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This book, first published in 1973, explores the manner in which conceptions of deviancy arise and shows how the attitudes of non-deviants, of society and of authority, are as instrumental in forming these conceptions as the actions of the deviants themselves. Chapters include discussions on the definition of deviants and deviancy and the enforcement of the law, alongside a detailed introduction. This title will be of particular value to students and scholars with an interest in criminology and the sociology and psychology of deviancy.

This paper is a much abridged version of a section of the opening chapter of the official history of criminal justice between 1959 and 1997 which David Downes, Tim Newburn and Paul Rock were formally commissioned to write some six and a half years ago. Their work has been based on numerous archives, secondary sources and interviews, but the principal resource, and the principal archive, the repository of government records, the 'strong box of the Empire', is the National Archive at Kew, and the focus of this article is on record management there.

Abstract: In January 1990, Victim Support, the National Organisation of Victims Support Schemes, inaugurated a programme of demonstration projects to assist prosecution witnesses attending seven Crown Courts in England and Wales. The article focusses on the special experiences and position of prosecution witnesses at one such Crown Court, the initial phases of the 'victim in court project' established there, and emerging patterns of interaction between witnesses and the project's volunteers. The chief role of volunteers was to diminish the isolation encountered by witnesses as they waited to appear in court.

Any sociological description is an organisation of perspectives which necessarily throws certain ideas out of focus. The sociology of deviance has characteristically ignored one major quality of crime, its capacity to inflict distress upon people. Not all crimes impose suffering, and not all forms of inflicted suffering are illegal, but the criminal law is conventionally held to be concerned with the regulation of damage to the physical or material self. In its neglect of that quality, sociology has distorted its analysis of a number of problems. One such problem, that of motivation, is examined in this paper. It is argued that many deviant acts produce discomfort in others and a description of motives must comprehend how that discomfort is defined and tolerated by the deviant.

The sociology of deviancy is emerging as a distinctive perspective on problems of rule-breaking and social control. Among its integral features is an antipathy towards the systematisation of its ideas. This antipathy has allowed the developing perspective to maintain contradictory positions on important issues. In particular, there is a contradiction between the sociology's phenomenalism, which stresses the need to faithfully reproduce the social world as it is known by its inhabitants, and its essentialism which searches for the underlying properties of social order. A limited solution to this discrepancy is offered in the form of the suggestion that sociologists of deviancy should focus their attention on the ideas of social structure which are held by the people whose behaviour they describe. Sociological maps of these ideas would permit the perspective to manage some of the issues that currently cause confusion.

Contents: Introduction; Published writings; Observations on debt collection; Some problems of interpretative historiography; Law, order and power in late 17th and early 18th century England; Governments, victims and policies in 2 countries; The present state of criminology in Britain; Witnesses and space in a Crown court; Introduction: the emergence of criminological theory; The social organization of a Home Office initiative; The opening stages of criminal justice policy making; Sociology and the stereotype of the police; Murderers, victims and 'survivors': the social construction of deviance; Victims, prosecutors and the state in 19th century England and Wales; Chronocentrism and British criminology; Aspects of the social construction of victims in Australia; Urban homelessness, crime and victimisation in England (with Tim Newburn); Treatment of victims in England and Wales; Name Index.