Breaking Windows:

"At the end of the day, the book should be judged not so much as an academic discourse but as a political brick that was hurled through the windows of various establishments that had it coming to them. "The retreat from theory is over, and the politicization of crime and criminology is imminent. Close reading of the classical social theorists reveals a basic agreement; the abolition of crime is possible under certain social arrangements ... "It should be clear that a criminology which is not normatively committed to the abolition of inequalities of wealth and power, and in particular inequalities in property and life chances [is] irreducibly bound up with the identification of deviance with pathology ... for crime to be abolished these social arrangements themselves must be subject to fundamental social change ... "The task is not merely to 'penetrate' these problems, not merely to question the stereotypes, not merely to act as carriers of 'alternative phenomenological realities'. The task is to create a society in which the facts of human diversity, whether personal, organic or social, are not subject to the power to criminalize." Eric Hobsbawm, in The Age of Extremes, pinpoints the extraordinary changes which occurred in the last third of the Twentieth Century. The Golden Age of postwar Europe and North America was a world of full employment and steadily rising affluence, it witnessed the gradual incorporation of the working class into, at least the trappings, of full citizenship, the entry of women more fully into public life and the labour market, the attempt in the United States to create political equality for African Americans. It was an era of inclusion, of affluence and of conformity. But, as Hobsbawm wryly delineates, the Golden Age was followed by the cultural Revolution of the late Sixties and Seventies, with