ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at accounts of crime that came into prominence during the latter part of the twentieth century. Foucault questions the roots and patterns of ideas found in social life and how they help to construct what is going on in social worlds. Foucault sowed the seeds of a major ‘anti-criminology’ movement, arguing that criminology was a discourse through which power–knowledge relations were enacted. The New Criminology eventually critiqued much of this new radicalism and itself unfolded into a number of other positions. Some of those involved left criminology altogether and developed other fields such as cultural studies or sexuality studies. Ways of seeing crime and deviance as ideologically driven categories that stretched the concerns of criminology away from offenders toward the role of social control. Labelling theory – with its rejection of so-called positivistic criminology and its deterministic understanding of human action – was a key component in the development of the sociology of deviance.
