Realist Criminology. By Roger Matthews (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, xi + 179 pp. £24.99 pb)

Extract

Readers are likely to approach this book from varying temporal perspectives. Those new to the field of criminology may do so with little sense of the history of ‘left realism’, or equipped only with what they have gleaned from the summary accounts of realism found in criminological theory textbooks. Some will wish simply to discover what realist criminology is. Such readers may reasonably want to judge Realist Criminology as an updated introduction to those debates. Older readers however—and I am one of those—will remember the emergence and interventions of left realism in the 1980s—because they were in some sense ‘there’ at its inception. They will recall the efforts of Jock Young, John Lea, Richard Kinsey, Ian Taylor, Roger Matthews and others to persuade the political left—in both critical criminology and the British Labour Party—to counter the Thatcherite ‘law-and-order’ agenda by ‘taking crime seriously’ and developing practical policies to reduce it. They may recall, as I do, that at the time an extended theoretical exposition of the realist position was often promised but at best only sporadically delivered—its failure to appear a product of the fact that left realism was, as Matthews puts it, ‘essentially a political project’ (p. 28). These readers may be tempted to ask, as I was, whether Matthews has written a version of that book—a theoretical account and renewal of realist criminology that specifies how realism can speak to the crime and justice questions of today.