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.     

Green Criminology and Dirty Collar Crime

As a contribution to literature drawing together green criminology and studies of organised and corporate crime, this paper provides a case study of crimes and public health harms linked to the Naples garbage disposal crisis. The context is the inability of modern consumer society to cope with the problem of mass production of waste. In turn this leads to opportunities for both legal and criminal entrepreneurs to offer services that promise but fail to ‘dispose’ of the problem. The analysis draws upon environmental law and classic studies of organised crime.     

Technology, Criminology and Crime Science

Developments in technology have changed the environment of crime, which, in some of its new forms, poses a serious threat to society. At the same time the technologies of crime control are being transformed. If criminology is to respond adequately to this changed environment, it must make radical changes in its mission, its theories and its methodologies, the collective result of which would be to make the discipline more directly relevant to crime control and prevention. This would enhance the effectiveness of these activities and would also open up new and exciting career opportunities for criminologists. If criminology does not change, it will become eclipsed by crime science and will find it increasingly hard to survive – even in the protected environment of universities.     

Environmental Crime and Contemporary Criminology: Making a Difference

American Journal of Criminal Justice - The current body of literature on the topic of environmental crime is bigger and better than ever, but the question of whether criminology/criminal justice...     

Ironies of Crime, Control, and Criminology

Irony is a kind of communication in which shared knowledge about a particular context is formed as a counter-intuitive statement with hidden meaning. Irony is important because it branches the tree of knowledge and balances morality. This paper reviews the definition and value of irony; examines ironic works on crime and control; proposes an irony of criminology: it can be studied with science and thereby improved; draws on this idea to provide a method-based theory of theory and findings; and concludes by discussing implications for future work in reflexive criminology.     

State Crime,the Prophetic Voice and Public Criminology Activism

State crimes are, by far, the most destructive of all crimes. The use and threat to use nuclear weapons, the aerial bombardment of civilians, wars of aggression, torture, the failure to mitigate global warming and adapt to climate change ecocide, along with myriad other state-corporate crimes, fill the world with death and devastation, misery and want. This article argues that criminologists have a responsibility to act as public criminologists by speaking in the “prophetic voice” concerning these crimes and their victims, and then acting in the political arena in an attempt to control and prevent these harms. The paper briefly describes three approaches to engaging in what Belknap (Criminology 53:1–23, 2015) calls “criminology activism” on these issues. The first approach is for criminologists to counter the cultures of denial and normalization that usually cover state crimes. The second involves contesting the global corporate capitalist system and the power of the American capitalist state in an effort to achieve specific progressive policy reforms and structural changes in the global political economy. Finally, criminologists can work to enhance the democratization of the international political community and strengthen the ability of specific international legal institutions to control state crimes.     

妨害公务罪的犯罪对象范围

【裁判要旨】除非有明确的授权委托,代表国家机关行使疫情防控职权,一般参与疫情防控的村社工作人员均不属于妨害公务罪的犯罪对象。在疫情防控期间,他人针对参与疫情防控检查的村社工作人员施加暴力或威胁时,并不直接构成妨害公务罪。如果情节达到入罪条件,可以故意伤害罪、寻衅滋事罪、侮辱罪等案由立案追究,若达不到入罪条件的,可以根据治安管理处罚法的规定予以行政处罚。     

Campus Crime Beat: The Challenges of Doing Feminist Criminology in the Academy

One of the persistent problems with academic life is that one is encouraged to tell the truth, whether in research, the classroom, or the department meeting. For feminists, graduate school in particular stresses the importance of meticulously documenting girls' and women's lives, which have been rendered invisible by virtually all fields. Although these days the idea of truth is contentious, in the real world in which feminist academics and feminist criminologists in particular work, real problems that women confront (like sexual harassment, discrimination, and workplace violence) continue. Documenting these problems on their own campuses is a particular burden that feminist criminologists as well as others have taken on. It produces genuine challenges in a career that relies heavily on collegiality and civility. This article reflects on the costs of telling it like it is while also considering the long-term benefits, such as they are, of bringing the feminist perspective fully into the field of criminology.     

Poverty and Peacemaking Criminology: Beyond Mainstream Criminology

Mainstream criminology has traditionally focused on poverty as an isolated variable, whose effects are typically explored by inserting a limited measure of this variable in a multivariate analysis. Peacemaking criminology, however, offers an alternative perspective. In this paradigm, poverty is seen as a source of suffering and, to a degree, a “crime” in and of itself. Furthermore, the suffering poverty engenders is an enveloping social experience that exposes its victims to concentrated disadvantage—or, to use Jonathan Kozol’s (1991) term, to a range of “savage inequalities.” Thus, poverty is best understood not as an isolated variable, but as a master status of fundamental social reality that subjects people to lives filled with suffering—suffering that can engender criminal behavior. From a peacemaking perspective, a key avenue for preventing crime is, in the short run, diminishing the suffering poverty causes and, in the long run, embracing social policies that reduce the prevalence of economic suffering in contemporary society.

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Southern Green Cultural Criminology and Environmental Crime Prevention: Representations of Nature Within Four Colombian Indigenous Communities

Critical Criminology - This exploratory study develops a “southern green cultural criminology” approach to the prevention of environmental harms and crimes. The main aim is to...