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Book Review: Beyond criminology: Taking harm seriously

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.1177/146247450500700411
Date01 October 2005
Published date01 October 2005
AuthorDave Whyte
Subject MatterArticles
09_bkrevws_057124 (jk-t) 2/9/05 9:14 am Page 488
PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY 7(4)
Reference
Burton, F. and P. Carlen (1979) Official discourse: On discourse analysis, government publi-
cations, ideology and the state. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Jacqueline Tombs
Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
Beyond criminology: Taking harm seriously, P. Hillyard, C. Pantazis, S. Tombs and D.
Gordon (eds). London: Pluto, 2004. 332 pp. ISBN 1–55266–148 –2.
Michel Foucault once argued that criminology was the ‘alibi’ upon which the criminal
justice system depends. When future generations of social scientists look back to an out-
of-control criminal justice system at the turn of the 21st century, they will question not
what was being done to excuse, but what their colleagues were doing to challenge its
counter-productive expansion, its exorbitantly rising economic costs and its less measur-
able but undeniably huge social costs, indicated most graphically in terms of the mass
criminalization and marginalization of young people. What criminology desperately
needs at this juncture is the ability to look beyond the ready-made landscape of state-
defined crime in order to regain some perspective, a vantage point far enough removed
from official definition and moral panic; a vantage point that is sufficiently disconnected
from the evaluative demands of criminal justice agencies. For this reason, criminolo-
gists cannot afford to ignore Beyond criminology, a truly groundbreaking text which
proposes a new perspective from which to approach the study of crime and criminal
justice.
The starting point for the text is that the category of ‘crime’, as currently constructed,
obscures some of the most socially harmful acts and omissions. For, the crimes that are
generally dealt with by the apparatuses and technologies of crime control involve only
a minority of individually produced harms, many of which would not appear very high
on any objective scale of social harm. The text demonstrates how criminology, by failing
to...

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