Criminology's Public Roles: A Drama in Six Acts

Abstract

Abstract This chapter addresses the following questions: what contribution can criminological knowledge make to shaping responses to crime in a polity which acknowledges crime and punishment to be properly political issues? What in a democracy is the public value of criminology? What is the collective good that criminological enquiry seeks to promote? What modes of intervention — and what institutional arrangements — can best realize that good? To answer these questions a new figure, or perhaps more accurately, a revived and updated old one, is introduced. This character, following and extending John Locke (1690/1975), is called the democratic under-labourer. The figure is used to elaborate and defend the idea that we can best give coherence to criminology's public purpose by understanding its role as one of seeking to foster and sustain a better politics of crime and its regulation. This figure — the hero or heroine of the drama that follows — emerges from an effort to revisit and revise an earlier treatment of these issues by Garland and Sparks.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.