Critical criminology, critical theory and social harm

Author(s):  
Paddy Hillyard ◽  
Steve Tombs

This chapter examines the relationships between social harm, zemiology, and criminology. It begins by reviewing some of the main arguments set out by those advocating a turn towards social harm and/or zemiology. It then elaborates on some of those arguments, first through illustrating the kinds of harms more significant than those captured by ’crime’ and, following that, to consider how these harms might take peculiar forms under neoliberalism. The chapter then turns to consider ‘criminological’ responses to those arguments—both at the level of the discipline as a set of institutions, and then via an analyses of some of the more critical, intellectual responses. The final substantive section explores the relationship between critical criminology, social harm, and zemiology.


Author(s):  
Allison Gray

A food crime perspective involves an evaluation of the (lack of) criminal, legal, and regulatory organisation, and the insufficient, ineffective, or lack of enforcement, which surrounds the criminal behaviour and social harms produced within systems of food production, processing, marketing, distribution, selling, consumption, and disposal, victimising (often simultaneously) humans, animals, and the environment. Married to a social harm approach, and grounded in the views of critical criminology, green criminology, and radical victimology, a food crime perspective problematises the practices and contexts of food systems as immoral, harmful, and criminal. This chapter introduces this concept of a food crime perspective in three parts. First, it recognises the study of food must be contextualised in contemporary global food systems. Second, it situates a food crime perspective among other (sub)theories of criminology. Finally, it concludes with an argument why it is important to think criminologically about food.


Criminologie ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Andrée Bertrand

Is critical criminology “passée”? Have its fathers, the British and American sociologists who wrote Critical Criminology in the mid seventies exhaust its potential interest and flavour? It would be too bad because critical criminology never really took place. There never was a serious and rigorous attempt at unfolding the historical, epistemological, socio-political roots of the discipline, a critical look at it that took nothing for granted. Reminding the readers of the very serious and highly publicised debate around Traditional and Critical Theory in the late thirties launched by the sociologists and philosophers of the Frankfurt School, the author shows that, far from being outdated, critical theory is of the utmost practicality in criminology, even more so because its founding fathers have taken, since, a less partisan and doctrinaire view of it. The applications of their intellectual and socio-political orientations to criminology are numerous, calling for a serious socio-historical analysis of the discipline and of its academic origins that should throw light on where it is going and its impotence at developing a paradigm.


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