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In the same way, parents, especially in the working class, may also bemoan the loss of the certainty of traditional relations between teachers and pupils, parents and children, and authorities and subjects, and attribute this in part to the undermining of proper moral training by progressive educationalists and liberal schoolteachers. Jeremy Seabrook has vividly caught the bathos of this loss of parental influence: As [parents') role decreases, the bewilderment of the parents grows. 'He only sleeps here'; 'I'm the ever-open purse'; 'It's the kids he mixes with'; 'I don't know where they get it from'; 'He's never heard things like that in this house'; 'I've tried to teach him right from wrong'.

This penology is organised in part around the control of dangerous individuals, the 'hard core' delinquents and criminals - a project which does relate to popular anxieties - but it is also articulated around the remoralisation of the population at risk. Retributive and remoralising measures: juvenile justice since 1979 The three major initiatives taken by the Thatcher government in the field of juvenile justice since 1979 have been concerned with the fundamental revision of the liberal Children and The Real£ty of Right-Wing Criminology 25 Young Persons Act of ten years earlier.

Violent offences constituted a total of 95,000 in 1979 (only 3. 7 per cent of the 2,376,700 offences known to the police). This was certainly a significant increase over ten years earlier, when there were 3 7,000 offences so recorded. Britain none the less remains a much less violent society overall than the United States and also than other European societies. In 1975, for example, there were 1,645 murders and non-negligent manslaughters in New York City, 818 in Chicago, 633 in Detroit, 554 in Los Angeles and 434 in Philadelphia, with an overall total of 18,642 murders known to the police in the United States as a whole.