CRIMINOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IAN LOADER

Criminological Knowledge Ian Loader

Criminological Knowledge Ian Loader

Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology and Director of the Centre for Criminology. He arrived at Oxford in 2005 from Keele University, where he had worked since 1992 in the Department of Criminology. Prior to that he was a Lecturer in Criminology and Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh, from where he obtained his PhD in 1993.

Between 1994 and 1996, Loader, conducted an intensive study of public concerns about and responses to crime in a relatively prosperous town in Middle England. Toward this end, they analyzed official documents, observed meetings, went on ride-alongs, and conducted interviews and discussions with the town's residents and its criminal justice professionals. Two of the three authors lived in Macclesfield during this period in order to increase their opportunities for observation and conversation and to deepen their understanding of the town and its residents. A variety of methods were thus used to access the experiences and perspectives of the members of the assorted communities who reside or work in the town. Macclesfield, a relatively prosperous, homogeneous, and safe town, was chosen in order to extend existing work on public responses to crime to a more mundane place, the kind that the "social problems" approach to criminology often overlooks.

Loader, unwilling to rely upon the concept of fear. Research on the fear of crime, they argue, demonstrates that "it is not clear what fear is, and that whatever it is, it is multidimensional": it is an emotion, a judgment, and it involves meanings and abstractions. By using an alternative conceptual language--that of "sensibilities" and "crime-talk"-and by paying attention to the situated character of these, Loader, provide a more inclusive approach, one that foregrounds the multidimensionality of public sensibilities and allows us to identify the moral commitments, beliefs, concerns, attachments, and identifications that inform them.

On one hand, Loader, argue that these concerns are filtered through a national (perhaps international) discourse concerning the "youth problem" that shapes people's sense of what is happening in their communities. Contra Skogan and Maxfield (1981), who argues that residents see incivilities as signs of neighborhood decline, they contend that the environmental cues provided by disorderly youth are also seen as indicative of larger social changes. Thus, for some, the youth problem is seen as a manifestation of declining economic prospects; more often, it is seen as a consequence of a "crisis of the family." Local crime-talk, they conclude, draws from and echoes larger political discourses, especially in its denunciations of permissiveness; discussions of youth incivility prompt discourse that accounts for "the problem" in larger, national terms. In this context, residents are more likely to endorse comparatively punitive and exclusionary crime control policies.

But when the discussion is about the local crime problem and what to do about it, residents rarely evince the desire to banish or exclude teens. Instead, most identify local teenagers as "our kids" and talk about how they might be better incorporated into community life. ...