Theoretical Criminology 15(2)

Crime and time: The temporal patterning of causal variables
Robert Agnew

Criminologists tend to assume that most of the variables that cause crime are stable over long periods, with some variables having a brief, episodic existence in the lives of individuals. This article challenges that assumption and instead argues that variables are best described in terms of three temporal levels: baseline levels or long-term averages; short-term deviations around these baseline levels, with such deviations lasting from hours to days; and situational deviations, lasting from seconds to minutes. Criminologists can more accurately describe the standing of individuals on the causes of crime using these levels, thereby improving the ability to explain crime.

Reconstructing Leviathan: Emerging contours of the security state
Simon Hallsworth and John Lea

This article develops an account of the current emergence of the security state as successor to the liberal welfare state. It is argued that the security state heralds a new type of authoritarianism which, beginning at the periphery and pre-occupied with the management of the marginalized and socially excluded, is gradually infecting the core social institutions, the criminal justice system in particular. The article considers three areas in which the security state is emerging—the transition from welfare to workfare and risk management; new measures to combat terrorism and organized crime; and the blurring of warfare and crime control. The article concludes by stressing the mutually reinforcing effect of these developments.

The cultural politics of justice: Bakhtin, stand-up comedy and post-9/11 securitization
Elaine Campbell

For Rabelais,‘folk humour’ and its boundless forms are not frivolous, inconsequential aspects of the human condition but, rather, are central to modes of critique and the formation of discourses which seek radical cultural transformation by evading, exposing, resisting, scandalizing and mocking ‘official culture’. Taking its cue from Bakhtin’s exposition of the grotesque realism of the Rabelaisian novel, this article explores the abstract notion of ‘justice’ through the lens of ‘folk humour’—specifically, stand-up comedy which references securitization in the post-9/11 period. In so doing, it calls into question Habermasian discourse ethics, proposing instead a model of ‘doing justice’ predicated on Bakhtinian dialogism.

Reframing criminal victimization: Finding a place for vulnerability and resilience
Sandra Walklate

The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which studies of criminal victimization have contributed to this presumption of human vulnerability, and to examine the potential in understandings of resilience for overcoming this presumption. In order to do this the argument falls into three parts. In the first part I shall consider the different ways in which victimization and vulnerability have been linked together. In the second I shall examine the concept of resilience and its relationship, if any, with vulnerability and victimization. Throughout this discussion I shall draw on feminist informed work as a way of suggesting a differently oriented approach to both of these concepts: presented here as thinking otherwise. In the final and concluding part of this article the implications of contemporary understandings of these concepts will be situated within the broader policy context characterized by Aradau (2004) as informed by a ‘politics of pity’.

Pedophile crime films as popular criminology: A problem of justice?
Steven A. Kohm and Pauline Greenhill

This article responds to Nicole Rafter’s recent call to develop a popular criminology using cultural representations of crime and criminal justice to supplement and extend mainstream criminological knowledge. Using representations of child sexual abuse in film, we begin to build a popular criminology of the pedophile. In cinema, this figure opens up a cultural space to interrogate key criminological dilemmas about the nature and shape of justice. Pedophile crime films work through concepts by making emotion central to understanding and by using child sexual abuse as a moral context for otherwise abstract dilemmas. Because of their form as well as their content, recent examples of the subgenre hold the potential to challenge popular conceptions of justice in ways that mainstream academic discourse cannot.

Review Symposium:
Pat O’ Malley, Crime and Risk, London: SAGE, 2010.

Introduction to the review symposium
Nicole Rafter

Review Symposium: The risks of risk
Jeff Ferrell

Review Symposium: The politics of risk, the risk of politics
Sandra Walklate

Review Symposium: Il miglior fabbro (the finer craftsman)
Jonathan Simon

Review Symposium: Risk for prevention
Brandon C. Welsh

Theoretical Criminology, May 2011: Volume 15, Issue 2