1st Edition

Policing, Popular Culture and Political Economy Towards a Social Democratic Criminology

By Robert Reiner Copyright 2011

    Robert Reiner has been one of the pioneers in the development of research on policing since the 1970s as well as a prolific writer on mass media and popular culture representations of crime and criminal justice. His work includes the renowned books The Politics of the Police and Law and Order: An Honest Citizen's Guide to Crime and Control, an analysis of the neo-liberal transformation of crime and criminal justice in recent decades. This volume brings together many of Reiner's most important essays on the police written over the last four decades as well as selected essays on mass media and on the neo-liberal transformation of crime and criminal justice. All the work included in this important volume is underpinned by a framework of analysis in terms of political economy and a commitment to the ethics and politics of social democracy

    Contents: Introduction; Part I Policing: The police, class and politics; The police in the class structure; Fuzzy thoughts: the police and law-and-order politics; In the office of Chief Constable; Policing a postmodern society; From PC Dixon to Dixon plc: policing and police powers since 1954 (with T. Newburn); Neophilia or back to basics? Policing research and the seductions of crime control; New theories of policing: a social democratic critique. Part II Popular Culture and Crime: The new blue films; True lies: changing images of crime in British postwar cinema, (with Jessica Allen and Sonia Livingstone); Media, crime, law and order. Part III Political Economy of Crime and Control: The state and British criminology; Crime and control in Britain; Beyond risk: a lament for social democratic criminology; Law and order - a 20:20 vision; Neo-liberalism, crime and criminal justice; The law and order trap; Citizenship, crime, criminalization: marshalling a social democratic perspective; List of publications; Name Index.

    Biography

    Robert Reiner is Professor of Criminology in the Law Department, London School of Economics and Political Science. He is author of Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime and Control (Polity Press 2007); and editor of (with M.Maguire and R.Morgan) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford University Press, now in its 4th edition, 2007). He has published over 100 papers on criminological topics in journals and books. He was President of the British Society of Criminology from 1993-6; Director of the LSE Mannheim Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice 1995-8; and Convenor of the Law Department 2001-4. Professor Robert Reiner is the British Society of Criminology Outstanding Achievement Award winner for 2011.