Theoretical Criminology 19(1)

Theoretical Criminology, February 2015: Volume 19, Issue 1

Editorial
Mary Bosworth and Simon Cole

The Dark Ghetto revisited: Kenneth B Clark’s classic analysis as cutting edge criminology
Elliott Currie, Tim Goddard, and Randolph R Myers

In this article we revisit one of the classic works of the 1960s on crime and delinquency in poor communities: Kenneth B Clark’s Dark Ghetto. Our exploration reveals its insights to be extremely relevant today both in understanding the roots of the self-destructive violence that tears at those communities and in thinking about how to combat the structural conditions and individual mentalities that generate it. Beyond the specific theoretical and methodological lessons that can be gleaned from Dark Ghetto, Clark’s work serves as a much-needed illustration of how theoretical insights derived from intensive qualitative research that is attuned to political, historical, and economic realities—and their human consequences—can enhance criminological theory, and align with progressive movements for social change.

Resistance or friction: Understanding the significance of prisoners’ secondary adjustments
Ashley T Rubin

Scholars examining prisoners’ “secondary adjustments” have often emphasized prisoners’ “resistance” to the prison regime, particularly their agentic acts that frustrate the prison’s rules, goals, or functions. While these agency-centered accounts offer an important corrective to the understanding of prisons as totalizing institutions, they may go too far. I argue that scholars have overused (and misused) the term “resistance” to describe certain prisoner behaviors, creating both analytical and normative consequences. Instead, I suggest the concept of “friction” more accurately describes the reactive behaviors that occur when people find themselves in highly controlled environments.

The police and punishment: Understanding the pains of policing
Diarmaid M Harkin

This article argues that police studies should draw on the sociology of punishment to better understand state pain-delivery. Whereas penal theorists commonly assess the pain and punishment of inmates in relation to wider social sentiments, police theory has yet to regard police violence and harm in the same fashion. As a result, police scholars often fail to address why the damage caused by public constabularies, even when widely publicized, is accommodated and accepted. Adapting the idea of ‘punitiveness’ from penal theory allows some explanation of how the public views injury and suffering caused by the police by illuminating the emotions and sentiments their actions generate.

Falling crime rates: What happened last time
Paul Knepper

Although the falling crime rates in the 1990s surprised criminologists, it was not the first time crime had declined. There was a ‘crime drop’ in England in the 1920s. When crime did not rise as expected following the Great War, the government closed half the prisons, and Edwin Sutherland came to investigate ‘England’s empty prisons’. To conduct his analysis, Sutherland relied on work by SK Ruck, and between them, they came up with most of the leading explanations now used by criminologists. They considered the police and prisons, the economy and household security. They also discussed the psychological conditions of low-crime societies, the ‘sense of security’. Drawing on their unpublished material from archives in New York and London, the discussion here examines what can be learned about contemporary analyses of the crime drop of the 1990s. Overall, this article argues for the importance of theory in analysing the statistics of falling crime and how historical studies of crime trends can be useful in developing this theory.

Resilience in UK counter-terrorism
Keiran Hardy

Resilience describes the capacity of an individual, community or ecosystem to mitigate the impact of a shock or disturbance and then to recover in its aftermath. In recent years, resilience has become the favoured solution for a range of contemporary policy problems including natural disasters, mental health issues and terrorism. However, the concept is understood far less in criminology and counter-terrorism than in other fields such as psychology and natural hazards studies. This article compares resilience-building measures in the Prepare and Prevent strands of CONTEST, the UK government’s national strategy for countering terrorism. Its aim is to explore the benefits and dangers of resilience according to how the concept is defined and applied across different contexts.

Securing the home: Gender, CCTV and the hybridized space of apartment buildings
Jordana Wright, Amanda Glasbeek, and Emily van der Meulen

This article explores gendered narratives of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in apartment buildings. Drawing on primary data from a study with a diversity of women in Toronto, Canada, the authors foreground women’s experiences with apartment living and situate it as a profoundly feminized domestic arrangement. Consideration of the workings of CCTV in apartment buildings troubles both security and surveillance studies, especially in the context of the dominant legal and ideological configuration of ‘the home’. The apartment is at once ‘the home’ and neighbourhood; it is simultaneously a private space that must be secured from external threats and a public space that inhabitants have little power to secure.

Digital drift and the criminal interaction order
Andrew Goldsmith and Russell Brewer

Despite growing interest in cybercrime, the Internet still poses significant challenges for criminological understanding. Its penetration of everyday life is relevant to many crime types, not just cybercrimes. This article examines the ways in which criminal commitments form using the Internet and related communication technologies that empower the individual relative to the group (gang, mafia, etc.). We argue this occurs in two ways. First, it allows individuals to limit involvement in particular associations or networks. The concept of digital drift is used to explore this element. Second, it allows them to commit crimes more autonomously through facilitating self-instruction. Drawing on Goffman, the importance of studying the encounter as the basic unit of a criminal interaction order is proposed.