Professor John Lea
I have attended the British Society of Criminology Annual Conferences from time to time since the early 1990s and have occasionally given papers. I still have fond memories of the last conference of the twentieth century at the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool in 1999 and very much enjoyed the Plymouth Conference in 2015. I have also attended meetings of the South East Branch at the Mannheim Centre at LSE. I have spoken there and at the South West branch in Plymouth and have contributed to the Newsletter. I am also an occasional book reviewer for the British Journal of Criminology. I see criminology as a healthily eclectic discipline drawing together people from a variety of academic disciplines and practitioner backgrounds. The British Society of Criminology is important for maintaining a common set of values and professional identity.
Most of my academic career was at Middlesex University where, during the decade from the mid-1980s, I worked with Jock Young on the development of Left Realist criminology. Our 1984 book ‘What Is To Be Done About Law and Order?‘ was written during that period. I was Professor of Criminology at Middlesex from 1995 until my retirement from full time teaching in 2005. Since then I have held a number of honorary visiting professorships, at Brighton, Leicester and Roehampton Universities.
My recent work covers a number of fields. I continued work on left realism in Crime and Modernity (Sage 2002) and ‘Left Realism, Community and State Building’ Crime, Law and Social Change (2010) 54: 141-158 and ‘Jock Young and the Development of Left Realist Criminology’. Critical Criminology (2015), 23(2), 165–177. My interest in Marxism and state theory is reflected in ‘Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ in de Keseredy, W and Dragiewicz, M. eds. (2014) Critical Criminology, Volume 1. New York: Routledge and (with Simon Hallsworth) ‘Reconstructing Leviathan: Emerging contours of the security state’ Theoretical Criminology (2010) 15(2): 141-157
More recent interests in the interface between crime and warfare are reflected in ‘From the Criminalisation of War to the Militarisation of Crime Control’ in Sandra Walklate & Ross McGarry eds. Criminology and War: Transgressing the Borders. London: Routledge and in ‘War, Criminal Justice and the Rebirth of Privatisation’ in Sandra Walklate & Ross McGarry eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and War (forthcoming 2016).
My recent work on the private sector and the role of non-state actors range from (with Kevin Stenson) ‘Security, Sovereignty and Non-State Governance From Below’ Canadian Journal of Law and Society (2007) 22(2): 9-277 to (with Wendy Fitzgibbon) in ‘Defending probation: Beyond privatisation and security’ (2014) European Journal of Probation 6(1): 24–41.
In recent years I have also written on the history of English riots, racism and policing, and on money laundering legislation. I seem to show no signs of slowing down.