Upcoming Attractions

Right, now I've setup the new blog (see www.andnowforsomethingcompletelysectarian.blogspot.com) its time to figure out what to do with the old one. Should I delete everything non-crime and criminology related? Should I just post my own stuff or do some reposts on it off other articles that I think are interesting on this subject? Who knows, I'm gonna mull that question over for a while.

What I do want to do is get some new material up on the blog. Posts perhaps aren't gonna be all that frequent (maybe once a week on average), but I have got some things I did want to post.
For example, I came across a few pieces by James P Cannon in his book Notebook of an Agitator on crime which I want to post some commentary on. I want to post up some more material on Haiti as well as examining 'humanitarian' intervention in some other places too.
One piece that is finished and will be posted up at the end of this month is a review I have written for the current issue of Socialism Today (http://www.socialismtoday.org/). The book is a history of the Prison Officers Association called The Everlasting Staircase by David Evans with Sheila Cohen. If you're interested you can get a copy of this months issue from the website above or your local Socialist Party branch.

New Blog

I've done it - I am going to split this blog in two. I'm still in the process of figuring out how that works completely, but from now on this blog will just feature posts on crime, criminal justice and other related issues.
For everything else, please see my new blog - And Now For Something Completely Sectarian

New Years Blogging Resolutions

1) Hammer your niche – This blog has a bit of a niche that isn’t really filled by any other blog (although there are some that come close). That doesn’t mean only post on these issues as there are people who read the posts about other issues too. Try to keep a good balance between crime posts and other ones roughly 1:1.

2) Try to develop the blog – make the commenting policy more of a welcoming statements, try and develop the links to resources section of the site, try to work on the look of the site to make it more appealing (perhaps even consider moving to Wordpress), and also try to include some pictures with posts.

3) Write a more finalised text based on the Draft Principles of a Marxist Approach to Criminology. Latest draft can be found http://leftwingcriminologist.blogspot.com/2008/12/principles-of-marxist-approach-to.html

4) Reduce the number of articles re-posted from other sites. Whilst these are no doubt often very good articles, surely your readers would appreciate your own commentary and take on the events as well from which you could link to the original article.

5) Try to get some guest posts on the website – these could include articles written by local members of Socialist Students and the Socialist Party. Another source could be encouraging other Socialist Party members to write some articles for blog on crime related issues.

6) Do more ‘cultural’ stuff, ie. more posts on music, TV and films. Okay, you don’t do anywhere near as refined analysis of many things like on A Very Public Sociologist or other blogs but people still read them. Rather you tend to hammer on about one point of them.

7) Do more stuff on previous ‘Marxist’ criminology. Do more posts on the National Deviancy Conference, for example.

8) On a similar note, do some critique’s of more ‘traditional’ criminological theory and ideas.

9) Remember, you are part of a blogging community – you should try to link to more people. On a similar note, weren’t you supposed to do a Carnival of Socialism? You should also comment on crime related posts on other website to encourage discussion of these issues.

10) Try to avoid long gaps between blogging – try not to leave it more than two days if possible. Also, try to see if there is a way of automating posts that you have already written to appear if you know you won’t be able to blog for a while (which would have been useful recently).

By the way, some blogs I've recently linked to are Journeyman, A Socialist Malaysia, Jour de Fete, Seren's Blog, and possibly some others. Check them out.

Coming Soon

This blog has been a little neglected over the last week or so, but it's becuase I've just been too busy at the moment. Anyways, I'm trying to do something about it.
So over the next week or two expect posts on student debt, a review of a book about Huddersfield during WW1, parks and museums, economics and crime, a post about castleford. And if I get around to it I'll even do a post that I've been planning for over half a year on an chapter National Deviancy Conference documents book by Bob Fine.

I also think I might try and introduce some sort of regular features to the blog - one I've being toying with in 'Brunstrom watch', looking at North Wakes' outspoken police chief. I'm not sure what else I could do though (any thoughts?)

And if I haven't plugged it already, I'd urge readers of this blog to visit The Bent Society Blog. Although it isn't written from a Marxist perspective like this blog, I'm sure that anyone who reads this blog will find what is commented on there of interest.

Showing Off

Having being tagged by Phil BC from A Very Public Sociologist with a meme (see http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2008/08/look-at-me.html) and being stuck for ideas a bit, I'm gonna do it, basically posting my favourite ten posts that I have written myself from this blog (in order of preference by the way).

1. Crime in Revolutionary Russia

2. Whats Wrong With Psychology?

3. Plaid and Crime

4. Principles of a Marxist Approach to Criminology (Second Draft)

5. A Manifesto for Wargamers

6. Prisons: Lumbering Into Further Crisis

7. Open Letter from Bangor University Socialist Students

8. Crime in the Soviet Union

9. A Brief Look at the Origins and History of Police Unionism in Britain – Pt2

10. The Question of Human Rights

(btw. if I was allowed to include posts within the last month I would have included Nid oes bradwr yn y ty hwn (No traitor in this house) - The Great North Wales Quarry Strikes failry high up on this list)

Left Student Blogging?

This is my contribution which hopefully will be included in the forthcoming Carnival of Socialism http://carnivalofsocialism.blogspot.com/ on the left and blogging.

So whats so special about students that it is worth blogging about? Well I am one, albeit part-time, so I suppose 'student politics' matters to me, especially when we have an NUS that seems to be tied to the Labour government on most things that matter to students.

Anyway, the thing that bothers me is the lack of representation that these blogs cover. I mean, what have we got a handful of Respect, AWL, Communist Students bloggers - and they usually spend most of the time arguing with each other again and again(of course, this doesn't mean that all these arguements are not important). And we've got a few green student bloggers too I suspect, although the only one I've come across is Aled Dilwyn Fisher, who's blog seems to have gone cold - nwhich is disappointing seeing as he is currently LSE SU General Secretary. And then representing the Socialist Party there's me, Nation of Duncan and AVPS, but we're both postgrads! (Plus AVPS generally doesn't ever, ever blog about student stuff, but he's doinga PhD so its quite peripheral really)

Anyway, the point is that you generally can't find out anything all that much about what students are doing on the ground. I mean, it seems to me that most student bloggers I've come across are from Manchester or Oxford, which is great if you want to know the positions of the various left groups at that University, but not if you want to hear about any actual campaigning that affects ordinary students, although the silence seemed to be broken for a while around the Reclaim the Uni thing.

On this blog, I've chronicled the struggle against a Student Union leadership that was one of the biggest supporters of the NUS governance review. Now given that apart from a small People and Planet group we're the only active political society at this uni, that may be why I don't get bogged down so much in those arguments, but i'd like to think that I'd spend some of the time discussing the day to day stuff too.

Of course, this may just be my own limited knowledge of the student left blog-o-sphere, but I'd like to hear more about eroding the support for the local Student Union bureacracies that prop-up the current NUS leadership than yet another re-hash of the same debates all the time.

Whoops!

When I changed the layout a few weeks back I tried to make sure everything that I had previously on the blog was still there. Well I forgot the stat counter code. It's not necessarily the most important thin, but i do like to see which posts are the most popular, so i know what people enjoy reading. (btw if you want more on anything let me know - maybe i should have a vote?) Anyway, its back now.

Which gives me time to welcome two new blogs to my listings

Firstly we have Leftwrites - which looks to me like an Ausralian Socialist Unity blog - but theres some interesting discussions on there.

Secondly, we have Infantile and Disorderly, written by a supporter of HOPI and as you might have imaged from this features posts on Iran and the various groups on the lefts attitudes towards this country.

Anyways, I'll post a proper post tonight.

A New Look In Development

As you may have noticed the blog looks slightly different today. A while a go I decided I needed to freshen things up a little, so today I have done so - a new look for the blog and more. It's not finished yet, I want to try and play about with the fonts and stuff. Also you'll notice that many of the links have gone missing from the side - don't worry they will be back - I've added a feature that blogger now has for most recently updated blogs (partially for my own use more than anything else)./ I'll also have a traditional blog roll, but i'm in the middle of recategorising (and if you don't like wheich category your blog has been placed in let me know and i'll move it into whichever one you want). I'm also planning on getting rid of the blog archive page (as it is far too much hassle to update) and replacing it with

Anywasy, recently I had added the following blogs to the old blog roll

Bent Society Blog
La Lutte Continue!
Derek McMillan's Blog
Militant Worker

Some Thoughts On My Blog

Now my exams are over and I have a little more time I am hoping to renovate the blog a little. Firstly by updating the blog archive and updating the list of blogs I link to. Secondly I'm wanting to personalise the blog a little, so expect some posts on things that I am personally interested in. Thirdly, I'm going to steal an idea from The Daily (maybe) and invite readers of this blog to request a topic they would like me to post on.

PS. There is a new article just below this one on the harassment of young people by the police in Essex which has been in the news a lot recently.

Who Cares About Local Campaigns?

Well I do! As you may have noticed I like having people making useful comments on pieces appearing on this blog. But I do get concerned about lack of commenting too. Particularly as I notice that people often don’t comment on local reports I put up of activities in Bangor. I think this is a really big shame.

Why? You may ask. Well I think a lot can be learnt from local campaigns when campaigning on similar issues elsewhere. Local reports of events can also be a good indicator of the support for various ideas in different places.

Now I suppose the question is whether the lack of comments represents people not just reading a report (and often the ones I post are versions of articles published in The Socialist) or whether they read it but don’t think it is worth commenting?

Now as you may have realised, I am particularly interested in student politics (as in involving actual students in political campaigning – rather than engaging purely in shouting matches with the NUS bureaucracy). As such I am usually quite delighted when I can find reports of the activities of student political societies on the internet, it helps me to generalise from the situation here in Bangor to the rest of the country.

For example, I would say the willingness of students to get involved with campaigning is definitely greater than it was last year when I was a student in Huddersfield. Now this could be down to me just being in a different place, but from reading reports from elsewhere it seems to be the case everywhere on a general level. Of course the events of last week show that students at Manchester Uni and Bangor Uni have a big gap between them in terms of level of political awareness, preparedness to campaign and level of organisation.

So here’s a plea to other bloggers – more reports of your own local political activity – and if I haven’t been commenting on stuff in the past – then I’ll try and do it more often from now on.

Dead...

Yes, not me but the comments part of the website. But so seems to be many of the comments boxes of websites I have been visiting.
Is there a lot fo activity people are being engaged in? Can people just not be bothered commenting at the moment? I feel I have to say, some of the posts of the last week haven't been the most criminologically focussed, but i think the student ones were quite good, and the report from NUS Wales Conference I think is important. Any please below see a post on the history of police trade unions - something for people to get stuck into

Anyways, I feel i should introduce a few new blogs, they are Campaign for a New Workers' Party blog, Ten Percent and Classroom Teacher.

Birthday Blogging - A Year in Review

Today marks the 1st birthday of this blog, which saw the double post of Socialist Alternative Radio and Reading Materials at Uni.
Back then, the blog was a little more personal I would say. The vast amount of activity I get up to these days, particularly in building a Socialist party branch from pretty much scratch has seen to that, meaning that many posts these days are reports of activity or articles written for the Socialist. The blog has also come more to focus on my study of criminology and putting forward a marxist criminology which has seen me put forward two drafts of The Principles of a Marxist Criminology, as well as many other pieces on crime in variosu times and places (including a series on Venezuela and the popular Crime in Revolutionary Russia.
I've also set up a post archive of some of my posts (which needs updating again), as well as participated in the short lived Militant blog. Anyways, I thought I'd finish up this reminiscence with a post that i did for that blog.

Friday, 13 April 2007:
Elections and the 'Law and Order' cards - How Should Marxists Oppose This

In elections we often hear about the main political parties playing the 'law and order' card of setting out tougher and tougher policies to tackle crime rates. Last years local elections saw the 'foreign prisoners scandal' that led to the replacement of then Home Secretary Charles Clarke by John Reid.'Law and order' ideology arose in the late 70's promoted in this country by Thatcher and the Tories who made crime an electoral issue. It arose as a response to the re-habilitative ideal that collapsed in the 60's and 70's where the penal system (prisons, police etc.) focussed on trying to re-integrate offenders back into society by treating them as if something was wrong with them (like in medicine). The problem wasn't that something was wrong with all offenders, however, it was the capitalist system that can never provide for everyone, as it requires ever increasing concentration of wealth (which underlies many property crimes). Not only this the whole nature of intense competition and struggle for survival under such a system places huge strains and stresses on individuals (which underlies all crime and things such as drug abuse and alchoholism). No matter how much you treat some individuals you are fighting a losing battle as the system is the big problem that causes the others.

As such crime rates were rising and the old rehabilitative system was seen as falling apart. Taking the quasi-religious notion that offenders are evil or somehow implicitly wrong no matter what and also the idea that if you make the penal system scary enough nobody will offend (even though as I've explained the nature of the system means that people will commit criminal offences regardless of this), 'law and order' ideology took the position that one had to have heavy sanctions for offenders and and lots of police officers to appear threatening.

Of course marxists should point out that any bulking up of the penal system is a bulking up of the state of forces that can be used against the working class in struggle, indeed Thatcher used her extra 'coppers' to batter the 1984-85 miners strike. Demands should be posed to counter the grip of the ruling classes on the state forces (such as more openness, democratisation etc.), although ultimately the tops of these forces will side with the ruling class and indecision will help workers struggles.

We also have to understand why 'law and order' ideology appeal to some workers and continues to do so. The reason was that the rehabilitative ideal was failing to reduce or even control crime which threatens working class people. No-one wants to be the victim of a rape, burglary or assault, workers and other people are afraid of crime, they don't want to become victims to it. In this situation saying that you could immediately reduce the crime rate by scaring people out of doing it presents itself as an easy solution to the problem. However, it is a solution that was never going to work and hasn't as is shown by the huge increase in crime and prison population that has occured for the last almost thirty years.

We need to not pose a return to the rehabilitative ideal (although some elements such as giving people the opportunity to access decent education will still be relevant), but to rid ourselves of the capitalist system that breeds mass crime and fight for a socialist world.

Blogging & the Blogging Community

Firstly, thanks to everyone for their responses to my previous post on blogging. I think i shall definitely not post anything as long as the 3000 word post recently again. Moreover, I won't be splitting the blog into two or more (although the offer is still open to collaborate on a left & crime blog).

Anyway, I thought with the re-launch of the carnival of socialism (see http://carnivalofsocialism.blogspot.com/) I'd blog a little about the blogging community. Now as other people have told me, as a blogger if you want to get people to come and visit your site, you need to visit other people's too. I haven't been particularly good at this, but other the last week or so, I've been trying to post more regularly on others sites as well as add some more as links. So (a la AVPS) we will welcome A Bit Like Lenin..., Classroom Teacher, Karl Marx Strasse, Kit Notes, Rebellion Sucks!, The Daily (Maybe), Landsker and Law And Disorder to the blogroll. Hopefully, that makes me doing my bit a little more.

And now for a little bit about this blog. I know several people are fans of visitor stats, so below are my stats since i began recording them



as you can hopefully see, i'm getting about 300 visitors a week, that's probably not that great, but I feel good about it. in terms of days, my lowest has been 10 visitors (during the period when I didn't post for a week) and highest has been 93. As for comments, well I've had plenty over the last week, with different people posting on different things, and given the range of things I post on here, I think that's somewhat healthy, but I try to post things that should make sense to most people - if i get too technical with criminology articles please mention it.

Visitors will also be pleased to know that I've now scored a hit from every continent, with a stream of visitors now from nigeria - I guess looking at the stuff I've posted on the students there.

On Blogging

Over the last few weeks I've seen a few commentaries on blogging and blog stats that have got me thinking about these in relation to this blog. The most interesting discussion I found was here http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2008/01/vital-statistics.html.

I only recently managed to sort myself out with stats stuff, and the results are fairly interesting. As well as getting regular visits from many of the people on my blog roll, I get quite a few sent my way due thanks to A Very Public Sociologist and also from the attacks at us (Socialist Students in Bangor) made on the blog of the some of the local SU officers. I also get quite a few visits from people surfing the internet and searching for bits and pieces on crime and criminology, and recently international visits have increased to the extent i've had visits from every continent with the exception of Latin America.

But this doesn't really help me. One of the main things I'm trying to do with this blog is to develop a marxist analysis of crime, it's what well over half the posts here are about, and the last post (below this one) was of an essay I'd recently written and no-one has commented (although from the stats i can see several people have read it). This is a little frustrating becuase I really do want criticism and comments on this piece as it covers an awful lot of stuff i'd like to talk more about.

The other side of the blog is mostly about local stuff, what's happening at the Student Union in particular recently and I don't really expect all that many comments on this becuase most of my readership isn't in Bangor, and frankly I prefer having the discussions about this face to face on the streets with students where I can explain our ideas more fully.

So how do improve the comments and get more relevant visitors. Some of the suggests from the post on AVPS may indeed be useful. commenting on other blogs, getting links posted on other blogs and commenting regularly on other blogs probably would help get more visitors, and to be honest with me being so busy this is one of the reasons why my visit count dipped as low as 10 a day over this weekend.

But this isn't enough, when I go comment on other people's sites the posts have to be interesting - i'm really not that interested in reading re-posts from other sites or things that I don't care about. I either need to cultivate a more criminology orientated audience or develop posts which will interest a larger section of my readership.

I should also probably post on some stuff people have heard less, some of my top commented posts http://leftwingcriminologist.blogspot.com/2008/01/crime-in-revolutionary-russia.html and http://leftwingcriminologist.blogspot.com/2007/10/venezuela-and-crime-preliminary.html were precisely this kind of post.

The other thing I've started doing is writing some posts well before I post them, especially if they are book reviews etc. as this will obviously help when I get to a time when I've been really busy (like over the past week). Anyway, if anyone has more suggests please feel free. As an aside, I wonder if anyone has done any sociological research into blogging and why people do it and their other involvement, I think it would make interesting reading.