Demystifying Power, Crime and Social Harm: The Work and Legacy of Steven Box

This collection revisits Steven Box’s book, Power, Crime and Mystification, published in 1983, and considers its relevance forty years on. It introduces the critical analysis developed by Box which examined corporate crime, police crime, rape and sexual assault and female crime and analyses the continuities and discontinuities since 1983 in relation to crime, the state and the exercise/mystification of power. The book explores the ways in which we can see his influence nationally and internationally on critical criminological, zemiological and abolitionist writings today. It asks how can these perspectives be applied to a critical analysis of contemporary, state authoritarianism and the criminal injustice that this authoritarianism generates? Additionally, how can Box’s concepts shine a critical light on contemporary social harms that were not covered in the original book? The collection provides a toolkit for students and academics to criticallyanalyse the issues around crime/social harm, power/powerlessness, truth/mystification, criminal injustice/social justice as well as historical and contemporary sites of resistance confronting the exercise of state power. 

David Gordon Scott works at The Open University, UK. His previous books include Why Prison? (Cambridge University Press), Against Imprisonment (Waterside Press), For Abolition (Waterside Press) and The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition (Routledge, co-edited with Michael Coyle). David is co-founding editor (with Emma Bell) of the international journal Justice, Power and Resistance. A former coordinator of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control (2009-2012), he is Chair of the Weavers’ Uprising Bicentennial Committee. 

Joe Sim is Emeritus Professor of Criminology at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. His previous books include Medical Power in Prisons (Open University Press), Punishment and Prisons (Sage), British Prisons (Basil Blackwell, with Mike Fitzgerald) and Prisons Under Protest (Open University Press, with Phil Scraton and Paula Skidmore). He has also co-edited Western European Penal Systems (Sage, with Vincenzo Ruggiero and Mick Ryan) and State Power Crime (Sage, with Roy Coleman, Steve Tombs and David Whyte). He is a Trustee of the charity INQUEST.