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Category: Editor's blog

Created: Saturday, 03 April 2021 19:23

Last Updated: Thursday, 04 June 2026 13:04

Published: Wednesday, 03 June 2026 18:23

Written by Colin Sumner

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“Deviancy theory’s dead as a dodo, mate……It wants to be radicalism but it’s just liberalism with a big mouth”

In this clip from The Long Firm, top actor Mark Strong, as Harry, the locked-up gay, murdering, extortionist gangster studying sociology, confronts Lenny, the sociology lecturer at that prison, with the weakness of his manuscript, submitted towards his OU degree. Lenny had asked for "brutal" comments on it from his star student.…Well, he got brutal......The prisoner-student deliciously tells the sociology lecturer that 'it needs a bit more Foucault, mate'. 

Based on Jake Arnott’s novel The Long Firm. The full 6-part BBC series is on YouTube and a must-see.  Arnott seemed to use my Obituary to deviance in the novel and the film so the point is about turning the tables on ‘normality’, whatever that was.

Deviance?  It is indeed as dead as a dodo, mate...It wants to be conservative but, Harry, it's gone over to the far right and a gangster is now in charge of the USA, which in turn is run by a genocidal Israel. I used to write about deviance but soon after edited a book on Violence, Culture and Censure (1997) memorialising the Holocaust and developed a law school extension in Haifa as a co-education for peace project, doomed to fail within two years.

Or as I argued in the Obituary to the sociology of deviance, it's not about what is 'normal, it's about social censure, who is censuring whom and why, and in what context.

For an excellent review of that Obituary, see Paul Roberts' From Deviance to Censure: a 'New' Criminology for the Nineties in the Modern Law Review (1996, 59:1)

Lindsay Farmer explains my work on social censure well in his essay on Censure: moral and sociological https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/140045/1/140045.pdf also in Tony Amatrudo's book Social Censure and Critical Criminology : After Sumner (2017, Springer). 

Dave Moxon's heroic journey through my academic woprk must also be mentioned here because he understands the intellectial and political roots of my censure analysis so well; see his Colin Sumner: Criminology through the Looking-Glass (2020, Palgrave).

An interesting non-academic US article from Time magazine is Essay: In Praise of Censure: https://time.com/archive/6703087/essay-in-praise-of-censure/

See als Paul Kearns' Freedom of Artistic Expression: Essays of Cultural and Legal Censure (2014, Hart Publishing) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Freedom-Artistic-Expression-Culture-Censure-ebook/dp/B00LC4S6GS