If academic criminology currently stands in rude health, this obscures a range of deeply disturbing trends in the content of the discipline. We begin by exploring the recent boom in Home Office funded research in criminology, examining the key theoretical and empirical issues that have been both included and excluded from the official research agenda. The content and expanding nature of this agenda is then placed within the wider context of the entrepreneurialisation of universities, particularly with respect to the marketisation of academic research and the disciplinary, self-regulatory effects that follow from this. As a paradigmatic process within these wider trends, we subject the Research Assessment Exercise to critical scrutiny. We conclude by noting some strategies that criminologists might pursue to combat the increasingly narrow and pernicious research agenda funded and sanctioned by the state. Nothing is less logical than to try to be too logical: nothing is more imprudent than to try to maintain theories … if they are going to upset the order of society … the sociologist must observe still greater circumspection, for if he puts into operation innovations of an upsetting nature he will simply succeed in demonstrating the uselessness and inefficiency of his science. (Lombroso, cited in Garland 1985: 27)
In 1999, in response to the ongoing controversy surrounding prison health care, the Home Office and the NHS Executive published The Future Organization of Prison Health Care. This article, building on interviews and field notes from research conducted in the health care centres of three local prisons, analyses and critiques the document's premises, and argues that, until the formal and informal networks of penal power are addressed, then the document's hopes for change are unlikely to be realized.
This paper is concerned to chart the establishment and uses of CCTV within the location of Liverpool city centre. In doing this the paper seeks to contextualize CCTV within contemporary 'partnership' approaches to regeneration which are reshaping the material and discursive form of the city. Thus CCTV schemes along with other security initiatives are understood as social ordering strategies emanating from within locally powerful networks which are seeking to define and enact orderly regeneration projects. In focusing on the normative aspects of CCTV, the paper raises questions concerning the efficacy of understanding contemporary forms of 'social ordering practices' primarily in terms of technical rationalities while neglecting other, more material and ideological processes involved in the construction of social order.
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