Reconstructing and reporting the history of a social problem is always a diffi cult and speculative enterprise. Substantial areas of the problem may never have been recorded because they were covert or concealed. Those unknown areas form an uncertain context for interpreting the residue that was intentionally or unwittingly left for others to examine. The residue itself is composed of contributions made by people who were often engaged in masking or transforming the possible signifi cance of what they were doing. The worlds of legislators, control agents, and deviants tend to be complex,...

The first ethnographic study of a Crown Court Centre, this book describes the origins and early history of a pioneering project to support victims and prosecution witnesses appearing before the court--the Witness Support Project. Paul Rock analyzes the major divide which exists in the life of the court between professional insiders and public outsiders. He provides details of how this division is built into court architecture, administration, and social relations, and examines how it stems from the preoccupation of court officials with the control of knowledge, public order, and emotion.

This collection examines the ambiguous relationship be-tween the politically mute, average drug user and the small number, socially distant from the common user, who started the work of undermining official definitions of drug use. The drug users' identification with the issues of power, freedom, oppression, and libertarianism, triggered by the experience of police and penal regulations, is discussed, as is the influence of the growth in the collective competence of users and the changes in the using population on the shifting image of drugs.