Review: Lush Life: Constructing Organised Crime in the UK, Doing Probation Work: Identity in a Criminal Justice Occupation
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| Author | Oliver Smith,Jill Annison,Chris Pac-Soo |
| DOI | 10.1350/pojo.2013.86.2.621 |
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
CHRIS PAC-SOO
Reviews Editor
chris.pacsoo@plymouth.ac.uk
REVIEWS
LUSH LIFE: CONSTRUCTING ORGANISED CRIME IN
THE UK
Dick Hobbs
Oxford University Press, Oxford
hardback ISBN-10 0199668280; ISBN-13: 978-0199668281,
£65.00; 335pp
Review by Dr Oliver Smith, Plymouth University
There is no shortage of discussion within the academic commun-
ity around organised crime, and a lack of clear legal or academic
definitions has not held back the palpable anxiety and concern
engendered by political and law enforcement discourse. We do
not have to look far or hard for myriad tomes on the control or
policing of organised crime, while thorough analysis and ethno-
graphic exploration of organised crime and associated criminal
markets have been conspicuous by their absence. It is this void
that Dick Hobbs has spent much of his career filling, through
rich and detailed analysis, exploration and discussion. Lush Life
offers the reader an absorbing submersion into the criminal
underworld of Dogtown, a series of neighbourhoods in the East
End of London that have formed the basis for much of his earlier
research, not least Doing the Business: Entrepreneurship, the
Working Class and Detectives in the East End of London. This
was widely regarded as an essential piece of work, which
investigated the development of criminal entrepreneurship
against the backdrop of nascent neoliberalism and deindustrial-
isation that formed the cornerstone of Thatcher’s Britain. It is
within these pages that Hobbs positions himself as providing an
alternative and altogether more compelling narrative to the issue
of organised crime than that offered by the politically driven
policing perspective. He follows up with Bad Business, a book
which through the use of detailed and original data examines the
shifting terrain of organised crime in the UK, the decline of
particular criminal skills and enterprises, and the rise of others in
line with burgeoning consumer markets that are based upon a
heady cocktail of hedonistic consumption and excess.
190 The Police Journal, Volume 86 (2013)
DOI: 10.1350/pojo.2013.86.2.621
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