Editorial
| Author | David J. Smith |
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370804038705 |
| Published date | 01 January 2004 |
| Date | 01 January 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Editorial
Criminology and the Wider Europe
David J. Smith
Centre for Law and Society, University of Edinburgh, UK
Why launch a new criminology journal in January 2004? From the
intensity of discussion at the first two annual conferences of the European
Society of Criminology in Lausanne and then Toledo there is a sense that
criminology in Europe is reaching a tipping point, and that once this point
is reached there will be rapid growth. The purpose of this journal is to
support and stimulate that growth by providing a forum for research and
scholarship on crime and criminal justice institutions.
A number of forces are driving the development of criminology in
Europe. The most obvious one is the rising profile of crime control,
criminal justice and security in European politics. In many European
countries, the politics surrounding crime control and criminal justice were
largely consensual for much of the period since the Second World War, but
this is changing. The politicization of crime and punishment combines with
a successful effort by far right parties to define migration and asylum
seekers as a focal political issue. The link between crime and immigration
in European politics is that some migrant groups, such as Albanians in
Greece, tend to be criminalized. Moreover, the same police are responsible
for controlling both crime and illegal immigration, so that checks on the
status of migrants can also be used to target potential criminals. At a
deeper level, of course, migrants represent the ‘other’ against which
longstanding respectable citizens define themselves, and tend to merge in
the collective consciousness with the criminal ‘other’.
In this respect, Britain is the paradigmatic case. In the Britain of the
1950s, 1960s and 1970s, both crime and immigration (always bracketed
with ‘race relations’) stood largely outside the competition between polit-
ical parties, which tended to avoid bidding up the punitiveness of the
criminal justice system. At the same time, the parties cooperated with each
other to introduce more and more stringent controls against immigration
Volume 1 (1): 5–15: 1477-3708
DOI: 10.1177/1477370804038705
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA, and New Delhi
www.sagepublications.com
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