Critical Criminology, Existential Humanism, and Social Justice: Exploring the Contours of Conceptual Integration

The relationship between critical criminology and social justice has been well documented, but efforts to provide a unified theory of social justice that cuts across and embodies the various strains of critical criminological thought have not been systematically researched. One useful approach for engaging in such a project comes from existential humanism, which draws attention to a number of life themes (e.g., the struggle to be free, being and becoming, redemption) and is compatible with critical criminology's commitment to radical social change. This article provisionally explores the boundaries of theoretical synthesis, mindful of those complex (and thorny) issues upon which successful conceptual integration depends, including definitions, assumptions, domains of inquiry, and modes of integration. This discussion concludes with an outline of the implications of a commentary for the future of critical criminology and for sustainable, meaningful praxis. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Left Out? The coverage of critical perspectives in introductory criminology textbooks, 1990–1999

DeKeseredy and Schwartz have criticized introductory criminology textbooks published in the United States for their ‘poor treatment’ of critical/radical perspectives. This paper subjects this criticism to empirical analysis by studying the coverage of critical perspectives in 34 introductory criminology textbooks published from 1990 to 1999. Specifically, I examine how the coverage of critical perspectives in the textbooks is influenced by: 1) the theoretical orientations of the texts; 2) the positions of the texts on debate over conflict and consensus theories of law; and 3) the positions of the texts on the evidence supporting critical perspectives. This analysis shows that critical/radical perspectives in general, but in particular recent developments in critical criminology (including critical feminism, left realism, peacemaking criminology and postmodern criminology) are often ‘left out’ of contemporary criminology textbooks.     

Intersectionality,Rural Criminology,and Re-imaging the Boundaries of Critical Criminology

One of the significant shortcomings of the criminological canon, including its critical strands—feminist, cultural and green—has been its urbancentric bias. In this theoretical model, rural communities are idealised as conforming to the typical small-scale traditional societies based on cohesive organic forms of solidarity and close density acquaintance networks. This article challenges the myth that rural communities are relatively crime free places of ‘moral virtue’ with no need for a closer scrutiny of rural context, rural places, and rural peoples about crime and other social problems. This challenge is likewise woven into the conceptual and empirical narratives of the other articles in this Special Edition, which we argue constitute an important body of innovative work, not just for reinvigorating debates in rural criminology, but also critical criminology. For without a critical perspective of place, the realities of context are too easily overlooked. A new criminology of crime and place will help keep both critical criminology and rural criminology firmly anchored in both the sociological and the criminological imagination. We argue that intersectionality, a framework that resists privileging any particular social structural category of analysis, but is cognisant of the power effects of colonialism, class, race and gender, can provide the theoretical scaffolding to further develop such a project.     

Constitutive Criminology and the ‘War on Terror’

This article presents a constitutive criminological perspective of the ‘war on terror’. The article will first deconstruct the ‘war on terror’; showing how constitutive criminology provides a framework in which foreign policy, the UK state; the police, and society can be systematically analyzed in relation to one another. Second, the article explores how constitutive criminology enables a critical analysis of the dominant state-centric ‘war on terror’ discourse. The article through discussing the multifaceted ‘war on terror’ demonstrates the relevance of constitutive criminology, as a non state centric approach to critical perspectives in criminology.     

From ‘crime’ to social harm?

Debates around the relationships between criminology and social harm are long-standing. This article sets out some of the key features of current debates between, on the one hand, those who would retain a commitment to ‘crime’ and criminology and those, on the other hand who would abandon criminology for a social harm perspective. To this end, the article begins by highlighting several criticisms of criminology, criticisms raised in particular by a diverse group of critical criminologists over the past 30 to 40 years. While these are hardly new, the rehearsal of these is an important starting point for a discussion of the potential of the development of an alternative discipline. The paper then proposes a number of reasons why a disciplinary approach organised around a notion of social harm may prove to be more productive than has criminology hitherto: that is, may have the potential for greater theoretical coherence and imagination, and for more political progress.     

Intersectional Criminology: Interrogating Identity and Power in Criminological Research and Theory

Intersectional criminology is a theoretical approach that necessitates a critical reflection on the impact of interconnected identities and statuses of individuals and groups in relation to their experiences with crime, the social control of crime, and any crime-related issues. This approach is grounded in intersectionality, a concept developed from the tenets of women of color feminist theory and activism. To demonstrate how intersectionality is useful in criminology, this article reviews a sampling of feminist and critical research conducted on Black girls’ and women’s experiences with crime, victimization, and criminal legal system processes. This research demonstrates the interlaced social impacts of race, gender, femininity/masculinity ideals, sexuality, and socioeconomic class. This article also provides a basis for widely deploying an intersectional approach throughout the field of criminology across all social identities and statuses.     

Transformative Feminist Criminology: A Critical Re-thinking of a Discipline

This essay makes the case for a transformative critical feminist criminology, one that explicitly theorizes gender, one that requires a commitment to social justice, and one that must increasingly be global in scope. Key to this re-thinking of a mature field is the need to expand beyond traditional positivist notions of “science,” to embrace core elements of a feminist approach to methodology, notably the epistemological insights gleaned from a new way of thinking about research, methods, and the relationship between the knower and the known. Other key features of contemporary feminist criminology include an explicit commitment to intersectionality, an understanding of the unique positionality of women in the male dominated fields of policing and corrections, a focus on masculinity and the gender gap in serious crime, a critical assessment of corporate media and the demonization of girls and women of color, and a recognition of the importance of girls’ studies as well as women’s studies to the development of a global, critical feminist criminology.     

Postmodern criminology in relation to radical and conflict criminology

The literature on postmodern criminology suggests that there is some relationship between it and radical criminology. This relationship apparently is based in part on the ract that both are further related to conflict theory. However, conceptual analyses on these types of theories have not fully explicated whatever similarities and differences exist among them. This essay identifies six core theoretical assertions in conflict criminology and compares them to parallel assertions in radical and postmodern criminology. Such comparison is followed by a discussion on the relevance of conflict and radical theory as conceptual backdrops from which to comprehend postmodern inquiry.     

Cultural Criminology and the Politics of Meaning

Cultural criminology focuses on situational, subcultural, and mediated constructions of meaning around issues of crime and crime control. In this sense cultural criminology is designed for critical engagement with the politics of meaning, and for critical intervention into those politics. Yet the broader enterprise of critical criminology engages with the politics of meaning as well; in confronting the power relations of justice and injustice, critical criminologists of all sorts investigate the social and cultural processes by which situations are defined, groups are categorized, and human consequences are understood. The divergence between cultural criminology and other critical criminologies, then, may be defined less by meaning than by the degree of methodological militancy with which meaning is pursued. In any case, this shared concern with the politics of meaning suggests a number of innovations and interventions that cultural criminologists and other critical criminologists might explore.     

Social harm future(s): exploring the potential of the social harm approach

The notion of social harm has sporadically interested critical criminologists as an alternative to the concept of crime. In particular, it has been viewed as a means to widen the rather narrow approach to harm that criminology offers. More recently, the publication of Beyond Criminology: Taking Harm Seriously has renewed interest in the notion of social harm. The book asserted a number of very valid reasons for a social harm approach that provoked a number of interesting critical responses. The article seeks to respond to five recurring questions: Should the social harm perspective move beyond criminology? If so, where should the perspective locate itself? From this position, how will the perspective continue to engage within ‘law and order’ debates and address the concerns of those affected by crime? If the notion of crime is problematic, how will the perspective form an alternative definition of harm? Moreover, without a notion of crime and the accompanying concept of criminal intent, how would the perspective allocate responsibility for harm? The article is not offering definitive answers to these questions, but possible directions for the perspective’s future development.     

A Radical Economic Model of Crime with an Empirical Test in Non-city Zip Codes

This article addresses three main issues. First, the structural explanation of crime rates across zip codes within a US county outside of that county’s major city’s limits. Second, this article addresses whether the traditional social disorganization argument which links measures of disorganized neighborhoods and in particularly deficiencies in informal social control to race, income inequality and poverty provides an adequate explanation of variations in non-city zip code crime rates. Third, this article also examines a radical critique of the kind of structural model posed by social disorganization, and tests an alternative radical economic model of crime at the zip code level. The empirical evidence illustrates the weakness of social disorganization explanations of crime at the zip code level. In contrast to those results, the empirical results for the proposed radical economic model of crime support its use for explaining crime across county zip codes. This type of empirical evidence demonstrates that radical models of crime have utility in explaining how economic structures influence the distribution of crime independently of variable identified in orthodox criminology.     

Teaching to shift people’s thinking toward peace: the relevance of Colman McCarthy’s work for peacemaking criminology

Peacemaking criminology is often conceived as a theoretical perspective built upon linkages between religious, feminist, and critical traditions. Equally important in peacemaking criminology is its teaching tradition, which promotes educating people about the values of peace, integration, cooperation, and caring over the values of control, repression, power, and domination. Teaching from a peacemaking perspective has generally involved efforts to design crime‐related courses that feature core concepts, readings, and policies within peacemaking criminology writings. However, such peacemaking teaching and writings have not commonly provided a central focus upon what needs to be taught to shift people’s thinking. This article thereby illustrates the work of peace educator Colman McCarthy, whose teaching experiences in high schools and universities are predicated upon influencing teenagers and young adults to embrace the idea that nothing can matter more than the struggle for and embracing of peace. This article also explores the ways in which Colman McCarthy’s books, I’d Rather Teach Peace and All of One Peace: Essays on Nonviolence, offer a foundation to help people shift their thinking toward a culture of nonviolence and peace.     

Seeing War as Criminal: Peace Activist Views and Critical Criminology

A hallmark of critical criminology is its critique of the traditional definition of crime. For decades, critical scholars have proposed humanistic definitions of crime that bring state violence into the purview of academic criminology—although outside of critical criminology this is a matter of great contentiousness. This study investigates the views of those involved in peace activism, but not in any way associated with academic criminology, about the application of the term ‘crime’ to war, specifically the recent US war on Iraq. Given that there is no existing research on this subject, the article also examines how peace activists define crime generally and whether they believe those responsible for the war should be regarded as war criminals. Not surprisingly, semi‐structured interviews with 13 anti‐war activists reveal significant support for elements of critical criminological definitions of crime but an unexpected concern on the part of some that the application of the term ‘crime’ to war could be counterproductive in efforts to stop state violence. The rationales for this concern, as well as those for other issues addressed in the study, are largely presented in the interviewees’ own words.     

On an entrepreneurial criminology of mass political violence

This article examines an entrepreneurial criminology of mass political violencewithin the broader set of criminological communications on this theme, and identifies some troubling dimensions of the criminological closures on which the enterprise rests. The criminological enterprise over mass political violence testifies to ambitions of external expansion at the expense of other social scientific analyses, that are represented as ill-qualified for the study of this particular object, while evacuating from its conception of criminology intellectual traditions averse to the promotion of criminalization as a means to constitute and respond to troubling events. The normative values advanced in enterprising calls seem to have led to a failure to submit certain assumptions to rigorous intellectual (and political) critique. The result is an analytic conservatism that, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces dominant assumptions about crime, as well as an uncritical adoption of liberal internationalism and western cultural dominance.     

The failure of postmodern criminology

Postmodernism has recently washed up on the shores of criminology, and is the subject of considerable theoretical debate. This essay critically assesses some of the most trenchant and relevant components of the theoretical bases for postmodernism, and sketches out their applicability to criminology. It argues that postmodernism can be of little assistance to intellectuals committed to critique and fundamental social change. While postmodernists look down so severely at ‘old-fashioned’ ‘meta-narratives’ like Marxism, it is now they who are falling off the contemporary agenda, because they are dated and theoretically flawed. My main argument is that the theoretical imporverishment of postmodernism creates an obstacle to the development of a truly critical criminology. One of the current challenges of critical criminology is to amplify the critique of postmodern criminology and to reorient the trajectory of critical criminology away from the postmodern detour. The essay explores the historical context of the emergence of postmodernism, the modernist/ postmodernist era, deconstructionism, ‘meta-narratives’, idealism, form and content, fragmentation/pluralism/relativism, absence of progressive praxis, conservatism and Marxism.     

Critical criminology,social justice,and an alternative view of incarceration

Despite its lack of general popularity, critical criminology continues to offer compelling criticism of the dominant paradigm of criminal justice. In this essay, critical criminology is presented along with its principal assertions, theoretical assumptions, and implications for social reform and criminal justice. The author argues that critical criminology provides a valuable theoretical backdrop for the analysis of incarceration, particularly its emergence as a form of local industry. Other developments pertinent to the political economy are also discussed, especially as they pertain to the shaping of patterns of unemployment and imprisonment.     

DEVELOPMENT AND FRACTURE OF A DISCIPLINE: LEGACIES OF THE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY AT BERKELEY

In the early twentieth century, the University of California—Berkeley opened its doors to police professionals for instruction in “police science.” This program ultimately developed into the full‐fledged School of Criminology, whose graduates helped shape American criminology and criminal justice until well into the 1970s. Scholarship at the School of Criminology eventually fractured into three distinct traditions: “Administrative criminology” applied scientific methods in pursuit of refining law enforcement practices, “law and society” coupled legal scholarship with social scientific methods, and “radical criminology” combined Marxist critiques of the state with community activism. Those scientific traditions relied on competing epistemic premises and normative aspirations, and they drew legitimacy from different sources. Drawing on oral histories and archival data permits a neo‐institutional analysis of how each of these criminological traditions emerged, acquired stability, and subsided. The Berkeley School of Criminology provides fertile ground to examine trends in the development of criminal justice as a profession, criminology as a discipline and its place in elite universities, the uncoupling of criminology from law and society scholarship, and criminal justice policy's disenchantment with the academy. These legacies highlight how the development of modern criminology and the professionalization of American law enforcement find precedent in events that originate at Berkeley.     

MAINSTREAM CRIMINOLOGY:

This study explores the tendency of academic criminology and other crime-related areas 10 accept or reject the new criminology as a viable alternative to the traditional perspective. Criminology has been characterized as being in a period of paradigm revolution as indicated by the radical writings of the 1970s. The results of this study lead to the conclusion that mainstream criminology has slipped its traditional boundaries and the new criminology is gaining acceptance.     

Revisionist history,visionary criminology,and needs-based justice

Although there may be some value in debating the question of whatever happened to radical criminology, I believe that it is more productive to think in terms of radical and/or critical continuities in pedagogy, research, and practice that have survived time and can be linked to current efforts in visionary criminology and transformative justice. Examining changes in the study of crime and justice from such a perspective, it can be argued that the antiestablishment criminologies of the year 2003 are not any more marginal, and in fact may be less marginal today than when radical criminology first burst onto the scene in the early 1970s.     

Towards a global critical justice problematic

This paper argues that a global perspective is demanded by neo-Marxist methodological considerations, pointing out that traditional comparative criminology has been seriously flawed in its assumptions and preconceptions. A critical comparative criminology must be based on a world system and/or dependency model, coupled with human rights concerns. The crucial concerns of critical criminology are re-identified within a problematic of the concepts: “reproduction”, “production”, “the state”, and “transformation”. Their relevance to a comparative criminology is underscored, by way of critiquing north/western (including Canadian) critical criminology. The paper ends by drawing out some of the implications of this approach for justice theory and research in Canada.