From 'Public Criminology' To The Reflexive Sociology of Criminological Production and Consumption: A Review of Public Criminology? by Ian Loader and Richard Sparks (London: Routledge, 2010)

Abstract

I want to both congratulate and chastise Ian Loader and Richard Sparks for their oddly titled book, Public Criminology? (Loader and Sparks 2010, henceforth PC). I will make my remarks brief and pointed for the sake of provoking and then reorienting the discussion away from textualist disquisitions on the hoary label of ‘public’ (enter discipline) and towards the political economy of the production, circulation and consumption of criminological knowledge in the age of escalating inequality and pornographic penality. First, I congratulate the Loader–Sparks team for raising the question of the social and political uses of criminology in this period of frenetic transformation of justice policy discourses and practices and for mapping out influential ways of resolving that question through the exposition of five ‘styles of engagement’, or manners of gearing scholarship on crime and punishment with public debate. This is an urgent topic at a time when variants of penal populism rule the day in nearly all Western countries: crime fighting has everywhere been elevated to the rank of government priority and ‘insecurity’—understood narrowly in strict reference to lower-class street offending, despite the mounting wave of corporate criminality—has been turned into a driver of election campaigns and raw materials for re-asserting state sovereignty. Moreover, politicians of both Left and Right not only vie to prance on the law-and-order stage, but they increasingly claim that their martial solutions are based on solid science, often imported from the United States, promoted global Mecca of the ‘War on Crime’. PC is an oblique yet keen response to this transnational drift towards reactive punitiveness, especially in its proposal to deploy ‘cooling devices’ to inject baseline rationality and civic mindfulness into the penal policy goulash. In addition to being small, compact and friendly to the hand (making it a perfect read for a transatlantic flight), this book is learned, clearly written, scrupulously argued and highly stimulating, thanks to a number of innovative moves. Thus, Loader and Sparks bring the ‘historical hermeneutics’ of John Dunn and Quentin Skinner to bear on criminological texts; they borrow fruitfully from the social studies of science to transfer lessons gleaned from controversies over scientific inquiry and the public good in the natural sciences to discussions of justice; they smartly deploy the metaphor of global warming to characterize the latter’s changed atmospherics; and they employ their considerable