The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society – Garland

The Culture of Control

Crime and Order in Contemporary Society

Garland, David

ISBN 9788497840408

464 pages

Format 15.5 x 22.5 cm

Date: April 1, 2005

*The Culture of Control* presents the dramatic changes in crime control and criminal justice that have occurred over the last 25 years. In a fascinating and complex study, David Garland illustrates how falling crime rates have been accompanied—paradoxically—by rising incarceration, a reduction in civil liberties, and the stigmatization of a large minority as an underclass.

Garland, one of the most distinguished specialists in the sociology of crime, shows how—after nearly a century of broad acceptance—the "penal-welfare" model (based on rehabilitation, social assistance, and parole) has been replaced by a legislative spirit advocating for more aggressive policing and harsher sentencing. The rise of "street violence" rhetoric—evident in American gun culture and the expansion of the private security sector—sways public opinion to view a new class of "pariahs" (relegated to the cycle of prison industries and repeated reoffending) as criminals undeserving of fundamental liberties.

This book offers an original, profound, and panoramic—yet finely detailed—analysis of the punitive shift in law enforcement, revealing its underlying logic and rationales while identifying the social relationships and cultural sensibilities that have produced this new culture of control.