ABSTRACT
The fi rst edition of An Introduction to Criminological Theory was published in July 2001. It had taken several years from fi rst thoughts to fi nal publication and, looking back now on that experience, those were clearly very different times from those of today. For many of us in the social sciences in the UK (and criminology was no exception), these were times of great optimism. An extremely popular New Labour Government had been elected with a massive majority in May 1997 and appeared committed to pursuing progressive social policies backed up by the empirical research evidence that had been gathering dust during the long years of the previous Conservative regime. Where research fi ndings did not exist, then resources would be made available so that the appropriate studies could be conducted. These were good times to be a researcher in the areas of criminology and criminal justice. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 was the new government’s major fl agship criminal justice legislation, which was intended to transform criminal justice in the UK. In the area of young people and crime – a particular area of expertise for this author – the long-established juvenile justice system was to be replaced with a new youth justice system via the auspices of the newly created Youth Justice Board for England and Wales with a signifi cantly large budget which epitomized the self-confi dent optimistic times. There was, of course, academic and some professional resistance to these developments. Some observed a new punitive turn (see Chapter 21) in youth justice policies, while others (such as this author) recognized a proposed ‘balanced intervention’ where young offenders would be required to take responsibility for their actions but, at the same time, a great emphasis would be placed on addressing the personal and
social conditions that had impacted on the lives of these young people, which could encourage them to make the ‘wrong’ decisions in life (a welfare-oriented intervention). All of this would be located in the context of a government programme of ‘reintegrative tutelage’ (Hopkins Burke, 1999), which would seek to socially reintegrate into mainstream society those large sections of the population who had become economically excluded from the good life as an outcome of the laissez-faire free-market economic policies implemented by the previous Conservative administrations. These governments had presided over a major restructuring of the UK economy away from manufacturing to the service industries (such as banking), leaving many in the traditional working-class communities high and dry on the economic scrapyard. Never mind. New Labour socio-economic policy would sort it all out. From the vantage point of today (June 2013), all that optimism seems incredibly naive and embarrassing.
