Introduction: Crime at the Millennium — New Anxieties and Old Issues

Abstract

We stand on the threshold of the twenty-first century with all its promise of new opportunities, new technologies and presently unthought-of discourses and discoveries. Yet, despite the appetite for novelty, innovation and change which a millennium assuredly provokes, many of the recurring social problems of the twentieth century seem, today, to be as unamenable to the most modern remedies as they have ever been. They remain with us, unresolved, blots on the horizon of the twentieth-first century. Nowhere are these challenges to the concept of ‘social progress’ more evident than in the continuing debates about distributive justice (in recent years given an even sharper edge by mass long-term unemployment and the accompanying crises of western welfare systems); and in equally heated debates about crime and punishment; legitimate modes of social regulation, policing and penality; and the ever-problematic relationships between social justice and criminal justice.