Professor Colin Webster

The disproportionate criminalisation and incarceration of particular minority ethnic groups has long been observed, though much of the work in criminology has been dominated by a somewhat narrow debate. This debate has concerned itself with explaining this disproportionality in terms of structural inequalities and socio-economic disadvantage or discriminatory criminal justice processing. This book offers an accessible and innovative approach, including chapters on anti-Semitism, social cohesion in London, Bradford and Glasgow, as well as an exploration of policing Traveller communities. Incorporating current empirical research and new departures in methodology and theory, this book also draws on a range of contemporary issues such as policing terrorism, immigration detention and youth gangs. In offering minority perspectives on race, crime and justice and white inmate perspectives from the multicultural prison, the book emphasises contrasting and distinctive influences on constructing ethnic identities. It will be of interest to students studying courses in ethnicity, crime and justice.

The disproportionate criminalisation and incarceration of particular minority ethnic groups has long been observed, though much of the work in criminology has been dominated by a somewhat narrow debate. This debate has concerned itself with explaining this disproportionality in terms of structural inequalities and socio-economic disadvantage or discriminatory criminal justice processing. This book offers an accessible and innovative approach, including chapters on anti-Semitism, social cohesion in London, Bradford and Glasgow, as well as an exploration of policing Traveller communities. Incorporating current empirical research and new departures in methodology and theory, this book also draws on a range of contemporary issues such as policing terrorism, immigration detention and youth gangs. In offering minority perspectives on race, crime and justice and white inmate perspectives from the multicultural prison, the book emphasises contrasting and distinctive influences on constructing ethnic identities. It will be of interest to students studying courses in ethnicity, crime and justice.

An important and challenging book comprehensively spanning across the establishment of power systems, Rich Crime, Poor Crime is a vital read for academics, professionals and those interested in the fields of history, sociology, criminology, and politics.

This chapter presents a brief ethnic profile of Britain. It recounts the processes and events surrounding the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence and the findings of the inquiry into the failure of the Metropolitan Police to successfully apprehend his killers. Changes in Britain’s ethnic makeup are complicated by much diversity of origin, educational and occupational status and geography within and between ethnic groups. Racist victimization and crime are understood in their historical and geographical context showing that their processes, patterns and meaning change within and between localities over time. The extent of racist victimization in England and Wales is outlined to show trends and changes in self-reported victimization, victimization reported to and recorded by the police. The Crime and Disorder Act of 1998 introduced into law the concept of specific racially aggravated offences in relation to violence, harassment, public order and criminal damage. The chapter ends with a prognosis of changes in racist victimization and of police effectiveness.

Drawing upon qualitative, longitudinal research with ‘socially excluded’ young adults from some of England’s poorest neighbourhoods, the article explores how locally-embedded, social networks become part of the process whereby poverty and class inequalities are reproduced. Networks of family and friends, rooted in severely de-industrialized locales, supported young people as they carved out transitions to adulthood in adverse circumstances. Examples are given in respect of informants’ highly localized housing careers and their longer-term experience of ‘poor work’.

Paradoxically, though, while local networks helped in coping with the problems of growing up in poor neighbourhoods and generated a sense of inclusion, the sort of social capital embedded in them served simultaneously to close down opportunities and to limit the possibilities of escaping the conditions of social exclusion. Overall, and contrary to some recent youth sociology, the article stresses the continuing importance of class and place in shaping youth transitions.

Traditional approaches to understanding and responding to children and crime are fundamentally based on 'miniaturised' adult models. The assumption appears to be that children are adults in the making, essentially just smaller, developing versions of grown-ups. This view of children is increasingly being challenged. Children are not simply putative adults, they are different, distinct and developing. This paper sets out to explore the notion that children essentially think and behave 'in the moment'. The implications of this for our understanding of children and crime are also explored.

The disproportionate criminalisation and incarceration of particular minority ethnic groups has long been observed, though much of the work in criminology has been dominated by a somewhat narrow debate. This debate has concerned itself with explaining this disproportionality in terms of structural inequalities and socio-economic disadvantage or discriminatory criminal justice processing. This book offers an accessible and innovative approach, including chapters on anti-Semitism, social cohesion in London, Bradford and Glasgow, as well as an exploration of policing Traveller communities. Incorporating current empirical research and new departures in methodology and theory, this book also draws on a range of contemporary issues such as policing terrorism, immigration detention and youth gangs. In offering minority perspectives on race, crime and justice and white inmate perspectives from the multicultural prison, the book emphasises contrasting and distinctive influences on constructing ethnic identities. It will be of interest to students studying courses in ethnicity, crime and justice.

How and why do people become trapped in a long-term cycle of low-paid jobs and unemployment? Little is known about people's repeated movements into and out of poverty over the course of their lives and, in particular, how this 'recurrent poverty' links to the low-pay, no-pay cycle and broader experiences of disadvantage. Based on detailed qualitative research in deprived neighbourhoods, the report: - examines the relationships between personal, family and labour market factors in explaining the low-pay, no-pay cycle; - documents experiences of everyday hardship and recurrent poverty amongst individuals with strong work motivation and repeated episodes in employment; and - outlines a series of policy measures to tackle the problems of the low-pay, no-pay cycle.

Racist victimisation involvesa socialand power relationship betweenthe police, victim and perpetrator and this relationship ... Europe and Australiain that immigrants fromthe NewCommonwealth had arightto full British citizenship as embodied ...

Victimisation: Patterns. and. Trends. Thepolice have recorded racist incidents since1986. There issome evidence that thenumber recorded rose steadily ... Graph 3.1 Ten year trend in reported racist incidents (England, Wales and London)

Emerging Themes in British Criminology

(1965) 'The Sociology of the Deviant Act: Anomie Theory and Beyond', American Sociological Review, 30: 5–14. ... However, his reputation as a key criminological thinker was based on a host of other original achievements: he was an expert ...

This review of the literature about how and why poverty and crime influence one another, and the benefits to crime reduction of reducing poverty, looks at the implications for practical policies and strategies.

Coverage of all the core aspects of Criminal Justice is accompanied by details of a wide range of insights and experiences of real world practitioners to really bring the subject to life, providing students with a resource they can rely on ...

Understanding Race and Crime provides a comprehensive and critical introduction to the debates and controversies about race, crime and criminal justice. While focusing on Britain and America, it also takes a broader international perspective, with case studies including the historical legacy of lynching in the United States and racist state crime in the Nazi and Rwandan genocides. The book provides a conceptual framework in which racism, race and crime might be better understood. It traces the historical origins of how thinking about crime came to be associated with racism and how fears and anxieties about race and crime become rooted in places destabilized by rapid social change. The book questions whether race and ethnicity alone are significant enough factors to explain differing offending and victimization patterns between ethnic groups.

This book provides a thorough account of victimisation across the social spectrum of class, race, age and gender.

Due to social, cultural and demographic change over the last two decades, the boundaries of the race and crime debate as originally conceived are reconfigured. The wider scope and deeper analytical reach of the debate are predicated on the wider range of groups and situations to take into account and the changed meaning of racialization processes. This requires a reassessment of concepts, theories and evidence beyond reiterating a narrower focus about police and criminal justice effectiveness, efficiency and fairness, important as this is. Here we offer examples of how this reassessment may proceed using sociological evidence about identity and difference; the experiences of a new and diverse generation of migrants and minority ethnic groups; and the work of a new generation of scholars. We conclude asking whether racism and discrimination has declined or entered a new, more subtle phase in relation to race, crime and justice.

Focusing on discretion by the police, criminal justice practitioners and the courts at different stages in the criminal justice process, this chapter explores whether their judgements and decisions contribute to the overrepresentation of those from black, minority ethnic and lower social status backgrounds in the criminal justice system. The chapter asks whether overrepresentation is due to alleged discrimination or reflects typical patterns of offending, and the policy implications. The structure of the chapter is first to present the most recent official data about overrepresentation taking note of recent trends. Contrasting this data with self-reported offending data shows that the overrepresentation of some ethnic groups in the criminal justice system is not a true picture of their actual offending. Second, I argue that an exclusive focus on ethnicity ignores social determinants such as socio-economic status and in any case the ethnic categories used to compare criminal justice outcomes are too crude. Third, I argue that residual discrimination by the police and the courts varies between and within jurisdictions and neighbourhoods, and by their ethnic and social class makeup. Fourth, because discretion is least visible and discrimination most likely at the police stage of criminal justice, police stop and searches are examined. Fifth, the conclusions examine police reform since the Lawrence Inquiry before broadening the discussion to wider structural issues of policy and reform.

These contrasting quotes - one an imaginary of a reversal of power, the other an injunction to avoid a priori assumptions about the infl uence of ‘race’ - are connected in going to the heart of some diffi cult theoretical questions about ‘race’, ethnicity and crime. A cursory glance at criminological theory textbooks suggests mainstream theory takes a ‘colour-blind’ approach. Accordingly, the same theories used to explain ‘white’ crime equally apply to ‘black’ crime because there is little difference in their conditions and causes. Leaving aside the fact that when majorities defi ne minorities as having ‘ethnicity’ they defi ne themselves as having this also, and discounting the remnants of a discredited biological criminology that still believes ‘races’ exist, this seems odd. Among other things this chapter asks whether there are grounds to justify a distinct theory of ethnicity, race and crime rather than being subsumed into general criminological theories of crime and justice.

White ethnicity is generally invisible and unexamined in racism, crime and justice debates. Serving mostly as a default comparator to describe visible minority experiences of crime and criminal justice processes, white ethnicity is seen as unproblematic as an ethnicity except as a potential source of racism. This article draws on aspects of `whiteness studies' in the USA and UK—focusing on marginalized white ethnicities—to explore racialized `white' ethnicity, both historically and today. Designations such as white `underclass', `new' migrants, `white trash' are offered to show that some whites are seen as `less white' than others within a hierarchy of `whiteness'. The article concludes that racism and classism towards marginalized white working-class ethnicities have criminalized these groups in ways not too dissimilar from the criminalization of visible working-class minorities.

Public policy reform over several decades has succeeded in systematically impoverishing and worsening the social and economic conditions of poor, single young men. That this group is the most prone to criminality and criminalisation, while being pushed further into the margins of the licit and illicit economy, has been a central feature of long-term and growing crime trends. The article argues that successive governments have been unwise to neglect the poverty of unemployed, single young men into young adulthood. Their comparatively unfavourable treatment (as the most 'undeserving' of the 'undeserving poor') has impoverished a group renowned for being crime-prone.

Colin Webster, a Professor of Criminology here at Leeds Metropolitan, has had prime responsibility for developing and leading the undergraduate and postgraduate study of criminology in the School of Social, Psychological and Communication Sciences. He teaches Crime, Justice and Society, Contemporary Criminological Theory, Youth Justice, Understanding Race and Crime, Issues in Contemporary Criminology, and Crime Prevention. Professor Colin Webster has recently completed as co-investigator and collaborator with colleagues at Brunel and Middlesex Universities on a Research Councils funded (£500,000 Economic and Social Research Council/Arts and Humanities Research Council AHRC) national study about young people’s attitudes towards religious faith and their implications for social cohesion. Colin has directed various research projects funded by the Home Office, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Drug Prevention Advisory Service, Safer Cities and Local Authorities. His areas of research have included: the role of youth work in crime prevention; racist violence; ethnicity and crime; youth transitions and social exclusion; criminal and drug careers; drug treatment; and social cohesion. Poverty and insecurity: Decrying and devaluing life and work in low-pay, no-pay Britain Since the writing and publication last year of his book Poverty and insecurity: Life in lowpay, no-pay Britain, co-authored with Tracey Shildrick, Robert MacDonald and Kayleigh Garthwaite, the detrimental effects of ‘welfare to work’ changes on the conditions of the working poor and those in precarious work have been swift and unrelenting. The lecture draws on this earlier work to assess the current and likely future of ‘welfare to work’. The mantra ‘work is the best route out of poverty’, is tirelessly repeated to reassure ‘hard working families’ that they too will benefit and prosper by their own efforts. This study empirically tested whether work indeed redeems poverty over years, asking people about their lives as they cycled between work and welfare.This body of work together demonstrated three key facts about the working poor. First, a strong motivation and resilience to work exists among people faced with low-waged and insecure labour markets; secondly, intergenerational workless households rarely exist; and thirdly, that work channels people not out of - but into – poverty, when what is offered is poor work. Professor Webster’s lecture briefly takes stock of what is happening to, and some of the consequences, of ‘welfare to work’, particularly the further rapid rise of the ‘precariat’ as a result of a deterioration of in-work and welfare benefits. Focussing on the real operation of labour markets and welfare, and the nature of the offer and quality of work and welfare, Colin asks why ‘welfare to work’ processes are perceived in such distorted and perverse ways by economists and politicians alike. What is missing from these assumptions and perceptions is an almost wilful ignorance of the subjective side of working and work, showing little appreciation of life and work at the bottom of the labour market. The talk ends with a plea for labour market and welfare reform based on economically literate ‘welfare to work’ policies, justified within a sustainable social democracy.

How do men and women get by in times and places where opportunities for standard employment have drastically reduced? Are we witnessing the growth of a new class, the 'Precariat', where people exist without predictability or security in their lives? What effects do flexible and insecure forms of work have on material and psychological well-being? This book is the first of its kind to examine the relationship between social exclusion, poverty and the labour market. It challenges long-standing and dominant myths about ‘the workless’ and ‘the poor’, by exploring close-up the lived realities of life in low-pay, no-pay Britain. Work may be ‘the best route out of poverty’ sometimes but for many people getting a job can be just a turn in the cycle of recurrent poverty – and of long-term churning between low-skilled ‘poor work’ and unemployment. Based on unique qualitative, life-history research with a 'hard-to-reach group' of younger and older people, men and women, the book shows how poverty and insecurity have now become the defining features of working life for many.

Using qualitative biographical data from a longitudinal study of youth transitions, criminal careers and desistance, this paper casts doubt on the veracity and predictive power of risk assessment devices such as Asset and OASys. These devices, and the research on which they are based, suggest that earlier and current childhood and teenage influences trigger and sustain later re-offending. In contrast, we argue that focus must be shifted to contingent risk factors that accrue in late teenage and young adulthood. Secondly, risk assessment and criminal career research has ignored the influence that unforeseen and unforeseeable processes of neighbourhood destabilization and life events have in criminal careers and their cessation.

This paper describes and analyses the wider mechanisms, processes and contexts of the riots that took place in Northern UK cities and towns in the Summer of 2001. It examines these events and the imagined fears that aided the hardening of boundaries between violently opposed groups. It is noted that a long-term entrenchment of various forms of racial discrimination and racist violence in Oldham, Bradford and Burnley areas was connected to the long-term economic decline of the textile industry. Localised deindustrialisation, it is argued, generated a community discourse of nostalgia and cultural decline that was articulated via twin motors of race and ethnicity. As a result geographical concentrations of fear, risk and insecurity aided the likelihood and intensity of racist violence and disorder.

Focusing on the lives of first- and second-generation British Pakistani young adult men and those approaching middle age who offend or have offended and the experiences of their fathers bringing them up in a de-industrialised city, this ...

Although enjoying a period of renewed government policy interest and favourable research funding, youth studies has recently come under considerable intellectual attack, much of it from within. A common theme is that the major conceptual approach of most British youth research over the past twenty years - the sociological study of youth transitions - is not helpful in approaching 'the youth question'. The paper locates these recent critiques in terms of the development of 'two traditions' of youth research in the UK; a development which has served to separate structural and cultural analyses and so to limit the theoretical potential of the field.A recent qualitative study of young people growing up in Teesside, Northeast England is then discussed. Close analysis of the biographies of two of its participants are used as the basis for a reconsideration of the nature of transitions amongst 'socially excluded' youth and a discussion of some of the limitations of recent critiques of youth studies. The paper argues that the sort of research, methods and analysis employed here provide one example of how interests in the cultural and structural aspects of youth might be integrated. It concludes by reasserting the theoretical value of a broad conceptualisation of transition in understanding the social, economic and cultural processes that define the youth phase.

This edited collection focuses on the sociology of 'social censure' – the sociological term advocated by Colin Sumner in his seminal writing of the 1980s and 1990s.

This edited collection brings together established global scholars and new thinkers to outline fresh concepts and theoretical perspectives for criminological research and analysis in the 21st century. Criminologists from the UK, USA, Canada and Australia evaluate the current condition of criminological theory and present students and researchers with new and revised ideas from the realms of politics, culture and subjectivity to unpack crime and violence in the precarious age of global neoliberalism. These ideas range from the micro-realm of the ‘personality disorder’ to the macro-realm of global ‘power-crime’. Rejecting or modifying the orthodox notion that crime and harm are largely the products of criminalisation and control systems, these scholars bring causes and conditions back into play in an eclectic yet thematic way that should inspire students and researchers to once again investigate the reasons why some individuals and groups elect to harm others rather than seek sociability. This collection will inspire new criminologists to both look outside their discipline for new ideas to import, and to create new ideas within their discipline to reinvigorate it and further strengthen its ability to explain the crimes and harms that we see around us today. This book will be of particular interest to academics and both undergraduate and postgraduate students in the field of criminology, especially to those looking for theoretical concepts and frameworks for dissertations, theses and research reports.

Criminology is at a crossroads. In the last two decades it has largely failed to produce the kind of new intellectual frameworks and empirical data that might help us to explain the high levels of crime and interpersonal violence that beset inner city areas and corrode community life. Similarly, it has failed to adequately explain forms of antisocial behaviour that are just as much a part of life in corporate boardrooms as they are in the ghettos of north America and the sink estates of Britain. Criminology needs to rethink the problem of crime and re-engage its audience with strident theoretical analysis and powerful empirical data. In New Directions in Crime and Deviancy some of the world’s most talented and polemical critical criminologists come together to offer new ideas and new avenues for analysis. The book contains chapters that address a broad range of issues central to 21st century critical criminology: ecological issues and the new green criminology; the broad impact of neoliberalism upon our cultural and economic life; recent signs of political resistance and opposition; systemic and interpersonal forms of violence; growing fear and enmity in cities; the backlash against the women’s movement; the subjective pathology of the serial killer; computer hacking and so on. Based on key papers presented at the historic York Deviancy Conferences, this cutting-edge volume also contains important critical essays that address criminological research methods and the production of criminological knowledge. It is key reading material for those with an academic interest in critical, cultural and theoretical criminology, and crime and deviance more generally.

As an original, albeit short lived, researcher and member of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in the mid-1970s, this author reflects about the legacy and influence of Resistance through Rituals (RTR) on the author’s scholarship and research, and the theoretical and methodological hinterland from which RTR emerges and to which it continues to be linked. The article argues that the main influence on RTR was a materialist theory of culture conveyed through everyday ritual and style. In this sense culture is the class arena through which each generation of young people attempts to resolve anew the dilemmas and contradictions of their parent culture, brought by disruptive rapid social and economic change. Focussed on work, leisure, housing and community, youth transitions and subcultures concentrate and expose, sometimes in exaggerated ways, the vulnerability and exposure felt by parent cultures towards change at key points in the intergenerational reproduction of social order.

© 2018 by the author. Focusing on the lives of British Muslim young men, this article examines the links between their social and economic relations and their prison experiences, desistance, and identity. In understanding the meanings they place on their prison experiences and their social and economic marginalization, the article theorises about social integration, and their place in British society. An intergenerational shift from the availability of local high-waged, skilled, and secure textile work to low-waged, precarious, service work presented them with a series of problems and opportunities, leading them to reject licit wage labour and embrace illicit entrepreneurial criminality. The article concludes that their social and economic relations drove criminal solutions, not ethnicity.

British Muslim young men who offend upon reentry from prison reported that “Prisons were made for people like us.” At one level, this meant that the challenges they faced were likely to be intractable and insurmountable, regrettably returning them to prison. At another, their social integration after release from prison was hampered by something more than their individual choices and agency. Cycling between neighborhood, offending, and prison, it was their characteristic social relations and the peculiar social structural constraints placed upon them as a group that best explained their experiences upon release from prison.

Globalisation has led to increasing cultural and religious diversity in cities around the world. What are the implications for young people growing up in these settings? How do they develop their religious identities, and what roles do families, friends and peers, teachers, religious leaders and wider cultural influences play in the process? Furthermore, how do members of similar and different cultural and faith backgrounds get on together, and what can young people tell us about reducing conflict and promoting social solidarity amid diversity? Youth On Religion outlines the findings from a unique large-scale project investigating the meaning of religion to young people in three multi-faith locations. Drawing on survey data from over 10,000 young people with a range of faith positions, as well as a series of fascinating interviews, discussion groups and diary reports involving 160 adolescents, this book examines myriad aspects of their daily lives. It provides the most comprehensive account yet of the role of religion for young people growing up in contemporary, multicultural urban contexts. Youth On Religion is a rigorous and engaging account of developing religiosity in a changing society. It presents young people’s own perspectives on their attitudes and experiences and how they negotiate their identities. The book will be an instructive and valuable resource for psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, educationalists and anthropologists, as well as youth workers, social workers and anyone working with young people today. It will also provide essential understanding for policy makers tackling issues of multiculturalism in advanced societies.

This review of the literature about how and why poverty and crime influence one another, and the benefits to crime reduction of reducing poverty, looks at the implications for practical policies and strategies.

There are few published articles on conducting large-scale surveys in secondary schools, and this paper seeks to fill this gap. Drawing on the experiences of the Youth On Religion project, it discusses the politics of gaining access to these schools and the considerations leading to the adoption and administration of an online survey. It is concluded that successful research in schools has to be planned carefully in collaboration with key members of staff, and justified as an educational activity. Providing speedy feedback was helpful to ensure schools benefited from the research and to keep them engaged with the project.

This book contributes to understanding of the contemporary relationship between Muslims and the Western societies in which they live, focusing particularly on the UK. Chapters reflect on the nature of multiculturalism, as well as a wide range of specific aspects of daily life, including religious dialogue, gender, freedom of speech and politics.