Critical Criminology 21(2)

 Critical Criminology, May 2013: Volume 21, Issue 2

Brutal Serendipity: Criminological Verstehen and Victimization
Carl Root, Jeff Ferrell & Wilson R. Palacios

This article explores police use of force and its aftermath by focusing on the immediacy of police–citizen interactions via an autoethnographic account that invokes the concept of criminological verstehen. Specifically, the article explores issues of constructed meaning via Yuen’s interpretive constructs of ‘safe spaces’ and ‘creative analytic practice’ as a way of coming to terms with the first author’s lived experience of police brutality and its consequent legal process. Based on document analysis of official records such as police citations, medical files, and court transcripts, along with media accounts and the first author’s personal notes, the process of memoing provides an immersion into and an exploration of the data, and a tool for ascertaining meaning from it. Resultant themes of presentation of self, identity accomplishment, and silence are discussed in relation to the sorts of experiences and emotions necessary to a verstehen-oriented victimology. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this exercise in criminological verstehen.

Resilience and Criminal Justice: Unsafe at Low Altitude
Willem de Lint & Nerida Chazal

Resilience is increasingly featuring in crime and justice policy discussions. It appears in the fusion of military, security and criminal justice. It offers an alignment by which individual actors are to be adaptive to the uncertain conditions of high risk societies. This article unpacks the application of resilience to criminal justice to reveal at least one negative implication: by placing the focus on self-directed change resilient subjects have limited transformative power. The concept of resilience involves discounting a longer view that challenges the dominant social institutions and orders of neoliberalism. In contrast, we propose the dignified subject and the re-assertion of the discounted institutional context at a level above the individual and community. This analysis supports renewing the transformative agenda of a critical criminology.

Examining the Ruggie Report: Can Voluntary Guidelines Tame Global Capitalism?
Steven Bittle & Laureen Snider

In recent years many academics, social activists and NGOs have turned to international bodies in an attempt to hold corporations accountable for their harmful and illegal acts. Significant amongst these is the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on issues of human rights and transnational corporations. In 2008, following extensive research and consultation with states, corporations and civil society groups, the Special Representative released a series of guidelines outlining the responsibilities of states and corporations to respect human rights, and of both to ensure access to effective judicial and non-judicial remedies for victims. This paper argues that the UN guidelines fail to recognize or incorporate the empirically and historically demonstrated imperatives that guide transnational global capitalism. While global capitalism is complex and rife with contradictions, its raison d’etre is rooted in profit maximization. The paper sets out alternative provisions with, we argue, greater potential to subject global capital to the rule of law.

You Say Regulation, I Say Punishment: The Semantics and Attributes of Punitive Activity
Karol Lucken

Recent trends in crime control have given new energy to an age-old question, namely what kinds of activity qualify as punishment. In addressing this question, jurists and scholars have often employed a logic that either restricts interpretations of punishment to traditional forms (e.g., prison, probation, death penalty) and functions (e.g., deterrence and retribution), or expands them to include the broader forms and functions of social control. This paper examines these opposing logics and considers an alternative logic based in common stipulations in power theory. Within this particular framework, punishment is conceived as action that is necessarily relational, intentional, personal and coercive.

How the News was Made: The Anti-Social Behaviour Day Count, Newsmaking Criminology and the Construction of Anti-Social Behaviour
Phil Edwards

‘Newsmaking criminology’ is an approach to criminological research characterised by critical engagement with topics being covered by the news media, offering greater engagement with public debate and reflexive critique of the objects of criminological knowledge. Two examples of Brisith criminological researchers taking an identifiable ‘newsmaking’ approach are discussed in this paper: the Anti-Social Behaviour One Day Count, a 24-h comprehensive survey of reports of anti-social behaviour carried out in 2003, and the 24-h Domestic Violence Audit, carried out in 2000. This paper analyses the construction of knowledge of anti-social behaviour through the Day Count, identifying continuities and discontinuities between the Day Count and the Domestic Violence Audit. This leads to a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the ‘newsmaking’ approach, suggesting that it may serve conservative as well as progressive ends.

Teaching Criminological Theory: The Power of Film and Music
Dawn L. Rothe & Victoria E. Collins

Interest in utilizing pop culture as a means of teaching and enhancing students’ understanding of complex or abstract ideas in the classroom has increased over the course of the past decade. This includes the use of film, television, fiction books, the internet, and music. The fields of criminology and criminal justice have also increasingly noted the value of using such means to teach about atrocities such as state crime, transnational crime and corporate crimes as well as issues of inequality, racism, and classism. Film, music and television can also be great tools to enhance the understanding of and ability to apply criminological theory. Most articles that have focused on incorporating the use of a ‘popular criminology’ within the classroom, however, have concentrated on one form or another of ‘pop culture’ (i.e., film). This article seeks to add to the existing literature by providing an example of how the use of film combined with music can not only enhance undergraduate criminology and criminal justice students’ ability to grasp criminological theory and apply it in their everyday lives, but also can be utilized as tools for exams.