ABSTRACT
Karl Mannheim defines the utopian mentality in the following way: 'a state of mind is utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs'. Zygmunt Bauman defines utopia by invoking the dual sense of its original meaning. Utopias are clearly connected with, as Adam Smith would have put it, the passions. Within criminology, from the point of view of the insider, the position, of course, is more complex. Many criminologists would wish, to point to the occasional contributions criminology and/or the study of crime and its control have made to the advancement of general sociology. David Downes and Paul Rock argue that what amounts to criminology' is better understood as the residues of knowledge left behind by the occasional visits of scholars emanating from a master discipline. Criminology becomes primarily an expression of a complex combination of a series of powerknowledge relations and is perceived as, again, always open to deconstruction.
