ABSTRACT
Conversely, for a public surrounded by the media’s constant parading of criminal statistics and horror stories, the need to espouse a general social theory of crime smacks of ivory tower irrelevancy or another form of do-gooder ‘social
liberalism’. Into this breach has stepped right realism. Right realism speaks the language of popular dissatisfaction and popular anger, it is not some simple pragmatic managerialism, but an appeal to the world view of the ordinary person who understands that the others have lost the fear of punishment, that the criminal justice system is loaded in favour of the criminal, that liberal lawyers get too many criminals off, that the courts do not pass sufficiently stiff punishments, that offenders do not receive their ‘just deserts’, and that criminology provides justifications for crime, that the rehabilitative ethos merely provided excuses for offenders (see, for example, Patricia Morgan, Delinquent Fantasies, 1978). Alongside right realism we have a dry narrowly focused managerialism, exampled by government bodies which sponsor research into the effect of steering car locks and surveillance cameras.
