Editor’s Introduction to the Special Issue: “Crucial Critical Criminology”

Abstract

A relevant, spirited, and crucial critical criminology sees power, inequality, and oppression as fundamental elements of social structure, culture, and interaction. Stratification systems based on class, race, ethnicity, gender, age, geography, anthropocentrism, and sexual identities and orientations are obvious realms of critical criminological analysis, but so are inquiries into the crimes of powerful state and corporate organizations along with the material and ideological forces impacting the development and exercise of criminal justice, law, and social control. To these concerns we can add the importance of praxis to critical criminology, whether in the form of street protest, counter-hegemonic pedagogy, social media claims-making activities, or collaborating with non-academics in various social spaces toward social justice. A prophetic, healthy, and visionary critical criminology also takes interdisciplinary and international research and theory seriously—after all, much of the history of traditional criminological research and theory in criminology is simplistic, jingoistic, fails to see crime as mostly epiphenomenal, is riddled with bias and stereotypes, remains silent on major forms of oppression, and is out of touch with many of the realities of street and home-life as they relate to crime, harm, justice, and victimization. My belief is that critical criminology has generally moved the larger field of criminology into far more interesting, exciting, and productive paths and away from the tired and staid theories and research findings that explain next to nothing about crime and deviance. That mainstream, ‘‘professional’’ criminology, like many of its academic brothers and sisters, has become a legitimized reification of its subject matter has never been lost on critical criminologists. The authors of the articles in this special issue are excellent examples scholars who have rejected the banality of traditional criminological concerns and forged new intellectual ground in the field: Dragan Milovanovic along with just a handful of others such as Bruce Arrigo have brought the ultra-critical perspective of postmodernism to criminology; Meda Chesney-Lind along with Merry Morash and Claire Renzetti are among the first scholars to bring feminism to life and enduring relevance in critical criminology; Hal Pepinksy and Richard Quinney brought a totally different vision