Writing on the Cusp of Change: A New Criminology for an Age of Late Modernity

Abstract

It is my belief that the last twenty years has witnessed the most profound transformation in our discipline. Heralded by the new deviancy ‘explosion’ of theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s and with The New Criminology in 1973 as a convenient marker, we have experienced the shattering of the seemingly monolithic world of modernity associated with the postwar period and the emergence of a late modernity, where the ground rules of certainty undergirding our subject have become blurred, contested, ambiguous and perpetually debateable. The changes have occurred at the level of crime, crime control and criminology itself. They are certainly not merely an intellectual product — perhaps the reverse; real changes have occurred in the world both in the quantity and quality of crime, and the public discourse on crime, whether in the mass media, in fiction or at the doorstep has radically altered. Nor, of course, is such a transformation limited to crime and criminology but is part of a wider movement into late modernity that has resonances in every sphere of life, whether cultural, architectural, sexual, biographical or economic (see Harvey, 1989). Indeed making a connection between the wide-ranging changes that have occurred within the labour market, in leisure, within the family, in changing usage of public and private space and in relationships of gender on the one hand, and the newly emerging patterns of crime and victimisation on the other, must be top of our agenda (see Young, 1998).