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Criminology today

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Much of the latter half of the 20th century saw


criminology, as an academic discipline, continue the
empirical, positivistic focus of its beginnings. Early work
concentrated on statistical data collection to inform
policy and improve correctional institutions and
processes. Such data indicated that being poor and
deprived aligned with being caught committing crime.
As a consequence, class became a major variable to
consider in theorising crime, whilst addressing poverty
and structural inequality did not.
Such perspectives generated deeply politicised critiques and
a new criminology (Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973) emerged
which saw crime as a construct, largely serving the interests of
power. It also underwrote a new and continuing direction
of cultural criminology that is deeply concerned with
identity, expressiveness and representation as readily being
criminalised (Willis 1978; Hall and Jefferson 1993; Ferrell and
Sanders 1997; Presdee 2000) particularly through biased news
coverage of groups like beggars.
However, following the election of a Thatcher-led conservative
government in the UK in 1979, criminology, as an academic
discipline, rapidly became realistic rather than revolutionary.
Research was heavily dependent on state funding, either from
the government via the Home Office or via the major social
research councils. Realism occupied both right (punitive) and
left (rehabilitative) positions politically, but more than anything
it was about policy rather than political critique.
The problem of crime remains, with more people (over 90%
male) than ever in overcrowded British prisons. The masculinity
of much offending remains largely unacknowledged despite

forty years of effort fromfeminist criminologists to draw


attention to the relationship between gender and crime. This
means that though much more is now known about victims and
womens place in crime and criminal justice, criminology has
done little to alleviate levels of violence against women and
girls which globally, regardless of age, colour or creed is
perpetrated by men, most often within the family. Nor has it
effectively addressed male on male violence.
Perhaps part of criminologys struggle to deal effectively with
crime is precisely Garlands account of it as a discipline
steeped in a Victorian effort at social control.
As

a discipline criminology is shaped only to a small


extent by its own theoretical object and logic of inquiry.
Its epistemological threshold is a low one, making it
susceptible to pressures and interests elsewhere.
(Garland 2002:17)

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