During the 1960s, traditional thinking about crime and its punishment,
deviance and its control, came under radical attack. The discipline of
criminology split into feuding factions, and various schools of thought
emerged, each with quite different ideas about the nature of the crime
problem and its solutions. These differences often took political form,
with conservative, liberal, and radical supporters, and the resulting
controversies continue to reverberate throughout the fields of
criminology and sociology, as well as related areas such as social work,
social policy, psychiatry, and law. Stanley Cohen has been at the center
of these debates in Britain and the United States. This volume is a
selection of his essays, written over the past fifteen years, which
contribute to and comment upon the major theoretical conflicts in
criminology during this period. Though associated with the "new" or
radical criminology, Cohen has always been the first to point out its
limitations particularly in translating its theoretical claims into real
world applications. His essays cove a wide range of topics-political
crime, the nature of individual responsibility, the implications of new
theories for social work practice, models of crime used in the Third
World, banditry and rebellion, and the decentralization of social
control. Also included is a previously unpublished paper on how radical
social movements such as feminism deal with criminal law. Many
criminology textbooks present particular theories or research findings.
This book uniquely reviews the main debates of the last two decades
about just what the role and scope of the subject should be.
