Book Review: In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests and Institutions, Public Indecency in England 1857–1960, Criminalization: The Political Morality of the Criminal Law, Criminalisation and Criminal Responsibility in Australia and Criminal Laws
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663917747316 |
| Author | David Dixon |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Social & Legal Studies
2017, Vol. 26(6) 776–789
Book Reviews
ª The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663917747316
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N LACEY, In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests and Institutions. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016, pp. 237, ISBN 9780199248209, £75.00 (hbk), 9780199248216
£30.00 (pbk).
DJ COX, K STEVENSON, C HARRIS AND J ROWBOTHAM, Public Indecency in England 1857–
1960. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015, pp. 237, ISBN 9780415524711, £90.00 (hbk).
RA DUFF, L FARMER, SE MARSHALL, M RENZO AND V TADROS (eds), Criminalization: The
Political Morality of the Criminal Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 313, ISBN
9780198726357, £65.00 (hbk).
T CROFTS AND A LOUGHNAN (eds), Criminalisation and Criminal Responsibility in Australia. South
Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 322, ISBN 9780195597561, AUD$95.
D BROWN, D FARRIER, L MCNAMARA, A STEEL, M GREWCOCK, J QUILTER AND M
SCHWARTZ, Criminal Laws (6th edition). Sydney: Federation Press, 2015, pp. 1393, ISBN
978186287984, AUD$155 (pbk).
The spark for From Prohibition to Regulation (Dixon, 1991), reviewed in the first issue
of SLS by Pat O’Malley, was the insistence by the new criminologies of the 1970s that, in
order to understand crime (and deviance more generally), we must understand the social
reaction which defines certain behaviour as such. My book was intended to investigate
the legislation of criminal prohibitions, the formal apex of social reaction. I excavated
the prohibition of English street betting in 1906, and the fate of that prohibition as the
state shifted through mid-century towards other means of control, such as licensing,
registration and taxation.
As an undergraduate studying law, I had been disappointed and alienated by the
teaching of criminal law via an arid, unpopulated combination of black-letter appeal
cases and analytical philosophy. How this might relate to social reality was a mystery to
me and a matter of apparent indifference to my lecturers. In a philosophy of criminal law
seminar, we were expected to justify punishment, analyse free will and count angels on
pinheads while saying, as a fellow student did in a cut-glass accent, things like ‘human
life is overvalued’. I should have assured him that his certainly wasn’t, but instead, I tried
to present a paper on Stanley Cohen and the National Deviancy Conference. The
renowned professor looked like he’d smelt something very bad and suggested that I
should ‘move on to something else’. I did, but not quite as he intended, getting away
Book Reviews
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from law as quickly as I could and heading for criminology and sociology which at least
were interested in people and how the world worked. The PhD which turned into From
Prohibition to Regulation was the result.
Pat O’Malley was characteristically incisive but gentle in his review. My book con-
tained some decent social history (about discretion and corruption in policing, working-
class respectability and honourable if misguided efforts of liberal social reformers).
However, the theoretical framework used to analyse...
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