Criminology

This paper offers a re-reading of the ‘classics’ of American and British sub-cultural criminology. It notes the move from the authoritarian criminology that takes the criminal as Other to the fraternal criminology that takes the criminal as ‘bad young brother’. The sub-cultural tradition in criminology says as much about youthful masculinities as it does about crime and as much about criminology as about ‘criminals’. Both crime and criminology offer ways of ‘doing’ masculinity. ...the academics’ desire to find rationality and purpose in the deviance of youth (despite its surface appearance of senseless crime) was possibly itself a desire to find in those youth the very qualities which the academic male still most admired in himself - intellectual reason rather than, say, animal spirits or something deeply alien, perhaps deeply different which could not be encapsulated in an academic treatise. (Naffine,1997:43)

Sage eBooks, 2001

Edinburgh Law Review, 2012

2014

With this original collection of mainly North American writings, Walter S. Dekeseredy and Molly Dragiewicz set out to provide “the most up-to-date empirical, theoretical and political contributions” (p. 6) on critical criminology. While the text is certainly the most extensive to be produced on the subject to date, some significant omissions and underwhelming chapters mean that the editors are only partly successful in achieving their aspirations.

2020