156 The Culture of Control – Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society David Garland Oxford University Press, 2001; pp301; £19.99, hbk ISBN 0-19-829937-0 David Garland’s previous books – Punishment and Welfare and Punishment and Modern Society – are landmark studies and essential reading for anyone seeking to comprehend how and why things are as they are within the penal realm. The former remains perhaps the definitive account of the development of the ‘penal-welfare complex’, while the latter outlined a social theory of punishment that significantly advanced the work of the grand theorists. In conjunction with a series of important recent articles focusing upon post-modern penality, the limits of the sovereign state and the penal culture of high crime societies, this body of work represents the foremost contemporary attempt to make sense of the evolution of systemic responses to criminality within a theoretical framework sensitive to the influence of social, political, and cultural dynamics. The Culture of Control is the latest instalment of this ongoing project. It illuminates how and why strategies of crime control have recently altered so radically. Garland characterises the recent punitive turn as political adaptation. The absence of preventative initiatives which can guarantee public safety, lead to a wider cultural demand for control orientated responses to criminality. Paradoxically, in a ‘risk society’our precariousness motivates us to demand the identification, segregation and incapacitation of ‘the dangerous other’. The outcome is a system that relies upon stigma, retribution and the real and symbolic exclusionary potency of the prison to manufacture an illusory reduction in our vulnerability, so as to reaffirm the legitimacy of the state and its actors. The author’s belief that policy has become the problem rather than the solution is robustly articulated. Significant re-thinking is required if an increasingly dystopian future is to be averted. This involves reversing policies which perpetuate rather than challenge the damaging effects of social exclusion; acknowledging and addressing the links between criminal behaviour and the economic and social roots of marginalisation; and devolving power and resources to a local level. Ultimately, this is a political and moral challenge, strategically dependant upon the re- orientation of social policy towards an explicitly reformist agenda. Garland is convinced that democracy is sufficiently self-reflexive to recognise the counter productive effects of a damaging and divisive penal culture. His arguments inspire optimism, which is testament to their strength. It is difficult to be confidently and objectively critical when reviewing a text heralded as the most important since Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Nevertheless, I did feel that Garland’s analysis was somewhat detached from the contradictions and ambiguities characteristic of day to day work with offenders. Thus, although I might agree that the long term implications for the 7927 -Book Reviews 23/5/01 3:02 pm Page 3 at University of York on May 17, 2016 prb.sagepub.com Downloaded from