Cutting the Edge
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Cutting the Edge

Current Perspectives in Radical/critical Criminology and Criminal Justice

Jeffrey Ian Ross, Jeffrey Ian Ross

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eBook - ePub

Cutting the Edge

Current Perspectives in Radical/critical Criminology and Criminal Justice

Jeffrey Ian Ross, Jeffrey Ian Ross

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About This Book

Understanding crime, criminals, and criminal justice from a radical/critical perspective is indispensable in today's academic, applied research, and policy sectors. Neglect of this approach leads to narrow-mindedness and the probability of repeating past mistakes or reinventing the wheel. Cutting the Edge by Jeffrey Ian Ross will encourage individuals and organizations, especially students and instructors, to innovatively identify ways of experimenting with new policy initiatives designed to improve not only criminal justice, but social and human justice as well.

Ross has significantly changed this volume to include six new chapters and three revised ones as well. The studies chosen demonstrate the difference between critical criminology and other approaches used to study and explain criminological phenomena. The authors do not approach the inequalities of the criminal justice system as phenomena that should be studied, but as wrongs that must be righted.

Cutting-edge critical criminology combines concerns about fairness in punishment, tools of class analysis and the insights of feminism, postmodernism, and ethnography. The authors included here wield these newer tools with elegance and enthusiasm. Written with passion by experts in the field, the book engages the mind as fully as it engages the emotions.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2018
ISBN
9781351523868
Subtopic
Criminology
Edition
2

1

Introduction to the Second Edition: Cutting the Edge: What a Difference a Decade Makes?
1

Jeffrey Ian Ross

The First Edition of Cutting the Edge

In the first edition of Cutting the Edge (1998) twelve scholars examined different subtopics in the field of radical and critical criminology. Their chapters included stock takings and discussions on a diverse range of subjects including the contemporary relevance of well-known social theorists (e.g., Marx, Weber, Simmel, and Lacan) to critical criminology, the role of the economy in politics and crime in countries that have market economies, the evolution of an integrative criminology, and the application of postmodernist theories to the study of critical criminology.
Other chapters in the first edition examined traditional concerns in the field of criminology and criminal justice (e.g., white collar crime, municipal policing, corrections, community corrections, juvenile justice, and sentencing) from a radical and/or critical criminological point of view. The contributors reviewed the history and current status of radical/critical criminology, and provided a lens through which to conceptualize future scholarship in the area of critical criminology. The first edition was generally well received by the scholarly community with the bulk of the reviews praising the overall quality of the work, the range of contributions, and the book’s suitability for undergraduate and graduate students.
Ten years later, the first edition remains an important contribution to our understanding of radical and critical criminology. Nevertheless, critical criminology is a multidimensional and continually evolving concept as well as a scholarly field of inquiry. In the meantime, social, political, and historical events as well as research and policy developments of the last decade have respectively produced new scholarship and insights and have had an effect on criminal justice policies and practice.

What Has Changed Since the Publication of the First Edition?

Over the past decade, social, economic, and political events at both the national and international levels have had a profound impact on American society and beyond. These effects have been felt not only in the practitioner field of criminal justice, they have also had a noticeable impact on the nature and process of scholarship that approaches crime from a radical and critical point of view.
Over the past ten years these events and processes include but are not limited to:
  • the changing dynamics in the war on drugs;
  • the increased number of people who are incarcerated in the United States;
  • predatory lending policies and practices of financial institutions;
  • increasing globalization; and, most importantly,
  • the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Each of these events have had important ripple and interconnected effects most noticeably felt by the poor, powerless, and marginalized sectors of our society. For example, the war on drugs that began during the Reagan administration has resulted in correctional facilities that are disproportionately full of first-time, nonviolent drug offenders. The burgeoning prison population translates into overcrowded jails and prisons, institutions that cannot achieve their stated goal of rehabilitation. Increasing globalization has led to noticeable shifts in what gets produced in our factories, sold at our box stores, and on the web, and by whom.
The 9/11 attacks, in particular, were the catalyst for the expanded war on terrorism. A significant policy consequence is the PATRIOT Act, which includes, among other developments, a general erosion of our civil liberties. This legislation appeared coterminous with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (ostensibly to root out terrorist threats against Americans) which are not only putting Americans in harm’s way, but bankrupting our nation. The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq also prompted the reliance on Guantanamo to hold “enemy combatants,” the use of torture to extract information, rendition of suspected terrorists to other states, and the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib just outside of Baghdad. These events have been the subject of papers at our scholarly conferences, have been represented in the pages of our academic journals, and occasionally been the subject matter of books published by critical criminologists.
There are some who suggest that two of these events, such as the wars on drugs and terrorism, have more recently had some positive impact at least in the United States. For example, had it not been for the excesses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, then it might not have led to the development of the National Commission on Safety and Abuse in Prisoner Abuse (2005-2006) that examined the state of correctional facilities in our country and the passage of key legislation like the Prisoner Rape Elimination Act (2003) and the Prisoner Reentry Act (2008).
Others see these developments as lip service, mere drops in the bucket, and that we are missing the bigger picture where the modern state is all powerful, one that works and operates with little compassion, and exists to further the interests of a powerful elite.

What Sorts of Publishing Developments Have Occurred Over the Last Decade in the Field of Critical Criminology?

For the past two decades the Division of Critical Criminology, which is part of the American Society of Criminology has been responsible for publishing the journal Critical Criminology: An International Journal. This venue is an important vehicle for promoting important scholarship in the field. But as with any scholarly journal, balance among the different themes in every issue is not easily achieved, nor should this necessarily be its mission or function.
Scholars and instructors wishing for an easily accessible comprehensive overview of the contemporary status of field of critical criminology have at their disposal a number of books. Since the first edition of Cutting the Edge was published, three somewhat similar books have been produced that have added to our understanding of radical/critical criminology. First, Kerry Carrington and Russell Hogg’s Critical Criminology: Issues, Debates, Challenges (2002) is a collection of eleven essays focusing on among other interesting subjects the history of critical criminology, feminism, social control, and international influences. This book provides an analysis of major theoretical approaches and illustrates various issues drawing primarily from historical events and situations that have occurred in Britain and Australia.
Second, Schwartz and Hatty (2003) Controversies in Critical Criminology is also an excellent introduction to the field. Consisting of twelve chapters, and the shortest of the three, it is well balanced in terms of subjects of inquiry and experts in the field. The editors have included chapters on state crime, the relationship between crime and the body, the relationship between masculinity and male violence, and hate crime.
Third is Lynch and Michalowski’s Primer in Radical Criminology: Critical Perspectives on Crime, Power and Identity (2006), which is now in its fourth edition and the longest of the three books described thus far. It is divided into eleven chapters, provides a masterful history of radical criminology, taking into account the environment, policing, the courts, state crime and terrorism, policing, the courts, and corrections.
Collectively, these books provide slightly different approaches to the field of critical criminology. And each has a different emphasis. Some topics and points of view are stressed more than others, while others are totally neglected. More importantly perhaps, as time marches on, these books are now becoming out of date.

The Second Edition of Cutting the Edge

The second edition of Cutting the Edge builds on and extends the writing and analysis presented in the first edition in several significant ways. Among the twelve chapters in the new edition, few of them are mainly reviews of literature. On the other hand, while the new edition includes three of the original eleven chapters, another three of the chapters are completely revised (e.g., Friedrichs, Richards, and Elrod), and the balance are either written by new authors or are on old subjects but written by new writers bringing a freshness of approach. In sum, these new chapters cover new and cutting-edge scholarship and include topics such as supranational criminology, cultural criminology, corporate crime, and restorative justice.
Meanwhile, in any enterprise of this size there will always be omissions. Had I more time I would have had a chapter specifically devoted to feminist criminology and one that focuses almost exclusively on race and ethnicity. I recognize this as a shortcoming. But with all collective projects and publishers deadlines there comes a point in time when one must deliver, and that time has gone and past.
The book is divided into two sections: the first looks at perspectives in criminology and the second examines different branches or processes in criminal justice. Following this chapter, the new edition starts out with an abridged version of the original introductory chapter, “Introduction to the First Edition. Cutting the Edge: Where Have We been and Where are We Going?” It outlines the original reasons why the book was developed and the goals as they then existed.
The next chapter is “Insurgent Possibilities: The Politics of Cultural Criminology,” written by Jeff Ferrell and Keith Hayward. The piece attempts to “offer a brief introduction to the politics of cultural criminology, and to provide some examples of how cultural criminology seeks to critically account for the complex relationships that exist between crime, culture and contemporary political economy.” In so doing, the authors confront capitalism as the only progressive explanation for crime and look into the politics of resistance.
Chapter 4, “White Collar Crime and Critical Criminology: Convergence and Divergence,” is written by David O. Friedrichs. He looks at how the field of white collar crime has matured and how it has been adopted and integrated into the mainstream of critical criminology research. Friedrichs looks at white collar crime research through the backdrop of “four prominent strains of critical criminology in the contemporary era:” radical/critical criminology: peacemaking criminology, postmodernist criminology, feminist criminology, and left realism. He concludes his analysis of white collar crime through a review of four recent criminological trends: newsmaking criminology, cultural criminology, green criminology, and social harm and crime, state-corporate crime, and state crime.
In “Corporate Crime: A Panacea for Critical Criminology,” Vincenzo Ruggiero argues that efforts to resume the use of critical tools in the analysis of crime and control have been made in different quarters. Most obviously, a critical criminological perspective has proven well equipped to address recent international violence, be it institutional or anti-institutional. This chapter suggests that, in the current situation, the area of study pertaining to corporate crime is the ideal area, within criminology, that lends itself to a radical approach. The chapter reviews a number of conceptualizations of corporate crime, then identifies a specific form of criminality that the author terms “power crime.” Ruggiero then discusses causation and prevention, an exercise that he conducts with the tools offered by classical sociology as well as those made available by more contemporary analysis. The point is made that conceptualizations, causations, and prevention of corporate crime cannot be dealt with if a conventional criminological paradigm is adopted. In brief, the author argues that corporate crime is a panacea for critical criminology.
Christopher Mullins and Dawn L. Rothe, in their chapter “Toward a Supranational Criminology,” investigate the phenomena of “violations of international criminal law that cause large amounts of human suffering and misery (i.e., genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes of aggression and other gross human rights violations) by government actors acting in the name of or on behalf of state, paramilitaries, or militias.” This definition has its origins in the phenomenon of state crime. Their chapter reviews the component parts of supranational criminology, the methodological issues for social scientists examining these phenomena., and the social context in which they operate (i.e., global economies, political instability, economic collapse, and ethnic tensions).
Chapter 7, “Radical and Critical Criminology’s’ Treatment of Municipal Policing” is written by Jeffrey Ian Ross. Ross reviews the conservative, liberal, and radical/critical criminological literature on municipal policing. In particular, he examines each of these types of research in terms of methodological approaches focus, and theoretical frameworks. In the final part of the chapter, Ross classifies radical/critical research into categories (e.g., overarching reviews, studies on the coercive capacity of police, police violence and homicides, working conditions of police, and the history of police) and offers a critique of each category.
In “A House Divided: Corrections in Conflict,” (chapter 8) Angela West Crews updates and extends Michael Welch’s original chapter “Critical Criminology, Social Control, and an Alternative View of Corrections,” and integrates a decades worth of research and current affairs that have affected jails, prisons, and prisoners. She reviews the growth of corrections and the staggering numbers and rates related to incarceration in the United States. West Crews also examines the consequences of the race to incarcerate, and suggests lessons from the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo incarceration experiences. Therapeutic jurisprudence, problem-solving justice, and restorative justice are explored for their potential to provide alternatives to incarceration, and the latest preoccupation with release and reentry among some policymakers is critiqued.
Stephen C. Richards’ “A Convict Criminology Perspective on Community Punishment: Further Lessons from the Darkness of Prison,” (chapter 9) is a revision of his original essay “Critical and Radical Perspectives on Community Punishment: Lessons from the Darkness.” It provides a critical critique of the traditional/utilitarian, and liberal studies on community corrections and argues for the adoption of a broader critical approach to the subject matter. Richards documents how the critical criminology literature has improved with the inclusion of feminist and peacemaking perspectives. By adding the convict criminology perspective, the research is finally incorporating the voices of prisoners in the community.
Chapter 10, “The Potential for Fundamental Change in Juvenile Justice: Implementing an Alternative Approach to Problem Youth,” is authored by Preston Flood. Flood updates his original chapter from the first edition of this book by providing a historical overview of the juvenile justice research, looking at the failure of conservative and liberal juvenile justice policy, and puts forward not only “the key ingredients of humane and effective juvenile justice intervention,” but also the politics involved in implementing successful strategies in this policy sphere.
Chapter 11, “Razing the Wall: A Feminist Critique of Sentencing Theory, Research, and Policy,” is written by Jeanne Flavin. Since the sixties and seventies, much concern has been voiced over the possibility of gender and racial discrimination in sentencing. Although the topic has been widely studied, the findings from scores of sentencing studies are inconclusive, in part because the line between disparity (or justifiable difference) and discrimination is blurry. In this chapter, Flavin provides a critical examination of mainstream approaches to sentencing which have been based on androcentric assumptions and similarly flawed methodology. She also argues that attempts at legislating “neutrality” through gu...

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