ABSTRACT
Social control was espoused as the humane, non-violent alternative to order maintenance through the criminal justice system because that rested ultimately upon the potential delivery of physical force and the pain of imprisonment. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the development of labelling theory, and later critical criminologies, upended the moral/political evaluation of social control, and its causal significance. Formal social-control institutions were castigated as causes of the most seriously problematic behaviour that came to be criminalized. Since the 1980s, discussions of social control have become bifurcated, reflecting more general destructuring impulses in criminology and social science. On the one hand, studies of specific formal control institutions, such as policing, prosecution and punishment, have proliferated. The most influential overall analysis of crime-control trends in recent decades has been Garland's Culture of Control, which pays due weight to social, economic and cultural aspects of the development of crime-control practices in late-modern times.
