ABSTRACT
This has been the stuff of much observation. Giddens (1990), for example, colourfully equates everyday life in late modernity with trying to regain control of an out-of-control juggernaut. Mike Davis (1990, 1998) and Zygmunt Bauman (1987, 1998), meanwhile, see the future only in terms of a new dialectic of social control predicated on each individual’s ability to bridge the cultural/financial gap that dictates entry into the consumer society, creating a new category of the excluded urban repressed. However, from a purely criminological perspective, perhaps the best articulation of the impact of current social and economic conditions on individual subjectivity is the one set out by Jock Young:
We live now in a much more difficult world: we face a greater range in life choices than ever before, our lives are less firmly embedded in work and relationships, our everyday existence is experienced as a series of encounters with risk either in actuality or in the shape of fears and apprehensions. We feel both materially insecure and ontologically precarious. (Young 1999: vi)12
What all these commentators have in common is the belief that success in tackling the contemporary crime problem depends upon acknowledging the ‘ontological insecurity’ of feeling physically and psychologically at risk in an unstable and changing world. In short, we must engage with the contingencies and dilemmas/the dilemmas of the contingent brought about by the late modern condition.
