Crime and Social Theory Robert van Krieken, University of Sydney A shorter version published in: The Critical Criminology Companion, edited by Thalia Anthony & Chris Cunneen, Sydney: Hawkins Press, 2008: 68‐79. In his foreword to one of the books that launched critical criminology, Taylor, Walton and Young’s The New Criminology, Alvin Gouldner observed that what gave the book its ‘reorienting power’ was not just that it drew on bodies of social theory otherwise neglected in criminology, or theorizations of crime overlooked in social theory. What made it important was ‘its ability to demonstrate that all studies of crime and deviance, however deeply entrenched in their own technical traditions, are inevitably also grounded in larger, more general social theories which are always present (and consequential) even as unspoken silences’ (1973: ix). The significance of the ‘critical turn’ in criminology was not just to direct the study of crime and punishment towards particular approaches to social theory (to begin with, Western Marxism), but to point out that it does not actually matter whether one actually refers to Durkheim, Sutherland, Merton, Foucault, Beck, or Bauman, any analysis of crime and punishment necessarily assumes some theoretical position on the nature of the current state of social relations, structure, dynamics, and processes of transformation more broadly. It remains, then, an ongoing question how the middle‐range theories and conceptualizations one can use to explain a particular ‘technical’ criminological problem or issue fit within some broader understanding of how crime comes about, its relationship to the structuring of social relations, modes of inequality and forms of power, and a number of other issues concerning what might be called the fundamental ‘nature’ or ‘character’ of contemporary social life. This is of course especially important when one is attempting to explain how and why things are changing, or why they differ across different countries. If crime rates go up or down in the US, if they are lower in Japan, if imprisonment rates go up in the Netherlands and Sweden, criminologists are generally reluctant to ascribe such changes to fate or serendipity, and look for changes in social structure which can be seen as driving these shifts. Overall one needs to have at least some understanding of, for example, the on‐going transformations in the state’s relationship to civil society and economic life, changing objective patterns and subjective experiences of inequality, and shifting relationships between what Norbert Elias called ‘the established’ and ‘outsiders’, in order to understand crime and crime control. There is always generally a question of relationship between patterns of crime and punishment at any time and the dominants forms of social organization accompanying them. It is often seen to be a close relationship, so that one is meant to be able to read off one from the other, shifts in one are meant to lead to corresponding transformations in the other, or to be capable of explanation in terms of the changes in the other. The focus is then often on points of transformation from one ‘regime’ of crime and punishment to another. It is probably fair to say that it is generally a turn to social theory that makes criminology ‘critical’, as opposed to approaches influenced by economics or psychology. Conversely, a number of social and political theorists place an understanding of the origins of criminal behaviour as well as its management (especially punishment) at the centre of their accounts of modernity, seeing the forms taken by punishment as a kind of index to the whole society. When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States, for example, he was embarking on a tour of their penitentiary system as a ‘window’ onto what was specific and characteristic about US society and politics. In many respects the interest among social theorists in law as the infrastructure of social, political and economic life more generally has tended in fact to concentrate on criminal law (Karstedt 2007: 55). The New Criminology was in many respects an extension of these types of arguments for taking crime and punishment from the periphery to the very heart of disciplines such as sociology, a plea for the centrality of de‐naturalising and de‐individualizing crime, of perceiving