Introduces critical issues, important trends, theories, and various subdisciplines in the current manifestation of radical and critical criminology and criminal justice, including postmodernism, left realism, feminism, and peacemaking.
This book introduces the reader to the critical issues, important trends, theories, and various subdisciplines in the current manifestation of radical and critical criminology and criminal justice, including postmodernism, left realism, feminism, and peacemaking. Since its articulation in the 1960s, radical and critical criminology has matured into a diverse body of work encompassing a variety of interesting perspectives. Contributors to this volume examine emerging issues in the theory (the importance of classics in radical theory, the market economy, the introduction of anarchist theory) and traditional concerns of criminology and criminal justice (white collar crime, police, prisons, community corrections, courts/sentencing), but from a critical perspective.
This book showcases current scholarship in this often neglected area of theory and praxis with contributions by respected academics in the field of radical and critical criminology. These individuals represent a diversity of nationalities, races, ethnicities, religions, and genders. The reader will find their conclusions not only thought-provoking and stimulating, but highly accessible as well.
Preface
Foreword by Dorothy H. Bracey
Cutting the Edge: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going? by Jeffrey Ian Ross
The Contributions of Marx, Weber, and Simmel: The Common Ground is the Cutting Edge by Thomas O'Connor
Understanding Crime and Social Control in Market Economies: Looking Back and Moving Forward by Robert Bohm
Time for an Integrated Critical Criminology by Gregg Barak
Marxist Criminology and Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Outline for a General Constitutive Theory of Crime by Bruce A. Arrigo
Stumbling Toward a Critical Criminology (and into the Anarchy and Imagery of Postmodernism) by Jeff Ferrell
New Directions in Critical Criminology and White Collar Crime by David O. Friedrichs
Radical and Critical Criminology's Treatment of Municipal Policing by Jeffrey Ian Ross
Critical Criminology, Social Control, and an Alternative View of Corrections by Michael Welch
Critical and Radical Perspectives on Community Punishment: Lessons from the Darkness by Stephen C. Richards
Razing the Wall: A Feminist Critique of Sentencing Theory, Research, and Policy by Jeanne Flavin
The Similarities in Conservative and Liberal Juvenile Justice Policies: Is There a Critical Alternative? by Preston Elrod
References
Index
Reviews
This provocative book introduces the reader to the fundamental differences between critical and mainstream criminology. Organized in two discrete sections, conceptual and substantive, all twelve well balanced articles engage in rigorous edge work; that is, they push the boundaries of inquiry and proffer possibilities for a truly transformative criminology. The most outstanding feature of the book lies in its imaginative and sophisticated critique of contemporary research. Accessibly written, this book investigates crime as a contested terrain. As Dorothy Bracey's Foreword suggests, this book challeges, by incorporating class analysis with insights of feminism, postmodernism, and ethnography, and literary criticism....Ross' book should be required reading since it challenges the congested closures of criminological canons.—Canadian Journal of Sociology
