An educational resource for students and staff studying the sociology of crime, deviance and social censure, criminology, sociology of law and socio-legal studies; the intriguing stuff that made the subject fascinating in the first place. So much of this has now become political that we also discuss politics.
User Rating: 5 / 5
Published on the Rowntree Foundation website:
User Rating: 4 / 5
Unusual riots have provoked an unusual batch of sociological analyses of riots. I found these this morning and thought it was best to record them here rather than add them belatedly to my own belated riots essay published here on 2nd September.
1] Zygmunt Bauman, one of my favourite sociologists:
The London Riots – On Consumerism coming Home to Roost
2] This list, including The Guardian's data maps, I also found this morning: Top ten articles on the causes of the UK riots.
3] The Daily Telegraph made a lot of sense too: The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom.
4] And Gus John's open letter to the Prime Minister on 19 August is a must read. I know Gus from way back - he supported me by coming to give a seminar at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology when I was in the lion's den and running the Wednesday afternoon seminar series - this really is spot on.
5] Now today, 6th September 2011, The Guardian started its series on what young people who lived in the area thought of the riots. The passage below provided much vindication for my argument in Riots, Aggravated Shopping and 30 Years of Opportunism
"Finally, many young people talked about the riots as a consequence of the anger and frustration felt at not seeing a future. Unable to see education, jobs and pensions on their horizon, some explained how they sought pleasure in consumerism. But while those they looked up to accessed and displayed these objects freely, for young people they were often out of reach. As consumers first and foremost, the inability to shop made them feel unfulfilled and lacking in self respect. In some places the signs of these divides were part of the architecture around them – the upward mobility of the cityscapes of global capitalism looked increasingly remote." [emphasis links to the Bauman piece]. Behind the riots: what young people think about the 2011 summer unrest
6] This excellent piece from The Times Colonist, that wonderfully named newspaper on Vancouver Island, makes many of the most pertinent key points: London's rioters are Thatcher's grandchildren.
User Rating: 5 / 5
Useful information on the first cases to go through the courts after the London riots of August 2011:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/aug/11/uk-riots-magistrates-court-list?CMP=twt_gu
User Rating: 4 / 5
From the Gallup site, 11 July 2011, results of a survey into confidence in the American criminal justice system:
User Rating: 4 / 5
