Criminology, Social Theory and the Challenge of our Times

Abstract

Contemporary criminology inhabits a rapidly changing world. The speed and profundity of these changes are echoed in the rapidly changing character of criminology's subject matter-in crime rates, in crime policy, and in the practices of policing, prevention and punishment. And if we look beyond the immediate data of crime and punishment to the processes that underpin them-to routines of social life and social control, the circulation of goods and persons, the organization of families and households, the spatial ecology of cities, the character of work and labour markets, the power of state authorities-it becomes apparent that criminology's subject matter is centrally implicated in the major transformations of our time. The questions that animate this collection of essays concern the challenges that are posed for criminology by the economic, cultural, and political transformations that have marked late twentieth-century social life. The restructuring of social and economic relations, the fluidity of social process, the speed of technological change, and the remarkable cultural heterogeneity that constitute 'late modernity' pose intellectual challenges for criminology that are difficult and sometimes discomfiting but which are ultimately too insistent to ignore. To wish them away, to carry on regardless, to pursue the conventional agendas of criminological enquiry in the accustomed way, would be to turn away from some of the most important issues that face contemporary social thought and public policy. It would also be to depart from the canons of clarity, perspicacity and relevance that worthwhile criminological work has always observed. Ever since its emergence in the industrialized, urbanized world of the mid-nineteenth century, criminology has been, or has sought to be, a contemporary, timely, worldly subject. Criminologists-particularly those who draw upon a sociological tradition-have always sought to ground their analyses in a nuanced sense of the world as it is, and as it is becoming, not least because the phenomena of crime and disorder have so regularly been traced to the effects of social upheaval and dislocation. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, the social transformations of late modernity pose new problems of criminological understanding and relevance, and have definite implications for the intellectual dispositions, strategic aims and political commitments that criminology inevitably entails. How then might criminologists come to terms with the kinds of variation and change that characterize their twenty-first century world? Are criminology's frameworks of explanation adequate to the changing realities of crime and criminal justice and to the expansive hinterland of political, economic and regulatory activity that encircles them? 189

UNDERSTANDING ‘POINTY FACE’: What is criminology for?

“…What I want to argue in the rest of this paper is that, over the last 25 years or so, South African criminology Like most of the participants in the more recent debates about the scope and purposes of the discipline, Garland and Sparks were primarily concerned with criminology in the Englishspeaking countries of the global north. 5 Among the few exceptions to this rule are Clifford Shearing and Monique Marks, who take up the Australian criminologist Chris Cunneen's call for a postcolonial perspective. 6 They suggest that the kind of questions a postcolonial criminology should try to answer in a place like South Africa differ from those asked in 'western democracies' .…”

Penal Populism and the Problem of Mass Incarceration:

“…These responses have also emerged at a time when popular political discourses of crime and justice are increasingly jettisoned from professional expertise in the field of crime and justice policy (Garland & Sparks, 2000;Dzur, 2012a: 23). As Garland and Sparks have noted Modern criminology took shape as an element of the postwar welfare state.…”

“…At the same time, the increasing commercialization of academic knowledge and subsequent channelling of academic expertise into the service of contemporary political ends (see Garland & Sparks, 2000;Hillyard et al, 2004;Walters, [2007] 2011), arguably serves the agenda of the popular politics. As Walters has noted, Criminology's origins reveal that is has been an intellectual enterprise largely dominated by a scientific causation of state defined crime for the purposes of developing a more efficient crime control apparatus.…”

Quand la « délinquance des élites1 » contribue au savoir criminologique

“…Pour d'autres, vu l'objet sur lequel elle travaille, le crime, elle est inévitablement amenée à devoir prendre une distance avec les demandes du pouvoir étatique, « ne plus faire la morale, pour, comme disait P. Claval (…), "se consacrer à l'exploration des choses de ce monde" » (Mary, 1998, p. 712). En accord avec Garland et Sparks (2000), nous pensons que plus que jamais « criminology has never been so relevant, however much governments resists his findings. (…) it must understand the terms in which these wider debates and discussions are being discussed and how crime and crime control feature within them » (p. 201-202).…”