Review Symposium

Theoretical Criminology
15(2) 217–228
Introduction to the review © The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480611404977
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Nicole Rafter
Northeastern University, USA

Pat O’ Malley
Crime and Risk, London: SAGE, 2010. 112 pp. ISBN: 978-1-84787-350-7 (hbk);
978-1-84787-351-4 (pbk)

In one of those big analytical shifts that most of us do not notice, risk has become a key
concept in social theory and social-control policies. One of the tasks Pat O’Malley sets
himself in Crime and Risk is to analyze the movement toward governing through risk-
assessment and risk-containment. But, pushing much further, O’Malley also analyzes the
more optimistic trend toward a de-pathologization of risk-taking behavior, indeed toward
a celebration of risk-taking and ‘edgework’. Moreover, O’Malley finds a bridge between
risk-containment approaches to social control and new understandings of risk-taking as
festive and liberatory behavior in the idea of risk as a cultural product, an expression of
cultural values.
In the four review essays that follow, leading theorists evaluate the contribution of
O’Malley’s important essay on crime and risk.

The risks of risk

Jeff Ferrell
Texas Christian University, USA and University of Kent, UK

Within the discourse of criminology surely few concepts carry less precision of mean-
ing than ‘crime’ and ‘risk’. ‘Crime’ is variously taken to mean a category of law, an act
of social harm, and a matter of personal pathology, with each of these regularly coming
and going within the same theoretical model or policy discussion. As for ‘risk’—well, of
what sort, and to whom? On the assumption that risk constitutes a contemporary crime
problem—even a definitive social problem of late modernity—many politicians, policy
makers, and theorists are today eager to manage its occurrence and minimize its harms.
Risky circumstances, though, can be created by individuals or institutions or external
events; likewise, the dangers that befall the perpetrators of risk can differ distinctively

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