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This chapter examines David Downes' contribution, through both Contrasts in Tolerance and his earlier paper to comparative criminology, especially in the context of the recent wave of studies. He stated that instructive comparisons of criminal justice policies have a long history. Contrasts offers a model case study despite the author's modesty about his achievement. It is also used as a link to study and evaluate the burgeoning range of work on comparative criminology and criminal justice. Discussion on the creation of taxonomy is provided. It is noted that Downes allowed himself some optimism about the Dutch penal model and its scope for transfer; today that system is seemingly in ruins, but the scope for conducting comparative criminological studies has never been greater.

David Downes' Delinquent Solution was publicized in 1966 and presented a rich and rewarding picture of East London in the early 1960s. It produced a platform for scholars to understand the worlds of successive generations of British Youth. This chapter reconsiders the socio-economic changes that have taken place in the East End during the past forty years. A few of Downes' old haunts are described in a contemporary context, and the validity of the concept of dissociation that emerged from his fieldwork is interrogated along with the relevance of the subcultural canon. It specifically had a tremendous influence upon the study of British youth subcultures. In general, The Delinquent Solution was an important text in the sociology of youth culture, and in its careful unravelling of the realities of being young in the 1960s Downes succeeded in contradicting some of the crude stereotyping of working-class youth, and in its place created a complex picture of a rich culture that was both oppositional and subservient.

This chapter explores two recent contributions to the flourishing debate about the history of criminal justice in modern societies so as to develop some ideas about how it can add to the structured, macro-level understanding which comparative studies also promise. It emphasizes James Q. Whitman's Harsh Justice and Markus Dirk Dubber's The Police Power. In line with this, it proposes that historical studies can usefully complement comparative research, can put questions on the agenda of comparative studies, and can fulfil some of the same explanatory and policy-relevant functions as comparative scholarship. A blend of Whitman's degradation hypothesis and of David Downes' interpretation may usefully be combined with the insights of recent political-economic analysis of comparative institutional advantage. It is argued that additional contributions to the genre of comparative scholarship exemplified by David Downes' Contrasts in Tolerance is important. In addition, the legitimacy of criminology or criminal justice studies as autonomous disciplines must be questioned.

David Downes taught at the London School of Economics for forty years. Over the duration of a long career, a career that paralleled the coming of age of British criminology itself, he exhibited responsiveness to all that change as well as a significant intellectual consistency. It is shown why the title Festschrift The Politics of Crime Control was selected and why the chapters it includes should settle on the topics of comparative penal policy; the politics of crime; and subcultural theory and youth, the object of Downes' original research, which pointed to the manner in which delinquency takes form within the framework of class inequalities. This book started out of a one-day conference planned in June 2003 to commemorate David Downes as a scholar and a man, and it reflects more than a simple admiration for his ideas.

This chapter extends the analysis in which David Downes and the author engaged in their joint essay on ‘law and order’ politics over three editions of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology. In doing so, it reflects on developments since the new millennium. It also suggests as the starting point Prime Minister Blair's pronouncement that the excesses to be laid at the door of the liberal 1960s are now to be tackled head on. This represents, it argues, the latest effort by New Labour finally to expel the Old Labour ‘skeletons in the cupboard’, as David and the author termed it, thereby preventing the Tories from recovering their traditional stronghold to the ‘law and order’ right of Labour. It is stated that the rules of the game have indeed changed, and are radically changing. The autumn 2005 ‘rules’ debate has of course been placed on a much more bitter argument about whether the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq was and is justified, and whether those events have made the world and Britain a more dangerous place.