Review Essay: Critical Criminology: Continuity and Change
| Published date | 01 September 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0734016807304881 |
| Date | 01 September 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Criminal Justice Review
Volume 32 Number 3
September 2007 246-255
© 2007 Georgia State University
Research Foundation, Inc.
Critical Criminology: Continuity
10.1177/0734016807304881
http://cjr.sagepub.com
and Change
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Martin O’Brien
Susan Penna
Schwartz, M. D., & Hatty, S. E. (2003). Controversies in Critical
Criminology. Albany, NY: Anderson.
Carrington, K., & Hogg, R. (2002). Critical Criminology: Issues,
Debates and Challenges. Cullompton, Devon, United Kingdom: Willan.
Milovanovic, D. (2002). Critical Criminology at the Edge: Postmodern
Perspectives, Integration, and Application. Westport, CT: Praeger.
In a weak world, it is difficult to know where to turn for clean, strong explanations.
Lemert 1995, p. 114
We want to situate our review essay in the space between two essays in social science that
exemplify the distance between critical criminology’s origins and its present formations. The
first is an essay by Alvin Gouldner (1968/1973b) that sets the tone for the emergence of a
critical criminological enterprise. The second is an essay by Michael Burawoy (2005a) that
helps to define some of the contemporary problems facing any “critical” social scientific
project. The two essays only tangentially address core issues in critical criminology, but nev-
ertheless they establish important parameters within which that project has developed.
In the Spring of 1968, when Europe’s major cities were besieged by radicals and revolu-
tionaries and waves of political opposition swept the developed and developing world, when
Paris was barricaded and Prague was in the calm of its socialistic experiment before the
approaching communist storm, Alvin Gouldner published an essay in The American
Sociologist titled “The Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State” (Gouldner,
1968/1973b). It was a sometimes sarcastic and brutal but characteristically insightful and
sharp critique of what he called the “Becker School” of sociology—especially as it related
to law-breaking and norm-transgressing outsiders. Gouldner’s attack came as something of
a surprise to the academic world for two reasons. First, as Gouldner pointed out, only a few
years earlier he had laid into the “dominant ideology of professional sociologists”: the ide-
ology of a value-free social science. This ideology, he had claimed in 1961, was
useful to those young, or not so young, men who live off sociology rather than for it, and who
think of sociology as a way of getting ahead in the world by providing them with neutral tech-
niques that may be sold on the open market to any buyer. (Gouldner 1961/1973a, p. 12)
The myth of value freedom provided sociologists with a moral escape clause and led
to an abandonment of public responsibility for social ills. “If we today,” Gouldner
(1961/1973a, p. 25) continued in venomous prose,
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O'Brien, Penna / Review Essay
247
concern ourselves exclusively with the technical proficiency of our students and reject all
responsibility for their moral sense, or lack of it, then we may some day be compelled to
accept responsibility for having trained a generation willing to serve in a future Auschwitz.
Gouldner’s dismissal of the myth of value freedom seemed to place him on the side of the
radicals, the critics, the new generation of engaged sociologists whose morals tended to be
openly displayed rather than surreptitiously veiled, and who willingly declared their desire to
take sides in matters of social injustice. Thus, the second reason why Gouldner’s attack was
unexpected was because the Becker School—and Becker as its systematizer in particular—
had been instrumental in challenging the conventional precepts of the sociology of deviance:
the assumption of a consensual moral order, the belief that deviant behavior was inevitably
and immanently pathologically different from the norm, and the unexamined proposition that
criminalizing behaviors decreases, rather than increases, crime. What Becker and others
pointed to was that creating crime is a social accomplishment underpinned by a dominant
moral paradigm that branded some segments of society as deviant in a political drama
(Becker, 1974, p. 45, as cited in Sumner, 1994) in which the act of labeling held center stage.
But Gouldner’s (1961/1973a) essay was nothing if not prescient. In attacking the failure of
the skeptical deviancy theory of the Becker School to confront the wider structural sources of
power and authority, its seeming inability to address gross social divisions of wealth and status,
and its lack of attention to the larger political and economic interests that were embedded in
departments of state and industrial and financial corporations alike, Gouldner pinpointed with
some accuracy the radical motivations of a soon-to-emerge “new criminology.” In the same
year in which Gouldner launched his assault on Becker, a group of disaffected young social
scientists established the National Deviancy Conference (NDC) as a direct challenge to con-
servative, mainstream British criminology. Equally dissatisfied with the positivist and “cor-
rectionalist” bent of the mainstream and the antipolitics of labeling theory, the NDC
embarked on the ambitious intellectual project of connecting the creation of deviance to the
social and political contours of postwar capitalism. In search of a fully social theory of
deviance, rather than merely a just-so story of societal reaction, a generation of social scien-
tists sought to shift the criminological lens away from the character and situation of the deviant
person and his or her behavior and toward the social and historical patterns that produced
“deviance” as an object of state and social intervention. With a nod to Gouldner’s original cri-
tique, Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young (1975) cut the scar of “left idealism” into sub-
sequent criminology by accusing “the ‘sceptical’ deviancy theory of the late 1960s of
developing a criminology that is rarely interested in crime” and deflecting attention away
from the “wider processes of the social system” (pp. 16, 17). Thus, skeptical deviancy theory’s
“potential contribution to a radical critique of society lay in its ambiguous commitment to cultural
diversity, but that potential was marred by a failure to evolve a theory of the State and the total
society” (pp. 16, 17). In this failure, the idealistic position of skeptical deviancy theory was
unable to “explain the continuance, the innovation or the abolition of legal and social norms
in terms of the interests they support, the functions they serve to particular material arrange-
ments, or production in propertied societies” (p. 56).
Two important things were happening simultaneously here. First, there was a clear
attempt to develop an “anti-utilitarian” criminology that was able to conceptualize, theo-
rize, and research crime and deviance from outside the state’s agenda of crime control, one
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that included the controlling institutions and their networks of supporting agencies within
an overall theory of deviance creation and management. Second, there was a direct politi-
cization of academic criminology in order to open up a critical space between the control
talk of state-sponsored utilitarianism and a more engaged, socially aware, and, to use
Gouldner’s (1968/1973b, p. 59) phrase, “personally authentic” construction of the deviance
process. The NDC and its emerging new criminology wanted to sever the ties that bound
the study of crime and deviance to the organs of social control whose own operations were
to be subjected to intense, politicized scrutiny. Much more than a new theory or perspec-
tive, the NDC sought to create a new public identity for criminology: a new mission that
would embed criminology in the pursuit of progressive social change. Criminology’s task,
concluded Taylor, Walton, and Young (1973/1985, p. 282),
[is] not merely to question the...
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