“…People, he argued, are no longer interested in 'understanding the social causes of criminalityy people have had enough of this part of the 1960s consensus' (Blair, 2004). The shift in focus is also marked by a much greater preoccupation with individual offender cognition and motivation, and a more traditional and 'neo-classical' conception of criminality (including challengeable assumptions about the supposedly rational core to a great deal of offending, perceptions about the existence of 'committed evil' among us, and regarding the existence of an anti-social sub-class at the base of society) which, taken together with the policies to address these putative problems, have led some commentators to debate the notion that we may have entered a new culture of punitiveness (Matthews, 2005;Pratt et al, 2005).…”