This book gives us the voices of miners who felt the full weight of state censure and regulatory power in the long strike of 1984-85. Censured as "the enemy within", they are subjected to a wide range of policing practices. Apart from the police force itself, the law (both criminal and civil), the Government, the welfare agencies, the National Coal Board, the mass media and the trade union bureaucracy all played their major parts in policing the strike, and each played a particular role in the changing political consciouness of the striking community. The book aims to remind us of the recurrent class character of criminal justice and of the long-neglected necessity for criminology to deal with the processes of criminalization involved in industrial relations, and to locate people's responses to disputes, censures and policing in terms of their level of class consciousness. The book describes the political consciousness of the politically criminalized, and the way in which that consciousness changes in relation to repressive policing and social regulation. This is an account of the effects this policing had on a divided mining community's consciousness of class, state and justice.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 Criminology, industrial conflict and the miners' strike: introduction - a history of neglect; criminology and the "grip of new realism"; British criminology and the miners' strike; class consciousness and policing. Part 2 The strike and its context: policing industrial conflict - the lessons of history, The Featherstone Riot, The Llanelli Riots 1911, the General Strike, policing the Depression; the Post-War British political economy - from boom to recession; Heath 1970-74 - crsis management; social contracts and the Labour Party; Thatcher - term one; Thatcher - term two; preparations for the confrontation - the Government, the Union; the Nottinghamshire Coalfield; the strike in profile. Part 3 Miners and the police: attitudes - past and present, the experiences of change, the thick blue line, police confrontation, police tactics, the process of arrest, police powers and civil liberties, political detention; policing and the question of "fairness"; working miners and the police; the politics of strike policing; a police state?; police, violence and industrial conflict; the policing and its effects - behaviour and consciousness. Part 4 Miners and the law: civil law and criminal law - perceptions and distinctions; industrial disputes and the law; law as an arena of struggle; bail conditions - a tactical weapon; the Court process; legal representation; a new consciousness - law, society and industrial conflict. Part 5 Government, employers and welfare: puppets and puppeteers; policing by local management; working miners and the NCB; policing through welfare; military intervention; government intent. Part 6 trade union officials - policing by bureaucracy: a role of social regulation; divisions and vacillations - area leadership; branch officials; Scargill and the National Executive; rank and file organization - the strike committee, the Ollerton Women's Action Group; the Trade Union Movement and the TUC. Part 7 Miners and the mass media: introduction - the policing of ideas; what they read, what they watched - women, working miners; changing options of the media; distortion, sensationalism and bias; the role of the mass media; the lessons drawn; neutral and anonymous?. Part 8 Class consciousness, policing and the Ollerton striking community: class consciousness - a theoretical overview; policing - an amplifier of consciousness; class consciousness and the miners; divisions and unevenness - picketing and non-picketing strikers, women, working miners; trade unions, reformism and class consciousness; the revolutionary party and class consciousness. Appendices: fieldwork - the setting, policing a class consciouness, the interview, participant observation, partisanship and points of caution.