Knowledge and Politics of Social Control of Crime

Abstract

Understanding social control is firmly intertwined with understanding criminology as a science. This paper analyses different types of knowledge that has been penetrating the science about crime, and understanding, and practice of social control in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. It focuses specifically on psychological understanding of crime and social control, i.e. understanding of crime as primarily a psychologically-rooted phenomena that needs to be addressed by the agents of social control. The analysis of articles published in the Journal of Criminal Investigation and Criminology shows that understanding and responding to social deviance, especially psychologically informed social control approaches, have been at the crux of understanding social control in this specific time and space. By focusing on those articles published in the Journal, this article shows different aspects of social control and varying understanding of what social control is and what it ought to be. In doing this, the article attaches various understandings of social control in the "politics of a specific historical moment". In the second part, it answers the question of what kind of surveillance studies were developed by researchers in the last seven decades. In the final part, this article analyses understanding crime control policy as encapsulated throughout the Journal's lifespan and the decades-long attempts to confine crime control policy to reason and scientific method that continues to this day.