Keynote Address: Critical Criminology for a Global Age 1

Abstract

Keywords: critical criminology; crime and political economy; corporate and state crime; Iraq war; power and domination as crime; instrumental versus structural Marxism; state deviance; analogous social injury A SHORT PREFACE I want to begin by thanking all those who worked to make possible what I hope will be looked upon as first annual Critical Criminology and Justice Studies Conference. I also want to thank organizers for honor of being invited to deliver keynote address for conference. Being in room that day with so many like-minded seemed a long way from early 1970s when small groups of U.S. and British radical criminologists - bete noir of what Don Gibbons (1979) so aptly termed the criminological enterprise - were struggling for, while being ambivalent about, a place within academic criminology. Today, in 2009, there is a sufficient critical mass of critical within even relatively limited geographical reach of Western Society of Criminology to hold a separate conference. Stanley Cohen (1988), to my mind one of best sociologists of criminological knowledge, has questioned whether such gains are to be lauded or lamented. It is certainly case that while radical, critical, and feminist were scaling ramparts of academia with some success, forces of repressive control were successfully capturing levers of state power, unleashing thirty years of mass incarceration fueled by wars on crime, drugs, and poor people (Austin and Irwin 2000; Patillo, Weiman and Western 2004). Despite this triumph of repressive control, it remains important, nevertheless, for those of us that Cohen termed anti-criminologists to continue reaffirming our commitment to critical analyses and honing our public policy alternatives to unequal justice. Doing so is not academic wool-gathering, as conservative politicians and managerial might suggest. It is, instead, purposeful action. Public policy inevitably articulates interests and consciousness of those with positional power to determine state law, rather than codifying some pure form of scholarly knowledge or reflecting positivist visions of evidence based practice. Politics is always political, and justice policy is politics par excellence because it always announces a particular worldview about human nature and social order. One need not have read Foucault (2003) to know that power determines what is understood as truth and that this politically determined truth is basis for state policy. The inability of critical criminology to substantially slow tide of state repression against dispossessed is not a failure of intellectual effort or political commitment. Nor is it some failure to get message out. Speaking truth to power comes with no guarantee that power will listen. In fact, it probably comes with exactly opposite. Small groups of dissidents, by themselves, rarely make headway against forces of history. They can, however, create, nurture, and grow an intellectual framework that offers alternatives to a moribund system of thought and action once that system's failings become too weighty to ignore. It seems to me that this has been largely what critical have been doing these last 30 years, British left-realists excepted. With collapse of neo-liberal dream of global economic hegemony, burgeoning costs of a wildly overgrown justice system, and election of first mixed-race president in U.S. history, I think that moment for broad, public reconsideration of our justice practices might not be too far ahead. Thus, this is a timely opportunity to reflect on challenges and promises of growing a criminology that is capable of understanding crime and justice as an expression of social order rather than as just an annoying social problem to be managed in what is otherwise best of all possible worlds. …

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