Critical Criminology Research Articles

The Construction of Lithuanian Prison Sentence Assumptions in Critical Criminology Perspective: an Analysis of the Goals of Imprisonment

The declared aims of custodial sentencing worldwide and in Lithuania are to protect society from crime and reduce recidivism; it is agreed that these aims can be achieved only when the duration of imprisonment is devoted to the prisoner’s gradual return to society (UNODC 2015). However, the newest Lithuanian strategic documents note that the sentencing system does not promote the change of prisoners’ criminal habits, offender resocialization is fragmented, and prison staff carries out offender protection and surveillance, not resocialization and social help (LR Vyriausybė 2021b). By building upon the ideas of social constructionism tradition (Berger and Luckmann 1999) and critical criminology (Christie 1999; Hulsman 1997; Quinney 2004; Mathiesen 2006), this paper analyzes the aims of custodial sentencing in the context of Lithuanian penal system’s reform and specifies possible implementational problems of declared aims of imprisonment. Document analysis showed that the raising and naming of imprisonment problems are conditioned by the commitment to international organizations and projects, as well as the cascading aims of the Lithuanian political agenda. In Lithuania, the purposes of custodial sentencing continue to be relatively general and instrumental. They are used to justify current and future means of reform while it is expected of correctional facilities to provide long-term positive influences on a person and fulfill quantitative indicators. We presume that resocialization and social integration ideas, as the main declared aim of custodial sentencing, are “imprisoned” in political discourse, which lacks critical analysis and does not provide much chance for success.

Watchmen: critical criminology and biopolitical semantics

ABSTRACT The paper attempts to critically examine Allan Moore’s Watchmen in terms of its elements that could be utilised for critical power thinking and the critique of fanatic and/or apolitical self-proclaimed saviours of society. The first part of the paper attempts to read Rorschach through the prism of critical criminology, as he represents the novel’s most distinct expression of revenge and retribution, which, eventually, is linked to fascist-like practices. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the reading of Veidt’s macabre plan and his set of advice for self-care in terms of a twofold biopolitical strategy that entails both the thanatopolitical effect of killing millions for the sake of life itself and preaching the need for the latter’s optimisation to achieve individual and collective happiness. In the end, Watchmen is a ‘superhero neo-noir’ critique to both worldviews, since its point of departure is the critique of superheroes overall, as ‘nothing works’ and therefore ‘nothing ever ends’ if the structural reasons behind unfairness and oppression remain untouched.

Teaching and doing anti-criminology: An autoethnography of transgressive pedagogies

ABSTRACT As both first-generation, working-class Canadians from Italian immigrant families we were very much outsiders to the academy when we began our respective university studies in the late 1980s. Today, as third-generation critical criminologists, we strive to bring an intersectional perspective to the classroom and to likewise enable marginalized students to find their voice and position themselves as active subjects, not objects of others’ inquiry. From sharing the insights offered by Left Realism and Zemiology the authors offer an autoethnographic account of teaching crime and justice. In keeping with hooks’ observation that the reality of class differences is starkly revealed in educational settings, this paper seeks to explore the intersections between teaching and learning as a process that involves existential self-reflection towards a critical pedagogy aimed at creating an inclusive teaching and learning space that challenges myths, demythologize power relations, and promotes social justice.

Caring in the classroom: the hidden toll of emotional labor of abolitionist scholar-activism

ABSTRACT Abolitionist-academics who bring abolition into the classroom are teaching to transgress quite literally in the service of and hope for freedom. This article relies upon thirty in-depth, international interviews with academics teaching in universities and prisons. The research questions emotional labor’s hidden toll on abolitionist scholars and finds that within the interdisciplinary field of critical criminology, participants commonly experienced working through hope, love, loneliness, fear and anxiety. While this research supports earlier understandings of the impact of expectations of caretaking on marginalized scholars, I also find that those who experience personal histories of criminalization may be especially vulnerable to burnout and pushout.

Critical Criminology: Past, Present, and Future

Crime problems have drawn more and more attention in recent years, with criminological theories widely developed. Critical criminology is perhaps the most controversial and ambitious among those theories because it abandons the state's definition of crime, demonstrates the injustice of society, and tries to address crime problems (or social harm) more comprehensively. Meanwhile, its radical position attracts criticisms, such as ignoring real victimisation.
 The essay aims to explore the past, present, and future of critical criminology and explain why society requires such a critical voice. First, it introduces the origin and development of critical criminology. Then, through two current examples - the war on terror and COVID-19, it illustrates the critical perspective's value of comprehensiveness and independence, especially compared to mainstream criminology. Lastly, it indicates the challenges and how critical criminology could develop in the future to pursue its goal - real equality and justice.

‘It’s like crossing a border everyday’: Police-migrant encounters in a postcolonial city

ABSTRACT How are migrant communities policed in cities of the Global South where racially securitized discourses and colonial institutional legacies shape contemporary police practice? Critical criminologists advise that postcolonial perspectives offer valuable insights on imperial legacies, while allowing us to expand conceptual and empirical analyses of crime, policing, justice, and social order. Building on this agenda, this paper explores the intersection of postcolonial policing and immigration enforcement in the context of urban encounters between police officers and Afghan and Bengali migrants in urban Pakistan. It considers how the securitization of migration and migrants impacts their routine interactions with street-level enforcement officers. Based on ethnographic findings from Karachi, this paper argues that migrant encounters with urban policing can be captured by what I call the “postcolonial condition of policing” wherein prejudiced security policies enable expansions in police power without addressing structural inequalities within the police, facilitating reliance upon informal procedures and practices.

Disciplinary Neo-Liberalisation and the New Politics of Inequality

AbstractOverlaps exist between critical Criminology and critical International Political Economy (IPE). However, while criminologists are keen to engage with political economy, there has been less interest in criminology from scholars in IPE. Recently, though, a literature started to emerge within IPE that focusses on discipline, including research which focusses on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ yet without explicitly engaging with the criminological literature. This paper engages with criminological research to demonstrate areas of shared interest, particularly in understanding the role of discipline and consent in the structuring of the ‘social ensemble’ thereby offering something of a corrective to the literature on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’. We argue that combining insights from Gramscian and (critical) Feminist social theory can help to explain the social reproduction of ‘hegemony’ in which discipline – including self-discipline – plays an important role. Long-term trends in the fracturing of the hegemonic post-war social ensemble were displaced by temporary ‘fixes’ related to consumerism, credit and discipline (including in state institutions, changing economic and ideological structures). However, in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 – the limits of these fixes are revealed and social polarisation is the result. In this context, disciplinary processes in and beyond state institutions are becoming more visible.

Rafe McGregor (2021) Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism. Bristol: Bristol University Press

Vincenzo Ruggiero reviews Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism by Rafe McGregor

Desistance research and critical criminology: a conversation

Critical criminologists in Germany have been criticized for dealing with desistance research. In the opinion of Peters (in this volume) both perspectives of research are outright incompatible with each other. This critique is based on a certain understanding of the labeling approach that is prevalent in German-language critical criminology. From this perspective, crime is understood exclusively as an attribution. Desistance research is then perceived as a backlash towards an etiological understanding of crime. Peters addresses his critique especially towards the reception of Maruna’s work that in Peters’ eyes takes crime for “real” (as of a behavioral quality) and supports the hegemonial normative system. As opposed to this, critical criminology and desistance research seem to coexist quite peacefully in international criminology – with Maruna being one of the most prominent proponents of their combination. However, their relation to each other is usually not analysed and discussed. Therefore, Christine Graebsch asked Shadd Maruna for his respective contribution. It resulted in the following conversation.

Contributing Authors

Say Burgin is assistant professor of history at Dickinson College. Her publications have appeared in the Women's History Review, Journal of American Studies, Journal of International Women's Studies, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her first book project examines the myth that Black Power was “antiwhite” and the white fight for Black Power in Detroit. Say was a regular contributor to Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society. She also co-created the educational website Rosa Parks's Biography: A Resource for Teaching Rosa Parks (https://rosaparksbiography.org/). Follow her on Twitter @sayburgin.Robert T. Chase is associate professor of history at Stony Brook University. His research and teaching interests include the history of mass incarceration and the construction of what historians call “the carceral state.” He is also the co-director of the national organization Historians Against Slavery (HAS). He is an expert in social justice, Latino/a, and civil rights movements, and political and African American history. He is the editor of the book Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance (2019). His book We are Not Slaves won the Best Book Award from the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice, American Society of Criminology; the Hank Lacayo Best Labor-Themed Award from the International Latino Book Award; and honorable mention for the Betty and Alfred Lee McClung Award from the Association for Humanist Sociology.Simon Hall is professor of modern history at the University of Leeds, where his research and teaching focus on the civil rights–Black Power movements, the student radicalism of the long 1960s, and global protest during the Cold War. His previous books include 1956: The World in Revolt (2016) and Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s (2005).Brandon James Render is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include twentieth-century United States social and intellectual history, post-1945 social movements and “the culture wars,” and public policy. His dissertation, “Colorblind University,” traces the intellectual genealogy of race-neutral policies and practices in higher education through admissions policies, departmental structure, and curriculum design. In addition to service as a graduate research fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy in 2018–19, he is the 2021-22 Mitchem Dissertation Fellow at Marquette University.

Rafe McGregor: Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism

Rafe McGregor: Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism

Gang Phantasmagoria: How Racialized Gang Allegations Haunt Immigration Legal Work

Through an analysis of interviews with Southern California attorneys, supplemented by archival materials, this article contributes to the literature on gangs, critical criminology, and Gothic tropes by examining how the ambiguous nature of gang profiling allows state actors to target racialized others in various legal and administrative venues with little evidence and few procedural protections. I conceptualize gang phantasmagoria as the constant, amorphous, unpredictable, and haunting threat of racialized gang allegations and argue that the dynamic shapes the work of legal practitioners and constitutes a state mechanism of racial terror. Specifically, first I argue that government officials deploy the specter of gangs to both portray asylum seekers as monstrous threats and justify restrictions in asylum eligibility. I then illustrate how the potential for gang phantasmagoria to upend asylum applications and trigger the deportation of their clients elicits constant low-grade anxiety for attorneys. Consequently, attorneys are forced to adopt more cautious approaches to legal work in a way that indirectly facilitates the social control of young Latinx immigrants.

Rafe McGregor, "Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism"

Rafe McGregor, "Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism"

Toward a Criminological Understanding of Financialization

This article weaves together the ascendancy of financial markets and the field of critical criminology. It argues that critical perspectives such as crimes of the powerful and crimes of globalization may benefit from analyzing financialization as a key economic and cultural transformation in today’s capitalism. The analysis of financialization is made through the literature that addresses the economic transformations of capitalist accumulation, thus framing finance capital in the post-Fordist regime of production. By using this perspective, this article develops the argument that the cyclical speculative waves of finance are not a congenital pathology of capitalism but its very mode of governmentality. Overall, this article claims the analytic potential of financialization studies to deepen our understanding of the social and environmental harms produced by powerful corporations and financial institutions.

Continuity and Durability of Violent Border Policies and Practices Directed at Undesirable Migrants in Britain and Australia: Some Reflections on the Past–present Continuum

ABSTRACT Using an interdisciplinary approach of critical historical and border criminology, this paper sheds light on the continuity and durability of the violent gendered-racialised border regime impacting ‘undesirable migrants’. With a focus on Britain and Australia, this article argues that border policies and practices have been constructed and maintained since the nineteenth century to the present day (continuity) and able to withstand various pressures for change (durability). The importance of controlling and monitoring ‘un/desirability’ in this way must be understood in the socio-political and temporal context of twentieth-century nation-state design, which entrenches these border mechanisms within a ‘white patriarchal possession logic’, therefore ensuring their durability. The concept of ‘un/desirability’, as this article demonstrates, is an adaptable tool that enables transformative coloniality and is currently actualised through the narrative of a ‘humanitarian border’. This article achieves these aims by presenting multiple historical and contemporary examples. These cases, when read in isolation from each other, do not offer a comprehensive and longitudinal view of the border regime over time. However, when these examples are considered together, they provide evidence of the continuity and durability of the border.

Infrastructure Vandalism and Protection in a Vulnerable Zimbabwean Environment: Review of the Structural Materialism Theory

Many institutions are facing or have faced challenges related to vandalism of equipment and property in Zimbabwe. This criminal phenomenon is not only restricted and peculiar to this country but is experienced in other regions of the world, however with variations. The purpose of the study is to explore and unpack the various dimensions of infrastructure vandalism by gazing at Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) a power utility in Zimbabwe. The level of vandalism has been increasing unabated resulting in in a multitude of undesirable effects on the power utility and the economy as a whole. A plethora of stimulants have been seen to be triggering and sustaining the theft and vandalism of the infrastructure which targets copper conductors, copper windings, oils and the poles in the majority of cases. The study adopted the mixed method approach due to its technical advantage of converging and merging qualitative and quantitative data in order to provide comprehensive results and produce new knowledge claims. This methodological framework was guided by the structural materialism theory which is an off shot of the critical criminology perspective. Thus, the study found out that infrastructure vandalism is representative of a broader dysfunctional socioeconomic system of a country riddled by poverty, unemployment and the absence of mores and values within communities. Consequently, the levels of infrastructure vandalism have spiraled to unprecedented levels. The study concludes that the government is failing to sufficiently address the macro-economic fundamentals as way of discouraging citizens from engaging in crime and criminality while the traditional leaders are not being respected yet they have a significant role they can play in promoting the stability and serenity of communities. In view of these conclusions the study recommends that all stakeholders contribute towards the protection of all infrastructure and migrate to digitalize the protection of such infrastructure as well as promulgation of appropriate pieces of legislation.

Introduction: Critical Criminology for the 21st Century

Introduction: Critical Criminology for the 21st Century

Green Criminology: Its Foundation in Critical Criminology and the Way Forward

AbstractThis article outlines the field of critical criminology and how its development was essential for the development of green criminology. Through a personal trajectory, I use my experiences first as a student and later as Professor of Criminology at the University of Oslo as an entry point. I draw on my involvement with the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control to explore how critical criminology has influenced green critical criminology. Critical criminology, with its focus on the crimes of the powerful, is concerned with victims of injustice, and a social harm approach was, I argue, a necessary foundation for non‐speciesist, green critical criminology. The article concludes by elucidating the challenges for a green critical non‐speciesist criminology, which includes a presentation of my current research project, ‘Criminal justice, wildlife conservation and animal rights in the Anthropocene – CRIMEANTHROP’.

Critical Criminology and Race: Re‐examining the Whiteness of US Criminological Thought

AbstractRace and racism are defining features of criminal justice systems in the United States. Race is also a defining feature of criminological theory. There have been robust efforts to address racism within theories and institutional practices pertaining to crime, law, and institutions of formal social control, but whiteness remains at the core of criminological knowledge production. The current article provides empirical support for showing how whiteness conditions the academic discourses of criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) in the United States. CCJ research plays an important role in discussions of racial justice and public policy. By studying the racialised (that is, white) nature of the CCJ research industry, we can better understand where critical criminology ‘fits’ in the broader struggle for social, racial and epistemological justice.

Critical Criminology: State‐Facilitated Corporate Crime, Environmental Racism, and the Atlantic Coast Pipeline

AbstractCritical criminology continues to focus on the intersections of race, class, and green harms, as this analysis provides a more complete framework for understanding the role of state violence in capitalist projects. This article utilises the frameworks of environmental racism and state‐facilitated corporate crime to analyse the proposed 600‐mile natural gas pipeline, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP). We focus on the narratives of the corporations and state in pursuing the project, including dispelling the myth that natural gas is ‘clean’. We also highlight the project's disproportionate social and environmental impact on poor and black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) communities. We end by discussing the state's role in facilitating the project through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).