Crime and the City: Essays in Memory of John Barron Mays

255 Pages·1989·22.92 MB·English

by  David Downes (eds.)

CRIME AND THE CITY
ii
JOHN BARRON MAYS 1914- 87
Crime and the City
Essays in Memory of John Barron Mays
Edited by
David Downes
Professor of Social Administration
London School of Economics
M
MACMILLAN
©David Downes 1989
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First published 1989
Published by
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Crime and the city: essays in memory of John Barron
Mays.
1. Urban regions. Crime. Prevention. Environmental
aspects.
I. Downes, David. 1938-II. Mays, John
Barron. 1914-1987.
364'.91732
ISBN 978-1-349-09306-9 ISBN 978-1-349-09304-5 (eBook)
DDOI 10.1007/978-1-3419-09304-5
iv
YOUNG DELINQUENT
Pushed from his-mother's lap too early
So that another member of the team
Can have his too-brief innings, he collects
His playmates from the street as easily
As hands and knees get dirt, and a few yards
Of gritty pavement form his only playground.
With a few broken toys, tin cans and bricks
He fabricates a world to stretch his mind
And makes the nearest wall his Everest.
After school roaming near the river
He jumps a lorry rumbling from the docks
With other boys, fumbles beneath the sheets
And finds a treasure-trove of fruit or nuts,
Sugar or chocolate ... and trespasses
On railway cuttings, trapping wild rock-pigeons
To keep in back-yard boxes ... tests his skill
Climbing a warehouse wall, chancing his luck ...
And on that instant's stamped a criminal!
By casual peccadilloes of the street
He moves through nursery stages into crime.
Police files record his long delinquency;
Magistrates probe and ponder on his case.
He takes his cue and cons his given part,
Learning his role, which is to break the rule.
But no one anywhere breaks in with love,
Or makes a simple reconciling move!
The play proceeds-a small domestic farce-
Watched by bored officers, baffled social workers,
And social scientists making case-studies,
Minds stuffed with aetiologies and theories
All evanescing in a cloud of words,
Turning to fossil print in libraries,
Catalogued, indexed, filed, objective ... dead ...
And now no one dares to break in with love.
John Mays
Nicer Than Humans (1977)
v
Contents
John Barron Mays (1914-87) frontispiece
List of Contributors ix
1 Introduction 1
David Downes
2 'A Jekyll in the Classroom, a Hyde in the Street':
Queen Victoria's Hooligans
Geoffrey Pearson 10
3 A Tale of Two Estates
Anthony Bottoms, R. I. Mawby and Polii Xanthos 36
4 Youth Unemployment in Liverpool
Kenneth Roberts 88
5 Women and Crime in the City
Elaine Player 111
6 Two Stations: An Ethnographic Study of Policing
in the Inner City
Janet Foster 128
7 Policing in the Vernacular
Richard Hobbs 154
-8 The Age of the Drain Revisited
Terence Morris 182
9 Housing, Community and Crime
Anne Power 206
John Barron Mays (1914-87): A Bibliography 236
Index 239
vii
List of Contributors
David Downes is Professor of Social Administration at the London
School of Economics, where he has taught since 1963. His books
include a study of delinquency in East London, The Delinquent
Solution (1966); Gambling, Work and Leisure (1976); and, with Paul
Rock, a text on social theories of deviance, Understanding Deviance
(1982, second revised edition, 1988). His comparative work on
post-war penal policy in the Netherlands and England, Contrasts in
Tolerance (1988), was published by Oxford University Press. He has
been Editor of the British Journal of Criminology since 1985.
Geoffrey Pearson is Professor of Sociai Work at Middlesex
Polytechnic. Educated at the Universities of Cambridge, Sheffield
and the London School of Economics, he taught formerly at
University College, Cardiff and at the University of Bradford where
he was Reader in Applied Social Studies. His published work
includes The Deviant Imagination (Macmillan, 1975), Working Class
Youth Culture (Routledge, 1976), Hooligan: A History of Respectable
Fears '(Macmillan, 1983), Young People and Heroin (Gower &
Health Education Council, 1986) and The New Heroin Users
(Blackwell, 1987).
Anthony Bottoms is Wolfson Professor of Criminology and Director
of the Institute of Criminology in the University of Cambridge. He
was formerly Professor of Criminology in the University of Sheffield,
and whilst in Sheffield he directed a research project on urban social
structure and crime, resulting in a book on The Urban Criminal (with
J. Baldwin, 1976) and several articles.
R. I. Mawby is Principal Lecturer in Social Policy in the Department
of Social and Political Studies at Plymouth Polytechnic. He is the
author of Policing the City (1979), Crime Victims (1987, with Martin
Gill) and numerous articles on various topics in criminology and
social policy.
Polli Xanthos completed a Ph.D. thesis on housing and crime at the
University of Sheffield in 1981, and subsequently worked as a
Research Fellow in the Centre for Criminological and Socio-Legal
ix
X List of Contributors
Studies at Sheffield on a study of observation and assessment centres.
She has now left academic life, and runs her own business.·
Kenneth Roberts is Reader in Sociology at Liverpool University. His
books include Leisure (Longman, 1981); Youth and Leisure (Allen
and Unwin, 1983); and School-leavers and their Prospects (Open
University Press, 1984).
Elaine Player is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Criminological
Research, University of Oxford, where she is currently conducting
research into Grendon psychiatric prison. She is the co-author, with
Baroness Seear, of the Howard League study Women in the Penal
System (1986). With Elaine Genders, she has published studies of
women's imprisonment, and their book on Race Relations in Prison is
to be published by Oxford University Press.
Janet Foster is a Research Officer at the London School of
Economics. She is currently involved in an ethnographic evaluation
of the Priority Estates Project and its impact on crime and
community. Her book, Crime, Community and Culture will be
published by Routledge in 1989. The research described in this paper
was conducted as part of her Ph.D. Thesis, Crime and Community:
Attitudes Towards Crime and Law Enforcement in Two generations in
South East London, University of London (1987).
Dick Hobbs is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Criminological
Research, University of Oxford and a member of the Council of the
Howard League. He is currently working on a study of police
workloads and priorities, and has published articles on youth
subcultures, police corruption, firearms control and policing. He is
the author of Doing the Business (Oxford University Press, 1988), an
ethnographic study of East London.
Terence Morris is Professor of Social Institutions at the University of
London and has taught criminology and the sociology of deviance at
the London School of Economics since 1955. While an undergraduate
in the early 1950s he worked with the late John Mays and others when
together they produced Spontaneous Youth Groups. His own
research into urban delinquency was published in 1957 as The
Criminal Area. His interests extended to the sociology of the prison,
Pentonville: The Sociology of an English Prison (1963); and to capital
List of Contributors xi
punishment, A Calendar of Murder, with Louis Blom-Cooper (1964).
He is the author of Deviance and Control: The Secular Heresy (1976)
and Crime and Criminal Justice since 1945 (1988). He is a Vice
President of the Howard League for Penal Reform with which he has
been associated for forty years and has served as a magistrate in Inner
London since 1967. He has served in the past as an Advisor to
colonial governments in the Caribbean and the Western Pacific, and
was a member of the Longford Committee that produced the blue-
print for the penal reforms of the 1960s. His current interests include
the politics of policing and crimes against animals.
Anne Power teaches in the Department of Social Policy and
Administration at the London School of Economics, running the
Diploma in Housing. She is Director of the Priority Estates Project
and Consultant to the Department of Environment and Welsh Office.
Her book Property before People, about the management of
twentieth-century Council housing, was published in November 1987
by Unwin Hyman. Her essay is a developed and extended version of
her presentation to the Sociology and Politics Departmental Seminar
at Cumberland Lodge, January 1986.