Critical Criminology Research Articles

Crime in context: a critical criminology of market societies

Crime in context: a critical criminology of market societies

Social Crime Revisited

This article attempts a critical re-evaluation of the concept of social crime. A brief review of the deployment of the concept by radical historians in studies of crime in 18th-century England is followed by an analysis of attempts to apply the term to crime in modern industrial capitalism. The article concludes with an attempt to rehabilitate the concept as useful in the present context in particular as a counterbalance to an overemphasis on the victim perspective in contemporary critical criminologies.

A Critical Perspective on Drug Selling in the United States: Can Transposition of the Dutch Model Succeed?

This is the first study of drug selling in the United States that attempts squarely and solely to place the problem of drug dealing within a “critical” criminological perspective. The drug issue is placed in historical and cross-national context; emphasized are a fundamental American ambivalence toward the issue of drugs and their control and the resultant cyclical quality of approaches to that control. “Left realism,” that branch of critical criminology deemed most theoretically and practically applicable to the drug issue, is explicated and compared with traditional perspectives within the sociology of crime. A “crime as work” thesis is developed; its essential tenets are explained, and remedial suggestions that flow logically from the thesis are highlighted. Emphasized is the unlikely prospect that the Dutch model, against which U.S. policy is compared, could profitably be transposed to resolution of the U.S. drug problem.

Criminological ideas and the South African transition

The struggles surrounding apartheid and the quest for democracy have had an important impact on the development of criminological thought in South Africa. This paper describes the three major tendencies in South African criminological thought: the formerly dominant Afrikaner nationalist criminology, legal reformism and a critical criminology with a commitment to democratic and communitarian practice. It traces the opportunities for development that the immediate transition to democracy offered to the latter two tendencies in particular. It then sketches the extent to which the ideals of the various tendencies have been met since the first democratic election in 1994 and outlines the obstacles to their implementation that have emerged. In conclusion, the paper considers the prognoses for the various tendencies and warns that, notwithstanding the undoubted achievements of South African critical criminology, an undiscriminating reliance on the communitarian ideals of the transition may make it difficult for the South African criminal justice system to meet the challenges it now faces.

Reclaiming Critical Criminology:

This article seeks to examine the relevance of the continental European tradition in critical criminology for the theoretical elaboration of criminological theory today. The first step towards an answer is a rather descriptive one: how did critical criminology develop historically on the European continent? That is the theme of the first section. In the second section, the social and cultural developments which accompanied the heyday of critical criminology in the 1970s will be analysed, and an exposé will be given of the spectrum of the different critical perspectives on the continent. The same cultural sociological line of thought will be followed in the explanation of the rather abrupt decline of critical criminology shortly after in the third section. The need for a normative counter-weight to present-day, managerial political discourse which follows from these analyses also forms the prelude to a reaffirmation of critical criminology in section four. Because many of its original concepts and presumptions no longer fit very well to the changed political and socio-cultural reality of the late 1990s, a reconstruction of critical criminology is proposed in section five.

Criticism and Criminology:

Although the new criminology held a mandate to advance novel critical genres, it developed a radical program at the expense of studying the bases of its critique. In this article, I argue that by overlooking the latter, influential strands of radical criminology (e.g. left realism) have inadvertently succumbed to the lure of an insubstantial critical pragmatism. Here, critique claims legitimacy either on the basis of an ability to secure universal emancipation, or increase managerial efficiency. Both claims are problematic since contemporary knowledge-producing arenas no longer embrace the certainties driving modernity's critical genres and technical efficiency disallows fundamental critique. As such, critique has been immoderately abridged. By not paying sufficient attention to such issues, many critical criminologists have not appreciated the extent to which their favored critical genres are ill-suited to an ethos wracked by uncertainty. In trying to recover legitimate genres of critique, I refer to recent developments within critical criminology and I explore how Lyotard's work can help us to reconceive critical practices in criminology. The discussion concludes with a prologue outlining an alternative critical genre that might claim legitimacy through `paralogy.'

Crime and Social Criticism

AbstractNo Abstract

The most-cited scholars and works in critical criminology*

Previous studies that reported the most-cited scholars and works in criminology and criminal justice journals and textbooks neglected the contributions of critical criminologists to crime and justice scholarship. This paper extends citation analysis to the study of critical criminology. Through an examination of 18 books published from 1980 to 1997 and three journals published from 1991 to 1995, we list the 50 most-cited scholars in critical criminology, the 50 most-cited critical criminologists, and the 25 most-cited works. The most-cited scholars and works in critical criminology are compared to similar lists from mainstream criminology. The paper concludes with some thoughts about the importance of citation analysis in critical criminology.

Critical Criminology: Visions from Europe

Preface - Jock Young Introduction The Value of Comparative Criminology The Early Criminological Critique of Penal Reform Precursors of Critical Criminology The Patchwork of European Critical Criminology Criminal Justice as a Social Problem The Radical Penal Lobby in Europe What Has Happened to Law and Order? 'Newer' Criminologies and Social Safety The Role of Law and Social Justice Conclusion

Legitimating The Entry of ‘The Animals Issue’ into (Critical) Criminology

A partir du droit des animaux dans notre societe, il convient selon l'A. de consacrer une partie de la criminologie a l'etude des crimes perpetres a l'encontre ou par les animaux, mais aussi a des questions inexplorees comme l'utilisation d'animaux d'attaque ou de fouille. Examinant les arguments des activistes des droits des animaux ainsi que la legislation en vigueur a ce sujet, l'A. propose de franchir le fosse epistemologique qui separe ces questions de la criminologie traditionnelle. L'A. rapproche les abus a l'egard des animaux des autres formes de domination vis-a-vis des opprimes (sexisme, racisme, etc.) et deplore la dichotomie nature/culture qui fonde l'anthropocentrisme.

Alternatives to What Kind of Suffering?

This article seeks to imagine a renewed common ground for critical criminologies. In this article, the quest of imagination is developed as an answer to the question: `On what kind of suffering should critical criminologies/ists be concentrating their attention?'. Looking for answers to that question, the paper explores the broad contours of our contemporary era, which is read as a `hypermodern' zone of strategized ambivalence, or ambivalent strategics. This hypermodern zone, which has seeped into the very capillaries of everyday life, is also the zone which (re)produces contingent logics of incoherence/coherence within politics of identity/difference; it is the zone of hyperflexibility, and of hyperreflexivity, of ambivalent social fragmentation/contraction, and of ambivalent communities, of ambivalent de(re)centring identities, of contingent locations of multiple, multivocal and often incoherent and contradictory voices of oppression/liberation. Answering the question: `Alternatives to what kind of suffering?', then, must take this hypermodern ambivalence into account. One way of doing so, as is argued here, is in and through a discursive praxis of `border-crossing', during which critical criminologists will find a renewed common ground only (paradoxically) while dissolving or evaporating into a radical democratic politics.

Book Review: ‘Critical Criminology. Visions from Europe’

Book Review: ‘Critical Criminology. Visions from Europe’

Book Review: Critical Criminology: Visions from Europe

Book Review: Critical Criminology: Visions from Europe

Critical Criminology on the European Continent: Its History, Rise, Fall and Resurrection

Critical Criminology on the European Continent: Its History, Rise, Fall and Resurrection

Criminology post-Maastricht

My objectives in this paper are to try and identify the range of challenges that now confront critical criminologists who work in, and are attentive to, the “new Europe” whose construction was so clearly signalled by the Maastricht Treaty (the Treaty on European Union) of 1993. I want to concentrate here on two issues — firstly, the challenge of situating the work of criminology in relation to the process of political union (and enlargement) of the European Union, and, secondly, the articulation of an agenda of work for critical criminology, that derives, from an understanding of this broader context.

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY: VISIONS FROM EUROPE. By R. VAN SWAANINGEN (London: Sage, 1997. 281 pp. £15.99) Joe Sim Joe Sim School of Law and Applied Social Studies, Liverpool John Moores University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 38, Issue 4, Autumn 1998, Pages 701–703, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/38.4.701 Published: 01 October 1998

The failure of postmodern criminology

Postmodernism has recently washed up on the shores of criminology, and is the subject of considerable theoretical debate. This essay critically assesses some of the most trenchant and relevant components of the theoretical bases for postmodernism, and sketches out their applicability to criminology. It argues that postmodernism can be of little assistance to intellectuals committed to critique and fundamental social change. While postmodernists look down so severely at ‘old-fashioned’ ‘meta-narratives’ like Marxism, it is now they who are falling off the contemporary agenda, because they are dated and theoretically flawed. My main argument is that the theoretical imporverishment of postmodernism creates an obstacle to the development of a truly critical criminology. One of the current challenges of critical criminology is to amplify the critique of postmodern criminology and to reorient the trajectory of critical criminology away from the postmodern detour. The essay explores the historical context of the emergence of postmodernism, the modernist/ postmodernist era, deconstructionism, ‘meta-narratives’, idealism, form and content, fragmentation/pluralism/relativism, absence of progressive praxis, conservatism and Marxism.

Between Fathers and Fetuses: The Social Construction of Male Reproduction and the Politics of Fetal Harm

L'A. examine la construction sociale masculine de la reproduction. Il s'efforce de comprendre l'impact de ce type de phenomene sur les politiques de la sante et plus particulierement sur celles concernant les affections des fœtus. Il analyse de quelle maniere les notions de paternite et de maternite ont ete contruites socialement. Il evoque la situation des nourrissons victimes du «crack» et celle des meres intoxiquees. Il affirme que la litterature en toxicologie tend a minimiser le role du sperme des peres toxicomanes en matiere de transmission d'affections au nourrisson. Il etudie les differentes conceptions concernant le role du sperme en matiere de reproduction et estime que le sperme peut etre un vecteur pathologique en cas de toxicomanie et d'alcoolisme. Il envisage les discours populaires en ce qui concerne la reproduction et notamment ceux vehicules par les medias et montre qu'ils interviennent dans la definition de ce qui est politiquement correct

Vingt ans de « Déviance et Société » sous l'angle de la criminologie critique

This article places the history of Déviance et Société in the context of the simultaneous development of critical criminology in Europe. The reasons given for the establishment of the journal, the need to explicitly cover studies of deviance and institutionalised control in a social perspective, resembles those reasons for which the critical perspective has emerged. In the first years volumes, critical criminology received a clear place next to more conventional studies, be it that the interactionist perspective clearly prevailed over neo- Marxist approaches. From 1983 on the link with the critical debate seems to have got a bit lost. This gap is been matched again in the 1990s, when the debate on risk and social safety receives a central place both in Déviance et Société and in critical criminology, whilst, vice versa, positivist and social aetiological themes which have always been represented in Déviance et Société are also taken up again within the European critical criminologies.

Postmodern criminology: Mapping the terrain

An affirmative postmodern criminology is in its developing stages. This article provides some examples of some of the methodological and conceptual tools for inquiry. Accordingly it draws from chaos theory, catastrophe theory, and topology theory, focusing on psychoanalytic semiotics and three exemplary topological constructions: the Mobius band, the cross-cap, and Borromean knots. The relevance to doing critical criminology is indicated by focusing attention on some selected criminological theories that have affinities for an integrative approach, particularly those on “edgework,” “invitational edge,” and the “foreground factors.” This emergent state is more in tune with modeling and with explaining dynamic, nonlinear, transformational states (complexity theory).