The culture of control : crime and social order in contemporary society

How is it that our response to crime and our sense of criminal justice has become so dramatically reconfigured over the past 30 years? Si nce the 1970s our attitudes towards crime have changes. Prison populations have increased, and community policing and "zero-tolerance" policies have dominated the headlines. David Garland charts these changes in America and britain over a 25 year period to show how both countries have been shaped by two underlying social forces: the social organization of late modernity and the neoconservative politics that came to dominate in the US and UK in the 1980s. Garland explains how the politics of crime and punishment, welfare and security, and the changing class, race and gender relations that underpin them, are linked to the fundamental problem of governing contemporary societies. States, corporatations and private citizens grapple with a volitile economy and a culture that combines personal freedom with relaxed social controls. Garland concludes that crime is not the only thing to have changed, society has cahnged as well, and this transformation has reshaped criminalogical thought, public polocy and the cultural meaning of crime and criminals.