Social democracy and the crime question in Britain : 1945 to 1980.

This thesis has the twin purposes of (a) providing an historical narrative of the evolution of social democratic, conservative and liberal approaches to crime in Britain since the war, and (b) (in part through this historical investigation) beginning to reconstruct the social-democratic form of "socialist-criminology", in both its academic and political versions, for present and future use. The thesis is therefore organised in part as a chronological investigation. Chapters One, Two, Three, Five and Six focus in part on the general development of the crime debates in the 1940's, the middle 1950's, the early 1960's, the late 1960's to early 1970's, and the late 1970's respectively. But they also depart from a purely chronological presentation in order to allow a more detailed interrogation of particular topics in popular, political and academic debate. Thus, Chapter One attempts to describe the general character of social democratic criminology in the form it assumed in the 1940's, with an eye to its longer term effects in the later post-war period. Chapter Two contains an analytical essay on the responses of the different ideologies to Homicide and Capital Punishment. Chapter Three departs from its narrative to examine the re-emergence of the youth problem in the early 1960's as a major social issue. Chapter Five devolves around an essay on the rapid development of the major institutions of State power (particularly, social work, the police and prisons) during the late 1960's and the early 1970's; and Chapter Six, with its historical focus on the late 1970's, contains two other essays: (a) on the rise of the radical Right and its critique of criminal justice and social welfare systems, and (b) an analysis of the relationship between Conservative and Social-democratic ideology and the particular questions of the criminality of the powerful and so-called organised crime. Chapters Four and Seven depart from this form of presentation. Chapter Four provides an account and a critique of social democratic approaches to crimes against women and the criminality of women. Chapter Seven is the programmatic conclusion to the critique of social democratic criminology provided earlier: it is an attempted first move, in seriously changed circumstances (at the end of the post-war boom), to sketch out the elements of a reconstructed socialist criminology.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Ph.D

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Sheffield

Year dc:date.issued

1981

Author dc:creator

• Taylor, Ian

Identifier

uk.bl.ethos.306864

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etheses.whiterose.ac.uk:1885