Social Responses to Crime: Control, Prevention and Victim Support

Abstract

Finding a common and coherent thread running through the sociology of crime was, I argued in Chapter 1, a task beyond even the fairytale heroine who has to spin golden silk by morning or face death in the story of Rumpelstiltskin. Nevertheless, we can put the range of sociological understanding to considerable use. First, sociology provides accounts and descriptions: sociologists describe situations, such as those in family life or at work. They also analyse those situations in relation to one another: sociologists have shown, for example, how family background is related to educational achievement. We might call this the landscape-with-figures aspect of sociology. Second, and more contentiously, sociological findings can be used in certain social situations. Some of these may be in social policies: the findings mentioned above influenced a series of initiatives in pre-school provision in the USA and in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s in order to compensate children for the relative disadvantages of their family backgrounds. This aspect we might call ‘applied sociology’. (It is important to remember that applying sociology can be a highly political and politicised act, something perhaps not suggested by this innocuous term.) In this chapter I shall examine both the landscape of crime portrayed by sociologists, including the most modern perspectives, and a range of applications in the policy field. Not all of the latter have strictly sociological antecedents, but where they do not they can be seen as parts of wider projects which do.