Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of interest in the phenomenon of the gang both in the UK and across Europe. Such concern has been driven forward by growing reports of gang activity reported in the media, circulated by populist politicians as well as by academic researchers convinced the European gang has been ignored for too long. This anxiety has coalesced in a perception that the gang is a serious and growing problem, that the rise in lethal violence, as seen recently in inner cities such as London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, is connected to the proliferation of the gang, and that the solution to the problem of urban gang violence lies in its suppression. This article takes a critical standpoint against these statements and challenges attempts to interpret urban violence in the UK as a problem of gangs or a burgeoning gang culture. It argues that the problem of street-based violence is not always reducible to the gang and suggests that the solution to preventing urban violence will not be found by sanctioning crackdowns or gang suppression programmes. It concludes by offering an alternate perception of the gang and urban violence and signposts areas that research on urban violence might need to address.
This article develops an account of the current emergence of the security state as successor to the liberal welfare state. It is argued that the security state heralds a new type of authoritarianism which, beginning at the periphery and pre-occupied with the management of the marginalized and socially excluded, is gradually infecting the core social institutions, the criminal justice system in particular. The article considers three areas in which the security state is emerging—the transition from welfare to workfare and risk management; new measures to combat terrorism and organized crime; and the blurring of warfare and crime control. The article concludes by stressing the mutually reinforcing effect of these developments.
Rising prison populations and the return of punitively orientated ‘ostentatious’ forms of punishment (Pratt, 2000) have led a number of theorists to consider whether key defining characteristics of western penal modernity have been abandoned and replaced with something entirely different. The question has been raised: Are we witnessing the rise of a postmodern penality qualitatively different in form than that which prevailed in the modern era? While this question has tentatively been answered in the affirmative by Simon (1995) and, more recently, Pratt (2000), a number of criminologists have argued a contrary case (see Garland, 1995; Lucken, 1998; O’Malley, 1999). There is, they suggest, no such thing as a postmodern penality, or if there is, evidence for it is very slight. Such theorists have also sought to question both the utility and validity of the discourse of modernity and postmodernity as a framework in which to locate an understanding of contemporary penal development. This article questions this critique and does so by addressing the criticisms that have been raised against those who have challenged the validity of this framework of analysis and by reaffirming the case for seeing the rise of certain new penal trends as indicative of an emergent postmodern penality.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.