NCJ Number: 184046
Title: Theoretical Criminology: From Modernity to Post-Moderism
Author(s): Wayne Morrison
Date Published: 1997
Page Count: 535
Sponsoring Agency: Gaunt (Distributor of Cavendish & Federation Press)
Publication Number: ISBN 1-85941-220-3
Sale Source: Gaunt (Distributor of Cavendish & Federation Press)
Type: Overview Text
Format: Book (Softbound)
Language: English
Country: United Kingdom
Annotation: This book places the development of criminological theory within
the changing forms of modernity and the arrival of
post-modernism, as it emphasizes the connection between
theorizing about crime and constructing modern social relations
and shows how criminology offers a site of analysis in which the
very fabric of modernity is exposed.
Abstract: The themes of the book emerged from field research conducted on
various Social Service Juvenile Justice teams that implement
community sanctions with juveniles. Various projects were visited
by the author, and a number of staff and juvenile offenders were
interviewed. The author develops two themes from this research.
One theme is the focus of team members on "everyday technologies
of the self," as opposed to the client-oriented therapy derived
from Rogers (1951). Routine team tasks aimed at setting
boundaries around the daily activities of the offenders, at
building the self-esteem of offenders, and at enabling the
offender to cope with the pressures of daily life without resort
to crime. A second theme was the degree to which the discourse of
the juvenile offenders mirrored the confusing and stimulating
world so central to the images of radical differentiation in
post-modernist descriptions of social structure. The accounts of
the young offenders show the impossibility of satisfying the
multiplicity of desires experienced. The world depicted by the
youth is one of perpetual entrapment in conditions of stimulated
desire and images of an abundance of material goods, with a
scarcity of the means of obtaining them. The author advises that
multiple realities, attention to the surface, interaction with a
world that takes on the semblance of the imaginary, but behind
which lurks victimization, is the way contemporary life is lived.
Among the topics considered in this discussion are labeling
theory in the work of David Matza, gender and crime, contemporary
social stratification and the development of the underclass, and
the building of criminological theory in post-modernism. A
512-item bibliography and a subject index
Main Term(s): Criminology
Index Term(s): Cultural influences; Gender issues; Juvenile delinquency factors; Labeling theory; Social classes; Social conditions
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