NCJ Number
187214
Journal
Punishment & Society Volume: 3 Issue: 1 Dated: January 2001 Pages: 21-33
Editor(s)
David Garland
Date Published
January 2001
Length
13 pages
Annotation
In 1982, Douglas and Wildavsky developed a productive framework for examining the relationship between social organization and risk selection in their study of environmentalism, and this framework is applied to fear of crime in the United States.
Abstract
Douglas and Wildavsky argued that the contemporary obsession with pollution risk indicated a drift in society toward sectarian forms of social organization with weak incentives and internal social controls. The author applies the Douglas and Wildavsky framework to fear of crime in the United States since 1980 and argues that crime has replaced pollution as the preferred risk for the increasingly sectarian social order in the United States. In looking at crime, risk, and culture and at risk selection in the context of social organization, the author indicates that crime in the United States and genetically altered foods in Europe function as two of the preferred risks of global post-modern societies. He contends that both reflect major transformations of centrist institutions and believes that the cultural analysis of risk introduced by Douglas and Wildavsky suggests efforts to characterize fear of crime as a natural response to a threat or as the result of strategies of manipulation are inadequate. Instead, the author advocates a return to middle-range questions of social organization and a consideration of differences in social organization that remain common despite tendencies toward globalization and post-modernization. 13 references and 9 notes