Book Review: Social Democratic Criminology by Robert Reiner
| Author | Richard Sparks |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221089676 |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Reiner, Social Democratic Criminology, Routledge: Abingdon, 2021; 180 pp.: 9781138238794, £34.99
(pbk)
Reviewed by: Richard Sparks, University of Edinburgh, UK
To say that Robert Reiner is one of the most admired scholars in criminology is to state
the more than obvious. Reiner’s achievements are legion, and his personal as well as aca-
demic influence immense. As long ago as the early 1990s Paul Rock’s sketch of the social
organization of criminology in Britain identified Reiner as the field’s most influential
member (Rock, 1994), as much for his reach as a teacher, mentor and model as his then-
published work. That work, however, has been truly remarkable in its scope and quality.
Reiner was by no means alone in developing the sociology of policing as a topic of
inquiry in the United Kingdom, but his studies in that field reached across and beyond
criminology as an academic field (including into the professional formation and changing
consciousness of police officers themselves). This is far from all, of course. Reiner’s work
on crime in news media and popular culture, his contributions as an editor (most obvi-
ously with Mike Maguire and Rod Morgan on the first five editions of the Oxford
Handbook of Criminology) and much else, have established him as a central figure.
Reiner’s personal qualities of probity, gentleness and humour are also, quite rightly,
legendary. Not only is he one of our most admired colleagues, but also among the
best-loved.
Over the last decade or so, Reiner’s central focus has been on questions of crime and
political economy, especially the effects of neo-liberalism as a political ideology and its
associated inventions in respect of policy and practice. This is not a new concern for him
—indeed it is prefigured long ago in essays such as ‘British criminology and the State’
(1988). It has however become a more focal and, I think, somehow more urgent
theme. Social Democratic Criminology is centrally concerned with the political
economy of crime and punishment, and especially with recovering prior, and ultimately
discovering new, alternatives to neo-liberal perspectives on these topics.
Sometimes people grow more radical with age, in the manner sometimes attributed to
Bertrand Russell. And sometimes they achieve this largely by standing still, or at least by
holding on tenaciously to certain articles of their faith. In Social Democratic Criminology
Robert Reiner has given us one of his most conceptually ambitious as well as most
Theoretical Criminology
2022, Vol. 26(3) 515–522
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13624806221089676
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