Richard Sparks

University of Edinburgh | UoE · School of Law

Much policy discourse concentrates on the contribution police make to keeping people safe. Often, this means minimizing fear of crime. Yet, more expansive accounts stress the extent to which deeper-rooted forms of security and belonging might also be important ‘outcomes’ of police activity. Using data collected from a survey of residents of a mid-s...

What crimes and security concerns trouble differently-situated groups of people today? What demands for action do these prompt from different authorities? To what extent are contemporary insecurities mediated through people’s sense of place and attendant feelings of belonging? The field of criminology used to be confident that it knew how to answer...

This chapter draws together the book’s main arguments and links them to key events and trends of its last two decades. It returns to central questions regarding who is entitled to be a police officer, whose interests and needs are met through policing, and how policing is delivered.

This chapter analyses the formal rhetoric, mechanisms and structures of governance through which policing was organised in Scotland. It examines shifts in the tripartite relationship between the UK Home Office, the Scottish Office and local police authorities, highlighting the tensions between centrism and localism across the twentieth century, as...

This chapter focuses specifically on the role of the Glasgow ‘beat man’ as well as the group identity and reputation that was forged in the city for ‘robust and ‘tough’ policing, grounded in male physical prowess (as embodied masculinity). It was constructed through the culture of the muster hall, inscribed into everyday life through the performanc...

Policing in Glasgow was segmented into discrete roles, linked to the proliferation of specialisms across the twentieth century. This chapter analyses the effects of encounters generated by some of these specialist units (particularly those associated with plainclothes rather than work in uniform) on relationships between police and communities. Aft...

This chapter focuses on the role of the ‘village constable’ in the Highland and Islands of Scotland. It identifies an approach to policing that was mostly diffusive and conciliatory in terms of the settled population. This was facilitated by the rural officer’s role as a generalist, geographically embedded within the village as primary point of con...

This chapter examines the gradual appointment of female police officers in Scotland from 1915 onwards, the political and social context that shaped these initiatives and the work of women as volunteer patrols and auxiliaries. The chapter highlights the gendered construction of women’s police work in the interwar period, as well as the development o...

The contributions in this themed section developed from conversations that took place at an event hosted by the British Society of Criminology and Criminology & Criminal Justice in April 2019. The papers that follow respond to a ‘think-piece’ presented by Richard Sparks at that event, and engage with the subsequent debate about the future of fundin...

The expansion and diffusion of the ‘carceral state’ – understood here as the set of institutional configurations and actors that prioritise punishment, containment, detention, and/or incarceration as a means of treating poverty and marginalisation – is a looming contemporary concern. It seems probable that confluent interests from the commercial, g...

This collection offers a comprehensive review of the origins, scale and breadth of the privatisation and marketisation revolution across the criminal justice system. Leading academics and researchers assess the consequences of market-driven criminal justice in a wide range of contexts, from prison and probation to policing, migrant detention, rehab...

‘Forty Years On’: What Use Is the Penitentiary Today? The publication of Melossi and Pavarini’s classic discussion of the origins of the penitentiary ironically coincided with a shift—especially in the United States but with profound reverberations elsewhere—towards an expansive, incapacitative model of incarceration. The republication of The Priso...

We would like to start our response by thanking Brendan Dooley and Sean Goodison for producing such a thought-provoking article. We were the (originally anonymous, now self-outed) peer reviewers for this journal. The stimulus and, we should admit, provocation that we received from Dooley and Goodison’s article encouraged us both into producing two...

Research Summary In our article, we attend to the implied outlooks (“philosophies” in the sense of operative practical discourses and assumptions) and the competing ethical concerns that animate differing views on privatizing corrections. We consider some normative arguments and empirical observations that have been mobilized for and against privat...

Questions of crime and security often today seem dominated by a contest between populism on the one hand and technocracy on the other. These positions appear to press conflicting claims: the former seeks to speak for 'the people', or 'victims', or 'law-abiding citizens' who have been ill-served by remote penal elites; the latter (for example, the e...

This article assembles some theoretical resources for a project that investigates the ways in which thinking about politics has since the 1970s been bound up with thinking and action around crime. Such investigation is hampered by a dominant (neoliberal) narrative of governance that tends to reduce crime policy to a ‘contest’ between tactics and te...

The history of criminology is examined comparatively for four countries or regions: the United States, Latin America, Scandinavia, and the United Kingdom. Each case history considers a common set of analytic dimensions: origin and takeoff (time, discipline, political context); changing shapes (themes, theoretical orientations, data); changing organ...

Drawing on archival research and oral history interviews, this article compares the characteristics of the relationships between police officers and communities in the Glasgow conurbation with those in the highlands and islands of Scotland in the period c. 1900–70. Rejecting the uniform or linear narrative suggested by existing historiography, it a...

This symposium is a timely, welcome and valuable addition to the developing body of work that strives to draw productive linkages between accounts of the problems of contemporary democratic politics, the vagaries and extravagances of punishment in advanced capitalist countries today and efforts to sketch how these matters might be theorised, approa...

This paper develops an argument lightly sketched in our book Public Criminology? (2010). There we posed the question of what it would take for criminology to make a substantial contribution to the search for “a better politics of crime”. We were of course well aware of what some of our critics then informed us, namely that this was just a suggestio...

What is the role and value of criminology in a democratic society? How do, and how should, its practitioners engage with politics and public policy? How can criminology find a voice in an agitated, insecure and intensely mediated world in which crime and punishment loom large in government agendas and public discourse? What collective good do we wa...

Does the academy need another Handbook? Encyclopedia? Dictionary? Or whatever other form of authoritative narrative you prefer? As occasional contributors to such enterprises, we have brought some serious scepticism to these questions as we have contemplated developing this Handbook of Punishment and Society for SAGE Publications. The publishers we...

The project of interpreting contemporary forms of punishment means exploring the social, political, economic, and historical conditions in the society in which those forms arise. The SAGE Handbook of Punishment and Society draws together this disparate and expansive field of punishment and society into one compelling new volume.

This paper addresses some prospects for and impediments upon the democratization of aspects of crime control policy. It does so in the first place through a sympathetic critique of themes in the recent work of Robert Reiner. A consistent theme especially of Reiner’s later work has been the critique of hegemonic neo-liberalism and of its effects on...

This article investigates the role of the arts in enabling prisoners to engage with learning and improve their literacy, and the impact this has on their rehabilitation and desistance from crime. It draws on data collected from prisoners who participated in arts interventions in three different Scottish prisons. It argues that participating in the...

Inspiring Change was a co‐ordinated programme of arts interventions that ran in 5 Scottish pilot prisons (Barlinnie, Greenock, Polmont, Shotts and the Open Estate) throughout 20101. The programme involved a wide‐ranging partnership between its principal sponsors Creative Scotland, its coordinators Motherwell College and Learning Centre staff locate...

This chapter addresses the following questions: what contribution can criminological knowledge make to shaping responses to crime in a polity which acknowledges crime and punishment to be properly political issues? What in a democracy is the public value of criminology? What is the collective good that criminological enquiry seeks to promote? What...

Book synopsis: Escape Routes: Contemporary Perspectives on Life After Punishment addresses the reasons why people stop offending, and the processes by which they are rehabilitated or resettled back into the community. Engaging with, and building upon, renewed criminological interest in this area, Escape Routes nevertheless broadens and enlivens the...

Not long after this issue of cjm appears the voters of the United Kingdom will elect a new government. We do not know, at the time of writing, the colour or composition of the new administration, though everyone has their hunches, suspicions, and predictions.

Based on findings from a two-year study in four UK prisons, this article discusses the prison experiences and release expectations of male prisoners aged 65 and above. In terms of the prison experience, we argue that elderly men in prison often have enormous difficulties simply coping with the prison regime. In addition, most have certain painful p...

The numbers of elderly men in the prisons of England and Wales has grown significantly over the past decade, and they continue to rise. Based on intensive fieldwork in four English prisons, this article explores the prison experiences of men aged 65 years and over. Some of our interviewees had grown old in prison, some had served previous prison se...

This essay proposes an approach to understanding changes in political responses to crime in England and Wales over the last third of the twentieth century and developments in criminological knowledge over the same period. To explore the association between these in some empirical detail, we argue, would provide a historical-sociological understandi...

Inside prisons, situations of intractable conflict between certain prisoners and correctional authorities arise. The choices available to either party in escaping the sometimes desperate consequences of these battles are usually severely limited. One effect, desire for which is usually disclaimed by the authorities, can be the creation of a yet dee...

This paper draws on a study of the ways in which the moral and practical dilemmas of punishment are debated and deliberated upon in discussions among nine year old children (with adult facilitators). Theoretically, we are concerned with the points of connection between the social study of childhood and the analysis of punishment as an arena of disc...

We can accept that risk is a key idea in understanding contemporary penality—but which constructions of risk are most compelling? Moreover, how does risk-based practice intersect with other structuring principles of penal systems and penal politics? I compare and contrast the views of Feeley and Simon (1992) and of Mary Douglas's `cultural theory'...

Contemporary criminology inhabits a rapidly changing world. The speed and profundity of these changes are echoed in the rapidly chang- ing character of criminology's subject matter—in crime rates, in crime policy, and in the practices of policing, prevention and punishment. And if we look beyond the immediate data of crime and punishment to the pro...

The chapter is based on the attached paper, which is a revised version of a paper presented at a pre-publication development workshop organised by the editors and publisher

In his latest reflections on our times Zygmunt Bauman (1997) depicts modernity as an epoch in which a good deal of freedom was sacrificed in the name of collectively guaranteed order and security; an era of reliability where people were able (albeit, for many, within severely circumscribed limits) to forge secure identities, plan ahead and hope for...

This paper considers one 'vigilante' episode in an English town in 1993 and its subsequent appearances in the press and in local 'crime-talk'. In so doing it a) proposes as an alternative to most current constructions of 'fear of crime' an interpretive approach grounded in place; b) considers the intersections between the generic 'law and order' pr...

The paper is concerned with how adult residents of one medium-sized, moderately affluent English town which is generally regarded as having a relatively low crime rate interpret and respond to teenage ‘incivilities’. We begin by locating the conflicts over teenage mis/behaviour that occur across many of the town's diverse areas and assessing how th...

Relocation of prisoners to a ‘normal location’ is viewed as an administrative tool to produce ‘order’ taking into account the various controversies and disagreements produced by such undertaking. This intervention comes within prison cells or from one place to another. Here, the ‘vulnerable prisoners' are most commonly faced with such kind of treat...

This chapter raises certain arguments and historical analogies which may assist in taking a few preliminary sightings of some distinctive features of the current British penal landscape. I hope to show that some of the present developments, which initially appear rather particular and ‘of the moment’, interestingly bear comparison with much earlier...

This article considers the connections between masculinity and heroic agency in certain versions of popular film. It proposes that how films dignify and celebrate the suffering and striving of their leading men may be quite centrally indicative of durable sensibilities regarding the qualities and virtues seen as defining manliness; and, moreover, t...

This paper attempts to theorize some aspects of problems of order in prisons in the light of recent contributions in the theory of legitimacy by Beetham (1991) and Tyler (1990). Previous work in the sociology of imprisonment has generally raised the problem of legitimation only implicitly, and often merely to deny its possibility. Drawing on fieldw...