The Reality of Right-Wing Criminology

Abstract

Writing in 1973, the American ‘futurologist’, Alvin Toffler, observed that

Not so many years ago, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence prophesied that, unless corrective action was taken quickly, the US ghettoes would become ‘places of terror, perhaps entirely uncontrolled during the night-time hours’. It went on to predict that schools, playgrounds, apartment houses, libraries and other structures would need day-time police, and that armed guards would have to ‘ride shot-gun’ on our means of transportation, our buses and our trains. Anyone who lives in a major US city, or who has been frisked on the way into a jet, knows that we have already fulfilled many of their nightmarish predictions. (Toffler, 1973, p. 13)

Until very recently, British observers would have thought of this kind of breakdown in urban life as being intrinsically American, and they would have distrusted any attempt to speak of any such breakdown in the British environment. ‘It couldn’t happen here’, in a country that was traditionally non-violent and crime-free, especially when compared to the street corner of American ghettoes, viewed every evening on television police shows like Kojak or Starsky and Hutch.