Crime,Politics, and Punishment: Criminological Research for Political Sociologists

As a sociologist studying the intersection of crime, punishment, and politics, it is often surprising to me how many aspects of political sociology and the study of crime and punishment overlap, and yet, there is often limited cross‐fertilization of the two fields. For the sake of brevity in this discussion, I refer to those who study crime, deviance, law, criminal justice, and punishment as criminologists. My goal is to provide an extremely brief “primer” on criminology for political sociologists, in the hopes that a short reading of some issues and research in criminology may stimulate additional theorizing and research, as has so often happened when I have read political sociological work. To do this, I begin with a brief discussion of overlaps in political sociological and criminological perspectives. Following this, I highlight some examples of criminological research which incorporates politics, and would likely interest political sociologists, Then, I highlight a hot button issue in criminology – sex offenses – and suggest some ways that political sociologists could examine recent legislation on sex offenders and conclude with brief discussions of a few additional areas of overlap for the two disciplines.     

Emotions in criminological theory: Insights from social psychology

A number of scholars have noted that emotional processes have been undertheorized in criminology. Although criminologists have explored how various emotions facilitate or inhibit crime, few formal theories of crime clearly address the role of emotional processes. Sociological theories of emotions provide a number of insights that criminologists might find useful to help fill the gaps in criminological explanations of offending. We illustrate the utility of sociological theories of emotions to criminology by connecting three prominent criminological theories with complimentary social psychological theories of emotions. Specifically, we discuss how the power–status theory of emotions can clarify emotional responses to strain in general strain theory, how affect control theory can illuminate the emotions involved in identity adoption within labeling theory, and how interaction ritual chains theory can highlight emotional responses to coercion in differential coercion theory. Making connections to more clearly theorize emotions is critical to the advancement of criminological theory.     

Overcoming the Neglect of Social Process in Cross‐National and Comparative Criminology

How and why crime rates vary across different societal and cultural contexts has been a perennial question within criminological research. Numerous studies have emerged in recent years responding to calls for criminology to examine the cross‐cultural relevance of contemporary theory. While many of these studies have made significant advances, a great deal of work remains to be done in the development of theory, measurement, and methods. The present article examines the state of cross‐national criminological research, including a discussion of challenges in examining key theoretical questions. Promising avenues for overcoming issues with data and developing key theoretical perspectives to better assess how social processes explain cross‐national variations of crime are discussed.     

Status,socialization, and identities: Central factors to understand disparities in crime

Although issues related to disparities and inequalities have long been assessed in criminological research, the orthodox approaches to understanding these differences have historically been largely rooted in cultural deficit or individual pathology perspectives. Progressive scholars have long condemned these failings of orthodox criminology, calling for group‐based theories of crime, with some scholars attempting to heed the call. Although such specific articulations are worthwhile endeavors, they still often overlook the intersectional, multileveled, and historically rooted lived experiences of diverse people. To best understand disparate pathways to and from criminal behavior and entanglements with the criminal justice system, variations in historically rooted social statuses, unique socialization experiences, and how these influence various intersecting emergent identities must be acknowledged and better accounted for in empirical work. Building on Potter's call for a disruption of criminology and taking an interdisciplinary approach, I posit an integrative structured identities model as a potential framework for understanding within and between group disparities in crime. How this model may be achieved empirically as well as the potential theoretical and policy implications are discussed.     

Expanding Horizons of Risk in Criminology

Few topics in the social sciences have witnessed as dramatic an increase in scholarly attention over the past two decades as the topic of risk. In this essay we examine sociological approaches to risk in criminological research and theory. After briefly describing the concept of risk in classical and neoclassical criminology, we turn our attention to three emerging social science perspectives on risk, those associated with the scholarship on risk society, edgework, and governmentality. We examine the new directions that these emerging ``risk paradigms'' open for criminological theory and research, including new perspectives on the motivation for criminal risk-taking, the organization of policing and criminal justice systems, and public and political responses to crime. We conclude by reviewing critiques of the scholarship associated with the new risk paradigms and by suggesting promising future directions for criminological research seeking to advance these perspectives.     

Donald R. Cressey: An Intellectual Portrait of a Criminologist

The late Donald R. Cressey (1919–1987) was a central figure in twentieth century American criminology. A distinctive feature of criminology since the 1930s has been the dominance of sociology among the various disciplines studying crime and criminal justice. Cressey's contributions to the sociology of crime and delinquency came from his teaching, scholarship, and involvement in criminal justice policy. He was best known for his carrying on the tradition of Edwin Sutherland in taking Sutherland's criminology textbook through many revised editions after Sutherland's passing and for his pioneering, innovative contributions to the study of organized crime, prisons, and criminological theory. He also made central and lasting contributions to the sociology of criminal law and white collar crime. His ideas in each of these areas are reviewed to produce a portrait or profile of what he added to criminology, to remind those who know it already and to introduce it to those who may not.     

Criminology 9/11

ABSTRACT

9/11 is a historically significant event that was hastily designated by authorities as an act of both terrorism and war. It led to a call for forensics investigations and commissions of inquiry, notably the 9/11 Commission, which reported famously on alleged lapses in intelligence, preparedness and bureaucratic imagination. Some high profile crime events may be understood as ‘apex crimes’, conceptualized here as a subtype of political crime in which the ideological order, official narrative, contested and problematic forensics and third party review are each constitutive features. In support of a sociology of 9/11 as a criminal event and apex crime, the paper considers how 9/11 has ‘played out’ or been understood in criminology. The implication of the analysis is that the absence of serious academic engagement with 9/11 as a crime event is indicative of a lack of critical scrutiny of high-level political crimes in scholarly discourse (in criminology and other disciplines) and that this gives a pass to one of the most significant crime events in the past 50 years.     

‘Green‐Collar Crime’: Environmental Crime and Justice in the Sociological Perspective

One of the more neglected areas of research in the field of criminology are the crimes committed by ‘white collar’ offenders. An even more understudied area is the corporate crimes that are committed against the environment for profit. Despite this dearth of research, there have been several sociologically significant examinations into some of the more serious environmental crimes committed over the last three decades. While some of this research is theoretically underdeveloped, more recent studies have attempted to develop a coherent framework to study environmental crime. By linking and synthesizing two literatures in both white‐collar criminology and environmental justice, sociologists have begun to develop a framework for examining ‘green crimes’, the motivations, opportunity context, victimology, and enforcement issues. This article will be a survey of these studies and development literature along with some typological and definitional issues relevant to the subfield. This aims to map where criminology has been in the sub‐field of environmental crime and provides directions for where future research should be headed.     

A comprehensive review of quantitative research on crime,the built environment,land use,and physical geography

This paper provides a comprehensive review of space- and place-based criminology, with a focus on the relationship between crime, the built environment, land use, and/or physical geography, through sociological and critical geography lenses. An historical overview of major criminological and spatial theories and contributors is presented before examining the current state of the field. In honor of critical geography's goal to be “a people's geography,”¹ this paper aims to be an accessible overview of space- and place-based criminological research, especially for readers who are unfamiliar with these topics.     

Criminology and war: where are we going and where have we been?

Although the metaphor of war (e.g., the war on terror, war on crime, war on drugs) figures prominently in contemporary criminological discourse, criminologists have generally lagged behind other disciplines in studying the reality of war and its implications for crime, punishment, and ideology. In this essay, I first consider potential reasons for criminology's limited role in studying war and make the case for why war warrants a more central place in criminological discourse. Subsequently, I trace some of criminology's early contributions to the study of war in two domains—(a) legal responses to war and (b) the link between war and crime—and reflect upon ways in which the discipline can both broaden its purview and draw from its own intellectual history to engage more critically with the subject of war.     

Inequality,Unemployment and Crime: A Cross-National Analysis*

In order to contribute to the development of an international perspective on crime and to examine a central tenet similar to many theoretical perspectives on the etiology of crime, cross-national data on inequality, unemployment, and crime rates were analyzed. It was hypothesized that nations having a high rate of unemployment and an inequitable distribution of income would have a high crime rate. The results of the correlational analyses indicate a moderate positive relationship between the rate of unemployment and homicide rates, whereas there are small negative relationships between unemployment rates and (1) the rates of property crime, and (2) the total crime rates. The variable of inequality is strongly related to the three indices of crime and the directions of the relationships are consistent with those involving unemployment rates. The results were further investigated to examine the possibility that the observed relationships were due to the effects of industrialization. The direction of the zero-order correlations involving property crime rates and total crime rates are not changed in the partial correlations and the strength of the relationships are not consistently reduced. These results are discussed in reference to their implications for criminological theory and the development of a comparative criminology.     

Sociology of Deviance and Criminology in France: History and Controversies

This article investigates the peculiar history of sociology of deviance and criminology in France, from the end of the 19th until now. In the 1880s, the criminal questions invade the intellectual debate. I show how sociology (Gabriel Tarde and the Durkheimians) was largely built against biomedical determinisms. Then, the criminal question has conducted doctors and lawyers to join forces in the first half of the 20th century in order to develop the first criminological institutions, or “criminal sciences.” In the 1950s and 1960s, Jean Pinatel would try to elaborate a synthesis out of this but he would fail to institutionalize a criminological discipline. Yet, from the 1970s, sociology of deviance has known a rennaissance in the scientific field, partly because of the influence of American sociology of deviance and British critical criminology. Since then, the social sciences are the first producers of scientific knowledge about the criminal phenomena, the criminal justice system (police, justice), and about the public policies of security and prevention. However, between 2007 and 2012, in a political context of neo-conservatism, the need to institutionalize the criminological discipline in France led to a controversy.     

Crimes against non-human animals: Examining dog fighting in the UK and the USA through a green criminology perspective

This article reviews the social scientific literature published between the late 1990s and 2021 on the illegal ‘sport’ of dog fighting in the UK and USA. Adopting a green criminological perspective, it argues that studying dog fighting is important for understanding the ways in which this form of animal cruelty contributes to a range of social and animal harms. The review is structured in five sections. The first situates the review theoretically by introducing key ideas within green criminology that will inform the discussion. The next section presents a typology of the different levels of dog fighting in both countries. The third section then explores both the motivations of contemporary dog fighters, as well as the justifications they deploy to defend their ‘sport’ to outsiders. The fourth section then adopts a green criminological perspective to explore the various social and animal harms associated with dog fighting. The final section then brings the threads of the discussion together and highlights some directions for future research.     

Conceptual Remixing in Criminology: Tracing Durkheim and Marx's Influence on Etiological Theories of Crime

Sociologists have previously argued that our current knowledge and inquiries stem from our standing on the shoulders of giants. Exactly how this occurs, however, may be less clear. This paper identifies how the works of two of the most valued classical social theorists – Durkheim and Marx – have influenced theories of crime causation. In doing so, I reveal that classical social theory continues to be relevant in the advancement of criminological thought. Identifying this lineage is crucial in developing more informed research and policy on crime and social control, which is especially important given the widespread interest in crime and delinquency among students (and citizens more generally).     

At the Intersection of Urban Sociology and Criminology: Fear Of Crime and the Postindustrial City

This essay examines the intersections between urban sociology and criminology in relation to fear of crime. I argue that there is a disconnect between theory and practice when it comes to reducing fear of crime that needs to be resolved in order for the postindustrial city to attract the new middle‐class demographic that is known for embracing and seeking out diversity. Despite the contributions made by environmental criminologists and new urbanists, the most popular explanation of fear of crime and crime reduction, offered by the field of criminology, focuses on reducing quality‐of‐life offenses and incivilities. Yet, these strategies are not known to significantly reduce fear of crime, but rather for purging the urban landscape of its diversity through exclusion.     

Theorizing fear of crime: beyond the rational/irrational opposition

Much has been written about the ‘social problem’ of fear of crime in the criminological and sociological literature in recent years. We would argue that thus far in this literature, however, there has been too much emphasis on the question ‘How rational is people's fear of crime?’, a question that largely reduces the complexity of the phenomenon and positions a ‘biased’ lay response against an ‘expert’ objective judgment. In this article, we review different epistemological perspectives that can be offered to understand in greater depth the fear of crime phenomenon. We place particular emphasis on those hermeneutic perspectives that go beyond the models of the rationalist, individualistic subject to exploring issues of symbolic representation, discourse and the micro - and macro-contexts in which fear of crime is experienced and given meaning. We also draw upon two case studies from our own empirical research into fear of crime, conducted with the intention of exploring the situated narratives, cultural representations and different levels of symbolic meaning that contribute to the dynamic constitution of fear.     

Colonial criminology: A survey of what it means and why it is important

As the United States is experiencing unprecedented high rates of incarceration, especially of minorities and marginalized communities, racialized punishment has been addressed by many scholars (Alexander 2010; Wacquant 2001; Cole 1999, Tonry 2011; Stevenson 2014). Studies have shown the connection between racialized structures of inequality, punishment, and colonization (Agozino 2000, 2003; Irwin and Umemoto 2016; Bosworth and Flavin 2007). However, scholars have recognized a void in the discussion of colonial theory in the field of criminology (Agozino 2003; Cunneen and Tauri 2016; Bosworth and Flavin 2007). In this paper, I identify several ways in which criminology is closely tied to colonialism. I argue that a colonial criminology perspective assists in identifying power distinctions that construct notions of difference, thus providing a more nuanced understanding of crime, violence, and criminalization as a response to oppression and alienation. I focus primarily on colonialism in Hawai'i because of its fairly recent colonization and continuing indigenous struggle for Hawaiian sovereignty. Furthermore, Hawai'i is representative of racial and ethnic inequality and disparity within the United States criminal justice system, as the majority of both the adult and juvenile incarcerated populations in Hawai'i are of Native Hawaiian and/or Pacific Islander decent.     

Feminist Criminology: Gain, Loss and Backlash

Surviving the inevitable process of innovation, critique and response that accompanies conceptual invention, feminist criminology is now a rich and diverse field of scholarship and political activism. This article follows the main threads of feminist criminological thought (empirical, standpoint and post-modern), outlining the tensions and connections between each. I then consider the political ground gained and lost by feminist criminologists, paying careful attention to the ways in which feminist ideas have been co-opted by governing authorities and also considering the current climate of backlash against feminist ideas in both criminal justice policy and the academy.     

Federal funding and its effect on criminological research: Emphasizing individualistic explanations for criminal behavior

The sociology of knowledge suggests that various influences can affect the development of any substantive area of science. Much discussion has ensued over the years on the impact of sponsorship on sociological research. This article examines the effect of sponsorship on theoretical criminological research. I hypothesize that research funded by the federal government is more likely to support research having individualistic as opposed to structural explanations of crime. To test this, 181 theoretical criminological journal articles from 1975 to 1993 were examined. The data support this conclusion. There is a relationship between the type of funding received and whether an article’s focus is individualistic or structural. Alternative explanations are discussed and areas for future research are suggested. Finally, the relevance of these findings to sociology are examined in terms of the development of theory.     

Viewpoint - romantic fictions: the re-emergence of the crime as politics debate

Arising out of current debates in criminology over the nature of black criminality and black crime statistics, this paper focuses specifically on the argument that black/working class crime represents a form of political action. Attempts to infuse working class crime with political status have a sociological pedigree stretching back at least to the 1960s. This paper examines the links between contemporary and earlier work in this field, and critically appraises what are seen as often over-romanticised formulations. The final section attempts to indicate how a relevant theoretical framework may be constructed.