Critical Criminology Research Articles

Realist Criminology, the New Aetiological Crisis and the Crime Drop

This paper aims to provide a summary of some of the key issues outlined in my recent publication Realist Criminology (2014a). It discusses, in particular, the perceived deficiencies of both mainstream and critical criminology in relation to their explanations of the crime drop. It argues that the failure of criminologists to provide a convincing and plausible explanation of the recent decrease in recorded crime in Britain, North America and other countries has resulted in a new aetiological crisis. It is suggested that the failure to explain what is arguably the most significant development in relation to crime in living memory is no accident, but rather a function of the theoretical and methodological inadequacies that are prevalent in academic criminology.

Human Rights, Colonial Criminality, and the Death of Kwementyaye Briscoe in Custody: A Central Australian Case Study

The intersection of colonialism, legal systems, and human rights is revealed in the Alice Springs Watch House, a place for the temporary custody of, usually intoxicated, Aboriginal men. “Kwementyaye Briscoe” became the fourth death in custody since 1999; and this article draws on his coronial inquest. The post‐mortem humanity of the coroner is contrasted with the uncaring disregard of the police for Briscoe while he lived. These contradictory postures reveal the contingency of Aboriginal people's human rights in the neoliberal colonial state. Critical criminology has revealed that the Australian legal system has been complicit in establishing and reproducing the Aboriginal “criminal”. Relative to colonial relations of power, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the associated machinery of international law are relatively recent phenomena. This articles questions: What can a consideration of the discourse of human rights bring to an understanding of the treatment of an Aboriginal man in custody, and is this discourse complicit? Also, would sanctioning human rights in national law, via, for example, a bill of rights, legitimize human rights while simultaneously revealing their tacit assumptions? Agamben's concept of “bare life” sheds light on the paradoxes of human rights, as they are intensified in this custodial context.

Special Edition: Left Realism Today - Guest Editor’s Introduction

Since its birth in the mid-1980s, as a major variant of critical criminology, Left Realism continues to ebb and flow. Furthermore, not all Left realist contributions are alike and some are subject to very heated debates. The fact remains, however, that Left Realism is ‘alive and well’. Of course, given that I devoted 26 years of my life (much of it with Martin D Schwartz) to the realist project, I could easily be accused of being biased. Nonetheless, some contemporary empirical support for my claim is the recent publication of Roger Matthews’ (2014) book Realist Criminology. The main objective of this volume is to use this offering as a ‘launching pad’ or ‘springboard’ for broader analyses of the relevance of Left Realism to critical criminology as we know it today. Matthews’ piece is the lead article. Following this are six others that, in part, address his monograph and that also point us to new directions in Left realist ways of knowing. In keeping with the spirit of the International Journal of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, the authors constitute an international cadre of progressive scholars, including me, Joseph Donnermeyer, Steve Hall, Russell Hogg, John Lea, Claire Renzetti, and Simon Winlow. It cannot be emphasized enough, though, that this special issue is not a ‘love-in’ and there is no ‘party line’ here. All of the authors have strong positions on topics of major concern to academics and activists seeking new ways of thinking critically about crime, law and social control.

New Directions in Critical Criminology Conference

New Directions in Critical Criminology Conference

From Critical Criminology to the Criminological Imagination: An Interview with Jock Young

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CORRIGENDUM Cultural criminology: Script rewrites

Owing to the need for a post-publication amendment to the article, a correction has been published. Hayward KJ (2015) Cultural criminology: Script rewrites. Theoretical Criminology. Epub ahead of print 18 December 2015. DOI: 10.1177/1362480615619668 . Following the publication of this article, the author has revised the second paragraph on page eight under the heading ‘Romance everywhere?’ as a professional courtesy. The new paragraph is as follows and will be incorporated in future versions of this article. Here, as mentioned above, the charge is that, by focusing on forms of ‘criminal edgework’ or ‘low-level transgression’, cultural criminologists are simply repeating the mistakes of earlier versions of critical criminology. Roger Matthews (2014a: 97, 115), for example, cautions that ‘by focusing on selected forms of micro resistance, narratives of dissent and alternative life-styles, cultural criminologists are in danger of engaging in the kind of romanticism associated with left idealism’. But for this line of argument to stack up, the alleged parallels between left idealism and cultural criminology need to be carefully articulated and theoretically substantiated. It is not enough, as certain commentators have tended to do, simply to equate two decades of diverse cultural criminological research with, say, the study of graffiti. By stating this I do not wish to imply that cultural criminologists have not undertaken a number of appreciative studies of subcultural groups—they clearly have. It is to point out that, if critics wish us to treat this ‘romanticization’ accusation seriously, they should demonstrate its existence by providing concrete examples, citing key works when the offender is actually romanticized and highlighting precisely how the alleged process of romanticization takes place.

Has Criminology Awakened From Its “Androcentric Slumber”?

This is a decades-old question. In 1988, Daly and Chesney-Lind suggested that criminology was awakening from its “androcentric slumber” thanks to feminist critiques. This article looks at the history of criminology in terms of when gender analysis was or was not introduced; in particular, a series of “missed opportunities” concerning gender are explored the work of Sutherland and that of Cohen, Sampson, and others. In some of this classical criminological scholarship, gender was initially identified as a major cause of crime but thereafter overlooked. The article also analyzes how critical criminologists continued to under-emphasize the importance of gender despite advancing the discipline through significant examinations of social inequalities and crime. The article also turns to contemporary challenges to the mainstream that emerged from later critical and feminist criminologists who have proffered innovative advances about gender and intersectional analyses regarding crime. The article concludes with thoughts about moving feminist criminology forward toward a more intellectually diverse and complete discipline.

Critical Criminology as Academic Activism: On Praxis and Pedagogy, Resistance and Revolution

Critical Criminology as Academic Activism: On Praxis and Pedagogy, Resistance and Revolution

Response Essay to the Special Edition of Critical Criminology

Response Essay to the Special Edition of Critical Criminology

Convict Criminology and the Struggle for Inclusion

Convict Criminology (CC) began in the early 1990s as a reaction to the then current state of academic criminology that did not adequately reflect the voices of convicted felons. Since its beginnings, CC has attempted to draw attention to a range of problems created by the criminal justice apparatus and defenders of the status quo. Dr. Joanne Belknap’s 2014 ASC presidential address and subsequent article presented an argument that stressed the importance of activism to be considered as part of criminological research. In the process, she reviewed her career and then criticized the field of Critical Criminology, in particular Convict Criminology. The article, however, ignored the numerous efforts that CC has engaged in to build an inclusive group school, movement, organization and network that includes the diverse voices of Ph.D. educated convicts and excons, and overall reflected a superficial understanding of the history and intent of Convict Criminology. This article attempts to explain the shortcomings of Belknap’s article and clarifies misunderstandings.

Division of Critical Criminology

Division of Critical Criminology

R. Sollund (ed.) Green Harms and Crimes: Critical Criminology in a Changing World

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Edwin H. Sutherland: An Improbable Criminological Key Thinker—For Critical Criminologists and for Mainstream Criminologists

Edwin H. Sutherland’s status as a key thinker among criminologists—for many critical criminologists as well as mainstream criminologists—is addressed, with special attention to the various dimensions of his background that render this status highly improbable. Sutherland’s principal contributions to criminology are identified along with the limitations of these contributions. While Sutherland is especially known for his theory of differential association, his own history suggests that “influence” broadly conceived is complex and idiosyncratic and does not lend itself well to straightforward prediction, hence a “theory” of differential influence (applying differential quite differently from Sutherland) is advanced. Some attention is devoted to contemporaries or near contemporaries (including the Dutch Marxist Willem Bonger) of Sutherland in relation to why their influence has been more limited than that of Sutherland. Criminological “influence” is complex, and not easily testable. A closing section identifies some typically overlooked radical observations of Sutherland’s.

Critical Criminology: Guest Editors' Introduction

This issue of the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy stems from selected papers delivered at the 2013 and 2014 Critical Criminology conferences convened in, respectively, Adelaide (Flinders University) and Melbourne (Monash University). This was the final occasion when the Critical Criminology event would be held in successive years. In future, this conference will alternate with the Crime, Justice and Social Democracy Conference (hosted biennially by the Queensland University of Technology). As guest editors and the conferences’ facilitators, we examined the abstracts across both events and listened to as many speakers as possible with the view to inviting submissions from a mix of Australian and international delegates, including a selection of postgraduate and early career researchers.The papers published in this issue provide solid evidence of not only the liveliness of critical criminological thought, but also its relevance to the twenty-first century problems besetting various governments and communities around the world.To find out more about this special edition, download the PDF file from this page.

Structural Violence; Critical Criminology; Social Harm

The aim of this Paper is to analyze three epistemological tools to develop a contemporary and global Critical Criminology. In that sense, by the one hand, we examine the concept of structural violence as the material meaning of fundamental rights and its deprivation. By the other hand, we develop the sociological category of collective memory to try to understand the importance of this tool with the function to fight against impunity of state and corporate crimes. Finally, we examine the concept of social harm in order to go beyond penal and criminological sciences.

Herman Bianchi

Herman Bianchi, who passed away on the 30th of December 2015, has been a true ‘significant other’ for cultural criminologists. This article is a ‘criminological Verstehen’ of Bianchi’s work. His general attitude towards criminology is characterised by a mix of academic analysis, emotional outrage and incongruities. In order to understand this, his contributions to criminology are linked to biographical notes and to the mixed reactions he got on his work. Bianchi played an important role in the establishment of criminology as an autonomous academic discipline, yet he was very critical of this ‘discipline of shame’ because it has always served the exclusion of the most vulnerable members of society. He has been one of the frontmen of critical criminology, but he was not a Marxist. His concern for the despised other is related to his eternal fear, as a gay man in a ‘closet with a revolving door’, of new waves of discrimination against gays, and his rigorous abolitionism to his experience as a prisoner in a Nazi-concentration camp in 1944. Bianchi’s historical interest led him at the end of his career in the 1980s to support the emergence of strong historical criminol­ogy, but his utilitarian use of historical studies, also resulted in some clashes with professional historians.

Crítica e contracrítica dos movimentos de crítica à dogmática jurídica: ensaio sobre as transições da escola do direito livre e do movimento do direito alternativo em homenagem a Amilton Bueno de Carvalho

O ensaio problematiza a transição histórica que ocorreu, a partir de meados dos anos 90 no Brasil, do Movimento do Direito Alternativo ao garantismo jurídico-penal, desde o marco da criminologia crítica. A hipótese é a de que a adesão ao garantismo representou uma resposta à crítica promovida contra o movimento. São utilizadas as experiências históricas de Magnaud, Kantorowicz e Neumann como recursos interpretativos para compreender as transições e os sentidos da crítica: crítica negativa aos fundamentos e aos pressupostos do positivismo dogmático; crítica positiva de construção de uma práxis jurídica emancipatória.

As máscaras do Estado repressor: A criminalização dos movimentos sociais no Brasil

This article aims to problematize the way in which social movements in the form of popular demonstrations held in Brazil in 2013/14 were criminalized in order to guarantee the hosting of megaevents in the country. We therefore discuss the roles played by the legal system in the social sphere, notably its repressive discourse, relating it to the process of identifying those opposing the system. We also conduct a historical review of several Brazilian penal standards used in states of exception, with the aim of better observing how the legal system legitimizes state social control. Our theoretical framework harnesses the perspectives of critical criminology, observing how the debate is marked by numerous political, economic and ideological factors.

Green harms and crimes: critical criminology in a changing world

Green harms and crimes: critical criminology in a changing world

Thinking Critically About Rural Crime: The Influence of William J. Chambliss

William J. Chambliss (Bill) is well-known for his path-breaking theories of lawmaking and for his innovative research on state-organized crime. However, the fact that his study of the original vagrancy laws marked the birth of rural critical criminology has gone unrecognized by criminologists. The main objective of this article is twofold: (1) to show how Bill helped shape contemporary rural critical criminology and (2) to provide suggestions for further critical theoretical and empirical work on rural crime and social control.