Theoretical Criminology: From Modernity to Post-Moderism

• NCJ Number: 184046
• Author(s): Wayne Morrison
• Date Published: 1997
• Length: 535 pages
• Sale Source: Gaunt (Distributor of Cavendish & Federation Press)
• Publication Format: Book (Softbound)
• Publication Type: Overview Text
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom

Annotation

This book places the development of criminological theory within the changing forms of modernity and the arrival of post-modernism, as it emphasizes the connection between theorizing about crime and constructing modern social relations and shows how criminology offers a site of analysis in which the very fabric of modernity is exposed.

Abstract

The themes of the book emerged from field research conducted on various Social Service Juvenile Justice teams that implement community sanctions with juveniles. Various projects were visited by the author, and a number of staff and juvenile offenders were interviewed. The author develops two themes from this research. One theme is the focus of team members on "everyday technologies of the self," as opposed to the client-oriented therapy derived from Rogers (1951). Routine team tasks aimed at setting boundaries around the daily activities of the offenders, at building the self-esteem of offenders, and at enabling the offender to cope with the pressures of daily life without resort to crime. A second theme was the degree to which the discourse of the juvenile offenders mirrored the confusing and stimulating world so central to the images of radical differentiation in post-modernist descriptions of social structure. The accounts of the young offenders show the impossibility of satisfying the multiplicity of desires experienced. The world depicted by the youth is one of perpetual entrapment in conditions of stimulated desire and images of an abundance of material goods, with a scarcity of the means of obtaining them. The author advises that multiple realities, attention to the surface, interaction with a world that takes on the semblance of the imaginary, but behind which lurks victimization, is the way contemporary life is lived. Among the topics considered in this discussion are labeling theory in the work of David Matza, gender and crime, contemporary social stratification and the development of the underclass, and the building of criminological theory in post-modernism. A 512-item bibliography and a subject index