ABSTRACT
David Garland’s The Culture of Control locates the study of crime and control at the center of social scientific and historical analysis, and argues that these subjects are central to the social life of all societies and especially those experiencing “late modernity” as it has expressed itself in the developed world. One of the most compelling aspects of The Culture of Control is Garland’s capacity to reveal the ideological and rhetorical logics that underlie the seemingly disconnected elements that, he persuasively argues, comprise the crime control “field.” Garland’s focus is thus on the emergence of “cultures of control” in the United Kingdom and the United States, and the impact of the cultural sensibilities on the crime control field. Garland’s claim that the social conditions associated with late modernity give rise to high crime rates is also in tension with evidence that crime rates have been falling precipitously across industrialized societies since the 1990s.
