Bearing Witness to Crime and Social Justice
by Richard Quinney
Albany, NY: SUNY Press. 2000
With this book, Richard Quinney provides us with his own selection of his past papers that reflect what a student of crime (and beyond) should be aware of. The readings are articles and book chapters that span Quinney's career and carry us through a series of positions marking the author's progression as: 1) the radical thinker and scholarly critic; 2) the social epistemologist arguing in favour of a constructivist stance in the study of crime; 3) the peacemaker; and 4) the spiritual sage. The common thread across these chapters is found in the author's relentless struggle to question and propose otherwise. Such an approach is primarily applied, as was evident throughout Quinney's career, against the status quo and, as is often overlooked, against himself. The struggle is one that places the researcher into a persistent battle to seek something new - something else. The overall approach is straightforward and highlighted in a series of basic existential assumptions: 1) I am what I see; 2) we learn much about life by studying crime; and 3) "we and the criminal are one and the same" (p.xiv).
Chapter 1, although written in 1971, remains one of the more complete reviews of criminological thought and research. It is still amongst the best papers for introductory students and inspiration-seeking old-hands alike in that it teaches us and reminds us of our oft-ignored roots in a manner that sways from the tiresome and systematic approach maintained in the far too many introductory textbooks.
Chapter 2 is the opening segment to The Social Reality of Crime (1970). Quinney lays down the first steps in attributing the problem of crime as an extension of capitalist exploitation, moral perversion, and social regulation by dominant groups in American society. The fuller demonstrations that extend from this chapter in the original publication are indeed lacking here. However, the author does pursue his critique of capitalism throughout chapters 3 to 7. Chapter 3 is a wonderful take-down of one of the primary symbols of American justice and popular culture, the Lone Ranger: "How could you know that you were actually protecting the economic interests of Eastern capitalists?... Lone Ranger, the outlaws were rebels (without a revolutionary consciousness) who were threatening the territory of the financiers, railroad men, and large landowners. The cavalry was your real enemy" (pp. 88-89). This attack, in typical Quinney fashion, is followed by a description of the cleansing process that he went through in deconditioning himself of the values and countervalues of "frontier individualism" that has justified America's movement towards expansive control through economic force in all areas elsewhere. Chapter 4, from A Critique of Legal Order (1975), provides an explicit method to developing a radical criminology: "Only in a negation of the present can we experience something else" (p. 104). Chapter 5 reprints a 1978 paper that reverts the attack on capitalism within the realm of criminology itself. The duality within the field guides the essay: "As bourgeois criminology has served the capitalist class under capitalism, Marxist criminology will serve the working class under socialism" (p. 124). (On the other hand, why must we, as criminologists or as members of society, serve anything or anyone?) The assault against the American establishment is aimed at the notion and practice of justice in Chapters 6 and 7, the opening chapters in Quinney's most formidable contribution, Class, State, and Crime (1977/1980). "Capitalist justice" and the "criminal justice movement" that supports it are extensions of a system (the "capitalist order") that "assumes a hierarchy of rights and competitive social relations" (p. 138). Quinney counters with a prophetic form of justice that expels the idea of higher-ordered control and bases itself on the inspiration that humans develop a personal responsibility and devotion to the historical account and struggle to change. The direct link between the production of crime and the progression of capitalism is neatly framed within a conflict process situating domination and repression on one side and accommodation and resistance on the other. The advent of the latter side's response to the former is the criminal process.
The common thread linking each chapter is at one the attack against capitalism and the systematic solution in the socialist alternative. Here, Quinney's criminology takes the reader beyond the critical stance. His most stimulating writing comes when he aims against an object. In this sense, Quinney was striking in his anti-capitalist stance, but less revealing in his visions towards a criminology based in a socialist reality. Because his arguments were primarily critically driven, he consistently proposed an alternative to the system in place. Hence, the shift from the socialist to the peacemaking alternative (Chapter 9) is consistent with his stance against capitalism, while softening the tone in proposing a new systemic alternative (a position which is in considerable increase today). This anti-capitalist stance is what keeps Quinney's legacy particularly alive beyond scholarly circles (regardless of which alternative one opts for).
This prophetic approach is continued in Chapter 10 as the author combines his major influences after three full decades of experience: Marx; the theologian Paul Tillich; Sutherland (the man who dared to rethink the way we thought of crime - see Chapter 8); Emily Dickinson ("Tell the Truth but tell it slant", p. 172); Eastern philosophers that guide one to question established images and profess that "change rules the world forever" (p. 175)p Willie Nelson... Such influences and the numerous extensions that Quinney took them through in his thinking of crime are countered against a multitude of nemeses.
Quinney's brand of criminology is clearly not a mainstream one. His may never be a mainstream criminology. The approach professed in this collection and throughout the author's career is one that positions the criminologist as a moral philosopher (this idea is thoroughly spelled out in Chapter 10). Quinney's work is a personal legacy and one which the author is assured will be carried out in the observations, thoughts, and actions of some future witnesses who will come to appreciate and apply the ideas expressed by this predecessor: "someday the report will be found, and perhaps it will be valued and of use" (p. 208).
Most social scientists are taught to learn the main ideas of early thinkers in their discipline. Quinney's work constitutes the basis of a new form of (American) criminology that evolved throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. In this sense, this work should be made familiar to present and future students of crime in as much as leaders of early classical and various positivist doctrines. Here is a document containing the key expressions of a criminologist and social thinker who bases his reputation on what he felt was right and took the risks by consistently countering the powers that be. All criminologists must have at least some Quinney in them in order to arrive at a fuller understanding of their main objects of interest.
CARLO MORSELLI
Criminologie
Université de Montréal |
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