Book Review
This review will focus on the book entitled “The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society,” by David Garland. The analysis will focus on different arguments mentioned by the author in relation to crime and justice system as well as cultural aspects. In addition, this will also provide some criticisms on the book. The main objective of this book is to discuss the history of the presence of penological developments in America and United Kingdom during the late modern generation. In this book, it can be said that the author has been able to present a complex argument regarding the emergence of a schizophrenic crime control approach. Herein, the author argued on the characteristic of late modern penality. The book has been able to highlight how justice policies on both sides of the Atlantic took their modern shape and the author makes an essential contribution to issuing the rise of punitiveness in modern Western Nations like the US and Britain, the contradictory of the aspects of 21st century justice policies as well as the political interests attributed within such justice process.
The interrogation of the degree which distinguishes contemporary or modern crime control policy from those which governed for most of the 20th century can be considered as one of the most comprehensive and ambitious in this generation. In this book, Garland has carefully avoid to argue the idea that the changes and transformations he noticed in the latter part of the 20th century American and British Justice policy has signalled the end of modernity and the existence of post modernity. In doing so, he recommends that recent crime control approaches on both nations represent reconfigured aspects of interlocking structures and strategies which are usually consisted of old and new elements, the old element was revised and reoriented by new operational context (23). According to the book, there are two social forces which are positioned in the modern crime control system. This includes the distinctive social arrangement which the author labelled as late modernity and the free market policies and neo-conservativism that gained importance and eminence in 2000 onwards in the US. Considering the work of the Michel Foucault (French Poststructuralist), the author of the book has been able to compare present-day policies as well as praties to those used before the 1970s in creating what the author terms as genealogy of crime and crime control. Te author has also been able to observed drastic changes in crime penal policy, criminological theory and others. For the author, the culture of crime control is described by the following beliefs and attitudes and assumptions of Western culture.
In this book, Garland has also argued that the penal welfarism which described criminal justice system from the 1890s to the 1970s has been dismantled increasingly. Due to significant changes in terms of economic and social aspects, the author of the book recommends that the new politics of crime control have been culturally and socially conditioned and have been more expressive as well as instrumental (139). Garland also suggests that the modern justice policy and system is bifurcated by an adaptive approach which is described by community partnerships as well as a sovereign state approach which addresses coercive control of crime offenders. As discussed in this book, such division existed when high crime rates became common; the rehabilitative notion fell out of favour which leads to the failure of the penal welfare complex in terms of protecting the public from the risks associated with the crime (141).
One of the most important observations made by Garland in this book is about the reinvention of the prison. Recommending that Western nations such as America and Britain possess high rates of imprisonment seems to be pedestrian. Nonetheless, this was not always the situation for these nations. Within the post-war penal welfare justice complex prisons are considered in various manners as schools for crime, counterproductive and a last resort. In this book, the author has been able to explain that significant governmental aspects was expended on the responsibilities of generating other ways to incarceration as well as encouraging sentencers to utilise such (14). In most of the period of the 20th century, a worldly shift away from carceral punishment was very obvious. Such trends have not been observable in modern American and British penality in which record numbers of offenders are presently being locked up. Even if the author of the book gives emphasis on the United States as well as Britain, parallels are still drawn to the experiences of Canada.
As noted in the book, such trends are much more pronounced in the two nations. Nonetheless, Canada too has considered greater emphasis on the prison as a solution to deviance accountability for crime control onto the community. However, the impact of late modern penalty, were still seen much later in Canada than in Britain and US and are specifically obvious in the juvenile justice system. The association of the development in the US and UK permits the author of the book to show the dissemination of crime control approaches and penological developments in the cross cultural level. In the book, both arguments of cultural context and social aspects have been given emphasized by the author. The author has been able to connect cultural aspects with cultural criminology and determines how culture can control criminal justice system and penalty.
The above discussion provide details about the arguments noted by the author in the book, however this book is also prone to several criticisms. While reading the book, it can be said that the book is lacking of consistency of the discussion of the differences in crime control approaches between the US and the UK. The book has not been able to provide much attention to the overrepresentation of minority populations in the US prisons which is helpful to understand the main objective even better. In this book, the viable differences and politically powerless continue to create up the class of offender who frequently feels the sting of the justice system, however, the author has not been able to engage himself fully with such description feature of later modern penality. Furthermore, the author glosses over how modern criminal justice policy differentially impact men and women (gender related disparities).
In this regard, I can say that with the way the book has been presented, this book can be considered as a depressing literature. Although it can be said that this is so eloquent and impressive with its level, and penetrating with the insights of the author and also convincing on how the discussions were analysed, this book had offered little hope. The modern condition that the author has been described is considered as grim which include the hardening of racial and social divisions, the reinforcement of criminogenic approaches, and the alienation of large social groups among other worst situations in the society.
Reference
Garland, D. (2001). The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary
Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press
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