CRIME, RISK AND JUSTICE: THE POLITICS OF CRIME CONTROL IN LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES by Kevin Stenson and Robert P. Sullivan (Editors). Uffculme Cullompten, U. K.: Willan Publishing, 2001. 232 pp. Cloth $59.95. ISBN: 1-903240-31-X. Paper $31.95. ISBN: 1-903240-30-1.

Reviewed by Craig Hemmens, Department of Criminal Justice Administration, Boise State University.

Crime and crime control have become hot buttons issue in many countries. Politicians run for office on “get tough on crime” platforms, and attack social policies deemed too easy on the crime-prone--read lower--classes. State policies in the past decade have focused on harsher punishment, such as long prison sentences for
drug offenses and three-strike laws, and risk management. CRIME, RISK AND JUSTICE is a collection of works by a group of international criminal justice scholars who seek to explore the link, in liberal democracies, between “neo-liberal” policies and the emergence of an emphasis on risk management approaches to crime control.

This is a fascinating approach to the study of criminal justice, which not infrequently is conducted without regard for the larger political context. The purpose of this book is to broaden the perspective of criminal justice scholars, and spark a critical reexamination of current criminal justice policies. By and large the contributors are successful in achieving this goal. The primary shortcoming of this collection is that many of the contributions take the form of essays, and so add more heat than light to the discussion. Many of these essays read as polemics, and as such are likely to be persuasive only to those who already share the authors’ perspective.

The book is edited by Kevin Stenson, a professor of criminology in Great Britain, and Robert R. Sullivan, a professor of political science in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. The book is a collection of papers originally presented at a conference held at John Jay in 1999. The editors note that the purpose of the conference was to look at crime, liberalism, and the “risk society.” Most of the papers collected from the conference, however, focus primarily on the
problem of crime, a shortcoming acknowledged by the editors in the preface. There are five sections to the book, with a total of eleven chapters.

Part One provides an introduction to the debate and an overview of the main issues. The chapter by Stenson gives a brief historical overview of crime control in the welfare state between 1945 and the late 1990s. Stenson notes the shift from the “welfare society” approach to crime control (emphasizing societal responsibility for crime) to the New Right, or “neo-liberal” approach (emphasizing individual responsibility). The shift in focus to individual responsibility, combined with a free market approach to government and a “get tough” on crime attitude among the public has resulted in a dramatic change in the state’s approach to crime control. Sullivan’s chapter examines the impact of

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combining neo-liberal reforms such as risk management with increasingly repressive and intrusive crime control tactics, such as “zero tolerance” policing and increased use of military style police units. These chapters set the stage for the remaining essays, clearly delineating the major issues to be discussed: the impact on criminal justice of two related phenomena—the rise of risk management approaches to governing and the shift from rehabilitation to incapacitation and retribution as the primary goals of criminal justice systems in Western democracies.

Part Two examines the new emphasis on crime control at the local level. The chapter by Todd Clear and Eric Cadora traces the development of risk management in corrections and its impact on what the authors call the “community justice movement”—a loose assemblage of programs or approaches such as restorative justice and community policing. They note that risk management is a misunderstood concept, and that it can in fact affect--for good or ill--the implementation of
community justice initiatives. The chapter by Stenson and Adam Edwards discusses the role of local government agencies in crime control. The decade of the 1990s saw a decentralizing of governmental power generally, and in criminal justice. This chapter draws on empirical data from a study of two English cities, a fact which adds some persuasive weight to the authors’ argument.

Part Three focuses on the impact of risk management strategies on policing. The chapter by Pat O’Malley examines the implications of risk management approach to crime control on policing strategies. He argues that the move from explanatory criminology, which attempts to explain and understand the causes of crime, to rational choice criminology, which merely attempts to predict when and where crime will occur, has serous and troubling implications for criminal justice policy. The chapter by Eugene McLaughlin and Karim Murji focuses on the growth of “public managerialism” on the British police, and attempt to link this to the growth of neo-liberalism in Western democracies.

Part Four examines the impact of punitive measures, borne of the “get tough” movement, on the criminal justice system. The chapter by Jonathan Simon examines the current tendency to create new, more punitive penal schemes in the United States—what he refers to as a new public role for cruelty. These include the reintroduction of chain gangs, the development of boot camp-style prisons, and increased use of the death penalty. This is a fascinating chapter, well-conceived and
presented. The chapter by Barbara Hudson examines the changes in penal practice in the United Kingdom since the early 1980s. She notes a growing punitiveness, and a focus on public protection and victim’s rights at the expense of due process rights of criminal suspects.

Part Five examines the links between media portrayals of crime and governmental responses to crime. There are three chapters in this section, making it the largest in the book, and while the chapters are interesting, they are only tangentially related to the rest of the essays. The first chapter in this section, by Robert Reiner, Sonia
Livingstone and Jessica Allen, employs a focus group methodology to study the impact of mass media representations of crime on fear of crime. The authors conclude that media portrayals of the criminal justice system have served both to demystify the law, and create ambiguity about the validity of legal

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authority. The chapter by Richard Sparks examines, empirically, the impact of media representations on perceptions of and fear of crime in England. He argues that media attention on crime has both increased the fear of crime and provided individuals with an emotional connection that transcends physical boundaries. The final chapter, by Philip Green, is an examination of the ideological frame of American television, and how the economic and social structure of the media affects the presentation of crime on television. He asserts that American television portrayals of crime avoid moral ambiguities and emphasis clear distinctions between right and wrong, in contrast to the British media approach discussed in the previous chapter by Reiner et al.

CRIME, RISK AND JUSTICE is an interesting, if somewhat uneven, collection of essays. The chapters cover a range of vaguely related issues, such as the custodial warehousing of offenders, the implementation of draconian sentencing schemes, and media depictions of criminal justice. What unifies these essays on disparate aspects of the criminal justice system is the authors’ position that crime control is no longer dominated by “experts” in law enforcement agencies, but
has instead become a political issue, involving local, state, and national governments. The authors raise important issues and discuss them clearly and forcefully. The authors’ arguments are, unfortunately, not infrequently hampered by the lack of empirical evidence to support their assertions. Nonetheless, this book is an
important first step towards approaching the study of criminal justice with a wider perspective. Now the discipline needs to conduct the empirical research to support the broad assertions made here.

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Copyright 2002 by the author, Craig Hemmens.