N–P: Net-widening to Policing and the Police

Core idea

The N–P cluster is the topic where criminology's control apparatus comes into focus. Net-widening describes how well-meaning diversionary reforms expanded rather than reduced the reach of the criminal-justice system. New media opens a parallel control space, the digital one, with its own criminal opportunities. Norms name the soft regulators on which formal control depends. Obscenity and pornography mark the moving line between legal and unacceptable representation. Organised crime identifies the transnational enterprise sector now seen as a global priority. Peace-making criminology offers a normative alternative — non-violence and reconciliation in place of retribution. And policing and the police anchor the cluster in the institution that does most of the formal control work, while quietly being transformed by pluralisation and privatisation.

Across these seven entries the topic argues that social control in late modern societies has become at once wider (more agents, more situations, more behaviour) and more diffuse (less anchored in the public police, more distributed across private and informal actors).

Why it matters

The most consequential criminological fact of the late twentieth century is not that crime rose, fell, or stabilised — it is that the apparatus of control expanded enormously and changed shape. The N–P cluster gives the conceptual vocabulary for reading that expansion. Without it, an analyst sees more police, more prisons, more surveillance cameras, more security guards, and more electronic monitoring devices without a framework for what they collectively constitute.

The cluster also names a normative alternative. Peace-making criminology argues that meeting violence with state violence cannot reduce violence; only a positive peace — built on social justice, inclusion, and reconciliation — has any chance of doing so. The argument may be utopian, but it is the only sustained criminological tradition that takes the question of means as seriously as the question of ends.

Key takeaways

Mental model

Net-widening

The topic opens with a paradox. The 1960s and 1970s saw a sustained effort to divert young offenders away from the criminal-justice system through community service, probation, and intermediate treatment programmes. The intent was decriminalisation; the effect was the opposite.

Stan Cohen's "The Punitive City" (1979) and Visions of Social Control (1985) traced what went wrong. Drawing on Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Cohen argued that the diversionary programmes did not substitute for criminal-justice interventions — they supplemented them, adding more menu options for experts to apply sanctions to previously unsanctioned behaviour.

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The thesis has had a long afterlife. Every subsequent reform that aspires to be an "alternative" to custody invites the question: is this substituting for, or supplementing, existing controls? In most cases the empirical answer has been "supplementing."

New media

New media — primarily the internet — differ from the mass media of Chapter 11 in three crucial ways. First, they enable many-to-many communication rather than one-to-many. Second, digitisation allows words, sound, and images to be flexibly manipulated using inexpensive devices. Third, they span geographical and political boundaries effortlessly.

The democratic promise (ordinary people as producers, not just consumers) is real but not the criminologist's main interest. The criminological interest is cybercrime — hacking, identity theft, fraud, child pornography distribution — and the new geometry of policing it requires. Crimes can now be committed across borders, in different time zones, with offender and victim never co-present. The defensible-space toolkit of Chapter 7 has almost nothing to offer here; entirely new investigative and regulatory capacities are required.

Norms

Norms are the shared rules that regulate behaviour in various social settings — the guidelines and expectations about what is acceptable, inculcated through socialisation. For Durkheim, every society is held together by a normative structure whose failure is closely linked to crime and social conflict. The Chicago School and social-control theorists explored how norms inhibit criminality; subcultural criminologists explored how competing norms in deviant subcultures can support rule-breaking.

The norms concept is the silent floor under most of criminology. When labelling theory talks about "the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance," it is talking about norms. When moral-panic analysis talks about "societal values and interests" under threat, it is talking about norms. When peace-making criminology proposes a normative reorientation of the criminal-justice system, it is talking about norms. Naming the floor matters.

Obscenity and pornography

Pornography denotes sexually explicit representations whose primary purpose is sexual stimulation; obscenity denotes representations regarded as generally offensive and thus unacceptable to society at large. In Western societies most pornography is legal, though often condemned as deviant; obscenity is almost invariably subject to criminal sanction.

The topic flags two contemporary preoccupations. Child pornography has become a major crime problem as digital technology has made distribution cheap and global. Violent sexual pornography has been linked — rightly or wrongly — to sexual victimisation, and is the focus of recent legislative attention. The persistent analytic point is that what counts as either pornographic or obscene varies widely across cultural and historical contexts, and the line is the result of specific legal and political processes, not a settled feature of nature.

Organised crime

Organised crime is the topic's most contested category. Two problems — definition and sources — dog every attempt to study it.

The definition problem

Definitions vary between countries, agencies, and academic traditions. The FBI defines organised crime as "A continuing criminal conspiracy, having an organised structure, fed by fear and corruption and motivated by greed." Other definitions focus on activity type (drug trafficking, internet fraud, car-jacking rings). Germany in the 1960s officially had no organised crime — because it was using the American Cosa Nostra template as its definition, and nothing in Germany matched. Once Germany changed its definition, organised crime appeared. The category is doing constitutive work, not just descriptive work.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (2002) catalogued forty distinct organised-crime group structures across sixteen countries — from rigid hierarchies to small fluid clusters of people coming together for particular "projects." The hierarchies-versus-networks debate is unlikely to resolve because organised crime really does take radically different forms at different scales of sophistication.

Typical activities

Organised crime, however defined, covers a sprawling range of activities:

• trafficking — arms, drugs, humans (especially for the sex trade), hazardous wastes, human organs, wildlife;
• smuggling — stolen vehicles, contraband alcohol and tobacco, humans;
• counterfeiting, piracy, fraud, gambling, racketeering, loan sharking;
• theft, robbery, hijacking, kidnapping, prostitution, pornography;
• enabling activities — corruption of officials, money laundering, intimidation.

The "enabling" category is critical. Organised crime is not a separate shadow economy; it depends on customs officials, police officers, politicians, business people, and others in the licit economy. This integration is what has driven the political prioritisation of organised crime — fears of destabilising financial systems through money laundering, of corrupting weak democracies, and (post-1990) of links to insurgent groups.

The sources problem

Academic study of organised crime depends largely on data held by law-enforcement and government agencies — whose agendas differ from academics'. Access is fiercely guarded, gaps are systematic, and gatekeeping shapes what becomes visible. Donald Cressey's classic Theft of the Nation (1969) relied on FBI data on the Cosa Nostra and reached the famous conclusion that "if one understands the Cosa Nostra, he understands organised crime in the United States." Cressey's access depended on agreeing to a positive representation of the agencies he was researching — which Lyman and Potter rightly flag as a compromise of academic independence.

The post-1989 period — collapse of Communism, EU enlargement, neoliberal trade liberalisation — has made organised crime increasingly transnational, with members in different countries, sourcing illicit goods or services in economically disadvantaged regions and selling them in richer ones, and forging cross-border alliances with kindred groups. Hence the alternative term enterprise crime: organised crime as a business sector aimed at serious money.

Peace-making criminology

Peace-making criminology is the topic's normative outlier. It is less a theoretical perspective than a philosophy of non-violent conflict resolution. Pepinsky and Quinney's Criminology as Peacemaking (1991) drew its sources widely — religious traditions (Buddhism, Quakerism, Gandhi), critical theory (Marxism, anarchism, socialism, mutualism), and the social sciences (social psychology, functionalist sociology, post-structuralism, existentialism, psychoanalysis).

The argument turns on a distinction.

• Negative peace = the absence of violence.
• Positive peace = the presence of mutual support, humanism, and freedom from oppression — the conditions that reduce motivations for violence in the first place.

Author's argument: Meeting violence with state violence cannot reduce violence. As Quinney puts it, "the means cannot be different from the ends, peace can come only out of peace." A criminal-justice system founded on punishment and retribution upholds violence as a means of resolving conflicts and so reproduces the violence it claims to suppress.

John Fuller's "pyramid paradigm" gives the philosophy practical shape. At the base sits non-violence — for the state as much as for the offender. On top of that base, five further commitments: to social justice, inclusion, correct means, ascertainable criteria, and the categorical imperative (dignity and respect for all parties, including the offender).

The major critiques (Gibbons, Akers) press two points. First, the project requires a wholesale transformation of social institutions — politically implausible in any near-term horizon. Second, many of the proposed practical methods (mediation, rehabilitation, restitution) have been in the mainstream for decades without producing a peaceful society. Whether peace-making criminology is a serious empirical research programme or an ethical posture remains contested.

Policing and the police

The topic's longest entry. The distinction between policing (regulatory practices that monitor and enforce conformity, performed by many actors) and the police (the formal, state-accountable institutional apparatus) is foundational. The police are one of many policing agents.

The emergence of modern policing

Before the late eighteenth century, English policing was a "patchwork" — watchmen, part-time parish constables, private "thief-takers" who recovered property or apprehended felons for reward. The watershed was Robert Peel's 1829 Metropolitan Police Act, which created a centralised, accountable, government-funded force based on the Fielding brothers' mid-eighteenth-century "Bow Street Runners" model. County-based forces followed across England and Wales, with central inspection, standardised training, and incremental professionalisation through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Two historical readings compete:

• The Whig history treats the emergence as a rational, progressive response to inefficiency, corruption, and rising urban crime.
• The revisionist history locates the drive in political motivations — the suppression of an organised, impoverished, mobilising working class.

The evidence supports the revisionist reading at least in part. The Metropolitan and county forces were repeatedly used in a military manner to break strikes, suppress political protest, and tighten control over working-class movements — most famously during the miners' strike of the 1980s.

The contradictions of modern policing

The topic identifies three structural tensions in the modern police role.

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Pluralisation and privatisation

The largest recent structural change is the breakup of the public police monopoly. Pluralisation distributes crime-control activity across local authorities, community groups, private contractors, and citizen schemes. Privatisation transfers specific functions to for-profit firms — private security guards, alarm systems, electronic tagging, criminal-intelligence systems, drug testing, prisoner transport (Group 4, for example).

Four pressures drove the change: rising post-war recorded crime that the police could not contain; the Thatcher-era political shift toward market provision of public services; expanding demands (crime prevention, public reassurance, antisocial behaviour, terrorism); and the emergence of new offence categories (cybercrime, IP crime, transnational crime) that the traditional police were ill-equipped to tackle.

Bayley and Shearing (1996) argue this represents a reversion to a premodern pattern in which policing is supplied by many actors, many outside the public sphere. Critics raise three concerns: accountability is harder to ensure for private providers; market provision discriminates against those with the fewest resources; and overlapping agencies can produce inefficiency, not efficiency.

Practical application

The N–P cluster gives an analyst a checklist for reading any contemporary control-system reform.

Example

Consider a fictional municipal reform package billed as a "community-based alternative to incarceration" for low-level offenders: GPS-monitored home confinement, mandatory rehabilitation programmes, weekly community-service requirements, and a new digital case-management system shared across police, probation, social services, and the local school district.

A net-widening reading predicts the trap. The ankle monitor and the case-management database will not shrink the prison population significantly; they will instead capture a broader population of low-level offenders who, before the reform, would have been informally diverted by police discretion. The mesh of the net thins, more agencies (schools! social workers!) are pulled into the criminal-justice administrative apparatus, and the duration of monitoring under "community supervision" often exceeds the equivalent custodial sentence. Net population under formal control grows.

A policing pluralisation reading notes that the GPS monitoring is operated by a private contractor with quarterly performance targets that incentivise reported violations; the case-management database is licensed from a private firm whose data-access agreements are not subject to public records law; the rehabilitation programmes are provided by sub-contracted nonprofits with their own performance metrics.

A peace-making reading observes that the reform retains the underlying retributive framing — we are doing this to you because of what you did. It does not work on the conditions that produced the offending population in the first place (housing, mental-health support, education, employment). Fuller's pyramid would call this a "non-violence" reform without the upper commitments.

The example does not predict that the reform will fail to do any good — only that, without the N–P toolkit, an evaluator cannot tell whether the headline ("alternative to incarceration") matches the actual structural effect. The cluster's job is to refuse the headline.

Related lessons