Geoffrey Skoll
Historian-social worker-anthropologist turned to academic criminal justice to make a living. Now retired but still teach on line. Trying to contribute to understandings for a human world.
Please contact me by email: skollgr@buffalostate.edu (alternate email: skoll@uwm.edu).
Phone: 351 911 574543
Address: Lisbon, Portugal
Please contact me by email: skollgr@buffalostate.edu (alternate email: skoll@uwm.edu).
Phone: 351 911 574543
Address: Lisbon, Portugal
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Books by Geoffrey Skoll
“This book is solid and represents a needed corrective in our field: Advancing it theoretically through the development of criminal justice theory. Skoll articulates difficult material in a very accessible manner…It is exciting to come across a book that is absolutely needed in our field, and that pushes the disciplinary envelope through applying and synthesizing an intellectually sophisticated body of literature.”--Peter Kraska, Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Department of Crime and Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University
“In this essential book, Skoll's aim and accomplishment is to rearrange our perceptual fields, to challenge the anesthetizing effects and dogma of common sense, and to invite us to see differently so that we might act differently. So much of law and public policy turns on questions of competing metaphors and analogies, and challenging any controlling analogy is always a risky business…We enter an open space of rethinking and negotiation, a space of ethical reflection and political struggle, a space where we must rely not on rules so much as on our moral intuition, our queer questions, our commitment to the dignity of persons, our belief in equality and fairness. Skoll cuts with laser-like precision to the intellectual roots of our thinking about criminal justice, upends layers of mystification and myth that currently dictate criminal justice policy, and opens a window allowing fresh and startling winds to blow. You will never again see the cop on the corner, the court, or the cage in the same way.”--William Ayers, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Education
“Skolls’ Contemporary Criminology and Criminal Justice Theory is unafraid – unafraid to expose the malignant intellectual vacancy that echoes through much of contemporary criminology and criminal justice, unafraid to situate this theoretical hollow squarely in its historical and political context, unafraid to recall radical alternatives to the present situation, and unafraid to imagine new ones.”--Jeff Ferrell, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, Texas Christian University
Geoffrey R. Skoll is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, Buffalo State College. He has a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology and MSW in clinical social work. Previous publications include Walk the Walk and Talk the Talk: An Ethnography of a Drug Abuse Treatment Facility (1992). His current interests focus on social theory, terrorism, and the death penalty in comparative perspective.
Papers by Geoffrey Skoll
considerable criticism on the role of technology
as it impacts and benefits human life. In what was
one of the best-selling books on the sociology of
risk, Ulrich Beck realized that accidents under
some conditions were the result of an inadequate
manipulation of technology. If modern society had
been based on Fordist scale production, Chernobyl
marked the turning-point of a new era where risk
predominated. With this backdrop, Beck considers
that post-modernity needs technology and risk in
order for the capital to be replicated (Beck, 2006).
Although, technological advances, in forms of
computers, ITC, and devices, are aimed at making
of this world a safer site to be, mitigating and
controlling the risk, the fact is that somehow, it
contributes to creating new risks, which go beyond
the control of society. This pungent point of view
was widely examined by sociologists, anthropologists
and psychologists in the recent decades. Is
technology and technological advance a threat or
a benefit for humankind? Ecological concerns are
perhaps a point where more vividly may be seen
the paradox of technology appreciated.
“This book is solid and represents a needed corrective in our field: Advancing it theoretically through the development of criminal justice theory. Skoll articulates difficult material in a very accessible manner…It is exciting to come across a book that is absolutely needed in our field, and that pushes the disciplinary envelope through applying and synthesizing an intellectually sophisticated body of literature.”--Peter Kraska, Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Department of Crime and Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University
“In this essential book, Skoll's aim and accomplishment is to rearrange our perceptual fields, to challenge the anesthetizing effects and dogma of common sense, and to invite us to see differently so that we might act differently. So much of law and public policy turns on questions of competing metaphors and analogies, and challenging any controlling analogy is always a risky business…We enter an open space of rethinking and negotiation, a space of ethical reflection and political struggle, a space where we must rely not on rules so much as on our moral intuition, our queer questions, our commitment to the dignity of persons, our belief in equality and fairness. Skoll cuts with laser-like precision to the intellectual roots of our thinking about criminal justice, upends layers of mystification and myth that currently dictate criminal justice policy, and opens a window allowing fresh and startling winds to blow. You will never again see the cop on the corner, the court, or the cage in the same way.”--William Ayers, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Education
“Skolls’ Contemporary Criminology and Criminal Justice Theory is unafraid – unafraid to expose the malignant intellectual vacancy that echoes through much of contemporary criminology and criminal justice, unafraid to situate this theoretical hollow squarely in its historical and political context, unafraid to recall radical alternatives to the present situation, and unafraid to imagine new ones.”--Jeff Ferrell, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, Texas Christian University
Geoffrey R. Skoll is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, Buffalo State College. He has a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology and MSW in clinical social work. Previous publications include Walk the Walk and Talk the Talk: An Ethnography of a Drug Abuse Treatment Facility (1992). His current interests focus on social theory, terrorism, and the death penalty in comparative perspective.
considerable criticism on the role of technology
as it impacts and benefits human life. In what was
one of the best-selling books on the sociology of
risk, Ulrich Beck realized that accidents under
some conditions were the result of an inadequate
manipulation of technology. If modern society had
been based on Fordist scale production, Chernobyl
marked the turning-point of a new era where risk
predominated. With this backdrop, Beck considers
that post-modernity needs technology and risk in
order for the capital to be replicated (Beck, 2006).
Although, technological advances, in forms of
computers, ITC, and devices, are aimed at making
of this world a safer site to be, mitigating and
controlling the risk, the fact is that somehow, it
contributes to creating new risks, which go beyond
the control of society. This pungent point of view
was widely examined by sociologists, anthropologists
and psychologists in the recent decades. Is
technology and technological advance a threat or
a benefit for humankind? Ecological concerns are
perhaps a point where more vividly may be seen
the paradox of technology appreciated.
The advent of neoliberalism in the early 1970s marked a new age for ethical practices. Although pragmatism as an approach to ethics pre-dated neoliberalism, the neoliberal approach to political economy ushered in a new kind of pragmatism, owing little to Jeremy Bentham, even less to the American philosophical pragmatists Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Today's pragmatism has permeated the penal systems of the central countries of the world capitalist system. A new ethics emerged, a neopragmatism. Acts came to be judged by their effects and not by the motives that led to the actions. This altered the doctrine of Abrahamic religions, and led to the disappearance of forgiveness as a moral good.