The prison hunger strikes of 2011 and 2013 in California were among the most coordinated and politically conscious acts of prisoner resistance in U.S. history. As a survivor and participant in both strikes while confined in the general population yard, I draw from lived experience and critical criminological theory to examine how incarcerated people transformed their bodies into instruments of political expression. The California gang validation system operates as a racialized regime of domination, criminalizing culture itself; yet, through collective refusal and cross-racial solidarity, the hunger strikes dismantled its logic from within. From this crucible emerged the incarcerated credible messenger-those who, forged in repression, learned to turn survival into pedagogy and resistance into transformation. Upon release, we carried that credibility back to our neighborhoods, reshaping the role of the credible messenger as one rooted in radical accountability and liberation rather than institutional compliance. This paper exposes how state agencies have co-opted the credible messenger model, converting it from grassroots insurgency to bureaucratic management, and argues for its reclamation as a revolutionary practice grounded in lived struggle, consciousness-building, and collective liberation.

Welcome to another issue of Critical Criminology as we assemble a formidable collection of authors making both timely theoretical and empirical contributions in a period of increasing global instability and crisis mismanagement, with its source once again primarily located along the Washington, D.C.-Tel Aviv political axis. As the war machines of these respective imperialistic nations go about the grand designs of their intertwined military-industrial complexes it's the least powerful in society who bear the brunt. As witnessed most recently in the massacre of 168 female school students in Tehran or the torpedoing of a non-combat related Iranian frigate, there is no need to abide by any "rules of engagement" when you do not live by the same moral code as those of us who like to think we still live in a somewhat civilized society. It is as if in the years following World War Two when such acts of aggression were cast as crimes against humanity for the first time never happened. For what else explains the spineless behavior of the United States Congress or the bulk of genuflecting leaders in other Western governments (with the notable exception of Spain), as they shrink from applying the most basic concepts of international law and human rights. As a consequence, it is these ongoing naked acts of violence such as the assassinations and sequestrations of heads of sovereign states or the efforts to bankrupt and overthrow legitimate governments that now become the norm against which we have to measure ourselves. This critical lesson of Nuremberg regarding the moral imperative to take a stand against systems that engender the pathological hatred of our fellow human beings that, in turn, leads to genocide, is a truth and a practice we cannot avoid. Yet it is once again this unthinkable apocalyptical scenario that describes much of the current state of our increasingly asymmetrical world order. A world now dominated by the billionaire class with its vast array of apologists, architects and enforcers. If ever there was a need for a journal of critical social science committed to the exposure, analysis and theory of social harms carried out in the name of freedom, nationhood and democracy then this surely is our time. In the ensuing issue we begin with two contributions dealing with different areas of theory. In the first, the author draws comparisons between rock music and criminology,

This study expounds on the media’s role in legitimating criminalization, lateral surveillance, and stigmatization as the appropriate response to violating public health restrictions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. Specifically, our qualitative content analysis of news articles (n = 66) reveals how media echoed politicians’ calls to “stop the spread” of the virus by making personal sacrifices, relied heavily on law enforcement sources when telling stories relating to non-compliance, and routinely excluded the voices of those disproportionately impacted by public health restrictions and the concomitant expansion of social control. At times, news media stories failed to name violations explicitly or employed ambiguous phrasing to downplay the structural problems associated with pandemic conditions. Taken together, we suggest news media coverage of pandemic sport violations upholds punitive ideologies, conceals the social determinants of health and structural barriers to physical recreation opportunities, and legitimates the amorphous expansion and diffusion of social control.