The new regulatory state and the transformation of criminology

The forms of government and social relations that increasingly characterize contemporary society are giving rise to new ways of thinking about crime a nd crime control. In Particular it is argued that although the discipline o f crimology is currently well established in institutional terms, the intel lectual fools of the discipline are of diminishing relevance to the social world that is now emerging. The article describes the major developmental trends in government policy a s involving a shift from a welfare state, governed by Keynesian techniques of demand management to a new form of regulatory state, premised upon a neo -liberal combination of market competition, privatized institutions, and de centred, at-a-distance forms of state regulation. These new styles of gover nance are premised upon a recognition of new social forces and mentalities, particularly of the globalizing logic of risk management, and they will in creasingly reconfigure the social and political fields in ways that have co nsequences for the Policing and control of crime Criminology's traditional focus upon street crimes and thp institutions of police, courts and prisons may he decreasingly relevant to the new harms, r isks and mechanisms of control that are emerging today. The innovative work of 'regulatory state scholars' such as Clifford Shearing is identified as Pushing criminology in new directions that confound the discipline's tradit ional boundaries but which give it more leverage age in the attempt to unde rstand and respond to the control Problems of the end of the century. The p ossibilities for restorative justice in the new context are also discussed, as are other methods for combating insecurity, and both are linked to the importance of developing forms of local knowledge that am informed by a sen se of the global development context. It is argued that the Keynesian state has been replaced by a new regulatory state that is a more Hayekian response to a risk society. Clifford Shearin g is identified as a criminological theorist who has come to terms with the se developments, especially in his collaborations with Phillip Stenning Dav id Bayley Tony Doob and his colleagues at the Community Peace Foundation in Cape Town. Shearing et al. are forging a new paradigm (that incorporates t he restorative justice paradigm) which might just transcend criminology and become something of general import to the social sciences.