Table Of ContentCritical
Criminology
Issues, debates, challenges
KERRY CARRINGTON and
RUSSELL HOGG
13
I v
Critical Criminology
This book is dedicated to the memory of Ian Taylor 1944-2001.
Critical Criminology
Issues, debates, challenges
Edited by Kerry Carrington and Russell Hogg
13 Routledge
Taylor & Francis Croup
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published by Willan Publishing 2002
This edition published by Routledge 2011
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ISBN 13:978-1-903240-69-4 (cased)
ISBN 13: 978-1-903240-68-7 (paper)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset by PDQ Typesetting, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire
Contents
Preface by Elliott Currie
Acknowledgements
About the authors
1 Critical criminologies: an introduction
Kerri/ Carrington and Russell Hogg
PART 1 ISSUES AND DEBATES IN CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY
2 Defining 'power' and challenging 'knowledge': critical analysis
as resistance in the UK 15
Phil Scraton
3 Critical criminology in the United States: the Berkeley School
and theoretical trajectories 41
Herman Schwendinger, Julia R. Schwendinger and Michael J. Lynch
4 'Losing my religion': reflections on critical criminology in
Australia 73
David Brown
5 Feminism and critical criminology: confronting genealogies 114
Kerri/ Carrington
Critical Criminology
PART II NEW DIRECTIONS AND CHALLENGES FOR CRITICAL
CRIMINOLOGY
6 For a psychosocial criminology 145
Tony Jefferson
7 Critical criminology and the punitive society: some new
'visions of social control' 168
John Pratt
8 Criminology beyond the nation state: global conflicts, human
rights and the 'new world disorder' 185
Russell Hogg
9 Left, right or straight ahead: contemporary prospects for
progressive and critical criminology 218
Judith Bessant
10 Critical criminology? In praise of an oxymoron and its enemies 243
Pat Carlen
11 Critical criminology in the twenty-first century: critique, irony
and the always unfinished 251
Jock Young
General index 275
Name index 284
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Preface
by Elliott Currie
When I first sat down to review this manuscript, what struck me most
immediately was not the articles but the contributors' biographies.
Between books and other writings, teaching, public service, and social
activism, the diverse group of international scholars who have made this
volume possible have, quite simply, done a lot. Individually and
collectively, theirs is a record of strong accomplishment and accumulated
usefulness. By the same token, those biographies stand as a record of
how far 'critical criminology' has come in the roughly three decades since
its beginnings.
A thorough reading of the chapters of this book reinforces the
impression of a movement in criminology that has, in a very real sense,
come of age. This book doesn't simply offer a description of some of the
main currents and issues in critical criminology at the start of the new
millennium - though it does do that, and does it well. It also represents
the mature self-reflection of some of the most talented scholars in the
field - scholars who are not shy about acknowledging the strengths and
successes of progressive criminology, but also not afraid to question its
trajectory and to confront its failures. There is no party line here; the
contributors don't all speak with the same voice, but what links their
diverse perspectives is a willingness to apply a critical lens not only to the
work of their more conventional counterparts in the discipline but their
own as well.
That sense of a movement mature enough to challenge itself is also
apparent in the reach of some of the articles into largely uncharted areas
that criminologists, critical and otherwise, have generally neglected in the
Critical Criminology
past - including, among others, Russell Hogg's wide-ranging explora
tions into the impact of globalisation on a variety of criminological
concerns, and Tony Jefferson's probing and thoughtful attempt to bring
psychology 'back in' to a progressive criminology. These pieces, and
others, break new ground and take us several steps down roads that
criminology has, up to now, been hesitant to travel. And, again, they
reveal a kind of criminological imagination that is able and willing to
break free of old constraints and look at the problems of crime and
punishment with fresh eyes.
That kind of criminological imagination has always been a great
strength of the movement we loosely call critical criminology, but it has
arguably never been as necessary as it is today, as we confront the new
intellectual and political challenges that are raised by an increasingly
volatile and interconnected planet: the challenge of creating justice
systems permeated by respect for human rights in a world where those
rights are threatened at every turn by the proliferation of autocratic and/
or failed regimes and of predatory and punitive ideologies; the challenge
of creating and maintaining safe, vibrant and respectful communities in
the face of global economic forces that threaten to erode communal
stability and widen the inequality that is so often at the root of
criminality; the challenge - noted by several contributors - of effectively
confronting new forms of global violence while simultaneously promot
ing democracy and accountability in our institutions of criminal justice;
and more. Handling those challenges is not, of course, something that
criminologists, critical or otherwise, can take on by themselves. But in the
broader movement for a just and secure world in the twenty-first
century, progressive criminology should have an important and
necessary place.
We may sometimes underestimate the role that the critical crimin
ological imagination has already played in that respect. But in fact another
sign of progressive criminology's coming of age is that it has inspired, or
at the very least influenced, many of the organisations whose work has
done the most to enhance justice around the world in the past twenty
years - both in the negative sense of having held the line against some of
the worst excesses of the increasingly punitive thrust of crime policy in
many countries and, more positively, in significantly affecting public
opinion on issues ranging from sentencing policy to the treatment of
juvenile offenders, from health services in prisons to the response to
domestic violence. Organisations like the Sentencing Project, the Justice
Policy Institute, and the Eisenhower Foundation in the United States;
NACRO and Penal Reform International in England; and their counter
parts in Australia and elsewhere have tenaciously - and often
Preface
successfully - fought to put a progressive view of crime and punishment
on the political agenda and to keep it there despite enormous pressures
to bury it. There is much to be proud of in that record, and much work
ahead. And that work will need the steady infusion of the kind of
engaged critical thinking so evident in this book.
Finally, I'd like to say how pleased I am that this book is dedicated to
the memory of Ian Taylor. As many of the articles in this collection make
abundantly clear, Ian was indisputably one of the most important
founding influences on critical criminology, and one of its strongest and
sanest voices throughout his professional life. He was also a dear friend
and one of the best intellectual companions I ever had. It is a great loss to
all of us that Ian is not here to read these articles. But I am sure he would
be pleased.
Elliott Currie
School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University
Legal Studies Program, University of California, Berkeley
May, 2002
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