Public Criminology?

What is the role and value of criminology in a democratic society? How do, and how should, its practitioners engage with politics and public policy? How can criminology find a voice in an agitated, insecure and intensely mediated world in which crime and punishment loom large in government agendas and public discourse? What collective good do we want criminological enquiry to promote? In addressing these questions, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks offer a sociological account of how criminologists understand their craft and position themselves in relation to social and political controversies about crime, whether as scientific experts, policy advisors, governmental players, social movement theorists, or lonely prophets. They examine the conditions under which these diverse commitments and affiliations arose, and gained or lost credibility and influence. This forms the basis for a timely articulation of the idea that criminology's overarching public purpose is to contribute to a better politics of crime and its regulation. Public Criminology? offers an original and provocative account of the condition of, and prospects for, criminology which will be of interest not only to those who work in the fields of crime, security and punishment, but to anyone interested in the vexed relationship between social science, public policy and politics.

Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology and Director of the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford. He is author of Civilizing Security, with Neil Walker (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and is currently researching and writing about markets for security commodities. Richard Sparks is Professor of Criminology at the University of Edinburgh and a Co-Director of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (www.sccjr.ac.uk). His current interests include comparative and trans-national aspects of public policy on crime and punishment.

Introduction: Why Public Criminology? 1. The Condition of Contemporary Criminology 2. The Public Social Science Debate 3. Criminology in a Hot Climate 4. Cooling Devices 5. Criminology as a Democratic Under-Labourer.