Just Criminology: The Legacy of Jock Young

Abstract

In his search for a just criminology, Jock Young displayed a courageous originality in his uses of critique and imagination. It is argued that one of Young’s unique legacies to criminology might be that, in fashioning the new, he tried out every conceivable method – including irony, satire and contradiction – for understanding and transforming the old. This is why he was constantly changing perspective, sometimes privileging one mode of analysis, sometimes another. But Young’s contradictory or challenging analyses never led to a closing-off of debate, either with others or, more importantly, with himself. So – and ironically – although each of his books is an invitation to think, rather than to follow, there is much to be learned from a critical appreciation of the courage with which Jock Young practised a fully sociological criminology.