State Power Crime.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: McGovern, Alyce
• Date: 01 April 2010

State Power Crime

Edited by Roy Coleman, Joe Sim, Steve Tombs and David Whyte

London: Sage Publications, 2009

This edited collection is a broad-ranging, critical, exploration of the relationship between state power and crime. Prefaced by Stuart Hall, the collection ambitiously aims to put state power and practice under a 'critical' microscope, building upon, extending and challenging many of the ideas put forward by Hall et al. (1978) in their seminal work, Policing the Crisis.

In their introductory chapter, Coleman et al. argue that many of the conceptualisations of state power introduced in Policing the Crisis have not been taken up by criminologists and, as such, need to be revisited and the state 'reproblematised'. The collection, they propose, identifies those 'continuities and discontinuities' in state formation, practices and power in the United Kingdom in the period since Policing the Crisis.

Overall, the collection successfully seeks to trace the 'histories of the present' (Garland, 2001) that offer important understandings of the nature of the neo-liberal state under scrutiny here. To varying degrees the following chapters draw on the work of Hall et al., with some offering new directions or sites of analysis, while others trace the historical developments of theories of state power and law-and-order policies. Despite the collection primarily reflecting upon issues and examples within the UK, the central thesis of the collection and theoretical insights offered are applicable to conditions and subjects of other western nations and the wider field of critical criminology.

The first two chapters of the collection consider issues of gender, sexualities and state power, themes not originally addressed in Policing the Crisis. Ballinger (Chapter 1), for example, addresses the way in which the state 'does gender', arguing that inequality between the sexes is still a serious issue, perpetuated by the state's inclination for dealing with gender in a patriarchal way, via indirect procedures and structures. Using the examples of rape legislation, domestic violence and the funding of crisis refuges, Ballinger demonstrates the ways in which state reinforces heteropatriarchal social order, ignoring many of the complex social issues and structures that contribute to violence against women.

Similar themes are explored by Bibbings (Chapter 2) in his chapter on the heterostate, which attempts to draw criminological attention to sexualities through...