Controlling Crime (Published in association with The Open University)

This innovative textbook adopts a series of vantage points to assess the historical emergence, function and purpose of modern criminal justice systems. The areas covered include: origins of the police; police powers, accountability and management; criminal courts and sentencing practices; the emergence of the prison, prison privatization; penal policy; youth justice; punishment in the community; and crime prevention and community safety.

Collectively, the chapters provide an accessible overview of the nature of contemporary British criminal justice and encourage historical, comparative and critical analysis of its powers, practices and procedures.

The book is the course text for The Open University course D315 Crime, Order and Social Control.

Eugene McLaughlin is Professor of Criminology and co-director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Research. He is also a member of the Centre for Law Justice and Journalism. He completed his postgraduate criminology studies at the University of Cambridge and the University of Sheffield. Eugene has held various academic appointments including at the University of Hong Kong, the Open University and the University of Southampton. He has also been Visiting Professor at the Department of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, the Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. He is an associate editor of Crime, Media and Cultureand is on the editorial board of Criminal Justice Matters. He has served on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Criminology, Critical Social Policy, the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice and was co-editor of Theoretical Criminology.


John Muncie is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at the Open University, UK. He is the author of Youth and Crime (5th edition, Sage, 2021), and he has published widely on issues in comparative youth justice and children’s rights, including the co-edited companion volumes Youth Crime and Justice and Comparative Youth Justice (Sage, 2006). He has produced numerous Open University texts and readers, including Crime: Local and Global (Willan, 2010), Criminal Justice: Local and Global (Willan, 2010), The Problem of Crime (2nd edition, Sage, 2001), Crime Prevention and Community Safety (Sage, 2001) and Imprisonment: European Perspectives (Harvester, 1991). He has also contributed nine volumes to the The Sage Library of Criminology (Sage, 2007–2009). He is co-editor of the Sage journal Youth Justice: An International Journal.