Debating Deviance: Moral Dilemmas

One of the interesting things about the sociology of crime and deviance at a-level is that it invariably throws-up a range of what we might term “moral dilemmas” – acts that, while they might strictly and legally be called crimes, may be motivated more by an altruistic aesthetic – such as the desire to “right […]

Understanding Crime and Deviance in Postmodernity: Part 2 – Deviance as Harm

The Part 1 Workbook looked at some general criticisms of conventional (positivist) approaches to understanding crime and criminals and the Part 2 Workbook builds on this critique by outlining an alternative approach based on the concept of social harm. This contemporary approach argues we need to widen the way we see “crime” to include various […]

Understanding Crime and Deviance in Postmodernity: Part 1

Although the concept of a “postmodern criminology” is, for various reasons, highly problematic this doesn’t mean that newer approaches to understanding and explaining crime don’t have something to offer the a-level sociologist. In this two-part extravaganza, therefore, we can look at two (yes, really) dimensions to this criminological shift through the medium of a couple […]

Methods in Context: Crime and Official Statistics

While the validity of Official Crime Statistics has long been questioned, their reliability has tended to be assumed. Recent pronouncements by the ONS, however, suggest that students should look at the reliability of crime statistics more critically…

Some Notes on Constitutive Criminology

While the concept of a “postmodern criminology” may be somewhat nebulous, to say the least, the ideas underpinning constitutive criminology may be the closest we have. The basic idea here is to adopt what Henry and Milovanovic (1999) call a holistic approach, involving a ‘duality of blame’ that moves the debate away from thinking about […]

Crime and Deviance Channel

Updated the 2 hours+ of video on the Channel to a higher resolution (which means less pixilation when playing at larger sizes).

Institutional Racism?

It’s always useful to have a range of examples – especially contemporary examples – to hand when / if you need to illustrate a particular idea, theory or concept. And in the context of Institutional Racism, this Report by the Institute of Race Relations that has uncovered the fact that in terms of the 500+ […]

Crime Statistics: The Dark Figure video

A request from an American University to use this video in an online course prompted me to remember its existence on my YouTube Channel. It’s a short video that looks at the “dark figure” of crime – crimes that are committed in our society but which never appear in the official recorded crime statistics. As such […]

Neutralising Deviance

Matza’s (1964) notion of “Delinquency and Drift” is particularly useful for the way it looks at “techniques of neutralisation” and while these ideas are still relevant the focus has tended to be on the behaviour of individual, mainly lower class, deviants. It would, however, be a mistake to think Matza’s ideas can’t be applied to […]

Crime, Media and Postmodern Modalities

Harari’s “The theatre of terror” article is worth reading because it explicitly sees terrorism as a form of “spectacle” in contemporary Western societies – an idea referenced by Kidd-Hewitt and Osborne (1995) when they argue crime in general can be seen in terms of postmodern spectacle, a general “crime discourse” driven by two main narratives: […]

Situational Crime Prevention

Examples of different types of Situational Crime Prevention aren’t too hard to find (Alley Gates / Defensible Space, various forms of target-hardening etc.) but a couple of new ones – to me at least – might be useful to add to the list: 1, Community Shelters: Used as “safe places” for “young people” (12 -18) […]