The Enemy Without: Policing and Class Consciousness in the Miners' Strike (New Directions in Criminology Series)

This book gives us the voices of miners who felt the full weight of state censure and regulatory power in the long strike of 1984-85. Censured as "the enemy within", they are subjected to a wide range of policing practices. Apart from the police force itself, the law (both criminal and civil), the Government, the welfare agencies, the National Coal Board, the mass media and the trade union bureaucracy all played their major parts in policing the strike, and each played a particular role in the changing political consciouness of the striking community. The book aims to remind us of the recurrent class character of criminal justice and of the long-neglected necessity for criminology to deal with the processes of criminalization involved in industrial relations, and to locate people's responses to disputes, censures and policing in terms of their level of class consciousness. The book describes the political consciousness of the politically criminalized, and the way in which that consciousness changes in relation to repressive policing and social regulation. This is an account of the effects this policing had on a divided mining community's consciousness of class, state and justice.