Myth of the ‘Crime Decline’

Justin Kotzé is Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at Teesside University. He was awarded his PhD in 2016 and has previously published work in the fields of ex-prisoner reintegration and the historical sublimation of violence. Justin is the co-editor of Zemiology: Reconnecting Crime and Social Harm (2018).

• Introduction: A Picture in Search of a New FrameChapter One: Constructing the Statistical Quilt for the Comfortable Dream: Exploring the ‘International Crime Decline’Chapter Two: Context is EverythingChapter Three: Invisible Crimes and Non-Criminalised HarmsChapter Four: A View from Life on the PrecipiceChapter Five: Paradigmatic Dominance and Eyes Wide Shut: Beyond Positivism and ConstructionismChapter Six: Dreaming Comfortably: Theorising the ‘Crime Decline’ and Modernity’s Dream MythConclusion

"Kotzé theoretically and rigorously skewers the myth of the 'crime decline' as a 'baseless assertion built on insufficient data'. In doing so he punctures liberal, dream-like notions of 'better angels of our nature' exercising some mystical and ameliorating influence on the harm that is still so catastrophically caused by our underlying social and economic system and the toxic subjectivity that it creates. Beautifully written and intellectually challenging, it also serves to remind every Criminologist of the debt that we now and will continue to owe to Ultra Realism for re-invigorating a discipline that was theoretically atrophied."Professor Emeritus David Wilson, Centre for Applied Criminology, Birmingham City University."Justin Kotzé does what few criminologists are willing to do these days. He pushes past the cloying sensitivities of contemporary social science to offer an admirably honest account of the genuine problems that continue to blight our most impoverished and disorderly boroughs... he carefully and convincingly dismantles the crime decline narrative. Compelling stuff."Professor Simon Winlow, Northumbria UniversityIn The Myth of the Crime Decline, Justin Kotzé carefully unpicks one of the predominant narratives of mainstream criminology. Using cutting edge social theory and original data, this book demands that we move beyond positivism or constructionism as explanatory frameworks for our contemporary condition and examine the complexity of a criminological reality that is far from static. Kotzé draws us into a rapidly changing criminological landscape, illustrating how adaptive and new forms of crime are facilitated by technological advances, rendering the creaking mechanisms of crime surveys and many categories of crime and deviance obsolete. Beneath the statistical radar, and against a backdrop of socioeconomic precarity, these new forms of criminality are often entrepreneurial, ruthless and effective, resulting in a range of invisible and unmeasured harms. This book is essential reading, and an antidote to the orthodoxy of optimism that has paralysed the social sciences in recent years.Dr Oliver Smith, Reader in Criminology, Plymouth University