Review Essay: Crime, Risk and Money

Abstract

Sharing some closely related themes and a common theoretical orientation based on the governmentality analytic, these are nevertheless two very different contributions to criminological knowledge and theory. The first, 'The Currency of Justice: Fines and Damages in Consumer Societies' (COJ), is a sustained and highly original analysis of that most pervasive yet overlooked feature of modern legal orders; their reliance on monetary sanctions. 'Crime and Risk' (CAR), on the other hand, is a short synoptic overview of the many dimensions and trajectories of risk in contemporary debate and practice, both the practices of crime and the governance of crime. It is one of the first in a new series by Sage, 'Compact Criminology', in which authors survey in little more than a hundred pages some current field of debate. With this small gem, Pat O'Malley has set the bar very high for those who follow. For all its brevity, CAR traverses a massive expanse of research, debates and issues, while also opening up new and challenging questions around the politics of risk and the relationship between criminal risk-taking and the governance of risk and crime. The two books draw together various threads of O'Malley's rich body of work on these issues, and once again demonstrate that he is one of the foremost international scholars of risk inside and outside criminology. I will focus first on the longer book, for this is ground which might be said to be less familiar to criminologists, or perhaps so apparently familiar that it is lost in plain sight.