The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society

by David Garland

The past 30 years have seen vast changes in our attitudes toward crime. More and more of us live in gated communities; prison populations have skyrocketed; and issues such as racial profiling, community policing, and "zero-tolerance" policies dominate the headlines. How is it that our response to crime and our sense of criminal justice has come to be so dramatically reconfigured? David Garland charts the changes in crime and criminal justice in America and Britain over the past twenty-five years, showing how they have been shaped by two underlying social the distinctive social organization of late modernity and the neoconservative politics that came to dominate the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s.

Garland explains how the new policies of crime and punishment, welfare and security—and the changing class, race, and gender relations that underpin them—are linked to the fundamental problems of governing contemporary societies, as states, corporations, and private citizens grapple with a volatile economy and a culture that combines expanded personal freedom with relaxed social controls. It is the risky, unfixed character of modern life that underlies our accelerating concern with control and crime control in particular. It is not just crime that has changed; society has changed as well, and this transformation has reshaped criminological thought, public policy, and the cultural meaning of crime and criminals. David Garland's The Culture of Control offers a brilliant guide to this process and its still-reverberating consequences.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Politics, History, Race, Law, Academic

336 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2001

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

David Garland is the Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University. He is the author of the award-winning studies Punishment and Welfare and Punishment and Modern Society.

Reviews

[DoctorM · Rating 3 out of 5]

A look at the decline of the American and British crime-and-punishment paradigms of the mid-20th century and the replacement of what Garland calls a "penal-welfarist" model emphasising rehabilitation, the social roots of crime, and the re-integration of ex-offenders into society by a model that emphasises imprisonment ("incapacitation") and an exclusionary model of social control that keeps suspect populations (the young, the poor, racial minorities) out of increasingly privatised public spaces.

Garland looks at the perceived failure of a welfarist model of crime control in the face of rising violent crime in the 1960s-70s and charts how a series of intellectual movements (a "rational choice" view of crime taken from microeconomics; a conservative reassertion of retributive sentences; and a moral outlook that simply regards some people as beyond rehabilitation) combined with growing fears of an underclass and collapsing social order to make the US and Britain both receptive to systems that imprison vast numbers of people with no attention to re-integration or training, that impose ever-harsher sentences, and that increasingly make crime and punishment a kind of politicised ritual of emotional purging.

Garland is perhaps too theoretical here--- he could've used more examples of policies concretly in action ---but his picture is bleak enough. Even after violent crime rates dropped in the late '90s, American and British governments continue to rely on (often privatised) prisons to simply warehouse offenders and politicians and the media use the fear of crime (often the fear of civic inconvenience or simply fear of the lower classes or the "deviant") to exclude more and more people from being considered as real citizens.

[Kony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eye-opening. Traces the cultural, political, and economic forces that have pushed the US and UK toward control-freakish mentalities and punitive social policies.

[Liam Philbin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A veritable gem of a book for developing a solid understanding of the shifts in criminology and culture in the decades it features. Garland features a certain matter-of-factness to his research in which he panders to neither the penal-welfare system nor the system of retributive justice. His work has made other books on this topic suddenly seem ripe with conservative or liberal bias while he navigates the topic- a must read for those interested in criminology or how we arrived in our own culture of control.

[Yupa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opera che richiede pazienza e impegno alla lettura, ma fondamentale per comprendere come si sia andata formando, dagli anni Settanta in poi, quella società ad alti livelli di incarcerazione in cui ancora oggi viviamo e che sembra voler estendere le sue logiche di controllo e criminalizzazione su tutti gli aspetti del quotidiano, anche i più minuti, senza incontrare quasi alcuna resistenza.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a fantastic look at crime in the US and UK since the 60s and 70s, the rise of a culture of fear, and the way that skyrocketing incarceration rates mirror sociopolitical developments. Plus, it's actually readable.

[JP Beaty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating approach to understanding crime and the crisis of the nation state in late modernity. Does the work Foucault may have done had he survived to see the seismic changes in the area of crime.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

profound and on point.

[Samir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind opening book. It turned around my point of view on the prison system and social control.