Critical Criminology: Issues, Debates, Challenges

Abstract

While multi-authored, this edited collection coheres around a number of integrated themes. The first comprises a set of reflections on the crucial issues and debates in critical criminology over the last three decades authored mainly by key players in the praxis of critical criminology over the same time-frame ... Collectively, these four chapters locate the virtues and limitations of critical criminology in Australia, the USA and Britain in a historical and genealogical context.The second part of the book considers the possibility of re-envisioning the intellectual and political projects of critical criminology in the twenty-first century, given these challenges: the critiques of the 'rational' subject of western thought, the shortcomings of the universalising ideals of the 'new criminology', the rise of a 'governmentalised' criminology of risk, the impact of globalisation, the erosion of the sovereignty of nation states, the shifts in strategies of social control and criminal justice and an increasingly corporatised university sector ill-equipped or uninterested in supporting critical research.