Critical Criminology 22(3)

Critical Criminology, September 2014: Volume 22, Issue 3

Slaughtering the Bison, Controlling Native Americans: A State Crime and Green Criminology Synthesis
Christopher J. Moloney & William J. Chambliss

We demonstrate the usefulness and importance of achieving descriptive and explanatory synthesis between the fields of state crime and green criminology when analyzing events that embody both state and “green” crime elements. Utilizing the case of the nineteenth century North American bison slaughter (1865–1890), we present an analysis that attends to the state and green crime elements present in this singular event and show that the bison slaughter exemplifies the type of case that benefits from a synthesis of the state and green criminology perspectives. That is, we can best understand the bison slaughter and other similar events when drawing jointly upon the resources offered by the state and green criminology fields. We conclude this paper with an explanation of the bison slaughter that utilizes a political–economic framework and the complementary concepts of structural contradictions and hegemony, showing, among other things, that political economy is one vital approach that meets the explanatory goals of both state crime and green criminology, aiding our understanding of cases like the bison slaughter. As the world moves forward into a future defined by various ecological, political and economic insecurities, scholars from both disciplines will increasingly encounter events that are impossible to fully understand without engaging with each other. This paper is thus an attempt to motivate the sowing of cross-disciplinary seeds of heightened collaboration between state crime scholars and green criminologists.

Beyond the Ghetto: Police Power, Methamphetamine and the Rural War on Drugs
Travis Linnemann & Don L. Kurtz

Viewing police as important cultural producers, we ask how police power fashions structures of feeling and social imaginaries of the “war on drugs” in small towns of the rural Midwest. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and a collection of interviews focusing on police officers’ beliefs about the causes of crime and drug use, we locate a narrative of rural decline attributed to the producers and users of methamphetamine. We argue this narrative supports punitive and authoritarian sensibilities and broader narcopolitical projects more generally and ignores long-standing social inequalities observed in rural communities. As such, the cultural work of rural police provides important insight to the shape and direction of late-modern crime control beyond the familiar terrains of the city and its “ghetto.”

Constitutive Criminology and the ‘War on Terror’
Shamila Ahmed

This article presents a constitutive criminological perspective of the ‘war on terror’. The article will first deconstruct the ‘war on terror’; showing how constitutive criminology provides a framework in which foreign policy, the UK state; the police, and society can be systematically analyzed in relation to one another. Second, the article explores how constitutive criminology enables a critical analysis of the dominant state-centric ‘war on terror’ discourse. The article through discussing the multifaceted ‘war on terror’ demonstrates the relevance of constitutive criminology, as a non state centric approach to critical perspectives in criminology.

The Normality of Political Administration and State Violence: Casuistry, Law, and Drones
Dawn L. Rothe & Victoria E. Collins

Large unmanned aerial vehicles (i.e., drones) equipped with missiles and bombs or battle-equipped have progressively become the newest wave in “warfare.” We argue that the use of drones for targeted assassinations is merely a new technological tool for state violence that is increasingly becoming a regular exercise of the US power in the construction and reification of the broader social geopolitical order. Further, it is through law, domestic and international, that state violence, wars and the use of drones for targeted assassinations are legitimated and are a normality, and continuation of, the political management of the state. Taken with the core of humanitarian law that legitimates war and state violence, we suggest that the use of drones can be interpreted within the body of legislation, political discourse, and laws that serve to normalize and legitimize their use: no different than such processes that occurred with the technological advances that offered military tanks, aerial bombing, projectile missiles or even nuclear and chemical weapons.

“Mom, They are Going to Kill My Dad!” A Personal Narrative on Capital Punishment From a Convict Criminology Perspective
D. J. Williams , Debra Bischoff , Teresa Casey & James Burnett

Capital punishment, although opposed by numerous scholars and banned in several countries, continues to be practiced in many locations under a popular rationale associated with retributive justice. While there has been extensive debate on this issue for decades among scholars, policymakers, correctional professionals, and the media; other important voices, specifically the voices of family members of executed convicts, have been ignored or discounted. Situated within a convict criminology perspective, this paper focuses on a personal narrative of how the issue of capital punishment was experienced by the partner (second author of this paper) of an executed convict. This narrative powerfully illustrates complexities and unintended social injustices toward family members that can occur from capital punishment.

Green and Grey: Water Justice, Criminalization, and Resistance
Bill McClanahan

Since its initial proposal in the 1990s, ‘green criminology’ has focused on environmental crimes and harms affecting non-human and human life, ecosystems, and the planet as a whole. Describing global trends toward privatization of water supply systems and the criminalization of several water conservation activities and tactics, this paper employs theoretical perspectives offered by green, cultural, and critical criminologies, focusing on overt resistance to water privatization and oppressive regulations governing rainwater storage and residential water recycling. Taking a critical theoretical perspective, this paper examines water access and autonomy, individuals and groups openly resisting the criminalization of household water reuse and storage, and the cultural significance of water. This paper concludes with an exploration of the potential benefits of a green cultural criminology.

Creep and Normalisation: Exploring a Strategy of Social Control
Ashley Carver

In the post 9/11 world, expansion of extraordinary powers of control through criminal justice is an important area of study. However criminological study of how these powers expand into unintended areas of criminal justice is currently underdeveloped. A few notable authors have set out complimentary templates that can provide basic tools to understanding the processes by which extraordinary laws are normalised into not so extraordinary activity. By analysing, understanding and unifying the existing literature in this area, this article seeks to amalgamate the studies of control creep and normalisation of the extraordinary into one comprehensive school of thought capable of recognising, and analysing unjustified expansion of state power. Furthermore this article will analyse the G8/G20 Meetings in Ontario, Canada to demonstrate how the processes of creep and normalisation have intentionally been used to criminalise legitimate protest.

A Lust for Treasure and a Love of Gold…or Desperation? Global Facilitation of Piracy, Neoliberal Policies and the Control of the Somali Pirate
Victoria E. Collins

The issue of piracy is most often framed as being the product of dangerous individuals plundering and murdering for personal gain. What is less often discussed are the state, political, economic, and corporate interests that intersect with piracy (i.e. the corporate interest demand for protection of global shipping routes that are instrumental for capital accumulation in the world market). Here I utilize the concept of crimes of globalization to demonstrate that the motivations that undergird policies aimed at controlling piracy today are not dissimilar to those promoted through international financial institutions in their effort to advance the economic interests of highly empowered countries at the expense of addressing localized needs.