His PhD was an ethnography of drug use in Notting Hill, West London, out of which he developed the concept of moral panic.
He was a founding member of the National Deviancy Conferences and a group of critical criminologists in which milieu he wrote the groundbreaking, The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance in 1973, with Ian Taylor and Paul Walton and The Manufacture of News (with Stan Cohen).
With his colleagues, most notably John Lea and Roger Matthews, he developed left realist criminology in a series of books including What Is to Be Done About Law and Order?
He completed research on criminal victimisation, stop and search, and urban riots, and was a frequent contributor to media debates on crime and policing.
Twenty-seven of his articles were published as book chapters, whilst essays from his early work in the 1970s to today have been reproduced in readers and in translation.