Richard Sparks
Biographic Data
| ID | 169863 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Sparks |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Sparks |
| SIGNATURE | SPARKS R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4969-3525 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 78 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 364 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 74 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1961 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Comments by Richard Sparks
Disability and foreign language learning: Countering systemic ableism in secondary and postsecondary education
Ableist ideologies in schools and among clinicians have impeded equity for students with disabilities. By excluding individuals with diagnoses of learning disability (SLD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from foreign language (FL) courses, professionals and schools discriminate against students who could benefit from participation. This essay reviews evidence falsifying the notion of an FL learning disability and contradicting…
Inescapable objects? Automobility and everyday disorder in an English town
In our study of everyday security in one English town (Macclesfield in north-west England), numerous sources of data suggest that annoyance about cars—their volume, speed, (bad) parking, presence at the school gate, and overall effect on the quality and character of everyday life in the town—loom large in the preoccupations of local people. It has been common in work on public insecurities—including, we should add, our own study of the same town …
Seeing disorder’ in an English town
Perceptions of low-level social and physical disorder loom large in criminological theory and research. When disorder seems high, trust in authorities is eroded, concerns about crime precipitated, and a general sense of unease develops. In this article, we use fine-grained survey data from a medium-sized town in the north of England to consider why some people experience their environment as disorderly while others do not. People are more likely …
The Greening of Environmental Criminology: Changing Meanings of Disorder in an English Town
Grounded in a detailed local study of everyday security, in this paper we set out a path for bringing together environmental and green criminology. Revisiting an old research site, Macclesfield in north-west England, we encountered marked shifts in the local meanings of disorder that seem to have developed since we were last there in the mid-1990s. Residents described ‘chronic harms’ that focussed on various forms of ‘litter’ (e.g. drugs detritus…
Policing and Sense of Place: ‘Shallow’ and ‘Deep’ Security in an English Town
Much policy discourse concentrates on the contribution police make to keeping people safe. Often, this means minimizing fear of crime. Yet, more expansive accounts stress the extent to which deeper-rooted forms of security and belonging might also be important ‘outcomes’ of police activity. Using data collected from a survey of residents of a mid-sized English town, Macclesfield in Cheshire, we consider the extent to which evaluations of policing…
Crime, Justice, and Social Order: Essays in Honour of A. E. Bottoms
Professor Sir Anthony Bottoms is unique in British criminology. He has achieved mastery of all the disciplines which rightly require attention if criminological questions are to be adequately addressed, including law, social science, social theory, moral philosophy, and matters of ‘administrative criminology’: from uses of the fine, to the origins and functions of the probation service. He was, of course, once a probation officer. This is one of …
Crime and justice research: The current landscape and future possibilities
The contributions in this themed section developed from conversations that took place at an event hosted by the British Society of Criminology and Criminology & Criminal Justice in April 2019. The papers that follow respond to a ‘think-piece’ presented by Richard Sparks at that event, and engage with the subsequent debate about the future of funding for crime and justice research. Contributors reflect on the opportunities and challenges arising f…
The Prison and the Factory (40TH Anniversary Edition): Origins of the Penitentiary System
The publication of Melossi and Pavarini’s classic discussion of the origins of the penitentiary ironically coincided with a shift—especially in the United States but with profound reverberations elsewhere—towards an expansive, incapacitative model of incarceration. The republication of The Prison and the Factory offers an opportunity to reflect on some, perhaps, surprising, contradictory and unfinished aspects of the intervening decades, many but…
Response to Dooley and Goodison: Falsification By Atrophy: The Kuhnian Process of Rejecting Theory in American Criminology
We would like to start our response by thanking Brendan Dooley and Sean Goodison for producing such a thought-provoking article. We were the (originally anonymous, now self-outed) peer reviewers for this journal. The stimulus and, we should admit, provocation that we received from Dooley and Goodison’s article encouraged us both into producing two of the longest peer reviews either of us can recall writing. So when Sandra Walklate offered us the …
Democratic experimentalism and the futures of crime control
The ‘resources of hope’ which the socialist thinker Raymond Williams searched for in his last works seem to be in short supply. The authors suggest that, in recent times, many commentators, especially those writing as professional criminologists in the privileged yet pessimistic circumstances of the global North, have found their view of radical democratic aspiration blocked by the long shadows of mass incarceration, and other seemingly immoveabl…
Justice Alternatives
This chapter seeks to critically examine current approaches to criminal records and their disclosure outside of criminal justice processes. In particular, it questions the rationalities underpinning disclosure practices where the rights of people with convictions (henceforth ‘PWCs’) to live a life free of stigma are often subordinated to the perceived need to maintain ‘public safety’ by disseminating criminal record information. Instead, an alter…
Persistent puzzles: The philosophy and ethics of private corrections in the context of contemporary penality
Research Summary In our article, we attend to the implied outlooks (“philosophies” in the sense of operative practical discourses and assumptions) and the competing ethical concerns that animate differing views on privatizing corrections. We consider some normative arguments and empirical observations that have been mobilized for and against privatization since the inception of the modern version of this debate in the late 1980s, and we seek to p…
For US Students, L2 Reading Comprehension is Hard Because L2 Listening Comprehension is Hard, Too
The Simple View of Reading (SVR) model posits that reading is the product of word decoding and language comprehension and that oral language (listening) comprehension is the best predictor of reading comprehension once word-decoding skill has been established. The SVR model also proposes that there are good readers and three types of poor readers—dyslexic, hyperlexic, and garden variety. In this study, a random sample of US high school monolingua…
Democratic Theory and Mass Incarceration
This chapter introduces the central theme that animates the chapters in this volume: that one underexploited resource for a better penal politics lies in investigating the ideals and institutions of democracy, and thinking about how these ideals can be theorized and given practical effect in reshaping the criminal justice and penal arrangements of advanced capitalist democracies today. Penal scholarship has seen the emergence of a defensive, nost…
Ideologies and crime: Political ideas and the dynamics of crime control
This article assembles some theoretical resources for a project that investigates the ways in which thinking about politics has since the 1970s been bound up with thinking and action around crime. Such investigation is hampered by a dominant (neoliberal) narrative of governance that tends to reduce crime policy to a ‘contest’ between tactics and technique. In contrast, we establish a political framework for theorising crime and its control. This …
Perspectivas sobre riesgo y política penal
Americanae nace como un proyecto conjunto que surge dentro de la Red Europea de Información y Documentación sobre América Latina (REDIAL), y que ha afrontado la Biblioteca de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID). Esta nueva biblioteca virtual hace más accesibles los libros digitales de tema americanista a los investigadores y usuarios interesados de cualquier parte del mundo
Examining the Simple View of Reading Model for United States High School Spanish Students
The Simple View of Reading (SVR) model, which posits that reading comprehension is the product of word decoding and language comprehension that make independent contributions to reading skill, has been found to explain the acquisition of first language (L1) reading and second language (L2) reading in young English language learners (ELLs). Researchers have not examined the SVR for explaining L2 reading acquisition in older L2 learners several yea…
Más allá de la lamentación. Hacia una política sobre el delito y la justicia democrática e igualitaria
Americanae nace como un proyecto conjunto que surge dentro de la Red Europea de Información y Documentación sobre América Latina (REDIAL), y que ha afrontado la Biblioteca de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID). Esta nueva biblioteca virtual hace más accesibles los libros digitales de tema americanista a los investigadores y usuarios interesados de cualquier parte del mundo
Criminology, History of
Police and Community in Twentieth-century Scotland: The Uses of Social History
Drawing on archival research and oral history interviews, this article compares the characteristics of the relationships between police officers and communities in the Glasgow conurbation with those in the highlands and islands of Scotland in the period c. 1900–70. Rejecting the uniform or linear narrative suggested by existing historiography, it argues that these relationships were diverse, complex and shaped by local cultural, social and econom…
In memoriam: Barbara Hudson
Beyond Mass Incarceration
This symposium is a timely, welcome and valuable addition to the developing body of work that strives to draw productive linkages between accounts of the problems of contemporary democratic politics, the vagaries and extravagances of punishment in advanced capitalist countries today and efforts to sketch how these matters might be theorised, approached, and done differently. We therefore want to use these brief reflections on the papers to take s…
Introduction: Punishment and Society: The Emergence of an Academic Field
Does the academy need another Handbook? Encyclopedia? Dictionary? Or whatever other form of authoritative narrative you prefer? As occasional contributors to such enterprises, we have brought some serious scepticism to these questions as we have contemplated developing this Handbook of Punishment and Society for SAGE Publications. The publishers were keen, persuasive and clearly capable. It was ourselves whom we needed to convince that this was t…
The Sage Handbook of Punishment and Society
Bringing together contributions from internationally renowned names in the field, this engaging and lively handbook is a definitive resource to the controversial topic of punishment and society
Criminology, Social Theory and the Challenge of our Times
Journal Article Criminology, Social Theory and the Challenge of our Times Get access David Garland, David Garland Respectively, School of Law and Department of Sociology, New York University; Department of Criminology, Keele University. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Richard Sparks Richard Sparks Respectively, School of Law and Department of Sociology, New York University; Department of Criminology, Keele…
Legitimacy and Order in Prisons
L'A. s'efforce d'elaborer une theorie concernant la legitimite en systeme carceral et cela a la lumiere des contributions de D. Beetham et T.R. Tyler. L'A. affirme que l'on n'a pas pose le probleme de la legitimation par rapport au fonctionnement des prisons. Il etudie certains etablissements penitentiaires de securite maximale. Il examine les circonstances, le contexte au cours desquels les detenus vont accorder une certaine legitimite aux respo…
Degrees of Estrangement: The Cultural Theory of Risk and Comparative Penology
We can accept that risk is a key idea in understanding contemporary penality—but which constructions of risk are most compelling? Moreover, how does risk-based practice intersect with other structuring principles of penal systems and penal politics? I compare and contrast the views of Feeley and Simon (1992) and of Mary Douglas's `cultural theory' (Douglas, 1992), and conclude that among the attractions of the latter are its orientation towards c…
For an historical sociology of crime policy in England and Wales since 1968
This essay proposes an approach to understanding changes in political responses to crime in England and Wales over the last third of the twentieth century and developments in criminological knowledge over the same period. To explore the association between these in some empirical detail, we argue, would provide a historical–sociological understanding that is currently lacking, notwithstanding Garland's significant intervention in The Culture of C…
Out of the `Digger: The Warrior's Honour and the Guilty Observer
Inside prisons, situations of intractable conflict between certain prisoners and correctional authorities arise. The choices available to either party in escaping the sometimes desperate consequences of these battles are usually severely limited. One effect, desire for which is usually disclaimed by the authorities, can be the creation of a yet deeper level of incarceration for the most recalcitrant. Recalling fieldwork experiences in Scotland in…
Narratives of Decline: Youth, Dis/order and Community in an English 'Middletown
The paper is concerned with how adult residents of one medium-sized, moderately affluent English town which is generally regarded as having a relatively low crime rate interpret and respond to teenage ‘incivilities’. We begin by locating the conflicts over teenage mis/behaviour that occur across many of the town's diverse areas and assessing how the intensity of adult response varies according to people's relationship to place. We then examine th…
Fear and Everyday Urban Lives
A Telling Tale: A Case of Vigilantism and Its Aftermath in an English Town
This paper considers one 'vigilante' episode in an English town in 1993 and its subsequent appearances in the press and in local 'crime-talk'. In so doing it a) proposes as an alternative to most current constructions of 'fear of crime' an interpretive approach grounded in place; b) considers the intersections between the generic 'law and order' preoccupations of the national press and the salience in local knowledge of a particular sequence of e…
Long-Term Crosslinguistic Transfer of Skills From L1 to L2
This study investigated the relationship of first language (L1) skills in elementary school and second language (L2) learning in high school. Students classified as high-, average-, and low-proficiency L2 learners were compared on L1 achievement measures of reading, spelling, vocabulary, phonological awareness, and listening comprehension administered in the first, second, third, and fifth grades. An L2 aptitude measure was administered in ninth …
Is there life after imprisonment: How elderly men talk about imprisonment and release
Based on findings from a two-year study in four UK prisons, this article discusses the prison experiences and release expectations of male prisoners aged 65 and above. In terms of the prison experience, we argue that elderly men in prison often have enormous difficulties simply coping with the prison regime. In addition, most have certain painful pre-occupations, including a fear of dying in prison, the loss of familial contact, the loss of a ‘pr…
A Screening Instrument for the Identification of Foreign Language Learning Problems
Authors describe a self‐scoring screening instrument designed to predict college students' risk for success or failure in foreign language classes. The instrument's questions, based on the authors' experiences with students with learning disabilities, focus on students' foreign language backgrounds, developmental and academic learning histories, and tests and classroom learning characteristics. Results of research studies conducted with the instr…
Ideologies and crime: Political ideas and the dynamics of crime control
This article assembles some theoretical resources for a project that investigates the ways in which thinking about politics has since the 1970s been bound up with thinking and action around crime. Such investigation is hampered by a dominant (neoliberal) narrative of governance that tends to reduce crime policy to a ‘contest’ between tactics and technique. In contrast, we establish a political framework for theorising crime and its control. This …
Can Prisons Be Legitimate
Journal Article CAN PRISONS BE LEGITIMATE? Penal Politics, Privatization, and the Timeliness of an Old Idea Get access Richard Sparks Richard Sparks Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 34, Issue S1, 1994, Pages 14–28, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjc.34.S1.14 Published: 01 September 1994
What is to be done with public criminology
Masculinity and Heroism in the Hollywood 'Blockbuster: The Culture Industry and Contemporary Images of Crime and Law Enforcement
This article considers the connections between masculinity and heroic agency in certain versions of popular film. It proposes that how films dignify and celebrate the suffering and striving of their leading men may be quite centrally indicative of durable sensibilities regarding the qualities and virtues seen as defining manliness; and, moreover, that some of the more drastic reaffirmations of rugged masculinity in recent films starring Schwarzen…
Learning, rehabilitation and the arts in prisons: A Scottish case study
This article investigates the role of the arts in enabling prisoners to engage with learning and improve their literacy, and the impact this has on their rehabilitation and desistance from crime. It draws on data collected from prisoners who participated in arts interventions in three different Scottish prisons. It argues that participating in the arts projects built an active learning culture and encouraged the improvement of verbal and written …
Examining the Simple View of Reading Model for United States High School Spanish Students
The Simple View of Reading (SVR) model, which posits that reading comprehension is the product of word decoding and language comprehension that make independent contributions to reading skill, has been found to explain the acquisition of first language (L1) reading and second language (L2) reading in young English language learners (ELLs). Researchers have not examined the SVR for explaining L2 reading acquisition in older L2 learners several yea…
Educating Sensibilities: The Image of `The Lesson' in Children's Talk about Punishment
Theoretical work in the sociology of punishment (especially since Garland's influential introduction of the notion of penal `sensibilities') increasingly recognizes the importance of the cultural aspects of the topic. Yet surprisingly little examination exists of how penal questions actually figure in people's everyday consciousness or conversations. We address penal culture from the perspective of conversation. Specifically, we discuss a number …
A Critique of Marxist Criminology
Within the past few years, a marxist school of criminology has developed in England and the United States. In both countries, this school arose in part because of a dissatisfaction with "mainstream" criminology; especially in the United States, political radicalism provoked by the turmoil of the sixties also played a part. The theoretical antecedents of marxist criminology include "labeling" and "conflict" theories of crime and the origins of the…
Inescapable objects? Automobility and everyday disorder in an English town
In our study of everyday security in one English town (Macclesfield in north-west England), numerous sources of data suggest that annoyance about cars—their volume, speed, (bad) parking, presence at the school gate, and overall effect on the quality and character of everyday life in the town—loom large in the preoccupations of local people. It has been common in work on public insecurities—including, we should add, our own study of the same town …
For US Students, L2 Reading Comprehension is Hard Because L2 Listening Comprehension is Hard, Too
The Simple View of Reading (SVR) model posits that reading is the product of word decoding and language comprehension and that oral language (listening) comprehension is the best predictor of reading comprehension once word-decoding skill has been established. The SVR model also proposes that there are good readers and three types of poor readers—dyslexic, hyperlexic, and garden variety. In this study, a random sample of US high school monolingua…
The Media and Penal Politics
New Directions in Prison Studies: Some Introductory Comments
Children talking about justice and punishment
No Abstract
Surveys of Victimization-An Optimistic Assessment
Surveys of victimization-in which members of the public are asked directly about crimes which may have been committed against them-have been carried out in the United States and other countries since 1966. The National Crime Surveys, currently being conducted by the U. S. Census Bureau for the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, are the largest program of surveys of this kind and may represent the largest and most expensive data collection…
Sentencing by Magistrates: Some Facts of Life
Diminished Responsibility” in Theory and Practice
The Elusive Element of “Unlawfulness”
The Decision to Remand for Mental Examination
Journal Article THE DECISION TO REMAND FOR MENTAL EXAMINATION Get access RICHARD F. SPARKS RICHARD F. SPARKS * Lecturer in Criminal Law and Criminology, Birmingham University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 6, Issue 1, January 1966, Pages 6–26, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjc.a048896 Published: 01 January 1966
The Enforcement of Fines
Journal Article THE ENFORCEMENT OF FINES: THE PROCESS FROM SENTENCE TO COMMITTAL Get access RICHARD F. SPARKS RICHARD F. SPARKS *Institute of Criminology, University of CambridgeCambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 13, Issue 2, April 1973, Pages 92–107, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjc.a046456 Published: 01 April 1973
Images of Deviance
Surveying Victims: A Study of the Measurement of Criminal Victimization
Surveying Victims: A Study of the Measurement of Criminal Victimization, Perceptions of Crime, and Attitudes to Criminal Justice
A Critique of Marxist Criminology
Within the past few years, a marxist school of criminology has developed in England and the United States. In both countries, this school arose in part because of a dissatisfaction with "mainstream" criminology; especially in the United States, political radicalism provoked by the turmoil of the sixties also played a part. The theoretical antecedents of marxist criminology include "labeling" and "conflict" theories of crime and the origins of the…
Surveys of Victimization-An Optimistic Assessment
Surveys of victimization-in which members of the public are asked directly about crimes which may have been committed against them-have been carried out in the United States and other countries since 1966. The National Crime Surveys, currently being conducted by the U. S. Census Bureau for the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, are the largest program of surveys of this kind and may represent the largest and most expensive data collection…
Linguistic coding deficits in foreign language learners
A Screening Instrument for the Identification of Foreign Language Learning Problems
Authors describe a self‐scoring screening instrument designed to predict college students' risk for success or failure in foreign language classes. The instrument's questions, based on the authors' experiences with students with learning disabilities, focus on students' foreign language backgrounds, developmental and academic learning histories, and tests and classroom learning characteristics. Results of research studies conducted with the instr…
The Social Economy and the Democratic State: A New Policy Agenda for the 1990s
Television and the drama of crime: Moral Tales and the Place of Crime in Public Life
The effects of multisensory structured language instruction on native language and foreign language aptitude skills of at-risk high school foreign language learners
Searching for the Cognitive Locus of Foreign Language Learning Difficulties: Linking First and Second Language Learning
Can Prisons Be Legitimate
Journal Article CAN PRISONS BE LEGITIMATE? Penal Politics, Privatization, and the Timeliness of an Old Idea Get access Richard Sparks Richard Sparks Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 34, Issue S1, 1994, Pages 14–28, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjc.34.S1.14 Published: 01 September 1994
Book notes
Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civil Liberties 1991–1992 by Freedom House Survey Team. New York: Freedom House, 1992. Pp.570; tables; ratings. £58.50 (hardback); £22.50 (paperback). ISBN 0 932 088 75 9 and 74 0 The Middle East and Problems of Democracy by Heather Deagan. Buckingham and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1993. Pp.152; index; bibliography. £37.50 (hardback); £12.99 (paperback). ISBN 0 335 and 15686 X Nation‐buildi…
Legitimacy and Order in Prisons
L'A. s'efforce d'elaborer une theorie concernant la legitimite en systeme carceral et cela a la lumiere des contributions de D. Beetham et T.R. Tyler. L'A. affirme que l'on n'a pas pose le probleme de la legitimation par rapport au fonctionnement des prisons. Il etudie certains etablissements penitentiaires de securite maximale. Il examine les circonstances, le contexte au cours desquels les detenus vont accorder une certaine legitimite aux respo…
Prisons and the Problem of Order
This book presents a substantial revolution on the character of confined social life. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in two contrasting English maximum security prisons, the authors systematically compare their institutional order, including the differing control strategies deployed in each, as seen by both custodians and captives, controllers and controlled. The authors discuss the insinuations of their research for the tradition of sociologic…
Masculinity and Heroism in the Hollywood 'Blockbuster: The Culture Industry and Contemporary Images of Crime and Law Enforcement
This article considers the connections between masculinity and heroic agency in certain versions of popular film. It proposes that how films dignify and celebrate the suffering and striving of their leading men may be quite centrally indicative of durable sensibilities regarding the qualities and virtues seen as defining manliness; and, moreover, that some of the more drastic reaffirmations of rugged masculinity in recent films starring Schwarzen…
Crime Talk: How Citizens Construct a Social Problem
Changing Prison Life
Narratives of Decline: Youth, Dis/order and Community in an English 'Middletown
The paper is concerned with how adult residents of one medium-sized, moderately affluent English town which is generally regarded as having a relatively low crime rate interpret and respond to teenage ‘incivilities’. We begin by locating the conflicts over teenage mis/behaviour that occur across many of the town's diverse areas and assessing how the intensity of adult response varies according to people's relationship to place. We then examine th…
A Telling Tale: A Case of Vigilantism and Its Aftermath in an English Town
This paper considers one 'vigilante' episode in an English town in 1993 and its subsequent appearances in the press and in local 'crime-talk'. In so doing it a) proposes as an alternative to most current constructions of 'fear of crime' an interpretive approach grounded in place; b) considers the intersections between the generic 'law and order' preoccupations of the national press and the salience in local knowledge of a particular sequence of e…
Sociology (55 works) · Criminology (51 works) · Political science (48 works) · Psychology (41 works) · Law (35 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (30 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (24 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Computer Science (15 works)