Book review: Police Culture in a Changing World
| Author | Simon Holdaway |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895812468661 |
| Date | 01 February 2013 |
| Published date | 01 February 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 119
book throughout. In some places, multiple quotations are used to evidence a point of par-
ticular importance; in others, single extended extracts offer more detail. Without superflu-
ous analytical rhetoric, these quotations light up the text and illustrate the muted aspirations
of a group of offenders who seem permanently subdued by the experience of the life
sentence. This text should be read by a wide audience: by academics interested in desist-
ance, offender management and long-term imprisonment, and, I very much hope, by crim-
inal justice practitioners who face the uneasy task of balancing care and control. Above
all, Life after Life Imprisonment highlights the importance of trust, acceptance and genu-
ine engagement as the sine qua non of professional practice, and as the basis for strength-
ening offenders’ efforts to develop non-offending identities. In all, it is a very good book.
Reference
Maruna S (2001) Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives. Washington,
DC: American Psychological Association.
Bethan Loftus,
Police Culture in a Changing World. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009; 236 pp.:
9780199653539, £19.99 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Simon Holdaway, University of Sheffield, UK
The occupational culture of the police lower ranks has attracted the interest of criminolo-
gists for over two decades. Although the number of empirical studies completed is quite
small, inferences and commentary drawn from them have been wide-ranging. Two criti-
cisms, neither based on particularly robust empirical evidence, have become taken-for-
granted assumptions within criminological debate. The first is that the occupational
culture must have changed since the early studies were completed. The second is that
there are occupational cultures, not one unifying culture.
Police Culture in a Changing World is based on 18 months’ participant observation in
an English constabulary, particularly in two police divisions, one urban, one rural.
Loftus’s study indicates that she observed and probed officers’ working practices with an
analytical ability that has led to a very welcome and interesting research monograph. On
the basis of her work we can further assess whether or not the occupational culture (at
times she calls it the ‘inner life of policing’) has changed, and whether or not it remains
a unified cohesive structure, binding working relationships and practices.
Following a description of the early studies of the occupational culture in the USA
and the UK, Bethan Loftus asks if they still hold relevance within a societal context of
policing marked by significant social and legal change. The Police and Criminal Evidence
Act 1984; a new public rhetoric of law and order; the politics of policing diversity; and
central features of late modern societies, not least the creation of the new unemployed, a
marginalized class of young men, are presented as central to the wider context within
which the study was undertaken. Importantly, this and other features of late modernity
draw attention to how social class has been neglected by previous studies of the occupa-
tional culture, something Loftus further addresses in a separate chapter.
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