And more importantly this book is focused on how these historical changes in such different fields as sociology, economy and politics have had such a noticeable effect on the developing structures of crime control and public order in the UK and the USA. Accordingly, one of the Garland''s arguments in this book is that any major transformations in social grounds lead to the correlative alterations in the structure of crime control (p. 7). In doing so, Garland put an effort to integrate changes in different fields in order to explain what the structure of the modern Justice system is and changes it is shaped by.
This book includes eight chapters each of which to contemplate Justice system and crime control. The starting point in answering the questions mentioned above is comparison old and modern crime control and criminal Justice systems in the UK and the USA, which was made in the first chapter. Furthermore, to make this kind of evaluation, in Garland''s view, it is crucial to evaluate changes in historical: when the discontinuity started, penalogical: change in the way of discerning and acting on crime, sharp shift of the hierarchy of criminal Justice system''s organisations, and inally sociological background of both British and American societies.
In addition, list of the most important streams of change, such as the reappearance of corrective sanctions as a result of public outcry and anger, that consequently has led to invocation of people''s opinion in support of new laws and penal policies, which, in turn, resulted in ''politicization and the new populism'', occurring over the past three decades were explored and broadly explained. In another David Garland''s criminological book named ''Punishment and Modern Society (1990) the system of prisons was broadly discussed and critically analysed.
In this book Garland criticised the prison to fail correctionalist objectives, and, according to him, the rates of imprisonment declined, while monetary penalties increased harshly (Garland, 1990, p. 149). However, in ''The culture of Control'' Garland found this rates to went up and the reinvention of the prison was listed to be one of the major changes taken place in last 30 years both in the I-JK and the USA.
It was explained by huge changes of criminological ideas, which used to regard crime as a result of relative deprivation, therefore, according to this theory, person becomes delinquent because of the poor ducation or social injustice, whereas since 1970 control theories, the base of which is assumed to be perfectibility of human-being, were widely adopted, and social control, self-control became dominant subjects of the modern criminal Justice in making policies (p. As a resul t, there were developed innovative criminological and corrective viewpoints, whose the main purpose was to control the occurrence of crime through techniques of social control. While discussing the limitations of the penal-welfare state, Garland mentioned this theory to be emphasized on crime revention, safety of the nation and upholding the order in society by legislators and the public itself.
The next few chapters move on to the discussion of how these radical changes in the total crime control arena were formed not only by forces which have influenced the criminal Justice system directly, but also by broader social, economic, and political changes that took place in the United States and Great Britain and were described by huge growth in both of these countries. The author attributes much of this change to industrial and technical progresses uch as mass media, also a growing structure of social and commercial stratification, environmental changes, as well as the transformations in the construction of relationships within family.
Furthermore, it was argued that changes which occurred were the result of the numerous national and global calamities that have been plunged. All the social and political transformations mentioned above apparently contributed to the expansion of conflicting political and cultural opinions that reproduced following variations to the structure of social control. In sum, the first our chapters of the book provide a full clarification of the procedures that ended up with the development of a new crime control strategy for the USA and the I-JK.
While the next two sections provide an explanation on how politicians and legislators, administrative agencies and criminal Justice specialists replied to difficulties that rose from growing crime rates, as well as the in ability of the contemporary Justice system to meet the public''s requests of crime control. According to this view, approval given by public and government is the base for the comparative success of ny crime control.
In these chapters the author sought to create a straight connection between the whole mechanisms of the criminal Justice system and the objectives of other organisations. Publics and legislators are viewed to exert an unlimited deal of effect over present social control strategies. This book implies that criminal Justice organizations reply to the requirements of those to whom they are obliged by adjusting their public control responses.
The most important conclusion that is considered to be made by Garland in two final chapters is that official social control esponses of criminal Justice institutions are reliant on a certain extent of mutuality with other organizations of informal social control, what consequently leads criminal justice system to be dependent on politicians and legislators who pass and control the law. Also the concluding part of the book contains a brief discussion of the future.
In this regard, Garland anticipates times of economic improvements for states and the federal government, as well as as the noticeable decrease of rates of unemployment and gradually declining criminality rates at the first half of the twenty-first century. However, he also predicts that our society is holding the direction towards even more retributory measures, which was described as distinctive feature of the current structure of crime control, and that this track could require extra financial outlay, especially its'' cost is expected to be most tangible in the long-run future.
Hence, he questions the effectiveness of our existing system of social control in tavour ot the penal-weltare structure ot the twentieth century, whose advantages and positive impacts were clearly discussed in ''Managing Modernity written by Matt Matravers. Where he points out advantages of penal-welfarism as hilosophy of criminal Justice sysem, which supports the point of view that criminals should own the right and the optimistic incentive to achieve chances for improvement in the criminal Justice system (Matavers, 2005, p. ) To draw a conclusion, the book provides an outstanding and broad contrast between crime control system of the past, which was ruled by the penal-welfare ideal, and the recent one, which is considered to be more flexible punitive scheme of social control that developed in the last three decades.
This book not only describes the procedures and internal processes of the contemporary crime control system in nusual way and details , paying attention to criminal Justice structure reactions and adaptations to present delinquency control problems, but also it tries to predict the effects of the modern criminological theory and consequences it could lead to in the future. The progression of the contemporary crime control in the UK and he USA was explored and observed from variety angles that this is difficult for me to think of uncovered aspects of this field. And this, according to my mind, resulted in unclear organization of the book.
That is, it is often difficult to identify how details of each hapter related to the main argument of the author and consequently, this makes the reader look through the previous pages in order to understand the link and not get confused . Despite the fact that Garland''s writing style of The Culture of Control was thorough; the feeling of poor relatedness accompanied me throughout the reading. The high extent of intersection of huge amount of materials could be found to be too complicated to comprehend the aim of each chapter for non-professional in the field of criminal Justice philosophy and crime control literature.
Another disenchantment f the book is that it did not provide broad comparison of the development of criminal Justice system between the states of America and Great Britain, which was expected, according to the plan of Garland, to include a range of similarities as well as the differences. There was not clear and systematic contrast on British and American crime controls, that is, some parts of the book have more emphasis on British system, while the others on United States'' one. Nevertheless, the book delivers a detailed explanation of the forces that have Joint together and contributed to the development of todays crime control system.
This book would undeniably be valuable and informative source for expansion the familiarity with sophisticated processes that have developed our social control. Therefore, university students or readers interested or involved into criminological field are expected to advantage from David Garland''s investigation of crime and the noticeable shifting of our modern societys reactions to it. References: Garland, D. 1990. Punishment and modern society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garland, D 2001. The culture ot control. Oxtord: Clarendon. Matravers, M. 2005. Managing modernity. London: Routledge.
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