The New Criminologies in Canada: Crime, State and Control

Louis A. Knafla is a history professor at the University of Calgary.

History, ideology, politics, and economics are now being perceived by criminologists as essential elements in the creation of crime and criminals, and in the concepts of justice and social order. Professor Fleming, of the Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, is a member of The Centre for Criminological Research who has gone beyond the traditional boundaries of the disciplines of criminology in his own work on crime, law, and deviance, and has brought together here a multi-faceted series of generally penetrating essays to forge a critical understanding of crime and state control in Canada within an international perspective. The essays in Part I describe some of the new approaches in criminology in Canada, and those in Part II are concerned with government involvement with corporations both as perpetrators and as victims. The studies of John Hagan, and W. Gordon West and D. Laureen Snider are particularly well developed. Pant III focuses on the relatively new area of the political economy of crime, exploring the themes of social control and decarceration. Part IV contains a number of short analyses that reflect contemporary theory and research, ranging from youth and unemployment to racketeering and suicidal inmates.

Collections of essays are often too disparate to provide a good read, a central focus, or interrelated themes. This book is an exception. Each part is introduced by an incisive introduction, the essays are often lively and clearly expressed, each essay has a useful bibliography, and the book is attractively produced. For some of the themes, such as the critical conflict and fundamentalist dichotomy, one would wish for a general introduction or conclusion. And the lack of an index precludes browsing either for persons, subjects, or terms of interest. Nonetheless, Professor Fleming and Oxford University Press should be congratulated for the planning and execution of a good collection of essays, which will form a part of contemporary reading and thought for many years to come.