A FORGOTTEN RADICAL Dennis Chapman and the New Criminology in Britain

IN 1968 a book appeared from a British sociologist offering a sustained critique of " establishment " criminology. It adopted an uncompromising stand about the ideological underpinnings of a criminology which was more concerned to reform criminals than understand crime, and it attempted to describe what were said to be the close links between class interests and juridical control exerted over the less powerful. It was not explicitly Marxist, though the direction of its analysis shared many similarities with what has subsequently appeared within that sub-discipline known as " the political economy of law and crime ". The book was Dennis Chapman's Sociology and the Stereotype of the Criminal. It probably raises only a faint glimmer of re-collection, but its powerfully critical thrust puts it well to the " Left " of what then, in the late 1960s, stood as radical British criminology. Whereas the compromised and reformist weaknesses of the new deviancy are now acknowl-edged [e.g. Taylor, Walton and Young, 1975), Chapman's book stands the test of time far better; his structural analysis of the links between economy, crim