A Criminological Imagination contains a selection of key articles from Pat Carlen's research studies of magistrates' courts and women's imprisonment together with a range of other articles on social control, discourse analysis, ideology, punishment, criminology and critique. They are all informed by an assumption that while criminal justice must remain imaginary in societies based upon unequal and exploitative social relations, one task of a criminological imagination might be to suggest why this is so, and how things could be otherwise. This is an invaluable collection for anyone interested in crime, justice and injustice and the social, political and academic contexts in which knowledge of them is constructed.

Pat Carlen is Visiting Professor of Criminology at Kent University and Editor-in-Chief, British Journal of Criminology.