The New Regulatory State and the Transformation of Criminology

Source: (2000) British Journal of Criminology. 40: 222-238.

The article describes the major developmental trends in government policy as involving a shift from a welfare state, governed by Keynesian techniques of demand management to a new form of regulatory state, premised upon a neo-liberal combination of market competition, privatized institutions, and decentred, at-a-sistance forms of state regulation. The new styles of governance are premised upon a recognition of new social forces and mentalities, particularly of the globalizing logic of risk management, and they will increasingly reconfigure the social and political fields in ways that have consequesnces for the policing and control of crime. Criminology’s traditional focus upon street crimes and the institutions of police, courts, and prisons may be decreasingly relevant to the new harms, risks and mechanisms of control that are emerging today. The innovative work of ‘regulatory state scholars’ such as Clifford Shearing is identified as pushing criminology in new directions that confound the discipline’s traditional boundaries but which give it more leverage in the attempt to understand and respond to the control problems of the end of the century. The posibilities for restorative justice in the new context are also discussed, as are other methods for combating insecurity, and both are linked to the importance of developing forms of local knowledge that are informed by a sense of the global development context.