NCJ Number
74511
Date Published
1980
Length
29 pages
Annotation
Dominant intellectual discussions of violence and their application in British party political criminology are discussed.
Abstract
Criminology has shared in the successful administrative control and institutional containment of violence. The welfare complex establishes acceptable norms of violence through a legitimate order guided by a balance of coercive and supportive policies. Criminology must deal with the individuals who fail to accept the normal modes of social discipline, but always seems in crisis when striving to manage these 'failures.' Analysis of party political criminology based on party pamphlets reveals that both the Conservative and the Labor Parties are committed to the power relations of socialization as well as segregation. The policies of supervised liberty through nonprison modalities of pacification, regulation, and reformation are firmly implicated in the welfare complex. Constant refinement of these practices is achieved through the productive utilization of selections from the eclecticism of criminology. The metaphoric ambiguity of the connotations of violence is mobilized in party texts, so that both the rupturous politics of collective violence are separated from the constrained and measured coercion of penal administration. Both parties portray contemporary violence as a faintly menacing echo which highlights the success of their control efforts. In response, socialist strategy should deconstruct official criminology by recognizing the crime problem for the working class, relativizing and historicizing claims of increased violence, undermining empiricist claims with empirical facts, normalizing reforms through comparative analysis with more progressive regimes, exposing the violence of new technicist forms of control, and demonstrating the encroachment on liberal ideology that attacks on civil rights entail. For related articles, see NCJ 74506.