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This chapter begins by noting how in the last third of the 19th century, the usual suspects — beggars, vagabonds, prostitutes, the day-labouring poor of the cities and their children — continued to be stigmatized as criminals. It also notes the shift in this period towards medical and scientific discourses that led to criminals being identified as individuals with mental problems, with hereditary failings, or else corrupted by their environment. In addition to the medical experts summoned to give evidence in court, a new academic discipline emerged, fostered particularly by the work of Cesare Lombroso. These criminologists met and debated their findings in international congresses where national pride was often a spur to the criticism of others.

This chapter addresses how criminal justice institutions are responding to climate change. This entails description of court cases intended to bolster the reduction of carbon emissions and the overall role of climate change litigation in the pursuit of climate justice. The chapter argues that an action plan against climate change must include activities and responses that involve the law and legal change, environmental law enforcement activities, courts and adjudication processes, and direct social action. Ultimately, however, this will also require action in and around the exercise of state power as well — since the carbon vandal more often than not acts with direct and indirect state support, through government policy decisions and via laws and courts that are skewed in pro-business directions. The place and role of the criminologist in pursuit of climate justice, therefore, can never be politically neutral.

This concluding chapter summarises the main propositions and areas of concern for Climate Change Criminology. It also emphasises the role of criminologists as public intellectuals and political activists, and the necessity that there be stewards and guardians of the future. This translates into prioritising research, policy, and practice around climate change themes. For criminologists, this means that they need to go beyond parochial viewpoints and those perspectives that frame harm in terms of national or regional interests. Their loyalty has to be to the planet as a whole, rather than being bound by a narrow prescriptive patriotism based on nation. Ultimately, the endeavour of Climate Change Criminology should be to create the conditions for a future that is more forgiving and generous rather than exploitive of humans, environments, and animals.

This chapter explores the implications for criminological scholarship and for juvenile correctional reform, arguing that the criminological literature is limited because it fails to acknowledge the role of masculinity in crime. It also argues that juvenile correctional reformers should consider the role criminally involved young men might play in bringing about needed reforms. The chapter discusses the classical, positivist, and subcultural perspectives of criminologists, and suggests implications for thinking differently about the mechanism by which juvenile correctional reform might take place, and about the actors who will bring it about. It also suggests that young men's individual rehabilitation must be connected to the collective rehabilitation of the world in which they live. To avoid the dual reproductions of outsider masculinity and insider masculinity, the challenge is for organizers, teachers, and young men themselves to create the space for critical practice.

This chapter discusses the role of experimental research in policy-focused criminology. It makes some fairly simple points in response to a current tendency to overstate the contribution that particular research methods can make to the discipline. The context on which the chapter draws is British, but the conclusions drawn here may have wider applicability and relevance. The main argument is this: the questions with which policy-focused criminology grapples range from the simple to the very complex; experimental research methods have a value in answering questions of middling complexity; but they are useful in answering neither very simple questions nor very complex ones; criminologists should not artificially restrict themselves to examining issues of middling complexity, by insisting that experimental research methods should lie at the heart of the discipline.

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of how criminology appears to be fragmenting at the precise moment that, as a discipline, it appears to be so vibrant and successful. It then sets out the purpose of the book, which is to bring together this collection of specially commissioned chapters that chart the intellectual shape of the discipline as it is currently configured. Contributors have taken a normative position, writing from their different perspectives about the way they view the current criminological landscape, about the subjects they choose to research, the approaches they take and the audiences they write for. Using a series of prompts, contributors were asked to consider the historical and intellectual background to their work and their ambitions for the discipline.

This chapter argues that opportunity theory has deep theoretical underpinnings. It also illustrates how the sociology of deviance's influence in policy-circles has declined as a simplified form of economic analysis has emerged as the key driver of crime control policies. It then goes on to show the present vogue for the quick fix of opportunity theory by reference to a convergence of intellectual fashion and political style. In addition, it explores the political environment in which economic analysis flourished, the basic features of the economic approach, and its implications for crime control policy. Moreover, it evaluates the influence to date of economic analysis on the policy field. It is shown that situational control theories are better seen as deriving from the assumptions, insights, and conceptual tools of modern economic analysis than from sociology. Despite its undoubted impact in policy circles, British criminologists remain sceptical about economic analysis principally because they see its approach as reductive and insufficiently concerned with the staple explanatory variables of the sociology of deviance.

This chapter examines a poem that is widely held to be one of the most significant precursors to the poetry of Afrocubanismo. Pichardo Moya's “La comparsa” was originally published in 1916—just four years after the Racist Massacre of 1912—and the chapter argues that its reputation as an important precursor has largely overshadowed its obvious conjuration of the deep-seated prejudices against Afro-Cuban carnival celebrations and related cultural manifestations that had led to their official banning during the early decades of the twentieth century. In this chapter it is demonstrated how “La comparsa” echoes many aspects of the early writings of the man who was, at the time, one of Cuba's preeminent criminologists.

In many ways, working alongside police officers and CCTV operators requires a researcher to confront a number of difficult questions about the role of observer and to re-examine many of the ethical boundaries typically set out before entering the field. In light of the challenges that actually face criminologists in the field, it would be misleading to give the impression that research findings are always collected without difficulty or that decisions about how to present data are simple and clear-cut. This chapter describes the research methods adopted for this study and explores a number of ethical issues associated with studying the police, as well as some of the problems that regularly confront criminologists in the field. Data were collected from observations and field notes, interviews, and documentary analysis. This chapter also discusses the ethics of covert research.

This chapter outlines the emergence of the fear of crime as a piece of political rhetoric and as an object of criminological interest. This chapter draws upon qualitative interviews with twenty-eight academic and government criminologists, conducted in 1999 and 2000. It further outlines some of the explanations that have been posited for the seemingly inexorable rise of the fear of crime as a topic for and of research. This takes us into uncertain terrain and accordingly the pitfalls are numerous; this part of the chapter necessarily remains informed but speculative. The chapter states that the fear of crime made the journey from the US to the UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Partly this was the result of social upheaval in the UK that was (again) employed by rightwing politicians in election campaigns. However, it was also partly the result of members of the British Crime Survey team taking advice from their US colleagues.

This chapter considers how prison technology is especially one-sided and imposed because it is not shared. Philosopher Jacques Ellul has argued that technical mastery (technopoly) can narrow thought and make it less sensitive to human dimensions and needs. Criminologists call this level of total technological imposition “a habitus of subjection.” In “total institutions,” prison theorists agree that current modes of technical use have led to “mortification of the self.” The bad aspects of prison technology are indeed bad. The United States has so many people in prison and jail and many more under legal surveillance because technology has made it possible.

This chapter discusses the destruction of the independent jury system in France which was laid by the Positivists of the pre-World War I era. It emphasizes that the liberals' abandonment of their traditional support of an independent jury proved crucial and was a major reason why the system of échevinage instituted by the Vichy government in 1941 was kept by France's post-World War II regimes. The chapter notes that this was related to an even broader theme: the triumph of fonctionnaires over democracy by the mid-twentieth century. It observes that the rise of government by experts—by trained, professional administrators—was already noticeable during the interwar years, and became still more evident later. The chapter emphasizes that échevinage was seen by many jurists, magistrates, criminologists, and politicians as a means by which juries would be guided by judges, the experts of the criminal justice system.

This chapter examines the extent to which criminologists have addressed issues relating to media representation of homicide. It first considers the shifts in media and the degree to which criminologists have accommodated these changes in their work. In particular, it discusses one strand of the mediatisation literature that focuses on the concept of ‘media logic’ and draws on the criminological literature around school shootings to address the question of how homicide is portrayed in media. It then explores cultural criminology's concern with the superficial nature of wider criminological sense making around media. It also looks at several studies that focus on homicide perpetrators' use of media, noting that some scholars have pointed to the killer's pursuit of celebrity status. The chapter concludes by calling on criminologists to push the boundaries and engage with questions of media as practice.

Becker, in his famous article ’Whose side are we on’, (unintentionally) raises questions that demand renewed attention from Marxist criminologists: Whose side are they on, and what values guide their work? The former question is problematic as the class that Marxism is ’for’ no longer exists in any coherent form, if indeed it ever did. The latter question is problematic as Marxism has long struggled to explicate a coherent moral position or promote particular values. After exploring these issues, this chapter suggests that the best way forward for Marxist criminology is through the development of Sumner’s notion of ‘censure’, which allows for a fruitful dialogue with other perspectives and positions and takes Marxism beyond the remit of ‘criminology’ and the study of ‘crime’ as traditionally conceived.

This introductory chapter addresses why neither crime at the workplace nor crime generated by workplace experiences has received much attention in criminology. To some degree this neglect reflects the opinion of prominent criminologists who have argued that: (1) the public is most concerned with street crime or that (2) the causes of crime rest with characteristics of offenders established at an early age. In this regard, the chapter presents the rationale of the book: to discuss white-collar crime in relation to injustice and the abuse of power, as well as show that general theories of crime can provide general frameworks for organizing the study of crime in relation to the workplace.

This introductory chapter defines narrative criminology and describes the role of narrative criminologists. Narrative criminology is any inquiry based on the view of stories as instigating, sustaining, or effecting desistance from harmful action. Narrative criminologists consider these narrative texts as foundational objects of inquiry for “a useful corrective to the reductive tendencies that other analyses, rooted in individual disciplines, can manifest.” They make ample use of offenders’ narratives as vehicles for data on the factors that promote criminal behavior. In particular, they study the role of metaphors, nodal points, symbolic boundary drawing, and floating signifiers to define excusable harm and blameworthy victim.

This chapter presents U.S. Congressional Representative Wilson Lumpkin’s speech on the relocation of Native American tribes from the southeastern United States to federally controlled lands west of the Mississippi River. He forges a clear connection between the story of the Israelites and the situation of the Native Americans in the earliest decades of the nineteenth century to justify the harm of their migration. On that note, the chapter asserts that Biblical references have been used many times to validate policies of politically sanctioned mass harm including slavery, torture, and war. By understanding how religious narratives motivate human action, criminologists can provide a theoretical framework useful for explaining how social institutions are able to motivate individuals to engage in collective action.