Professor John MuncieThe basis of this approach is an important study that began in the early 1960s conducted at the University of Cambridge called ‘The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development’. It’s important to contextualise this study, because a lot of our information of what the important risk factors for juvenile offending [are] comes from studies such as this. Basically it’s a longitudinal study. It started in the early 1960s with a sample of four hundred and eleven, mainly boys, who were then aged eight, selected from six primary schools in one area of London. In fact there are no girls included at that time and only twelve were from ethnic minorities, so the sample is very much a white, working-class one. Over the next forty or fifty years they were contacted nine times; and what the researchers were trying to find out is which of them have developed what they call a ‘delinquent way of life’, and why some of them had continued that delinquency beyond childhood into a life of crime into adulthood. This was a longitudinal study which means it was carried out over a long period of time during which the young people being studied were contacted nine times from their childhood into adulthood.The sample, although consisting of 411 children, was mainly male, white and working class.The study aimed to discover the factors to explain why some children became delinquents.2. Summarise, in your own words, the findings of the study.
Delinquent development 2
Professor John MuncieThe survey found that about a fifth of their sample of four hundred and eleven had been convicted of criminal offences as juveniles, and over a third of them had been convicted by the time they were thirty-two. But about a half of all those convictions were attributed to only twenty-three what were then young men. That was less than six per cent of the sample. Based on this six per cent of what they call chronic offenders, they seem to share some common childhood characteristics. So this study, the Cambridge Study, argued that they were more likely to be rated as troublesome, impulsive and dishonest at primary school. They tended to come from poorer, larger families and were more likely to have criminal parents. Based on this data the research tried to identify the most salient individual, family and environment predictors, or if you like risk factors for future criminality. The main findings were:A fifth of the sample had been convicted of criminal offences as juveniles.A third had been convicted by the time they were thirty-two.Six per cent of the sample was labelled chronic offenders who shared some common childhood characteristics.3. Jot down, in your own words, the individual, family and environmental risk factors the study identifies.
Delinquent development 3
Professor John MuncieOver the years of this study the most important individual factors that seem to emerge were low intelligence, personality and impulsiveness. The strongest family factors were criminal and antisocial parents, poor parental supervision and disruptive families. Whereas the most notable environmental factors were association with like-minded friends and peers, living in areas of high deprivation and high-delinquency-rate schools. Now on this basis the Cambridge Study then contended that these chronic offenders could be identified with reasonable accuracy at the age of ten. The importance of this research is that it has been replicated not just in the UK but across many USA cities and also in Scandinavia and Australia. So the argument is that what the risk factor paradigm actually represents is something of a global knowledge. Now it’s interesting to see how this has filtered through into precise policy terms where the strongest influence has been a focus on individual and family factors rather than the environmental ones.Individual risk factors were low intelligence, personality and impulsiveness.Family factors were criminal and anti-social parents, poor parenting and a disruptive family life.Environmental factors were associating with similar friends, living in poor areas and attending schools with high delinquency rates.4. What weaknesses does Professor Muncie highlight with using these risk factors to identify potential young offenders?
Delinquent development 4
Professor John MuncieAnother core problem with the risk factor paradigm is that it tends to present risks as individualised and also as if they [comprise] uncontroversial facts and truths. What is being revealed is correlations rather than causes. There is a question of whether we can reduce the complex lives of young offenders down to a limited and prescribed menu of factors, again derived from this research, which emanates initially from a fairly narrow psychosocial focus. Such studies tell us what factors are linked to offending, or offending that we know about, but not how and why such factors might actually be linked.What’s also missing, I think, from statistical and quantitative data, which the risk factor analysis is based on, is perceptions about notions of risk from young people themselves or from the practitioners within the youth justice system, which may be completely at odds with what seems to be indicated by quantitative research. So, in other words, it generalises probabilities to specific individuals and, as I’ve said, it may create a high number of false positives: in other words mislabelling and inaccurately identifying particular individuals who are believed to pose a risk in the future. And that then may lead to unwarranted degrees of intrusive intervention in their immediate and in their future lives.Professor Muncie argues that out of this list of risk factors it is impossible to know which are the most important and we don’t know how these factors influence each other.Most significantly, although this research shows links between certain risk factors and juvenile delinquency, it doesn’t explain what causes juvenile delinquency.5. What weaknesses of the Cambridge Study have been identified by further research?
Delinquent development 5
Professor John MuncieThese forms of risk analysis have become more and more common, particularly since the 1990s, as interest in crime prevention research and how best [to] prevent young offending has hit the top of the political agenda and as a result something of a consensus around notions of family conflict, truancy, irresponsible or lack of parenting, low intelligence and delinquent friends has sort of emerged and in particular has been propagated by the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales. The problem with this type of an analysis, as various people have pointed out, is how we decipher which of those numerous variables are more pertinent with some people and at some times. We still don’t really know which are the most important risk factors. We really don’t know how they interrelate and how they react with one another. And of course the important point to stress is that what risk factor analysis is examining is a series of links or correlations between factors, not necessarily identifying what causes young offending.A study in the north-east of England based on interviews showed that risk factors couldn’t explain why some children, who had many of these risk factors, did not offend.Another study in Pittsburgh highlighted the economic status of neighbourhoods as a more important risk factor than individual personality or family background.2.6 SummaryThe previous sections explored the micro theories of criminal behaviour that focus on individuals, and why some people commit crimes and others do not.Psychological theories look at the risk factors for individuals to commit crime, not society more widely or why certain groups of people may commit crime.Eysenck’s theory looked at the link between biology, personality and crime, and suggested that people who commit crimes score more highly on the three scales of extraversion (E), neuroticism (N) and psychoticism (P).Eysenck’s theory has been praised for combining the biological and social processes to try and understand why some people commit crimes and others do not. Yet, research using Eysenck’s personality measures, the EPI and the EPQ, has failed to find support for Eysenck’s claim that offenders score more highly on the three scales, as compared to non-offenders.Farrington’s ICAP theory and the Cambridge study looked at risk factors that could potentially lead a person to commit crime. Personality is one risk factor for crime; other factors include size of family, poverty, child-rearing practices, school attainment and employment.The ICAP theory also examines situational factors that may influence a person to behave in a deviant way, for example alcohol, drugs, and feelings of boredom and frustration.The ICAP theory has been praised for its emphasis on short-term and long-term risk factors that may lead to crime, and has been influential in implementing programmes to try to reduce offending. However, the ICAP theory has been criticised for not taking into account the influence of the neighbourhood on offending.3 Studying the control of disorderYou are now going to look at sociological approaches to disorderly behaviour. In contrast to the psychological approaches that you have just examined, which study juvenile delinquency to find out why some individuals commit crimes while others do not, sociologists start with an entirely different question: not, why did this person commit this crime, but why is this behaviour and this person viewed as disorderly?3.1 Howard Becker and the turn to controlIn 1963, the American sociologist Howard Becker published Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, which laid the foundations for a very different approach to studying deviant, criminal and delinquent behaviour. Becker’s work started from a rather mundane observation: not everyone who breaks the law is caught and prosecuted. This fact falls into the ‘everybody knows’ category of knowledge, but Becker turned it from a rather dull observation into a different way of thinking about deviant behaviour. He drew four related arguments from it:Most studies of delinquents/criminals that seek to explain the causes of crime are methodologically flawed. They tend to assume a reliable distinction between a normal group and a deviant group, and search for the factor(s) that make the difference between the two. Do deviants have the wrong chromosomes, the wrong parenting, the wrong friends, the wrong environment, and so on? But, for Becker, the only reliable difference between the two groups was that one group had been identified – labelled – as deviant/criminal. The others – the normals – might have done exactly the same things, but had not been detected, processed and labelled as deviant (see Table 1). It might also be the case that among the ‘deviants’ were people who had been falsely accused and labelled – people who had not committed the criminal or deviant act. So the search for the X factor (that made the difference) was fundamentally flawed.
Table 1 True and false negatives and positives
Detected and labelled
Not detected or labelled
Committed the act
Positive (Deviant)
False negative
Did not commit the act
False positive
Negative (Normal)
Becker argued that social scientists should therefore pay much more attention to the processes involved in identifying some acts – and some people – as criminal or deviant. Why are some behaviours and some types of people the focus of attention? What processes of selection are involved in these processes of social control? Are they merely random (some people are just unlucky to be caught and prosecuted) or do they have social biases or logic? Becker asserted that this meant breaking the fundamental assumption that treats deviance as the:... infraction of some agreed-upon rule: such an assumption seems to me to ignore the central fact about deviance: it is created by society. I do not mean this in the way that it is ordinarily understood, in which the causes of deviance are located in the social situation of the deviant or in ‘social factors’ which prompt his [sic] action. I mean, rather, that social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. From this point of view deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’. The deviant is one to whom that label has been successfully applied; deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label. (Becker, 1996 [1963], pp. 217−18, emphasis in original)It is important to note that Becker makes a distinction between the behaviour and the person. Societies decide which behaviours are ‘deviant’ (and they make some of them illegal – crimes). Societies do not necessarily share the same judgements about what should be judged as deviant or criminal. For example, not all societies judge ‘hate crimes’ (attacks motivated by hatred of a person’s ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion) as crimes or even deviant , although the UK now recognises such actions as criminal. Killing people is usually thought to be both deviant and criminal, but societies vary in the exemptions they permit (it may depend on who commits the act: agents of the government often have some immunity – think about soldiers in wartime or deaths in police custody; deaths that result from corporate action rarely result in murder charges). Indeed specific societies may change their judgements over time (for over a century, the UK treated homosexual acts between consenting male adults as crimes, but ‘de-criminalised’ them in 1967). Second, though, some people performing those behaviours are identified and labelled as deviant (or criminal), but perhaps not everyone who acts in these ways is identified and labelled.Becker also argued that labels could have powerful consequences. Drawing on the social interactionist approach in social psychology (from the work of George Herbert Mead, 1863–1931), Becker suggested that how others define us may well shape how we act: if we are labelled as ‘bad’ or ‘criminal’, we might start to live up to the label. Equally, the label may shape how others treat us – once labelled, people identified as criminals or deviants may face extra scrutiny, suspicion or even discrimination. A powerful label changes the situation – for the person so labelled and for others. For Becker, the arrival of a label created the conditions of people moving into a ‘deviant career’: the label shapes the possible future directions of both identity and action.3.2 Labelling and devianceActivity 7Can you think of any other examples of labels that might re-shape the conditions of a person’s future possibilities?What about medical or psychiatric diagnoses; being identified as a ‘citizen’ or an ‘alien’; being described as a ‘scrounger’; being called a ‘job seeker’ rather than an ‘unemployed person’; becoming homeless; becoming a mother?Becker’s work has been influential in sociological approaches to the study of delinquency, deviance and social control. In fact, he put the processes of social control into a more dramatically visible position, exposing their role in ‘defining the situation’. We will now trace some of the issues that emerged from Becker’s focus on ‘labelling’.One issue that emerges is the selection of what sorts of behaviour are to be defined as criminal or deviant. Remember that criminal behaviour is defined as that which breaks the criminal law; while deviant behaviour is that which breaks established social rules or norms of conduct. But this very general definition conceals a more important question for social scientists about how both the criminal law (in a particular society) and social norms change over time. If we take the criminal law in England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland have different legal systems, even if many of the offences overlap), then it has changed in important ways. New offences are sometimes added: over 3500 during the Labour governments between 1997 and 2010 (see, for example, Slack (2010) or Morris (2008)). Sometimes, established offences are deleted or downgraded: it is no longer possible to be executed, imprisoned or transported for stealing timber, turf or peat from the King’s Forests (see E.P. Thompson’s study (1977) of the Black Act of 1723, which created 50 new criminal offences). Similarly, the content of social norms changes – reflecting shifting views of what is normal, right, proper or reasonable.It is important to remember that neither the law nor social codes are permanent and unchanging. They change over time and are different from country to country (or from one legal jurisdiction to another).3.3 Agencies of control: being selectiveIt is equally important to remember that rules may be applied selectively. In democratic societies subject to the Rule of Law, the principle of ‘equality before the law’ is an important political value. However, investigations of how the criminal law is applied suggest that forms of social difference and inequality may have a significant impact on who gets ‘labelled’. There are numerous examples of distinctions being made between similar behaviour that is judged differently depending on the social identities of the actors. For instance, rowdy, noisy behaviour involving forms of criminal damage to property may be viewed as criminal or delinquent behaviour if done by young working-class men, but treated as ‘high jinks’ or ‘youthful high spirits’ if perpetrated by middle- or upper-class young men.Activity 8Read the following extract about the ideas of criminal damage in the aftermath of the English riots of 2011 and reflect on whether the comparison at stake is between types of behaviour or types of people.‘An excessive sense of entitlement’ was what the mayor of London ascribed to those looting their way across our sceptred isle – but he could have been referring to himself. In the mid-to-late 80s, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson – not to mention David Cameron and his now chancellor George Osborne – were members of the notorious Bullingdon Club, the Oxford University ‘dining’ clique that smashed their way through restaurant crockery, car windscreens and antique violins all over the city of knowledge.Not unlike a certain section of today’s youth, the ‘Bullers’ have little regard for property. Prospective members often have their rooms trashed by their new-found friends, while the club has a reputation for ritualistic plate smashing at unsuspecting country pubs. It has been banned from several establishments, while contemporary Bullers are said to chant, at all hours: ‘Buller, Buller, Buller! Buller, Buller, Buller! We are the famous Bullingdon Club, and we don’t give a f***!’(Kingsley, 2011)We can see some of these differentiating social dynamics at work in the definition and control of juvenile delinquency. It is understood as a male problem: most concern about delinquency – and most arrests and prosecutions of young people – concentrate on young men. Young women have historically been the focus of rather different anxieties – fears about moral or sexual delinquency have dominated. More recently, however, are worries that young women are behaving like young men – sometimes calling them ‘ladettes’ or ‘yobettes’, as in the Daily Mail headline ‘Yobette generation is plaguing our streets’ (Wharton, 2007). John Muncie, writing about the difference between male and female juvenile offending, noted that:Fuelled by media-driven panics about a ‘new breed’ of girl gangs, the numbers of girls convicted of indictable offences rose, the use of diversionary measures (cautions, reprimands and warnings) decreased and the number sentenced to immediate custody increased dramatically (by 365 percent between 1993 and 2002) (Gelsthorpe and Sharpe, 2006).(Muncie, 2009, p. 30)3.3.1 Official statistics and self-report studiesWe will return to Muncie’s observation about ‘media-driven panics’ in the following section, but here we want to consider other patterns of social difference in relation to the control of juvenile delinquency. Using two different types of evidence, sociologists have pointed to a systematic difference between who breaks the law and who is officially labelled as law-breaking. On the one hand, official statistics about crime – data collected by the criminal justice system that records arrests, prosecutions, sentences, and so on – identifies delinquency and criminality as a behaviour associated with young working-class men. On the other hand, self-report studies – in which people report their own law-breaking activities anonymously – tend to contradict this apparent distribution. Muncie summarises the situation as follows:… the major contribution of self-report studies has been to seriously question widely held beliefs about the correlations of class position, ‘race’ and gender to criminality. Both Anderson et al. (1994) and Graham and Bowling (1995) found that middle-class children were just as likely to be involved in crime as working-class children. Indeed a survey by the British Household Panel in 2001 based on interviews with 1,000 13−15 year olds found that those from higher income families were more likely to commit vandalism, play truant and take illegal drugs (Guardian, 25 February, 2001) … This suggests strongly that official statistics reflect not patterns of offending but patterns of policing. As a result, the relative criminality of certain groups of young people has been exaggerated. For example, inner-city working-class youths face a greater risk of arrest than middle-class youths engaged in similar activities but in areas where the police presence is lower. Ethnic minority youths are statistically more likely to be stopped and searched by the police (Burke, 1996), but self-report studies show that those of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin have significantly lower rates of offending and that for African-Caribbeans the rate is no higher than for whites.(Muncie, 2009, pp. 24−25)There are two important points to draw out of this discussion. The first concerns the problem of evidence in relation to delinquency and criminality. Two types of data – official statistics and self-report studies – produce very different pictures of the social distribution of law-breaking behaviour. Each of them has problems. As Muncie suggests, official statistics tend to report police activity rather than law-breaking. Self-report studies also have potential flaws, as people may be selective about what they admit to; or may even over-dramatise their law breaking when hidden behind anonymity. Such studies tend to be conducted through questionnaires with relatively low response rates; and tend to focus on a limited set of crime behaviours (leaving out a range of possible crimes – from large-scale financial fraud to child abuse). Evidence in the social sciences is rarely perfect, but here it is the comparison between the two sorts of data that is the point of interest.The second important point concerns the shift of attention to the processes of social control, and their critical role in defining and acting on what – and who – counts as deviant. This concern with ‘defining the situation’ inspired a wide range of investigations into crime, deviance and social problems more generally. For example, Bacchi’s work (1999) builds this starting point into an analysis of social policies and their relationship to gender divisions, arguing that the power or capacity to define ‘what the problem is’ is central to the policy-making process. This issue is also central to other work on youthful disorder.3.4 Media and moral panicsThe sociologist Stan Cohen published a widely used study (1972) of the social reaction to fights between Mods and Rockers (two rival youth subcultures) at English seaside towns during the 1960s. Cohen analysed the media’s reporting of these events and found them to be highly dramatised, turning rather banal events into sensational – and sensationalised – news. He pointed to the ways in which these groups of young people were demonised, and viewed as posing a major threat to the stability of social order in the UK. He called this process of demonisation the creation of ‘folk devils’ – invented figures onto whom a whole variety of problems, dangers and anxieties could be projected.At the heart of this process was a relationship between the mass media and figures of authority (judges and magistrates, senior police officers, politicians and others whom Cohen described as ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who saw an opportunity to speak out about the ‘state of the nation’ and the dangers posed by such young people). The mass media – print journalism, radio and television – provided the forum in which figures of authority could pass judgement, issue dire warnings and demand strong action. Cohen described this process as the creation of a moral panic, which he described as taking place when a ‘condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests’ (1972, p. 9). The important point here is the idea of ‘become defined as’. Cohen’s study suggests that the fights between Mods and Rockers were treated disproportionately by the media and those in authority. In the process, they had other concerns and social anxieties projected onto them. The ‘definition of the situation’ turned the Mods and Rockers into a major threat to the future of the social order – and they were treated according to that definition (a combination of public condemnation, heavy policing and tough sentencing). Finally, Cohen suggests that the creation of folk devils and the development of moral panics – although certainly irrational and disproportionate – served some social interests. The Mods and Rockers gave a platform for ‘moral entrepreneurs’ to tell stories about the state of the nation and its young people; for judges and magistrates to ‘defend the public’ through tough sentencing; and for senior police officers to demand more resources in order to respond to this new threat to society. And, just as Becker suggested, the process of labelling had effects on those being labelled – such that Mods and Rockers tried to live up to their new public reputations: learning to perform their roles in the drama.Cohen used the idea of a ‘deviancy amplification spiral’ in which the media’s dramatisation of particular events increased their visibility and the anxieties about them, such that campaigns by police, politicians, the judiciary and representatives of ‘concerned citizens’ increased the public focus on these actions and the ‘folk devils’ held responsible for them.In the conclusion to the book, Cohen argued that this distinctive set of dynamics – identifying folk devils, dramatising them as other and dangerous, creating a moral panic about the threat that they pose to the social order, and amplifying the reaction to them (tougher policing, tougher sentences, and so on) – would recur:More moral panics will be generated and other, as yet nameless, folk devils will be created … our society as presently structured will continue to generate problems for some of its members … and then condemn whatever solution these groups find.(Cohen, 1972, p. 233)3.4.1 The ‘yob culture’Many studies have borrowed the ideas of folk devils and moral panics from Cohen, exploring the tendency of societies to enter into this cycle of discovering dangers, projecting fears and anxieties onto them, and demanding harsh responses to ‘protect society’ (see the discussions by Critcher, 2003 and 2008; Garland, 2001; Jewkes, 2004). Young people seem to be particularly vulnerable to being portrayed as ‘folk devils’ in this way. For example, Coward (1994) has reflected on the way in which ‘yobs’ and ‘yob culture’ came to be powerful images of social crisis and disorder during the 1990s:‘YOB’, once a slang insult, is now a descriptive category used by tabloid and quality newspapers alike. Incorporating other breeds, like the lager louts, football hooligans and joyriders, yob is a species of young, white, working-class male which, if the British media is to be believed, is more common than ever before. The yob is foul-mouthed, irresponsible, probably unemployed and violent. The yob hangs around council estates where he terrorises the local inhabitants, possibly in the company of his pit-bull terrier. He fathers children rather than cares for them. He is often drunk, probably uses drugs and is likely to be involved in crime, including domestic violence. He is the ultimate expression of macho values: mad, bad, and dangerous to know.The yob is the bogey of the Nineties, hated and feared with a startling intensity by the British middle class … Individual men disappear in this language into a faceless mob, or appear only as thuggish stereotypes.(Coward, 1994, p. 32)Can you identify any current ‘folk devils’?3.5 ‘Society must be protected’: crises and controlOne important study that drew on and extended Cohen’s work was by Stuart Hall and his colleagues (1978), which examined the construction of a moral panic about ‘mugging’ (street robbery) in Britain during the early 1970s. A term that had not been used since the nineteenth century was suddenly discussed in the mass media as a ‘frightening new strain of crime’, possibly arriving from what the British perceived as the violent, dangerous and racially divided USA. ‘Muggers’ became a new type of folk devil, identified as a threat to stability and social order, and requiring tough measures to protect society. Hall et al. argued that this invention of ‘mugging’ needed to be understood as part of wider social and political dynamics.They explored the different sorts of disorder that shaped British society at the beginning of the 1970s: a deepening economic crisis and a stagnant economy; growing political conflict; a variety of social divisions that were becoming more severe; and a loss of public confidence in the nation’s political leaders. Describing a time in which a relatively consensual society in the 20-year period following the Second World War was becoming increasingly characterised by economic, social and political conflicts, they claimed that the figure of the ‘mugger’ was placed in the middle of this crisis. He (muggers were usually imagined as men – young, black men to be more precise) became the focus of social and political anxiety – the ‘mugger’ was seen to represent the breakdown of law and order. As a result, the mass media were full of denunciations, dire warnings and demands for tough action to be taken to save the country from this appalling threat.3.5.1 Police powersFor Hall et al., this invention was a way of displacing genuine social and political tensions onto a folk devil. Attention could be deflected from the deepening crises. Society would be protected – not by overcoming divisions – but by ‘cracking down’ on young black men on the nation’s streets. Getting tough on mugging created new police powers, brought about ‘exemplary’ sentences for those found guilty of robbery (mugging was never a crime in a legal definition), and exposed young black men to a programme of systematic harassment by police officers (under what became known as the ‘sus’ law: the right of police officers to stop anyone that they suspected might have committed a crime or be intending to commit a crime). The ‘suspicious person’ powers derived from Section 4 of the Vagrancy Act 1824 and became a major point of conflict between the police and the black community in Britain (especially in London: see Whitfield, 2004). It was eventually abolished in the early 1980s (following the Scarman Report’s recommendation of the need for more integrative ‘community policing’) but re-emerged in a new guise as the power to ‘stop and search’. The new power continued to be deployed in an ethnically discriminatory way (what in the USA is known – and condemned – as ‘racial profiling’). Whitfield indicates that:Ministry of Justice figures published in October 2007 reveal that black and Asian people are more likely to be stopped and searched than their white counterparts. This is especially the case in London where, in 2005/06, black people were more than seven times more likely to be searched than whites. Outside London, they are 4.8 per cent more likely to be searched.(Whitfield, 2009)For Hall et al., ‘mugging’ helped the politically dominant groups in Britain to move attention from social divisions and political conflict onto a group of folk devils, and to argue that society needed to be protected through tougher policing and a generally stronger state. In ‘cracking down’ on crime and violence, particularly among young black men, the state (seen by Hall et al. to be representing the most powerful groups and interests in society) became a ‘primary definer’ of disorder. The media then took their cue from government, police and judges – for instance, in the use of the term ‘mugging’ – and extended the primary definitions further, giving them a popular ring. In this view, the deep-seated causes of social conflict, chiefly inequality, were obscured and the issue was turned into a legal and moral struggle against what was defined as ‘mindless violence’. Hall and his colleagues described this as the creation of a ‘law and order society’ in which those defined as the enemies of the nation would be rooted out and subjected to increasingly harsh treatment. The analysis they presented has proved to be both very powerful (the book was reissued on its thirty-fifth anniversary in 2013) and very controversial. Debates about it continue that address its account of the British political situation, the relationship between institutions of social control and the mass media, and its view of the situation of young black men in Britain (see, for example, Jewkes (2004) and the special issue of the journal Crime, Media, Culture published in April 2008 (Clarke, 2008)).Perhaps the most interesting question that emerges from the Hall et al. study is whether we are still ‘policing the crisis’: deflecting attention away from economic crises, social divisions and political conflict by focusing too much on the deviant behaviour of young people and the need to impose a ‘law and order society’ (Clarke, 2008). Following the English riots of August 2011, it was possible to trace very different views: between those who denounced the ‘pure criminality’ of the rioters; those who sought to explain rioting in terms of the social and economic conditions facing young people (young men, in particular); and those who suggested that the reaction to the riots was also a displacement of larger social, economic and political crises onto a problem of crime. For this last group, policing the crisis remained an important point of reference.3.6 Activity: Mugging and the mediaIn 1978 Stuart Hall and his co-writers (Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts) published Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, in which they argued that the growth in media coverage of crime in Britain in the early 1970s contributed to a widespread belief that there was a crisis in society, in particular to do with the sudden rise of the ‘mugger’ or street robber. The video with Professor Stuart Hall which you are now going to watch is introduced by one of Hall’s co-authors, Professor John Clarke.Activity 9Suggested time allocation: 40 minutesAs you watch the video, jot down, in your own words, some brief notes in response to the questions below. It might be helpful to watch the video all the way through once and to then watch each section in turn, pausing to make notes in response to the questions.