ISSN 1062-7421
Vol. 11 No. 11 (November 2001) pp. 559-561.

THE CULTURE OF CONTROL: CRIME AND SOCIAL ORDER IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY by David Garland. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 320 pp. $30.00. ISBN: 0 226 28383 6

Reviewed by John Gilliom, Department of Political Science, Ohio University

David Garland's new book opens with a big surprise. To explain the big surprise (and why it is so surprising), Garland takes us back to the mid-twentieth century world of criminology and crime control. This was the world of "penal welfarism"--a world increasingly defined by the assumptions that reform and social intervention were plausible responses to crime; that alternatives to prison were healthy; that the death penalty was useless and barbaric; that crime control was a clinical, scientific discourse free of populist sentiments; that personalized victims were not part of the criminologic equation; that the state was to be the only player in crime control; and that things were generally okay--some basic level of deviance was a normal part of mass society and we were making progress in managing it. Scholars and policy makers predicted a continued strengthening of these premises.

But then came the big surprise. Over the course of the last twenty or thirty years, these premises have not only unraveled, but almost INVERTED as we have undergone a fundamental reorganization of the discourse and practice of crime control in the United States and the United Kingdom. The conventional wisdom now places the victim at the center of an ongoing crisis in crime, embraces retribution, applauds the death penalty, fills the prisons, and laughs the idea of reform or rehabilitation off the stage. James Q. Wilson's once jarring assertion that "nothing works" (so let's lock them up as fast as we can and as long as we can) has emerged as the now unsurprising common sense of a new era in crime control. Confounding the expectations of many scholars writing about the almost inevitable unfolding of a patient, caring, rational, tutelary state in which crime control institutions are a sort of boundless treatment center, we seem to have revived an earlier mode of the angry, violent, indiscriminate punisher who seeks revenge and exclusion. How and why did it happen?

THE CULTURE OF CONTROL sets out to explore and explain these historical changes. The result is a persuasive, indeed, compelling account of economic,
social, and political transformation that not only addresses the topics at hands but also offers a model for scholarship in related areas. This work serves as both a history of crime control policy debates as set in and shaped by the historical moments of the late twentieth century AND a treatise on explanation and critique in socio-legal research; as such it should interest a wide array of scholars and command an important position in the field.

Garland argues that the radical transformation in crime control must be understood not (just) as a response to rising crime rates or the fear mongering of the

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mass media. Nor should it be seen as (just) some internal intellectual adjustment in the world of criminology and crime policy or as a simple outgrowth of the rise of the conservatives in the U. S. and U .K. These events were certainly an important part of the story, but he bases his explanation for the change in crime control policy (as well as the public sentiments and other trends that support it) upon more fundamental causes to be found in the broad historical transformations of economic and social life that marked the latter decades of the twentieth century.

Here, we turn to a time and a condition which Garland calls "late modernity"--a loose title referring to the economic, social, cultural and technological changes, upheavals and displacements that have produced the insecurities, risks, and control challenges that marked the latter half of the twentieth century. The origins of the transformations that created late modernity "can be traced back to the process of capital accumulation and the unceasing drive for new markets, enhanced profits, and competitive advantage" (p. 78). As the rapid economic changes of the era gave rise to such things as the service economy, regressive taxation, stagnant wages, weakening unions, and permanent armies of the un- and underemployed, we see the formation of a cleaved society marked by resentment, conflict, and the deterioration of any sense of shared fate or identity. Other important changes define the era: dramatic reformations in family structure; the rise of the segregated suburb; the revolution called television; the decline of traditional communities and patterns of authority. And, of course, there were the increases in crime
that began shortly after mid-century. New patterns of need, alienation, isolation, opportunity and mobility helped fuel a widespread and sustained increase in
crime rates and, in turn, the debate over how to respond to those crime rates became increasingly politicized and polarized.

Here, Garland's analysis reminds us that in the face of all of these structural realignments, people still make choices and that it is, therefore, critically important to understand the rise of the socially conservative, free market, anti-welfare politics that were exemplified by Reagan and Thatcher. With this political shift, came the rise of a "reactionary vision in which the underlying problem of order was viewed not as a Durkheimian problem of solidarity but as a Hobbesian problem of order, to which the solution was to be a focused, disciplinary version of the Leviathan State" (p. 102). As politics made a dramatic shift to the right, conservative ideology
increasingly influenced the formation of crime control policy.

However, the reactionaries were not entirely alone. In the reality of the policy-making world, the reactionary vision was forced to coexist with an often contradictory set of neo-liberal programs in which, among other things, some forms of deviance are redefined as not-so-deviant and in which state and private agencies work toward cooperative solutions and prevention strategies. This is what Garland sees as the ambivalence of our situation--"One strategy seeks to build institutions better suited to the conditions of late modernity, another cranks up the old powers of the state in an attempt to overcome the same conditions" (p. 138). And the ambivalence is not mere coincidence or compromise. It grows out of the very crises of late modernity, the ambivalence of our culture, and a "complex state machine (that is) confronted by its own limitations (p. 138).

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Perhaps the most striking facet of late modernity is a widely shared, institutionalized cluster of attitudes and beliefs that Garland calls the "crime"--high crime rates are an ongoing crisis; crime engenders intense fascination, fear and anger; crime policy is an emotional and highly politicized terrain; crime victims are at the center of policy concerns; the state is unable to meet new challenges; private defense and security is widely engaged; the mass media continually feeds our awareness of crime. It is upon the terrain of this new, settled consciousness of crime that the harshly punitive and costly policies of the current era find such widespread public
support.

Thus we see how the interplay of structural economic transformation, social upheaval, technological change, institutional adaptation and political choice play into the making of a new paradigm for the crime control world. However, there is another fascinating dimension to Garland's explanation for our approaches to crime (and, he notes, welfare policy). A triumphant ethic of market individualism insists that we are all free, rational beings making choices about an array of options. For the middle classes and above, this leaves us free to work, play, purchase and prosper, liberated by the knowledge that we are free, self-made, and not responsible for the fates of others. For the working class and below, people are free to work, scrape, and go without, "liberated" by a culture that sees poverty as yet another choice made by a rational consumer. Within this framework, crime is also positioned as the rational choice of a free, self-made person and, therefore, the neo-conservative strategy of increasing the likelihood of apprehension and the severity of punishment is a sensible adjustment in the market economy of crime. The ethos that "crime is a decision, not a disease" parallels and supports the market economy's necessary fictions that prosperity and poverty are the accomplishments of individuals, not races, classes, or genders and that none of us is responsible for the plight of others or obliged to confront structural deficiencies in the system.

This is a vast and complex work that has the potential to recast our thinking about culture, crime, and social causation. Although some readers may occasionally resist the "How everything happened and why " narrative style of the book, THE CULTURE OF CONTROL is really compelled to produce such a narrative because of the scale of Garland's mission. And one has to judge the mission a success. His "loose structuralist" account of how economic, cultural, social, and political transformations create clusterings of pressures, necessities, and opportunities goes far toward debunking more simplistic accounts for the rise of the sometimes bizarre new world of crime control that marks our time.

Tragically, the most telling epilogue for this powerful book has been written by the episodes of terror and state reaction that marked the last months of 2001. When each day sees new and more radical measures of control as a desperate state swings blindly at its challenges, it is hard to imagine a more disturbing affirmation of the interconnectedness of crime policy, economics, politics, insecurity, and the seemingly intractable conflicts of our divided global culture. Also, it is also hard to question the prognosis that the "iron cage" built by our new culture of control will expand, fortify, and entrench in the years ahead.

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Copyright 2001 by the author, John Gilliom.