Advancing Critical Criminology Theory and Application

Edited by Walter S. DeKeseredy and Barbara Perry
Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books, 2006

The editors’ objective is to review the literature on different theoretical branches of critical criminology and illustrate how this approach can be applied. The first chapter by DeKeseredy, Alvi and Schwartz presents left realism, an account well illustrated with analyses of specific offences in well specified social conditions. Other theoretical chapters present feminist criminology, cultural criminology, restorative justice and a critique of actuarial approaches to social control. The best application is Barbara Perry’s mapping of what needs to be done about hate crime. The other applications concern violence, women and drugs, rural crime, how the competency of mentally ill offenders is structured and finally how the decision of John Jernigan, a convict executed in Texas, who was the basis of the first completely digitalized human, was constructed by him and a variety of social practices.

In their introduction, the editors present critical criminology’s basic premise as being that crime and what is criminalized is rooted in the unequal and unjust core structures of society, its class structure, patriarchy and authoritarianism. An alternative view is that critical criminology is a useful critique of mainstream criminology, but depends on it for its coherence. In other words, critical criminology is an orchid analysis. Orchids add beauty to the forest, help purify the air, yet depend on the rest of the forest for support.

Restorative justice supporters see conferences involving victim(s), offender(s) and those linked to them as a place where emotions can be expressed, accountability for harm occurs and everybody focuses on repairing damaged relationships. Community is created from the ground up. Drawing on their observations of diversionary conferences in Australia, Kimberly Cook and Chris Powell, they find that these conferences are tending towards being “judicial happy meals”: bite-sized pre-packaged McDonaldized emotions. The bureaucrats running the conferences are under economic pressure to keep costs down. Thus they push for speedy case resolutions. In addition, the emotional assembly line accepts as appropriate the status quo before the offence. Society’s core structures are shown to support a process reinforcing a conservative social interest, not creating an egalitarian community where people look out for each other.

Judith Grant in “Women and drugs: A feminist perspective” points out that much of the literature on women and drugs characterizes women in psychological or psychiatric terms and fits them into a criminal or medical framework. The women’s social cultural context is largely ignored. The social context includes poverty, racism, sexual victimization and objectification, all of which contribute to drug using women feeling powerless. The feminist approach asserts that the women have the right to define their own directions and that their self acceptance is the cornerstone of recovery (p.186). As many accounts of recovery are also accounts of self-transformation, Grant needs to further clarify what self-acceptance means. Grant’s conclusion is that more attention needs to be paid to women’s experiences on drugs, how they recover and what social policies can help them recover. These criticisms are well known: this is a wilted orchid analysis. What is needed is a positive analysis of women and drugs rooted in the core structures of society which dominate women.

This book will appeal to people with some background knowledge of critical criminology, and sympathy for critical criminology. If you are sympathetic, but not convinced of critical criminology’s potential to provide independent positive analyses rooted in the power relations of society, then several chapters will appeal. Other chapters are orchids, most beautiful, a few wilted.