Deconstructing jurisprudence: An experiential feminist critique

Feminist legal scholars continue to raise questions concerning the nature of jurisprudence in its treatment of women. Central to this debate are issues of knowledge, truth, and power founded on the patriarchal code of justice. This article argues that the essentialism of the masculine system alone is entirely inadequate in speaking for the voice of women and/or for the feminine in consciousness. By disrupting Freudian and Lacanian constructions of female sexuality through a psycho-linguistic analysis, these insights are then applied to the works of both Carol Gilligan and Catharine MacKinnon. In doing so, it is discovered that an uncultivated feminine discourse is grounded in experience, gatherings, consciousness-raising, and interpersonal truth. Constituting an unadulterated code of feminine justice requires a return to imaginative discourse; a process whereby metaphors, symbols, and myths for and about women are re-constituted and freed from misogynous language and culture.     

Imperialism, crime and criminology: Towards the decolonisation of criminology

Cohen (1988) once concluded that it is ironic that critics in the West are identifying forms of social control that are more traditional in the Third World as better alternatives to the neo–classical and positivistic repressive traditions in the West while some suggest that what they found malignant in the West should be exported to the Third World as benign. In this paper, I am going beyond Western crime control models to examine the character of criminology itself as an imperialist science for the control of others.     

向左、向右或向前:批判性进步犯罪学的现代展望

在批判学中,后现代主义、后基础主义、后结构主义以及马克思主义和新犯罪学法,都对犯罪学的发展产生影响,但女权主义者犯罪学是个例外,其坚持参与主流社会运动,以至参与到后基础主义所摆出的理论挑战行动中.而后基础主义者的理论框架能够帮助我们开拓批判的新空间,产生促进社会进步的新的团结力量,其挑战传统犯罪学的观点揭示了权力的某种运作形式,甚至从既估量消极后果又估量能动作用的方式上去理解权力,从而形成了权力运行方式的多样性并提供了正确的鉴别方法.犯罪学的研究及其学科建设也与政治有关,甚至包括文化对其的影响,尤其是一个进步的犯罪学不可能不与民主、公正、人权有关.     

Justice and the neutral state: A postmodern,feminist critique of lehning's account of justice

In this journal, Lehning (1990) defended the liberal view of political justice, arguing on behalf of a comprehensive principle of state neutrality as the linchpin of justice. By failing to deal with the postmodern challenge to the Enlightenment-liberalist conception of neutrality and by thoroughly ignoring the feminist understanding in which neutrality actually conceals a masculinist bias, Lehning's analysis is seriously undermined with respect to its possibility for understanding, let alone for accomplishing political justice.     

Newsmaking criminology: Reflections of the media,intellectuals, and crime

Although academicians in criminology and criminal justice have come to appreciate the importance of the media in constructing ideological images of crime and punishment, apparently they have not considered how to use mass communications for the purposes of informing, interpreting, and altering those images to reflect more realistically the social, political, and economic conditions of crime and social control. Beginning with an analysis of the relationships among the developing political economy of the mass media, intellectuals, and conceptions of crime and justice, this essay introduces a criminological practice that can take advantage of the available opportunities in the production of crime news. I call this practice “newsmaking criminology.” It refers to the conscious efforts of criminologists and others to participate in the presentation of “newsworthy” items about crime and justice.     

Schizophrenia: Causes,crime, and implications for criminology and criminal justice

This paper is aimed at criminologists and criminal justicians seeking to understand their role in educating law enforcement and correctional personnel who must deal with the mentally ill. It is motivated by William Johnson's (2011) recent call for rethinking the interface between mental illness, criminal justice, and academia, and his call for advocacy. We concur with his concerns, and insist that this rethinking must necessarily include grounding in the etiology of mental illness (specifically, with schizophrenia) as it is currently understood by researchers in the area. Advocacy must go hand in hand with a thorough knowledge of the condition of the people for whom we are advocating. We first examine major etiological models of schizophrenia, emphasizing the neurodevelopmental model that incorporates genetics, neurological functioning, and immunological factors guided by the assumption that the typical criminologist/criminal justician has minimal acquaintance with such material. We then address the link between schizophrenia and criminal behavior, and conclude with a discussion of the implications for criminology and criminal justice.     

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.     

Power, crime and criminology in the new imperial age

As a consequence of the U.S. pursuit of neo-liberal global hegemony in the post-Soviet era, the language of empire has returned to political discourse and social analysis after an eighty-year absence. Although the pursuit of empire and the exertion of imperial control is deeply and demonstrably injurious to the nations and people subjected to this control, orthodox criminology has given relatively little attention to this emerging world of transnational social injury, choosing instead to continue its traditional focus on private crimes of greed, lust and rage. In this essay I detail how legal formalism, methodological individualism, ameliorative motives, mass-communications and the reward structure of orthodox criminology combine to form a meta-theoretical framework that has kept the criminological gaze averted from injurious actions of transnational structures of power. I then offer an alternative framework for a criminology of empire and other power crimes focused on how intersections among economic, political and cultural processes generate social injuries that are analogous to crimes in their nature and consequences, and that, as a result should become as significant a focus of criminological inquiry as the street crimes that now dominate criminological research and writing. What do we do with our knowledge about the suffering of others, and what does this knowledge do to us? -Stanley Cohen      

RSPCA and the criminology of social control

This paper contributes to a rethinking of animal abuse control and animal welfare protection in criminology, specifically, and in the social sciences more broadly. We do this, first, through a broad mapping of the institutional control complex around animal abuse in contemporary Britain. Second, we focus on the institutional strategies and practices, past and present, of the main agency of animal protection, and the policing thereof, in this society, namely the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA). In looking back to this charity’s growth since the first decades of the nineteenth century at the time of the birth of modern industrial capitalism and also to its current rationale and practices as a late-modern, corporate organisation, we explore the seeming paradox of a private body taking a lead on the regulation and prosecution of illegalities associated with animal-human relationships. Finally, the ideology and strategy of the RSPCA are explored in the context of the often visceral and culturally influential ‘morality war’ associated with proponents, respectively, of animal rights (‘abolition’) and ‘anthropic’ welfare proponents (‘regulation’ and ‘protection’).