The key area of concern in this chapter is the relationship between crime, the police and social exclusion. It has been argued, for example, that the main function of the modern British police service since its inception in 1829 is to regulate the underclass (Reiner, 2000b). The racialised disorders occurring in the north of England throughout 2001 are recent examples of the police service's role in containing excluded sections of society (Home Office, 2000, 2001a). The connection between police policy and practice, and marginalised, deprived and criminogenic populations has been described by two schools of thought. First, by writers drawing on the sociologists of modernity, in particular Marx, Weber and Durkheim (Choongh, 1997; Crowther, 2000a, 2000b; Reiner, 2000b) and second, by those drawing on post-structuralist commentators indebted to Michel Foucault (Feeley and Simon, 1994; Ericson and Haggerty, 1997; Stenson, 1998, 2000). The former concentrate on the dynamics of the capitalist political economy; a structure that reflects the economic interests of the ruling class and maintains its superiority in relation to the working and underclasses. The police are a component of the ‘repressive state apparatus’ safeguarding the productive and profit-making activities of the ruling elite by containing the potentially unruly and rebellious behaviour of an economically redundant crime-prone lumpenproletariat (Hall et al, 1978; Brake and Hale, 1992; Cook, 1997). The latter approach consists of several strands of thought and a detailed review of this rich literature is beyond the remit of this discussion. However, for heuristic purposes there are two principal schools of thought: (i) the governmentality approach (Foucault, 1991; Feeley and Simon, 1994; Dean, 1999; Rose, 1999); and (ii) the ‘dispersal of discipline’ and ‘carceral society’ thesis (Foucault, 1977; Cohen, 1985; Squires, 1990; Hillyard and Watson, 1996). There are crucial differences between these two perspectives, but what they share in common is their suspicion of totalising theoretical claims, such as those made by neo-Marxists about the functions of the capitalist economy. For Foucauldians, power is not concentrated in the hands of a sovereign, in the form of a state elite or ruling class, but is dispersed throughout various networks of agents and agencies and does not systematically represent the unitary interests of dominant groups. Instead of class, risk society is more important. Moreover, Foucauldians are concerned with the local or micro levels, rather than the meso and macro levels of analysis favoured by neo-Marxists.