Crime, Risk and Justice

From being a relatively marginal political issue, crime control has risen rapidly up the social and political agendas of western societies. As inequalities have increased, so the actual and perceived risks of crime and other social ills have grown rapidly for all sections of society: the management of risk has become a central concern.In response, the state has increasingly devolved responsibility for personal security onto individuals, resulting in an explosion of private security arrangements related to the home, the person and personal property. At the same time the state has addressed itself in increasingly draconian fashion to more serious crime: retributive sentencing has grown even harsher.This book addresses a range of themes arising from these developments. An eminent cast of criminologists from Britain, the USA and Australia explores the links between crime and risk -- from the depiction of crime in the media to the dilemmas of policing, from the new punitiveness of criminal justice systems to the custodial warehousing of the poor and excluded.A central connecting theme of the book is that crime control can no longer be viewed as a technical operation of law enforcement and adjudication; rather it has become a central feature of the increasingly pluralised and complex government of liberal societies.v