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Willan Publications Ltd

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Policing Beyond Macpherson: Issues in policing race and society

Edition: 1st

Author: Michael Rowe

ISBN: 1-843922-12-6/ISBN-13: 978-1-84392-212-4

Format: Paperback

Publishers: Willan

Price £22

Publication Date: February 2007

Publisher's Title InformationFebruary 2007


The book will explore the impact of the Lawrence Report since it was published in 1999. Upon publication in, Home Secretary Jack Straw promised that the Macpherson Inquiry would lead to real change in the policing of minority ethnic communities in Britain. Several senior police officers made similar pledges and insisted that the benchmark against which their commitment should be judged should be the extent to which progress was made ‘on the ground’. In the aftermath of the report a host of initiatives have addressed issues ranging from police liaison with victims, first aid training, to stop and search procedures and police complaints. As well as exploring the many ways in which the Lawrence Report has impacted on the police service and on society more widely this collection assesses the extent to which, in retrospect, the Macpherson Inquiry has led to significant changes to policing, and highlights areas where future efforts ought to be concentrated.

Contents

Introduction: Policing and Racism in the Limelight – the politics and context of the Lawrence Report, Michael Rowe
1 The Historical Context: Policing and Black People in Post-War Britain, James Whitfield
2 Diversity or Anarchy? The Post-Macpherson Blues, Eugene McLaughlin
3 Police Diversity Training: a Silver-Bullet Tarnished?, Michael Rowe and Jon Garland
4 Understanding ‘Institutional Racism’: The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and the Police Service Reaction, Anna Souhami
5 Black Police Associations and the Lawrence Report, Simon Holdaway and Megan O’Neill
6 Policing Muslim Communities, Neil Chakraborti
7 Macpherson, Police Stops and Institutionalised Racism, Kevin Stenson and P.A.J. Waddington
8 Reform by Crisis: The Murder of Stephen Lawrence and a Socio-Historical Analysis of Developments in the Conduct of Major Crime Investigations, Mark Roycroft, Jennifer Brown and Martin Innes
9 View from Within - The realities of promoting race and diversity inside the police service, Hilary Kinnell
Index


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Drugs and Popular Culture, Drugs, media and identity in contemporary culture

Edition: 1st

Authors: Edited by Paul Manning

ISBN-10: 1-843922-10-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-84392-210-0

Publishers: Willan

Price £24

Publication Date: February 2007

Publisher’s Title Information


The use of illegal drugs is so common that a number of commentators now refer to the ‘normalisation’ of drug consumption. It is surprising, then, that to date very little academic work has explored drug use as part of contemporary popular culture. This collection of readings will apply an innovatory, multi-disciplinary approach to this theme, combining some of the most recent research on ‘the normalisation thesis’ with fresh work on the relationship between drug use and popular culture. In drawing upon criminological, sociological and cultural studies approaches, this book will make an important contribution to the newly emerging field positioned at the intersection of these disciplines. The particular focus of the book is upon drug consumption as popular culture. It aims to provide an accessible collection of chapters and readings that will explore drug use in popular culture in a way that is relevant to undergraduates and postgraduates studying a variety of courses, including criminology, sociology, media studies, health care and social work.

Contents
Introduction
Part 1 Context, theory and history
Part 1 introduction, Paul Manning
1 An introduction to theoretical approaches and research traditions, Paul Manning
2 Mental health and moral panic: drug discourses in history, Andrew Blake
Part 2 Considering the 'normalisation thesis'
Introduction: an overview of the normalisation debate, Paul Manning
3 Definitely, maybe, not? The normalization of recreational drug use amongst young people, Michael Shiner and Tim Newburn
4 The 'normalisation' of 'sensible' recreational drug use: further evidence from the North West Longitudinal Study, Howard Parker, Judith Aldridge and L Williams
Part 3 representing drugs in and as popular culture
Part 3 Introduction, Paul Manning
5 Drugs and popular music in the modern age, Andrew Blake
6 Drugs, the family and recent American cinema, Leighton Grist
7 Under a cloud: morality, ambivalence and uncertainty in news discourse of cannabis law reform in Great Britain Simon Cross
8 The symbolic framing of drug use in the news: ecstasy and volatile substance abuse in newspapers, Paul Manning
9 Drug dealers as folk heroes? Drugs and television situation comedy, Paul Carter
10 'Junk, skunk and Northern Lights - representing drugs in children's literature, Andy Melrose and Vanessa Harbour
Part 4 Identities, cultural practices and drugs
Part 4 Introduction, Paul Manning
11 Echoes of drug culture in urban music Oluyinka Esan
12 Drugs and identity: being a junkie mum Sarah Goode
13 Women, drugs and popular culture: is there a need for a feminist embodiment perspective? Elizabeth Ettore
14 The drugs of labour: the contested nature of popular drug use in childbirth, Laura Hubner
Part 5 Drugs, normalisation and popular culture: implications and policy
Introduction to part 5, Paul Manning
15 Systemic 'normalisation'? - mapping and interpreting policy responses to illicit drug use, Richard Huggins
Index



Reviewer Wanted

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Transforming Youth Justice, Occupational Identity and Cultural Change

Edition: 1st

Author: Anna Souhami

ISBN: 1-843921-93-6, : 978-1-84392-193-6
Publishers: Willan

Price £40

Publication Date: February 2007

Publisher’s Title Information


In 1997 the newly modernized Labour party swept into power promising a radical overhaul of the youth justice system.  The creation of inter-agency Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) for the delivery of youth justice services were the cornerstone of the new approach.  These new YOTs were designed to tackle an ‘excuse culture’ that was alleged to pervade the youth justice system and aimed to encourage the emergence of a shared culture among youth justice practitioners from different agencies.

The transformation of the youth justice system brought about a period of intense disruption for the practitioners working within it. The nature and purpose of contemporary youth justice work was called into question and wider issues of occupational identity and culture became of crucial importance.
Through a detailed ethnographic study of the formation of a YOT this book explores a previously neglected area of organisational cultures in criminal justice.  It examines the nature of occupational culture and professional identity through the lived experience of youth justice professionals in this time of transition and change.  It shows how profound and complex of the effects of organisational change are, and the fundamental challenges it raises for practitioners’ sense of professional identity and vocation.
Transforming Youth Justice makes a highly significant contribution not only to the way that professional cultures are understood in criminal justice, but to an understanding of the often dissonant relationship between policy and practice.

Contents
1 Transforming youth justice
2 Occupational cultures and criminal justice
Part 1 The Youth Justice Team
3 Experiences and problems of team membership
4 Working in youth justice: social work and ambiguity
5 An unrepresentative representative: being a police officer on a YOT
Part 2 Ambiguity and change
6 Joining the team: problems of identity and membership
7 Experiencing change: identity, resistance and fragmentation
8 Managing ambiguity and change: power and creativity
Part 3 A Youth Offending Team
9 Culture and identity in the new youth justice
10 Understanding culture and change Appendix Researching a Youth
Offending Team
Index



Reviewer Wanted

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Inventing Fear of Crime

Edition: 1st

Author: Murray Lee

ISBN: 1-843921-74-X, ISBN-13 978-1-84392-174-5

Publishers: Willan Publishing

Price £22

Publication Date: January 2007



Over the past four decades the fear of crime has become an increasingly significant concern for criminologists, victimologists, policy makers, politicians, police, the media and the general public. For many practitioners reducing fear of crime has become almost as important an issue as reducing crime itself.  The identification of fear of crime as a serious policy problem has given rise to a massive amount of research activity, political discussion and intellectual debate.  Despite this activity, actually reducing levels of fear of crime has proved difficult. Even in recent years when many western nations have experienced reductions in the levels of reported crime, fear of crime has often proven intractable. The result has been the development of what amounts to a fear of crime industry.

Previous studies have identified conceptual challenges, theoretical cul-de-sacs and methodological problems with the use of the concept fear of crime.  Yet it has endured as both an organizing principal for a body of research and a term to describe a social malady.  This provocative, wide ranging book asks how and why fear of crime retains this cultural, political and social scientific currency despite concerted criticism of its utility? It subjects the concept to rigorous critical scrutiny taking examples from the UK, North America and Australia.

Part one of Inventing Fear of Crime traces the historical emergence of the fear of crime concept, while part two addresses the issue of fear of crime and political rationality, and analyses fear of crime as a tactic or technique of government.  His book will be essential reading on one of the key issues in government and politics in contemporary society.

Fear and anxieties over crime of crime are a central feature of western societies and their government’s approaches to crime control policy.

This book provides a wide-ranging analysis, investigating fear and anxieties over crime with special reference to N America, UK and Australia.

This is a major contribution to criminological theory and our understanding of the development of government policy on crime.

Contents
1 Introduction
2 Fear of crime: a pre-history
3 Anxieties in the knowledgeable society: the birth of a new criminological object
4 Surveying the fearful: the expansion of the victim survey
5 Fearing subjects
6 Governing and policing the fearful
7 The marketing of monsters
8 Conclusions: don't mention the 'F' word
Bibliography
Index





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Out of Sight

Crime, youth and exclusion in modern Britain

Edition: 1st

Author: Robert McAuley

ISBN-10: 1-843921-96-0

ISBN-13: 978-1-843921-96-7
Publishers: Willan

Price £40 HB

Publication Date: October 2006

Publisher’s Title Information


Youth crime is simultaneously a social problem and an intrinsic part of consumer culture: while images of gangs and gangsters are used to sell global commodities, young people not in work and education are labelled as antisocial and susceptible to crime

This book focuses on the lives of a group of young adults living in a deprived housing estate situated on the edge of a large city in the North of England. It investigates the importance of fashion, music and drugs in young people’s lives, providing a richly detailed ethnographic account of the realities of exclusion, and explaining how young people become involved in crime and drug use. Young men and women describe their own personal experiences of exclusion in education, employment and the public sphere. They describe their history of exclusion as ‘the life’, and the term identifies how young people grew up as objects of suspicion in the eyes of an affluent majority.
While social exclusion continues to be seen as a consequence of young people’s behaviour, Out of Sight: crime, youth and exclusion in modern Britain examines how stigmatising poor communities has come to define Britain’s consumer society.
The book challenges the view underlying government policy that social exclusion is a product of crime, antisocial behaviour and drug use, and in focusing on one socially deprived neighbourhood it promotes a different way of seeing the problematic relationship between socially excluded young people, society and government.
Contents

Acknowledgements
List of illustrations

Introduction
Masking poverty
Twenty-four seven society
Outline
1 A mugger's paradise
The unusual suspects
Working poor
Growing up in a poor community
Through the looking glass
Being poor in an affluent society
Shovelin shit: Nova's local economy
Ordinary world
Crime as status
Welfare and Workfare
Poverty, culture and crime
Too much too young
Social exclusion
Stitched up: exclusion at school
Compulsory youth training
Working in a service economy
Room 101
Crime and consumption
2 Nova
The Project
Uncle Sean
Born and bred
Spirit of a community
The rule of the street
Linden's
Nova: it's me, it's who I am
Survival of the fittest

Elements of a culture
Orpheus
Going under
Work and leisure
Working in Nova
A bit of business
Fuckin' chaos

3 Work
Life or death
Children under a shadow
Just Thievin'
Racism
Gender and crime
Youthful aspirations
Shit Street
4 Respect
Gangsters
Drugs and crime
Poverty and drug use
Inside out
Social exclusion in action
Achieving respect
Floetry
Exclusion through style
Hip Hop culture
Watching communities
Risk and defeat
Maintaining respect
The enemy within
Feeling for one another
Faith in the future
5 Education
Problem youth
Ghetto heaven
One hand doesn't know what the other hand's doing'
A new initiative
Learning to labour
Escape attempts
You got no hopes: working on Workfare
Urban regeneration
The Workfare carousel
Been here before: repackaging the Project
Behind the scenes
Making history
The Breakfast Club
Demonising community
6 Community
Living with poverty
Stigmatising poor people
Changing times
Thinking about society
Fatal strategies
People power
Township community
They think you're bad
War on community
The last frontier
Staying alive
7 Society
A dolls' house
Heroes and villains
Imagining crime
Search and destroy
Consumer protection
Faith in the city
The golden years
Law and order
Back to basics
Intel: crime in an information society
Being human
Bibliography
Index

The author

Robert McAuley studied for a doctorate in criminology at the University of Cambridge, and was formerly a research Fellow at London South Bank University. He is currently writing a book about young people’s experiences of higher education.


Review

As the millennium approached, a number of insightful books appeared that questioned the self-satisfied state of fin-de-siecle Britain. In their descriptions of the poor and the marginalised, works such as Danziger’s Britain (Danziger 1997) and Dark Heart (Davies 1997) echoed earlier writing, for example, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. In Out of Sight, Robert McAuley adds to this recent body of hitherto largely journalistic work by providing an ethnographic and theoretically informed investigation of this ‘other’ Britain. His context is Britain as a de-industrialised consumer society characterised by the ‘redevelopment of cities into theme parks organised around the pursuit of a consumer lifestyle’ (page 12). Unfortunately these are theme parks that require cheap labour to undertake work that is unrewarding and poorly paid. The marginalised young people whom McAuley interviews and observes during his twelve months of field work are faced with the unsatisfactory prospect of joining this work force or opting for alternative means of scraping a living.

McAuley focuses on ‘Nova’, a 1950s housing estate located on the edge of ‘Ford’, one of northern England’s large cities. Initially constructed in post-war optimism to house the workers who powered the post 1945 recovery, by the time of his study, Nova is disproportionately featured in the local media for its association with car crime, drug dealing and vandalism; its residents are associated with fecklessness, poor parenting and welfare dependency. This is an estate overlooked by regeneration booms and its residents are demonised at school and work for where they come from. Geographically adjacent to Nova, regeneration funding has led to the establishment of ‘Gemini Park,’ a retail, business and hi-tech park where the more affluent residents of Ford work and play, oblivious to the other Britain just beyond. 

Out of Sight provides numerous rich insights into the lives of the young people of Nova. After setting the context of Nova and its neighbour, Gemini Park, in chapters one and two, the author allows his informants to guide us through their world. This includes: the ‘workfare merry-go-round’ that perpetuates exclusion with its culture of lowly paid, insecure employment; the escape of some into informal work and working for themselves, sometimes crossing the border into criminality through ‘mooching’ and going ‘on the shift’; the decline of others into class A drug-taking. Relief is provided by ‘the Project’ (see below) and through the hedonistic pursuit of leisure; the account of a night out in the area’s leading night-spot is suitably grim.

McAuley’s conceptual framework is consumer society as ‘a world in which everyone is trapped’ (page 77) and where consumer culture is ‘defined by angst and dread’ (page 166). The dominant structural conditions, exacerbated by government policy, ensure that poor communities such as Nova are excluded and its residents carry the stigma of crime. This is a post-modern vision in which the modern Nova contrasts starkly with post-modern mainstream Britain (page 165). The absurdity of the strangling structural conditions described by McAuley is symbolised by ‘the Project’. This is a valued drop-in centre, providing employment advice for the young people of Nova. It is one public amenity that has succeeded in wining the trust of young people; it is both a link to work and training and also a place where they meet and socialise. Yet because it doesn’t fit the managerialist model of achieving performance targets and providing a standardised service, it is forced to close, denting the collective confidence of the community’s young people and further emphasising their exclusion.

The outline thus far suggests that the lives of Nova’s young people are bleak and literally hopeless. However, the book describes also how the young people maintain their self-respect through working for themselves and enjoying a collective, inclusive culture expressed, for example, through hip-hop. The older young people, particularly, maintain notions of faith in themselves and some degree of positive certainty about the future. Following the low of the demise of ‘the Project’, optimism for the future is raised by the creation of ‘Gateways’, a local education and employment training centre, achieved through the social capital that Nova’s community groups are able to build. For those who wonder what will become of Nova’s young people, McAuley tells us towards the end of the book (page 157) of returning to Nova and meeting up with the people who had let him into their lives for a year; he finds that most remain strong and resilient.

This book is not without faults. The prose throughout the book is idiosyncratic. For example, on page 20 McAuley argues that ‘economic and social policies designed to target young people living in deprived urban areas are based on a principle of evil’ (page 20). He certainly can’t be accused of fence-sitting. In addition: the frequent sub-headings don’t always appear directly relevant to the text that follows; Ellis Cashmore is not an African American as stated on page 163. He is ‘White British’ (more Birmingham, West Midlands, than Birmingham, Alabama). Nevertheless, McAuley should be congratulated; his personal investment in this ethnographic journey shines through and he succeeds in bringing out these people’s voices and their experiences of exclusion.

References

Davies, N (1997) Dark Heart: The shocking truth about hidden Britain, London: Vintage

Danziger, N. (1997) Danziger’s Britain: A journey to the edge, London: Flamingo

Reviewer:

Dr Rob Mawby, Reader in Criminal Justice, Centre for Criminal Justice Policy and Research, UCE Birmingham. 



Imagining Security

Edition: 1st

Author: Jennifer Wood & Clifford Shearing

ISBN 10: 1-843920-74-3

ISBN-13: 978-1-843920-74-8

Publishers: Willan

Price £22

Publication Date: November 2006

Publisher’s Title Information


This book is concerned with the ways in which the problem of security is thought about and promoted by a range of actors and agencies in the public, private and nongovernmental sectors. The authors are concerned not simply with the influence of risk-based thinking in the area of security, but seek rather to map the mentalities and practices of security found in a variety of sectors, and to understand the ways in which thinking from these sectors influence one another. Their particular concern is to understand the drivers of innovation in the governance of security, the conditions that make innovation possible and the ways in which innovation is imagined and realised by actors from a wide range of sectors.

The book has two key themes: first, governance is now no longer simply shaped by thinking within the state sphere, for thinking originating within the business and community spheres now also shapes governance, and influence one another. Secondly, these developments have implications for the future of democratic values as assumptions about the traditional role of government are increasingly challenged.
The first five chapters of the book explore what has happened to the governance of security, through an analysis of the drivers, conditions and processes of innovation in the context of particular empirical developments. Particular reference is made here to 'waves of change' in security within the Ontario Provincial Police in Canada. In the final chapter the authors examine the implications of 'nodal governance' for democratic values, and then suggest normative directions for deepening democracy in these new circumstances.

Cutting-edge analysis of the nature of thinking of security and its wider implications

Leading scholars in the field

Widespread international interest in this issue

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Imagining security
Imagining governance
Governance through force
Governing through enrolment
1 From state to nodal governance
Introduction
Transformations in state governance
Governing through others: enrolment and alignment
Private governments
Nodal governance
Conclusion
2 Community security and local governance: waves in public policing
Introduction
The place of the police
Waves in public policing
Policing as community-based
Policing as solving problems
The influence of neo-liberalism
Policing as restorative justice
Policing as fixing broken windows
Policing as intelligence work
Policing as reassurance
Conclusion
3 Human security and global governance
Introduction
Imagining human security
Threats to human security
Strategies of human security governance
Fighting crime and terror
Protecting people in zones of conflict
Protecting human rights
Building peace
Developing communities and societies
The state security/human security nexus
Conclusion
4 Responding to governance deficits
Introduction
Methods of power
Concentrate power nodally and use it to steer governance
Recognize and use all your power resources
Focus on nodes where one can be creative and assertive
Concentrate knowledge at nodes
Locate resources at nodes
Promote deliberative processes within nodes
Democracy in nodal governance
Conclusion
5 The governance of governance
Introduction
Hybridity in state governance: the case of public policing
Legal accountability
Political accountability
The new regulatory state or regulatory capitalism
Thinking like a business
Hybridity in decentred governance: private policing and beyond
Nodal governance for the future
Conclusion
Conclusion
Explanatory themes
Normative themes
Bibliography
Legislation
Legal cases
Index



Reviewer Wanted

Would you be interested in reviewing this book? (The Book Above) If you are interested in providing a review in about 600/800 words within 3 months or sooner then please contact me by e-mail at robjerrard@aol.com providing a small CV and your interest in this particular book.

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Crime Online

Edition: 1st

Author:  Edited by Yvonne Jewkes

ISBN-10: 1-843921-97-9
ISBN-13:
978-1-843921-97-4

Publishers: Willan

Price £22

Publication Date: November 2006

Publisher’s Title Information


Crime Online is concerned to explore the dual capacity of the Internet to pervert and to democratize: it offers its users freedom, democracy, and communication with people around the world while at the same time generating anxieties concerning its potential to corrupt vulnerable minds and facilitate heinous crimes.

This book provides a highly authoritative account and analysis of key issues within the rapidly burgeoning field of cybercrime. Drawing upon a range of internationally known experts in the field, and representing several different disciplines, Crime Online focuses on different constructions and manifestations of cybercrime and diverse responses to its regulation. It will be essential reading for anybody with an interest in one of the most exciting and fast moving areas of crime, policing and legislation.

Contents
1 ‘Killed by the Internet’: Cyber Homicides, Cyber Suicides and Cyber Sex Crimes, Yvonne Jewkes
2 Cybercrime: Re-thinking Crime Control Strategies, Susan W. Brenner
3 The Problem of Stolen Identity and the Internet, Emily Finch
4 Biometric Solutions to Identity-related Cybercrime, Russell G. Smith
5 Internet Child Pornography: International Responses, Yvonne Jewkes and Carol Andrews
6 The Role of Computer Forensics in Criminal Investigations, Robert Moore
7 Teenage Kicks or Virtual Villainy? Internet Piracy, Moral Entrepreneurship, and the Social Construction of a Crime Problem, Majid Yar
8 In the back of the net: football hooliganism and the Internet, Stefan Fafinski
9 Constructing Crime: Stalking, Celebrity, ‘Cyber’ and Media, Maggie Wykes
10 Digital Undergrounds: Alternative Politics and Civil Society, Rinella Cere
11 Beyond ‘the Desert of the Real’: Crime Control in a Virtual(ised) Reality, Katja Franko Aas
Index

The editor
Yvonne Jewkes is Reader in Criminology at the Open University.  She has written extensively on the problems of policing cybercrime as well as more generally about the relationship between new technologies, crime and deviance. Her books include Dot. cons: crime, deviance and identity on the internet (Willan, 2003) and Media and Crime (Sage, 2004).  She is also Editor of Crime, Media, Culture: an international journal.



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Young People and Offending : Education,youth justice and social inclusion

Author: Martin Stephenson

ISBN-10:1-843921-54-5

ISBN-13:978-1-843921-54-7
Publishers: Willan

Price £19.50

Publication Date: November 2006

Publisher’s Title Information


The relationship between education and youth crime has long been recognised in terms of social policy and public opinion, the full extent of this and its implications has been largely neglected and unexplored: educationalists on the one hand and criminologists on the other have largely failed to engage meaningfully with one another on the issue, and there has often been a large gap between youth justice and educational provision.

This book seeks to remedy this deficiency, providing a critical survey of the research evidence, policy development and practical issues relating to education and offending by young people. It has the following objectives: to examine the evolution of social policy and institutions in relation to the relationship between education and offending by young people; establish the scale and nature of the problem and the characteristics of the young people involved; identify any evidence based approaches that could be adopted across education and youth justice; review the effectiveness of New Labour's education and youth justice reforms; propose a series of measures for social policy makers and practitioners in education and youth justice.
Young People and Offending will be essential reading for youth justice practitioners as well as students taking courses on youth crime and youth justice, or on youth justice or probation training courses.

Contents
1 Foreword by Rod Morgan (Chairman, Youth
Justice Board)
Introduction
1 Background: theories and evidence
2 The Evolution of Education and Youth
Justice
3 Social Inclusion
4 Detachment: exclusion, absenteeism, non participation
and unemployment
5 Low Attainment and Under-achievement
6 The Influence of the School
7 Custody and Custodial Education
8 Stakeholders: public opinion, magistrates,
Yots, and young people
9 What Works in Youth Justice and
Education
10 Social Policy
11 Conclusions
References
Index


Review

I was particularly interested in reviewing this book since my own work for over 20 years was in the prevention and treatment of young persons who were becoming delinquents and criminals. I ran a therapeutic community and school at Allington Manor, in Hampshire between 1977 and 1997 which individually assessed, treated and educated the young persons in my care, many of whom had already committed serious crimes. The author rightly brings into the open the devastating effect that a poor education has on children at risk who end up by becoming delinquents. This is due to the lack of adequate analysis of their problems in school and an appropriate educational curriculum to meet their needs.  This is why prisons spend a considerable period of time in educating young offenders through teaching them to read and write. This point was also made by Rod Morgan, Chairman, Youth Justice Board who wrote the foreword to the book.

Education is an important aspect to consider as it can both cause antisocial and delinquent behaviour and prevent it by an appropriate educational presentation to the child at an optimum time in his life. This book provides evidence of this as to the question of the importance of appropriate education for potential young persons who are likely to offend.This book therefore is likely to be of considerable value to Probation Officers, Youth Justice Practitioners, and those running Therapeutic Communities and Schools whether they be open or secure.

Mr Stephenson, the author, has extensive experience in education, youth justice and social care. He has been on the Youth Justice Board from 1998 onwards to 2002. He was a Chief Executive of the charity INCLUDE. This organisation provides education for excluded young persons.

The book is divided into three sections. The first provides background theories and evidence and the evolution of education and youth justice, as well as social exclusion and youth crime. Section 2 provides information on the impact on young persons due to an inappropriate education being presented to them. This often results in low achievement and eventually, coming into conflict with the Law. Part 3 concerns itself with what can be done about the situation and involves the work of Magistrates, the Youth Justice System, and social policy as well as social inclusion.

The book begins with a glossary of terms including such terms as Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD), Special Education Needs (SEN) and the Young Offender Institution (YOI). These terms are particularly employed in dealing with young people who offend.

The author points out what has been known for many years that young people who are disengaged from education are much more likely to be involved in antisocial and criminal behaviour. One might well ask whether the education system currently in vogue is responsible for much crime that could have been prevented had an appropriate method been included for young persons who cannot compete effectively with others in the school setting. Such youngsters then become severely handicapped in obtaining appropriate employment due to the fact that they have often failed to receive either education or training. This is often due to their "drop-out" from school and their having a string of offences before they are of school leaving age. This leads to low self-esteem and the tendency to seek gratification elsewhere. This is often by participating in a variety of criminal activities. Once such youngsters have been incarcerated their chances of finding employment of an appropriate kind becomes even more severely restricted.

The process is well known. Children initially find school work difficult, or meaningless, or both, and become children who are stressed and frustrated. This is followed by conduct disorders of various kinds. The next step is undoubtedly to avoid attending school or when attending school showing signs of considerable behaviour problems. Sometimes they bully and sometimes they become the target of bullying. They frequently turn to such behaviour as shoplifting, joy riding, drinking alcohol, and taking and selling drugs. Eventually they graduate to assaulting or robbing others. Sometimes even more serious crimes than that are committed by such young persons as they graduate from one antisocial activity to another. This book returns again and again to the connection between an inappropriate education and criminality. Quite early such youngsters become labelled and such labels stick. They tend to become worse as time and same antisocial cycle continues.

The author draws heavily on research carried out by such individuals as Farrington, Furlong, West and Pennell. This book continues to explore the relationship between education and offending. Efforts are made by the penal system rather belatedly to put right what has gone wrong before and to provide education for the young people who have failed to receive it earlier. One might well ask: "Would there be so many in prison today had they in the early stages received an appropriate and meaningful educational process?"

This book is well written. It is informative and well organised with summaries at the end of chapters and sections. In the final section the author puts forward some ideas that may be of value. He states in the final conclusions: "The only chances of significant improvement lie in a very significant reduction in the custodial population and complete reconfiguration of the juvenile secure estate." Hence the author encourages, except for the most grave of crimes, some other form of dealing with young offenders than utilising the prison system primarily. This I endorse most whole-heartedly.

L F Lowenstein



Problem-oriented Policing and Partnerships: Implementing an evidence-based approach to crime reduction

Edition: 1st

Authors: Karen Bullock, Rosie Erol & Nick Tilley

ISBN-10: 1-843921-39-1
ISBN-13:
978-1-843921-39-4

Publishers: Willan

Price £26

Publication Date: September 2006


This book makes an important contribution to the literature on problem-oriented policing, aiming to distill the British experience of problem-oriented policing. Drawing upon over 500 entries to the Tilley Award since its inception in 1999, the book examines what can be achieved by problem-oriented policing, what conditions are required for its successful implementation and what has been learned about resolving crime and disorder issues.
Examples of problem-oriented policing examined in this book include specific police and partnership initiatives targeting a wide spectrum of individual problems (such as road safety, graffiti and alcohol-related violence), as well as organisational efforts to embed problem-oriented work as a routine way of working (such as improving training and interagency problem solving along with more specific challenges like improving the way that identity parades are conducted.
This book will be of particular interest to those working in the field of crime reduction and community safety in the police, local government and other agencies, as well as students taking courses in policing, criminal justice and criminology.

Contents
1 Introduction: problem-orientated approaches to crime reduction and policing
2 Experiences of problem-orientated policing implementation
3 Mainstreaming problem-orientated policing implementation
4 The implementation of problem-orientated projects in the UK
5 Resources for improving problem-orientated policing and partnerships
6 The changing context of British problem-orientated policing
7 Conclusions: problem-orientated policing and Evidence Based Policy and Practice
Index



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Holding Your Square

Masculinities,  Streetlife and Violence

Edition: 1st

Author: Christopher Mullins

ISBN: 1843921944

Publishers: Willan

Price £40

Publication Date: September 2006

Publisher’s Title Information


This book is about the meanings of masculinities within the social networks of the streets of an American city (St Louis, Missouri), and how these shaped perceptions and enactments of violence.  Based on a large number of interviews with offenders the author provides a rich description of life on the streets, contextualizing criminal violence within this deviant subculture, and with a specific focus on issues of gender.  The book provides one of the most detailed descriptions yet of the forms masculinity takes in disadvantages communities in the United States.  It establishes how street based gender identity motivated and guided men through violent encounters, exploring how men’s relationships with women and their families instigated violence.  One key issue addressed is why men resorted to violence in certain situations and not in others, exploring the range of choices open to them and how these opportunities were interpreted.  The book makes a major contribution to the study of the relationship between masculinities and violence, making use of a much larger sample than elsewhere.

Contents
Preface and acknowledgements
Foreword by Jody Miller (University of Missouri St Louis)
1 Doing crime, doing gender
2 Gender's omnipresence: methodology
3 Real men and punks: masculinities on the streets
4 Every motherfucker gonna try to punk you: masculinity challenges
5 One's man 'ho' is another man's sister: men's relationships with women and families
6 Is it being smart, or just a punk ass move? The contradictions of street masculinity
7 Masculinities, streetlife and violence
References
Index


Review

Holding Your Square is one of the first offerings as part of Willan publishing’s new crime and ethnography series.  However the title is interesting in so far as it is not what one would expect of ethnographic research because its author, Christopher Mullins is not the ethnographer.  Rather he has drawn on a staggering array of work undertaken by a collective of academics at the University St Louis, Missouri as part of an ongoing academic project aimed at mapping the particular criminal’s practices and cultures around a number of black American men from an excluded community where opportunities are limited.  To that end, much of the material has already been used and published, for example as texts on ‘Street Justice’ (Jacobs and Wright 2006) and ‘Robbing drug dealers’ (Jacobs 2000).  Indeed one of the disappointing aspects of this book, is that those who have read the various offerings of the St. Louis academics might well feel a sense of déjà vu.  While Mullins can claim to have used an innovative methodology, whether his using ethnographic data from a range of different projects towards a singular end (examining masculinity and crime generally) really offers anything theoretically new is debatable.  Indeed, I found his inductive theory coupled with a re-evaluation of existing ethnographic data to be far less interesting than the original studies. 

Mullins text is a little repetitive; there are very few basic observations; that gendered power on the streets is not simply men’s patriarchal dominance over women, and such gendered roles should not simply be taken for granted; the meanings of masculinities within the social networks of the streets are shaped by perceptions and enactments of violence; and that there is a distinct street culture that is largely masculine and highly stylised.  The book is best when it charts these and lets the ethnographic material flow, and provides a rich description of the sub cultural life of criminals on the streets.  However, empirically, it has more to say than it does theoretically, and the way in which Mullins deals with the issues of gender after a while becomes rather repetitive.  While it might be true that there are highly stylised masculine roles on the streets amongst offenders, the theoretical dressing that accompanies this seems to offer little that is new.  Criminals are driven by hedonism; they hold particular perceptions of masculinity based around violence; they are fatalistic; there are hegemonic and subordinate male roles; it is bad to be called a ‘punk’.   None of this strikes me as particularly relevant or new.  When compared with the way the data had originally been employed (for example in Jacobs and Wrights accounts of street justice mentioned above) it is not nearly as interesting or accessible.

References

Jacobs, Bruce A. 2000. Robbing Drug Dealers: Violence beyond the Law. New York: Aldine de Gruyter

Jacobs, B and Wright, R (2006) Street Justice: Retaliation in the Criminal Underworld.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

James Treadwell



Title: The Price of Sex, Prostitution, policy and society

Author: Belinda Brooks-Gordon
Edition: 1st
ISBN-10: 1-843920-87-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-843920-87-8

Publishers: Willan

Price £22

Publication Date: July 2006


Publisher’s Title Information

As a society we are buying more sex than ever before. Adult sex shops now take their place amongst retailers in the high street and lap dancing clubs compete for an increased share of the leisure economy. Hotel chains offer sexually explicit films as part of their standard service, the party selling of adult toys to women in their homes has become a mainstream activity. And at the traditional end of the sexual service economy, prostitution has experienced new growth.
Along with this has come new legal measure and attempts to regulate the sexual leisure economy, and far more comprehensive plans than ever before to regulate prostitution, in particular in the form of the new Sex Offences Act. This book seeks to address the range of issues and contemporary debates on the sex industry, including the demand by customers who buy sex, the policing of women who work in the street sex industry, and the violence that pervades prostitution. It shows how these issues have been addressed in policy terms, the problems that have emerged in this, and how a social policy might be formulated to minimize harm and enhance public understanding.
Overall the book aims to provide a critical perspective on prostitution policies and the legal chaos and complexities that surround this.

Society buys more sex than ever before

Focus on issue of how society deals with the selling of sexual services and how it is to be regulated

Provides a critical perspective on recent legislation and the chaos surrounding attempts to regulate it
Contents
Introduction
1 How prostitution became a legal problem
2 Understanding prostitution policy
3 Understanding sexual demand
4 Policing street prostitution
5 Violence, victimisation and protection
6 Motives, method and morality
7 Conclusion
References
Index


Review

This is the latest in the rapidly expanding specialist series of Willan books on themes relating to sex and society. It addresses a real gap in terms of current texts and understandings in relation to the problem of prostitution and specifically the legalization of commercial sex work. The author sets her stall out right from the start asserting that recent Government reforms to control prostitution are counter-productive in not only failing to meet their desired objectives, but in creating a number of unanticipated ancillary social problems. She has also been fortunate to draw on the expertise and help of a number of leading criminologists  and practitioners in the field,  including Betsy Stanko, Keith Soothill, Helen Self, Lorraine Gelsthorpe and the Metropolitan Police Vice and Clubs Unit. This gives the book not only considerable academic integrity, but embeds the discussion in a practical and real life context as well.

The first chapter provides a brief historiography of societal responses to commercial sex as both an actual and perceived problem, from initial public acceptance in Roman times to an increasingly less tolerant and more repressive regime. Reference is made to moral repression, the role of the church, the hypocrisy of the Victorians and associated vice and vigilance campaigns, through to the Wolfenden Report and the Sexual Offences Act 1956. From then the increasing use of more punitive strategies aimed at ‘eradicating’ the ‘problem,’ primarily the kerb-crawling provisions of 1985 are covered, culminating in the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

In the second chapter Brooks-Gordon analyses the integrity of the Government’s investigation into the current problem of prostitution; analysing its Consultation Document Paying the Price 2004 and subsequent Co-ordination Strategy on Prostitution January 2006. The consultation report maintains the premise that prostitution must be controlled despite the fact that it is not illegal. The author challenges the Government’s approach on the basis of its failure to even ask the question whether sex-work should be legitimate and its automatic assumption that it is and should be a crime. The consultation exercise is subjected to considerable criticism, particularly the lack of any historical perspective post-Wolfenden in the literature review and the subsequent failure to consider the wider contextual and socio-cultural changes of the past 50 years. The failure to address the psyche of male sex clients and the reasons why they choose to engage in commercial sex is identified as another shortcoming.  Existing research on these themes is also underutilised and remarkably the Home Office is alleged to have misrepresented its own previously commissioned research.  Further condemnation emanates from the Government’s failure to fully consider policy initiatives introduced elsewhere, particularly Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and New Zealand, and where reference has been made the author claims it has been misinterpreted or misread.  Finally, in relation to domestic ‘re-education schemes’ and ‘conditional cautioning’ the claimed successes of the Home Office are not, she argues, supported by its own research and statistics.

Thus not only is it claimed that there appears to be a considerable amount of spin but also that the Government’s approach lacks integrity in its failure to analyse the problem of prostitution in light of the not inconsiderable debates that have been taking place in sociological discourse. Brooks-Gordon questions the failure to utilise any legal discourse (i.e. legitimacy and  legal theory),  feminist discourse (traditional moral discourse, sexual domination discourse, sex work discourse) or social policy discourse (public nuisance discourse, moral order discourse, market discourse) which given the subject matter displays either extreme ignorance or extreme arrogance and the author is right to point this out. Instead she asserts that the discourse adopted is one where sex work is constructed as a crime, and that adult prostitution and child prostitution are confused through the emphasis on both being labelled as ‘victims’ and subjects of abuse, when patently with adult prostitution this is not always the case. While the subsequent Co-ordination Strategy contains some positive changes such as the removal of ‘common’ prostitute, referral medical services for street sex workers (albeit under threat of failure to comply) and redefinitions of and co-operation between brothels etc; the lack of vision including the dismissal of safety zones is in her view very disappointing.

Brooks-Gordon also offers some interesting commentary on the police perspective questioning police (primarily The Met) neutrality (at higher levels) in terms of intervention and politicization. She also alleges that the police are complicit in maintaining a high moral tone about commercial sex aligning themselves with some unfamiliar partners:  ‘The Strategy is a curious alliance of views which melds those of the police and the tabloids with those of radical separatist feminists, who along with the religious right, had a vested interest in running exit programmes linked to a new moral agenda (p.73).’

The book then moves on in chapter three to analyse some empirical research conducted by the author with men who pay for sex, preceeded by a summary of the limitations of previous research in this field. The chapter maps out the characteristics and patterns of 518 cases of kerb crawlers stopped in London over a 2 year period categorized according to ethnicity, age, employment, offence circumstances, vehicle use etc confirming a number of (mainly unsurprising) assumptions and correlations. For example it was found that most street business occurs mid-week, that there was a significant proportion of diplomats and taxi drivers, tourists were treated more leniently than UK nationals, and many men were as interested in voyeurism as commercial sex etc.. The findings are used to highlight the practical problems of enforcing law and policy espoused in chapter four which reflects on police responses and perceptions as evidenced in patrolling practices. Writing in the aftermath of the Macpherson Inquiry the author seems to be somewhat surprised that there was a ‘necessary awareness of gender’ in the Vice Squads she followed and had expected to find more examples of institutionalized racism and sexism.  Such assumptions from academics highlight the damage that findings of ‘institutionalized racism’ can create where all personnel are so-defined and the difficulties for the police service in endeavouring to overcome such labelling.  The research also revealed the dilemma held by many specialist officers that while they did not perceive prostitutes to be in the same class as other criminal offenders they acknowledged the need to respond to residents’ concerns. The result was that this could often lead to a selective and undesirable charging strategy. On the other hand police officers, particularly female officers, were more dismissive of kerb crawlers and reported that dealing with them had led to a more sensitive understanding of the issues faced by sex workers.

From her fieldwork, four typical responses of kerb crawlers to any police approach are identified - admission, admission to cruising, denial and failure to stop. These are reinforced by a distinctive 5 Phase order which matches, in 95% of the incidents observed, the interactions between the police and the kerb crawlers in the sample. These are labelled as the Bemused Phase, Excuse Phase, Indignant Phase, Confrontational/Pleading Phase and Indication of Future Intent. These signifiers are used to explain the tactics and strategies adopted by the kerb crawlers leading to the (not unexpected?) conclusion that kerb crawling is ‘not only more sophisticated and rule-governed behaviour than previously thought, but also perhaps more deeply rooted in the psyche …’ It is then strongly suggested that this model has implications for policy and practice such as in determining appropriate prosecution strategies.

Chapter five is a short chapter that summarizes the incidence of violence against prostitutes. Again, unsurprisingly, the author concludes that levels of reporting violence against sex workers are low, that 73 sex workers were killed 1990-2002 and that current sentencing practice is therefore not working. The case is briefly made that this justifies the promotion of a safer environment for sex workers and that only a seismic shift in public policy towards commercial sex will have any significant and positive impact. No doubt Brooks-Gordon is right in this context, but it appears unlikely that the Government will offer a sympathetic ear at the moment. Perhaps of more interest is the tentative suggestion that there could be a link between those who kerb crawl and those who perpetrate serious acts of violence against prostitutes, albeit in a very small number of cases.

The main conclusion drawn is that recent policies have increasingly criminalized the client and constructed the sex worker as victim causing conflicting tensions and dilemmas for police professionals. ‘Client’ groups are treated differently by the police and consequently the law is neither applied consistently or neutrally, undermining its integrity. The utility of criminalizing kerb crawlers is strongly challenged and the argument made that more non-criminal alternatives should be considered. A considerable number of (controversial?) suggestions for reform are proposed including the decriminalization of sex work and introduction of rights for those who choose to engage in what should be legitimate work, whether as part of a small worker-run establishment or larger business concern. Safety zones should be designated for street workers to operate in and laws protecting sex workers introduced so that civil remedies can be brought against those who abuse or harass them. Overseeing this should be a Home Office Sex Industry Inspectorate. While not everyone will necessarily agree with all of the recommendations and proposals suggested they are worthy of serious debate and introspection. This book should therefore provide the catalyst to generate the broader debate that Government in its consultation seemingly wished to avoid, whether deliberately or otherwise.

Kim Stevenson



Forensic Identification and Criminal Justice

Forensic Science, Justice and Risk

Edition: 1st

Author: Carole McCarthy

ISBN: 1-84392-184-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-843-92184-4

Publishers: Willan

Price £35

Publication Date: July 2006

Publisher’s Title Information


Analyses development of forensic identification technologies and impact on legal system

Considers human rights implications

Focus on national DNA database and its implications

This book provides an account of the development of forensic identification technologies and the way in which this has impacted upon the legal system. It traces the advent of forensic identification technologies, focusing on fingerprinting and forensic DNA typing, and their growing deployment within the criminal justice system. It also elucidates the ways in which these new technologies are accelerating procedural changes to investigative practices, and shows the ways in which in some areas human rights (such as privacy rights and rights against discrimination) are coming under threat. The use of forensic evidence in criminal investigations and trials is analysed in detail.

This book uncovers the way in which this new reliance on forensic technologies has gained a foothold within the criminal justice system, and the risks and dangers that this can pose. The National DNA Database provides a particular focus of attention. The author seeks to move beyond an approach that has seen forensic DNA profiling as error free, situating her analysis within broader risk discourses.

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Forensic identification: the legal framework
Police investigations and forensic identity evidence
Fingerprints and DNA sampling: the legal framework
2 Forensic identification: the criminal investigation
DNA and police investigations
The DNA Expansion Programme
DNA and criminal detection rates
Forensic science and criminal investigation: a case for caution?
Conclusion: forensic identification and the criminal process
3 Forensic identification: the criminal trial
The criminal trial: fairness or truth?
Identity 'matches': acceptance of fingerprint and DNA
Evidence
The criminal trial: certainty and rectitude
Conclusion: forensic identification and the criminal trial
Forensic Identification and Criminal Justice
4 The development of forensic identity databases
The development of forensic identity databases
Fingerprint databasing
A sceptical approach to forensic identity databases
Forensic identity databases: some new risks
Forensic identity databases: current problems, future risks
Conclusion: the endangerment of innocence in the pursuit of security
5 Forensic identification in other jurisdictions
Europe
Pan-European developments
Interpol
USA
Canada
New Zealand and Australia
Conclusion: England and Wales - leading the way?
6 The future of forensic identification: issues and prospects
Fingerprints and DNA in the 'fight against crime'
Future applications for forensic identification technologies
Forensic identification: human rights and civil liberties
Forensic identity databases: issues and prospects
The 'infallibility' of forensic identification
The information society: heading for 'information overload'?
Conclusion: Cause for optimism, pessimism, or scepticism?
References
Index


Review

The first few pages of this book set out how the Government, the criminal justice system, and many others view forensic science.

The author quotes the House of Lords Committee on Science and Technology, which outlined the task of forensic science as ‘to serve the interests of justice by providing scientifically based evidence relating to criminal activity’. The author then quotes the Forensic Science Service, (FSS), which states that its mission is ‘to provide forensic science information and expertise to support the investigation and detection of crime and the prosecution of offenders, and so to contribute to the prevention, deterrence and reduction of crime’. Also quoted is the FSS mission, which is ‘to realise the full potential of forensic science to contribute to safer and more just society’.

The book concentrates, but not exclusively, on the only two methods of positive identification that science can provide, which are DNA and Fingerprints. The book gives the reader a brief history of forensic science and then fingerprints and DNA, before discussing whether or not the latter two are as infallible as many perceive them to be. The arguments for and against are well presented and the author draws on many references, interviews and other sources. I was pleased to see the author state that whilst DNA is hailed as the ‘holy grail’ of identification techniques, the humble fingerprint retains its status as the most commonly utilised method of forensic identification.

The legal framework of police investigations and forensic identity evidence is discussed, including the legal provisions for obtaining samples and the potential for a suspect to refuse to supply samples.  The various Acts of Parliament, Codes of practice, Law reviews and stated cases are discussed and commented on.

Figures quoted in the book show how Government expenditure on the DNA programme has expanded at a massive rate during the last decade, but rightly questions whether this expenditure has brought comparable results. The author does not answer this question. My answer to the above question is no, and my reasons for this is something that is not directly mentioned in the book. The Government has spent millions of pounds, (over £300 million to date), on a DNA database and everything that goes with it, but then installs ‘budget managers’ in police forces. The result of this, all over the country, is that crime-scene examiners are returning from major crime scenes with, for example twenty five exhibits for examination by the FSS, only to be told by the budget manager, (who is neither a scientist or police officer), “we can only afford to send three samples for examination”.

The author also discusses the impact of the National DNA Database on crime figures, and this is neatly summed up by one interviewee who states, “DNA will never affect crime figures.  It could mean that more guilty people are convicted, however, these days getting caught doesn’t matter to the majority of criminals, because hardly any punishment fits the crime”.

The book then looks at recent developments in DNA profiling, changes in the law that have occurred to accommodate these developments and asks what the future is. The fact that it is now legal to retain, on various databases profiles of persons who are not charged or who are later acquitted, (this concerns me a great deal), is discussed at length. Biometrics, their reliability and feasibility, identity cards, the information held on Government databases and much more is written about in the chapter entitled ‘The future of forensic identification: issues and prospects’. Part of this chapter also makes reference to the security of the various databases, especially the DNA database, who has access to it and who may have access to it in the future. At the moment the FSS are the custodians of the National DNA Database, but what happens, the author asks, if, in the future, the FSS is privatised and the entire stock of DNA samples are handed over to a public limited company?

I have to confess however, that I personally found this book difficult to read. The author draws on many references, interviews and websites and I believe, too many. There are no less than twenty pages of references, many being quoted numerous times. I have no doubt however, that this book, which contains so much information and comment about all aspects of forensic identification and criminal justice, will prove to be an invaluable tool for scientists, lawyers and police officer

Andy Day 2007



Captured by the Media

Prison discourse in popular culture

Edition: 1st

Author: Edited by Paul Mason

ISBN: 1-84392-144-8

Publishers: Willan Publishers

Price £18.99

Publication Date:  November 2005

Publisher’s Title Information

This book turns on the television, opens the newspaper, goes to the cinema and assesses how punishment is performed in media culture, investigating the regimes of penal representation and how they may contribute to a populist and punitive criminological imagination. It places media discourse in prisons firmly within the arena of penal policy and public opinion, suggesting that while Bad Girls, The Shawshank Redemption, internet jail cams, advertising and debates about televising executions continue to ebb and flow in contemporary culture, the persistence of this spectacle of punishment - its contested meaning and its politics of representation - demands investigation.

Alongside chapters addressing the construction of popular images of prison and the death penalty in television and film, Captured by the Media also has contributions from prison reform groups and prison practitioners which discuss forms of media intervention in penal debate.

This book provides a highly readable exploration of media discourse on prisons and punishment, and its relationship to public attitudes and government penal policy. At the same time it engages with the 'cultural turn' within criminology and offers an original contribution to discussion of the relationship between prison, public and the state. It will be essential reading for students in both media studies and criminology as well as practi­tioners and commentators in these fields.

The editor

Paul Mason lectures at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University. He has written extensively in the field of crime and media, and is the editor of Criminal Visions: media representations of crime and justice (2003) and co-author (with Frank Leishman) of Policing and the Media: facts, fictions and factions (2003), both published by Willan Publishing. He is Editor of [jc2m] Journal of Crime, Conflict and Media Culture.

The contributors

Rob Allen, Jamie Bennett, Steve Chibnall, Chris Greer, Brian Jarvis, Yvonne Jewkes, Helen Johnston, Anna King, Shadd Maruna, Paul Mason, Mike Nellis, Mick Ryan, Enver Solomon.

Contents

1 Turn on, tune in, slop out, Paul Mason, Cardiff University
2 The function of fiction for a punitive public, Anna King, Keele University and Shadd Maruna, Cambridge University
3 Red tops, populists and the irresistible rise of the public voice(s), Mick Ryan, University of Greenwich
4 Crime sound bites: a view from both sides of the microphone, Enver Solomon, Prison Reform Trust
5 What works in changing public attitudes: findings from rethinking crime and punishment, Rob Allen, Rethinking Crime and Punishment
6 Delivering death: capital punishment, botched executions and the American news media, Chris Greer, Northumbria University
7 'Buried alive': representations of the separate system in Victorian England, Helen Johnston, University of Hull
8 Undermining the simplicities: the films of Rex Bloomstein, Jamie Bennett, Deputy Governor, HMP Whitemoor
9 Creating a stir? Prisons, popular media and the power to reform, Yvonne Jewkes, The Open University
10 The violence of images: inside the prison TV drama Oz, Brian Jarvis, Loughborough University
11 The anti-heroines of Holloway : the prison films of Joan Henry and J. Lee Thompson, Steve Chibnall, De Montfort University
12 Relocating Hollywood's prison film discourse, Paul Mason, Cardiff University
13 Future punishment in American science fiction films, Mike Nellis University of Birmingham
Index


REVIEW


At the present time of writing, prisons and prisoners seem to be hardly, if ever, out of the news. Both the popular press, and mainstream TV news, have given high profile to a series of concerns including - convicted offenders who are sentenced too leniently, the re-offending with sometimes tragic consequences of  prisoners freed on license and parole, and the 'scandal' of foreign prisoners released without being considered for deportation.

Many criminologists would argue that the public is not particularly well served by this style of reporting, which tends to infer that our criminal justice system is 'soft on crime' - despite the fact that Britain already has more life-sentenced prisoners than any other European country, who are increasingly serving longer and longer sentences than would have been the case ten or twenty years ago.

The power of the media to set the climate within which penal affairs are debated is a key theme of this collection edited by Paul Mason. The book claims to address how prison is portrayed in a range of media - including both the news media and fictional portrayals in film and television, but perhaps has most success in addressing the former. Yvonne Jewkes, for example, provides a chapter attempting to assess the significance of the TV dramas Bad Girls and Porridge, in contrast to the view of prisoners provided by the news media. Do these two popular TV portrayals have any practical impact or effect? Jewkes thinks not - suggesting that their relatively sympathetic portrayals of inmates are simply drowned out by the weight of news media portrayals of notorious inmates who have committed heinous crimes - the Ian Huntleys and Harold Shipmans of the prison population.

Other contributors to this volume follow a similar line of enquiry. Both Mick Ryan and Enver Soloman identify the ways in which reporting the 'notorious and heinous' is an easy option for news makers, whilst perhaps also conceding that public opinion on crime and punishment is not as simplistic as the newspaper tabloid editors would have us believe. But, both believe that, at present, the news media misinforms the public about the make-up of the prison population, the character of their offences and the viability of alternatives to prison. And both suggest that there is a need to engage the public with a more rounded appreciation of prisons and prisoners.

This is perhaps where this book is weakest. Having recognised the need for alternative ways of engaging the public in debate about prison, the authors tend to ignore or decry those media portrayals which attempt to do just this. Jamie Bennett offers an insightful examination of the work of documentary film-maker Rex Bloomstein. Bennet is able to show how Bloomstein's Lifer: Living With Murder  undermines simplistic perceptions of what life-sentenced prisoners are like and whether they  can  and should be eligible for parole. But this chapter is one of the few in this collection to find some value in sympathetic portrayals of offenders, in contrast to the more usual media stereotypes.

More generally, this collection is biased towards  'prison media pessimism' - believing that media portrayals of  prison and offenders have an impact when supporting a drift toward tougher penal policy, but decrying the extent to which  media portrayals can contribute towards more empathetic and less punitive responses to offending. It would have been nice to see an appreciation of the recent round of offender-centred docusoaps - Make Me Honest, Brat Camp, Bad Lads Army, Real Bad Girls, etc., although one feels that these would be unlikely to receive a sympathetic appreciation from authors generally committed to disapproval of media portrayals.

Given the present state of the way prison policy is presented within the popular media, it is perhaps understandable that the contributors to this collection tend towards criticism of media portrayals of prison. Although one perhaps might have liked to see more discussion of ways in which the media products we do have could be used as a springboard for debate (eg. Is it possible to use popular film and television in offence confrontation work?). As it is, this collection will appeal most to academics already interested in this area of study, and is likely to win few new converts to the cause of prison reform. For lecturers who teach courses on 'Crime and the Media' it is worth ordering a copy of Captured By The Media for your library.  Students may well find the papers collected here a stimulus for starting to think about how prisons and prisoners are portrayed within our culture - an important area of study as our society looks set to continue the trend towards an ever higher prison population.

Sean O’Sullivan

Centre for Criminal Justice Policy and Research

UCE Birmingham



Organised Crime

Edition: 1st

Author: Alan Wright

ISBN: 1-84392-140-5