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

by David Garland

This work charts the dramatic changes in crime control and criminal justice that have occurred in Britain and America since the 1970s. It then explains these transformations by showing how the social organization of late modern society has prompted a series of political and cultural adaptations that alter how governments and citizens think and act in relation to crime.

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

324 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.

Pseudonym of Keith Miles

Keith Miles (born 1940) is an English author, who writes under his own name and also historical fiction and mystery novels under the pseudonym Edward Marston. He is known for his mysteries set in the world of Elizabethan theater. He has also written a series of novels based on events in the Domesday Book.

The protagonist of the theater series is Nicholas Bracewell, the bookholder of a leading Elizabethan theater company (in an alternate non-Shakespearean universe).

The latter series' two protagonists are the Norman soldier Ralph Delchard and the former novitiate turned lawyer Gervase Bret, who is half Norman and half Saxon.

His latest series of novels are based in early Victorian period and revolve around the fictional railway detective Inspector Robert Colbeck.

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.