Critical Criminology 18(3)

Toward an Interpretive Criminal Justice
John P. Crank and Blythe Bowman Proulx

This paper presents the academic field of criminal justice as an interpretive social science. The opening section discusses academic criminal justice from scientific and interpretive perspectives, arguing that the terminology of “justice” is essentially contested. The second section presents the key implication of a contested core terminology: that an interpretive approach is the best way to develop the academic field of criminal justice. Section three reviews central elements of the Gadamerian tradition, with an eye towards its application to the field of criminal justice. The fourth section considers two issues pertinent to an interpretive criminal justice—the problem of interpretation in a field where professional practice is destructive to other normative systems, and the contribution of an interpretive criminal justice to public policy.

Overlooked and Overshadowed: The Case of Burundi
Kara Hoofnagle and Dawn L. Rothe

In east-central Africa, nestled between Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda is Burundi. From the onset of independence in 1961, Burundi has had a history of internal armed conflicts, ethnic tensions and civil unrest in the form of crimes against humanity, massive and systematic rape, and other gross human rights violations that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. Nonetheless, there has been relatively little attention paid to these types of crimes by criminologists. Political discourse and subsequent media reports suggest that the cause of the violence in Burundi is rooted in reappearing ethnic tensions between two ethnic groups. Yet, the origins and continued enactment of the conflict is far more complex. In this paper, the authors draw upon the extant state crime literature to both conceptually frame, and theoretically illuminate, the crimes against humanity and other gross human rights violations that have occurred.

Presidential Candidates and State Crime: Views of Some U.S. College Students
Josh Klein and Cathryn Lavery

This is a preliminary investigation of hawkish public opinion, understood as criminogenic in that it provides political support for state crimes of aggressive militarism. Our critical criminology approach treats public support for, or acceptance of, state aggression as part of criminogenic political culture. Despite growing interest among critical criminologists in broader perspectives on state crime and the politics of culture, there has been no work on this topic. Our survey of 53 criminal justice students at a liberal arts college finds both hawkish (militarist) and dovish (peaceful) beliefs and preferences regarding U.S. policy and the two major 2008 presidential candidates, Obama and McCain. We investigate whether authoritarianism helps explain hawkish opinions, but find little evidence for that expectation. We find evidence of respondent underestimation of the hawkishness of U.S. politics. We also find extensive evidence of dovish policy preferences, such as approval of diplomacy, a major attraction to Obama.

Scientific Method and the Crimes of the Powerful
Kristian Lasslett

Over the past six decades researchers interested in the crimes of the powerful have developed a respectable body of literature. Owing to the empirical and theoretical richness of these contributions, the crimes of the powerful sub-field is ready for critical interventions to be made on the plane of scientific method. Moreover, such interventions have become increasingly necessary owing to the disciplinary hegemony of an orthodox empiricist approach which erects a problematic boundary between empirical representations of the crimes of the powerful and theoretical explanation. To aid a critique of this approach, this paper will employ the scientific framework of classical Marxism to decipher the peculiar problems which flow out of the orthodoxy’s method. It will be concluded that while classical Marxism offers a more rigorous framework for penetrating analyses of the crimes of the powerful, orthodox scholars have nevertheless made significant contributions which should also be utilised in future research.

Engendering Imprisonment: The State and Incarcerated Female Subjects in Taiwan
Hua-Fu Hsu

In International feminist perspectives in criminology, Rafter and Heidensohn in International feminist perspectives in criminology: Engendering a discipline. Open University Press, Buckingham, (1995: 4) contended that current mainstream criminology was the most masculine of all social sciences. A look at arguments about penal development confronts us with the fact that most historical studies are not gender-specific. Whether female offenders were victimized or acted as their own agents in the penal institutions can be determined with reference to two considerations: first, women prisoners have persistently been treated differently from their male contemporaries; second, female offenders have typically been burdened with formal penalties and informal gender disciplines as punishments for their wrongdoings. The relationship between women and the state provides some clues regarding how penal institutions, which are authorized to act for the state in imposing penalties, treat female offenders and why women’s imprisonment has taken the forms that are evident historically. This study traces the unique political and social conditions of Taiwan’s history to determine what reformations penal institutions have sought to enforce upon female prisoners and which body-types of female inmates have been ‘docile’, ‘obedient’, and ‘useful’ to the state. From the establishment of women’s care homes and the practice of separating the genders in penal institutions, to the implementation of independent women’s prisons, the state in Taiwan has played a dominant role in penal reforms in various historical contexts. This investigation aims to provide a critical and unique perspective of the penalization of women.

Critical Criminology, September 2010: Volume 18, Issue 3