The culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society

Abstract

This chapter argues that the tunt against penal-welfarism took a ‘reactionary’, all-encompassing form because underlying the debate about crime and punishment was a fundamental shift of interests and sensibilities. This historical shift, which had both political and cultural dimensions, gave rise to new group relations and social attitudes—attitudes that were most sharply defined in relation to the problems of crime, welfare, and social order. The chapter begins with the most basic transformative forces of modern times: the economic force of capitalist competition and the political struggle for social and political equality. The coming of late modernity also had immediate practical consequences for the institutions of crime control and criminal justice, quite aside from the impact that higher crime rates would eventually have. In the watershed period, effective crime control came to be viewed as a matter of imposing more controls, increasing disincentives, and, if necessary, segregating the dangerous sector of the population.