Crime Control As Industry Summary

Crime Control As Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style by Nils Christie, a professor of Criminology at the University of Oslo, is somehow a ground-breaking book to the extent that it argues that ‘’crime control, rather than crime itself is the existent danger for our future’’ and that systems of crime control have the potential for developing western style Gulags, or concentration camps (p.15) Crime Control as Industry is divided into 13 chapters each of those filled with very concrete and heavily revised amounts of data which try to explains us the readers how managing crime has turned into a reasonably big industry; “the crime control industry” and how it will continue to grow because unlike most industries there is “no lack of raw-material” as crime is in endless supply. But it goes further into my interpretation as Nils Christie also suggests that the increased prison populations, especially in the United States characterise a move ‘’towards Gulag’s western style’’. Christie argues that the fundamental problems of this threat are the unequal distribution of wealth and the lack of access to paid work.

In this third edition the author does a quite memorable job as he documents the enormous growth in the number of prisoners in recent years by giving us a global perspective to incarceration and by comparing how unequal imprisonment rates between likely European countries are. He then particularly turns his attention to Russia and the US in chapters 6 and 7. According …show more content…
Crime Control As Industry warns us about the wicked growth of the US imprisonment levels, and the threats that this trend can have around the world if it continues to develop. A good way of stopping this from happening is to have a deeper look into the way the penal systems work and in particular to highlight the differences between political processes and