Law and order has become a key issue throughout the world. Crime
stories saturate the mass media and politicians shrilly compete
with each other in a race to be the toughest on crime. Prisons are
crammed to bursting point, and police powers and resources extended
repeatedly. After decades of explosive increase in crime rates,
these have plummeted throughout the Western world in the 1990s. Yet
fear of crime and violence, and the security industries catering
for these anxieties, grow relentlessly.
This book offers an up-to-date analysis of these contemporary
trends by providing all honest and concerned citizens with a
concise yet comprehensive survey of the sources of current problems
and anxieties about crime. It shows that the dominant tough law and
order approach to crime is based on fallacies about its nature,
sources, and what works in terms of crime control. Instead it
argues that the growth of crime has deep-seated causes, so that
policing and penal policy at best can only temporarily hold a lid
down on offending.
The book is intended to inform public debate about these vital
issues through a critical deconstruction of prevailing orthodoxy.
With its focus on current policies, problems and debates this book
is also an excellent introduction to criminology for the growing
numbers of students of the subject at all levels.
Table of Content
1. Introduction: Neo-Liberalism, Crime, and Control.
2. An Inspector Calls: Putting Crime in its Place.
3. A Mephistophelean Calculus: Measuring Crime Trends.
4. Permissiveness v. Political Economy: Explaining Crime
Trends.
5. A New Leviathan?: Law and Order Politics and Tough Crime
Control.
6. Conclusion: Law and Order – A 2020 Vision.
References
About the author
Robert Reiner is Professor of Criminology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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