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David Downes' early work on delinquency in East London made an original contribution to the comparative study of anomie and subcultural theory, and social policy on education and employment. His research and writing went on to include the study of gambling, drugs policy and the state of criminological theory. His later work broke new ground in detailed, cross-national, comparative analysis of criminal justice and penal policy, in particular in relation to England and the Netherlands. A related endeavour was to contribute (with Rod Morgan) to the burgeoning study of the politics of crime control. He was a founding member of the National Deviancy Conference in 1968 and of the Mannheim Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at the LSE in 1989. He edited the British Journal of Criminology from 1985 until 1990. His most recent work (with Tim Newburn and Paul Rock) has been on the official history of criminal justice policy in England and Wales 1960-1997.
List of contents
Contents: Introduction; Published writings; The teen canteen: in at the end; Educating for uncertainty (with Fred Flower); Delinquent subcultures in Stepney and Poplar: informal observation; Summary and conclusions; Gambling as a sociological problem; Gambling as a social problem (with B.P. Davies, M.E. David and P. Stone); Promise and performance in British criminology; Praxis makes perfect: a critique of critical criminology (with Paul Rock); Abolition: possibilities and pitfalls; Law and order: theft of an issue; Theories of decarceration: problems of accounting for sentencing trends in the Netherlands; The depth of imprisonment: an exploratory study of the Netherlands and England; Employment schemes for offenders; Mitigating the social effects of unemployment; Dumping the 'hostages to fortune'? The politics of law and order in post-war Britain (with Rod Morgan); The macho penal economy: mass incarceration in the United States - a European perspective; Toughing it out: from Labour opposition to Labour government; Visions of penal control in the Netherlands; Name index.
About the author
David Downes is Professor Emeritus of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.
