ACTIVIST CRIMINOLOGY: CRIMINOLOGISTS’ RESPONSIBILITY TO ADVOCATE FOR SOCIAL AND LEGAL JUSTICE

• Published date: 01 February 2015
• Author: JOANNE BELKNAP
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12063
• Date: 01 February 2015

THE 2014 AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CRIMINOLOGY

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

ACTIVIST CRIMINOLOGY: CRIMINOLOGISTS’

RESPONSIBILITY TO ADVOCATE FOR SOCIAL

AND LEGAL JUSTICE∗

JOANNE BELKNAP

Department of Sociology, University of Colorado–Boulder

KEYWORDS: criminology activism, diversity, critical criminology, feminist criminol-

ogy, convict criminologist, advocacy research, social justice, legal justice

Similar to many criminologists, my interest in pursuing this career was driven by

a desire to improve responses to injustices, on both small and large scales. I believe

that among criminologists, this dedication to effect changes in social and legal justice

disproportionately drives those of us historically kept out of the academy due to our

race, gender, class, sexual identity, and/or other marginalizations. Fortunately, there

is a growing diversity among criminologists and this has had a powerful impact on

expanding the scope and depth of the field. At the same time, I am concerned that

academic training and university climates frequently work against our commitment to

advancing social and legal justice changes, what I refer to as “criminology activism.”

This address is a call to action, stressing criminologists’ responsibility to advocate for

social and legal justice on small and large scales. Numerous types of criminology ac-

tivism are identified (e.g., in research, service, and teaching), including the requisite to

continue diversifying the representation of criminologists.

Something is terribly wrong in the United States when we incarcerate at a higher rate

than anywhere in the world, but we are grossly inadequate in providing equal access to

social and legal justice. At the same time that our government fosters and funds mass

incarceration and allows private prisons (money-makers for the private sector), we find

advocates for social and legal justice struggling to fund, open, and maintain schools,

health-care programs, jail and prison reentry programs, abused women’s shelters,

homeless shelters, child sexual abuse organizations, rape crisis centers, and so on.1

∗I would like to thank Mona Danner, Helen Eigenberg, and Nancy Wonders for encouraging me

to write my speech on activism; Bonnie Berry for conducting a careful review of my final written

speech; and all four of these scholar-friends, as well as Onye Ozuzu, Hillary Potter, Cris M. Sulli-

van, R. Scott Summers, Casey Belknap-Summers, and many of my current doctoral students and

friends, for letting me endlessly discuss this speech while it was in progress. Finally, as always, I’m

indebted to University of Colorado librarian Lindy Shultz, who helped me find a wide range of

sources while working on this speech. Of course, any errors in this speech are solely mine. Direct

correspondence to Joanne Belknap, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado–Boulder,

327 UCB, Boulder, CO 80302–0327 (e-mail: joanne.belknap@colorado.edu).

1. The ongoing resistance to Obamacare despite the evidence that it is working and cost-effective is

a textbook example of the political opposition to equality in health-care access (e.g., McCarthy,

2014).

C2015 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12063

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 53 Number 1 1–22 2015 1

2 BELKNAP

Criminologists should be more active in addressing these harmful and unjust patterns

for numerous reasons, principally, research clearly documenting that the availability

of quality education, health care, and other forms of social services (including the

professional responses to victims) are key to successfully safeguarding against offending

and incarceration (e.g., Binswanger, Krueger, and Steiner, 2009; Brown and Bloom,

2009; DeHart et al., 2014; Gaarder and Belknap, 2002; Lutze, Rosky, and Hamilton,

2014; Simson, 2014; Widom, 1989).2Additionally, research establishes how our so-called

correctional system does little to rehabilitate anyone, but more often it marginalizes and

criminalizes released offenders, and it creates probation and parole rules that are almost

impossible to comply with, particularly for poor people (e.g., Pager, 2003; Warner and

Kramer, 2009). If criminologists are unwilling to become more committed to activism

and dedicated to changing these practices and policies, we can expect continuing and

alarming ineffectiveness in deterring offending and incarceration. Indeed, we can expect

a backfiring of our stated efforts and, in short, we are falling down on the job.3

MY JOURNEY TO ACTIVIST CRIMINOLOGY

I attribute my activism to witnessing and experiencing injustice in my youth and to my

older sister, Sandra Dangler. Even in adolescence while growing up in Colorado and Ken-

tucky, she was a remarkable role model for standing up against everyday acts of racism,

whether they were perpetrated by someone in our immediate family or by a complete

stranger. In the summer of 1980 when she was a nurse in the Peace Corps in Guatemala

and I was taking summer school classes at the University of Colorado–Boulder, she wrote

and told me to read Malcolm X’s and Angela Davis’s autobiographies, and in that order

(Davis, 1974; X, 1973). I did and they were transformative. As I became a more engaged

activist during my undergraduate degree (and while I dropped out from my undergrad-

uate degree), I was intrigued with socialism and Marxism, and thus took a course titled

“Marxism and Leninism” when I studied at the University of Lancaster in England my

senior year (in 1980–1981). I was thrilled with the praxis aspect of Marxism, the call for

scholars to do more than sit in ivory towers and the necessity of being part of making

political and societal change. I still embrace most of the tenets of socialism, Marxism, the

“new criminology,” critical criminology, and many of the other labels this approach has

included; but in this speech, I outline some of my ongoing concerns, primarily the frequent

omission of gender and race in some of these publications, which is further problematic

when such lapses are not even acknowledged. Yet, I am encouraged by recent publica-

tions in Critical Criminology, primarily Potter’s (2013) publication stressing the need for

addressing intersecting oppressions and Woods’s (2014) queer criminology article.

A personal experience that had a significant impact on my activism was in 1988 at the

end of my second year as an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati. The night

before Jesse Jackson, who was running for president, was due in Cincinnati, racist flyers

2. Poignantly, the right to a decent education is such a fundamental core of justice that there is a

growing body of scholars advocating for the pedagogical incorporation of social justice into math

courses, starting as early as in middle school (see Gregson, 2013, in particular, but also Gutstein,

2006; McCoy, 2008; Stocker, 2007; and Turner and Strawhun, 2007).

3. In this speech, I am primarily making references regarding crime and responses to crime in the

United States, while recognizing and being very pleased with the growing global representation of

the ASC membership and conference registrants.