Rethinking Law and Order. A Rejoinder (Review Essay)
| Author | Russell Hogg,David Brown |
| Published date | 01 December 1999 |
| Date | 01 December 1999 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/000486589903200311 |
REVIEWS
have
succeeded in
treading
the
difficult line
between
grand
theory
and
blind
engagement with
the
minutiae of practice.
Rethinking
Lawand
Order
will
enhance
their
reputations in this regard.
References
Castles, E (1985). The
Working
Class
and
Welfare,
Wellington,
Allen
and Unwin.
Elias, N. (1988). Violence and Civilisation, in J. Keane (ed), Civic
Society
and
the
State,
London,
Verso.
Federal Justice Office (1992).
Creating
a
Safer
Community: Crime
Prevention
andCommunity
Safety
into
the
21stCentury, Canberra,
AGPS
Freiberg, A. (1995).
The
Politics of Sentencing Reform, in C. Clarkson and R. Morgan (eds.), The
Politics
of
Sentencing
Reform,
Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Morris, N. &Hawkins, G.
(1970).
The Honest
Politician's
Guide to Crime Control,
Chicago,
University of Chicago Press.
Mukherjee, S. &Dagger, D. (1995). The Size of the Crime
Problem
in Australia (2nd Edition),
Canberra, Australian Institute of Criminology.
Adam Sutton and Fiona Haines
University
of
Melbourne
Rethinking Law and
Order:
ARejoinder
(Review
Essay)
We are grateful to George Pavlich, Fiona Haines and
Adam
Sutton
for
their
generous comments
on
Rethinking
Law and Order
and
to
the
book
review
editor of
the
Australian and
New
Zealand Journal
of
Criminology for affording us
the
opportunity to briefly respond.
One
criticism made in
both
reviews is
that
the
book fails to set
out
the
more
detailed alternative political strategy promised in its title. Whilst we
cannot
entirely
wriggle out of this we will devote this rejoinder to an earnest attempt to do so.
Rethinking
Law and
Order
was written in
what
might be called a'post..critical'
vein.
One
of us has written elsewhere about
the
limits of
the
tradition of critique
within
criminology (Hogg, 1996).
At
some risk of over..simplification
the
point
of
this argument was to deny
that
the
domain of politics and
the
academic discipline
of criminology are or could ever be transparent to
each
other's objects, methods
and
knowledges. Moreover, it dismisses
the
claim
of
critique to occupy some privi..
leged seat at
the
pinnacle of
an
ethical heirarchy of knowledges, in
which
it would
make ethical and political' sense to judge practical political outcomes
and
policies
against the benchmarks supplied by critical theory.
The
upshot of
this
is
that
we resist
the
idea
that
there
is any useful way in
which
we might lay down atransformative trail or a political blueprint in relation
to a future law
and
order strategy.
The
'rethinking'
we seek is of a
much
more
modest
kind. It is
centred
on
sketching
both
the the
principal challenges
that
confront
those
who
seek
in
their
various
ways
to
develop
more
progressive
approaches to law
and
order
and
some of
the
available
avenues for doing so.
The
THE
AUSTRAUAN
AND NEW
ZEALAND
JOURNAL
OF
CRIMINOLOGY
331
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