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Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform (review)

to antisocial and delinquent behavior in children and adolescents. Less successful is their attempt to visually display developmental pathways to delinquency in the form of three-dimensional models. But their models are paragons of clarity next to Le Blanc’s diagrams in the following chapter showing how self and social controls develop from a chaos perspective (see P. 217, Figure 6.3, and P. 221, Figure 6.4). Le Blanc’s discussion is heavy going and way, way outside the box of contemporary criminology. The following sentence is typical: “The coupled motion of the interactions between the self and social control and deviant behavior systems wraps the coupled motion around the surface of a torus.” (P. 220) Even the venerable C. Wright Mills (1959), who masterfully deconstructed Parsons’ grand theory, would, I fear, fail to crack this code. Bottoms concludes the volume by considering the problem of human agency in the context of desistance from crime. Given risk-factor research showing the importance of various causal conditions, some operating early in life, in the explanation of criminal behavior, how much room is left for “uncaused” human volition in the analysis of desistance? Indeed, how can we analytically distinguish caused from uncaused behavior? Although Bottoms does not resolve these important issues, he suggests ways in which some current sociological and philosophical thinking on human agency may contribute to the study of desistance. Here again, while leaping over criminology for fresh criminological inspiration has some value, it is not clear to me that we will learn more about choice, constraint and crime from Bottoms’ sources than from David Matza (1964) or other insiders whose work this provocative volume too easily overlooks.