Alternative Criminologies

Pat Carlen, Leandro Ayres França, Pat Carlen, Leandro Ayres França

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138067424
• eBook ISBN: 9781351657242
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Alternative Criminologies celebrates a kaleidoscopic process of permanent critique and a diversity of social and scientific knowledges. It examines complex and global crime issues in light of the many alternative scientific, artistic, empathetic, campaigning and otherwise imaginative criminologies that attempt to understand and/or fundamentally change why crime and justice take the forms they do.

From cutting edge topics such as crimes against humanity, the criminology of mobility, terrorism, cybercrime, corporate crime and green criminology; to gendered perspectives on violence against women, sexualities and feminist and queer criminologies; to key issues in penology such as mass incarceration, the death penalty, desistance from crime, risk and the political economy of punishment; Alternative Criminologies demonstrates the breadth, the variety and the vibrancy of contemporary perspectives on crime, criminalization and punishment.

Bringing together 34 leading experts from around the world, this international collection unites fresh and insightful theoretical positions with innovative empirical research and marks an important juncture for criminologies and their imagined futures. Alternative Criminologies is essential reading for students of crime and criminal justice.

Part I

Theoretical perspectives

1

Alternative criminologies

An introduction

Pat Carlen

Crime, as Durkheim (1896/1955) said, is normal. But the critical alternative criminologies which lend their collective name to this book are all about Others: those who make the rules and because they are rich and powerful have many alternatives; those who break the rules and, because they are poor and powerless, have few alternatives; and all of the academic, professional and everyday criminological observers – those whose rules are so frequently alternatives to others’ rules and for whom there is no truth of the matter, no matters of fact and no binding rules for knowing – only continually changing tropes of science, art, law, morality and politics – and ever-changing emotional as well as intellectual, moral and artistic responses to all kinds of rule-breaking and law-breaking. Love it? Loathe it? Love it and loathe it? Whatever and/or however: crime is everywhere – in novels, scientific articles, books, rap lyrics, cartoons, films, conferences, online exchanges, financial deals, gossip and private fantasies. It is to be found in the highest echelons of governments, political parties, churches, universities, mass media, business, armed services, professions, families – everywhere. But it is not its ubiquity that makes crime so important. Crime is of such crucial importance because it is also one of the Others of people’s notions of justice, morality, order, security. By deconstructing crime and criminal justice it is possible to find out who has the power to make, break and enforce both the Rule of Law and the economic, social, cultural and political rules, roles and relationships conditioning the Rule of Law. Yet, at the same time, analytic deconstructions of crime and justice suggest that crime is a precarious, if not an imaginary, Other. For, history, geography, anthropology, sociology, philosophy and jurisprudence teach that the meanings of crime and justice vary by time, place, culture and social position (see Runciman 1966; Rawls 1972). Additionally, deconstruction of political and everyday discourse suggests that people can act on several seemingly opposed meanings of crime, justice, morality and order simultaneously – and then, later, give totally different, but logically coherent and/or legally acceptable, accounts of what happened, why it happened and what it meant (see Carlen 2008, 2010: xiv). The alternatives are endless, the combinations kaleidoscopic.

Alternative Criminologies examines the simultaneously alternative dimensions of crime and the professional and non-professional, visual, artistic and emotional criminologies that alternately, or simultaneously, attempt to portray, explain, understand or fundamentally change why crime and justice take the forms they do. This first chapter, however, is not intended as an introduction to the other chapters. Each ensuing chapter has its specific focus and style; each is a possible alternative (or not) to other alternatives. Moreover, in introducing the book’s eponymous theme, this chapter is not itself as Other-wise as, ideally, it should be; and this is primarily because it focuses exclusively upon criminology in the anglophone countries; and says little about criminology in any of the others. Readers, therefore, are forewarned that the alternative perspectives described in this chapter may have to be made emotionally, culturally and/or politically relevant by being constantly re-read and rewritten other-wise. (See, for instance, Cain 2000 on the oriental and the occident, Liu 2009 on Asian Criminology and Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo 2016 on Southern Criminology.) In fact, reading and writing critical alternative criminologies otherwise is an essential precondition for taking them seriously, regardless of geopolitical location. None the less, however often alternative criminologies are re-read and re-written, three fundamental questions of definition remain: what are alternative criminologies alternatives to? Does not the very term ‘alternative criminologies’ involve a rampant relativism unless it is further and more closely defined? How can anyone choose between alternatives? Many dictators have produced alternative criminologies which have neither respected human rights nor reduced political, economic or cultural oppressions. Indeed, post-revolutionary governments have again and again produced alternative criminologies characterised by savage punishments and the grossest violations of human rights. Agreed. That is why this chapter distinguishes between conservative alternative criminologies and critical alternative criminologies.

In this essay, conservative alternative criminologies are typified as either preserving the status quo, deliberately or by default, or as changing it in such ways that exploitation of the poor and powerless by the rich and powerful is less likely to be diminished and more likely to be increased. Examples of conservative alternative criminology are to be found in criminological projects which focus on attempting to reduce crime and prison populations without critically examining the social structures and forms of law which produce both. By contrast, critical alternative criminologies aim to deconstruct the meanings of crime and criminal justice so as to expose the relationships between social structural inequalities, criminal injustices, laws and human identities. In so doing, however, critical alternative criminologies do not restrict critique to literary deconstruction. Instead, in the imagining of critical alternative criminologies, it is assumed that deconstruction of present modes of criminal justice may be achieved by a variety of modes of knowing: analytically via critique; artistically via the dramatic or visual arts and/or musical forms; mathematically via statistical calculation; historically via cultural memories and records; and empathetically via the emotions. How those varied forms of understanding are then used, will of course, be in part determined by local ongoing economic, political and cultural conditions and processes, in part by international relations and in part by presently unpredictable global events. And, of course, it should go without saying, that the term ‘critical alternative criminologies’ ultimately names a process of permanent critique, a series of transitional states of new knowledge and ideology rather than sets of closed theories. For at the moment of recognition of a critical alternative criminology the critical alternative becomes subject to alternative critique itself. At such time it may be analysed by others as being neither critical nor alternative! By the same logic, apparently conservative alternative criminology projects may, in changing political conditions, have socially progressive effects. Thus, the brand names and brand-name criminology claims (including the name ‘critical alternative criminologies’) employed in this chapter are expected to have only a nominalist and discursive saliency, they are not proffered as having any essential empirical reality or guaranteed progressive policy pay-off.

The rest of the chapter is divided into three sections, each focusing on a different dimension of critical alternative criminologies. First, the many critical alternative perspectives on crime and justice that have been developed since Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young (1973 and 1975) developed their Marxist critiques in the UK in the 1970s are identified. Second, there is a focus on some of the critical alternative modes of knowing about crime – critical modes which both engage in deconstructive and reconstructive critique and, most importantly, are themselves open to continuous critique. (Ironically, continuous critique is, theoretically and supposedly, already a feature of the legal systems of democratic countries. In practice, continuous critique of democratic legal systems is most readily – and in some cases, exclusively – available to those who can afford to pay a large number of lawyers to scrutinise and ‘deconstruct’ the state’s case against them and then fund phenomenally expensive court delays in order for successive legal quibbles to be dealt with; for a recent and dramatic example, see Davies (2014) on the way in which Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers in the UK were able to pay for very costly and effective defences against the many criminal charges brought against their staff in 2013 and 2014.) In the chapter’s third and concluding section, the possible political significance of critical alternative criminologies today is briefly discussed.

Critical alternative criminologies with and without Marx 1973–2015

Today’s critical alternative criminologies have a history. As, therefore, it is a fundamental tenet of this chapter that new knowledge is, in part, reconstructed out of the deconstructed and re-theorised particles of the old, let us begin with The New Criminology published by Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young in 1973. When that book made its début in the mid-1970s (at a time when criminology in the UK was sometimes studied under the more wide-ranging title ‘sociology of deviance’) it made a massive impression; not because it was the first book to attempt a Marxist analysis of crime and justice (Bonger 1916; Chambliss and Seidman 1971; Quinney 1977; Rusche and Kirschheimer 1939 amongst many others, had already done that) but because it was aspirational in its scope and humane in its vision. When, two years later, The New Criminology was followed by Critical Criminology (Taylor, Walton and Young 1975) it quickly became apparent that the parameters of criminology in the UK (and maybe elsewhere) were never going to be the same again. From then on, anglophone criminology, which had, with a few exceptions, morphed into a punishment versus welfare debate about the best way to respond to crime, was reinvigorated with that very exciting notion of critique that had been apparent in Emile Durkheim’s (1896/1955) foundational radical insight that ‘crime is normal’. Other European books published around that time, and which helped buttress the burgeoning of diverse UK criminologies committed to constant critique, included Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests (1972), Donzelot’s The Policing of Families (1979), Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977), Mathiesen’s The Politics of Abolition (1974), Melossi and Paverini’s The Prison and the Factory (1981) and a variety of non-criminological works by Marxist philosophers such as Louis Althusser (1971), psychoanalytic writers like Jacques Lacan (1975), linguistic philosophers such as Ferdinand Saussure (1974) and Jacques Derrida (1967/1976); and feminist writers such as Julia Kristeva (1980).

Renewal of the Marxist critique of crime and justice gave new impetus to the study of white collar crime (e.g. Levi 1987/2014) while the constant stream of critical and qualitative case studies already coming to the UK from the United States (e.g. Becker 1963; Skolnick 1965; Matza 1969) imbued a new generation of UK criminologists with the courage to engage in qualitative case studies and the development of new theoretical perspectives. The later 1970s and 1980s qualitative studies were oriented less towards previous criminological writings and more theoretically informed by a variety of social science, literary and philosophical perspectives. Yet the emphasis on the relationships between crime, economy and politics was never abandoned. Now, during the first decades of the 21st century, a continuing emphasis on the relationships between politics, economy, culture and crime has been manifest in radical criminological works in the UK, Australia, the United States and elsewhere. These latest critical alternative ways of writing about, and deconstructing, crime and justice issues have variously highlighted the following: neo-liberal governance (Simon 2007); the globalisation of crime (Findlay 1999; Aas 2012); penal populism (Pratt 2006; Freiberg and Gelb 2008); risk (Hudson 2003; O’Malley 2010); consumerism (Hall, Winlow and Ancrum 2008; O’Malley 2009); eco-crime (Walters 2010); acquiescence and repressive surveillance (Mathiesen 2004, 2012); social exclusion (De Giorgi 2006; Winlow and Hall 2013); precarity and vertigo (Young 2007); orientalism and occidentalism (Cain 2000; Young 2007); acquiescence in various types of oppressions (Cohen 2000; Mathiesen 2004); and cultural change (Garland 2001; Wacquant 2004/2009; Matravers, 2005; Simon 2007; Comfort 2008; O’Malley 2009; Winlow and Hall 2013). Theoretical criminologies have increasingly drawn upon works not directly concerned with crime but whose focus is more upon: political economy (Esping-Andersen 1990); philosophy (e.g. Taylor 2004; Butler 2004; Chomsky 2006; Sassen 2014); politics (e.g. Fraser 1997); history (Thompson 1963); sociology (e.g. Bourdieu 1990; Sennett 2006); feminism (e.g. Butler 1990; May 2015); and even epidemiology (see Wilkinson and Pickett 2009) together with many, many more – as will be seen in the other chapters of this book.

Innovations in criminological perspectives since The New Criminology have been generated by substantive, as well as by theoretical and conceptual issues. Once criminology held up a critical mirror to its looking-glass self, Others soon came crowding in to ask why the criminal subject of criminology was always, traditionally, a male, working class and/or black individual lawbreaker? What about: Women? Corporate crime? Middle class crime? Racism? War crime? Political crime? State crime? Green crime? State regulation of sexuality? Violence against women? Crime victims? Hate crime? Child abuse? Elder abuse? People trafficking? Modern forms of slavery? Why are only a minority of lawbreakers ever criminalised? Why do women commit less crime than men? What are the roles of the criminal law, police, courts, prisons, official statistics, media and political creeds and political parties in shaping popular and professional conceptions of what is crime and who are the criminals? Who is included and who is excluded from the economic and social life of the modern city and how does cultural and social zoning shape popular conceptions of crime and criminals? How have innovations in science and technology – such as the internal combustion engine, the silicon chip and the worldwide web – given birth to new crime opportunities, new criminals and new questions of the relationships between global and local justice? What are the relationships between social justice and criminal justice? Why not abolish prisons? What kind of police do we need? How are conceptions of right, wrong, security and crime shaped by time, place, culture, inequalities of power and wealth, gender, ethnicity, age, emotions? Are most criminologies ethnocentric? (Enter here comparative criminology, e.g. Cain 1989; Downes 1993; Whitman 2003; Newburn and Sparks 2004; Carrington and others 2013; Pratt and Erikson 2013.) Why, and under what conditions do people stop committing crime? (Enter desistance theory: Maruna 2001.) And do academic criminologists speak only to each other, rather than to the publics they should serve? (Enter public criminology: Loader and Sparks 2010; British Journal of Criminology Review Symposium 2011.)

All of the foregoing are alternative questions. They are alternatives both to each other and to the amalgam of litera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Theoretical perspectives
• Part II Critical issues for the 21st century
• Index