ABSTRACT
While criminologists had often been arguing amongst themselves in the pursuit of the ‘holy grail’ of an all-encompassing explanation of crime and criminal behaviour, there is evidence that governments had lost patience with a discipline that seemed no closer than ever to solving the crime problem. One of the world’s leading criminologists, the Australian John Braithwaite had perceptively observed as recently as 1989:
The present state of criminology is one of abject failure in its own terms. We cannot say anything convincing to the community about the causes of crime; we cannot prescribe policies that will work to reduce crime; we cannot in all honesty say that societies spending more on criminological research get better criminal justice policies than those that spend little or nothing on criminology.
