Speaking Ill of the Dead: Institutionalised Responses to Deaths in Custody

Abstract

writings in and around critical criminology during the late seventies. Central to these debates was the relationship between what Wright termed the world at the level of appearances2 and the broader political and economic frameworks which provide determining contexts within which individuals interact and react. Important to these developments was the exhaustive analysis of mugging as a moral panic by Hall et a13 within the contexts of the political-economic crisis of advanced capitalism and the ideological construction of law and order issues. Furthermore, there has been a real attempt, particularly in feminist analyses,4 to examine critically the rule and practice of the law and the state in terms of people's own accounts of how they experience and receive the state's interventions and to contrast these experiences against official accounts and appreciable shifts in the definition, enforcement and application of the law. What this direction in research embodies is the objective of establishing a synthesis between experiences manifest at the personal, social and structural levels. It responds to E.P.Thompson's call to root analyses of the rule of law and authoritarian shifts in the state and their operational consequences within a systematic examination of case histories.5 Further to this is Sivanandan's priority of turning cases into issues.6 Taken together these directions have created an initiative in critical research which has provided close monitoring of the police, prisons, mental institutions and the courts. Inevitably, given its explicitly critical nature, much of this work has been carried out without the formal co-operation of the state agencies, but * Centre for Studies in Crime and Social Policy, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, Ormskirk, Lancashire. This paper was first presented to the annual

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