CRITICALCRIMINOLOGY WHAT DO THEY MEAN?
The field of criminology includes a diverse range of viewpoints and perspectives and is informed by a wide array of research methods and theoretical approaches. This diversity can make it difficult for those coming to criminology for the first time to locate the theoretical underpinnings or disciplinary roots of particular criminological perspectives. In order to situate the ideas that are associated with ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ criminology, we include here a very brief consideration of the history of the development of two ‘standard’ criminological perspectives: classical criminology and positivist criminology.
The emergence of criminological thinking is often traced to eighteenth-century criminal law reformers, such as Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and John Howard who began to question the legal constructions of crime. These early scholars were concerned with the legal protections of both the rights of society and those of the individual. Such principles are now considered part of the classical school of criminology. They form the foundations on which many contemporary criminal justice policies were founded and include the following notions:
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human beings have free will and are rational actors
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human beings have certain inalienable rights
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there is a social contract between citizens and the state.
The idea of a social contract is a key feature of the classical school and includes the notion that transgressions that breach the social contract are seen by society as ‘crimes’ (Williams and McShane, 1999). Accordingly, the punishment of individuals is justified as a deterrent from criminal behaviour and to preserve the social contract. Within the classical school of criminology, crime is seen as a moral transgression against societ
Classical school of criminology
In the late nineteenth century, some of the principles on which the classical school was based began to be challenged by the emergent positivist school in criminology, led primarily by three Italian thinkers: Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, and Raffaele Garofalo. It is at this point that the term ‘criminology’ first emerged, both in the work of Italian Raffaele Garofalo (criminologia) in 1885 and in the work of French anthropologist Paul Topinard (criminologie) around the same time. Positivist criminology assumes that criminal behaviour has its own distinct set of characteristics. As a result, most criminological research conducted within a positivist paradigm has sought to identify key differences between ‘criminals’ and ‘non-criminals’. Some theorists have focused on biological and psychological factors, locating the source of crime primarily within the individual and bringing to the fore questions of individual pathology. This approach is termed individual positivism. Other theorists – who regard crime as a consequence of social rather than individual pathology – have, by contrast, argued that more insights can be gained by studying the social context external to individuals. This approach is termed sociological positivism.
Differences between individual and sociological positivism
Key features of positivism
- The use of scientific methodologies, from which quantifiable data are produced and are then open to further empirical investigation and scrutiny
- The emphasis on the study of criminal behaviour, rather than on the creation of laws or the operation of criminal justice systems
- The assumption that ‘criminality’ is different from ‘normality’ and indicative of various pathological states
- The attempt to establish ‘cause-and-effect’ relations scientifically and to therefore increase the ability to predict criminality (when particular criminogenic factors can be identified)
- The assumption that, because criminals are ‘abnormal’, criminal behaviour is in violation of some widely held consensus in the rest of society
- An interest in the treatment of causes, when these become known, with the ultimate goal of eliminating criminal behaviour. Since behaviour is involuntary and not a matter of choice for the offender, punitive responses are misplaced.
The development of critical criminology
In the mid 1960s, positivist criminologies began to be challenged by a range of radical discourses that questioned the assumptions on which positivist criminology was founded.
These new discourses focused criminological attentions away from the search for causal relationships between unproblematised social phenomena and towards an interrogation of the concepts of social order, crime, and constructions of deviance. This generation of criminologists, influenced by a rapidly changing social world, denounced what they had come to view as the ‘mainstream criminological ideology’ (Taylor et al., 1973). It is here that the story of critical criminology begins.
It is important to recognise that much of the ‘criminological project’ has been characterised by knowledges developing either in parallel – or in response to – changing social conditions. New knowledges in criminology seldom completely replace old ones. Innovative approaches and ways of thinking about issues of criminological concern have emerged with regularity throughout the relatively short history of this dynamic and expanding field of study.
Although criminology is a fast-paced area of academic enquiry that is in constant development, roots from its earliest manifestations have been sustained while new branches have developed alongside them.
As a whole, the various developments and trajectories in criminology have formed a rich and varied tapestry of criminological ideas that reflect the wide range of disciplines that have contributed to its formation.
Governing through crime
Jonathan Simon is an American Professor of Law. In 2007 he published a book, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear, in which he argued that the US ‘War on Crime’ should be understood not as a straightforward, practical policy response to the social problem of crime, but as a much broader strategy of governance.
In the short video below, Simon outlines some of his central ideas on the function that the War on Crime has served for successive US governments. Rather than asking politicians and policymakers how government can tackle the problem of crime, Simon turns this on its head by asking if there isn’t in fact a governmental problem to which crime offers a solution. Simon suggests that by focusing on punishing crime – rather than tackling its very complex root causes, such as poverty – governments frame social problems in ways that appear to have simpler solutions, and in terms of which they can more easily claim success. Simon thus refocuses our attention, moving it away from thinking about the problem of crime in terms of the misdeeds of individuals. Instead, he encourages us to question the fundamental terms on which the debate is predicated and to ask how those terms might serve the interests of those with the power to define them.
Critical criminological perspectives all broadly refer to a strain of criminology that views crime as the product of social conflict; unequal power and social relations; and processes of labelling and meaning-making. As a result, critical criminologies have invited a radical reconfiguring of our focus from ‘criminal justice’ to ‘social justice’.
Critical criminological approaches departed from the positivist origins of mainstream criminology that had focused primarily on the search for the causes of crime, rather than questioning the basic category of ‘crime’. These critical approaches began to focus instead on the processes by which the law is made, and by which, therefore, individuals and groups become criminalised. The emergence of critical criminology represented a stark shift in criminological thinking. In this course you have been introduced to a number of key ideas and clusters of theories that rejected concepts of individual and social pathology in preference to frameworks that examine crime and deviance through processes by which certain behaviours are defined, labelled and policed by the state (Scraton and Chadwick, 1991).
Individual positivism |
Sociological positivism |
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| Crime is caused by individual abnormality or pathology | Crime is caused by social pathology |
| Crime is viewed as a biological, psychiatric, personality or learning deficiency | Crime is viewed as a product of dysfunctions in social, economic and political conditions |
| Behaviour is determined by constitutional, genetic or personality factors | Behaviour is determined by social conditions and structures |
| Crime is a violation of the moral consensus surrounding legal codes | Crime is a violation of a collective conscience |
| Crime varies with temperament, personality and degree of ‘adequate’ socialisation | Crime varies from region to region depending on economic and political milieux |
| Criminals can be treated via medicine, therapy and resocialisation and the condition of the majority thus cured | Crime can be treated via programmes of social reform, but never completely eradicated |
| Crime is an abnormal individual condition | Crime is a normal social fact, but certain rates of crime are dysfunctional |
Adipiscing egestas curabitur
Adipiscing egestas curabitur
Critical analysis
To be critical in an academic context does not just mean participating in the debates within an intellectual discipline. It also involves questioning the paradigms within which the discipline sits; the assumptions, concepts and categories through which it frames its concerns; and the methods by which it seeks to arrive at an understanding of the world. To be a critical criminological scholar is to look beyond official crime statistics and criminal justice policies and practices that are constructed through seemingly unquestionable mechanisms of state governance and control. It means questioning knowledges about crime and criminal justice that might seem unquestionable.
Violence
If we look at ‘violence’, we observe numerous definitions that historically have been generated by people in positions of power to describe physical force inflicted by one person on another. With this in mind, if we were to ask who the most violent offenders in UK society are, we might expect various answers about young males of certain socio-ethnic profiles. Such answers might be informed by media-generated stereotypes. But are they true?
A critical criminological analysis challenges the premises upon which accepted truths are constructed. In the UK, 1500 people a year are killed at work; more than double the annual murder rate, and up to 50,000 are injured in their place of employment (Tombs and Whyte, 2010). Critical criminological analyses point to the workplace as one of the most dangerous and violent areas of contemporary British society. However, such areas of economic activity are rarely portrayed as violence by official government sources. Is a factory a place of violence? When employees are killed, injured or made sick by employers that deliberately flout health and safety regulations in pursuit of profit, then yes, factories are places of violence. Trade and production are presented as the cornerstone of thriving capitalist economics, yet critical thinking reminds us that they are also responsible for widespread injury, suffering and death.
For some commentators (Young, 2002) the critical criminological project is a work-in-progress. It is an evolving, unfinished and eclectic narrative. It has been a project of key developments, not of a distinct discipline taking a specific form, but of a collection of perspectives that focus a different way of thinking about crime and criminalisation. Jock Young reminds us that ‘all good sociology is critical, as is all competent criminology’, where critical means ‘questioning the solidity of the social world and the stated purposes of its institutions’ (2002, p. 271). Young quotes Zygmunt Bauman to argue that we must begin our analyses from the premise that ‘things are not necessarily what they seem’ (2002, p. 271).
- What is ‘critical’ about critical criminological perspectives?
- In what ways does the ‘social construction of law’ help us to further understand crime and criminality?
- What biases and discriminations exist in the criminal justice system and why?
- Why is critique a ‘necessity’ in analyses of crime and justice? How does it promote human rights and social justice?
He argued that processes of criminalisation were heavily skewed in favour of lawmakers and property owners. For him, law served three purposes – the ‘protection of property, protection of government, protection of persons’ – and he famously concluded that such underpinning rationales highlighted ‘the uselessness and harmfulness of the law’ (McLaughlin et al., 2003, p. 69). As a result, Kropotkin motivated later social science critiques of ‘the state’ and is credited with providing the ideological foundations of abolitionist thinking.
Numerous critical commentaries outside of academia have also been part of the on-going development of critical criminology as well as broader critical narratives that have occurred throughout human social history. Literary and polemical works such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment (1866) and critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw’s essay ‘Crude criminology’ (1931) explored narratives in which states of oppression, exploitation and human greed were offered as alternatives to mainstream government-defined views of crime and criminals. In theatre, Broadway’s internationally acclaimed stage production of The War of Wealth (1896) portrayed economic and business chaos and the resultant pubic disorder. Such presentations of the complexities of social life in popular culture served to highlight and critique social discontent and unrest against institutions of power. In doing so, the stage became a platform for voicing the struggles of honest working ‘men’ against financial institutions that dictated economic policy. Furthermore, social transformations in the shape of political resistance and struggles surrounding rights, including, for example, the Women’s Social and Political Union of 1910 and its suffragette movement, pivoted on mobilised resistance. These and many other earlier social movements proved to be important forerunners of the critical criminological enterprise.
