This paper explores the possible patterns of crime and control in the twenty-first century, drawing on an analysis of current and recent developments. These suggest a dystopian prospect of permanently high crime rates, and control strategies that reinforce social division and exclusion. Current ‘third way’ policies for crime reduction may achieve modest success, in part because they indirectly encourage agencies to manipulate statistically recorded outcomes to their advantage. They do not however tackle the underlying sources of crime in the political economy and culture of global capitalism, offering only actuarial analyses of risk variation, and pragmatic preventive interventions to reduce these. In the absence of any broader changes to the social patterns which generate high-crime societies the prospect is of marginal palliatives for crime, which themselves have the dysfunctional consequences of increasing segregation, distrust and anxiety.