Although scholars in sociology of health and illness and criminology have long been interested in questions of authority, expertise, social control, legitimacy and credibility, the two fields have developed largely independently of one another. Sociologists studying health and illness have sustained an interest in issues of social control ever since Talcott Parsons conceptualised physicians as moral gatekeepers, helping to maintain the integrative function of society. The physicians’ main function consisted of normalising ‘deviant’ illness through the invasive treatment of the body. When physicians assigned the ‘sick role’ to patients, they legitimated a temporally limited state of deviance. In Parsons’ theory, physicians not only treated people to retake their roles in the labour force and other institutions but they verified the legitimacy of illnesses; defining what qualifies as a bona fide reason to abandon temporarily responsibilities in society and take up the ‘sick role’ (Parsons 1951, 1975). When functionalism lost its attraction for well-known theoretical and historical reasons, the theme of social control re-emerged in sociology of health and illness in more social constructivist perspectives, influenced by labelling theory and a critique of psychiatry as a total institution (Goffman 1961, Scull 1977, Szasz 1961). In a classic article, Irving Zola (1972) argued that medicine should be understood as an institution of social control, ‘nudging aside’ the traditional control institutions of law and religion. Medical social control advances through a process of medicalisation: conditions that were previously not considered to fall under the jurisdiction of health care providers, now are conceptually, interactionally and institutionally taken as illnesses, medical disorders and syndromes (Conrad and Schneider 1980). In these writings, the similarities between the prominence of the health care field and crime (or more generally deviance) in daily life is touched upon but not explored. Zola, for example, notes: Most analysts have tried to make a distinction between illness and crime on the issue of personal responsibility. The criminal is thought to be responsible and therefore accountable (or punishable) for his (sic) act, while the sick person is not. While the distinction does exist, it seems to be more a quantitative one rather than a qualitative one, with moral judgments but a pinprick below the surface (Zola 1972: 489). In a review article of the medicalisation literature in 1992, Conrad noted two exceptions to the lack of developing parallels between health and crime: a study by Pastor comparing legal and medical approaches to public drunkenness and another by Melick and associates on the increased admission of males with police records to psychiatric units (Conrad 1992). Some researchers trained in the health care field have ventured into the study of crime. Epidemiologist Kawachi and associates, for example, applied an ecological approach taken from public health to explain crime. Using data on homicide and other categories of crime they have explored the nature of the association between income distribution, mortality and a measure of social cohesion in the United States. They concluded that the violence associated with income inequality served as an indicator of the psychosocial impact of wider income differences (Wilkinson et al. 1998). More recently they have suggested that the crime rate reflects the quality of life in a community and have reported that crime increases when social buffers that normally exist in middle-class neighborhoods disappear (Kawachi et al. 1999). Catherine Ross (1993) investigated whether the fear of victimisation affects the subjective quality of life, hypothesising that the fear of crime affects the likelihood that people would engage in outdoor physical activity and generate psychological distress. Ross (2000) also found that residents of poor neighbourhoods have higher levels of depression than residents of more advantaged neighbourhoods. In the study of crime and law enforcement the social control theme has also held centre stage (social control theory is the most frequently discussed and ‘tested’ theory in criminology (Stitt and Giacopassi 1992)). Social control theorists focus on the strategies and techniques leading to conformity and compliance with the rules of society, in light of temptation, peer pressure and inducement that could lead to delinquency and crime. Rather than asking why people become ‘bad’, social control theorists wonder why people remain ‘good’ most of the time. They argue that social and personal controls prevent people from committing crimes: the more committed a person is to conventional activities and attached to others, the less likely that person will violate the rules of society. Travis Hirschi (1969) remains the major social control theorist in criminology. He proposes four principal bonds that help explain the likelihood of conformity: attachment to other people; commitment through investment in education or occupation; involvement in family, school, work and extra-curricular activities; and belief in the norms and laws of the wider society. Hirschi has also provided empirical indicators for his bonds, and the theory has been extensively tested. The current consensus in criminological circles is that social control theory is weakly supported by the available evidence (Agnew 1991, Akers 2000, Greenberg 1999). One author even suggests that social control theory has mainly resonated with criminologists for its conservative ideology (Greenberg 1999). In the 1980s and 1990s, Hirschi moved away from the classical social control theory to focus on one type of social control. In A General Theory of Crime Gottfredson and co-author Travis Hirschi (1990) claim that crime's attraction lies in its personal, easy and immediate gratification, rendering ‘self-control’ the key to understanding criminal behaviour. Criminals – including white-collar crime perpetrators – lack self-control, and tend to be ‘impulsive, insensitive, physical (as opposed to mental), prone to risk-taking, short-sighted, and non-verbal’ (Gottfredson and Hirschi 1990: 90). Drawing on social psychology and rational choice utilitarianism, Gottfredson and Hirschi argue that the seeds of criminal behaviour are fertilised in childhood: low self-control is established when parents provide weak direct controls for their children. When growing up, these children then lack the will to succeed in social institutions and succumb to the temptation of criminal behaviour. Again, the empirical evidence for this theory is mixed. Researchers have not been able to distinguish a strong relationship between low self-control and white-collar crime, nor specify the age-crime relationship. Yet self-control seems inversely related to general law violations and self-reported delinquency (Akers 2000, Pratt and Cullen 2000). A quantitative meta-analysis of the empirical evidence offers ‘fairly impressive empirical support for the theory’ (Pratt and Cullen 2000: 951), while at the same time also suggesting the importance of other theories such as social learning theory. Social control theory as specified by Hirschi and Gottfredson remains currently the most popular criminological explanation for the pervasive occurrence of criminal behaviour. While social control theorists see themselves as asking a different kind of question (conformity instead of deviance), they are ultimately concerned with conformity in light of criminality, and not in light of health, occupational achievement, family relationships, education, religion or other possibly related topics. Social control theory remains firmly focused on the dependent variables of conventional criminology. While it would be theoretically possible to expand the insights of social control theory to accounts of medical compliance or to analyse the attraction of unproven, possibly harmful alternative medicine, such developments have not taken place. Radical criminologists have offered a dissenting view to the liberal and conservative consensus that social control and punishment constitute a legislative enactment of public desires to punish ‘harmful’ and ‘socially undesirable’ behaviour (Cohen 1989). The basic premise of radical criminology is that crime control policy initiatives are actually aimed at social control, keeping down minorities, women and the other dispossessed. The criminal justice system and the welfare state serve the reproduction of a class-based society. Jock Young (1992) identified ‘the square of crime’ consisting of four elements that come together to explain the interplay of crime: victim, offender, state (formal control) and society (informal control). But, as conventional theorists point out, it remains unclear how the elements of the square might interact to generate crime, or even whether the four elements are simple, definitional terms or form an actual explanation (Akers 2000). Drawing from labelling theory and Marxism, critical researchers point out how class bias, sexism and racism are institutionalised in laws and sentencing practices, how the criminal justice system is permeated by large corporations running prisons according to business principles, and how incarceration functions to offset high unemployment rates and policy gaps due to the ‘de-institutionalisation’ of the mental health field (Welch 1998). A recent development within radical criminology has been the attempt to relate crime to the growth of a competitive market economy. According to Taylor (1999) the transformation of Fordist society, with the virtual collapse in demand for unskilled work and the lack of opportunities for the development of skills within particular crafts, has produced new and heightened forms of marginality and the development of different local ‘economies of crime’, especially in large urban the growth of has new opportunities for criminal activity by and corporations and the development of institutions such as police to such Young (1999) a the of the market in his of the development of an society. 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