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America fought the Vietnam War as a warrant for its solidity as an anti-Communist ally. In so doing, it brought to the surface widespread concerns that consumerist capitalism was being corrupted by militarism and ethical hypocrisy. The movements of 1968 rejected the shades of pre-war authoritarianism and intimations of neo-authoritarianism. In this, it was successful to a considerable degree. With the state partly de-legitimized, New Left and New Right ideas jostled for succession. As post-war capitalism entered into crisis, due to a squeeze on bourgeois income from a militant labour movement, Neo-Liberalism emerged as the bearer of libertarianism. Democratic revolution in the Mediterranean indicated that the threat of social revolution was now far more easily contained. Euro-Communism presaged a drawing of the claws of ‘proletarian democracy’.

I explore in this chapter how, in recent decades, modeling work has come to require embodying the ideal of a malleable body, especially since the 1980s and 1990s, when digital technologies facilitated the desire to manipulate appearances, since digitization enabled an infinite malleability of appearance down to the tiniest pixel. Modeling work increasingly became the work to always be ready for, or in the process of, transformation, and in so doing, models glamorized this practice for the general public.

This final chapter pulls all of the varying strands together. The chapter acknowledges the gaps in criminological understanding of State crime but calls for a more holistic approach to be taken: an approach that synthesises the nature of the new global hegemony of neo-liberalism, profit, governmental alliances, contraventions of international law, political violence/terrorism and the devastating consequences of inflicting social harm. In this latter respect, it is argued that the lens of social harm brings all the elements of such behaviour together. Social harm has a longitudinal dimension that keeps criminal and moral behaviour under scrutiny well beyond the initial, more obvious violations of morality and/or criminal law. Indeed, the socio-economic, ecological and psychological aftereffects of war, invasion, torture, genocide and unnecessary unemployment can be measured as they affect communities, families, the ecosystem, social infrastructure and communal health and livelihood issues. With a sense of optimism, the chapter argues that an examination of the dubious actions by the State and powerful can spark a prolonged sense of moral outrage in the eyes of public well beyond the initial atrocity and thus hold rogue state actions and the corrupt acts of the powerful more accountable.

This chapter presents an overview of Russia in the world and Russia through the eyes of its future leaders. 108 high-level students met in 4 focus groups from each of the three universities and across a large variety of disciplines. The experienced Russian moderator never imposed, a “scenario” of questions. Although America is acknowledged to be the most important country in the world, Russians (average citizens and leaders alike) do not like America. Bombing Serbia and the Bush Doctrine of bombing and regime change are on their minds. Their interest in the United States is asymmetrical: Americans do not return it and its media often report news from Russia inaccurately, another sign read as careless disparagement. America has extraordinary inequities and unregulated selfishness that post-Soviet Russia exhibits on a more massive scale and without democratic institutions.

Cook examines the context and function of the ongoing moral and cultural policing of young people and minorities in Mangaluru by vigilante Hindu groups with government complicity. Based on long term ethnographic fieldwork with the city’s burgeoning population of students and underemployed youth, Cook argues that the violence is fueled by the resentment against what is seen as the cultural pollution of ‘excessive’ freedom among middle class youth. Many of the vigilantes are underemployed youth, structurally shut out from gainful employment and prestigious education. Instead they assume positions as self-appointed guardians of Indian culture and putative ‘Hindu values’, as well as protectors of young women against the seductions of western immorality, and the imagined sexual predation by men from the minority community. Cook explains this as a contradiction within neo-liberalism: a tension between the ‘Western cultural values’ that are resented by the vigilantes, and their simultaneous celebration of a neo-liberal culture of economic freedom that they hope will deliver them into a life of success. Their failure in the latter seems to fuel their commitment to combat the former.

This chapter is based on the premise that marketisation extends beyond strategies such as privatisation or monetisation, but encroaches into our life-worlds more subtly. Based on the analysis of recent Irish youth justice policy reforms, it is suggested that softer aspects of marketisation become visible in the way that ‘problems’ or ‘solutions to problems’ are written and talked about. Importantly, this chapter traces how dominant discourses ‘travel’ from sites of administrative governance into the imaginations of front-line workers engaging with young people. It is further argued that the introduction of administrative governance is emblematic of neo-liberalism’s distinct mode of reason with the problematic effect of constructing young people and their families as responsible for their own self-improvement and self-realisation. Through its anti-political nature, administrative governance eschews important considerations relating to the wider contexts of youthful ‘offending’ and the professional field of ‘youth justice work’.

The right to legal representation is a fundamental right, and arrangements for funding this are crucial to ensuring access to justice for those accused of criminal offences. Criminal legal aid has long been regarded as an entitlement for most citizens, particularly the most economically vulnerable. However, criminal legal aid has been cast in a different light in recent years, viewed not through the lens of welfarism but subjected to neo-liberal values such as cost neutrality, marketisation and managerialism. This was particularly evident in the ‘Transforming Legal Aid’ consultation of 2013, which resurrected the idea of competitive tendering for provision of criminal legal aid services. Although not pursued in full, subsequent changes – including cuts of 8.75% to fees for legal aid lawyers – appear to have significantly affected the scope of criminal legal aid. The number of providers of such services has consistently declined over the past decade and firms have frequently reported significant financial pressure. Arguably, these reforms – justified in neo-liberal terms – have affected access to justice and by extension the quality of justice offered by the Criminal Justice System, CJS. This chapter will examine the market-driven reform of criminal legal aid in recent years, and consider two apparent examples of impact: evidence of an increasing number of litigants-in-person in criminal cases; and the outsourcing of police station work to independent ‘agents’. The chapter will also question some of the apparent contradictions in neo-liberal reform of criminal legal aid, such as the deliberate policy of reducing the size of the provider market; and the ‘false economies’ created by the pursuit of efficiency and economy: goals which are underpinned and enforced by the Criminal Procedure Rules.

This chapter investigates changes that have taken place in the recent past in relation to interventions with adult offenders in England and Wales, particularly in the context of the application of risk technologies and the increasingly managerial and market-driven set of arrangements. This review draws on criminological frameworks which examine such neo-liberal penal reforms, where social problems have been reframed as crime problems and where the application of the political policy of austerity has brought about the fragmentation and reduction of local services. Quantitative and qualitative data from a 2-year ESRC-funded research project are presented to illustrate and analyse the situations regarding ‘low-level’ offenders, whose cases were heard in a Community Justice Court in a large city in England. Detailed examination of this data reveals a complex picture of offending patterns, social issues and the pre-existing involvement of a wide range of statutory and third-sector agencies, even for many deemed ‘low-risk’ offenders. In many of these cases pathways out of crime seemed elusive, with rehabilitative interventions being framed in terms of penal narratives which emphasised individual responsibility and which denied wider structural problems. This critique raises concerns about the implications and consequences of these issues, particularly in relation to the widescale changes that were brought about by the Transforming Rehabilitation agenda. It argues that for constructive and effective interventions to take place in the field of community sanctions, including the therapeutic justice approach explored here, social justice and a more holistic approach to rehabilitation need to be (re)placed as central pillars of the criminal justice system.

This chapter explores the gendered impacts of the austerity-driven probation reforms, which include the dismantling of community-based services for economically marginalised women and the alarming 131% rise in women recalled to custody. Blame for these deleterious effects has been apportioned to the privatisation of Probation Trusts in England and Wales and the subsequent dominance of ‘Community Rehabilitation Companies’ – where, in practice, larger, cheaper service providers are pushing out smaller, specialist services. Whilst we don’t disagree with this narrative, we argue that the neo-liberal tropes of the gender responsive reform programme – that preceded the privatisation of Probation Trusts – is an important policy context for understanding the contractual inequalities that we are seeing unfold today. The roll out of the gender responsive reform programme marked a key moment in the landscape of women’s voluntary sector as it encouraged them to compete with other voluntary services and prove ‘better value’ for money. This form of marketisation, we argue, has resulted in women’s services attenuating or, at best, compromising the political values and ethics that previously underpinned their ‘specialist’ approach to working with women in the criminal justice system.

In 2012, alongside its part-privatisation of the Probation Service, the Ministry of Justice secretly conceived a strategy, hubristically named ‘New World’, to upgrade ‘obsolete’ Radio Frequency (RF) electronic monitoring technology with Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking, and subject unprecedented numbers of offenders to it by 2020. Replacing the existing private sector delivery infrastructure with a hitherto untried model was pursued more openly, but obscured larger ambitions. Over five years ‘New World’ failed spectacularly, and expensively. Subsequent official audits indicted its implementation and actually questioned its conception, but neglected the ideological context and the disruptive political strategy which underpinned it. ‘New World’ was a calculated exercise in ‘disruptive’ neo-liberal statecraft, and the failure of its first iteration does not mean the end of it.