Review of Culture of Control

Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2002), pp. 341–366

Dangers of Dystopias in Penal Theory†

LUCIA ZEDNER∗

1. IntroductionPoliticians and policymakers have pressed the fast-forward button on criminaljustice. The tumble of policy shifts, legislative pronouncements, and new penaltechnologies rush before our eyes; the latest development scarcely grasped beforea new direction is announced or a new penal order introduced. The rate ofchange is bewildering not least because many of the developments appear to bemutually incoherent or contradictory. More than one leading penal theorist hasobserved that we are in ‘a state of penological inconsistency that probably hasfew precedents in modern criminal justice’.1

The more ‘volatile and contradictory’ the philosophies, policies and practicesof punishment appear to be, the greater the drive among penal theorists togive an account capable of rendering them, if not coherent, then at leastcomprehensible. And it is striking that attempts to provide a theoreticallysatisfactory account of penal change have been appearing with almost the samespeed and marked by the same fervid energy as the penological developmentsthemselves.2 That contemporary penal policy and practice is complex andcapricious is generally agreed. Whether the transformations it appears to beundergoing can be explained by reference to a larger master pattern is morecontroversial. And which particular master pattern this might be is more con-troversial still. As in many other disciplines, much energy has been devoted toestablishing whether these transformations signify the onset of late modernity,the death throes of modernity, or the advent of postmodernity.3 The debate, as

† A review of D. Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2001) pp. xiii, 307, ISBN 0–19–829937–0, £19.99 hbk. I would like to thank Roger Hood,Klaus Gunther, Nicola Lacey, and Liora Lazarus for their comments. As ever, Joshua Getzler was my sternestcritic.∗ Reader in Criminal Justice and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.1 P.O’Malley ‘Volatile and contradictory punishment’, (1999) 3 Theoretical Criminology 175–76.2 To cite only some of the most recent publications: P. O’Malley above; I. Taylor, Crime in Context (London:

Polity Press, 1999); J.Young The Exclusive Society: Social Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity (London:Sage, 1999); D. Garland and R. Sparks (eds), British Journal of Criminology Special Issue: Criminology and SocialTheory (2000) 40; T. Hope and R. Sparks (eds), Crime, Risk & Insecurity (London: Routledge, 2000); K. Stensonand R. R. Sullivan (eds), Crime, Risk and Justice (Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2001); C. Shearing‘Punishment and the changing face of governance’, (2001) 3 Punishment and Society 203–20.

3 K. Lucken ‘Contemporary Penal Trends: Modern or Postmodern?’, (1998) 38 BJC 106–123; J. Pratt ‘TheReturn of the Wheelbarrow Man; Or, the Arrival of Postmodern Politics?’ (2000) 40 BJC 127–45; L. Miller‘Looking for Postmodernism in All the Wrong Places: Implementing a New Penology’ (2001) 41 BJC 168–184.

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Sparks has observed, ‘is messy and potentially disorientates us further’.4 Resistingthe temptation to superimpose neat temporal categories, he finds greater valuein attempting to make sense of transformations in penality as part of ‘our currentcultural and political condition’. No one has done more to achieve this thanDavid Garland in The Culture of Control.

The Culture of Control is an analytical account of social and penal change inthe closing decades of the 20th century. Whilst the book has a strongly historicalflavour, mapping penal change over 40 years, Garland’s primary interest is, inFoucauldian terms, archeological:5 to uncover the foundations of the presentpenal order. Although the complexity of his argument is not easily reducible toa single thesis, it might be that the social, economic and political dynamicsof late modernity have created a social order dominated by a new culturalformation—‘the crime complex’ (p. xi). In what follows, I offer an appreciative, ifcritical, account of his methodology, historical claims, and use of key concepts,not least ‘culture’ and ‘control’. Garland’s account is chilling in its grimlypessimistic reflections on the rise of the ‘criminal justice state’ and I concludewith some equally sober reflections on the dangers of writing so determinedlydystopic as this.6

2. A ‘History of the Present’The Culture of Control is painted on a large canvas and the schematic overviewof changes in crime problems, penal ideas, penal politics, and institutional formsit describes is masterly. To shift the metaphor slightly, the book has the characterof a vast tapestry in which myriad, diverse strands are woven together with greatskill and care. Although Garland is lured by the possibility of identifying ‘broadorganising principles’ (p. viii) and delineating ‘patterns of structural change,’ (p.ix) he is too sophisticated an intellectual and too honest a scholar to try to forcethe bewildering puzzle that is contemporary crime control into a single framework.The resulting picture is multi-faceted and replete with insight. But it is alsocontroversial and self-consciously so: he presents the book in a ‘spirit of pro-vocation and productivity’ (p. ix) that fully anticipates critical response andempirical refutation. Drawing an analogy with Foucault’s Discipline and Punish,7

Garland argues that ‘attempts to delineate patterns of structural change willtend, whether or not their claims can be sustained, to have a productive effect’(p. ix emphasis added). Though laudable for its honesty, this is a worryingstatement. If the claims made are not sustainable, what then is their purpose?

4 R. Sparks ‘Recent Social Theory and the Study of Crime and Punishment’ in M. Maguire, R. Morgan andR. Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) at 429–31.

5 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972); see discussion in L. McNay, Foucault:A Critical Introduction at Ch.2 ‘The Subject of Knowledge’ (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).

6 Prompted in part by P. Young ‘On the importance of Utopias in Criminological Thinking’, (1992) 32 BritishJournal of Criminology 423–37.

7 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977).

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Garland talks of telling ‘stories’, and one is left wondering what status and whateffect these stories are intended to have.

The central narrative is ‘a history of the present’;8 an analysis of how thepresent field of crime control came to be configured as it is (rather than aconventional historical narrative). It focuses on changes in crime control inBritain and America in the closing decades of the 20th century. After ‘severaldecades of flux and uncertainty’, Garland argues that the contours of a newlandscape of crime control are only now emerging with sufficient clarity that itis possible to map this new ‘terrain’ (p. 5). Whilst he uses the language of‘transformation’ and ‘reconfiguration’, he denies that this amounts to an epochaltransformation of the sort suggested by ‘the death of the social or the arrival ofpost-modernity’(p. 23). Indeed, Garland insists that our present responses tocrime and criminal justice, albeit ‘dramatically reconfigured’ (p. 25), are entirelyconsistent with late modernity.

Since penal theorists are far from agreed about the key characteristics ofcontemporary penality, Garland begins, somewhat idiosyncratically, by settingout twelve indices of substantive change to begin his own analysis. They are:the decline of the rehabilitative ideal; the re-emergence of punitive sanctions andexpressive justice; changes in the emotional tone of crime policy (principallyfrom ‘decency and humanity’ to ‘insecurity, anger, resentment’); the return ofthe victim; the privileging of public protection; the politicization of crime and anew populism; the reinvention of the prison (‘prison works’); the transformationof criminological thought (crime is no longer regarded as deviance but as ‘anormal, routine, commonplace aspect of modern society’); the expansion ofcrime prevention and community safety; the enlistment of civil society in crimecontrol and the expansion of private security; new management styles; and,finally, ‘a perpetual sense of crisis’. This eclectic list sets a formidable analyticalchallenge. Garland is the first to recognize that identifying key indices of penalchange is an interpretative act that sidelines other developments and closes downavenues of enquiry. Perhaps to pre-empt critical response, he sets out the dangersof describing indices of change in this way. To do so risks collapsing time andinstitutional space (p. 21); mistaking short-term developments for longer termstructural change; eliding discourse with practice; and confusing means withends. To recognize dangers is not, however, to eradicate them. Garland’smethodological self-admonishments, although admirable in their transparency,do not prevent the possibility of his falling prey to them. In particular, he seemsto be torn between accepting Foucault’s caution that we should recognize that‘the time we live in is not the unique or fundamental irruptive point in historywhere everything is completed and begun again’ (quoted, p. 22) and comingclose to identifying the penal present as a moment of exceptional social rupture.

8 Borrowing from M. Foucault at 31; K. Stenson ‘Beyond Histories of the Present’, (1998) 29 Economy andSociety 333–52.


3. Penal NostalgiaA central theme of The Culture of Control is the dismal path of criminal policyinto ‘populist punitivism’ taken in the past twenty years. Its starting point is thepeace and stability of the post-war welfare state. In ‘its unquestioning commitmentto social engineering; its confidence in the capacities of the state and thepossibilities of science’; and its unswerving belief that social conditions andindividual offenders could be reformed by the interventions of governmentagencies’, the classical welfare state was, argues Garland, the high point ofmodernism (p. 40). The logic of penal welfarism required the routine differ-entiation of the ‘normal’ from the ‘pathological’ and an almost exclusive focuson the latter. And this logic cast criminology in the role of handmaiden to thereformative project, charged with determining ‘what works’ and why. Garlandis reluctant to recognize dissent from this grand modernist project, insisting onthe ‘broad level of support for the ethos of penal-welfarism’ (p. 50) and ‘theabsence of any active public or political opposition’ (p. 51). It is questionable,however, whether welfarism, even in the heyday of the 1960s, enjoyed ‘a broadprofessional consensus about the basic framework within which crime controlshould operate, and a widely shared sense of the goals and values that shouldshape criminal justice’ (p. 27). Garland’s nostalgia for a lost penal past is curiouslyreminiscent of the argument put forward by protagonists of ‘Law and Order’that we are in rapid moral decline from the stable traditions of the past.9 And itis no easier to sustain.

Concerns about the potential of penal-welfarism to licence oppressive andexcessive intrusions into the lives of offenders; its questionable assumptionsabout the means to return delinquents to ‘good citizenship’; its lack of a normativeframework of fairness or justice; and, most fundamentally, its doubtful efficacymade impossible, even in the 1960s, the cosy consensus that Garland describes.If welfarism later collapsed completely (and I shall question below whether thisis so), it did so because of its own internal failings and because there was, fromthe outset, disagreement within the academy and amongst practitioners aboutits assumptions, its goals, and its capacity to achieve them. Moreover, whilstwelfarism might have dominated penal discourse, it is questionable whether itdominated practice in the way that Garland suggests. Even at welfarism’s height,the fine remained the most frequently used penal sanction. From 1938 to 1980its proportionate use roughly tripled (from 17% to 53%) whereas use of the(rehabilitative) probation order declined from 15% to 7%.10 As Bottoms hasshown, the fine is a juridical order par excellence and it is difficult to discern init any disciplinary, still less any reformative, impulse. This points to an interestingdisjuncture between the promotion of welfarism as a political ideal and acontinuing commitment by the courts to classical legalism. The criminal law has

9 On the mythic status of nostalgic regret for a past penal order see the classic study by G. Pearson, Hooligan:A History of Respectable Fears (London: Macmillan Press, 1983).

10 A. Bottoms, ‘Neglected features of Contemporary Penal Systems’ in D. Garland and P. Duff (eds), The Powerto Punish: Contemporary Penality and Social Analysis (London: Heinemann, 1983) at 167.


always been retributivist in its orientation, resting on the presumption of theresponsible subject and geared toward the attribution of culpability. To focuson the prevailing rhetoric of welfarism, as opposed to its law and practice,overlooks the persistent commitment to classical legalism that might partlyexplain the later ‘revival’ of retributivism.

Given his vision of universal optimism and widespread support for welfarism,it is hardly surprising that Garland goes on to describe the collapse of penal-welfarism as ‘sudden’, ‘radical’, and unforeseen. In the 1970s, he argues, ‘in thecourse of a few years, the orthodoxies of rehabilitative faith collapsed in virtuallyall of the developed countries’ (p. 54). He describes this fall as ‘something akinto a stockmarket crash’ (p. 69). His claims about the scale of the ‘crash’ arearguably no less problematic than his assumption of former universal support.For the moment though, let us set on one side the issue of scale in order toexamine Garland’s explanation of the demise of rehabilitation. He maintainsthat the ‘standard account’ attributes its demise to the impact of publishedcriticism by academics. The idea that the critics woke up one day to recognizethe dangers of abuse inherent in rehabilitation is, he suggests, ‘a modern versionof the fairy story of Enlightenment reform’ (p. 64). The force for change lay notsimply in academic criticism but in the changed institutional and culturalcircumstances that gave this writing unprecedented contextual power. Similarly,Garland suggests that the ‘standard account’ cites negative empirical researchfindings as decisive in the demise of the rehabilitative model. But he is hardlythe first to point out that negative findings were not entirely novel, that theywere by no means unequivocal,11 and could have been identified as problems ofimplementation rather than as a failure fatal to the entire conception of themodel. Like others before him, Garland argues we must look elsewhere forexplanations of the failure of penal-welfarism.

For Garland, the most decisive critics of welfarism were young, radicalacademics (themselves the products and beneficiaries of the post-war welfarestate) who judged the system according to high social ideals by which measure,of course, they found it wanting. From being natural constituents of welfarismthey rapidly became its sharpest critics, impatient at its perceived failure todeliver social justice and individual freedom. Their intellectual criticisms joinedwith the critical empirical findings that arose, ironically, from the very relianceof rehabilitation on self-validation through research. Garland insists that theconsequent reaction was, however, wholly disproportionate: what began as aprogressive critique rapidly became a wholesale rejection. Garland likens theforce of this overreaction to the ‘pouring forth of the discontents of the penal-welfare state’ (p. 71). This reaction, he suggests, ought ‘to be diagnosed ratherthan merely explained’ and his diagnosis draws upon the language of ‘hystericaldisproportion’, ‘nihilistic despondency’, (p. 69) and ‘catharsis’ (p. 71). But,

11 The article in which Martinson famously concluded ‘nothing works’ in fact identified some successes and itwas, in any case, swiftly followed by a less publicized retraction by him. R. Martinson ‘What works?—Questionsand Answers about Prison Reform’, (1974) 35 The Public Interest 22–54.


apparently not wholly persuaded himself by the explanatory power of psy-choanalytical diagnosis, he returns instead to solidly sociological explanationspredicated on ‘convergent processes of economic, political, and cultural change’(p. 73). In short, it was not a collapse of ideals or even, as Garland earliersuggested, faith alone that brought about the fall but rather the conjunction ofthese factors with larger structural changes.

There is a strong temptation to be swept up in Garland’s grand narrative, sopersuasively and energetically is it related. Before going on to examine the largerstructural changes he describes, we should pause to ask whether the explanationfor, or scale of, the collapse of welfarism can be accepted unequivocally. It isarguable that in so presenting its demise, Garland falls foul of his earlierinjunction: ‘do not mistake talk for action’.12 Reading his account one mightreasonably have expected probation officers, as primary agents of penal-welfarism,to resign en masse. Yet behind the academic refutation and the official rejection,penal practice carried on much as before. Probation and community service,both penal orders whose purpose is primarily rehabilitative, thrived and evenincreased in proportionate use in the ‘post-rehabilitative’ period. Prisons con-tinued to hold as a primary rule that ‘the purpose of the training and treatmentof convicted prisoners shall be to encourage and assist them to lead a good anduseful life’.13 And the work of probation officers, psychologists, educationalofficers, and resettlement workers continued to find its purpose in the fulfilmentof this rule, albeit in a markedly less benign political environment. Academics,too, have returned to the question of ‘what works’ in tackling offending behaviourand, some 20 years on, come to markedly more positive conclusions.14 It is alsoimportant to recognize that in some countries it is questionable whether welfarismdeclined at all. In Germany, for example, the subtlely different concept of‘resocialization’ was defended and remained a cornerstone of penal policythroughout the 1970s and 80s.

4. The Coming of ‘Late Modernity’Having registered these qualifications we can return to Garland’s grand narrative.And in what follows it becomes very grand indeed. The central chapters areprobably the most ambitious of the book in their delineation of the shifts thatsignal ‘the coming of late modernity’ (p. 75). For Garland this term denotes aparticular historical phase in the development of modernization without anysuggestion of its apogee, still less its end. The shifts that, for Garland, characterize

12 In illustration of which, ironically, his example is the discrediting of rehabilitation and of welfare in officialpolicy statements.

13 Rule 3, The Prison Rules 1999 (SI 1999/728) retained the same wording as Rule One, The Prison Rules1964 (SI 1964/388). One can hardly think of a more succinct commitment to rehabilitation.

14 For example, J. Maguire (ed.), What Works: Reducing Reoffending Guidelines from Research and Practice(Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1995); A.T. Harland (ed.), Choosing Correctional Options that Work (London:Sage, 1996); J. Vennard, D. Sugg and C. Hedderman, Changing offenders’ attitudes and behaviour: What works?HORS No.171 (London: HMSO, 1997).


late modernity range from the dynamic of capitalist production and marketexchange, the restructuring of the family and household, changes in the socialecology of cities and suburbs, the rise of the electronic mass media, and thedemocratization of social and cultural life (p. 78). These are imposing themes,traced necessarily briefly and sometimes controversially. We may take issue withsome claims as an oversimplification of a more complex economic picture.15 Butwe can only admire Garland’s bravura in attempting to get at the big structuralpatterns. His ability to synthesize shifts in social, economic and political life andto make sense of their implications for the field of crime control is outstandingand, almost, without parallel.16 Academic criminology has been all too devotedto the production of miniatures (of the police, of the courts, of prisons), preciselyand accurately drawn and intentionally narrowly focused.17 It has been morerarely inclined to risk the grand canvas of the sort Garland dares here. To paintwith a broad brush inevitably misses particularities but it would be a failure ofunderstanding to insist that the minutiae outweigh the grand patterns. ForGarland’s argument is precisely that only by going outside the institutions ofcrime control to examine deeper structural shifts in politics, economy, and societycan we understand the narrower field of crime control. He argues ‘the causes ofthis historical shift had little to do with criminal justice, but that did not preventit from being massively consequential in its criminological effects’ (p. 76).

The sweeping social, economic and cultural changes that signalled the comingof late modernity also prompted major political realignments: not least that thepolitics and policies of welfarism have been replaced by ‘a combination of free-market “neo-liberalism” and social conservatism’ (p. 75). This curious allianceis publicly committed to the ‘rolling back of the state while simultaneouslybuilding a state apparatus that is stronger and more authoritarian than before’(p. 98). Whilst neo-liberalism is committed to maximizing economic freedom(through anti-trade union legislation, deregulation and privatization, the ex-tension of market competition and the reduction of benefits) the concurrentresurgence of neo-conservatism has promoted tighter controls on social order.Hence, argues Garland, the economic control and social liberation of the post-war period has been replaced by a mirror image framework of economic freedomand social control (p. 100).

For Garland, economic deregulation fostered precisely the inequalities andinsecurities that fed the demand for more defensive policies against those unableto prosper in the ‘sink or swim society’. Crime took on a new significance as anindicator of indiscipline or inadequate control (where previously it had beenseen as indicating deprivation or need), whose solution lay therefore in theimposition of more controls. For Garland ‘the term that best captures the new

15 For example the claim that changes in the labour force allowed women’s entry to the workforce and broughtabout the decline of the family wage. S. Fredman, Women and the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

16 S. Cohen, Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classification (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985) standsout as a work of comparable synthesis and compass.

17 Or, as P. Young puts it: ‘most criminologists think small, not big’. P. Young, ‘On the importance of Utopiasin ‘Criminological Thinking’ (1992) 32 British Journal of Criminology 424.


right’s ideal is that of “zero tolerance”’ (p. 102). His arguments here arepersuasive but are they perhaps just a little too persuasive? The problem is thatwhilst zero tolerance certainly captures the spirit of a particular policy at aparticular moment in a particular American state, it does not and cannotadequately describe the vastly more complex picture that is contemporarycrime control. It would be equally dubious to refer to New Labour’s avowedcommitment to being ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ assymbolizing current penal policy in Britain. This particular fruit of the spindoctor’s art has been so remorselessly peddled, and just as remorselessly panned,that it is easy to overlook the fact that it promises commitment to a very differentresponse to crime. But political slogans alone can tell us no more than howthose in power seek to represent, and to sell, their policies. Closer analysis ofpolicy documents reveal significant disparities between the bold rhetoric of crimecontrol and the more complex, differentiated, and even progressive aspects ofcontemporary penal policy.18 Rhetoric is far from synonymous with policy andpolicy is not one and the same as practice.

5. Hysterical GovernmentThe promotion of crime control to the top of the political agenda has, Garlandargues, created serious policy dilemmas for governments faced with the un-enviable task of carrying out their election promises. Their central predicament‘has its origins in two major social facts of the last third of the 20th century: thenormality of high crime rates and the acknowledged limitations of the criminal justicestate’ (p. 106, his emphasis). Later on I will question the first of these claims,but for the moment let us examine the import of these ‘facts’ for Garland’sthesis.

Garland argues that, having invested significant political capital in the fightagainst crime, government is obliged to accept its own impotence to controlcrime rates and the inevitability, therefore, of well-documented failure. Initially,it dealt with this through a series of ‘adaptive’ responses (p. 113). These includethe withdrawal of police from the community and the rationing of justice;contracting out or privatising of police, court escorts, and prisons; ‘definingdeviance down’;19 redefining success in terms of service delivery rather thanoutcome; attention to the consequences of crime (victimization, fear of crimeetc) rather than its causes; and relocating responsibility for the control of crimeto others (the private sector, the community, individual citizens). Underlyingthese adaptive responses, Garland suggests, is the ‘normalization’ of crime or‘new criminologies of everyday life’ (p. 127). These new approaches include routine

18 An important recent British example is Home Office, Criminal Justice: The Way Ahead (London: HMSO,2001) which alongside the punitive rhetoric of crime control includes positive commitments, for example, ‘to helpprisoners to lead law-abiding lives after release’ via ‘decent, humane regimes and adequate and appropriate trainingand employment programmes’ at 46.

19 That is the strategic implementation of diversionary tactics and filters which had the effect of decriminalisinglow level, low visibility crimes through non-investigation, police cautioning, and diversion from prosecution.


activity theory, crime as opportunity, lifestyle analysis, and rational choice theory.Significantly, all are premised on the view that crime is a normal, commonplaceaspect of modern society. Correction of the individual is replaced by ‘supplyside criminology’ (p. 129) geared toward reduction of opportunity throughsituational prevention, target-hardening, and increased surveillance. Offendersare no longer seen as the product of social influence or psychological inadequacybut as rational calculators who can be priced out of criminal activity throughthe manipulation of (dis)incentives. In his account of these adaptive strategies,Garland is at his best: his insights into the radical changes that have beenwrought by governments grappling to control the largely self-generated politicalproblem of crime are profound.20 His overarching analysis makes sense of aseemingly disparate array of changes that might otherwise have appeared to haveno common source or end.

But this is only a prelude to a larger and more controversial thesis. For Garlandgoes on to argue that these adaptive strategies have increasingly been overlaidby an altogether less rational set of responses. Centrally, he identifies the enduring‘myth of the sovereign state’, namely that the state is capable of controllingcrime. Whereas, in a period of high and rising crime, the state is increasinglyperceived to have failed in its self-appointed role as provider of security. Ac-cordingly, it is driven both to deny its predicament and to reassert its power tocontrol crime. Simultaneously, it has retreated to an ‘expressive mode’, lessconcerned with control than the expression of anger. Here again, Garland revertsto the psychoanalytic vocabulary of ‘hysteria’, of ‘denial’ and of ‘acting out’.Psychoanalysis clearly has the potential to reveal qualities of state action hithertounexplained by conventional social sciences and it can be used to powerfuleffect.21 But it is questionable whether the adoption of punitive law and orderstrategies, the assertion that ‘prison works’, the reactive policy-making of ‘threestrikes’ laws, paedophile registers, and incapacitative sentencing are best un-derstood as emotive responses to a problem beyond control.

The ideas expressed here were the subject of an earlier article by Garland and,unsurprisingly, it generated considerable debate to which we can give no morethan passing reference here.22 For example, although Sparks finds Garland’sthesis generally persuasive, he argues that we need to examine not just thegeneric issue of sovereignty and its loss but rather how it pans out in particularnation-states at particular historical moments. More critically, O’Malley hasargued that neo-liberalism alone cannot account for the developments Garland

20 For suggestively different interpretations see J. Braithwaite ‘The New Regulatory State and the Transformationof Criminology’ and N. Rose ‘Government and Control’ both in D. Garland and R. Sparks (eds), British Journalof Criminology Special Issue: Criminology and Social Theory (2000).

21 See S. Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).22 D. Garland ‘The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control’, (1996) 36 British Journal of

Criminology 445–71. Responses, too numerous to list here, include: R. Sparks ‘Perspectives on Risk and PenalPolitics’ in T. Hope and R. Sparks (eds), Crime, Risk and Insecurity: Law and Order in everyday life and politicaldiscourse (London: Routledge, 2000) at 129–45; P. O’Malley ‘Volatile and contradictory punishment’, (1999) 3Theoretical Criminology 175–96; R.R. Sullivan, ‘The schizophrenic self: neo-liberal criminal justice’ in K. Stensonand R.R. Sullivan (eds), Crime, Risk and Justice: The politics of crime control in liberal democracies (Cullompton,Devon: Willan Publishing, 2001) at 29–47.


describes. Rather, the conjunction of neo-liberalism with the ‘New Right’ politicsof Reagan and Thatcher has been superseded by an unlikely alliance betweenneo-liberalism and ‘New Labour’ in the governments of Australia, New Zealandand, later, Britain. O’Malley concluded that the volatility of penality is thusbetter explained by changing paradigms of government than by any reaching ofthe limits of the sovereign state. Another view, put forward by Sullivan, is thatGarland is wrong to suggest that the reaching of the ‘limits of the sovereignstate’ signifies a loss of control. Like O’Malley, he is impressed by the ‘still highlyconfident presence of a residual moralistic conservatism’. For Sullivan, theappearance of instability in fact reflects the ‘two faces’ of neo-liberalism andconservatism. In ‘sharp distinction’ to Garland, he comes to the ‘ironic conclusionthat the sovereignty of [the state] . . . has seldom been on more solid ground’.23

I would argue that by characterizing crime control in this period as di-chotomously arrayed between the twin pillars of denial and acting out, Garlandover-simplifies a more complex picture. Wittingly or not, he achieves this partlyby compressing a period of change that was more protracted and less sure in itsdirection that his account suggests. One example is the assertion in 1993 by thethen Home Secretary Michael Howard that ‘prison works!’ Garland tells usthis came only months after his own government had publicly declared that“imprisonment is an expensive way of making bad people worse”’ (p. 132emphasis added). In fact Howard’s countermand came a full three years afterthe earlier statement.24 In the interim came the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, amore rational, parsimonious (in its proposed use of the prison), and philo-sophically coherent (in its attempt to set sentencing within the framework ofdesert theory) piece of legislation than Garland’s account of denial and actingout can accommodate.

More importantly still, Garland’s thesis rests on the claim that high crimerates are an inevitable ‘social fact’, a claim that I find problematic.25 Statisticsof recorded crime26 have shown a striking fall in recent years. In the period1995–99, recorded crime fell by 16% in the United States, by 10% in Englandand Wales, by 21% in Ireland and by lesser amounts in six other Europeancountries.27 The International Crime Victims Survey, which provides a closerestimate of absolute levels of crime, suggests that whilst crime rose between1988 and 1991, it stabilized or fell by 1995 and then fell further by 1999.28

These falls challenge the assumption that high crime is inevitable and immutable.Indeed, it is precisely the ability of governments to claim success in securingthis decline that has licensed the introduction of the draconian punitive policies

23 Sullivan, above n 22 at 45.24 Made in 1990 by the then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd.25 And from which Garland partially rescinds in his conclusion at 203.26 Admittedly, not an unproblematic proxy for actual crime rates. For a discussion of the meaning of criminal

statistics see J. Muncie, ‘The Construction and Deconstruction of Crime’ in J. Muncie and E. McLaughlin (eds),The Problem of Crime (London: Sage, 1996).

27 G. Barclay, C. Tavares and A. Siddique, International comparisons of criminal justice statistics 1999 (London:HMSO, 2001) at 2.

28 Reported at 5.


that Garland describes. The adoption elsewhere of the ‘zero tolerance’ policypioneered in New York, for example, might not have been possible were it notfor figures suggesting that the policy was actually successful in reducing crime.

A more radical interpretation still is that high crime rates are not so much ‘anormal social fact’ but an increasing irrelevance. As I have argued elsewhere,techniques of crime control have become curiously disassociated from crimeitself.29 The pursuit of ‘security’ (and its fashionable analogues, social order,personal and community safety) has become an end in itself whose success orfailure is gauged by quite other criteria than crime rates. Indeed, the promise ofprotection, of freedom from anxiety and insecurity are ends whose measurementmay have little rational relationship to actual risk. The irony, of course, is thatthe pursuit of security itself generates insecurity by littering the world with visiblereminders of risk (for example, burglar alarms, CCTV cameras, and securityguards). And, more ironically still, it could be said that reduction of risk acts inthe longer-term against the interests of those who invest political and financialcapital in its pursuit.30

6. Schizoid CriminologiesHaving diagnosed government as ‘hysterical’, Garland, still in psychoanalyticmode, sees criminology as ‘schizoid’: split between the twin pillars of a ‘crim-inology of the self’ and a ‘criminology of the other’ (p. 137). Whereas the formeris said to be predicated on rational, calculating offender; the criminology of ‘theother’ portrays the criminal as ‘the threatening outcast, the fearsome stranger,the excluded and the embittered’ (p. 137). As Garland goes on to observe, thisdemonizing of offenders permits the decidedly anti-modern, illiberal stance ofcondemning offenders as ‘monstrous creatures’31 to be incapacitated or evenkilled in the name of public safety (pp. 184–85). Curiously, he does not explorehow far this category of ‘the other’ is drawn upon lines of class, race and gender.This is all the more curious since at the outset of the book, Garland sets out his‘broader theoretical concern to understand our contemporary practices of crimeand punishment in relation to the structures of welfare and (in)security and inrelation to the changing class, race and gender relations that underpin thesearrangements’ (p. 26, emphasis added). This is a grand promise and a welcomeone, not least because advertence to class, and more particularly to race andgender, is all too often confined to a specialist literature.32 It is all the more

29 L. Zedner, ‘The Pursuit of Security’ in T. Hope and R. Sparks (eds), Crime, Risk & Insecurity (London:Routledge, 2000) at 200–14.

30 This is particularly, but by no means exclusively, true of the massively expanding private security industrywho promise security but rely on the perpetuation of insecurity for their business. Zedner at 210.

31 On this theme, see also J. Simon ‘Managing the Monstrous. Sex Offenders and the New Penology’, (1998)4 Psychology, Public Policy & Law 452–67.

32 This literature is, of course, no less valuable for being specialist but the absence of these categories fromlarger theoretical works is a significant loss. For useful synthesis of these literatures and bibliographies see: D.J.Smith, ‘Ethnic Origin, Crime and Criminal Justice’ and F. Heidensohn, ‘Gender and Crime’ in Maguire, Morgan& Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).


disappointing then that Garland does not appear to fulfil his promise. The indexreveals one reference each to class and race and none at all to gender.33 Andeven these references take us to single line allusions to the ‘the classic pathologiesof industrialized, inegalitarian, class society’ (p. 45) and ‘debates about thesupposed links between race and crime’ ( p. 136).

Contrast this absence with the extended exploration not only of class, raceand gender but also of lifestyle, sexual identity, cultural background, and religiousaffiliation in Jock Young’s analysis of the uses, abuses, and fallacies of essentialismin the ‘demonizing’ of offenders.34 For example, Young points out that thesupposed preponderance of young black males involved in London muggings isin fact principally a product of demography: a parallel analysis of Glasgow wouldreveal a preponderance of Catholic offenders for the same reason. As he observes,‘it would be a bizarre criminology which was based on religious preference andrates of crime. Perhaps one could imagine theories correlating belief in OriginalSin and rates of burglary, or access to the confessional and assault rates’. Young’sexample is deliberately mischievous but it reveals all too clearly how the politicallyloaded and highly contrived category of ‘the other’ is founded precisely uponcategories like class, race, and gender that Garland promises, but largely omits,to examine.

To return to Garland’s larger thesis: these shifts in political thinking aboutcrime have profound implications for policy: the criminology of the self sees thestate attempting to withdraw its claim to be sole provider of security by dispersingresponsibility through civil society; whilst the criminology of the other furnishesthe grounds for a ‘strategy of punitive segregation’ or mass imprisonment. Howshould we make sense of these political and policy shifts? Garland argues thatthe new politics of crime control are ‘socially and culturally conditioned’ andcannot be understood other than by reference to ‘shifts in social practice andcultural sensibility’ (p. 139). So far so good, but he goes on to argue that thephenomenon of high crime rates and increased insecurity has produced a ‘culturalformation’ or ‘crime complex of late modernity’ (p. 163). There seems to besome slippage here in Garland’s problematization of culture: it is not clear howcrime can be both culturally conditioned and itself the dominant culturalformation. Unless, perhaps, it has achieved the ultimate post-modern feat ofbeing ‘self-conditioning’?

The so-called ‘crime complex’ is characterized by a distinctive cluster ofattitudes, beliefs and assumptions including: a widespread and intense interestin crime fed in part by the politicization of crime issues; concern about victimsand public safety; a loss of faith in the power of the state to control crime; theconsequent development of personal safety routines and the expansion of theprivate security market; and, finally, ‘a crime consciousness is institutionalizedin the media, culture and the built environment’. For Garland the new strategies

33 And it does not appear that the lack lies in the inadequacy of the index.34 J. Young, The Exclusive Society: Social Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity (London: Sage, 1999)

generally but particularly Ch. 4 ‘Essentializing the Other: Demonization and the Creation of Monstrosity’.


of crime control are both grounded in this collective consciousness and rootedin a reactionary thematization of “late modernity”’ (p. 165). But is it the casethat the collective consciousness is reactionary, or that punitive crime controlpolicies are the direct product of populist mandate, in the way Garland suggests?As Sparks has pointed out, ‘we frequently use the notion of populism in aninadequately specified and theoretically thin fashion’, as a shorthand for theemotive, the punitive and the morally conservative, that fails to capture its useas a ‘set of styles or techniques’.35 Punitive crime policies may be portrayed bypoliticians and policy makers as being ‘what the public want’, but studies by theGovernment’s own research unit show that public opinion is no more punitivein its inclinations than current court practice.36 And, as Miller has shown in heranalysis of the ‘Weed and Seed’ program in Seattle: popular action can resistpunitive policies, ‘contain police discretion and mute the intensity of arrests andincapacitation’, and oblige the state to retain responsibility for crime control.37

By assuming that political and media representations of popular will are syn-onymous with public opinion, Garland passes over a more complex interactionby which populism provides both a purported mandate for punitivism and,simultaneously, a source of its resistance.38

7. The American DreamAs his exemplar of late modern society, Garland focuses almost exclusively onthe experiences of America and, to a lesser extent, Britain. Recognizing that ‘thefacts of national difference shape how [crime control] strategies have played outin their different locales’, he nonetheless insists that the two countries are‘substantially the same’ (p. 165). This is a central assumption of the book andyet one from which Garland himself radically departs in the concluding chapterwhere he concedes ‘But Britain is not America’ (p. 202). I would questionwhether the Anglo-American response to the problem of crime is the only orindeed the dominant response of late modernity.

Other major countries, identified by Garland himself, such as Canada, Norway,the Netherlands, and Japan suggest a very different picture of continuing penaloptimism and parsimony in the use of punishment. Against his portrayal ofuniversal ‘strategies of punitive segregation’, look at West Germany, hardly a

35 R. Sparks, ‘”Bringin’ it all back home”: populism, media coverage and the dynamics of locality and globalityin the politics of crime control’ in K. Stenson and R. R. Sullivan (eds), Crime, Risk and Justice (Cullompton,Devon: Willan Publishing, 2001) 197–200.

36 M. Hough and J. Roberts, Attitudes to Punishment: Findings from the British Crime Survey HORS 179 (London:HMSO, 1998); M. Hough and J. Roberts ‘Sentencing trends in Britain’, (1999) 1 Punishment and Society 11–26.On the need to resist slippage between ‘public opinion’ and ‘popular punitiveness’ see A. Bottoms, ‘The Philosophyand Practice of Punishment and Sentencing’ in C.M.V. Clarkson and R. Morgan (eds), The Politics of SentencingReform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) at 40.

37 L. Miller ‘Looking for Postmodernism in all the wrong places’, (2001) 41 British Journal of Criminology 171and 183.

38 For example, charities and lobby organisations like Amnesty and Oxfam are adept at mobilising powerfulpopular resistance to acts of state cruelty. S. Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001) Ch. 8, ‘Appeals’.


minor player and a unequivocally modernist state whose prison population wassubstantially reduced between 1968 and 1989 in a determined assault on theuse of short-term custody.39 Even into the 1990s Germany continued to pursuedecidedly welfarist ‘soft approaches’ toward juvenile offenders and small-scalecriminals that fit ill with the ‘crime complex’ described above.40 And, againstGarland’s portrayal of fear of crime as a normal social fact, note that fear ofcrime long remained low on the agenda in Germany, and even declined in theformer East German states in the years post-unification.41 Other countries suchas Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, and Japan maintaineda fairly stable prison population in the closing decades of the twentieth century,whilst in Finland the prison population actually declined by 36% in the decade1989–99.

Young has noted that in 1995 when the American prison population wasapproaching 1.6 million, the entire prison population of Western Europe wasbarely above 200,000.42 These startling figures are based, he observes, both uponactual differences in the crime rates and an overarching difference between ‘theAmerican Dream and the European Dream’: namely that whereas the former isexplicitly based on the basis of ‘winner takes all’, in the latter there is muchgreater stress on rights of inclusion.43 Young’s thesis would appear to be bornout by figures for 1999 that show that whilst the rate of imprisonment was onaverage 87 per 100,000 population for European Union countries, it was astartling 682 per 100,000 population in the United States.44 It is possible, ofcourse, that Garland subscribes to the dangerously self-fulfilling prophesy, thatthat which happens in America will surely follow elsewhere45 But proselytizingby leading academics can only make this dubious prospect more likely to occurthan not.

8. The New Culture of Crime ControlHaving set out his history of the present, Garland’s closing chapters provide uswith his vision of the ‘new culture of crime control’ that characterizes the

39 T. Weigend, ‘Germany Reduces Prison Sentences’ in M. Tonry and K. Hatlestad (eds), Sentencing Reform inOvercrowded Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) at 177–81.

40 Firmer approaches were reserved for organized criminals such as drug traffickers, and tough approachesconfined to dangerous offenders alone. H-J. Albrecht, ‘Germany (Developed Nation State)’ in G. Barak (ed.),Crime and Crime Control: A Global View (Westport, Connecticut, 2000) at 36. Only now are more punitive trendsbeginning to emerge.

41 H-J. Albrecht, above at 34.42 J. Young, The Exclusive Society: Social Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity (London: Sage, 1999)

at 18.43 J. Young, above at 42. Other illuminating comparisons between America and Europe are to be found in W.

Ludwig-Mayerhofer, ‘After the Welfare State: Whither Informal Law?’ and D. Melossi, ‘Translating Social Control:Reflections on the comparison of Italian and North-American Cultures Concerning Crime Control’ both in S.Karstedt and K-D. Bussmann (eds), Social Dynamics of Crime and Control (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000).

44 G. Barclay, C. Tavares and A. Siddique, International comparisons of criminal justice statistics 1999 (London:HMSO, 2001) at 7.

45 For a terrifying version of this orthodoxy see M. Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the future in Los Angeles(London: Pimlico, 1998). But see also E. Currie, Is America Really Winning the War on Crime and Should BritainFollow its Example? (London: Nacro, 1996).


contemporary field of penality. The present is a decidedly complex place. Foralongside the multifaceted, often contradictory, yet overwhelming, trans-formations that Garland has set out, co-exist surprising residues of the past.Having suggested that penal welfarism dominated the post-war period, Garlandnow acknowledges that ‘the modal sanctions were actually fines . . . and mostlocal jails offered little rehabilitative treatment’ (p. 167). Having characterizedthe demise of welfarism as having been experienced as ‘a bewildering, earth-shaking phenomenon’ (p. 54), he now recognizes that ‘the correctionalist ap-paratus associated with penal-welfarism is, for the most part, still in place’ (p.169) and that ‘the 1990s saw a quite significant increase in the numbers oftreatment programmes provided to offenders in the community and in prisons’(p. 170). For Garland this comes as a surprise. It is a surprise precisely becausethe subject of his analysis has been the culture of crime control and not itsinstitutions or practice. As Geertz astutely observed: ‘In the study of culture thesignifiers are not symptoms or clusters of symptoms, but symbolic acts or clustersof symbolic acts, and the aim is not therapy but the analysis of social discourse’.46

And certainly Garland appears to want to diagnose, through analysis of penaldiscourse (rather than practice), what ails late modern society. If the persistenceof penal-welfarist practice is a surprise, it is also a problem for Garland, fittingill with his inclination to see late modern society dominated by the discourse ofcontrol. There is a danger, here, that in his determination to project a whollydystopic vision of contemporary crime control, Garland overlooks, or choosesto overlook, trends that appear to point in a different direction.

Let us take just one example. In his discussion of offender-victim relations,Garland insists that ‘today the interests of convicted offenders, insofar as theyare considered at all, are viewed as fundamentally opposed to those of the public’(p. 180), ‘the interests of the victim and offender are assumed to be diametricallyopposed’, ‘the assumption today is that there is no such thing as an “ex-offender”’and ‘today stigma has become useful again’ (p. 181). Even if this reading, ofvictims’ interests as diametrically opposed to those of offenders, makes sense inthe American context (which I doubt), it has little resonance in Britain whererestorative justice is an increasingly potent counter to punitive tendencies.Restorative justice is predicated on the need to redress the harm done by crimeto the victim, society and the offender. In theory, at least, it attempts to encourageoffenders to recognize the harm that they have done, to provide an opportunity forthem to make good through financial or other reparation, to secure reconciliationbetween victim and offender, and thereby to secure the reintegration of theoffender into civil society.47 Practical attempts to implement restorative justice,developed in New Zealand and Australia in the 1980s, have attracted enormousinterest in many West European countries. The tireless promotional efforts of

46 C. Geertz, The Interpretations of Cultures (London: Fontana, 1983) at 26.47 J. Braithwaite, Crime, Shame and Reintegration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); H. Zehr, Changing

Lenses (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press 1990).


restorative justice advocates throughout the world48 may not yet have resultedin the paradigm shift they would claim, but their advocacy has had a profoundimpact both within and, more importantly, outside the academy. In Britain boththe Home Secretary and the Prime Minister have declared themselves impressedby its potential49 and the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 contains provisions thatare explicitly restorative in aim.50 These changes led Dignan to conclude ‘theshort term prospects for restorative justice have been transformed in the spaceof little over a year by the remarkable change in the political climate followingthe general election’.51 These prospects have been further enhanced by theintroduction of mandatory referral orders for most first time young offendersunder the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 and by the continuingcommitment to restorative justice affirmed in recent government policy docu-ments.52 Popular punitivism may be a key feature of contemporary penal politicsbut, as this brief illustration indicates, it is not the whole story. Garland consignsrecognition of this inconvenient counter-trend to a footnote.53 Yet the emergenceof restorative justice is a potentially powerful rival to more punitive orthodoxies,perhaps even a rebirth of rehabilitative impulses in a new guise. Where re-habilitation rendered the offender the subject of psycho-social intervention,restorative justice sets the offender as the author of his own readmission to civilsociety. Entirely in accordance with the emphasis on personal responsibility andindividual rationality so central to neo-liberal philosophy, restorative justice mayplausibly be seen as an attempt to revive rehabilitation for a new political era.

Deliberately playing down any evidence of persisting idealism or the renewedpursuit of progressive policies,54 Garland focuses relentlessly on the politics andtechnologies of control. From the ‘criminology of the self’ arises an ‘amoral andtechnological’ account of the acceptance of crime as a normal social fact.Garland’s emphasis on risk analysis, unobtrusive situational controls, and sociallyengineered crime reduction is strikingly reminiscent of Feeley and Simon’sanalysis of ‘actuarial justice’.55 In two seminal articles in 1992 and 1994 Feeleyand Simon set out their account of the ‘New Penology’. In striking contrast

48 For example, John Braithwaite, Nils Christie, Daniel van Ness, Allison Morris, Mark Umbreit, Martin Wright,and Howard Zehr.

49 See J. Dignan ‘The Crime and Disorder Act and the Prospects for Restorative Justice’, (1999) Criminal LawReview 50–51.

50 Particularly ss 65, 66, 67, and 69.51 J. Dignan ‘The Crime and Disorder Act and the Prospects for Restorative Justice’, (1999) Criminal Law

Review 60.52 Though it is debatable whether mandatory compliance is compatible with the voluntary ethos of restorative

justice. C. Ball ‘The Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999: Part 1: A significant move towards restorativejustice, or a recipe for unintended consequences?’, (2000) Criminal Law Review 211–22. See also Home Office,Criminal Justice: The Way Ahead (London: HMSO, 2001) Cm 5074 p.18 and Home Office, Making PunishmentsWork: Report of a Review of the Sentencing Framework for England and Wales ‘The Halliday Report’ (London: HMSO,2001) ii.

53 271, n 41. And a couple of dismissive references on pp. 104 and 169.54 On the impact of ‘third way’ or progressive governance’ on criminal justice see K. Stenson ‘Rethinking crime

control in advanced liberal government: the “third way” and the return to the local’ in K. Stenson & R. R. Sullivan(eds), Crime, Risk and Justice (Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2001) 68–86.

55 M. Feeley and J. Simon ‘The New Penology: Notes on the Emerging Strategy of Corrections and ItsImplications’ (1992) 30 Criminology 449–74; Feeley & Simon ‘Actuarial Justice: the Emerging New Criminal Law’in D. Nelken (ed.), The Futures of Criminology (1994) 173–201.


to the historic, ‘old penological’, preoccupation with ascertaining individualresponsibility, determining guilt, and punishing appropriately, the new penology:

has a radically different orientation. It is actuarial. It is concerned with techniques foridentifying, classifying and managing groups assorted by levels of dangerousness. Ittakes crime for granted. It accepts deviance as normal. It is sceptical that liberalinterventionist crime control strategies do or can make a difference.56

Garland differs from Feeley and Simon in his interpretation of the import ofthis new penology. Where Feeley and Simon see actuarial justice as a baselesspolicy-orientation, with no larger narrative of purpose that is entirely post-modern, Garland grounds this approach in an economic rationality that emphasescost effectiveness and fiscal restraint in a manner entirely consistent with latemodernity.57

Garland’s analysis departs from that of Feeley and Simon also in that he seesrunning alongside this managerialist trend, a second decidedly sinister trendpredicated on the ‘criminology of the other’ (p. 184). This trend depicts offendingin ‘melodramatic terms’, insists that crimes are the bad choices of ‘wickedindividuals’ (p. 185), and adopts an illiberal moralizing approach that sanctionscondemnation, stigma, exclusion and mass incapacitation. Although Garlanddescribes this approach as ‘anti-modern’, it is again reminiscent of accountsgiven by those who see contemporary crime control as signalling a return to pre-modern modes of punishment. For example, in the introduction of ‘punitivework orders’ introduced in Australia’s Northern Territory, Pratt finds a directand disturbing parallel with the ‘wheelbarrow men’ who, in antebellum UnitedStates ‘ironed and chained, with shaved heads and coarse uniforms lettered toindicate the crime committed . . . cleaned and repaired the streets of Phila-delphia’.58 For Pratt, such developments signal the more general renewal ofinterest in solutions derived from decidedly pre-modern penal repertoires. Sim-ilarly, Simon finds evidence of the arrival of postmodernity in the revival ofcurfew laws, community policing, and the introduction of boot camps.59 Bothare struck by the increased public visibility of punishment; the emphasis on itsdestructive, incapacitatory qualities; greater community participation; the in-crease in uncertainty and arbitrariness; the abandonment of individual rightsbefore community interests; and a new array of shaming punishments—“reason”thus giving way to emotion’60 that evidence the endgame of penal modernity.

Garland is insistent that these ambivalent trends in current penality (that wemight, for shorthand, call ‘managerialist’ and ‘moralist’) are consistent with late

56 Feeley and Simon ‘Actuarial Justice’ at 173.57 Others characterize both Garland and Feeley and Simon’s analysis as post modern. L. Miller ‘Looking for

Postmodernism in all the wrong places’, (2001) 41 British Journal of Criminology 170–01. Clearly this is not acharacterization that Garland would accept himself.

58 J. Pratt ‘The Return of the Wheelbarrow Men; Or, The Arrival of Postmodern Penality?’, (2000) 40 BritishJournal of Criminology 128

59 J. Simon ‘They died with Their Boots On: The Boot Camp and the Limits of Modern Penality’, (1994) 22Social Justice 26.

60 Pratt, above at 134


modernity. He argues that both share ‘a fundamental feature: they each respondto, and further entrench, the culture of control that has increasingly taken holdin public discourse about social and criminal issues’ (p. 185). Beyond that theyare wholly divergent, seeking to achieve control through contradictory means.Their coexistence would seem, therefore, to pose a puzzle, which Garland doesnot directly address. Why and how can two so utterly contradictory trendscoexist? This puzzle may, of course, have no solution but possible causal relationscan be identified. Is it, for example, that pursuit of the sterile, technicist riskmanagement strategies described by Feeley and Simon, so fail to satisfy our basepunitive instincts that they inadvertently stimulate demands for the symbolicdisplay of vengeance? The simultaneous re-emergence of popular punitivistrhetoric in politics alongside the arcane actuarial language of managerialism is thusno longer contradictory but directly causally related. A larger scale explanation stillmight be that the ‘disembedding’ processes of modernity, in part brought aboutby technological change and managerialist technique, have created a widespreadsense of insecurity that feeds popular punitivism.61 Alternatively, is it thatactuarialism allows the passionate vengeful reactions unleashed by populistpunitivism to be reduced to questions of internal efficiency? Complex moraldilemmas become mere issues of technical rationality and public sentimentexpressed through punitively orientated legislation can be neutralized by thebureaucracy of the system. It is this latter conjecture that allows van Swaaningento conclude that ‘Moralising and managerialism orientations seem contradictory,but on closer observation they need each other badly’.62 Another possibility againis that Garland is mistaken in suggesting that modern punishment displays twocontradictory faces. Actuarial techniques of risk assessment and incapacitationderive historically from the handling of dangerous offenders and, it could beargued, have been generalized to other groups in such a way as to expand thevery definition of dangerous.63 Understood this way, managerialism is not sodispassionate as is it first appears and the yawning chasm between managerialismand moralism closes.64

9. Two Key Concepts: ‘Culture’ and ‘Control’So far I have concentrated on the claims of Garland’s historical narrative. I havesaid little about the two concepts of ‘culture’ and of ‘control’ that are at theheart of his book. In earlier works, Garland’s primary focus on ‘penality’ attractedcriticism for the narrowness of its focus on ideas and instruments of punishment

61 A. Bottoms, ‘The Philosophy and Practice of Punishment and Sentencing’ in C.M.V. Clarkson & R. Morgan(eds), The Politics of Sentencing Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) at 47.

62 R. van Swaaningen, Critical Criminology: Visions from Europe (London: SAGE, 1997) at 183.63 In ways that both Feeley and Simon and Pratt acknowledge. See also discussion in B. Vaughan ‘The civilizing

process and the janus-face of modern punishment’, (2000) 4 Theoretical Criminology 84–85.64 Others have also suggested that Garland’s distinction may be overdrawn. See R. Ericson and K. Haggerty,

Policing the Risk Society (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997) at 12; R. Sparks ‘Perspectives on Risk andPenal Politics’ in T. Hope and R. Sparks (eds), Crime, Risk and Insecurity: Law and Order in everyday life andpolitical discourse (London: Routledge, 2000) at 136.


to the exclusion of wider questions about the politics of crime and the largerprocesses by which crime is measured, targeted, prevented, or drawn into thecriminal process.65 The Culture of Control meets this criticism by broadening thescope of enquiry enormously and moving culture from the periphery to the verycentre of investigation.

But what concept of culture does Garland employ? In Punishment and ModernSociety (P & MS), Garland developed an account of culture that drew heavily,and effectively, on anthropology.66 Employing the anthropological terminologyof ‘mentalities’ and ‘sensibilities’ to denote the cognitive and the affective aspectsof penal culture, Garland argued that a fully developed notion of cultureneeds to recognize both its intellectual aspects (conceptions, values, categories,distinctions, frameworks of ideas and systems of belief) and its emotional ones.67

Culture, thus defined, is capable of study both on its own terms and in relationto the social relations, institutional forms, and practices upon which it isdependent: ‘Morals and sensibilities are thus located within the grid of socialinterests and positions in a way which reflects the complex realities of culturallife’ (P & MS, p. 198). And Garland rightly argued that ‘any “cultural” or“discursive” approach . . . should never lose sight of the fact that punishment isalso, and simultaneously, a network of material social practices’, such that‘cultural forms’ and ‘instrumental practices’ are one and the same thing’ (P &MS, p. 199). The account of culture given in P & MS was well-sustained andsatisfying. It is striking, and perhaps significant, that little reference is made backto it in The Culture of Control. And it is notable that no similarly developedaccount of culture is offered here. This might seem otiose were it not for thefact that the concept of culture he employs appears to have metamorphosedfrom his earlier work. Garland now acknowledges a new set of intellectual debts.He borrows from Pierre Bourdieu the concept of culture as a relational entity,the product of interaction between cultural dispositions (which Bourdieu callshabitus) and structural positions (which he labels field). The concept of field,in particular, informs Garland’s work throughout and it is frustrating that heconfines discussion of Bourdieu’s theory to one brief footnote.

In an attempt to address this deficit, it is worth saying a little more about theanalytical framework within which The Culture of Control appears to be situated.For Bourdieu,68 society is made up of a series of relatively autonomous fields.A field is a distinct social space with its own rules, regularities and forms ofauthority69 but it is also a site of conflict and competition within which participants

65 A. Rutherford’s review of D. Garland, Punishment and Modern Society, (1991) 11 Legal Studies 213.66 Not least the work of Clifford Geertz: ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’ in

Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Fontana, 1983).67 D. Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)

at 195.68 P. Bourdieu ‘Social space and symbolic power’, (1989) 7 Social Theory 1; L. Wacquant, ‘Toward a Social

Praxeology: The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu’s Sociology’ in P. Bourdieu and L. Wacquant (eds), An Invitationto Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).

69 L. Wacquant, ‘Pierre Bourdieu’ in R. Stones (ed.), Key Sociological Thinkers (London: Macmillan 1990) at221.


struggle to establish authority and, in so doing, alter the structure of the fielditself. Thus a field is also a set of historical, structural relations between positionsof power that operate independently of the populations that these relationsdefine. By contrast the habitus (a term which Garland liberally employs butnowhere defines) is a set of autonomous dispositions acquired in childhood, andthus durable, by which agents adapt and adjust to widely differing contexts.Through past experience, individuals acquire the necessary capital, the ‘feelingfor the game’ or ‘practical sense’ to function within a specific field or fields. ForBourdieu, culture is not a set of norms, values or rules for social action butrather the relationship between field and habitus, the action of one upon theother. Garland makes effective use of the concept of field to identify the historicfield of ‘penal-welfare’, (p. 3) the ‘field of crime control’, (p. 5) and thetransformations, not least in ‘contiguous fields’ through which a ‘reconfiguredfield of crime control’ (p. 6) is now emerging. But his discussion of habitus isless explicit and, it might be argued, insufficiently developed to satisfy Bourdieu’sinsistence on the intimate relationship between the two: ‘the relation betweenhabitus and field . . . is a sort of ontological complicity, a subconscious and pre-reflexive fit’.70

The absence of a more developed theoretical discussion of the particularconcept of culture used in The Culture of Control is regrettable. That said, itsbreadth and fluidity offers a very different set of possibilities to the traditionaluse of culture in criminological theory as a synonym for the ‘sub-culture’ ofdelinquent gangs71 or for the mentalities of criminal justice professionals, mostusually the police.72 Both sub-cultural theories and ‘cop culture’ studies, valuableas they have been, may be subjected to like criticisms.73 Culture is typicallypresented as insulated from the larger social, political, and legal environment.Individual actors, be they gang members or criminal justice professionals, areportrayed as the more-or-less passive subjects of an acculturation process thatis internal to their group. Interactions between their immediate cultural en-vironment and larger social and political structures are at worst sidelined, at bestpresented as the subversion of a dominant culture by the codes, values or‘working rules’ of the sub-group. This view relies upon what Downes and Rockterm ‘differential magnification, the tuning of the analytical lens to an almostexceptional degree on the “subordinate cultures”, with a corresponding neglectof the “dominant” and “subaltern” cultures’.74 In its grand embrace of all thoseideas and institutions by and through which society responds to crime, Garland

70 P. Bourdieu, In Other Words (Cambridge: Polity, 1990) at 108.71 Classic studies include: A. Cohen, Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (London: Routledge & Kegan

Paul, 1956); R. Cloward and L. Ohlin, Delinquency and Opportunity (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961);S. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 2nd edn, 1980).

72 P. Manning, Police Work (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977); R. Reiner, The Politics of the Police (HemelHempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 2nd edn, 1992).

73 D. Downes and P. Rock, Understanding Deviance: A Guide to the Sociology of Crime and Rule Breaking (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1998) at 175–81; J. Chan ‘Changing Police Culture’, (1996) 36 British Journal ofCriminology 111–12.

74 D. Downes and P. Rock, Understanding Deviance: A Guide to the Sociology of Crime and Rule Breaking (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1998) at 180.


does much to invert the analytical lens and to make good the neglect of largercultural questions deplored by Downes and Rock.

The second concept central to this book is that of control. For the sake ofclarity, let us summarize Garland’s thesis as it pertains directly to control. Thepost-war period was marked by the capacity of civil society to control individuals:‘the informal social controls exerted by families, neighbours, and communities,together with the disciplines imposed by schools, workplaces, and other in-stitutions created an everyday environment of norms and sanctions that un-derpinned the law’s demands’ (p. 49). The ‘coming of late modernity’ signalledthe ‘relaxation of informal social controls—in families, in neighbourhoods, inschools, on the streets’ (p. 91). This development, together with the economic‘freedoms’ of neo-liberalism, created a crime problem that ushered in the ‘cultureof control’ that characterizes the penal present. Given the decline of ‘community,church and family’ (p. 89), the ‘culture of control’ is, for Garland, primarily apenal affair which owes little to those institutions traditionally identified bysociologists as the core agents of social control.

Again, Garland appears little interested in discussing the extensive sociologicalliterature on control or, more particularly, social control.75 And again we are leftunsure what precisely he understands by the term. The fact that in one sentencehe can talk of ‘spatial controls, situational controls, managerial controls, systemcontrols, social controls, self-controls’ (p. 194) suggests a dizzying array ofpossibilities. In Punishment and Modern Society,76 Garland made an impassionedargument for the centrality of penal theory to social theorizing. In the closingchapters of The Culture of Control, Garland both reiterates this claim and acceptsthe more conventional argument that crime and crime control are themselvesexplicable only by reference to wider social and economic change.77 The twoclaims taken together have a certain reinforcing logic: to understand society youmust understand its responses to crime, to understand crime you must understandsociety. But I would resist the dynamic of this circularity. If Garland’s primaryinterest is in control and the means by which the state maintains control duringperiods of social and economic upheaval, then it is questionable whether crimeis the best place to start, still less to end one’s analysis. Garland is insistent uponthe centrality of crime to the experience of citizens of contemporary society: ‘inAmerica and Britain today, “late modernity” is lived—and not just by offendersbut by all of us—in a mode that is more than ever defined by institutions ofpolicing, penality, and prevention’ (p. 194). But could it be that the restructuring

75 Classic accounts include: E.A. Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (London: Macmillan,1908) and S. Cohen, Visions of Social Control (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985). See also L. Zedner, ‘Social Control’in W. Outhwaite and T. Bottomore (eds), The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth Century Social Thought (London:Blackwell, 1993) at 585–87; C. Sumner, ‘Social Control: the History and Politics of a Central Concept in Anglo-American Sociology’ in R. Bergalli and C. Sumner (eds), Social Control and Political Order (London: Sage, 1997)1–33 and B. Hudson, ‘Social Control’ in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook ofCriminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) at 451–72.

76 D. Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)esp. Ch. 11.

77 As argued, with considerable insight, in I. Taylor, Crime in Context: A Critical Criminology of Market Societies(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).


of crime is but ‘a side-show in a far bigger restructuring of governance’?78 IfGarland is interested in the changes wrought in the culture and institutions ofcontrol by the transformations of late modernity, then it seems doubtful thatthese changes are to be found only or principally in respect of crime. Even if weaccept that the traditional institutions of social control are in decline, strikingdevelopments in social control are observable in quite other settings: for example,shopping centres, business districts, and transport systems, as well as themeparks.79

In an influential polemic published in 1983, Langbein criticized historians ofcrime for overstating the importance of crime control to the social order. ‘Thecriminal justice system’, he argued, ‘occupies a place not much more centralthan the garbage collection system’.80 Arguably, Langbein chose his examplepoorly: decent society falls apart quite rapidly when piles of rotting detritusrise on our pavements. But can Langbein’s charge be levelled also againstcontemporary penal theorists? Certainly, Garland appears to take the centralityof crime to political life as a given. Yet taking only a slightly longer historicalview, it is clear that crime has no necessary place on the agenda of public life.As Downes and Morgan point out in their discussion of post-war politics:‘Compared with the contested party politics of the economy, foreign affairs,defence, health, housing, and education, those of “law and order” are ofremarkably recent origin: they emerged in the mid-1960s, but came decisivelyto the fore only with the 1979 election’.81 Analysing the election manifestos ofthe main political parties in the post-war period, they reveal that until 1959 noparty made any mention of topics relating to law and order, and that as late as1964, the Labour Party did not see fit to refer to crime in its manifesto.82 Inother European countries, such as Germany, crime remained low on the politicalagenda much longer and to good effect.83

The transparent politicization of crime ought also to raise questions aboutother areas of social or economic policy that are, by contrast, depoliticized. Is itarguable that the orchestration of public and political interest in crime serves asa diversion or smokescreen from other graver sources of social ill? Let us givejust one example. In The Corrosion of Character84 Sennett demonstrates that oneof the key sources of insecurity in late modern society is the growing ‘flexibility’

78 P.O’Malley ‘Volatile and contradictory punishment’, (1999) 3 Theoretical Criminology 182.79 C. Shearing and P. Stenning, ‘From the Panopticon to Disney World’ in A. Doob and E. Greenspan (eds),

Perspective in Criminal Law (Aurora, Ontario: Canada Law Book Inc., 1985). Garland is, of course, no strangerto developments in situational crime prevention. See A. von Hirsch, D. Garland and A. Wakefield (eds), Ethicaland Social Perspectives on Situational Crime Prevention (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000). What we have in mind arecontrols that extend far beyond the field of crime.

80 J. Langbein ‘Albion’s Fatal Flaws’, (1983) Past and Present 119.81 D. Downes and R. Morgan, ‘Dumping the “Hostages to Fortune”? The Politics of Law and Order in Post-

War Britain’ in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1997) at 87.

82 Downes and Morgan, above at 89–90.83 See discussion in L. Zedner ‘In pursuit of the vernacular: comparing law and order discourse in Britain and

Germany’, (1995) 4 Social and Legal Studies 521–22.84 Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: the Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (London:

W.W. Norton & Co., 1998)


of employment practices. These, he argues, are characterized by short-termcontracts, ‘flextime’, re-engineering and ‘downsizing’. Long-term career as-pirations, institutional loyalty, and job security, and the sense of identity or‘character’ that came with these, have been replaced by anxieties associated withthe constant fear of unemployment, the need to remain marketable, and theimpossibility of providing for an unknown future. The extreme insecurities ofthe job market under late capitalism described by Sennett suggests a crisis ofcontrol that affects people’s lives to an infinitely greater degree than crime oreven the fear of crime. Is it possible that successive governments focus on crimeprecisely in order to conceal their relative powerlessness to control other ills, bethey the rapidly fluctuating global economy, the decline of the nuclear family,or the despoilment of the environment ?

10. Conclusion—the Predictive Power of DystopiasThe press release that accompanied the UK launch of this book posed a seriesof questions: ‘Do you transport your children to school? Use a car instead of abus? . . . Do you tune into police dramas and ‘Crimewatch UK’? . . . Are thereburglar alarms on the houses in your street? . . . Do you take care not to becomea crime victim? Are you convinced that we need to be tough on crime? If so,you are part of the new “culture of control”’.85 To this list one might reasonablyadd ‘do you write of the punitivism of governments, of the popular press, andof the people? If so are you part of the new culture of control’. This is a seriousproposition. There is a danger that writing so apocalyptic as The Culture of Controlwill further entrench a culture which penal theorists might properly think theyhave a duty to resist.86

Historically, criminologists and penal theorists have taken their political re-sponsibilities seriously. Since the 1960s, successive generations of radical, critical,Marxist, left realist, and abolitionist criminologists have seen their writings asagendas for a new penal order.87 Politically committed, with clear, albeit differing,visions of ‘what is to be done about law and order?’88 they set out to influencestate policy. To the extent that they projected dystopic visions of the future, theydid so with the positive political purpose of attempting to galvanize people intomaking the structural changes necessary to secure a different social order.89 Post-Marxist penal theory has, for the most part, abandoned the political project,

85 Oxford University Press release (no date).86 Namely the argument that it is ‘the duty of leading public intellectuals to . . . help safeguard inclusive liberal

freedoms’, K. Stenson, ‘The new politics of crime control’ in K. Stenson and R.R. Sullivan (eds), Crime, Risk andJustice: The politics of crime control in liberal democracies (Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2001) at 27.

87 For an overview see R. Reiner, ‘British Criminology and the State’ in P. Rock (ed.), A History of BritishCriminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) at 147–53; S. Walklate, Understanding Criminology: Currenttheoretical debates (Buckingham: Open University, 1998) at 26–32.

88 To borrow from J. Lea and J. Young, What is to be done about Law and Order? Crisis in the Eighties(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).

89 J. Young, The Exclusive Society (London: Sage, 1999) at 190.


privileging the analytical subtleties of deconstruction over ‘the old spirits of leftistanger and critique’.90

Garland, too, eschews critique for deconstruction. His preferred place is asthe vigilant watch, the witness to the multiple, shifting dangers that attach tothe condition of late modernity. Yet his subject is the culture of control and hecannot escape the fact that his own writing contributes to that culture, formingthe habitus of both penal theorists and criminal justice professionals. Is there adanger that Garland, in peddling the centrality of crime and crime controlpolicies, has himself become an agent of the very culture of control he purportsto decry? The responsibility of the social commentator for the society aboutwhich he passes judgement should not be overplayed. But writings within theacademy do not stay there. As Giddens has observed, the ideas used by socialscientists ‘circulate in and out of the social world they are coined to analyse’91

and academics cannot escape being participants as well as observers. Garland’sapparently apolitical observations on the culture of control in fact have profoundpolitical implications. To write of the insecurities of late modernity, of the rising‘wave of anxiety’, the ‘new sense of disorder’ (p. 195), and the ‘basic imperativesof security, economy, and control’ (p. 199) suggests the abandonment of com-mitment to a different order and something close to acquiescence to the newstatus quo. A book so pessimistic in its analysis of recent trends and futureprospects cannot help but attract political attention.

By the final pages one sniffs an air of political defeatism that is hardly gainsaidby his closing cri de coeur that the choices which created the culture of control‘can still be rethought and reversed’ (p. 201). His conclusion that the social andpolitical costs of current crime-control arrangements are too great to allow theseto persist indefinitely provides little comfort. Nor does his fainthearted predictionthat ‘there is a prospect that current trends will be tempered and perhapseventually reversed’ (p. 205). The relative caution with which Garland refutesthe dystopic future he has himself outlined is striking in its contrast to theconfidence with which he earlier predicted it. And one cannot help but wonderwhether his unwillingness to foresee a more optimistic future for criminal justicelies in his own uncertainty about what that future might look like or how onemight get there.

Despite Garland’s insistence throughout the book that the current crim-inological condition is late, rather than post, modern, there is something decidedlypostmodern about his own abandonment of political commitment and of norm-ative theorizing. Deconstruction is a nihilistic game, fun to play, and at its best,as it is here, highly illuminating for its audience—but self-consciously indifferentto its own political or normative import. To focus on the complexities andcontradictions of crime control suggests the abandonment of a larger political

90 M. Rustin ‘Review of I. Taylor “Crime in Context”; (2000) 40 British Journal of Criminology 163. I say ‘forthe most part’ because there are notable exceptions, for example, S. Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing aboutAtrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).

91 A. Giddens, Social Theory and Modern Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987) at 19.


vision and smacks of capitulation to the ‘hyper-modern, flexible, neo-conservative,economic politics’92 that are the very subject of Garland’s analysis. Braithwaitehas admonished his peers, arguing that ‘while criminologists take explanatorytheory increasingly seriously, they do not take normative theory seriously at all’.93

Garland’s conception of control is not as a goal that can be judged by externalphilosophical criteria of fairness or justice. Nor can it be judged by reference toefficacy in the same way as reform or prevention. If efficacy has any place inGarland’s account of control, it is in respect of political efficacy alone. Wherecontrol is little more than a synonym for popular punitivism94 it can provide noagenda for normative debate, still less a penological objective.95

In his conclusion, Garland insists that the penal present is not ‘strictlydetermined’ and that the dystopic future he has outlined ‘is not inevitable’ (p.201). But without a normative framework, a set of political ideals, or some visionof ‘the place to be desired’,96 it is not clear how this dystopia is to be avoided.A tantalizingly brief closing call for the devolution of state power and the sharingof social control with local organizations and communities hardly satisfies thispurpose.97 Despondently, we might conclude that his present dystopic visionmakes it more likely, not less, that ‘the place to be avoided’ is here to stay.

Is there any ground, then, for penal optimism? Just below the surface of TheCulture of Control lies an unspoken defence of the social democratic state. Implicitin Garland’s nostalgia for post-war penal welfarism is the suggestion that thiswas a golden age from which the ascendancy of neo-liberal politics, free-marketeconomics, and social conservatism has removed us irrevocably. If one looksprincipally to America, it is understandable why the descent into punitivismappears determined. But if one looks instead to the stronger, and more enduring,traditions of European social democracy (and indeed British welfare liberalism)

92 R. van Swaaningen, Critical Criminology: Visions from Europe (London: Sage, 1997) at 194.93 J. Braithwaite, ‘Republican Theory and Crime Control’ in S. Karstedt and K-D Bussmann (eds), Social

Dynamics of Crime and Control: New Theories for a World in Transition (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000) at 87. Thisis hardly a new criticism, see A. Bottoms ‘Reflections on the Criminological Enterprise’, (1987) 46 The CambridgeLaw Journal 262.

94 In the way that von Hirsch and Ashworth see ‘law and order’ as synonymous with the ‘politics of resentment’.A. von Hirsch and A. Ashworth (eds), Principled Sentencing: Readings on Theory and Policy (Oxford: Hart Publishing,1998) at 412–15.

95 Or at least not in any manner we would wish to countenance. See J. Simon on ‘the return to respectabilityof cruelty as a penal value’ in his “Entitlement to Cruelty”: the end of welfare and the punitive mentality in theUnited States’ in K. Stenson and R.R. Sullivan (eds), Crime, Risk and Justice (Cullompton, Devon: WillanPublishing, 2001) at 125–43.

96 See discussion in Z. Bauman, Socialism: The Active Utopia (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976) Ch. 1. Also P.Young ‘On the importance of Utopias in Criminological Thinking’, (1992) 32 British Journal of Criminology 423–37.

97 For highly critical analyses of the appeal to community see N. Lacey and L. Zedner ‘Discourses of Communityin Criminal Justice’, (1995) 22 Journal of Law and Society 301–25; Z. Bauman Community: Seeking Safety in anInsecure World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). For a more positive account see R. A. Duff ‘Penal Communities’,(1999) 1 Punishment and Society 27–43. The fact that on taking office as Home Secretary David Blunkett announced:‘To successfully bring down crime the community must be part of the solution. We must all play our part andwork together . . . we need to co-ordinate in such a way the drive against drug abuse and the drive against criminalactivities’ suggests that this approach offers no guarantees against the culture of crime control.


the possibility of another (if not a third) way can be discerned.98 Elsewhere,Garland has declared himself sceptical of the possibility of achieving a coherentnormative theory of punishment and more impressed by the conflicts amongprinciples, and between principles and pragmatism.99 But must this mean thatwe abandon all normative debate and accept the status quo? It seems probablethat his scepticism derives in large part from the failure of moral philosophersand political theorists writing on punishment to engage with sociological andhistorical analyses of penality.100 The extraordinary explanatory and analyticproject that Garland has pursued in this and earlier work reveals him to besingularly well equipped to develop a sociologically informed penal theory thatmight suggest a way out of the current abyss. Garland describes his latest workas the completion of a trilogy.101 Instead of abandoning us to the dismal historyof the penal present, we can only hope that he overcomes his scepticism and hispessimism and decides to make it a quartet.

98 See for example, H. Tham, ‘Crime and the Welfare State: The Case of the United Kingdom and Sweden’in V. Ruggerio, N. South and I. Taylor (eds), The New European Criminology: Crime and Social Order in Europe(London: Routledge, 1998) at 368–94. Tham shows that despite similarly rising crime rates, the continuingcommitment to welfarism in Sweden reduced and then held down its prison population.

99 A. Duff and D. Garland (eds), A Reader on Punishment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) at 19.100 For a penetrating critique see N. Lacey, ‘Penal Practices and Political Theory: An Agenda for Dialogue’ in

M. Matravers (ed.), Punishment and Political Theory (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 1999) at 152–63101 Following his Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Aldershot: Gower, 1985) and Punishment

and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

Documents

Review of Culture of Control