Social democracy and the crime question in Britain : 1945 to 1980.

This thesis has the twin purposes of (a) providing an historical
narrative of the evolution of social democratic, conservative and
liberal approaches to crime in Britain since the war, and (b) (in part
through this historical investigation) beginning to reconstruct the
social-democratic form of "socialist-criminology", in both its academic
and political versions, for present and future use.
The thesis is therefore organised in part as a chronological
investigation. Chapters One, Two, Three, Five and Six focus in part on
the general development of the crime debates in the 1940's, the middle
1950's, the early 1960's, the late 1960's to early 1970's, and the late
1970's respectively. But they also depart from a purely chronological
presentation in order to allow a more detailed interrogation of particular
topics in popular, political and academic debate. Thus, Chapter One
attempts to describe the general character of social democratic criminology
in the form it assumed in the 1940's, with an eye to its longer term
effects in the later post-war period. Chapter Two contains an analytical
essay on the responses of the different ideologies to Homicide and
Capital Punishment. Chapter Three departs from its narrative to examine
the re-emergence of the youth problem in the early 1960's as a major social
issue. Chapter Five devolves around an essay on the rapid development of
the major institutions of State power (particularly, social work, the
police and prisons) during the late 1960's and the early 1970's; and
Chapter Six, with its historical focus on the late 1970's, contains two
other essays: (a) on the rise of the radical Right and its critique of
criminal justice and social welfare systems, and (b) an analysis of the
relationship between Conservative and Social-democratic ideology and the
particular questions of the criminality of the powerful and so-called
organised crime.
Chapters Four and Seven depart from this form of presentation.
Chapter Four provides an account and a critique of social democratic
approaches to crimes against women and the criminality of women. Chapter
Seven is the programmatic conclusion to the critique of social democratic
criminology provided earlier: it is an attempted first move, in seriously
changed circumstances (at the end of the post-war boom), to sketch out the
elements of a reconstructed socialist criminology.