Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, Brian Roberts
Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order
Second Edition, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

We turn to crisis. The authors Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts write,

‘The problem is that the “present conditions”, which make the poor poor (or the criminal take to crime) are precisely the same conditions which make the rich rich (or allow the law-abiding to imagine that the social causes of crime will disappear if you punish individual criminals hard enough). There is something deeply ‘British” about our ability to abstract individual effects from the contradictory structures which produce them. So the “practical remedy” involves taking sides – struggling with the contradictions. This book may be disappointing to some people who know this hard truth, and who are already engaged in the struggle to change the structures and conditions which produce the effects analysed in this book. We greatly regret not feeling ourselves competent to take the argument further along this road. We hope, however, that what we have written may help to inform, deepen and strengthen their practical struggle. We hope they will read it as we have tried to write it: as an intervention — albeit an intervention in the battleground of ideas.’  p. 4

Schedule

Unsettled Subjects met to discuss reading this book from October 2022 through March 2023. Page numbers in this schedule refer to the 2013 edition.

12 October, Preface and Introduction, pp. x–xviii, and pp. 1–4.

26 October, Chapter 1: The Social History of a ‘Moral Panic’, pp. 7–31.

9 November, Chapter 2: The Origins of Social Control, pp. 32–55.

23 November, Chapter 3: The Social Production of News, pp. 56–82.

7 December, Chapter 4: Balancing Accounts: Cashing in on Handsworth, pp. 83–119.

21 December, Chapter 5: Orchestrating Public Opinion, pp. 120–137.

2023

18 January, Chapter 6: Explanations and Ideologies of Crime, pp. 138–178.

1 February, Chapter 7: Crime, Law and the State, pp. 179–214.

15 February, Chapter 8: The Law-and-Order Society: The Exhaustion of ‘Consent’, pp. 215–267.

1 March, Chapter 9 and recap: The Law-and-Order Society: Towards the ‘Exceptional State’, pp. 268–320.

15 March, Chapter 10: The Politics of ‘Mugging’, pp. 321–389.

29 March, Afterword and review, pp. 390–401.

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