Book Review: The French Connection in Criminology: Rediscovering Crime, Law, and Social Change

• Author: Michael J. Bolton
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016805282749
• Published date: 01 September 2005
• Date: 01 September 2005
• Subject Matter: Articles

Criminal Justice ReviewBook Reviews

The French Connection in Criminology: Rediscovering Crime, Law,

and Social Change, by Bruce A. Arrigo, Dragan Milovanovic, and Rob-

ert Carl Schehr. State University of New York Press, 2005.

DOI: 10.1177/0734016805282749

Whenever an article or book is published that hints of a major knowledge growth in the

nature of how science is actually conducted, a compelling intrigue is created. The French

Connection in Criminology: Rediscovering Crime, Law, and Social Change is no exception.

In its pages, the authors question the wisdom of clinging to the rigid positivistic lenses scien-

tists have relied on for centuries. In addition, despite the fact that a large body of literature

exists showing how historical writings have been penned by powerful persons of privilege

who ignored issues such as gender bias, racism, poverty, and class conflict, Arrigo,

Milovanovic, and Schehr not only use the critical perspectiveto illuminate such abject short-

sightedness, but they also offer the hope of a more inclusive world by challenging core linear

assumptions stemming from modernist thought that have guided scientific reasoning since

the Enlightenment—the “Festival of Reason.”Their plight is monumental because the domi-

nant scientific mind-set is so linked to the systematic, calculable, quantifiable observation of

physical and social phenomena that other nonpositivistic forms of investigating the universe

seem simply inconceivable.

Up until recently—the past several decades, to be sure—modernist scientific methods

have irrefutably tended to be regarded as the primary means for understanding what is know-

able about the universe. Conversely, and especially in the social sphere, postmodernists

negate the core mind-set of modernity by denying the macrotheories, grand narratives, and

macropolitics that have undergirded it for the past five centuries. Although some might sug-

gest that this hints of a knowledge turn of paradigmatic proportion, authors of the French

Connection in Criminology more appropriately call it a “Linguistic Turn in Social Theory,”

because language is so vital to our inner and external worlds—worlds of ideas, images, intu-

itions, concepts, narratives, and texts—that it shapes our existence individually and

collectively.

Unlike many of the early works on postmodernism that have tended to generate philosoph-

ical questions regarding the integral role power always plays in social relations, what Arrigo,

Milovanovic, and Schehr have created with The French Connection is a useable framework

for understanding how the postmodern, nonlinear lens can serve to demystify the “burning

issues of our era” (p. 139) by “fanning the flames of alternative, provocative, and novellines

of socio-legal scholarship that simultaneously identify the limits of existing research while

charting new directions” (p. xiii). They do this in the first three chaptersby providing worth-

while summaries of writings by deceased and active postmodern scholars, including discus-

sions of the current status of the linguistic turn and how knowledge gained from these writers

can help prepare mankind for a future of confusion and uncertainty. They supplement these

efforts in the last half of the book by demonstrating how lenses can be toggled and applied to

prisons and confinement laws, race and racism (including racial profiling and jury nullifica-

tion), media, cinema and literary texts, restorative justice, and offender mediation.

220

Book Reviews Criminal Justice Review

Volume 30 Number 2

September 2005 220-255

© 2005 Georgia State University

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