Towards a Utopian Criminology

Abstract

This chapter identifies the commitment to the development of practical projects concerned with improving or reforming society by eradicating (or at least reducing) crime as a key theme running through the history of criminology. This is despite the sometimes formal claims amongst criminologists to value-neutrality and the objective social ‘scientific’ nature of the discipline. At the heart of criminology, it is argued, lies an implicit vision of ‘the good society’. Within a contemporary climate that at best discourages radical reimaginings of the social order and, at worst, warns of their inherent dangerousness, however, such visions have typically been repressed. The result has been an emphasis on ‘tinkering at the edges’ or ‘piecemeal reforms’, which leave intact underlying broader structural inequalities, in which issues of crime and justice are located. Despite increasing calls (from both social scientists in general, and criminologists in particular) for the development of an ‘emancipatory social science’ (Wright, 2010) and ‘a better politics of crime and its control […] under which a more hopeful and more richly democratic way of approaching questions of crime and justice might be developed’ (Loader and Sparks, 2012: 14), there has, as yet, been little guidance as to how such improved social sciences are to be realised. It is in response to this absence that the development of a ‘utopian method’ as proposed by Ruth Levitas (2005, 2007a, 2008) is advanced as a means of developing an explicitly normative and speculative form of criminology.