This project works at the curiously under-explored interface between criminology and political theory with the aim of developing the intellectual tools and resources needed to fashion a better politics of crime. Using theories of ideology and work in the history of ideas in novel ways, the study aims to understand crime control via an analysis of the political concepts that are at issue (justice, authority, freedom etc.); as an inescapable site of ideological conflict and change, and as a field of policy and practice constituted through political thinking. The study will assemble and subject to close analysis a whole range of relevant materials from political parties, parliamentarians, policy-makers, think-tanks, campaign groups, commentators, and criminal justice agencies, as well as by criminologists and political theorists. In so doing, it will reconstruct and appraise the crime-relevant claims of the range of ideological positions whose proponents compete over the question of how to think about, and act upon, problems of crime and social order – from liberalism, conservatism and social democracy, to populism, technocracy, feminism and green political thought. The study aims to transcend the orientation towards critique, and the gloomy, dystopian disposition, that has come to dominate the social scientific analysis of crime and punishment in recent years. Instead the focus is on reconstruction – the search for principled, plausible visions of just ordering. The study will provide a careful work of ideological clarification that teases out what is at stake when crime is under discussion in ways that shed new light on the prospects and possibilities of creating social and penal institutions that can contribute to the realization of safer and more cohesive societies.