A Social Justice Model for a World Criminology

It is contended here that criminologists should be making conscious and more direct efforts to contribute toward solutions to the increasing problems of global disorder. This paper discusses the problem of social injustice in relation to social disorder, outlines the beginnings of a theoretical model for social justice, and suggests empirical studies and needed methodology to further development of the field of world criminology.     

THE PLACE OF CONTEXT: A THEORY AND STRATEGY FOR CRIMINOLOGY'S HARD PROBLEMS

I present a theoretical framework and analytic strategy for the study of place as a fundamental context in criminology, with a focus on neighborhood effects. My approach builds on the past 15 years of research from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and from a recent book unifying the results. I argue that “ecometrics” can be applied at multiple scales, and I elaborate core principles and guiding hypotheses for five problems: 1) legacies of inequality and developmental neighborhood effects; 2) race, crime, and the new diversity; 3) cognition and context, above all the social meaning of disorder; 4) the measurement and sources of collective efficacy in a cosmopolitan world; and 5) higher order structures beyond the neighborhood that arise in complex urban systems. Although conceptually distinct, these hard problems are interdependent and ultimately linked to a frontier in criminology: contextual causality.     

Comparing cultures, comparing crime: Challenges, prospects and problems for a global criminology

Globalization will intensify contacts – and perhaps conflicts – betweencultures more than ever in the history of humankind. The flow of migrantsaround the world, global business and global consumption provide us withnew experiences of difference and diversity as well as of common ground.As in other social sciences, the concept of culture has recently emerged oncentre stage in criminology. Western criminologists look in awe to Asia, andtry to solve the enigma of modern, affluent societies with low ratesespecially of violent crimes. Asian criminologists warn of an impact ofWestern culture that might cause rising crime rates. Asian models of socialcontrol are studied and adopted in Australia, Europe and the US, and viceversa.Crime and social control are social and cultural phenomena. Therefore,comparing cultures and comparing crime will offer new insights, freshtheories and chances of innovative perspectives. What is to learn fromcultural differences, what from universals in crime and social control? Whatwill be the fate of ``general theories of crime'' in different cultures? Willpractices of criminal justice be efficient when transported to another socialand cultural environment?Criminologists should develop a clear notion of the problems that arerelated to comparing cultures and crime. Cultures are not monolithic.Cultural comparisons often suffer from exaggerations of differences, andproduce exaggerated predictions and expectations. On its way into theglobalized 21st century, criminology will have to develop strategies to meetthe challenge of comparing cultures, to avoid former errors, and to solvethe problems that lie ahead.     

Global warming and state-corporate crime: the politicalization of global warming under the Bush administration

Global warming is one of the most significant and difficult issues facing the world today. As result, researchers in a number of disciplines have directed their attention to addressing issues relevant to the study of and responses to global warming. This has been less true in the social sciences, and especially within specific social sciences such as criminology, in comparison to the physical sciences. Global warming does, however, have criminological and sociological relevance on several levels. This article examines one of those levels by exploring the politicalization of global warming under the Bush Administration, and addresses this issue as an example of state-corporate crime.     

Deconstructing Criminology’s Origin Stories

The global production of knowledge is grossly skewed to the northern Anglophone world (Hogg et al. in International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 6(1), 1–7, 2017; Connell 2007). It should be no surprise therefore that criminology’s origin stories are derivative of northern experiences, yet generalised as universal theories of crime causation. In this article, we argue that the origin stories of criminological theory translated the ‘darker’, ‘hairier’ and ‘muscular’ masculinities of the global south into prototypes of dangerousness. These prototypes were first articulated as scientific claims in the nineteenth century works of Lombroso, but have been refined and embedded in mainstream criminological discourses well into the present, mainly through the quantitative study of social disorganisation, ‘race’ and racialised masculinities as variables in crime causation. The paper concedes that while deeply troubling expressions of violent masculinity exist now and in the past in the global south, it is mistaken to conceive this violence simply as expressions of atavism or social disorganisation associated with a less civilised world. On the contrary, this paper argues that the violence of colonality itself has had, and continues to have, a criminogenic impact on the present.     

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.     

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.     

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      

Critical Criminology Meets Radical Constructivism

Critical criminology and radical constructivism are frequently regarded as an impossible pair—or, at least, as a rather schizophrenic one. This is so, notably, because radical constructivism rests on the (paradoxical) abandonment of what Jean-François Lyotard named méta-récits. It rests on the refusal to distinguish between the phenomenal and the symbolic, and thus implies the complete vanishing of the classical difference between ontology and epistemology. This would consequently deprive criminology (or, more generally, the social sciences) of any anchoring point enabling a critical utterance. The present contribution’s thesis is that, on the contrary, radical constructivism can catalyze critical criminology. Among the possible contributions of a radically constructivist sociology of criminalization, this paper focuses on: its call for a reworking of the concept of social control, which avoids problems related to its contemporary usage; its focus on power and force, in a way which avoids Foucaultian perspectives’ aporetic elements, and problematizes every instance of legitimized authoritarian practices.     

Problems of Method in Comparative Criminology

Methodological problems of conducting comparative research in criminology are reviewed in the light of the severe lack of comparative research in criminology. Methodological difficulties in conducting survey research in comparative criminology are outlined. These include the necessity to establish equivalence of meaning, comparability of samples, temporal equivalence and equivalence of interviewers. It is suggested that an important and as yet unexplored avenue for comparative criminology may be in the area of comparative systems analysis.     

United Nations peace process as a peacemaking and human rights exercise. Lessons from conflict resolution in Sierra Leone

The United Nations peace process in Sierra Leone is one of the most successful initiatives in conflict resolution in the history of the UN. The peace building process has led to sustainable peace in a country located in a highly conflict ridden region in the world. This paper analyzes the peacemaking process to understand the process and its underlying unique features. Placing the events in the context of peacemaking criminology and human rights, it is argued that the UN peacemaking greatly reflects the values advocated by peacemaking criminology, while the goals of the process reflect universal human rights, recognized and promoted by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).     

Teaching critical crimimology and critical justice studies in Canada

This paper explores four problems in relation to teaching critical criminology. First, it argues that use of the label critical criminology is misleading because it sometimes creates the impression that antagonistic theoretical perspectives are similar. Second, it profiles the student audience for criminology courses in Canada, arguing that students in different programmes and with different social backgrounds present instructors with different teaching problems. Third, it reviews some of the more recent criminology and criminal justice texts and suggests that some may not be suitable for students taking their first course in criminology or criminal justice. Fourth, it reviews a particular teaching strategy to deal with various teaching situations and suggests that an interactive, comparative teaching model might be the best method when teaching controversial perspectives. Revision of paper presented to Learned Society Meetings, Quebec City, June, 1989.     

In search of criminological tradition: the development of criminology in Taiwan

There has been a growing interest in the historical development of criminology(ies) throughout the world. This paper examines the development of criminology in Taiwan (Republic of China) using both questionnaire and interview data. Textbooks, institutional development, and research activity are taken as proxy measures of a criminological tradition. Beginning with criminology in Republican China (1929–1949), the article explores the key features of change in criminology against the background of Taiwan's own particular adoption of social, political and economic ‘modernisation’. Foreign influence and the contemporary meaning of ‘indigenous’ are considered. The article ends with a research agenda for a grounded historical sociology of criminology on Taiwan; key identified research questions relate to sponsorship, research priorities and the production of criminological knowledge; the reception of research by policy communities and practitioners; the relationship between criminological knowledge and politics; and the processes of selective appropriation.     

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.     

Instrumental variables methods in experimental criminological research: what, why and how

Quantitative criminology focuses on straightforward causal questions that are ideally addressed with randomized experiments. In practice, however, traditional randomized trials are difficult to implement in the untidy world of criminal justice. Even when randomized trials are implemented, not everyone is treated as intended and some control subjects may obtain experimental services. Treatments may also be more complicated than a simple yes/no coding can capture. This paper argues that the instrumental variables methods (IV) used by economists to solve omitted variables bias problems in observational studies also solve the major statistical problems that arise in imperfect criminological experiments. In general, IV methods estimate causal effects on subjects who comply with a randomly assigned treatment. The use of IV in criminology is illustrated through a re-analysis of the Minneapolis domestic violence experiment. The results point to substantial selection bias in estimates using treatment delivered as the causal variable, and IV estimation generates deterrent effects of arrest that are about one-third larger than the corresponding intention-to-treat effects.     

The Radicalization of Democracy: Conflict,Social Movements and Terrorism

The idea of democracy is being championed across the world, with some fifty new countries embracing this type of political system between 1974 and 2011 (Freedom House Anxious dictators, wavering democracies: global freedom under pressure, Freedom House, Washington, 2016). Simultaneously, however, dissatisfaction has grown due to the perceived incapacity of democracy to deal with collective problems, hence the necessity to reconfigure it and redraw some of its principles. This paper links the analysis of the recent evolution of democratic systems with the trajectory of socio-political conflicts and the changing features of contemporary terrorism. It examines, therefore, two intertwined phenomena, namely the radicalization of democracy and the radicalization of the other. It concludes by stressing that encouraging dissent and heeding contentious claims made by social movements may be one way of mitigating both types of radicalization. Embedded in the tradition of critical criminology, this paper attempts to demonstrate that only by outflanking conventional categories of analysis can the criminological community aspire to grasp such thorny contemporary phenomena.     

Assessing the Spatial–Temporal Relationship Between Disorder and Violence

The relationship between disorder and violence has generated much debate in the field of criminology. While advocates of the broken windows thesis believe disorder is the root cause of crime, other researchers view both disorder and crime as analogous behaviors resulting from the breakdown of collective efficacy. Scholars from both sides of this debate, however, assume a long-term correlation between disorder and crime at places. This assumption has not been tested with a longitudinal dataset at a relatively small geographic unit of analysis. The current study used data collected in Seattle, Washington and utilized Group-based Trajectory Analysis and Joint Trajectory Analysis to explore the longitudinal relationship between disorder and violence. The results showed that disorder, just like crime, concentrates in a few “hot spots.” Additionally, the results showed that while the lack of disorder problems guarantees places to be violence free, having high levels of disorder predicts having violence problems only about 30% of time. As such, these findings point out the need for future theorization efforts on the disorder-violence nexus to include contextual factors which could explain this imperfect association between the two.     

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.     

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.     

犯罪学转型中研究对象的固化———从科尔曼的“系统行为内部分析说”谈起简

犯罪学是一门兼具综合性与交叉性的新兴学科,自其诞生以来,相关理论问题争议不断.其中,犯罪学的研究对象一直以来就是学者们热议的话题,尤其在我国犯罪学的转型时期,该问题更需亟待解决.犯罪学不再局限于以传统的个体行为或个体现象作为其研究对象,而是立足于从宏观的视角认识其研究对象,将其固化为一种特殊的系统现象,同时采用科尔曼的“系统行为内部分析”说作为分析犯罪学研究对象的方法论,把群体现象或群体行为作为犯罪学微观上的研究对象,旨在实现犯罪学研究的宏观与微观、系统与要素的结合,从而全面认识犯罪这一特殊的社会现象、及其本质和规律.