Critical Criminology

Russell Hogg, Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, Kerry Carrington

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135991180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book sets to explore the key issues and future prospects facing critical criminology, bringing together a set of leading authorities in the field from the UK, Australasia and the USA. A key concern of the book is to review the possibilities and strategies of pursuing critical criminological scholarship in the context of an increasingly dominant administrative criminology paradigm, reflected in the rise of neo-liberalism, a 'governmentalised' criminology of risk, crime control and situational crime prevention.

Chapter 1

Critical criminologies: an introduction

Kerry Carrington and Russell Hogg

A quarter of a century ago Taylor, Walton and Young referred to the science of criminology as one of the most influential and state-dominated branches of the social sciences (Taylor, Walton and Young, 1975: 5). Criminology has always risked a certain intellectual disreputability for its promiscuous scavenging among more established and respectable disciplines from across the sciences (from biology, law and medicine to sociology) and for courting political favour and relevance with the powers that be. Intellectual rigour and detachment were sacrificed to immediate utility in an always urgent fight against an unmistakable enemy or threat. Theory, explanation, moral reflection could be readily cast aside as unnecessary diversions from the task at hand, and worse as equivocation about the wrongfulness of crime itself and as little more than affording excuses for criminals. In Britain, the United States and Australia at least, criminology for the better part of its history in the twentieth century was largely trapped in, and servant to, this broad political and cultural consensus (Garland, 1994; Cohen, 1998; Carson and O'Malley, 1989; Hall et al., 1978; Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1975), albeit it frequently worked at the liberal edges of it, championing the cause of rehabilitative over deterrent approaches to punishment and challenging the efficacy and defensibility of capital punishment.

Of course alongside this more pragmatic tradition there existed a substantial body of European and North American sociological research and theory concerned with deviance, crime and social control which provided the platform for the emergence of radical and critical criminologies in the anglophone world in the 1960s and 1970s (i.e. Becker, 1963; Cicourel, 1968; Cohen, 1971; Matza, 1964). In addition, forums like the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, which first met in 1973 and is still convening, provided alternative gatherings for radical criminologists. This body of scholarship was overwhelmingly sociological (and later Marxist) in orientation, eschewed any association with the state authorities in charge of the apparatuses of social control, and its political allegiances lay firmly with the counterculture, the New Left and anti-institutional social movements such as the prisoner and anti-psychiatry movements (Mathiesen, 1974; Fitzgerald, 1977; Zdenkowski and Brown, 1982; Sedgewick, 1982), antiracist and anti-colonial struggles (Fanon, 1963), civil rights and later (and more problematically) feminism (see Chapter 5). A central concern was the manner in which social scientific knowledge itself was entangled with, and deployed in the service of, power thus raising for criminologists and others several sets of questions.

If knowledge was so entangled with power then the existing structure and internal life of the social science disciplines carried no necessary, obvious or rationally given validity and should be laid open to critical scrutiny and possible radical reorganisation (Foucault, in Gordon, 1980). From this standpoint the eschewal of conventional disciplinary boundaries such as was to be found in emerging fields like cultural studies and even established and more pragmatically oriented ones like criminology gave rise to new, more radical intellectual possibilities, connected with the experimental mood of the times and opened up emancipatory opportunities for students confined within traditional and staid disciplines like English (in the case of the future practitioners of cultural studies) and law (in the case of many future criminologists). Thus a critical intellectual rationale could be sought (if in the eyes of many never quite achieved) for a project like criminology when transgressing rather than observing traditional disciplinary boundaries became a sign of radical intellectual respectability. And far from this necessitating the cosying up to established powers in the apparatus of social control, the new intellectual rationale was to be nurtured by its association with new, radical, oppositional political possibilities.

While there have been many differences in the theoretical and empirical focuses of critical criminologies, they have tended to share an opposition to the kind of criminology that takes so much of the status quo for granted. Increasingly, however, as David Brown points out in Chapter 4, the lines between administrative and critical criminology tend to be more blurred in practice than they are at the level of rhetoric. Nevertheless, rejection of the correctionalism of orthodox criminology, and the methods and epistemology of positivism, a questioning of the definition of crime and its measurement by official statistics, accompanied by a critical posture towards the agents, systems and institutions of social control (i.e. prisons, courts, police, judiciary), tend to characterise much of the work in the dynamic field of critical criminology. So too does a commitment to connecting these intellectual projects with the politics of social justice and change, although there are many quarrels about just how these connections operate (Young, 1988:160). Sociological explanations tend to be favoured over individualist theories of crime and deviance, and pretences to the criminologist as a neutral scientific expert also tend to be disavowed. The emphasis in critical approaches to criminology has been on analysing how the effects of social power and the inequalities of the social order underscore the commission of crime, the experience of victimisation and the politics of the criminalisation process, although there is no agreement about any of this. All this contrasts significantly with the assumption upon which much ‘scientific’ criminology has been based, that the social order is underscored by a consensus, that its policing is unproblematic and the legal definition of crime uncontested. The genealogy of this kind of sceptical thinking about criminology, as the various contributions to the first part of this book demonstrate, cannot simply be located with the publication of a single text such as The New Criminology (1973) or the influence of neo-Marxism, or the emergence of a single set of National Deviancy Conferences. Although all of these have been significant in this genealogy, as Stan Cohen (1998) reminds us, the impetus for critical criminology grew out of a much wider constellation of decontructionist radical agendas, to challenge the status quo, modernist modes of social control, the claims of science and other disciplinary knowledges, the dominance of patriarchy and the underlying moral order of Anglophone culture. The various contributions to this book illustrate just how diverse those influences have been, and continue to be in shaping not only new directions but new challenges for future scholarship in critical criminology.

During the 1970s and 1980s critical criminology confidently staked out its ground around transformative projects in politics and intellectual work. Arguably this ground has been eroded in the harsher social, political and academic climate of the 1990s, leaving a question mark over the future directions that critical criminologies might or could take in the twenty-first century. This collection of essays debates the shortcomings and achievements of critical criminology, while exploring the possibilities for future critical criminological scholarship. The book's genesis arose out of a small conference on 26 February 2001 when a group of international scholars from several countries met at a forum at the University of Western Sydney. The papers they gave addressed specific issues that connected coherently into an overall analysis of the past, present and future of critical criminology. Earlier versions of most of the chapters in this book were presented as conference papers at that forum. Other chapters from continents, and on themes, not adequately represented at that conference were then solicited to complement these.

While multi-authored this edited collection coheres around a number of integrated themes. The first comprises a set of reflections on the crucial issues and debates in critical criminology over the last three decades authored mainly by key players in the praxis of critical criminology over the same time-frame: David Brown from Australia, Phil Scraton from the United Kingdom and Julia and Herman Schwendinger from the United States. These contributions are complemented by Kerry Carrington's chapter which analyses the vital role of feminism in the genealogy of critical approaches to criminology. Collectively, these four chapters locate the virtues and limitations of critical criminology in Australia, the USA and Britain in a historical and genealogical context. The second part of the book considers the possibility of re-envisioning the intellectual and political projects of critical criminology in the twenty-first century, given these challenges: the critiques of the ‘rational’ subject of western thought, the shortcomings of the universalising ideals of the ‘new criminology’, the rise of a ‘govermentalised’ criminology of risk, the impact of globalisation, the erosion of the sovereignty of nation states, the shifts in strategies of social control and criminal justice and an increasingly corporatised university sector ill-equipped or uninterested in supporting critical research. Beyond this the themes addressed by the contributors include the following:

• Is there a ‘tradition’ of critical criminology able to be sustained and worth sustaining under current conditions? If so, what are its defining elements?
• What has been the impact on the critical project of political, social and economic changes since the heyday of critical criminology in the 1960/70s?
• How have feminism, new social movements, ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘third way’ politics, impacted on the directions and possibilities for critical criminology?
• How should we assess the role, achievements and limitations of critical criminology in relation to changes in law and order politics and shifts in criminal justice and modes of social control?
• How has globalisation affected the boundaries and focus of critical criminology with its traditional focus on the criminal justice systems of nation states?
• What impact has the postmodern critique of enlightenment discourses had on what may appear to be the ‘modernist’ project of critical criminology?
• Critical criminology has been resolutely sociological in orientation. Do concerns within criminology (such as the role of sexism, racism and punitive sentiment in criminal justice policy) open up a role for psychosocial knowledges in the future of critical criminology?

The opening substantive chapter by Phil Scraton suggests that the application of critical analysis to the study of crime, ‘deviance’ and criminal justice within social democracies is crucial to understanding, interpreting and challenging the authoritarianism of state institutions committed to increasing police powers and expanding imprisonment. He argues that ‘critical criminology’ has provided the analytical means to theorise and explain ‘crime’, ‘deviance’ and ‘social conflict’ alongside the formalised processes of law-making, differential enforcement and punishment. His argument draws upon the important neo-Gramscian debates around ideology and hegemony and the Foucauldian analysis of the power–knowledge axis. Arguing that while much of what constitutes ‘critical’ analysis in criminology has been (wrongly) dismissed as reductionist or ‘idealist’, critical theorists have retained a commitment to advancing the critique of administrative criminology and criminal justice policy and practice through questioning the determination of power and the legitimation of knowledge. Focusing particularly on official discourses, including what is accepted and promoted as ‘scientific’ or ‘evidence-based’ knowledge, critical research demonstrates how structural inequalities are woven into the fabric of the ‘advanced’ democratic state and civil society. In endeavouring to broaden the scope of analysis to a consideration of harm rather than crime, social justice rather than criminal justice, treatment rather than punishment and discourses of rights rather than discipline and control, Scraton argues that critical criminology presents a form of intellectual resistance, turning cases into issues. As a challenge to powerful institutions and their collective regimes of truth, his piece shows how critical criminology can become associated with campaigns for social reform and political change mobilising a human rights discourse and agenda to provide a procedural alternative to the administration of law and criminal justice.

Chapter 3 which follows is a historically significant and similarly reflexive piece written by Julia and Herman Schwendinger with Michael Lynch. Thirty years ago the Schwendingers wrote a famous piece first published in Issues in Criminology (1970) and republished in Critical Criminology (1975) edited by Walton, Taylor and Young that challenged both legalistic and positivistic definitions of crime. In it they asked: ‘Isn't it time to raise serious questions about the assumptions underlying the definition of the field of criminology, when a man who steals a paltry sum can be called a criminal while agents of the State, can, with impunity, legally reward men who destroy food so that price levels can be maintained whilst a sizable portion of the population suffers from malnutrition?’ (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1975: 17). They argued that criminological work should not be confined to the analysis of crime sanctioned by the institutions of criminal justice (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1975: 113–18). They also rejected the claim that morality and value judgements have no role in the definition of crime (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1975: 132). They convinced a growing generation of budding critical criminologists around the globe that the definition of crime had to be broadened to include not just social harms, injuries and public wrongs but importantly also the violation of human rights. As racism, sexism, imperialist war and economic systems that create poverty and inequality violate human rights, these crimes, they argued, are vitally relevant to the domain of criminology as legitimate objects of study (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1975: 136). To defend human rights, rather than the status quo, they proposed that criminologists ‘must be able to sufficiently identify the violations of these rights – by whom and against whom; how and why’ (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1975: 134). The Berkeley School of Criminology where they worked set about doing just that and Julia and Herman Schwendinger became, along with their radical colleagues, the targets of vicious state-backed attacks on their academic freedom and livelihood.

The chapter, which Julia and Herman Schwendinger have generously written for this book with Michael Lynch, interrupting their retirement and recovery from serious illness, is in itself a testament to their indomitable spirits. It provides a detailed historical account of the rise and demise of the Berkeley School of Criminology at the University of California, arguably the most significant institutional site for the cultivation of critical criminology in the United States in late 1960s to the mid-1970s. At that time they wrote about the possibility of criminologists becoming the defenders of human rights, rather than the guardians of the social order. Their bold vision for a broader concept of crime to include social harm and the violation of human rights, challenging the narrow definitions of state defined criminality, opened the pathway for much contemporary criminological research, on corporate crime, state crime, government and police corruption, environmental crimes, war crimes, human rights abuses and so on. We appreciate the immense historical significance of this piece to the collection and hope you will too.

The business of being and living out a life as a critical criminologist entails moments of joy, seriousness, disappointment, frustration, challenge and change. Chapter 4 by David Brown reflects on three decades as a student and teacher of critical criminology, criminal justice and criminal law. While he notes the danger of engaging in reflection – the production of inconsequential, self-indulgent, sanitised accounts prey to the vagaries of memory – he hopes his reflections will assist in analysing the deeply problematic relationship between the intellectual and political projects of critical criminology. His chapter aims to demonstrate some of the problematic and undesirable features of critical criminology, alongside the immense value and enduring legacies of much work carried out in this tradition. His piece draws upon a rich history of thirty years of involvement in radical criminology and criminal justice politics in Australia manifest in the establishment of the Alternative Criminology Journal, involvement in the prisoners’ movement and the establishment of criminology in Australian universities. The key theme to emerge from his argument is the contingent and context-specific nature of doing critical criminology, over and against forms of critical theory that presume a timeless universal validity. While suitably serious for the most part, the style of this chapter is witty, light-hearted and reflexive.

Feminists as scholars and activists have long been perturbed by the masculinist bias of both the discipline of criminology and the criminal justice system's treatment of women as victims and offenders. Arguably, these feminist critiques have had a profound and lasting impact on the direction that critical criminology took although frequently overlooked in genealogies of this tradition. It was after all left largely to feminists to point out that neo-Marxist versions of critical criminology in rushing to romanticise the delinquent as a working-class resister forgot about the victim, who in many instances was a vulnerable and female member of the working classes or oppressed racial minorities. Chapter 5 by Kerry Carrington, the last along the theme of reflection, reviews the genealogical significance of the impact of feminist incursions into criminological debates and its influence over the directions of critical criminology over the last three decades. However, in rushing to condemn criminology's masculinist bias, she argues that some essentialist versions of feminist criminology lost sight of their critical edge, slipped into residual biologisms about the innate criminality of men as men, underestimated the politics of criminal justice, and overlooked the way in which women were situated, not as a single unified grouping, but differently in relation to the operation of the criminal process. Her chapter concludes by outlining a number of future challenges to the intellectual and political projects of feminist research in criminology. Most importantly she argues that feminist criminology has been integral and not just incidental to the intellectual and political projects of critical criminology.

The various contributions to the second part of the book seek in highly original ways to re-envision, redirect or renew the directions of critical criminology in the twenty-first century. This section is opened by Chapter 6 authored by Tony Jefferson, who like many of the contributors to this book has been working, writing and publishing broadly in the field of critical criminology for several decades. While the concept of crime has been questioned by much critical criminology, rarely has the notion of the subject received any critical attention at all. A riveting read that draws upon a vast depth and breadth of scholarship, Tony Jefferson's piece argues for a psychosocial criminology. He argues that the subject presumed by criminology, whether traditional or radical, is hopelessly inadequate. The subject presumed by a traditional Freudian approach is a ‘disturbed’/abnormal individual; that presumed by Marxism, feminism or left realism is purely social, a product of social structure or, more recently, discourse; and that presumed by administrative criminology or rational choice theorists is purely rational/voluntaristic. Jefferson points out that one result of this collective failure is to enable traditional psychology, with its equally problematic notion of a purely cognitive, information-processing subject, to inhabit the space. What is needed, he argues, i...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• 1 Critical criminologies: an introduction
• PART 1 ISSUES AND DEBATES IN CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY
• PART II NEW DIRECTIONS AND CHALLENGES FOR CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY
• General Index
• Name Index