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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Critical Criminology

Introduction, historical background.

Defining Crime and Critical Criminology
Constitutive Criminology/Deconstruction/Postmodernism/Semiotics
Marxism and Law
Marxist Criminology
Cultural Criminology
Green Criminology/Toxic Crimes
Left-Realist Criminology
Masculinities/Feminist Criminology/Structured Action
Anarchism/Humanism/Newsmaking/Peacemaking
General Economic Conditions and Crime
Empirical Studies of Economic Effects on Crime
Juvenile Delinquency
Alternative Theoretical and Empirical Developments in Critical Criminology
Rape and Violence
State Crime
State-Corporate Crime
Corporate Crime
Transnational/International/Global Corporate Crime
Nuclear Crimes of the State
War-related Crime and Deviance
General Approaches to Critical Penal Theory
Punishment and Economy: Theoretical Issues
Empirical Studies
The History of Policing
Race and Policing
Policing, Ideology, and Culture
General Critical Orientations Toward Law
Historical Analysis of Law
Empirical Analyses of Law
Marxist Interpretations of Law
Social Justice

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

Education Programs in Prison
Mixed Methods Research in Criminal Justice and Criminology
Victim Impact Statements
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Critical Criminology by Michael J. Lynch LAST REVIEWED: 01 August 2014 LAST MODIFIED: 15 February 2010 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396607-0064

Like orthodox criminology, critical criminology has developed numerous specialties, and thus it is no longer possible to describe a generic critical criminology, or to succinctly summarize this view. For this reason, this entry excludes coverage of portions of critical criminology such as critical race/racial bias, feminist criminology, violence against women, postmodern/semiotic/constitutive criminology, cultural criminology, convict criminology, and environmental justice and environmental/green criminology. Despite growing specialization, the field of critical criminology is united in its emphasis on addressing power differentials, hierarchies, and inequalities as explanations of crime, as these impact the distribution of crime over time and place, and in relation to definitions of crime and justice and processes of doing justice, as these impact the making and enforcing of laws. These power differentials also mold intermediary cultures and their relations to crime and justice. In addition, a number of critical criminology perspectives attempt to promote economic, social, and political equity to diminish the production of crime and disparities in the making and enforcement of law. Some seek to do so by empowering victims and marginalized groups, and it is this commitment to the powerless and marginalized that distinguishes critical from orthodox criminology. The bibliographic material that follows is organized to best reflect the limited segment of critical criminology that can adequately be addressed here.

The critical criminology movement began in the early 1970s ( Taylor, et al. 1974 ), with studies focused primarily on political-economic and class analysis ( Michalowski 1985 ; Reiman and Leighton 2009 ; Shelden 2001 ), and it exhibited a decidedly Marxist orientation ( Quinney 1980 ; Lynch and Michalowski 2006 ; Balkan, et al. 1980 ). Known by a number of names—left, socialist, radical, critical, Marxist, the new criminology ( Bohm 1982 )—the “criminologies of the left” were gathered under the title “critical criminology” in the late 1980s to recognize the variety of emerging perspectives ( Michalowski 1996 ). Today, a host of perspectives are associated with critical criminology: radical, political-economic, left-realist, postmodern and semiotic, newsmaking, cultural, critical race, feminist, constitutive, restorative-justice, Marxist, anarchist, convict, and peacemaking (see Defining Crime and Critical Criminology ). These approaches span several topics that distinguish critical criminology and orthodox criminological research, including social justice; corporate, state, and state-corporate crime ( Box 1984 ); and environmental justice.

Balkan, Sheila, Ronald J. Berger, and Janet Schmidt. 1980. Crime and deviance in America: A critical approach . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Though dated, this is perhaps one of the best and most overlooked textbooks on Marxist criminology, providing an exceptional introduction to the topic.

Bohm, Robert M. 1982. Radical criminology: An explication. Criminology 19.4: 565–589.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-9125.1982.tb00439.x

Lays out the important similarities and differences between radical criminologists, and addresses deficiencies and inaccuracies in the orthodox criminological critique of radical criminology.

Box, Steven. 1984. Power, crime, and mystification . London and New York: Tavistock.

A wide-ranging analysis of the applications of Marxist criminology that explores the creation of law and corporate crime. In its day, one of the best books of its type, and it still holds up despite the dated empirical examples.

Lynch, Michael J., and Raymond J. Michalowski. 2006. A primer in radical criminology: Critical perspectives on crime, power, and identity . 4th ed. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.

Provides an in-depth examination of contemporary radical criminology, emphasizing economic explanations. Chapters 1 through 4 examine this theoretical orientation, while the remaining chapters include applications to various topics: theories of crime (chapters 5, 6, and 7), environmental crime (chapter 8), state crime and terrorism (chapter 9), policing (chapter 10), courts (chapter 11), correction and punishment (chapter 12), and future issues (chapter 13). Originally published in 1986.

Michalowski, Raymond J. 1985. Order, law, and crime: An introduction to criminology . New York: Random House.

One of the most extensive and useful examinations of radical criminology, written at the height of the popularity of this approach. Section 1 explores how social orders define and respond to crime. Section 2 applies these insights to the United States and the United Kingdom. Section 3 examines criminal justice institutions in the United States.

Michalowski, Raymond J. 1996. Critical criminology and the critique of domination: The story of an intellectual movement. Critical Criminology 7:9–16.

DOI: 10.1007/BF02461091

The history of critical criminology is bound together with the critique of domination this perspective supplies. This article employs this relationship to traces the history of critical criminology in North America.

Quinney, Richard. 1980. Class, state, and crime: On the theory and practice of criminal justice . 2d ed. New York: Longman.

A classic work that defines many of the issues that critical criminology addresses, written by one of its most influential contributors. An excellent starting point for understanding early radicalism within criminology.

Reiman, Jeffrey, and Paul Leighton. 2009. The rich get richer and the poor get prison . 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

One of the best-known and most widely read radical analyses of the problem of crime, criminal justice, and imprisonment in relation to class conflict and ideology. An excellent starting point for understanding critical criminology, especially its radical variant derived from Marxism. Originally published in 1979 (New York: Wiley). In all editions prior to the 9th, Jeffrey Reiman was the sole author.

Shelden, Randall G. 2001. Controlling the dangerous classes: A critical introduction to the history of criminal justice . Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

A good introduction to class analysis of the history of criminal justice. Proposes that historical documents, which are written from the perspective of the powerful or wealthy, illustrate the long-term tendency of criminal justice processes to focus on the lower class, which comes to be defined as dangerous.

Taylor, Ian, Paul Walton, and Jock Young. 1974. The new criminology: For a social theory of deviance . New York: Harper and Row.

This book is often credited with establishing the field of critical criminology. A book that must be read to understand the origins and development of critical criminology. It develops extensive critiques of mainstream theories and offers radical alternatives to those explanations.

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10. Critical Criminology

10.4 Emergent Elements of Critical Criminology

Kevin Walby and Kelly Gorkoff

This next section focuses on three emergent elements in critical criminology: one we believe is core to the area of contemporary critical criminology and two that can contribute to critical criminology and are methodological in orientation. The first has to do with the expansion of discussions of police and penal abolition (and relatedly, convict criminology ). The second pertains to the use of freedom of information (FOI) requests and computational methods in criminology and criminal justice studies, which are both investigative techniques that have major methodological implications for performing critical criminology research.

Police and Penal Abolition

When one thinks of abolition, they likely think about abolishing prison before abolishing police. Prison abolition, sometimes called penal abolition, focuses on the whole set of sanctions, rules and punishments involved in institutional and community corrections. However, the idea of police abolition has recently become more popular. Since the police killing of George Floyd in May of 2020, police abolition has become a frequent and popular topic of public discussion. Police abolitionists argue that public police exist only to enforce social order. Public police do not provide real safety, though they cause much harm through violence, racism, and corruption. Here we elaborate on some of the roots of police and penal abolition while discussing contemporary developments. At its theoretical core, much abolitionist work draws on both Marxist and Foucauldian conceptions that posit criminal justice systems as part of the social structure and discourse.

Discussions about police abolition have roots in the Black radical tradition in the United States, and the Black feminist tradition. Police abolition was also a core feature of the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party and movement called for more community responses rather than state responses to transgression and critiques of the violence of the state articulated through police (Jeffries, 2002). A number of Black feminist scholars, from Beth Richie (2012) to Andrea Ritchie (2017) among others building on the work of Angela Davis (2011), have been calling for police abolition for some time and in regard to particular transgressions such as violence against women and domestic violence. Thus, even for these types of transgressions, the Black feminist tradition recognises that police often cause more harm, and amplify harm, to women in these scenarios.

Before 2020 in Canada, a very important work, Policing Black Lives by Robyn Maynard (2017), was published. Maynard’s book called for police defunding and abolition, arguing the police are an institution that upholds white supremacy and does not address transgression in a way that decreases harm. Instead, policing increases harm, and state violence and police as an instrument of state violence need to be reduced and dismantled. This explicitly abolitionist work then became important in the spring and summer of 2020 when the police abolition movement in Canada and the United States flourished in mass mobilisation and protests against police.

In the two years since that mass mobilisation against police, a number of other important abolitionist works have emerged. In Canada, for instance, Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada , edited by Diverlus, Hudson and Ware (2020), is an abolitionist work focusing on the intersection of social control and white supremacy in our society. Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada , edited by Pasternak, Walby, and Stadnyk (2022), brings together activists and academics to explain why police abolition is necessary to move toward a free and just society. And Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide by Ardath Whynacht (2021) adopts an abolitionist view to assess the failures of policing to address the most serious forms of harm and transgression in our society.

These works do not all identify as criminology and are not popular within the discipline of criminology as they represent a critique of its orthodoxy. However, we would argue that an abolitionist approach fits well among Marxist and Foucauldian concepts that ground critical criminology. Similarly, we could claim that Purnell’s (2021) Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom in the United States is adjacent to criminology and criminal law. Most criminologists would not have heard of it, unless they pay attention to abolition. Yet we would argue that Purnell’s text has much to offer regarding why even people who work in the criminal justice system should take abolition seriously. This is among the works that should be incorporated into critical criminology as it adopts more of an abolitionist point of view. Purnell is someone who has experience working in the criminal justice system. It is from those experiences that they developed an abolitionist perspective.

There are some criminological works that do provide an abolitionist perspective. For instance, McDowell’s (2019) article on insurgent safety theorises alternatives to policing and argues that state-sponsored social control fails to provide real safety against harm/transgression and fails to reduce it. They argue that community-based safety is the only way to reduce harm/transgression and achieve safety. Fernandez (2019) likewise argues that critical sociology and critical criminology should adopt an abolitionist perspective. McDowell and Fernandez (2018) wrote about the practice of police abolition in the journal Critical Criminology . This is a landmark article for discussions of police abolition, which shows that this topic predated the 2020 mass mobilisations against police and that there is an affinity between discussions of police abolition and critical criminology. This article makes a compelling case for disbanding, disempowering and disarming police and argues that criminologists should orient their research agendas in this regard. Alex Vitale’s (2017) The End of Policing makes the argument that police fail to reduce harm/transgression. Vitale argues that police reform (making changes to the existing structure of policing) is a failed endeavour and reforming police actually allows them to accumulate more resources for police and less to community-based safety. It never changes the institution. This is a common argument against reform made by several critical criminologists who claim that the system works as it is supposed to work to support the relations of marginalisation and capitalist power (Lynch, 2000; Colaguori, 2005; Gordon, 2005). There is also Siegel’s (2017) work on abolitionist police history and police work as violence work. All these contributions demonstrate the affinity between a police abolitionist approach and critical criminology and are among the major contributing schools of thought in the abolitionist line of argumentation.

Prison abolition and penal abolition are more well-known in criminology compared to police abolition contributions back to the 1970s. Claire Culhane was a prominent prison abolitionist in Canada who began her work in 1974 when she became a teacher in a provincial prison for women. She became an activist and advocate for human and legal rights of prisoners and was a founding member of the Vancouver activist group Prisoners’ Rights Group and hosted a cable TV show called Instead of Prisons. In Culhane’s (1991) book No Longer Barred from Prison , she made connections between the politics of imprisonment and the socio-economic practices of the state. She argued that the reliance on imprisonment for addressing social problems speaks more to our failure as a society to provide for all its members than it does to success in maintaining public safety.

The most well-known prison abolition works are those of Thomas Mathiesen, who in the 1970s and 80s argued for prison and penal abolition. Mathiesen (1974) offers some useful concepts. For example, Mathiesen focuses on positive and negative reforms and argues it is not contradictory for abolitionists or critical scholars to advocate for negative reforms , that is reforms that diminish the power of the state and diminish the power of carceral institutions. However, it is contradictory to argue for positive reforms or reforms that do add to the power of the carceral state. Mathiesen also gives us the concept of the unfinished . Mathiesen argues there is no precise or exact formula for abolitionist inquiry or activism. Instead, there is a terrain of shifting tactics and strategies. Questions of negative reform and penal power constantly emerge. The project of abolition is ongoing and requires constant struggle and analysis.

The works of Mathiesen have inspired a generation of penal abolitionists. In Canada, the works of Justin Piché (2014) are explicitly abolitionists and have focused on penal and carceral abolition. These works focus on penal expansion, and prison and jail construction/development. Piché has noted that there are shifting targets of penal and carceral abolition that may extend toward immigration detention practices (Piché & Larsen, 2010). Nicolas Carrier has written about the blind spots of abolitionist thinking, and the need for penal abolitionists to think seriously about the kinds of limit cases or the most difficult cases for abolitionists to address. These would include mass murderers or offenders who hurt children (Carrier & Piché, 2015a, 2015b). Carrier pushes abolitionists thinking to address the toughest cases, not the lower hanging fruit such as crimes related to poverty or disorder, Piché et al. (2019) and Carrier et al. (2019) have provided a history of penal abolition scholarship in Canada (also see Walby, 2011).

There are other penal abolitionists outside of Canada who have contributed to this school of thought that criminologists should be aware of and that critical criminologists should engage with. In the United States, McLeod (2015) argued that prison abolition should be an accepted perspective within legal studies and criminal law and argued that prison abolition is necessary for justice to exist in the world. Saleh-Hannah (2017) argues that abolitionist approaches to prison must take seriously the issues of racial justice and gender that feminists and critical race scholars have pointed to (see 4 Race and Crime ). An abolitionist perspective that does not account for other forms of domination, such as racism and sexism would not be a complete abolitionist theory. Complete penal abolition needs to account also for racial domination and gender domination.

Consistent with critical criminologists’ contention that rethinking what we perceive as normal is necessary, critical scholars and activists focus on ways to undo these infrastructures and institutions not only physically but mentally. This requires us to develop new ways of speaking about and responding to harm/transgression, which is a common theme across police and prison abolitionist work. It also reminds us of the ideas of how ideology and hegemonic thinking about crime needs to be unravelled. Whalley & Hackett (2017) argued that feminist scholars need to take penal abolition more seriously because any kind of carceral feminism , or feminism that advocates for police and prison responses to things like gendered violence, is contradictory and undermines the goal of both feminism and critical/ abolitionist criminology to live in a world free of domination. Whalley and Hackett (2017) make a strong argument for the abolitionist project and against carceral feminism that Garland outlined in Culture of Control . Similar to Carrier, Davis & Rodriguez (2000) argue that prison abolition does involve challenges, such as how to respond to a transgression and how to respond to harm that occurs in the community. These are key questions that police in prison abolitionists and penal abolitionists must address.

Brown & Schept (2017) argued that there is a new abolition emerging in critical criminology and critical carceral studies in the United States. They argue that this approach brings together critical geography and critical criminology. For example, Brankamp’s (2022) article on the humanitarian border and immigration migration camps and detention centres is part of this new abolition. Whether this is a new abolition or an extension of current discussions of penal/carceral abolition is an open question. Brown and Schept (2017) do not point to the Canadian or UK work in this area when advancing these claims about new abolitionist schools of thought. The point is that there is a movement to go beyond prison abolition and focus on penal, and carceral abolition, which would include all kinds of carceral sites that need to be investigated and confronted. This is consistent with Marx and Foucault who argued that the criminal justice system is entwined with other social formations, discourses, and institutions and social transformation cannot happen in one system alone.

There are also some adjacent works that do not explicitly identify as abolitionist, but provide compelling tools and arguments in this vein. For instance, Pemberton’s (2007) work on social harm is useful for showing how prisons and police create social harm. Instead of being conceived as a response to harm, it is argued that they create social harm in numerous ways including harming entire communities and neighbourhoods that become criminalized. The concept of social harm is useful for thinking about the negative consequences of the criminal justice system and also for introducing some language not based on the ideological language of crime and criminal law, which reproduces stereotypes (like the discourse of “the criminal” discussed above) and assumptions regarding who is engaging in harm/transgression.

Clear’s (2009) Imprisoning Communities is an incredibly important book on how imprisonment creates more harm than it avoids. Using quantitative data, Clear demonstrates that imprisonment undoes social bonds in neighbourhoods and communities where criminalization is high. Imprisonment increases divorce rates, decreases education rates, decreases employment rates, and dissolves the community. Pemberton’s (2007) notion of social harm and Clear’s (2009) notion of imprisoning communities show that prisons and jails are not only failed institutions in the sense that they fail to produce rehabilitation at an individual level, but they are damaging and harmful institutions at a social level because they have the capacity to damage entire communities and neighbourhoods where policing and criminalisation is high, often in already marginalised and racialised communities.

Hil & Robertson (2003) wrote about the future of critical criminology and the need to continue the project undertaken early on by those studying “new deviancy” to create different terminology and language that is an alternative to criminology itself. Today, it is difficult to imagine critical criminology without the terms and insights that police abolition and penal abolition work has provided. The future of critical criminology needs this abolitionist work to truly provide not only an alternative to criminology but an alternative to the criminal justice system. One major difference between abolitionist critical criminology and some forms of critical criminology which remain mostly analytical, is that it is engage and scholar activist oriented. Abolitionist critical criminology provides analyses and it provides investigations, but it also advocates for material change. It follows the path of critical social sciences with a focus on deconstructing dominant knowledge and engaging in social transformation by questioning taken-for-granted ways of thinking or knowing.

Convict Criminology

Another important approach somewhat connected to abolitionist work is convict criminology. Convict criminology is an approach to criminology that privileges the voices and standpoints of persons who have been criminalised or who have been affected by the criminal justice system (Richards & Ross, 2001). Experiential people combine their time inside prisons with their academic knowledge to provide new insights into the operation of the criminal justice system. Convict criminology began two decades ago (Jones et al., 2009) and was largely a US-based approach bringing together scholars who had experience behind bars or experience being criminalised to use their insights as a platform for analysing the criminal justice system and exploring the power relations involved in the criminal justice apparatus. Using ethnographic methods and empirical research, they highlight the destructive impact of prisons and penality from an experiential position.

Convict criminology has now branched out and become a global phenomenon (Ross et al., 2014). What is important about this expansion is that convict criminologists in different countries are uniquely positioned to shed light on and investigate the criminal justice system in each country, and to provide comparative insights. The works of convict criminology are experiential and provide insights from inside prisons and jails, which is important because scholarly criminological work that is more or less based on deductive academic concepts can not only be wrong, but also be harmful and alienating to people who have experienced the harms of the criminal justice system. Rather than providing a deductive armchair approach, convict criminology provides a more inductive and immanent understanding of criminal justice processes. The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons is the official journal publication of convict criminology. Today, it is almost impossible to think about what critical criminology would be without including convict criminologists and the kinds of inquiries they provide.

In sum, abolitionist thinking provides the alternative to criminology and the criminal justice system that critical criminology should be seeking. Convict criminology provides experiential voices that are pivotal to critical criminological studies.

New Research Tools for Critical Criminology

In addition to the vast range of empirical and ethnographic methods of research used by critical criminologists, many methods of critical criminology are anti-positivist in orientation. This means the use of the scientific method or natural science methods (see 5 Methods and Counting Crime ) is viewed as problematic in the social sciences because according to Habermas (1967), the social has a symbolically pre-structured reality which cannot be considered objective. This concept is parallel to what Foucault claimed – that what we think of as normal or observable is not always what it seems and is often embedded with power relations. Therefore, critical criminology requires an orientation to research that recognises this.

Most critical criminology uses historical ethnography , qualitative methods , institutional ethnography , and critical discourse analyses , which we will not explore here. In addition, many critical researchers realise that the trustworthiness or credibility of interviews with police or corrections workers can often be low. To overcome this concern, the records of related government agencies need to be examined to identify broad patterns. This would allow research to work around the rhetoric or clouded information that criminal justice agencies make public which has been argued to be a form of camouflage used to protect their own interests and budgets (Mussel et al., 2022; Piché et al., 2017). Based on this concern, two methodological developments can aid in critical criminological research: the use of FOI requests and the use of computational methods . We argue that these methodological considerations should be considered as part of the future of critical criminology.

First, more critical criminologists are turning to FOI requests as a form of qualitative research to investigate state and criminal justice practices. FOI requests allow access to state records that would otherwise not be disclosed (Walby & Luscombe, 2017, 2019). These records could include anything from planning and budget documents to meeting minutes to emails between criminal justice officials and occurrence reports of police officers and prison guards. As a number of works have found, FOI requests can provide illuminating investigative accounts of criminal justice. In Canada, the works of Justin Piché (Piché et al., 2017; Piché, 2011, 2012) have used FOI to compare front stage rhetoric (or what we see in the public) to the backstage practices (what really goes on) of prisons and jails. FOI has been used to investigate paid duty or special duty policing (Lippert et al., 2019) and to police militarisation and SWAT team deployment (Roziere & Walby, 2020). FOI research has been used to address police responses to social movements and police surveillance of social movements, notably in the work of Jeffrey Monaghan (Monaghan & Walby, 2012a, 2012b). This method allows for the release of information about the nature of state action and inaction and provides evidence of changes in criminal justice work and the nature of state power.

For example, Roziere and Walby (2020) gathered FOI data on the deployment of SWAT teams by Canadian police. They found that, contrary to police communications, the use of SWAT teams in major Canadian cities has escalated, and they are used in routine law enforcement activities such as traffic enforcement and in responding to mental health crises. This is critical evidence that police in Canada are becoming increasingly militarised.

As some of this research has made clear, there are benefits to using FOI in critical criminology and investigative research more generally. Luscombe and Walby (2015) have advocated for using FOI in conjunction with other investigative techniques, such as computational social science (also see Luscombe et al., 2017), another emerging research method (Luscombe et al., 2022; Luscombe et al., in press; Williams & Burnap, 2016; Al-Zaidy et al., 2012). Here we argue that critical criminology can harness the power of computational social science to add another investigative tool to its methodological toolkit. Computational social science involves using computers to model, simulate and analyse social phenomena, and to assess patterns and trends in working with big data. Big data could be anything from corporate databases or government data, which could be obtained using FOI (Luscombe & Walby, 2022). Or it could be any other kind of open-source record from government deliberations to social media data. This could include studying image data from newspapers or social media, police news releases, or legal decisions spanning decades. It could also include scraping websites, which involve writing a computer code that scans through websites to collect select data. The point is one wants to work with a gigantic dataset that could not feasibly be examined by humans using discourse or content analysis.

In computational research, what one does is write a code (using R or Python) to perform different tasks on the dataset that reveal something about trends or patterns in that data. For example, one approach is topic modelling. Topic modelling gives one a sense of the various topics emerging and their frequency in a large dataset. Others are sentiment analysis (SA) and social media sentiment analysis (SMSA) or “opinion mining”, which allows one to trace out the sentiments or emotional terminology appearing in, for example, a large social media dataset. This could reveal how certain speakers or authors are framing, or discussing a social issue such as transgression, crime or responses to these phenomena. Prichard and colleagues (2015) argue that SMSA is a powerful tool for researching public attitudes toward crime and crime control and can summarise publicly expressed thoughts, beliefs and arguments about what behaviour is criminalised, how categories of criminals are perceived and how police operate.

An example of this method is found in research focusing on attitudes toward the health of incarcerated people during the COVID-19 pandemic as it relates to prison reform (Ramjee et al.,2022). Utilising SA to assess emotions and opinions in newspapers, they found support for the urgency of criminal justice reform in the USA as it related to the health of racialized minorities who were incarcerated.

These computational techniques alone do not necessarily provide a definitive investigative outcome, but what they do is tell critical criminologists where to look in a large dataset. They can tell critical criminologists what is happening in a certain area of practice with a certain set of records, which the critical criminologist can then explore more deeply in depth using other investigative and qualitative techniques.

Computational research requires a particular skill set that involves computer coding and even some quantitative techniques. But we would argue that when it comes to critical criminology, what computational social science can add is insights about where to look for what is happening with records (Luscombe et al., 2022; Luscombe & Walby, 2022). Narrowing down exactly where certain trends or patterns are emerging in a large data set is useful for making particular arguments and conclusions about the criminal justice system. Computational social science also allows researchers to work with the increasingly prevalent forms of online and digital data. More digital data are produced every month and computational research is designed to pry open big data and see what trends and patterns are there. A more digital information flows become integrated into criminal justice work practices, computational social science will become an increasingly important tool for critical criminologists.

FOI requests and computational social science techniques provide investigative tools that can be useful to a critical criminologist. It is not surprising that investigative journalists are increasingly using FOI requests and computational social science techniques because they are also encountering barriers to traditional investigative techniques like interviewing or keeping insider sources. We argue that critical criminology should move in the same direction. FOI requests, computational techniques, and other investigative techniques should be used to both examine state criminal justice practices and confront them.

We have argued that police and penal abolition should be central to critical criminology, and that critical criminology should embrace police and penal abolitionist works even if they do not explicitly identify as criminological. These works on police and penal abolition provide insights into criminal justice practices and alternatives to both criminology and the criminal justice system which we have argued critical criminology is all about. It is not surprising that police and penal abolitionist works have provided such a useful set of terms and insights for resisting not only the criminal justice system but criminology itself, precisely because many of these works are located outside the discipline of criminology and outside the institutional networks that exist between the criminal justice system in criminology.

We have also argued that FOI requests and computational social science can provide methodological tools for critical criminologists to use to investigate criminal justice practices and institutions. FOI requests and computational techniques are promising investigative tools. They have limits and barriers, but they provide an alternative to positivist methods and overcome some of the limits associated with qualitative research methods.

an approach to criminology that privileges the voices and standpoint of persons who have been criminalized or who have been system affected.

making changes or slight modifications to the existing structure of policing but keeping the original purpose of police.

reforms that diminish the power of the state and diminish the power of carceral institutions.

an abolitionist concept capturing the idea that abolition is ongoing and requires constant struggle and analysis.

feminism that advocates for police and prison responses to things like gendered violence, sexual assault, child abuse, etc.

arguments and research examining the harms of criminal justice institutions of police and prisons and the attempts to dismantle them and re-think systems to deal with transgression.

method of research where a researcher examines a culture or society or social practice by immersing themselves in the history of experiences for the group or individual they are interested in .

collecting and analyzing data that are non-numerical and focused on the detailed understanding of the subject being researched which can include in-depth interviews, observation, and other non-numerical data.

method of research where a researcher examines a specific institution via in-depth study of all of its elements and practices to identify power relations that structure an experience in the institution and how the institution itself is organized

method of research to explore the connections between the use of language/text and the social and political context within which it occurs.

a tool to use in social science research to investigate state and criminal justice practices that accesses state records that would not otherwise be disclosed.

research methods that involve using computers to model, simulate and analyze social phenomena, and to assess patterns and trends working with big data. Big data could be anything from corporate databases or datasets from the government that could not feasibly be examined by humans using discourse or content analysis.

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Criminal Justice

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Critical criminology.

I. Introduction

Ii. origins of critical criminology, iii. principal strains of critical criminology, iv. emerging strains of critical criminology, v. the substantive concerns of critical criminology, vi. conclusion.

Critical criminology is an umbrella term for a variety of criminological theories and perspectives that challenge core assumptions of mainstream (or conventional) criminology in some substantial way and provide alternative approaches to understanding crime and its control. Mainstream criminology is sometimes referred to by critical criminologists as establishment, administrative, managerial, correctional, or positivistic criminology. Its focus is regarded as excessively narrow and predominantly directed toward individual offenders, street crime, and social engineering on behalf of the state. The critical criminological perspectives reject the claims of scientific objectivity made on behalf of mainstream criminology as well as the privileged status of the scientific method. Although some critical criminologists apply an empirical approach with the use of quantitative analysis, much critical criminology adopts an interpretive and qualitative approach to the understanding of social reality in the realm of crime and its control. The unequal distribution of power or of material resources within contemporary societies provides a unifying point of departure for all strains of critical criminology.

Critical criminologists tend to advocate some level of direct engagement with the range of social injustices so vividly exposed by their analysis and the application of theory to action, or praxis. All the different strains of critical criminology hold forth the possibility of effecting fundamental reforms or transformations within society that promote greater equality and a higher quality of life for the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised, not just the privileged members of society, and a more humane, authentic society for all. The dominant forms of social control—from policing practices to penal policies—are a common target of criticism as central to perpetuating injustices, as profoundly biased, and as counterproductive in terms of achieving positive changes in individuals as well as social conditions.

Crime and its control are major preoccupations of people everywhere. Public perceptions of crime and its control are in many respects distorted by media representations and the agendas of the governing elites. The immense significance of critical criminology, then, lies in its capacity to expose the conventional myths about crime and its control and to provide an alternative basis for understanding these tremendously consequential dimensions of our social existence.

The historical origins of critical criminology, its principal contemporary strains, and some of its major substantive concerns are identified in the paragraphs that follow. In addition, some speculation is offered regarding the future prospects of critical criminology.

Contemporary critical criminology has its roots in a range of theoretical perspectives that have advanced a critique of both the existing conditions in society and the conventional or established theories that claim to explain society, social phenomena, and social behavior. Marxist theory has been one source of inspiration for some influential strains of critical criminology, although it has been a common error to characterize all critical criminologists as Marxists or neo-Marxists. Karl Marx and his close collaborator Friedrich Engels did not develop a systematic criminological theory, but it is possible to extrapolate a generalized Marxist perspective on crime and criminal law from their work. The ownership class is guilty of the worst crime: the brutal exploitation of the working class. Revolution is a form of counterviolence, then, and is both necessary and morally justified. The state and the law itself ultimately serve the interests of the ownership class. Human beings are not by nature egocentric, greedy, and predatory, but they can become so under certain social conditions. Conventional crime is, in essence, a product of extreme poverty and economic disenfranchisement and of “false needs” and the dehumanizing and demoralizing effects of the capitalist system. However, conventional crime is neither an admirable nor an effective means of revolutionary action, and all too often it pits the poor against the poor. Marx also regarded crime as “productive”—perhaps ironically— insofar as it provides employment and business opportunities for many. In an authentically communist society the state and the law will wither away, with the formal law being replaced by a form of communal justice. Human beings will live in a state of harmony and cooperation, without crime.

For most of the history of criminology, rather few criminologists specifically adopted a Marxist framework. The Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger was an exception to this proposition. Although he rejected dogmatic Marxism, Bonger—especially in Criminality and Economic Conditions (1916)—sought to show how a political economy organized around “private property” promoted crime. Some later neo-Marxist or radical criminologists were critical of Bonger for adopting a positivist and empiricist approach to the study of crime and for his attention to the “correction” of lawbreakers, but within the context of his time Bonger was certainly a pioneering figure in recognizing the value of a Marxist framework for the understanding of crime. Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, in Punishment and Social Structure (1939), also drew on a Marxist approach in advancing the thesis that punishment in contemporary society could be viewed as a form of control of the laboring class in a capitalist society. Although Rusche and Kirchheimer were not trained as criminologists, some radical criminologists in a later era drew inspiration from their work. Indeed, some other scholars over the years who were not criminologists have had a significant impact on radical and critical criminologists. For example, the French social historian Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1979), set forth an influential interpretation of the ideological purposes of penal practices that has been quite widely cited by critical criminologists.

Although many sociologists and criminologists continue to recognize the power of some basic dimensions of Marxist theoretical analysis to make sense of the world, it is also indisputably true that any invocation of “Marxist” carries with it a lot of baggage in the form of association with the immense crimes committed—primarily during the 20th century—in the name of a claimed Marxist or communist society. Accordingly, it is difficult for some criminologists to be receptive to the potent explanatory dimensions of Marxist theory and concepts independent of the perverse applications of Marxist analysis in some historical circumstances.

In the American tradition, there have always been people who have recognized that the law and the criminal justice system it produces reflect disproportionately the interests of the privileged. American versions of critical criminology have drawn on a tradition of populism, anarchist thought, the civil rights movement, contemporary feminism, and other progressive endeavors that have challenged the dominance of white men of means, big business, and the status quo in general. At least some early American criminologists reflected such influences. Edwin H. Sutherland was arguably the single most important American criminologist of the 20th century. Although not a radical in a conventional sense, Sutherland was influenced by the American populism of his native Midwest and was outraged by stock market manipulators who helped bring about the famous 1929 stock market crash and the economic depression that followed. In 1939, Sutherland introduced the notion of white-collar crime into the field of criminology. Criminologists up to that time had focused on conventional crime and, disproportionately, the crimes of the poor. Sutherland recognized that the middle and upper classes of society are also significantly involved in criminal endeavors, and he especially examined crimes carried out on behalf of rich and powerful corporations.

Most of the criminology and criminological theory produced into the 1960s addressed the causes of crime and criminality within a framework that did not challenge the legitimacy of the law and the social order. This began to change in the 1960s. Labeling theory, which emerged out of symbolic interactionism, shifted attention away from criminal behavior to the processes whereby some members of society come to be labeled as deviants and criminals and to the consequences of being socially stigmatized. Many critical criminologists were influenced by this approach, although they ultimately criticized it for its focus upon the “microlevel” of social behavior and its relative neglect of the broader societal and political context within which the labeling process occurs.

The 1960s as an era is associated with the intensification of various forms of conflict within society, so it is not surprising that the core theme of conflict received more attention during this era. Thorsten Sellin, a socialist in his youth, produced one early version of a criminological approach that focused on the centrality of conflict in the 1930s, and George Vold subsequently produced a pioneering criminological theory textbook in the 1950s that highlighted the significance of group conflict for the understanding of crime and its control. In the 1960s, Austin Turk, Richard Quinney, and William J. Chambliss (with Robert T. Seidman) introduced influential versions of conflict theories into the field of criminology. Conflict theory focuses on the unequal distribution of power within society as a fundamental starting point for the understanding of crime and its control, with some groups better positioned than others to advance their interests through law. Conflict criminology provided a basic point of departure for radical criminology and, subsequently, critical criminology. Turk has been a proponent of a “nonpartisan” version of conflict theory, which takes the position that the central role of power and authority in defining crime and guiding criminal justice processes can be assessed empirically without identifying with a particular political agenda. Quinney, following the publication of his seminal conflict theory text, The Social Reality of Crime (1970), moved through a number of stages of theory development, from radical to critical to beyond. Chambliss also subsequently became more directly identified with radical and critical criminology.

The era of the 1960s (extending from the late 1960s to the early 1970s) was a period of much social turmoil, including, for example, the emergence of black power, feminist and gay rights movements, and consumer and environmentalist movements; the growing opposition to the Vietnam war; the surfacing of a highly visible counterculture and illicit drug use; and the embracing of radical ideology by a conspicuous segment of college and graduate students. By the late 1960s, a full-fledged radical sociology had emerged that challenged premises, methods, principal concerns, and corporate or governmental affiliations of mainstream sociology. C. Wright Mills (who died prematurely in 1964) was one seminal source of inspiration, and parallel radical approaches were developed in many other cognate disciplines, including history, economics, and political science. All these developments both influenced and were reflected within the field of criminology. Criminologists who became disenchanted with the limitations of a dominant liberal response to the problem of crime, with its emphasis on incremental social reforms and rehabilitation programs, were searching for an alternative approach to understanding crime and criminal justice. Some prominent faculty at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Criminology were key figures in the promotion of a radical criminology, which contributed to the school being shut down in 1974. Herman and Julia Schwendinger, affiliated with this school, published an influential article calling for an expansion of the scope of criminological concern beyond the parameters of state-defined crime and increased attention to other identifiable forms of social harm. However, self-identified radical criminologists continued to encounter many forms of resistance and some barriers to professional advancement. Research funding was less available to support the projects of radical criminologists than it was for mainstream criminological research that was perceived as useful in addressing conventional forms of crime.

A distinctive radical criminology—and a Union of Radical Criminologists—emerged in the early 1970s. Journals such as Crime and Social Justice and Contemporary Crises were important venues for radical criminology scholarship during this time. The Center for Research on Criminal Justice’s The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove (1970) exemplified the radical criminological ideal, insofar as it was an essentially Marxist analysis of the police, collectively written, and oriented toward praxis, with a section on organizing for action. Quinney was surely the best known, most frequently cited, most prolific, and most controversial radical criminologist of this period. In several books published in the 1970s—Critique of Legal Order (1974), Criminology (1979), and Class, State and Crime (1980)—Quinney applied a neo-Marxist interpretation of capitalist society to an understanding of crime and criminal justice. In Critique of Social Order, for example, Quinney argued that law in a capitalist society functions to legitimate the system and to facilitate oppression and exploitation. He asked whether we really need law and whether we might be better off without it. In 1982, Quinney coedited (with Piers Beirne) a noteworthy anthology, Marxism and Law.

By the end of the 1970s, Quinney had become somewhat disenchanted with the conventional concerns of academic scholars and of criminologists specifically. In the years that followed, he pursued a range of projects, often wholly removed from criminological concerns, including explorations in phenomenology; existentialism; critical philosophy; liberation theology; Buddhism; and autobiographical, reflexive work. However, he also made seminal contributions to the establishment (with Harold Pepinsky) of a major strain of critical criminology called peacemaking criminology, and several generations of radical and critical criminologists have drawn inspiration from his work.

Other criminologists during this period also made influential contributions to the establishment of a radical criminology: In the United States they included William J. Chambliss, Tony Platt, Paul Takagi, Elliott Currie, and Raymond J. Michalowski, among others. In many other countries versions of radical criminology surfaced as well. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young’s The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance (1973), which emerged out of meetings of the National Deviancy Conference in the United Kingdom, was a widely read attempt to expose the limitations of existing theories of crime and to construct a new framework based on a recognition of the capacity of the capitalist state to define criminality in ways compatible with the state’s own ends. The authors of this book called for a form of criminological theory and analysis that operated independently and not as a handmaiden to repressive state policies.

By the end of the 1970s, much of the initial radical political and cultural energy of the earlier part of that decade had disintegrated. A book entitled Radical Criminology: The Coming Crises (1980), edited by James Inciardi, was a controversial collection of critical (and appreciative) interpretations of radical criminology. If the radical criminology that emerged during the 1970s was never a fully unified enterprise, it became even more fragmented during the course of the 1980s. Going forward from that period, the term critical criminology increasingly displaced radical criminology, and the emergence of distinctive strains of critical criminology became increasingly evident. Scholars who adhere to these various strains of critical criminology are united in that they draw some basic inspiration from the conflict and neo-Marxist perspectives developed in the 1970s, in their rejection of mainstream positivistic approaches as a means of revealing fundamental truths about crime and criminal justice, and in their commitment to seeking connections between theoretical and empirical work and progressive policy initiatives and action. Although some critical criminologists continue to work within one or the other of the earlier conflict and neo-Marxist perspectives, many others have become more closely identified with critical perspectives that have emerged (or been applied to criminological phenomena) more recently.

The recent era has been regarded as both politically and culturally more conservative than the era of the 1960s, but critical criminology has been a fairly vigorous presence within criminology, despite—or perhaps because of—this less receptive societal environment. The Division on Critical Criminology, which publishes the journal Critical Criminology, has been an especially large division within the American Society of Criminology since its establishment in 1988. Every year, the Division on Critical Criminology attracts recruits among new criminology graduate students who recognize that their ideological orientation and research interests are at odds with those of mainstream criminology.

In the sections that follow, the principal strains of critical criminology are identified and described, along with a number of more recent emerging strains.

A. Peacemaking Criminology

The contemporary form of peacemaking criminology is principally the product of two well-known, prolific, and highly original critical criminologists: Richard Quinney and Harold Pepinsky. They have collaborated to put together the premier reader on the subject, Criminology as Peacemaking (1991). The basic themes of a peacemaking criminology have been concisely identified as follows: connectedness, caring, and mindfulness. Personal suffering and suffering in the world are taken to be inseparable. We should avoid personalizing evil and constructing false schemes that pigeonhole human beings as honorable citizens or reprehensible criminals. Instead, we should focus on our common humanity and choose affirmative ways of reaching out to and interacting with others. Responses to the problem of crime must begin with attending to ourselves as human beings; we need to suffer with the criminal rather than making the criminal suffer for us. Altogether, peacemaking criminology calls for a fundamental transformation in our way of thinking about crime and criminal justice.

Peacemaking criminology is by any measure a heretical challenge to the dominant assumptions of mainstream criminological perspectives. It can be criticized as a form of utopianism, but at a minimum it serves as a provocative antidote to the explicit or implicit cynicism or pessimism of other criminological perspectives. Peacemaking criminology has some affinity with an anarchic or abolitionist criminology, but this latter perspective is more directly associated with the controversial proposition that we would be better off without a formal state (and its laws) and would be better off without prisons and a formal justice system. Peacemaking criminology can also be linked with the expanding restorative justice movement, which calls for a shift away from a retributive justice system that focuses on identifying and punishing perpetrators of crimes and toward a system that focuses on repairing harm through a cooperative endeavor involving the accused, the victim, and the community. The restorative justice approach has been embraced by some portion of the mainstream (and even conservative) community, and at least some critical criminologists believe it has been co-opted by the criminal justice system. Others, however, believe that it continues to have progressive potential. The work of peacemaking criminologists has been directed toward sensitizing people to counterproductive, inherently unjust responses to conventional forms of crime.

B. Postmodernist Criminology

Although a postmodernist criminology has been identified as one strain of critical criminology, postmodern thought itself is by no means necessarily linked with a progressive agenda; on the contrary, much postmodernist thought is viewed as either consciously apolitical or inherently conservative and reactionary.

Any attempt to characterize a postmodernist criminology— or postmodern thought itself—encounters difficulties. It can be best described as a loose collection of themes and tendencies. Postmodernists reject totalizing concepts (e.g., the state), they reject positivism, and they reject the potential of collective action to transform society. Postmodernism contends that modernity is no longer liberating but has become rather a force of subjugation, oppression, and repression. For postmodernism, language plays the central role in the human experience of reality. The postmodernist “deconstruction” of texts exposes the instability and relativity of meaning in the world. Within critical criminology specifically, Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic have produced a pioneering effort—which they call constitutive criminology—to integrate elements of postmodernist thought with the critical criminological project. They are especially concerned with highlighting the role of ideology, discursive practices, symbols, and sense data in the production of meaning in the realm of crime. We must, they contend, understand how those who engage in crime, who seek to control it, and who study it “co-produce” its meaning.

C. Feminist Criminology

This perspective has especially focused on exposing the overall patterns of patriarchialism and male dominance in all realms pertaining to crime and the legal system. Whatever their differences, feminists such as Meda Chesney- Lind, Carol Smart, and Kathleen Daly have been quite united in identifying and opposing social arrangements that contribute to the oppression of women. Direct forms of male violence (e.g., rape and spouse abuse) targeting women inevitably have been a major preoccupation of feminist criminology. In addition to those forms of crime that specifically and directly target females, feminist criminologists have also sought to demonstrate the broader vulnerability of females to a range of crimes not in this category, such as the multinational corporate exploitation of labor in sweatshops in developing countries. At least some feminist criminologists have also focused on the nature of female involvement in criminal behavior and the social and cultural forces that have led to a higher level of female involvement in such activity in the most recent era. Some forms of illegal (and deviant) activity have always involved females to a significant degree, with prostitution and sex work as primary examples. Feminist criminologists who have explored female involvement in sex work have not been unified in their characterization of such female offenders—are they exploited victims or liberated women?—and indeed, no single feminist criminological perspective is uniformly adopted. The focus of criminological research historically has been overwhelmingly directed toward male offenders.

The feminist movement, since the 1970s, has had a significant impact on a wide range of cultural attitudes and social policies, and feminist criminologists have played some role in promoting policies, such as the reform of rape laws to diminish the further victimization of rape victims and the recognition of sexual harassment as a significant offense. They have also played a noteworthy role in the evaluation of the actual effects of such policy initiatives.

D. Left Realism

This perspective emerged largely in Great Britain and Canada in the period after 1985 as a response to the perceived analytical and practical deficiencies of radical criminology, especially in its neo-Marxist form. Jock Young in England and Walter DeKeseredy in Canada have been among the primary promoters of this perspective. Left realists realized that right-wingers were able to largely preempt the crime issue, because the fear of street crime is pervasive and intense and typically has more immediacy than fear of elite crime. Radicals who either ignore street crime or, even worse, are seen as romanticizing street criminals lose all credibility in the eyes of their largest potential constituency. Furthermore, traditional radical criminology does not attend to the fact that the principal victims of street crime are disadvantaged members of society and that conventional crime persists in noncapitalist societies. Left realists also reject one-dimensional interpretations of state crackdowns on street crime that characterize it exclusively as repression. However, left realists vehemently deny that their work leads in the same direction as right realists, and they differ from right realists in many ways: They prioritize social justice over order; reject biogenetic, individualistic explanations of criminality and emphasize structural factors; are not positivistic, insofar as they are concerned with social meaning of crime as well as criminal behavior and the links between lawmaking and lawbreaking; and they are acutely aware of the limitations of coercive intervention and are more likely to stress informal control. Left realist criminology insists on attending to the community as well as the state, the victim as well as the offender. It argues that some traditional criminological research methods can be used to generate research that can serve progressive objectives. Some left realists have focused on the crimes of powerful corporations. Here, however, the tendency has been to call for more regulation and tougher sanctions against lawbreakers who cause immense, demonstrable harm but who have been able to shield themselves from criminalization due to their wealth and influence. Altogether, left realists may be said to advocate policies and practices toward both conventional and corporate crime that are realistic as well as progressive.

The preceding sections identified four principal strains of critical criminology that are quite universally recognized as such. In the following sections, several other strains that are increasingly also acknowledged to be significant strains of critical criminology are identified.

A. Newsmaking Criminology and Public Criminology

Karl Marx famously argued that one should not be content to explain the world; one should change it. It is an enduring complaint about many forms of academic disciplines that they are insular and self-indulgent and make no measurable impact on the “real” world. Certainly they do not contribute to the alleviation of human suffering, in its various manifestations. Critical criminologists may be especially sensitive to this type of critique and the need for some form of praxis whereby “real-world” differences are effected. Newsmaking criminology, as originally promoted by Gregg Barak, calls for direct engagement by critical criminologists with a broad public constituency through actively seeking out opportunities to put across a critical criminological perspective on issues of crime and criminal justice in mass media outlets. Increasingly, of course, it is recognized that efforts to reach a broader audience—especially a younger audience—must involve the Internet. In a somewhat parallel vein, Elliott Currie, among others, has recently promoted a public criminology with a critical dimension. Too much of criminology— including some of critical criminology—is regarded as narrowly focused or adopting terminology and forms of analysis that are comprehensible to only a small number of other (like-minded) criminologists instead of addressing pressing substantive issues such as harmful present criminal justice policies in forms—and forums—capable of reaching a broader public. Such initiatives raise the question of whether newsmaking or public criminologists can realistically expect to inform and engage a public massively resistant to such engagement and largely distracted by a formidable culture of entertainment.

B. Cultural Criminology

The recognition of the profoundly stylistic and symbolic dimension of certain forms of lawbreaking and deviant behavior has been a primary focus of cultural criminology. This critical criminological approach, pioneered by Jeff Ferrell, among others, has sought to provide rich or “thick” descriptions of people who live at the margins of the conventional social order, including, among others, drug users, graffiti writers, motorcyclists, and skydivers, drawing on an ethnographic approach that often involves direct participant observation as well as on autobiographical and journalistic accounts. The “crimes of style” that cultural criminology addresses are best understood in relation to the contested political environment within which they occur and as representations of cultural values that challenge, on various levels, the dominant cultural value system of contemporary society. Some critics have complained that cultural criminologists overempathize with the social deviants and “outlaws” about whom they write and that they fail to adequately appreciate the perspective and legitimate concerns of the members of society charged with addressing their activities. However, cultural criminology provides us with a colorful and multilayered appreciation of a range of marginalized members of society.

C. Convict Criminology

Prison convicts have been a significant focus of criminological concern from the outset. However, a recently established convict criminology puts forth the notion— quite parallel to claims made by gender- and race-focused criminological perspectives—that the authentic experience of prison convicts often fails to fully emerge from the studies of conventional or managerial criminology. Furthermore, people who have served time in prison also offer a unique perspective on correctional reforms. A number of former convicts have become professors of criminology and criminal justice and have published books and articles on the prison experience. At least some of them have become a key part of the development of convict criminology. Their insider knowledge of the world of prisons makes them uniquely qualified to conduct ethnographic studies of prison life. They might also be said to have an extra measure of credibility in claims that existing policies of incarcerating huge numbers of nonviolent offenders, including many low-level drug offenders, and then subjecting them to demeaning and counterproductive conditions, do not work and should be abandoned. Convict criminology accordingly adopts core themes of critical criminology in calling for understanding crime and its control from the bottom up and in exposing the profound limitations of public policies imposed on a profoundly disadvantaged segment of the population.

D. Critical Race Criminology

If gender has been one significant variable in relation to crime and criminal justice, race has certainly been another. Accordingly, some critical criminologists have focused on both the historical role of racism in producing discriminatory treatment toward people of color in all aspects of crime and criminal justice as well as the role that enduring (if less manifestly obvious) forms of racism continue to play in promoting images of criminals and policies and practices in processing criminal offenders. It is well-known that racial minorities—and African American men in particular—are greatly overrepresented in the correctional system, and some of the work of critical race criminologists is directed toward demonstrating how this overrepresentation not only reflects embedded racist elements of our criminal law and criminal justice system but also contributes toward supporting a lucrative prison industry.

Beyond the strains of critical criminology discussed earlier, there are some additional emerging strains or proposed strains, although it remains to be seen whether they will be widely embraced and further expanded. Queer criminology explores the manifestations of homophobia in the realm of crime and criminal justice. Green criminology exposes and analyzes social practices and policies that are environmentally harmful. Countercultural criminology calls for addressing the “colonial” issues largely neglected in mainstream criminology and critical criminology. Certainly there is some critical criminological work coming out of developing countries today addressing the crime and crime control issues afflicting these countries and, more typically now, by drawing on indigenous intellectual traditions, as opposed to simply applying Western (Occidental) theories and frameworks. Biocritical criminology is a call for critical criminologists to acknowledge that genes play some role in at least certain forms of criminal behavior, and a cooperative endeavor between criminologists with a biosocial orientation and critical criminologists might disentangle the relative contributions of the political economy, the societal environment, and biogenetic factors in the emergence of criminal behavior. Species-related critical criminology calls for recognition that animals (or species other than human) are victims of a broad range of crimes by social institutions and specific human beings.

It should be obvious from the preceding discussion that critical criminology is an exceptionally diverse enterprise. It is also characterized by some measurable internal criticism, for example, from those who remain committed to the original utopian project of radical criminology and a fundamental transformation of society and from those who have adopted a more limited, practical approach of exposing limitations of mainstream criminological approaches to crime and criminal justice and promoting piecemeal reforms. Such pluralism is perhaps inevitable in critical criminology, and ideally the diverse strands of this enterprise complement and reinforce each other.

Critical criminologists have attended to conventional forms of criminal activity—such as street crime and drug trafficking—but when they have done so, they have been especially concerned with demonstrating how these conventional forms of criminality are best understood in relation to the attributes of a capitalist political economy. Accordingly, the approach of critical criminologists to such forms of crime differs from that of mainstream criminology, which is more likely to focus on individual attributes, rational calculations and routine activities, situational factors, and the more immediate environment.

The study of domestic violence and rape, with a range of studies exploring the cultural forces that both promote such violence and that have led to its past marginalization by the criminal justice system, has been a major preoccupation of feminist and left-realist criminologists. The role of “masculinities” in such crimes, as well as in various forms of street crime, has been explored as well. In recognition of the expanded involvement of females in conventional forms of crime—as one outcome of various liberating forces within society—some critical criminologists have addressed such matters as female gang members and their involvement in gang violence, with special emphasis on disparities of power.

Some critical criminologists have focused on newer forms of crime, such as hate crimes, which have a controversial status within the larger society. The challenge here is to demonstrate why such crimes have demonstrably harmful consequences that warrant recognition of their special character and why they should not be viewed as protected by the traditional liberal commitment to freedom of speech. Ethnic, racial, and sexual minority groups have been among the favored targets of such crime, and immigrant communities remain especially vulnerable.

Critical criminologists have been especially receptive to the claim that the most significant forms of crime are those committed by the powerful, not the powerless. Accordingly, some critical criminologists have taken up Sutherland’s call to attend to white-collar crime, with special emphasis on the crimes of large, powerful corporations. Within capitalist societies, corporations operate in an environment of unequal distribution of market power and relentless pressure to increase profit or growth, and they violate laws when the potential benefits of doing so are regarded as outweighing the potential costs. State regulation of corporate activity is significantly inhibited by the disproportionate influence of corporations in making and administering laws and by the states’ need to foster capital accumulation. Friedrich Engels—the collaborator of Marx—put forth the claim in the 19th century that the ownership class was guilty of murder because it is fully aware that workers in factories and mines will die violent, premature deaths due to unsafe conditions. Some critical criminologists today focus on the persistence of “safety crimes” in the workplace and the ongoing relative neglect of such crimes by most criminologists. Others have addressed environmental crimes carried out in the interest of maximizing profit, and it seems likely that concern over such crimes will intensify in the future. The production and distribution of a wide range of harmful products, from defective transportation vehicles to unsafe pharmaceuticals to genetically modified foods, are ongoing matters of interest in this realm.

Critical criminologists are responsible for introducing the concept of state–corporate crime into the literature, that is, demonstrable (often large-scale) harms that occur as a consequence of cooperative activity between state agencies and corporations. The complicity of various major corporations, such as I. G. Farben with the Nazi state, in relation to the Holocaust, is a classic case of state– corporate crime, but there are many other such cases in the world today.

The term crimes of globalization has been applied to the many forms of harm that occur in developing countries as a consequence of the policies and practices of such international financial institutions as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. From 1999 on, major protests in Seattle, Washington; Washington, D.C.; and other places directed at these institutional financial institutions demonstrate that outrage at some of their activities is quite widely diffused.

In 1988, Chambliss, whose work had a significant influence on multiple generations of critical criminologists, was serving as president of the American Society of Criminology. Radical and critical criminologists have not been elected typically to leadership positions in professional criminological associations, although there have been a few other cases of such leadership. In his presidential address, Chambliss focused on state-organized crime. Just as Sutherland almost 50 years earlier had urged his fellow criminologists to attend to the hitherto-neglected topic of white-collar crime, Chambliss in a similar vein was encouraging more criminological attention to the crimes of states, which had been almost totally ignored by criminologists. In the intervening years a growing number of critical criminologists have addressed a wide range of state-organized forms of crime, including crimes of the nuclear state, crimes of war, and the crime of genocide. A resurgent form of militarism in societies such as the United States has also been a focus of the attention of some critical criminologists.

Some critical criminologists have focused on the many different ways that the principal agents of social control— including the police, the courts, and the prisons—reflect the values and interests of the privileged and powerful strata of society and all too often realized repressive and counterproductive outcomes. Critical criminologists are concerned with identifying forms of social control that are cooperative and constructive. For some critical criminologists, the death penalty—almost uniquely retained by the United States among developed nations—is a worthy focus of attention, insofar as it brings into especially sharp relief the inherent injustices perpetrated by the existing system.

Finally, at least some critical criminologists have directed some attention to matters principally of interest to academics and researchers in relation to their professional activities. Accordingly, they have addressed some of the ethical issues that arise in relation to criminological research, with special attention to the corrupting influence of corporate and governmental funding of such research. Other critical criminologists have addressed challenges that arise in a pedagogical context: on the one hand, exposing students who are often largely either relatively conservative or apolitical in their outlook to a progressive perspective, without alienating or inspiring active hostility from such students, and on the other hand, providing programs such as criminal justice, conforming with expectations that students be prepared for careers as agents of the criminal justice system while at the same time addressing the repressive and inequitable character of such a system.

Critical criminology has in one sense tended to reflect the dominant focus of mainstream criminology on crime and its control within a particular nation; however, going forward in the 21st century, there is an increasing recognition that many of the most significant forms of crimes occur in the international sphere, cross borders, and can only be properly understood—and controlled—within the context of the forces of globalization. Accordingly, a growing number of critical criminologists have addressed such matters as collapsed states within a global economy, harms emanating out of the policies of such international financial institutions as the World Bank, the crimes of multinational corporations, trafficking of human beings across borders and sex tourism in a globalized world, the treatment of new waves of immigrants and refugees, international terrorism, the spread of militarism, preemptive wars as a form of state crime, transnational policing, international war crime tribunals, and transitional justice.

Although at least some of these topics have been occasionally addressed by mainstream criminologists, critical criminologists highlight the central role of imbalances of power in all of these realms. Altogether, critical criminologists going forward are increasingly likely to take into account the expanded globalized context, regardless of their specialized interest or focus.

On the one hand, critical criminologists fully recognize the immense power of corporate interests—and other privileged interests and constituencies—to shape public consciousness in a manner that is supportive of a capitalist political economy and the broad popular culture that is one of its key products. The Italian neo-Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci famously advanced the notion of hegemony to capture this capacity of privileged interests to influence public consciousness in fundamental ways. On the other hand, many critical criminologists are also, on some level, both somewhat puzzled and disappointed that the critical perspective on the political economy has failed to gain more traction with a wider public constituency by now. What is the future destiny of critical criminology? The most pessimistic projection would be that conventional and mainstream perspectives will succeed in rendering critical criminology increasingly marginalized. In a more moderate projection, critical criminology will continue to be a conspicuous and measurably influential alternative to dominant forms of criminological theory and analysis, although it will also continue to be overshadowed by mainstream criminology. In the most optimistic projection, the influence and impact of critical criminology will increase exponentially in the years ahead, perhaps at some point even coming to overshadow mainstream forms of analysis. For some version of this last scenario to be realized, perhaps a “perfect storm” of both objective and subjective conditions (to follow Marx’s own celebrated thesis) must take place: On the objective side, one would have the intensification of some fundamental forms of social inequality and injustices, and accordingly of human suffering. On the subjective side, one would have a more enlightened and autonomous “critical mass” of the citizenry that comes to recognize both the failures and the injustices of existing arrangements and policies within the political economy, and the inherent persuasiveness of critical perspectives, including that of critical criminology. In a world where inequalities of power and wealth have intensified recently in certain significant respects, it seems more likely than not that critical criminology will continue to play a prominent role in making sense of crime and its control and the promotion of alternative policies for addressing the enduring problem of crime.

References:

Arrigo, B. A. (1999). Social justice/criminal justice: The maturation of critical theory in law, crime and deviance. Belmont, CA: West/Wadsworth.
Bonger, W. (1916). Criminality and economic conditions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Carrington, K., & Hogg, R. (2002). Critical criminology: Issues, debates, challenges. Cullompton, UK: Willan.
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Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Greenberg, D. F. (Ed.). (1993). Crime and capitalism: Readings in Marxist criminology (2nd ed.). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Inciardi, J. A. (Ed.). (1980). Radical criminology: The coming crises. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Lynch, M., & Michalowski, J. M. (2006). The new primer in radical criminology: Critical perspectives on crime, power, and identity (4th ed.). Monsey, NY: Critical Justice Press.
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MacLean, B. D., & Milovanovic, D. (Eds.). (1997). Thinking critically about crime. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: Collective Press.
Quinney, R. (1970). The social reality of crime. Boston: Little, Brown.
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Quinney, R., & Beirne, P. (1982). Marxist law. New York: Wiley.
Quinney, R., & Pepinsky, H. (Eds.). (1991). Criminology as peacemaking. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Reiman, J. (2007). The rich get richer, and the poor get prison (8th ed.). Boston: Pearson.
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Schwartz, M. D., & Hatty, S. E. (Eds.). (2003). Controversies in critical criminology. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson.
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Taylor, I., Walton, P., & Young, J. (1973). The new criminology: For a social theory of deviance. New York: Harper & Row.
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Critical criminology and the social sciences

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This free course, Critical criminology and the social sciences , will provide you with an insight into some of the main disciplines within the social sciences, focusing in particular on critical criminology. It will begin by outlining some of the defining characteristics of the social science disciplines of psychology, law, sociology and critical criminology. Using the global financial crisis of 2007-8 as a case study, the course will then provide you with an insight into how academics working in some of these different disciplinary backgrounds make sense of a similar topic in different ways. The course will conclude by considering the place of critical criminology within the social sciences.

Course learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

outline the scope and nature of some of the key disciplines in the social sciences
identify the core features of critical criminology
explain how aspects of the social world might be explored from different disciplinary perspectives
understand how critical criminology relates to other social sciences.

First Published: 27/03/2019

Updated: 03/04/2020

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The official Journal of the ASC Division on Critical Criminology and the ACJS Section on Critical Criminology

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Articles not assigned to an issue 39 articles, the criminological analysis of communal motives on corrective rape in african communities: a case study of pietermaritzburg, kwa-zulu natal.

Sindiswa Ngongoma
Vuyelwa Maweni
Content type: OriginalPaper
Open Access
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Identitas per Fabulam: Joint Fantasising in the Construction of Criminal Group Identities

Fabio Indìo Massimo Poppi
Heith Copes
Published: 18 March 2024

Sexual Assault Impacts on Sexuality and Queer Identity: A Qualitative Study of Queer Substance-Involved Sexual Assault Survivors

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A Mixed-Method Analysis of the News Media Framing of Gender Non-Conforming Victims of Homicide in the U.S. from 2012 to 2022

Susana Avalos
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Published: 14 March 2024

Trans-Neutrality in Intimate Partner Violence Service Provision in the USA and Canada

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Lauren N. Moton
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The Social Reproduction Crisis During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Barcelona: Potentialities and Limitations

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Published: 06 March 2024

It is “Part of this Larger Tapestry of Anti-queer Experiences”: LGBTQ+ Australians’ Experiences of Street Harassment

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“Deliberate Indifference”: Challenging State-Sanctioned Violence Against Transgender People in Carceral Spaces

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Published: 01 March 2024

Michael Gibson-Light: Orange-Collar Labor: Work and Inequality in Prison

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Intersecting Identities in Carceral Spaces: Assessing Trans Female Inmates’ Risks of Violent Victimization

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Published: 26 February 2024

Rural Culture and Coercive Sexual Environments: A Queer Path from Victimization to Incarceration

April N. Terry
Published: 23 February 2024

Queer Victimology

Shelly Clevenger
Content type: EditorialNotes
Published: 22 February 2024

Anti-femininity or Gender-Nonconformity Prejudice? An Investigation of Femme, Twink, and Butch LGBTQ Victimization Using Norm-Centered Stigma Theory

Meredith G. F. Worthen
Published: 17 February 2024

Editorial 31(4) by David C. Brotherton and Jayne Mooney

David Brotherton
Jayne Mooney
Published: 09 February 2024

The Zemiological Afterlife of Wrongful Conviction: Spoiled Identity, Repair and Survivorship

Kevin Hearty
Published: 05 February 2024

Between Crime and Commemoration: Human–Object Relationships in the Treasure Hunting for World War II Objects

Diāna Bērziņa
Published: 26 January 2024

Policing Corona: Crime, Social Bulimia, and Racial Capitalism

Omar Montana
Published: 15 January 2024

Between the Sea and a Hard Place: Encounters with Sub-Saharan African Migration in Sfax in Mid-2023

Michela Lovato
Published: 13 January 2024

Interpretive Harms and Contested Agency: Transphobic Ideology, Correctional Officers, and the Law

Angie D. Gordon
Emily Lenning

Skogan, Wesley, G. 2023: Stop and Frisk and the Politics of Crime in Chicago, New York, NY: Oxford University Press

Taboada Diego
Published: 23 December 2023

“Something Could Happen to You at Any Moment”: Safety, Strategy, and Solidarity Among Trans and Nonbinary Protesters Against Police Violence

Published: 08 December 2023

Teen Courts as Alternative Justice? Teens’ Carceral Habitus and the Reproduction of Social Inequality

Amy M. Magnus
Published: 02 December 2023

Harms and the Illegal Wildlife Trade: Political Ecology, Green Criminology and the European Eel

Laura Gutierrez
Rosaleen Duffy
Published: 01 December 2023

Flexible Labor and Political Competition: Understanding Women’s Race-Specific Incarceration Rates

Pavel V. Vasiliev
Published: 24 November 2023

Dan Canon: Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class

Brianna M. Ovalle
Published: 14 November 2023

How Far does Prison Punishment Extend? Re-entry Processes in the Digitalised Society

Gudrun Brottveit
Elisabeth Fransson
Published: 06 November 2023

Kubrick on Crime and Deviance

Nachman Ben-Yehuda
Galia Frank
Published: 25 October 2023

Ryan, Hugh. (2022). The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison. New York, NY: Bold Type Books

Joshua E. Warren
Published: 10 October 2023

Biology and Criminology: Data Practices and the Creation of Anatomic and Genomic Body ‘Types’

Mareile Kaufmann
Maja Vestad
Published: 09 October 2023

Correction to: Editorial: (31)2

Content type: Correction
Published: 07 October 2023

From Meaning to Ecocide: The Value of Phenomenology for Green Criminology

Reece Burns
Published: 06 October 2023

The Social Organization of Pervasive Penality in the Lives of Young People Experiencing Homelessness

Naomi Nichols
Jayne Malenfant
Published: 05 October 2023

“Missing the Community for the Dots”: Newspaper Crime Maps, Territorial Stigma and Visual Criminology

Tilman Schwarze
Published: 09 September 2023

Transversal Harm and Zemiology: Reconsidering Green Criminology and Mineral Extractivism in Cerro de Pasco, Peru

Andreas Kotsakis
Published: 26 August 2023

Correction to: Ludic Negation: Thrasher’s The Gang and the Creative Foundations of Gang Sociality

Jon Horne Carter
Published: 18 June 2022

Correction to: Introduction: Special Issue Vol. 30 # 1—“Critical Gang Studies”

David C. Brotherton
Louis Kontos
Published: 16 June 2022

Correction to: Six Lines: A Methodological Agenda for Critical Gang Studies

Alistair Fraser
Elke Van Hellemont
Published: 21 April 2022

Correction to: Editor’s Final Introduction

Avi Brisman
Published: 21 January 2022
Published: 10 January 2022

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(PDF) Critical Criminology
Abstract. Critical criminology is a diverse area of criminological theory and research that sheds light on how inequality and power relations shape who commits crime, why someone commits crime ...
Introduction: Critical Criminology for the 21st Century
Currently, there is a division within the American Society of Criminology and a journal named Critical Criminology, while in Europe the Common Study Programme in Critical Criminology and the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control have been developing substantive work for decades. More recently, criminological approaches ...
Critical Criminology
The critical criminology movement began in the early 1970s (Taylor, et al. 1974), with studies focused primarily on political-economic and class analysis (Michalowski 1985; Reiman and Leighton 2009; Shelden 2001), and it exhibited a decidedly Marxist orientation (Quinney 1980; Lynch and Michalowski 2006; Balkan, et al. 1980).
Introduction to critical criminology: What does it mean to be critical
Critical criminological perspectives or criminologies represent a dynamic, interconnected yet diverse range of theories, perspectives and methods that share a commitment to providing an alternative approach to the ways crime, justice and the 'discipline' of criminology are examined. Critical criminological approaches have continually pushed ...
Home
Overview. Critical Criminology addresses issues of social harm and social justice, including work exploring the intersecting lines of class, gender, race/ethnicity, and heterosexism and oppression. Covers methodologies and theories pertaining to the study of crime and criminal justice systems that challenge and critique the status quo.
10.4 Emergent Elements of Critical Criminology
This article makes a compelling case for disbanding, disempowering and disarming police and argues that criminologists should orient their research agendas in this regard. ... Brown & Schept (2017) argued that there is a new abolition emerging in critical criminology and critical carceral studies in the United States. They argue that this ...
Critical Criminology
Critical criminological theory, the subject of this chapter, is a descriptive term that covers a broad range of theoretical positions. A criminological theory explains how and why some people at some times and in some circumstances deviate or not from some social norm or norms. Today, the Division on Critical Criminology of the American Society ...
2.4 Sonae: an archetypal case study for critical criminologists
Critical criminology and the social sciences. ... 2.4 Sonae: an archetypal case study for critical criminologists. In this section, you will watch a video that explores some of the harms associated with a factory producing wood particle boards in Kirkby, near Liverpool (England), between 1999 and 2012. ...
Critical criminology and the social sciences: 3.4 A critical
2.2 The scope of critical criminology. 2.3 Key features of critical criminology. 2.4 Sonae: an archetypal case study for critical criminologists. 3 Exploring the 2008 global financial crisis from different disciplinary perspectives. 3.1 A psychological perspective on the global financial crisis.
Introduction: Critical Criminology for the 21st Century
To cite this work/Para citar este trabajo: Vegh Weis, Valeria "Special Issue Critical Criminology for the 21st Century.". Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, Special Issue Critical ...
Truth and Method in Southern Criminology
These develop into a conversation that engages South Asian scholars working at the forefront of critical social science, history and theory with a foundational text of European hermeneuticist theory and practice, Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method, published in 1960. Out of this exercise in communication across culture, histories and ...
Capturing Crime: The Qualitative Analysis of Individual Cases for
The qualitative analysis of individual cases has a prominent place in the development of criminological theory, yet progression in the scientific study of crime has largely been viewed as a distinctly quantitative endeavor.
Volumes and issues
Volume 29 March - December 2021. Issue 4 December 2021. Issue 3 September 2021. Part 1: Special Issue: Southern Criminologies: Methods, Theories and Indigenous Issues (first 8 articles), Part 2: Regular Papers (last 7 articles) Issue 2 June 2021. Issue 1 March 2021.
Rise of Critical Criminology, The
Gresham M. Sykes, Rise of Critical Criminology, The, 65 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 206 (1974) This Criminology is brought to you for free and open access by Northwestern University School of Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology by an authorized editor of Northwestern University ...
Critical Criminology
Critical Criminology. Critical criminology is an umbrella term for a variety of criminological theories and perspectives that challenge core assumptions of mainstream (or conventional) criminology in some substantial way and provide alternative approaches to understanding crime and its control. Mainstream criminology is sometimes referred to by ...
Criminogenic Policy as a Crime of the Powerful: A Case Study ...
Critical Criminology - State-corporate crime frameworks have typically been applied to crimes committed by a single state. ... The current research uses a case study of NAFTA's negotiation and push for implementation to achieve at least three goals that should strengthen the crimes of the powerful literature: (1) further develop the concept ...
Critical criminology and the social sciences
Using the global financial crisis of 2007-8 as a case study, the course will then provide you with an insight into how academics working in some of these different disciplinary backgrounds make sense of a similar topic in different ways. The course will conclude by considering the place of critical criminology within the social sciences.
Introduction: Critical Criminology for the 21st Century
Currently, there is a division within the American Society of Criminology and a journal named Critical Criminology, while in Europe the Common Study Programme in Critical Criminology and the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control have been developing substantive work for decades. More recently, criminological approaches ...
Critical Criminological Methods
The founders of criminology almost completely overlooked women's crime, and they ignored, minimized, and trivialized female victimization. Critical criminologists, like our counterparts in the other sciences, need to be particularly mindful of the ways in which academic culture shapes the questions we ask in ways that tend to support inequality ...
Policing Corona: Crime, Social Bulimia, and Racial Capitalism
This article explores the case study of crime and policing in the urban New York City neighborhood of Corona, Queens. Taking a critical criminological approach and employing Jock Young's theory of social bulimia, it investigates media coverage of crime in Corona from 2011 to 2021, finding that the neighborhood was framed as both a hub for "vice" and for real estate investment via the ...
Introduction to Special Issue on comparative criminology: Context
This Special Issue highlights the value of the comparative case study method for theory-building and refinement in criminology. Early figures in criminology, including those in the Chicago School, were aware of the importance of scope and applicability, which refer to the temporal, geographic, or other contextual boundaries of a theory, yet the field as a whole has not always given these ...
Criminology Case Study Examples That Really Inspire
Introduction. Charles Manson was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 12, 1934 to Kathleen Maddox, a sixteen-year-old prostitute (Atchison & Kathleen, 2011). This paper aims at analyzing America's "most dangerous man.". In doing so, the paper will examine his history, actions, psychology, and personality.
Online first articles
The official Journal of the ASC Division on Critical Criminology and the ACJS Section on Critical Criminology ... A Case Study of Pietermaritzburg, Kwa-Zulu Natal Authors. Sindiswa Ngongoma; Vuyelwa Maweni; Content type ... A Methodological Agenda for Critical Gang Studies Authors. Alistair Fraser; Elke Van Hellemont; Content type: Correction