Politics of Crime Control

Prof Ian Loader

This option is an opportunity to make sense of the important shifts in the ordering of contemporary societies. Its aim is to encourage students to think politically about crime and its regulation, by examining the intersections between political ideologies, key concepts and traditions in political thought, and current developments in crime control. The course will examine the ways in which political debates over crime control are inescapably entangled with wider ideological contests between different political traditions and their competing conceptions of the good society (e.g. conservatism, liberalism, social democracy, populism, feminism), and with struggles over the meaning and significance of some core ideas in political thought (e.g. order, authority, legitimacy, justice, freedom, rights). Examining trajectories of crime control and penal policy in these ideological terms will enable consideration of the range of issues that are in play, and at stake, in debates about the criminal question. The course, in this sense, rests upon and explores the claim that the question of how to respond to crime is always, in part, a contest of competing political ideas and the contours of the good society.