thus, the diverse people of
Distant Voices modelled not just more creative ways of exploring, understanding and representing human
experience, but also more creative ways of becoming connected with one another in a complex, vibrant,
5
joyful, and challenging community.
As with the DesKE project, one of the key messages from the lived experience of Distant Voices is that the
initial academic framing of the project around ‘re/integration’ might have been wrong. Aside from the
debate about the appropriateness of the ‘re-’ prefix for people who may always have been at the hard end
of social inequality and injustice (McNeill 2017; Rubio Arnal 2021), and despite the project’s beginnings in
p. 944 recognition of the social and relational dynamics of reentry, even the term ‘integration’ ↵ implies the
insertion of a ‘corrected’ or ‘reformed’ individual into an established and well-functioning community.
What Distant Voices has revealed is the complexity and potential of working to create and sustain solidaristic
communities. Most recently, this has led the second author, with other colleagues (Beth Weaver and Mary
Corcoran) to begin to inquire into the nature of practices and processes of ‘generative justice’; meaning
responses to crime, criminalization and penalization that are generative of social solidarity rather than
destructive of it.
Research and reform in Tunisian prisons

From 2015, the third author of this chapter has been undertaking an exploratory study of the quality of life
in Tunisian prisons, which has inadvertently confronted some of the political and professional
complexities we raise in this chapter. Since its revolution in 2011, Tunisia has been transitioning from
decades of dictatorship to the region’s only (albeit fragile) democracy. Social, cultural, and institutional
paradigms have been shifting alongside the nation’s political transformation, including reform efforts
within the criminal justice system. Prisons have become more porous here, as civil society has gained
(limited) access in order to monitor conditions, investigate allegations of torture or abuse, and assess
compliance with international human rights standards. However, the saturation of NGOs, their narrow or
incomplete understanding of ‘what matters most’ to prison occupants, and a deficit-oriented approach to
evaluation has arguably impeded reform efforts by alienating and shaming prison authorities.
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Being granted access to such a closed-off world was nothing short of remarkable. Persistent, yet patient,
negotiations with Tunisian prison authorities over many months and several visits eventually opened
doors that had previously been closed to researchers, and most of society (Jefferson and Schmidt 2019).
‘Selling’ knowledge and academic expertise to curious, though sceptical, authorities took considerable
time and engagement. They posed practical, but difficult questions: ‘What good is your knowledge? We
need money and resources to reform – what will research do for us?’ Tunisia, much like prison services
(and universities) elsewhere, sought policy outputs to justify the research and exposure. They were keen to
6
better train, manage, and motivate prison staff, and to address the lasting traumatic effects of the prison
disturbances that occurred during the 2011 revolution (Schmidt and Jefferson 2021). Whilst headquarters
desired operational solutions to staff ‘problems’, we wanted to understand their prisons from the
perspective of all occupants, and to authentically describe everyday life as it unfolded. We managed to find
common ground that satisfied both objectives through (supervised) time in the field, workshops with staff,
participation in prisoner activities, and feeding back our reflections to the authorities.
Once we were inside the prison walls, we were given unprecedented access. We—two foreign and
7
experienced researchers, with two local and inexperienced assistants—were novel. We were appreciative
in our approach, intentionally setting our orientation and methods apart from civil society monitors,
towards whom the prisons felt a deep distrust (we came with notebooks but no checklists). We were not
there to judge or simply to criticize. We built rapport, gained some trust, and eventually became ‘children
p. 945 of the ↵ house’, rather than ‘guests’. Prisoners and staff alike were enthusiastic to engage, have their
voices heard, and be recognized. But they were also nervous.
Staff commonly asked, ‘What are you looking for?’ Their defensiveness was, to some extent, a reflex
stemming from encounters with monitors or activists who often had agendas or pre-determined
conclusions. Officers assumed that we too were seeking to find violations or reprehensible practices. Their
bemusement about our methods—long days spent ‘hanging out’, observing the prison’s daily routines,
asking (and answering) many questions, and sharing tea and meals with officers—quickly turned into a
respectful regard. Understanding the prison, they told us, meant understanding life in their transitioning
country: ‘Everyone feels powerless … Nobody knows what the rules are anymore’. Officers occupied a role
that was, from the public’s view, still a function of the former regime: they were seen as ‘guards of hell’
who beat and disappeared prisoners. The reality, as observed during fieldwork, was far less sensational
though no less instructive. Officers were caught in an unsettled professional and political space between
authoritarian rule (following orders, suppression through force, prison as containment) and democratic
liberalism (some discretion and diffused authority, an emphasis on human rights, prison as a
rehabilitative institution). This had significant implications for how they interpreted their work and
purpose, engaged with prisoners, and how they wielded their power. These tensions provoked deep and
candid conversations about punishment, state responsibility, and the ‘new’ (or reimagined) function of
prisons within a nation struggling with uncertainty, terrorism, economic instability, and corruption.
Staff appreciated the time we spent with them. They told us we asked the ‘right’ questions, in part because
we were invested in getting to know their lives in and beyond the prison, and within their country’s context.
Bearing witness to the hidden (and often misunderstood) working worlds of prison staff moved us closer
to comprehending how justice, dignity, and legitimacy are experienced and operationalized (or not) in
micro- and macro-level democratization processes (see Zakhour 2020).
Page 13 of 24
‘Presence’, Recognition, and Bearing Witness
All actual life is encounter (Buber 2010: 62).
Between us, we have learned that knowledge-generation is slow and cumulative, and that it takes time to
‘read a situation’ in complex human and social environments, precisely because knowledge is situated. It
is, and should be, an iterative process, with the research community and the worlds of practice and/or
experience teaching and learning from each other at every step of the way. We have learned that humility is
an important and valued quality that researchers must cultivate and that research participants welcome a
research presence of the kinds we outline above. They often know nothing about the research gatekeeping
processes that are intended to protect them. The question of when or whether research can harm or,
conversely, support participants is more complex and nuanced than our research frameworks typically
acknowledge. Sometimes, well-intentioned criminological engagements go awry but, equally, politically
driven, overtly critical, or abolitionist research agendas can inadvertently close doors or alienate those
they claim to support. In the same way, ‘protections’ that limit the kinds of questions that can be asked, or
p. 946 the length and nature of the contact permitted, can impose ↵ inappropriate constraints on ordinary
human interactions which are both ethically and methodologically defensible. Whilst our methodologies
sometimes break the rules of (non) engagement we are often required to follow, and we acknowledge that
there are dangers here, we can do worse than ‘being a Thou’ (a whole person, with no ‘reduction of the I or
8
of the Thou’; Buber 2010) in the field for others.
A rarely acknowledged counterweight to the emphasis on access, and the policing of it, and on the
protection of ‘human subjects’ from interference or harm, is the value of an appropriate and interested
‘research presence’ to people being punished and those who work in the penal system. Being in the field,
listening, observing and noticing cultures, practices and decisions, can validate champions of good
practice and campaigners for change alike, bringing hope to populations who otherwise feel devalued and/
or forgotten. Research can, however fleetingly, capture and tell ‘stories without an audience’, reducing
dehumanizing feelings of ‘ethical loneliness’ or the sense of injustice at not being heard (Stauffer 2015).
Once agreed, research can reach into places where power is flowing unobserved, except by those who
experience or wield it. Asking questions in such unreachable places can change situations, in the short and
longer term. One prisoner still insists that we (Liebling et al. 2015) were ‘sent by God’, because he had lost
all hope of ever making any progress out of the prison he felt ‘buried in’. We ‘simply’ (it was not so simple)
asked questions, until senior staff working in the institution came to realize that the circumstances of his
ultra-confinement (for example, on an administrative ‘no one-to-one contact’ procedure) were
illegitimate. The encounter between researchers, partners and participants can (at its most mundane)
temporarily alleviate loneliness and despair, or it can reframe a life or a practice: prisoners, staff and
senior managers have often reflected that an extended conversation about their experience or working life
has enabled an important (and usually helpful) shift in understanding and perspective. Some prepare for a
second stage interview by writing notes, keeping a diary, or talking with friends about what the interview
revealed. So many prisoners have said, ‘you know what, miss (or often, our names), that’s the most I’ve
talked since I’ve been in here!’. Practitioners often make similar comments about the opportunities for
deep reflection on practice that research engagements create.
Page 14 of 24
Increasingly, as we have learned to be more self-consciously appreciative and person-centred, research

partners and participants have expressed enthusiasm for, or meaning in, research encounters. They shake
our hands, use our names, and tell us that our presence in their world gives them hope, and makes them
feel ‘seen’: not just understood, but acknowledged as people with potential, who matter (‘Do you ever
think about us when you are not here?’ (The answer is ‘Yes’)). The building of trust, and the feeling of
recognition, generates deep and authentic conversation, allows space for reflection, and provides an
atmosphere in which both of us in the encounter are learning about who both we and our participants are,
and may want to be in the future. An absence of cynicism, the avoidance of labels and diagnoses, and care
to check powerful or institutionalized assumptions, permit the meaning of action to be worked out afresh.
This is not collusion, as under these conditions, and with sufficient time, participants (both penal subjects
and penal practitioners) may acknowledge parts of their nature, past or behaviour that they regret, and
p. 947 have been struggling to understand. There is, ↵ and should be, a link between our efforts at
criminological verstehen (an understanding of the intention, meaning, context and emotional content of
action) and the feeling of recognition reported by our research participants (Berlin 2013: 44). They
become, as we suggested above, a Thou: a ‘distinct personal being’ with moral commitments and complex
capacities, and not an It: the projection of others’ assumptions, in the research journey (see Smith 2010:
61; Buber 2010; Liebling 2015). We claim no exclusive expertise in using this approach, and we have seen it
in action in other work, but we attempt to describe it here in order to defend and encourage it, to challenge
some of the official frameworks that seek to ‘protect research participants’ from such encounters, and to
propose strong links between this person-centred approach and the quality of our data. There are always
day-to-day constraints of time, funding, job security, and other restrictions on research practice, we have
inherent limitations as people, and we should be alert to real risks, but our practices should aim to be
acceptable to research participants ‘in real time’ as well as to remote or politically configured committees.
This basic orientation to participants is made complex by the attention we pay to all of those with whom
we engage in our work—people being punished or after punishment, and staff and senior managers or
policy-makers—but these tensions and conflicts between the worldviews or frameworks of power holders,
and those who are its subjects, constitute the very penal field we seek to understand. The form that power
takes, its distribution, and how it is experienced, differ over time as well as between penal sites (and
jurisdictions). Diagnosing and describing these distinct formations and their underlying cultural
conditions has become an important dimension of our work. Of course, we hold, have collected, or grown,
powers and privileges of our own over the course of our research lives, or we would not be in a position to
write this account or carry out our work. Our powers are mainly (but not exclusively)—and certainly feel—
soft, fragile and contingent, and they are subject to many constraints. We consider some of the challenges
we have faced, and continue to face, below.
Some Problems and Challenges of Engagement
Despite all that we have said above, and our willingness to do it, one of the less visible but extraordinary
difficulties of engaged research is fielding, or navigating, ‘interests’—academic, political, professional,
and personal—and (in all four spheres) power/ambition. These intersecting interests shape and constrain
us, those with whom we engage, and responses to our research. Doing engaged research means there are
Page 15 of 24
high stakes for all concerned. The process, of (for example) managing (or being managed by) Steering
Groups, negotiating detail, discussing drafts of reports, and in the end, taking a ‘line’, can be emotionally
fraught, and personally testing. Reconciling honesty with diplomacy and tact, often on the spot at tense
meetings, can be a serious challenge. Getting this wrong, or losing the argument, can result in delays to
publication, declined access, changes in the tone of reports, and the loss of valued relationships. Keeping
both integrity and relationships intact requires fine judgment, some courage, faith in the data, and
thorough understanding of the field. This is one of the reasons why management-at-a-distance research
leadership models do not work. Acquiring research grants commits us to being in the field, not to
transferring data collection to cheaper and less experienced others. An apprenticeship model, involving
Principal Investigators and research teams working side by side for long periods, produces better
p. 948 outcomes (including the training and ↵ development of less experienced research personnel, and the
challenge they provide to our established practices) than other approaches, but is not systematically built
into our professional infrastructure. Responsible research requires an intensity of focus and presence that
funders and university managers routinely under-estimate.
We are acutely aware that there are some special problems in carrying out research in an adverse policy
climate. This is a very different experience, with its own implications, from doing so in a more liberal,
enlightened climate (e.g., in the years post-Woolf, 1991–3) or when policy and practice, for example in the
prevention of prison suicides, or in the organisation of prison regimes more generally, is improving. There
are times when we have found doing research in the ‘wrong policy climate’ deeply uncomfortable (e.g.
Liebling 1999) or when we have not responded to invitations to apply for research funding because it is too
obvious that the research question is futile, insincerely asked, or sets the wrong agenda.
For those entering the field or in the early stages of building a career (though some of these problems are
shared whatever the career stage), there are special difficulties of power, standing, and climate.
Criminology as a ‘moral enterprise’ often conflicts with a wary, defensive penal-political climate in which
austerity and punitive policy-driven agendas dominate the discourse. The changing landscape of criminal
justice, fuelled by an escalating trend to govern through crime (Simon 2009), has led to an institutional
culture fixated on fear, security, and control. Many penological researchers are denied access, or face
significant constraints determined by distant panels of decision-makers. The evolving landscape of
academic life, too, has changed the nature of funded research. As research has become more aggressively
market driven, demonstrating ‘impact’ or ‘producing deliverables’ often trumps the deep, sustained and
slow forms of engagement required for critical reflection. Criminologists find themselves working in
environments that demand greater efficiency and output, and a dependency on ‘income generation’. The
contractual arrangements between funding bodies and academics set a variety of boundaries around the
research to be completed. These arrangements regulate the nature of information to be gathered, the way
the research will be reported, and sometimes the form of dissemination. In this context, the concept of
‘academic freedom’ is under considerable threat.
For many in the growing penal research community, there remains a determination and obligation to
conduct meaningful and thoughtful, high quality empirical research despite the many institutional
limitations and changing political priorities. At times this requires creative or unorthodox, but always
careful and respectful, modes of engagement with those who hold the keys to access or funding.
Page 16 of 24
Navigating the way is not easy or comfortable. Some colleagues have given up the fight after finding the
power and politics of penological research too oppositional. Others have written insightfully about the
struggle and the moral complications of conducting such research.
Over twenty years ago, Mike Presdee and Reece Walters recounted their experience of research(er)
suppression. In 1996, the Australian government attempted to censor their presentation entitled ‘Mixing
Policy and Practice with Politics’ at the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology conference.
The paper related to an evaluation of a crime prevention strategy that was critical of state policy. The
conference convenors refused to accept this censorship, despite the threat of legal action, and instead
created a special plenary session on academic freedom. The debate at this session was unanimously in
support of academic freedom and the condemnation of the state in its efforts to suppress the
dissemination of independent research. However, there was some dissention; some of the academics
p. 949 present argued that criminologists needed ↵ to exert better diligence in safeguarding against the loss
of copyright and intellectual property by carefully negotiating these matters prior to signing contractual
agreements. John Braithwaite argued that social science researchers were constantly faced with
governments having ‘carte blanche over intellectual property’ and that criminologists needed to be
‘buccaneers’ when it comes to publishing their research. He went on to say, ‘You can try and stop me and
you can probably take away the report, but that would be foolish because I will go to the press and get the
report out in a much better way’ (Presdee and Walters 1998: 158). Braithwaite continues to research, write
and publish: we know of no criminologists who have been formally sanctioned for their work, but perhaps
repressive self-governance is a significant risk in all of our lives.
This brief case (there are many others like it that we know of—but few appear in published form) raises
several important questions about the current and future role of criminology. What does ‘academic
freedom’ mean in a changing, increasingly legalistic and managerial research environment? Do we have an
ethical obligation to disseminate findings? Does this obligation transcend contractual agreements, as it
does in other fields? How do we balance relationships when objectives or values are in conflict with each
other? Haskell (1996) argues that academic research must reflect a commitment to intellectual authority
and to our obligation as ‘critic and conscience of society’. Presdee and Walters (1998) warned that the
increase in contract research, which legally binds academics to provide information to clients or
stakeholders, is capable of restricting academic freedom, not only in terms of dissemination but in terms
of scope and as a curiosity-driven exercise. Loader and Sparks (2011: 55), drawing on Wilsdon and
colleagues (2005: 47), pose an urgent question for social science policy: ‘how do we best strengthen the
contribution that scientists and research can make to the health and robustness of our shared public
realm?’ Fostering a sense of ‘scientific citizenship’ is founded on methods of ‘upstream public
engagement’ that are critical and valuable to academic life, and to building an informed public.
Conclusion
There are risks that as criminologists working in an increasingly commodified ‘knowledge industry’ we
will follow rather than inform, challenge, and change prevailing public discourses about crime and
punishment (as Paul Rock suggests in his chapter, this volume)—perhaps especially when we engage in
specific, government-funded, and often politically constrained policy evaluation. As the examples above
Page 17 of 24
attest, we should resist this, and encourage our partners to be literate and enlightened users of,
commissioners of, and/or collaborators in meaningful research. This approach has worked, to a
considerable extent, in our collective experiences here and abroad. But, as we have illustrated across quite
a diverse range of projects, this resistance—and, with it, the insistence on working through respectful
relationships and communities of enquiry—comes at a cost. Building and sustaining these relationships
and communities is time-consuming and it involves a huge amount of hidden emotional labour—much of
it highly gendered. Large institutions and bureaucracies (whether academic or penal), operating within the
structural contexts of neo-liberal, late-modern societies, tend only to resource, recognize and reward this
labour (and these partnerships) for instrumental reasons (i.e. to meet their own needs). As a result, it is far
from easy to ensure that both the effort involved, and the resources, recognition, and rewards that come
p. 950 with perceived ‘success’ are distributed ↵ fairly within the diverse communities of enquiry involved
9
(see McNeill and Urie 2020; ‘Bridging the Void’, Episode 6 ). So, we often find ourselves striving not just to
do work about justice, but also struggling to do our work justly.
For early career scholars, these strivings and struggles are often more acute: many of the opportunities
and sources of capital available to more senior academics are not (yet) at their disposal; professional
precarity often prevents long-term engagement or investment. Despite this, many newer generation
researchers are making deliberate decisions to prioritize alternative—sometimes informal, reform-
oriented, experimental, creative, or shoestring—modes of engagement that enable ‘a meaningful and
satisfactory ethical sensibility’ within the field and academia (cf Threadgold 2017: 165). ‘Scholactivism’
and other forms of public intellectual work, in this regard, offer a desirable and values-driven
counterbalance to contemporary ‘corporate university’ life where ‘engagement’ and ‘impact’ can feel
commodified or extractive (Amini 2018: 46).
Inescapably, our work, collectively and cumulatively, is about justice. More specifically, we try to
understand and influence the ways in which penality is conceived and organized and to change it for the
better. As suggests, the criminological research enterprise is steeped in tensions between moral, political,
and scholarly imperatives. We often have to re/negotiate our priorities and goals, and to an extent, the
ends associated with our work, when engaged with criminal justice stakeholders (ibid.).
State punishment changes over time, as do the numbers and types of people subjected to penal sanctions
of different sorts. We learn much about how organizations think, and operate, from our own encounters
with them, and from reflecting on the legitimacy of our own research practices. If even we, as relatively
privileged interlocutors, emerge brutalized and reeling from engagement with penal power, this tells us
something important about what is going on. Of course, our bruises are much less severe than the wounds
of those on the receiving end of penal power day-to-day and year after year. It follows that we must also
attend carefully to the ways in which we work (and in which our institutions and research funders work),
so that we do not harm our research participants or our research partners, even as we struggle to reduce
the harms associated with state punishment.
Penal practice has a way of communicating its motives and values beyond those who are its principal
subjects; the same is perhaps true of research practice. Engaged criminological research is both a challenge
and a privilege; it also entails recognition of duties that we owe to those that we work with. There is a
Page 18 of 24
politics of both knowledge-building and of knowledge-sharing. Our reflections in this chapter are
intended as a gathering together of our own experience and a stimulus to more open discussion and careful
reflection on these important questions of knowledge, power, and change.

The best introduction to sociological research of the kind we describe is C. Wright Mills’, The Sociological Imagination
(1959). There are many helpful recent collections on the politics, methods, and emotional effects of engaged
criminological research, including special editions of Qualitative Inquiry (‘Doing Prison Research Differently’, edited by
Yvonne Jewkes (2014)), the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, edited by Hilde Tubex
p. 951 (2015), and Qualitative Research in Criminology: Advances in Criminological Theory, edited ↵ by J. Miller and W.
Palacios (2015). See also McAra’s ‘Can Criminologists Change the World? Critical Reflections on the Politics,
Performance and Effects Of Criminal Justice’ (2016) and Irwin-Rogers’ chapter in Activist Criminology edited by S.
Tombs, G. Martin, and V. Canning (forthcoming).
Online resources

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Notes
1
The term ‘lived experience’ tends to be used in research to indicate the distinct ontological realities of those who
have been imprisoned or ‘system impacted’ (see Earle et al., this volume) but it can arguably include anyone with
personal, direct, or even indirect experience of crime or criminal justice (e.g. as a family member). Close proximity to,
as well as full immersion in, criminal justice often means that we are ‘confronted by phenomenological themes [we]
could not dodge’ (Earle et al. this volume, citing Stiegler 1971). ‘Lived experience discourse’, however, can be
controversial if deployed in calculated or superficial appeals to policy-makers at the expense of careful, longer-term
struggles for justice (including those involving justice-affected people); or without the ‘critical theory’ that can help
contextualise it; see further, Earle et al., this volume).
2
Grateful thanks to Helen Arnold and Christina Straub; and Ruth Armstrong, Richard Bramwell, and Ryan Williams
respectively.
3
See: http://blogs.iriss.org.uk/discoveringdesistance/ <http://blogs.iriss.org.uk/discoveringdesistance/> accessed 29
June 2016.
4
See: https://discoveringdesistancehome.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/d7720-deske-propositions.pdf <https://
discoveringdesistancehome.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/d7720-deske-propositions.pdf> (accessed 19 April 2023).
5
For more on these processes and practices of connection, listen to the project’s podcast ‘The Art of Bridging’,
produced by Lucy Cathcart Frödén, and see the project website: www.distantvoices.org.uk <http://
www.distantvoices.org.uk>.
6
At the time of this research (2016–18), no one applied to work for the prison service. Jobseekers applied to the
Ministry of Justice, often with the hope for a civil service placement. Inevitably, some candidates were assigned to
work in prisons.
7
BES would like to thank her colleague in this study, Andrew M. Jefferson, and their research assistants, Yasmin
Haloui, Souhir Châari, and Nissaf Brahim.
8
Buber’s analysis of I-Thou encounters proposes that a meeting between embedded, experiencing persons should
occur, with ‘no system of ideas, no foreknowledge, and no fancy’ intervening between ‘I and Thou’. When we impose
such constraints, we force others to ‘appear as an It’: as experienced, projected, alienated objects. Conversely, we can
bring forth or meet a Thou in careful and curious dialogue. This is not easy: ‘How powerful is the unbroken world of It,
and how delicate are the appearances of the Thou’ (Buber 2010: 98).
9
See https://www.voxliminis.co.uk/media/the-art-of-bridging-episode-6-the-land/ <https://www.voxliminis.co.uk/
media/the-art-of-bridging-episode-6-the-land/>.
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Notes on Contributors

The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

p. xxi Notes on Contributors

Victoria Canning is Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Bristol.

Ben Collier is Lecturer in Digital Methods at the University of Edinburgh.

Bill Davies is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Leeds Beckett University.

Katja Franko is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oslo.

Pete Fussey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex.

Evi Girling is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Keele University.

Paddy Hillyard is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Queen’s University, Belfast.

p. xxiii ↵ Dick Hobbs is Emeritus Professor, University of Essex.

David Honeywell is Lecturer in Criminology at Arden University.

Yvonne Jewkes is Professor of Criminology at the University of Bath.

Cheryl Lawther is Reader in Law at Queen’s University Belfast.

Nicholas Lord is Professor of Criminology at the University of Manchester.

Jo Phoenix is Professor of Criminology at the University of Reading.

Gosia Polanska was Postdoctoral Research Associate at Keele University.

Lidia Puigvert is Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona.

Gwen Robinson is Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Sheffield.

Meredith Rossner is Professor of Criminology at the Australian National University.

Bethany E. Schmidt is Assistant Professor of Penology at the University of Cambridge.

Ed Schreeche-Powell is a Lecturer in Criminology at The University of Greenwich and Associate Lecturer in

Oliver Smith is Associate Professor (Reader) in Criminology at the University of Plymouth.

Alex Stevens is Professor in Criminal Justice at the University of Kent.

Steve Tombs is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at The Open University.

The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

p. xxvi Guide to the Online Resources

Selected Chapters from Previous Editions <http://

Useful Websites <https://learninglink.oup.com/access/

Essay Questions <https://learninglink.oup.com/access/

Guidance on Answering Essay Questions <https://

p. xxvii Lecturer Resources

Figures from the Text

p. xxviiiassignments and exams. ↵

The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

p. 1 Introduction: The renewed vision

p. 2 The New World We Live In

British Criminology’s Role in Fraught Times

Doing criminology in a changing climate

Losses and Acknowledgments

What Is New in the New Edition?

Garrett, B. (2020). https://wcsj.law.duke.edu/2020/11/remembering-roger-hood-a-champion-of-justice-and-

Hood, R. (1965), Borstal Reassessed, London: Heinemann.

Hood, R. (1990), The Death Penalty, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Matthews, R. (2014), Realist Criminology, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

West, D. (1955), Homosexuality, London: Penguin.

West, D. and Farrington, D. (1973), Who Becomes Delinquent, London: Heinemann.

WhatUni (2022), https://www.whatuni.com/ <https://www.whatuni.com/>.

Zapatero, L. A. (2020), ‘Obituary’. https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/content/roger-hood-obituary-luis-arroyo-

© Oxford University Press 2023

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The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (7th edn)

p. 15 1. Sociological theories of crime

Introduction: The Development of Criminology in Britain

Crime and Control

Anomie and the contradictions of social order

Anomie and social disorganization

Rational choice theory

p. 28 Routine Activities Theory

Crime, Control, and Space

The Chicago School

Control and space: beyond the Chicago School

Crime, power, and space

Culture and subculture