16. Critical criminology—part 2

Abstract

This chapter examines four main strands of critical criminology: zemiology, the study of social harm; cultural criminology, which re-focusses the critical criminological imagination on the emotional and carnivalesque aspects of crime and control; green criminology, which deals with environmental crime as a growing crime problem committed by powerful groups; and convict criminology, which is concerned with how knowledge is produced and how the marginalised voices of prisoners are silenced and muted in both criminological and policy debates. The chapter also considers some basic economic concepts and ideas and how these fit into the world of critical green criminology when studying crimes of the (economically) powerful, and how and why the features of subcultures and emotions are important to cultural criminologists. It concludes by evaluating the claim made by convict criminologists that the prisoner voice should be a central one when considering prison reform and penal change.