A Just Measure of Pain

The March book club choice is the classic text on the history of the prison, Michael Ignatieff's A Just Measure of Pain. Part of that pantheon of greats on the formation of the prison in its historical and social context, Ignatieff takes a look at the development of the institution from 1750 to 1850.

Where: Mulligan's, Pool Beg Street, Dublin 2 - in the back room
When: 6pm Wednesday 27th March

'Uppity Civilians' and 'Cyber Vigilantes': The Role of the General Public in Policing Cyber Crime

The month The Differential Association looked at an article from Laura Huey, Johnny Nhan and Ryan Broll, which explored the topic of cyber crime. The tantalisingly new frontier of the world wide web has delivered, Janus-like, both a communications and technological marvel of our time, as well as an unwieldy virtual space in which crime flourishes unchecked and unpoliced. For example, the article cites figures that only one in 6,500 online crimes are reported to the police, with most minor frauds drawing negligible actions from the authorities.

The costs of cyber crime are notoriously difficult to precisely state, as a recent University of Cambridge study has suggested. Previous estimates ranging in the tens of billions have been criticised as wildly inflated. The Cambridge research concluded that the costs of a state's antivirus software can often impose a greater financial burden on the nation's individuals than the direct costs of fraudulent internet schemes.

Huey et al argue that these costs of policing the internet impose onerous burdens on law enforcement, further suggesting that the forms which traditional policing takes are unsuited to a frontier which has no geography and to which we have yet to fully adapt. Traditional policing is built on a framework of geography, they write that forces are organised by divisions, by local policing areas, and by the individual's 'beat', and that such a framework struggles to cope with virtual space. They argue that the time and resources required for thorough policing of the Internet are beyond the scope of budgetary limits.

One of the most emotively charged areas of cyber crime, as well as the area that most often attracts resources, is that of child pornography and online grooming. This has been an area of persistent concern in recent decades. Rapid sophistication of our everyday technology has created uncertainty and anxiety as we run to get to grips with how our world has changed. Measures to combat child sex abuse have proliferated, such as the 2002 Sex Offenders Act, England and Wales, which explicitly criminalised for the first time the act of grooming a young person via internet communications. The Metropolitan Police in London, for example, have a covert Internet surveillance unit comprising over 50 investigators. Officers pose online as young children and a crime triggers an instant response from the team. This team was founded after the realisation by the Met that they would have to change how they operated, embracing pro-active targeting.

In this article, Huey et al have explored the work of "voluntary associations of citizens engaged in proactive policing on the Internet". These include online communities targeting various chat forums and websites, using their computer skills and time to identify and track criminal offenders. The article looks, in particular, at volunteer communities established to disrupt and deter the online activity of paedophiles. Members pose as children on chat forums, in an attempt to retrieve and pass identifying information along to the police. This kind of activity has been defined as 'civilian policing'.

The DA expressed wonder at the varying levels of evidence such activity would provide. The article tells us that many of these volunteers participate in training to ensure any evidence collected is legally admissible. While such training is crucial and without it the volunteers’ activity would be self-defeating, members wondered about how legally robust this training is. One group referred to in the article had a record of dozens of arrests and a 100 per cent conviction rate. However, once again acknowledging the transnational nature of the Internet, it would be interesting to have some idea of how this system worked across different legal jurisdictions.

The DA wondered whether such 'civilian policing' collectives were akin to David Garland’s concept of adaptive approaches to crime, described in Culture of Control as “usually developed by means of cumulative, low-visibility administrative decisions, rather than as announced policies subject to political or public debate”.

Garland's responsibilization strategy is defined as “an enhanced network of a more or less directed, more or less informal crime control, complementing and extending the formal controls of the criminal justice state”.  The police seek to build alliances with citizens to instil a sense of responsibility for crime-fighting, and to diffuse the onus of policing, such strategies include the now ubiquitous Neighbourhood Watch schemes. The difficulty emerges in trying to instil a sense of responsibility for something always previously assumed to be a solely state-activated activity. Responsibilization, according to Garland, is the shedding of state sovereignty, and an attempt at what Foucault called ‘governmentality’, which involves the shaping and enlisting of others to suit and work towards government policies.

The research methodology used by Huey et al incorporates nodal governance theory, this is an elaboration of network theory which looks at how a variety of actors interact to govern the systems they inhabit. It is a way of capturing the complex process of governance by incorporating all of the relevant actors. In this article, the four sets of actors are collectively referred to as nodal clusters: government, law enforcement, private industry and the general public.

The authors collected responses from over 200 volunteers engaged in 'civilian policing'; we were disappointed that there was only one full-length interview conducted with these volunteers, and it is suggested that further interviews would provide greater insight. However, four police officers were interviewed which adds a particularly welcome viewpoint on the issue.

The survey asked volunteers to provide their motive for involvement. The most common motive cited was television or the media, many of which were linked to the US television show 'To Catch a Predator'. This was usually accompanied with a desire to help others and reasons under the general category of 'justice', while a smaller minority reported that either they or someone they knew had previously been a victim of abuse.

The authors cite one response as typical: "Combating online predators takes HOURS of sitting at a computer screen.  There just isn’t enough manpower Colonel.  There are specialized units out there, but it’s still a number’s game.  Hundreds of law enforcement versus thousands of predators". This language seemed indicative of a personal narrative of heroism, a black and white crusade, draped in language of North American law enforcement culture and pop culture. Yet another example likened the internet chat scene to the Wild West.

The monsterisation of sex offenders was also very evident, for example among parents who expressed fears for their children, "I went and looked at my 13 year-old daughter peacefully sleeping and decided I needed to do something to stop these demons". Some websites also choose to herald their role in the apprehension of an offender with announcements such as the following: "We are very happy that these two subhuman individuals…". The demonisation of sex offenders, especially those who offend against children, is a component of the late-modern escalation of concern about the issue, previously referred to. In an article by Lieb et al, about post-conviction controls for sex offenders, they cite research which suggests that in the US at least five murders have occurred as a result of persons convicted of sex offences being found and tracked via the use of an online register.

The DA has previously discussed an article by Huey, which explored the appeal of exhibits of the macabre. In Crime Behind the Glass Huey looked at the popular appeal of cultural fixtures, such as the Jack the Ripper walking tour in London, or the Kriminalmuseum in Vienna which she looked at in some detail, and posed questions about the appeal of such cultural phenomena. The DA suggested that there is an overlap with the current article in relation to the appeal of the horrific. The television show mentioned, 'To Catch a Predator', is one example of popular entertained structured around the premise that the public are fascinated by and want to watch entertainment shows based on crime. The step of going further, and actively participating in the apprehension of a criminal chimes perfectly with the voyeurism that Huey previously identified as comprising an inevitable component of our natures.

The 'civilian policing' volunteers in the article comprise a surprising number of highly-skilled members. The organisations too often have a rigid structure and vetting procedure for members, and the most highly valued roles of decoy and verifier are difficult to attain. Regular contact is mandatory, and some of the groups use Facebook ‘clean-up’ operations as a tool to prove a member's mettle. Estimates suggest that such activity has resulted in the removal of 13,000 profiles of known sex offenders from Facebook. The DA wondered whether this was a self-defeating move with negative impacts on both offender reintegration and rehabilitation, as well as encouraging the creation of profiles which provided false information of identity. We also found ourselves drawn into a discussion of the responsibilities of companies who run social-networking websites.

The inclusion of police interviews really enriched the data. The attitudes of the police were fascinating, ranging from positive and hopeful about engagement in structured partnerships to the departments which refused to work with the groups. Many of these police departments remained fearful for members' safety, and aware of the problematic legal issues, while some felt the work was something they could do themselves. In reference to this last point, the authors mention the well-researched police subculture which can include lack of trust in outsiders. Many of the dubious police departments simply want tips and information and many of the larger 'civilian policing' groups hand over all information without any expectations of involvement, this 'Information First' police is in great contrast to those groups who have co-operated in sting operations targeted at persons met online.

The authors suggest that the greatest resources the members have are time and commitment. They write that 'civilian policing' seems to be aimed at creating ‘digitally defensible spaces’, transforming virtual spaces into spaces that more closely resemble physical spaces in an attempt to increase the accountability of the virtual world, something which requires members to ‘buy in’ as security stakeholders. Nhan and Huey have previously written that “structural and cultural limitations upon traditional policing agencies have resulted in a security deficit in the online world”. They argue that improving this situation does not involve recruiting more specialised police or resources, rather it requires a collaborative effort, due to the distributive nature of the internet. They recommend the greater utilisation of the nodal cluster of the general public, contending that this is a resource which can effectively be used to tackle cyber crime. They also recommend enhanced legal liability training for such groups, as well as the more widespread use of 'Information First' schemes which see all information passed along to law enforcement agencies.

This article provides a fascinating glimpse into the activities of citizens who take it upon themselves to dedicate time to 'civilian policing'. While this was an area of which the DA had known very little before, Huey et al’s article certainly provided for some engaging and intriguing debate. It will be most interesting to watch the progress of research in this area.

This month's blog was written by Colette Barry and Lynsey Black.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors' alone. 

Cyber Vigilantes

The next meeting of the Differential Association will take place on Wednesday 20th February.

We will be discussing the work of online communities in policing internet activity, known as 'civilian policing'. This topic has been dealt with in an article by Laura Huey, Johnny Nhan and Ryan Broll , who present their research as part of a longer-term project which seeks to explore the relationship between civilian policing online and law enforcement agencies. It poses the question of how traditional policing should approach the security issues raised by the internet and argues that as the internet is of such a collaborative nature, it requires a vastly different approach to security.

Related to this, and particularly to Huey et al's close analysis of one online community which attempts to provide information on paedophiles to law enforcement, we will also be looking at the growth of post-conviction restrictions on sex offenders in the US and UK. This has been explored in an article by Lieb at al which will form the basis of our discussion.

When: Wednesday 20th February

Time: 6pm

Where: Mulligan's of Poolbeg Street, back room

CCTV: What is it good for?

It was the book club's last meeting of 2012, the Xmas Xtravaganza, and we decided to do something different and set an open topic: CCTV. Unrestricted by the concerns of a single article, people brought to the table a variety of questions and perspectives on the topic: Has the advent of CCTV heralded Foucault’s predictions of a panopticon society? Is it a legitimate tool of modern security and a by-product of increased desire for order in a consumer society? Does the rise in CCTV increase feelings of safety or personal anxiety? Why has it become so widely accepted?

The topic of CCTV provided scope for an emotive turn in our DA discussion, with some people discovering a previously hidden libertarian! CCTV acts like a probing eye, invading the most mundane of our day-to-day moments, contravening our civil liberties. Conversely, others did not see CCTV as an evolution of something sinister, rather a sidebar in the technological age; a commodity which is perhaps less widespread and effective than realised (see for example the varying levels of competence with which CCTV is actually used).

The primary concern of DA members opposed to security cameras related to privacy.  Everyone is familiar with embarrassing images of anonymous strangers captured on CCTV which wind-up immortalised on a CCTV show-reel amusing audiences on YouTube or late night TV; what if that was to happen to you? Given the prevalence of these images it is no a wonder that feelings of invasion and humiliation are so closely linked to CCTV. However, surely the device to capture people’s embarrassing moments in this manner is less likely to be peering down from a city corner, and much more likely to be resting innocuously in people’s pockets? The proliferation of the smartphone enables users to capture images and videos of anyone around and within an instant upload it up onto the internet. Moreover, people have few qualms uploading photos from their own life, their own embarrassing moments and nights out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr and any other social website you care to mention. These sites generally don’t just contain images, comments, dates and details of other people, but also personal information like date of birth, relationship status and even current location. Is it duplicitous to be so vehemently opposed to CCTV while giving out more personal data than a security camera could ever capture? Viewed this way, is the sting taken out of the idea of CCTV as personal invasion?

The voluntary nature of people's usage of these sites is of course the counter-argument. Perhaps it is because great swathes of people now have so much control over their image that it feels like an even greater impropriety when it is taken out of their hands.

It was suggested that the idea of privacy of movement and action in a public space is a paradox worthy of Catch-22, however. In the end some people proposed that rather than right to privacy, the use of CCTV images could be restrained by stringent data protection laws, making company’s liable for the uploading of images on the internet. For those of us DA members who viewed the CCTV threat as something shadowy, unproven and verging on the mythic, are we blithely ignoring the realities? In order for CCTV images to remain private, there is a long chain of actors, each of whom must conform to various conditions, complying with guidelines and regulations each in their turn. It is a succession of 'ifs'. The difference, too, between a surveillance network controlled by the state, and those under private control, are pertinent. The reduced options for redress when the operator of the CCTV system is a private company make the use of corporate and private CCTV and the storage of data a pressing issue. The state is taking tentative steps to address the issue of privately-operated CCTV by re-examining the provisions of the 2006 Privacy Bill. In light of the expansion of private surveillance, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter has pledged a review of the Bill in order to safeguard the privacy of individuals (for a discussion of the issue see here).

It may be insightful to tease out some of the popular and opposing feelings about CCTV, those with more apathetic responses as well as the visceral sense of wrong felt by others. Are the more apathetic among us simply more accepting of the new ‘criminologies of everyday life’? Is it naïve to not see this as something more insidious, the responsbilization of civil society; the wider acceptance of the criminal as a rational opportunist? Does this position ignore or underplay the serious risk of destabilising social cohesion and increase state-scepticism in favour of mass individualisation and devolution of crime prevention? Popular ideas of CCTV are often connected to Orwellian prophesies of oppressive state power, yet if the above is the case then the growth of CCTV is actually connected to weakening state control and the awareness that the state on its own is inadequate to tackle the challenge of crime.

Contrastingly, there are those who are affronted by CCTV. Is it possible that some people are not used to the 24-hour glare of surveillance; being made to feel like a potential threat? Perhaps for some the spread of CCTV uncomfortably blurs the line between us and them, the suspect population. Is it that many people in fact don’t want CCTV to fall out of use, but instead have it focused on those who are seen as deviant? Or does the use of CCTV create the deviant population? as such, could the increased use of security surveillance in certain space entail a deepening of the trenches between various social groups? Outside the urban and commercial settings, it would be illuminating to know what the use of CCTV in residential areas represents to the people in these communities. Do they feel their privacy is undermined, or does the use of cameras increase a sense of safety? Interestingly, some commentators have suggested that widespread use of CCTV actually tends to undermine natural surveillance, thereby perhaps scoring an own goal for crime prevention.

No one happened across any research which explored these questions (of course that doesn’t mean such research doesn’t exist!). We felt there was a strong case for greater analytical focus to be spent exploring the increased use of surveillance technology. Perhaps, criminologically, the focus on CCTV is more spread out, it is only one node along a widening continuum of technologies of security. Furthermore, among some scholars the increased use of everyday security is considered one of the indices of changing modes of governance and an acceptance that the state has a limited capacity to address crime. As such, CCTV doesn't get, or maybe need its own solo analytical outing.

Several DA members were impressed by the work of Goold et al, which off-loaded some of the emotional and moral weight of this topic exploring the rise of security devices through a sociology of consumption framework. They describe CCTV as a common-place good, something uncontroversial and ubiquitous. Interviewing buyers of security goods, as well as those who work in the security business, the initial findings suggest that rather than people gaining a sense of order, power and safety, buying security feels less like an act of fulfilment and more like a ‘de facto taxation’; a nuisance and an irritant.

There was some evidence that CCTV does have an impact on criminal activity. For example, the Campbell Collaboration in 2008 reported that CCTV did have a 'modest but significant desirable effect.' However, it was most effective when used in very specific circumstances, namely as a means of reducing car crime in car-parks. The results supported the continued use of CCTV, but in a narrow, more targeted, fashion. Considering that CCTV is the single most heavily funded crime prevention method employed in the United Kingdom (where the study was carried out), such advice would seem to herald a chance for money-saving opportunities. However, there seems to be no sign of innovating the recommended targeted use of the technology.

Yet the promise of CCTV and the political gain attendant on this remains a political given. As such the rise of surveillance seems set to continue for the foreseeable future. Perhaps it is simply the case that CCTV is more for fear of crime than crime itself. Does the presence of CCTV itself act as a cause of anxiety? This was one of the keenest questions posed by the DA and one to which we could find no answer. CCTV acts as an external sign of action, politicians can be seen to be doing something. This was held as one of the most immediate causes of the number of cameras on our streets, this combined with a general lack of understanding on the scope of what such methods can actually achieve.

In practical terms CCTV appears to be quite specious at best. However, we found this topic to have more depth than it appears, and like all good debates we didn’t all quite agree in the end about what the rising use of CCTV means and what its practical and symbolic functions were. To understand its rise and subsequent acceptance it is best understood in wider political or cultural framework.

This month's blog was written by Louise Brangan and Lynsey Black.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors' alone.

January - Collective Memories of Hate

January marks the beginning of The Differential Association's third year! What better way to kick off this, our cotton anniversary, then with Savelsberg and King's impressive comparative analysis of hate crime law in Germany and the United States. They explore how the collective memories of national cultural traumas - specifically the Holocaust in Germany and slavery in America - can become institutionalised and thus reflected to various degrees in national law and law enforcement. 

Date: 24th of January

Time: 6pm

Place: Mulligan's on Poolbeg street

Distinctions and Distinctiveness in the Work of Prison Officers

Liebling, Alison (2011) Distinctions and Distinctiveness in the Work of Prison Officers: Legitimacy and Authority Revisited, European Journal of Criminology, Vol. 8(6) 484-489

Fresh from last month’s engaging debate on The Spirit Level, the Differential Association decided to turn our attention to something completely different: the prison officer. Professor Alison Liebling of the University of Cambridge has been at the forefront of research in this area, and her article 'Distinctions and Distinctiveness in the Work of Prison Officers: Legitimacy and Authority Revisited' which appeared in an issue of the European Journal of Criminology guest edited by Liebling in 2011, was selected for our discussion.

Admittedly we have quite a few fans of Prof. Liebling here at the DA, so a discussion of her work was always sure to make for an engaging evening. We were certainly not left disappointed; Liebling’s article evoked an interesting and energised discussion from all in attendance.

In this article Liebling examines the importance of staff-prisoner relationships, acknowledged as the heart of the whole prison system in the 1984 report of the Control Review Committee, and outlines the significant role that prison officers play in influencing the moral quality of life in prison. Outlining five key distinctions in prison work, Liebling attempts to construct a framework that explores this important influence that officers’ behaviour and beliefs exert on the prison environment.

Liebling begins with a discussion of authority and legitimacy, arguing that clarity about these concepts is of critical importance in articulating the highly skilled and distinctive nature of prison work. The exercise of authority is central to the work of a prison officer. Officers negotiate their authority on a day-to-day basis with a sceptical and complex audience in a context in which enforcing every rule ‘by the book’ would be impossible. Officers’ use of their authority is not always obvious; it is not only confined to disciplinary action but is also used in everyday interactions with prisoners. Turning to legitimacy, meaning authority used rightfully, Liebling explains that legitimacy is not a ‘fixed phenomenon’ but a ‘perpetual discussion’ between those who hold power and the recipients of this power. Liebling then outlines five important distinctions to be made in prison officer work: between ‘law in practice’ and ‘law in the books’; ‘good’ and ‘right’ relationships; ‘tragic’ and ‘cynical’ perspectives; ‘reassurance’ and ‘relational’ safety; and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ confidence.

Of the five distinctions Liebling proposes, DA members were particularly interested in ‘good’ v ‘right’ staff-prisoner relationships. The nature of staff-prisoner relationships is a growing area of research within the arena of prison work, and we were keen to focus on Liebling’s approach to this topic. Liebling explains that the question of what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘right’ relationship requires careful analysis. When comparing results from a survey of prisoners with observational and interview data, it became clear that the meaning of a ‘good’ relationship could differ significantly. For some prisoners a ‘good’ relationship could be characterised by respect or having a good rapport with officers, while for others the term ‘good’ could mean that contact with officers was minimal. Right relationships are to be found somewhere between formality and informality, closeness and distance, policing by consent and imposing order. As Liebling puts it, ‘niceness and blind faith in social harmony or the avoidance of conflicts, and naivety, can lead to chaos’. Returning to the statements of the Control Review Committee in 1984 that relationships were at the heart of the prison, Liebling argues that it is staff professionalism and legitimate practice that lie at the heart of prison life, and that this is about more than just relationships.

Another area that DA members were eager to discuss was staff-management relationships. Quite a few of us had seen Prof Liebling’s engaging presentation at the Scribani Conference (video available here) in September in which she made some interesting observations about the nature of the relationships that exist between officers and senior management. While officers’ work is highly visible to its key audience, prisoners, it is low visibility in relation to senior management. In the article Liebling highlights the dissonance that exists between managers’ perceptions of officers’ roles and the reality of day-to-day prison work for officers. For example, senior management (and policymakers) may believe that officers enforce all rules at all times in their dealings with prisoners while in reality officers often forgo rule enforcement and discipline in favour or discretion and the legitimate use of authority in order to maintain order. The group was also keenly interested in the role and influence of unionisation on staff-management relationships. Aware that this is an area that has received fuller empirical attention in England and Wales, DA members wondered about the dynamic that exists between unions and senior prison management in Ireland.

As always, the group discussion turned to the Irish context. We considered the changing role of the Irish prison officer over time, reflecting on the move away from a loosely articulated caring ethos towards a regime more concerned with security and coping with an expanding population. Liebling often describes prison officers as the ‘invisible ghosts of penality’, and this is certainly true when examining the position of the prison officer in Irish research. While recent years have seen exciting work emerge from Liebling and her colleagues in Cambridge, as well as from others such as Elaine Crawley, Ireland has unfortunately not enjoyed the same burgeoning scholarship in this area. The DA wondered about the nature of Irish prison work and the vast potential for Irish studies of prison officers. Throughout the meeting our discussions kept returning to the same sentiment, a frustration at the empirical deficit in this area.

Prof. Liebling’s article undoubtedly provided an engaging and thought-provoking discussion. While it is somewhat disappointing that research in Ireland has fallen considerably behind the UK (and beyond) in this context, the enthusiasm amongst all in attendance for this area is certainly encouraging. If anything is to be gleaned from this meeting of the Differential Association it is that a definite appetite exists for further knowledge about this most interesting cohort.

This month's blog was written by Colette Barry.

The views expressed are the author's alone.

The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

The Spirit Level was something of a sensation when it was published in 2009. Written by the epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, both of the University of York, it swiftly joined the pantheon of popular science tracts such as Tipping Point and Freakonomics, becoming a prestigious member of an elite group of psych-socio-economic books which are widely discussed if perhaps less widely read. The Spirit Level climbed still further when its messages sashayed their way off the shelves and into the speeches of politicians. But are such mentions sincerely meant or cynical attempts to jump on the buzzword band-wagon?

The central tenet of the book is that unequal societies do worse than more equal societies for almost every marker of social problem you can imagine, from teenage pregnancy, to imprisonment rates, from obesity to measures of trust. The writers acknowledge an intuitive tendency to agree with such statements, however, they go further than making mere statements that refer to levels of absolute poverty. For example, their claim that unequal societies do worse does not simply refer to the lowest socio-economic levels in society, rather they argue that at every level on society’s ladder, groups will be doing worse than corresponding demographic groups in more equal societies.

Unequal societies produce steep social gradients of social problems, so while you may enjoy better health than those on the rungs below you – you can be assured that those on the rung just above are enjoying better health than you.

This is perhaps the most revolutionary element of The Spirit Level, the idea that inequality is bad for all, even those of us who are living comfortably, far-removed from poverty-lines. It takes acknowledged drivers for social problems, such as relative deprivation, and effectively scales awareness of the problem up utilising an impressive array of cross-disciplinary research and theories.

It is this grand theory which has drawn ire down on the authors.  There are few books which have attracted such vociferous or sustained criticism, to the extent that books have been published which set out solely to disprove the work. Complaints centre on methodological issues and fire off accusations of cherry-picking data, the position of outliers and exaggerating correlations. The debate became so significant that it provoked a welcome level of engagement from the authors Pickett and Wilkinson, who have released an updated version of the book responding to their critics and have also participated in debates with their detractors. This is truly public academia – to an extent that can only be wistfully dreamed of by those criminologists who attempt to attain the same level of public awareness.

Clearly in any such grand theory, it is always possible to target flaws and problems. Achieving a level of nuance in a book that works in generalisations and persuasion is out of the question, and to some extent this book does function as a manifesto for change. It has become another evangelising work which seeks to determine exactly what has gone wrong in the final decades of the twentieth-century and into the twenty-first. The DA wondered how this theory of everything which focuses on inequality would relate to criminological texts dealing with the same consequences but working at the problem from a different discipline. In criminology, a variety of theories have been proposed to explain our criminological and political cultures, with terminologies ranging from late modernism, postmodernism, risk society, neo-liberalism. Perhaps The Spirit Level has something to add to these theories.

The authors’ statements that we are first generation to struggle for new answers to the question of how to improve our quality of life, sometimes seem peculiarly devoid of historical context. There is a danger, which Lucia Zedner elegantly elaborates, of seeing our present as a dystopia. We are being spectacularly solipsistic when we consider our own time as the apex or climax of history. However, refreshingly, Pickett and Wilkinson are positive in their view of how we bring about change. They use the examples of Japan and the US to illustrate just how quickly inequality can creep into a society, and how over the same period the gap can be effectively closed.

Their final chapters on environmental concerns and suggestions on how to close the inequality gap, are decidedly less compelling than previous chapters showing the correlations between social problems and inequality. These closing chapters are perhaps a pre-emptive strike against criticism that they have merely uncovered a problem without providing any solutions. While these chapters do not detract from the book, they are less confidently and expertly written, being, as they are, clearly beyond the authors’ areas of expertise. However, they do provide interesting examples and anecdotes, such as the individual carbon quota scheme being piloted in Manchester.

The Spirit Levels provides an excellent summary of hundreds of peer-reviewed studies, and effectively brings a considerable quantity of research together to form its argument. And that argument is persuasive. There are issues with causality, for example arguments in one section of the book were often reinforced by reference to earlier correlations, a method which seemed somewhat circular and lacking in internal validity. However, despite some issues which were raised within the group, and despite the above mentioned criticism from other academics, The Spirit Level remains a convincing hypothesis. Certainly the work will continue, the authors' work with The Equality Trust is just one sign that this is a idea which has more to give.

This months blog was written by Lynsey Black.

The views expressed are those of the author alone.