Readers with long memories, or perhaps just the older ones, may recall Joan Higgins (Reference Higgins1980) article in this journal. Significantly, the article was academically ‘pre-Foucauldian’ and, while arguing that the language of social control was frequently used and the concept crucial to explaining social policy development, it began by focussing especially upon the then recent Marxist and neo-Marxist contributions to social policy analysis. Having explored the contribution of public policy to the maintenance of macro-social, political and economic order, she then turned to the discussion of the policy and practice of social controls in ‘urban crisis’ management and radical social work, before moving on (in a manner not dissimilar to Chriss in the present book) to catalogue the various forms that this elusive notion of control might take. Social control as: repression, exploitation, co-optation, integration, paternalism, conformity or self-determination.

The problem with this multiplicity of forms taken by processes of social control is what prompted Stanley Cohen to refer to social control, in the introduction to his Visions of Social Control (Reference Cohen1985) as a ‘mickey mouse term’, a concept which, by purporting to explain everything, every ‘society effect’, every act of conformity or display of order, actually explained very little. It is this dilemma which appears to animate Chriss's analytical mission in the present book, as he seeks to distinguish the major forms that social control takes in contemporary societies. Having briefly discussed earlier theorists of social control, before turning to social control as the central problematic of American sociology reflected in the work of the Chicago school and theorised by Durkheim in terms of solidarity, Weber in terms of regulation and Schmitt in terms of political divisions, security and enmities, Chriss introduces the tripartite division of types of social control that forms the structure for the first half of his book. Contemporary social control is ‘Informal’, ‘Medical’ or ‘Legal’. And yet, in practice, each of these forms of control overlay, clash or reinforce one another as the book's opening vignette (much of the book proceeds via examples, illustrations and vignettes) regarding Jared Loughner's attempted murder of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in January 2011, demonstrates. Giffords was seriously injured, but six people were killed and thirteen injured in what was, by then, a depressingly familiar US armed rampage.

Chriss describes, in turn, the social controls which followed the incident, first the informal heroisms where ordinary citizens sought to control the carnage they were witnessing, subduing the attacker or comforting the injured; then the legal controls which commenced with the arrival of the police and the beginnings of legal process, and, finally, the medical controls which sought to determine the mental fitness of Loughner to stand trial. In the context of the example used, it might appear strange that Chriss never saw fit to consider the social control deficits in US public policy which failed to prevent Loughner, a mentally ill man, from buying a firearm. Doubtless, some commentators will see that as a different issue entirely.

The discussion of informal control ranges across the process of socialisation, the recent appeal of communitarianism (in both its positive, It takes a Village. . . and negatively populist forms) before addressing the question of culture, identity and social capital. A key danger facing ‘informal social controls’ apparently concerns their ‘colonisation’ by more formalised (medical and legal) regulatory controls, often involving specific sanctions or restrictions. Later case studies illustrate these developments in respect of the ‘dispersal of discipline’ often associated with ASB management in the UK and the collection of new ‘post 9/11’ policing powers associated with the PATRIOT Act in the USA and anti-terrorism provisions and new surveillance systems in the UK. These issues are further elaborated on in the final chapters of the book. An issue with the medical social controls has been their expansionist tendency, the appliance of science, in the therapeutic state which has given rise to what Chriss refers to as the ‘dark side’ of medicalisation (p. 103); on the one hand, a tendency towards individualisation and de-structuring of deviance explanations (he cites the 19th example of ‘drapetomania’, a condition which apparently caused slaves to become surly and un-cooperative ‒ in extreme forms it induced them to run away) and on the other hand the power of private sector commercial interests to bio-medicalise solutions for all manner of human conditions, from anti-ageing treatments, slimming cures and a pill for everything. As regards legal control, the form of social control which most captures public opinion (p. 123), the key issues involve ‘discipline dispersal’ or net-widening and the uncomfortable contrasts between formal legal equality (on paper) and substantive inequalities in street-level practice where consensus and contract encounter the realities of coercion. Chriss employs case studies of police racial profiling, racial disproportion on death row and the consequences of US mass incarceration to illustrate problems with legal controls, although the recent troubles following police-involved shootings in Albuquerque, New Mexico or Ferguson, Missouri might have thrown up richer examples. In particular, the efforts at community social control (protest, demonstrations and civil disobedience) to rein in a police force deemed to be ‘out of control’ might rather stretch the concept.

The second half of the book turns to explore the nature of informal, medical and legal controls through a wide range of case studies. In the case of informal social control, the examples chosen include housing area (racialised) segregation, Elijah Anderson's ‘code of the street’ and the ‘responsibilisation’ (the acquisition of ‘social capital’) of young people in the transition to adulthood. It is immediately clear that while each of these dimensions of informal social control has its own integrity, all are overlain with more formal aspects of regulation or coercion. The examples of medical social control include the increasing frequency of ADHD or ‘selective mutism’ diagnoses and the tendency to medicalise school violence ‒ in particular the US school shooting phenomenon ‒ by reference to analytical models rooted in the discourses of new public health and epidemiology. The latter illustration certainly raises issues for ‒ not unlike the Loughner case study, referred to earlier, which opens the whole book ‒ nowhere does Chriss's commentary (p. 174) on the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre (America's most lethal college shooting rampage, in which thirty-two people were killed) mention the firearms purchase laws which allowed a mentally unstable young man to acquire two semi-automatic handguns. Perhaps a level of social, political and legislative closure had deemed this issue as beyond consideration, thereby facilitating the arbitrary practice of individual control which armed citizenship brings. US gun advocates like to claim that ‘an armed society is a polite society’ but the corollary of this is that an armed society is also a society in which criminals and terrorists (a particular concern for Chriss in his concluding discussions of the tough legal ‒ although questionably constitutional ‒ controls inaugurated via a new paradigm of ‘post 9/11 policing’) find it relatively easy to access weaponry.

All told, this is an interesting, provocative, wide-ranging and highly readable book which is likely to provide much food for thought and many lively discussions on the nature, legitimacy – or otherwise – of our various forms of contemporary social control. In many respects, for reasons not unlike those attributed to Cohen (Reference Cohen1985), in particular the very ubiquity of the concept ‘social control’, I hadn't expected to enjoy the book as much as I did. But it seems to me that the particular virtue of the book lies in the way it opens up debates and provokes controversy and discussion around the undoubted strengths, but also the weaknesses, of its central concept. There is undoubtedly plenty to quibble with, for example, the claim that the demise of the ASBO was determined by virtue of the way in which the order had been subverted as a badge of street esteem (p. 229), although it was often claimed, rather than by reference to breach rates hovering around 65% until ASBOs were augmented by the ISO (Individual Support Orders intended to help young people comply). But even with these caveats, the very example still plays out a debate about control, compliance, resistance or support which, one suspects, were the author's wider purpose here. I was a little disappointed that Cohen's own work, especially his reference to the processes of ‘blurring, widening and masking’ (only the second is dealt with in any detail) to which social control mechanisms are often subject, did not get a fuller consideration. Reference to these issues may have helped to widen debates, in the ways alluded to earlier in this review in respect of Chriss's Case studies and illustrations: in other words, to help think, outside the social control box.