This chapter explores the intersection between criminology and transitional justice. The chapter begins with a critical discussion on the utility of criminological scholarship from settled democracies to the exceptional circumstances of post-conflict or post-authoritarian societies. It then explores a range of debates related to the punishment of offenders in such contexts 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.
Chapter
17. Criminology and transitional justice
Kieran McEvoy, Ron Dudai, and Cheryl Lawther
Chapter
1. The foundations of sociological theories of crime
Paul Rock
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 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 etiology of crime.
Chapter
34. Punishment, victimhood, and social control: towards a criminology of transitional justice
Kieran McEvoy, Ron Dudai, and Cheryl Lawther
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.
Chapter
25. Interpersonal violence on the British Isles, 1200–2016
Manuel Eisner
This chapter reviews the empirical evidence and theoretical frameworks for understanding the long-term trends in interpersonal violence on the British Isles, focusing on homicide. After an overview of the theoretical frameworks for long-term big-picture analyses of violence, it presents an introduction to the relevant historical sources and the problem of comparing violence over time. It then summarizes the current knowledge on trends and structural characteristics of homicide over the past 800 years, along with looking at infanticide as a separate category. The chapter finally provides an overview of core issues in four historical periods, namely the Middle Ages (1200–1500), the early modern period (1500–1800), the Industrial Age (1800–1950) and the post-Second World War period. For each period the chapter provides insight into historically specific cultural and economic processes that affected trends in violence.
Chapter
3. Punishment and welfare: social problems and social structures
David Garland
This chapter examines the complex relationship between ‘punishment’ and ‘welfare.’ It traces the various ways in which penal systems are influenced by, and interact with, broader systems of social welfare and how these linked institutions function as modes of social control and class control. Following a critical review of the historical and comparative literature—and associated questions of data and method—it discusses 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. ‘Penal-welfarist’ and ‘welfarist’ practices are defined and differentiated, some common elements of practices of punishing and assisting are identified, and the fundamentals of ‘the welfare state’ and its recent neoliberal history are explained.
Chapter
31. Critical perspectives on punishment
This chapter details a range of perspectives which effectively question the underlying assumptions behind the concept of ‘punishment’. This represents a shift in emphasis from the system ‘as it is’ to a critical evaluation of its social and ideological foundations, along with some ideas about how it might be different if we follow through the implications of these critical arguments. The chapter explores ideas about the use of punishment as a vehicle for maintaining the dominance of particular interests within society, and using it to exert social control. Implicated in this is the suggestion that claims of legitimacy, fairness, and justice must be called into question, especially in light of the evidence of the unequal treatment of certain groups, such as members of the black and minority ethnic communities. Critical perspectives also invite us to consider why some forms of behaviour, such as corporate negligence and tax fraud, appear to be much less heavily penalised (if at all) than crimes more typically associated with other groups and communities, such as benefit fraud or drug offences.
Book
David Downes, Paul Rock, and Eugene McLaughlin
Understanding Deviance provides a comprehensive guide to the current state of criminological theory. It outlines the principal theories of crime, deviance, and rule-breaking, discussing them chronologically, and placing them in their European and North American contexts considering major criticisms that have been voiced against them, and constructing defences where appropriate. The volume has been revised and brought up-to-date to include new issues of crime, deviance, disorder, criminal justice, and social control in the early twenty-first century. It considers new trends in criminological theory such as cultural criminology and public criminology, further discussion of how post-modernism and the ‘risk society’ is reformulating crime and deviance, and an assessment of how different approaches address the fall in crime rates across most democratic and developed societies. There is also a new chapter on victimology.
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11. Feminist Criminology
This chapter deals with feminist criminology and the critique of a traditionally masculine-driven discipline. It considers feminist arguments about the relationship between the criminality of women and their subordinate position and life experiences and the role of gender in theories of crime and deviance. It first considers Carol Smart’s views, as well as those of other theorists such as O. Pollak, W. I. Thomas, L. Gelsthorpe, and A. Morris. It then examines substantive areas where significant work has been accomplished in the field of feminist criminology: the ‘female emancipation leads to crime’ debate; the invalidation of the ‘leniency’ hypothesis; the relations between gender, crime, and social control; gender-specific crime; the increased prominence of the female victim in political and academic analysis; the gendered nature of victimization and criminalization; male violence; and intersectionality of class-race-gender inequalities. It concludes with a review of criticisms against feminist criminology.
Chapter
1. Watching the watchers: Theory and research in policing studies
Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner, and James Sheptycki
This chapter offers a broad introduction to the study of policing. It first outlines the concepts of police and policing, and the long-term evolution of these processes, with an emphasis on the idea of policing as an aspect of social control. There is discussion of the notion of the police as a body of people patrolling public places in blue uniforms, with a broad mandate of crime control, order maintenance, and some social service and specialist functions. The chapter then considers various sources of police research ranging from journalists and academic institutions to official government-related bodies, think-tanks, and pressure groups. It also looks at the development of police research. The concluding section offers an analysis of the vexed conceptual relationship between policing and politics.
Chapter
1. Sociological theories of crime
Paul Rock
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).
Chapter
35. The punishment-welfare relationship: history, sociology, and politics
David Garland
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.
