Book Review: Reclaiming the Streets: Surveillance, Social Control and the City

Abstract

anger and hatred captured in Paul Rock’s (1998) study of secondary victims of homicide. And much of the ‘hyper-banalization’ of control deplored by Hayward is due to the reluctance of victims to pay the price for offenders achieving ontological security, and control of their own destinies, at their expense. Situational crime prevention is viewed as counter-productive, rightly so in many ways: but it is difficult to explain falling crime rates without some weight being placed on that factor. There is also a tendency to belittle what has been achieved by so-called orthodox criminology. For example, Ken Pease’s work on repeat victimization by burglary has arguably spared many thousands of householders a great deal of pain, fear and insecurity. Moreover, if the trends distinguished as causal hold such sway over people’s lives—and little evidence is assembled to that effect—crime rates should have been rising, not falling, in general over the past 10 years. Overall, however, and despite these criticisms, this book—and its companion volume (Ferrell et al., 2004)—is a revitalization of much that has been unduly sidelined in criminology. It is also a recovery and in some ways an advance in the inter-disciplinary scope of the sociology of deviance.