ABSTRACT
Building on the “ground work,” we laid out in Chapters 1–3. In this chapter, we summarise and reflect on the main findings of our investigations into the legacy of Thatcherism on crime, criminal careers, public attitudes, and the criminal justice system in Britain. As the earlier chapters focused on the welfare and housing (Chapter 4), the economy, education, and criminal careers (Chapter 5), public attitudes (Chapter 6), the criminal justice system's degree of punitiveness (Chapter 7), and the spatial location of British prisons (Chapter 8) have shown, this was a multidimensional impact with numerous lines of outcome. The legacy of Thatcherism was temporal (as one would imagine), but also socio-spatial in that it affected different groups of people in different parts of the country in different ways, often in ways which reinforced existing inequalities. We also take the time to reflect on the use of a single case study, what this can and cannot tell us about legacies, and the ethical issues raised by a study of this nature.
