The Surveillance of Everyday Life

Edited by Katja Franko Aas, Helene Oppen Gundhus, Heidi Mork Lomell

Technologies of Insecurity examines how general social and political concerns about terrorism, crime, migration and globalization are translated into concrete practices of securitisation of everyday life.

Who are we afraid of in a globalizing world? How are issues of safety and security constructed and addressed by various local actors and embodied in a variety of surveillance systems? Examining how various forms of contemporary insecurity are translated into, and reduced to, issues of surveillance and social control, this book explores a variety of practical and cultural aspects of technological control, as well as the discourses about safety and security surrounding them. (In)security is a politically and socially constructed phenomenon, with a variety of meanings and modalities. And, exploring the inherent duality and dialectics between our striving for security and the simultaneous production of insecurity, Technologies of Insecurity considers how mundane objects and activities are becoming bearers of risks which need to be neutralised. As ordinary arenas - such as the workplace, the city centre, the football stadium, the airport, and the internet - are imbued with various notions of risk and danger and subject to changing public attitudes and sensibilities, the critical deconstruction of the nexus between everyday surveillance and (in)security pursued here provides important new insights about how broader political issues are translated into concrete and local practices of social control and exclusion.

ISBN: 9780415464550

Published August 21 2008 by Routledge-Cavendish.

Reconsidering the prospect of sanction

By David M. Kennedy

Deterrence is at the heart of the preventive aspiration of criminal justice. Deterrence, whether through preventive patrol by police officers or stiff prison sentences for violent offenders, is the principal mechanism through which the central feature of criminal justice, the exercise of state authority, works – it is hoped -- to diminish offending and enhance public safety. And however well we think deterrence works, it clearly often does not work nearly as well as we would like – and often at very great cost.

Drawing on a wide range of scholarly literatures and real-world experience, Kennedy argues that we should reframe the ways in which we think about and produce deterrence. He argues that many of the ways in which we seek to deter crime in fact facilitate offending; that simple steps such as providing clear information to offenders could transform deterrence; that communities may be far more effective than legal authorities in deterring crime; that apparently minor sanctions can deter more effectively than draconian ones; that groups, rather than individual offenders, should often be the focus of deterrence; that existing legal tools can be used in unusual but greatly more effective ways; that even serious offenders can be reached through deliberate moral engagement; and that authorities, communities, and offenders – no matter how divided – share and can occupy hidden common ground.

The result is a sophisticated but ultimately common-sense and profoundly hopeful case that we can and should use new deterrence strategies to address some of our most important crime problems. Drawing on and expanding on the lessons of groundbreaking real-world work like Boston’s Operation Ceasefire – credited with the "Boston Miracle" of the 1990s – "Deterrence and Crime Prevention" is required reading for scholars, law enforcement practitioners, and all with an interest in public safety and the health of communities.

ISBN: 9780415774154

Published August 15 2008 by Routledge.

Surveillance, Security and Identification in Global Perspective

Edited by Colin J. Bennett, David Lyon

National identity cards are in the news. While paper ID documents have been used in some countries for a long time, today's rapid growth features high-tech IDs with built-in biometrics and RFID chips. Both long-term trends towards e-Government and the more recent responses to 9/11 have prompted the quest for more stable identity systems. Commercial pressures mix with security rationales to catalyze ID development, aimed at accuracy, efficiency and speed. New ID systems also depend on computerized national registries. Many questions are raised about new IDs but they are often limited by focusing on the cards themselves or on "privacy."

Playing the Identity Card shows not only the benefits of how the state can "see" citizens better using these instruments but also the challenges this raises for civil liberties and human rights. ID cards are part of a broader trend towards intensified surveillance and as such are understood very differently according to the history and cultures of the countries concerned.

ISBN: 9780415465632

Published July 22 2008 by Routledge.

Critical Voices in an Age of Anxiety

Edited by Murray Lee, Stephen Farrall

An attention to the 'fear of crime' has found its way into governmental interventions in crime prevention and into popular discourse with many newspapers, local government and the like conducting their own fear of crime surveys. As a concept, 'fear of crime' has also produced considerable academic debate since it entered the criminological vocabulary in the 1960s.

Bringing together a collection of new and cutting edge articles from key scholars in criminology, Fear of Crime challenges many assumptions which remain submerged in attempts to measure and attribute cause to crime fear. But, in questioning the orthodoxy of 'fear of crime' models, along with inquiries that have supposed that fear is objectively quantifiable and measurable, the articles collected here also offer new paradigms and methods of inquiry for approaching 'fear of crime'.

ISBN: 9780415436915

Published July 03 2008 by Routledge-Cavendish.

The Longer Arm of the Law

Edited by Steven David Brown

The realities of international law enforcement are widely misunderstood and generally mystifying to the uninitiated. Combating cross border crime is a dynamic aspect of criminal justice that is becoming increasingly complex and directly relevant to national and local level policing. Unfortunately, most practitioners and policy-makers are unaware of the challenges involved in investigating and prosecuting criminals across frontiers. Professional experience of combating international crime is still restricted to relatively few.

Globalization and technological advances have removed a great many obstacles to trade, but they have also facilitated access to new markets for criminal entrepreneurs whilst offering a reduced risk of detection and prosecution. International criminal activity has always had a significant and direct, if somewhat obscured, impact on the national and local crime picture. Without effective or coordinated cross-border strategies to redress the balance, the risk and damage caused by international criminal activity will continue to increase unabated.

Combating International Crime maps the practicalities and challenges in making cross-border law enforcement work. Addressing the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of crime or criminality which is conducted in more than one country, it provides a professional assessment and describes the essential ingredients of international law enforcement cooperation. It identifies the needs, implications and consequences of a comprehensive strategy against international crime and contains case studies by way of illustration and example.

ISBN: 9780415458283

Published June 19 2008 by Routledge-Cavendish.

Learning from Key Debates

Edited by Tom Ellis

This innovative new book recognises that, while criminal justice studies is a core component of all criminology/criminal justice undergraduate degrees, it can be a confusing, overwhelming and a relatively dry topic despite its importance. This helpful book takes an original approach, setting out a series of ten key dilemmas, presented as debates, designed to provide students with a clear framework with which to develop their knowledge and analysis in a way that is both effective and an enjoyable learning experience. This book is also designed for lecturers to structure a core unit of their courses around.

Debates in Criminal Justice provides a new and very original type of framework for learning, making considerable use of the other already available academic key texts, press articles, web sources and more.

ISBN: 9780415445900

Published June 01 2008 by Routledge.

A Critical Introduction

By Rob Watts, Judith Bessant, Richard Hil

International Criminology is an easy access critical introduction to how conventional criminologists in the international arena think about, and research crime. By using examples from the US, UK and Australia, the authors outline key ideas, vocabulary, assumptions and findings of the discipline while opening up a set of critical underlying issues and problems.

From theoretical traditions to historical perspectives; contemporary criminology to reflexive criminology; this all encompassing text covers it all. This is the most valuable introduction to international criminology available for undergraduates and works as a superb refresher for more experienced students.

ISBN: 9780415431781

Published February 14 2008 by Routledge.

Conflict Resolution in Mediation, Restorative Justice, and Reparations

By Andrew Woolford, R.S. Ratner

The 'reparational turn' in the field of law has resulted in the increased use of so-called 'informal' approaches to conflict resolution, including primarily the three mechanisms considered in this book: mediation, restorative justice and reparations. While proponents of these mechanisms have acclaimed their communicative and democratic promise, critics have charged that mediation, restorative justice and reparations all potentially serve as means for encouraging citizens to internalize and mimic the rationalities of governance. Indeed, the critics suggest that informal justice's supposed oppositional relationship to formal justice is, at base, a mutually reinforcing one, in which each system relies on the other for its effective operation, rather than the two being locked in a struggle for dominance.

This book contributes to the discussion of the confluence of informal and formal justice by providing a clearer picture of the justice 'field' through the notion of the 'informal/formal justice complex.' This term, adapted from Garland and Sparks (2000), describes a cultural formation in which adversarial/punitive and conciliatory/restorative justice forms coexist in relative harmony despite their apparent contradictions. Situating this complex within the context of neoliberalism, this book identifies the points of rupture in the informal/formal justice complex to pinpoint how and where a truly alternative and 'transformative' justice (i.e. a justice that challenges and counters the hegemony of formal legal practices, opening the field of law to a broader array of actors and ideas) might be established through the tools of mediation, restorative justice and reparations.

ISBN: 9780415429344

Published December 20 2007 by Routledge-Cavendish.

The New Geometry of Harm

By Michael McGuire

Hypercrime develops a new theoretical approach toward current reformulations in criminal behaviours, in particular the phenomenon of cybercrime. Emphasizing a spatialized conception of deviance, one that clarifies the continuities between crime in the traditional, physical context and developing spaces of interaction such as a 'cyberspace', this book analyzes criminal behaviours in terms of the destructions, degradations or incursions to a hierarchy of regions that define our social world.

Each chapter outlines violations to the boundaries of each of these spaces - from those defined by our bodies or our property, to the more subtle borders of the local and global spaces we inhabit. By treating cybercrime as but one instance of various possible criminal virtualities, the book develops a general theoretical framework, as equally applicable to the, as yet unrealized, technologies of criminal behaviour of the next century, as it is to those which relate to contemporary computer networks. Cybercrime is thereby conceptualized as one of a variety of geometries of harm, merely the latest of many that have extended opportunities for illicit gain in the physical world.

Hypercrime offers a radical critique of the narrow conceptions of cybercrime offered by current justice systems and challenges the governing presumptions about the nature of the threat posed by it.

Runner-up for the British Society of Criminology Book Prize (2008).

ISBN: 9781904385936

Published December 06 2007 by Routledge-Cavendish.

The Criminalisation of HIV Transmission

By Matthew Weait

In what circumstances and on what basis, should those who transmit serious diseases to their sexual partners be criminalised? In this new book Matthew Weait uses English case law as the basis of a more general and critical analysis of the response of the criminal courts to those who have been convicted of transmitting HIV during sex.

Examining cases and engaging with the socio-cultural dimensions of HIV/AIDS and sexuality, he provides readers with an important insight into the way in which the criminal courts construct the concepts of harm, risk, causation, blame and responsibility.

Taking into account the socio-cultural issues surrounding HIV/AIDS and their interaction with the law, Weait has written an excellent book for postgraduate and undergraduate law and criminology students studying criminal law theory, the trial process, offences against the person, and the politics of criminalisation. The book will also be of interest to health professionals working in the field of HIV/AIDS genito-urinary medicine who want to understand the issues that may face their clients and patients.

ISBN: 9781904385714

Published December 06 2007 by Routledge-Cavendish.