ABSTRACT
In this Chapter, the author considers the development of criminology in the last half of the twentieth century through the prism of five key texts. It follows most criminology in being parochial in a deeper sense. Cohen's definition of the province of criminology cited above explicitly restricts its ambit to the making and breaking of criminal law. David Matza is a key progenitor of the 'Big Bang' in criminology during the 1960s, the epistemological and political break associated in this country above all with the NDC and new deviancy theory. The New Criminology and Critical Criminology, Taylor, Walton and Young's 1975 companion volume of essays, marked the zenith of radical criminology in what Jock Young himself was soon to call its 'left idealist' form. What Is To Be Done About Law and Order? is the flagship of the realist turn by many erstwhile 'new criminologists' during the 1980s, such as Jock Young, John Lea, Richard Kinsey and Roger Matthews.
