Author: Pat O'Malley
ISBN No: 9781 847 8735
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 120
Publisher: SAGE
Year of publication:
Brief:
Many books reviewed on these pages over the years have been formidably large. Nothing wrong with that, but a slim book makes a welcome change.
There’s always a market for short books that you can dip into when on a train or with a spare half an hour, and spark some thought in you, rather than a door-stopper of a textbook that you dig into. Prof Pat O’Malley is a Sydney Law School academic who has written for years on crime and risk, specialising in drugs. In fairness he’s aiming at a criminology student audience, so while this is right up the street of risk and security management MSc students – or people thinking of applying for such a course – it’s not a book you can sail through. To take the final page alone, it uses such words as ‘hegemonic’ and ‘disempowering’. With that warning, this is a powerful argument in terms of thinking about crime and crime control in terms of risk – the risk-taking behaviour of criminals as a sort of mirror image of law-abiding behaviour. In the third of four chapters, ‘Crime, risk and excitement’, he covers ‘edgework’; such as graffiti writers and vandals, some fraudsters, shop thieves and stolen car drivers – people in otherwise dour lives who feel fulfilled by doing wrong. O’Malley points to a ‘borderline between legitimate risk taking and criminal recklessness’. People in corporate security may find that of interest, that men may do well in the business, and do high-risk things, whether to let off steam or because the company lets them. Life on the edge is exciting, whether sky-diving (sport: legitimate) or starting a fire as in the August riots in England (crime: bad). O’Malley ponders an amoral world where what matters is not right or wrong, but merely what society approves or frowns on and seeks to control. Often I look at what a writer has to say about CCTV to judge how sensible he is. O’Malley shrewdly describes CCTV as information-gathering ‘risk-policing’, ‘behavioural channelling’, maybe not monitored.
