Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture

by Steve Hall, Simon Winlow, Craig Ancrum

This book offers the first in-depth investigation into the relationship between today's criminal identities and consumer culture. Using unique data taken from criminals locked in areas of permanent recession, the book aims to uncover feelings and attitudes towards a variety of criminal activities, investigating the incorporation of hearts and minds into consumer culture's surrogate social world and highlighting the relationship between the lived identities of active criminals and the socio-economic climate of instability and anxiety that permeates post-industrial Britain.

This book will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and lecturers in all fields within the social sciences, but especially criminology, sociology, social policy, politics and anthropology.

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Steve Hall is Professor of Criminology in the Social Futures Institute. He is an internationally leading criminological researcher and theorist. His book Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture (Willan 2008, with Simon Winlow and Craig Ancrum) has been described as ‘an important landmark in criminology’ and his most recent book Theorizing Crime and Deviance (Sage 2012) has been lauded as ‘a remarkable intellectual achievement’ that ‘rocks the foundations of the discipline’.
In the 1970s Steve worked as a professional musician and general labourer, and in the 1980s he worked in the field of rehabilitation and youth offending.
After graduating from university in 1991 with first class honours in sociology, he worked as a lecturer at Teesside from 1993, a member of the team that established the country’s first single-honours criminology degree. After spells as a senior research fellow at the University of Durham and a researcher and teacher at Northumbria University, he re-joined Teesside in 2010.