The Road to Whatever: Middle Class Cultgure and the Crisis of Adolescence

In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed sociologist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliott Currie draws on years of interviews to offer a profound investigation of what has gone wrong for so many “mainstream” American adolescents. Rejecting such predictable answers as TV violence, permissiveness, and inherent evil, Currie links this crisis to a pervasive “culture of exclusion” fostered by a society in which medications trump guidance and a punitive “zero tolerance” approach to adolescent misbehavior has become the norm. Broadening his inquiry, he dissects the changes in middle-class life that stratify the world into "winners" and "losers," imposing an extraordinarily harsh culture—and not just on kids. Vivid, compelling, and deeply empathetic, The Road to Whatever is a stark indictment of a society that has lost the will—or the capacity—to care.

Between the Devil and the Deep-blue Sea: Conceptualizing Victims Experiences of Policing in Domestic Violence in the Singaporean Context

In contextualising victims' experiences of policing in domestic violence situations in Singapore, two extreme but interrelated sets of responses have been observed. At one end of the continuum, criminal justice sanctions are strictly contingent upon victim willingness to initiate criminal proceedings against the perpetrator, and at the other, victims' rights, needs and preferences seem to be usurped by the justice system regardless of victims' choice. Neither of these positions takes victims' interests into account. Nor do they stem from an understanding of the sociocultural, economic and structural circumstances in which victims experienced violence, and continued to experience it, long after a police intervention. Data from the research revealed that criminalisation as an ideological and legally practical tool was not only rendered ineffective but irrelevant to the experiences of women in the Singaporean context.Two factors account for this phenomenon. First, the absence of support structures to achieve criminalisation and address victims' needs in the aftermath of criminalisation; second, the authoritative, paternalistic and patriarchal state impedes processes aimed at the empowerment of women victims.

Creating Institutions: Linking the Local and the Global in the Travel of Crime Policies

Institutions represent the ‘technologies of the social.’ They are increasingly modelled and transported to other cultures and societies, and criminal justice institutions—traditional, parochial, and local as they are—are no exception to this. Problems of crime and insecurity have engendered the travelling of institutions from the centre to the periphery and vice versa. This paper will explore the problems which arise from travelling and modelling, and from the transport and creation of institutions in the area of criminal justice. An important feature in the travel of criminal justice institutions is the use of ‘local knowledge’ and its role in this process.