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)