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This book compares interest group participation in the development of crime and justice policy across the local, state and national levels of government and has three main contributions to law, policy and criminology scholarship. First, it provides a detailed analysis of the narrow and often parochial nature of national and state crime politics, in contrast to the active and intense local political mobilization on crime by racial minorities and the urban poor. The book illustrates the ways the structure of U.S. federalism has contributed to the current situation in which national policy responses to crime overlook black and poor victims of violence and how highly organized, narrowly focused interest groups, such as the National Rifle Association, have a disproportionate influence in crime politics. This study also demonstrates that urban minorities and the poor mobilize locally to address crime as one of many social ills, though their tactics are often unconventional and their resources limited. Second, it illustrates how the absence of these groups from the policy process at the state and national levels has encouraged the development of policy frames that are highly skewed in favor of police, prosecutors, and narrow citizen interests, whose policy preferences often converge on increasing punishments for offenders. That this is true even at the national level, where policy scholars often assume the policy process is more open and porous than at subregional levels, is a major contribution of the book. Finally, the comparison of group participation across legislative venues on a single policy issue contributes to our understanding of group theory.

This volume addresses one of the most pressing problems of modern criminology: Why do some individuals become chronic, persistent offenders? Chronic offenders are responsible for the majority of serious crimes committed and understanding which individuals will become chronic offenders is an important step in developing interventions that will work. Unfortunately, much of the research on causes of offending does not distinguish between minor, short-term delinquency and long-term patterns of serious criminality. The volume was inspired by a desire to bridge the gap between two sets of literature that can help us shed light on this problem: criminological research on offending trajectories and research on risk factors for offending in the field of developmental psychology. Chapters cover topics such as families and parenting, poverty, stressful life events, social support, biology and genetics, early onset, foster care, educational programs for juvenile offenders, deterrence, and chronic offending among females. Several authors also share new theoretical approaches to understanding persistence and chronicity in offending, including an expansion of the conceptualization of the etiology of self-control, a discussion of offender resistance to social control, a dynamic developmental systems approach to understanding offending in young adulthood, and the application of Wikström's situational action theory to persistent offending.

Convict criminology is the study of criminology by those who have first-hand experience of imprisonment. This is the first single-authored account of this unusual perspective. It begins with an overview of the idea that direct experience of incarceration furnishes a criminologist with distinctive resources to analyse and critique ideas about crime, punishment, law and order. The book goes on to critically evaluate the emergence of the perspective within the USA. Key figures, such as Frank Tannenbaum and John Irwin, are identified, and their particular contributions to criminology are discussed before the accounts move across the Atlantic to Europe. The Russian anarchist theorist, Peter Kropotkin, is identified as the first ‘convict criminologist’ on the basis of his 19^th century study of French and Russian prisons that combined his own experiences of incarceration with extensive empirical studies. The author, by drawing on his own experience of imprisonment in the early 1980s, demonstrates how such experience can be developed academically to widen the horizons of criminology. Taking inspiration from feminist intersectional scholarship his account foregrounds gender, race, colonialism and class as central features of men’s penal experience. The reflexive autobiographical style of the book offers methodological insights, creative theoretical synthesis and a compelling narrative.

This volume discusses criminology and policy analysis of adolescence. The focus is on the principles and policy of a separate and distinct system of juvenile justice. The book opens with an introduction of the creation of adolescence, presenting a justification for the category of the juvenile or a period of partial responsibility before full adulthood. Subsequent sections include empirical investigations of the nature of youth criminality and legal policy towards youth crime. At the heart of the book is an argument for a penal policy that recognizes diminished responsibility and a youth policy that emphasizes the benefits of letting the maturing process continue with minimal interruption. The book concludes with applications of the core concerns to five specific problem areas in current juvenile justice: teen pregnancy, transfer to criminal court, minority overrepresentation, juvenile gun use, and youth homicide.

This book presents a substantial revolution on the character of confined social life. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in two contrasting English maximum security prisons, the authors systematically compare their institutional order, including the differing control strategies deployed in each, as seen by both custodians and captives, controllers and controlled. The authors discuss the insinuations of their research for the tradition of sociological concern within the ‘prison community.’ They re-examine the resources of that rich but latterly somewhat dormant field in the light of some of the main currents in contemporary social theory, and thereby provide a new perspective on the ‘problem of order’ in maximum custody. This book will have significant policy implications, and it will be required reading for scholars and students in criminology and criminal justice, as well as for administrators and reformers in penal systems.

Indigenous Criminology is the first book to explore a distinctly Indigenous approach to criminology. It is based on comparative research across the settler colonial states of Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States. The book draws on critical Indigenous and decolonial literature to argue for the importance of prioritising Indigenous knowledge in understanding contemporary Indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice system. Indigenous Criminology sets out the significance of colonialism as a key foundational concept to developing a critical Indigenous criminology. It analyses how colonialism impacts on the current operations of criminal justice. The book explores a number of explicit issues including the policing, sentencing and punishment of Indigenous people. It considers the impact of crime control specifically on Indigenous women and discusses the effects on Indigenous people of globalisation and crime control. The book concludes with a reflection on critical issues in the development of an Indigenous criminology, including the need to take seriously the voices of Indigenous peoples and the rights embedded in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Domestic Fortress offers a critical analysis of the contemporary home and its close relationship to fear and security. It considers the important connection between the private home, political life and the economy that we term tessellated neoliberalism. The book considers the nucleus of the domestic home as part of a much larger archipelago frontline of homes and gated communities that appear as a new home front set against diverse sources of social anxiety. These range from questions of invasion (such as burglary or identity theft) to those of security (the home as a financial resource in retirement and as a place of refuge in an unpredictable world). A culture of fear has been responded to through increasingly emphatic retreats by homeowners into fortified dwellings, palatial houses, concealed bunker pads and gated developments. Many feature elaborate security measures; alarms, CCTV systems, motion-sensing lights and impregnable panic rooms. Domestic Fortresslocates the anxieties driving these responses to the corporate and political manufacturing of fear, the triumph of neoliberal models of homeownership and related modes of social individualisation and risk that permeate society today. Domestic Fortress draws on perspectives and research from criminology, urban studies and sociology to offer a sense of the private home as a site of wavering anxiety and security, exclusion and warmth, alongside dreams of retreat and autonomy that mesh closely with the defining principles of neoliberal governance. Even as the home is acknowledged to play a vital role in sheltering us from the elements so it has now come to be a locus around which many anxieties are shut-out. The home allows us to lock out the daily hardships of life, but is also a site from which we witness a wide range of troubling phenomena: the insecurities of the workplace, plans for our future welfare, internationalized terror, geo-political warfare, ecological catastrophes, feelings of loss and uncertainty around identity, to say nothing of the daily risks of flood, fire and other disasters. The home now plays a complex dual role that slips between offering us protection from these worries while also offering the nightmare of its own possible invasion, erosion or destruction. On top of these concerns entire industries have been built that sell a war against strangers, dirt and disaster. This of course includes the insurance industry itself, but also the use of technologies that both protect the home and make it effectively more impregnable to casual social contact as well as the proliferation of products devoted to domestic cleanliness. Domestic Fortress considers the fantasies and realities of dangers to the contemporary home and its inhabitants and details the wide range of actions taken in the pursuit of total safety.

This book analyses the new phenomenon of Black Police Associations (BPAs) established in the majority of constabularies in England and Wales. The author takes a sociological and theoretical approach to the subject, in contrast to current criminology, which is more evaluative and policy oriented. The analysis is underpinned with the notion that race and ethnicity are socially constructed: the book describes and analyses how race and ethnicity are constructed and sustained within constabularies, and how they have changed during the last two decades, providing a sociological perspective on understanding race within criminal-justice institutions. The book covers the history of BPAs; the construction and consequences of the notion of ‘black’ as a political emblem within constabularies; the work and influence of BPAs (nationally and within constabularies); post-McPherson policing; new forms of racism within constabularies; ethnic identities amongst ethnic-minority police officers and BPAs; and the occupational culture. By analysing the work of BPAs within constabularies, the author posits a number of implications for change within the management of constabularies.

This book reviews the burgeoning literature on contemporary punishment and penal change, concentrating on the work of David Garland, John Pratt, Hans Boutellier and Loïc Wacquant. The author argues that academics do not think and write in a vacuum, they carry a past with them and are influenced by new insights and theories, and constantly need to reposition themselves within their own field and their political environment. This book, then, is as much about the selected authors as the stories they bring. It includes four large chapters devoted to the work of each author, offering an exposé of their work framed within the context of their lives. It offers a discussion of their central ideas and their distinctive approach towards questions of penal change and an analysis of the relationship between their roles as scholars in an academic environment and citizens in a political community. The scholar-oriented approach allows the author to deal with questions related to criminology's public persuasiveness—a timely analysis in view of recent calls for criminologists and other social scientists to enter public debate more directly.