Martin Schwartz - Controversies in Critical Criminology

Controversies in Crime and Justice

series editor Victor E, Kappeler Eastern Kentucky University

edited by Martin D. Schwartz
Suzanne E. Hatty
Ohio University

Controversies in Critical Criminology

First published 2003

by Anderson Publishing

Published 2015

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2003 Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notices
No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any in ury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use of operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Controversies in critical criminology / edited by Martin D. Schwartz and Suzanne E. Hatty.
p. cm. -- (Controversies in crime and justice)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-58360-521-9 (pbk)

Cover design by Tin Box Studio, Inc.

EDITOR Gail Eccleston
ACQUISITIONS EDITOR Michael C. Braswell

To Robert Blum and Carl Preston, the two right-wing old men who keep my arguments sharper by disagreeing vociferously and debating with me on everything.

MDS

To James Hatty and Winifred Caldwell Hatty, who taught me that left of center is a good place to be.

SEH

This book is, of course, a complete product of the Division on Critical Criminology of the American Society of Criminology, one of the most active divisions ever seen in the field. With up to 20 critical panels at the national meetings, an e-mail list server (Jim Thomas and Ken Mentor getting kudos). The Critical Criminologist, the best newsletter in criminology (thanks to Barbara Sims and Rick Matthews), and an excellent refereed journal, Critical Criminology , now on an even keel thanks to Jeff Walker and Paul Leighton, this large division is keeping critical criminology alive and well.

Many of the authors here have won one of the research awards of the Division. They are invariably the best known representatives of their subfield or least one of the top representatives. Of course, these authors did the bulk of the work on this book and deserve all of the praise.

Martin D. Schwartz & Suzanne E. Hatty

This book, which is composed of original essays, has been designed to introduce students to the complex and influential field of critical criminology This fairly new field has become quite important to the field at large, and involves a substantial number of criminological theorists. Just as an indicator, the main criminology organization in North Americathe American Society of Criminologyhas a large and active Division on Critical Criminology This division maintains a large membership base and a very active membership. It has a journal with 30 editorial board members from about 10 countries ( Critical Criminology: An International Journal ), a large and active intellectual newsletter ( The Critical Criminologist ), about 20 panels (more than 100 papers) delivered each year at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology, and an active web site ( www.critcrim.org ). The counterpart organization in criminal justice, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, also has a similar Section on Critical Criminology. Thus, critical criminology is an important and integral part of criminology itself.

But how do we define critical criminology? The problem is that there are as many types of critical criminology as there are writers and teachers in the area. One thing we can be sure about is that modern critical criminology has its roots in the long tradition of Marxist criminology that exploded into an enormously complex and rich field of radical criminology in the 1960s and the 1970s. In this volume, Rick Matthews discusses this history of criminologists trying to follow a Marxist tradition when Karl Marx himself said so little on the subject.

By the end of the 1970s, however, a number of criminologists began to agree with the self-description of David Friedrichs, another contributor to this volume. He said at the time that he was a "soft-core Marxist," in that he really liked the questions that the Marxists were asking, but he disagreed with their analyses. What drew together those criminologists somewhat like Friedrichs was their critical regard for the way in which modern capitalist society is constructed. Slowly through the 1980s, the term "critical" criminology became applied to a broad range of criminologists who, like Friedrichs, agreed to challenge the mainstream assumptions, policies and practices of academic criminology, but who might not be Marxists. Critical criminology became an "umbrella" termdescribing an intellectual space in which a broad variety of people could come together to think through issues related to power, crime and punishment. Marxists were just one of the many groups under this umbrella.

Although few critical criminologists would self-identify as Marxists, all critical theorists share in common is a concern with class, or at least the economic structure of society, and the manner in which the inequalities of modern capitalist society influence crime. Race has been important to many theorists, and increasingly scholars in this area take gender into account when developing their theories. The most cutting-edge work today not only includes race, class, and gender, but also specifically attempts to locate the intersections between these identities and experiences (see, e.g., Schwartz & Milovanovic, 1996). For example, in some circumstances being an African-American might be the primary influence on a person's behavior, but in others it might be the fact of being a woman, or being an African-American woman, or being a poor African-American woman or even just being a poor woman. She is the same woman, but in different circumstances she may call upon different resources. The same applies, of course, to rich white men, or any other combination.