The Culture Of Control Summary

Garland, D. 2001. The culture of control. Oxford: Clarendon.

The culture of control of David Garland describes the huge changes and developments of criminal justice and crime control system since the 1970s, as well as the changes of attitude and responses to crime of societies’ both in the United Kingdom and the USA. The main aim of this book is to explain and observe how come that crime control happened to be so unpredictable, and how those two societies’ path of historical development of crime control appeared to be practically the contrary of that which was expected. 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
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 finally 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 UK 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 education 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,