Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime, Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissism

How much does selfishness contribute to the establishment of a criminal identity? Hall(criminology, Northumbria U.) and his co-authors seek to rehabilitate criminology by analyzing late capitalist consumer societies. Using case studies and interviews they describe how people in such societies respond to economic change and acute marginalization by behaving outside that culture's expectations, covering consumerism and its countercultures, the intellectual roots of post-war criminal law theory, exclusion and resistance, current thinking on crime and culture, the reorientation of the Western superego, and the pseudo-pacification of crime. They believe crime numbers reflect shifts in perception of crime by citizens and police alike and on the successes of a security industry that has woven surveillance largely unnoticed into everyday economic life. They believe responses to neo-liberalism include resistance without real politics and narcissism, resulting in criminal behavior. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Steve Hall is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Northumbria University, UK.

Simon Winlow is Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at the University of York, UK.

Craig Ancrum is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Teeside, UK.