Cripping criminology
| Author | Nicole L Asquith,Ryan Thorneycroft |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480619877697 |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480619877697
Theoretical Criminology
2021, Vol. 25(2) 187 –208
© The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1362480619877697
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
Cripping criminology
Ryan Thorneycroft
Nicole L Asquith
Western Sydney University, Australia
Abstract
The position of disabled people within criminal justice frameworks and scholarship is
one of ambivalence, which leaves disabled people in the simultaneous and contradictory
position of centrality and marginality. While disabled people are over-represented within
the criminal justice system (as offenders, victims, and witnesses), their voices are often
marginalized or silenced. So too, while disabled people are over-represented within the
criminal justice system, they remain under-explored in policy, practice, research, and
scholarship. Aligning with the shift to queer and queering criminology, in this article we
deploy the lens of ‘crip’ and ‘cripping’ to facilitate a more critical engagement with the
concerns of disabled people, along with the mechanisms by which abledness informs
criminal justice encounters.
Keywords
Abledness, ableism, crip, crip criminology, disability
Introduction
The position of disabled people within criminal justice frameworks and scholarship is one
of ambivalence, which leaves disabled people in the simultaneous and contradictory posi-
tion of centrality and marginality (Steele and Thomas, 2014). While disabled people are
over-represented within the criminal justice system (as offenders, victims, and witnesses),
their voices are often marginalized or silenced. Constituted as unreliable, or positioned
as suspicious, their views and experiences are often dismissed and invisibilized. So too,
Corresponding author:
Ryan Thorneycroft, Lecturer in Criminology, School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney
University, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia.
Email: r.thorneycroft@westernsydney.edu.au
877697TCR0010.1177/1362480619877697Theoretical CriminologyThorneycroft and Asquith
research-article2019
Article
188 Theoretical Criminology 25(2)
while disabled people are over-represented within the criminal justice system, they remain
under-explored in policy, practice, research, and scholarship (Steele and Thomas, 2014).
And while disabled people are over-represented as victims, they are also under-repre-
sented in their access to justice. Disabled people thus have a contested and complex rela-
tionship with the criminal justice system and the field of criminology, and in this article,
we seek to explore the nexus between disability and criminology in the pursuit of cripping
criminology. We use the terms ‘crip’ and ‘cripping’ as a deliberate trope to problematize
both the biomedical and social models of disability. Aligning with the shift to queer and
queering criminology, in this article we deploy the lens of ‘crip’ and ‘cripping’ to facilitate
a more critical engagement with the concerns of disabled people, along with the mecha-
nisms by which abledness informs criminal justice encounters.
Disabled people are abjected by the criminal justice system even before they encoun-
ter its practices. Ableism and disablism are constitutive elements of many modern socie-
ties (Campbell, 2009a), and like other social practices, run in and through the criminal
justice system. Just as Sir William Macpherson argued that the police in the UK were
‘institutionally racist’ (Chakraborti, 2015: 15), it is our claim that the criminal justice
system and criminology are institutionally and theoretically ableist. Ableism and disab-
lism are under-explored concepts in the field of criminology. In this article we tease them
out to explore the ways in which disabled bodies and lives are constituted, regulated,
governed, and violated by criminal justice frameworks. We explore the relationship
between crip and criminology in order to articulate sites, practices, and opportunities in
which disabled bodies and lives can attain justice within an ableist criminological institu-
tion. Our exposition is an act of provocation, as we aim to subvert and disrupt criminol-
ogy from the inside in order to expose its ableism and disablism, and identify the ways
in which criminology might be cripped.
In exploring the prospects of a crip criminology we are indebted to the work of femi-
nist, critical race, and queer criminologists who have come before us. In this article, we
focus on the theoretical legacies and links with queer criminology, which itself has been
informed by critical studies of masculinity and whiteness. Over the past few years, schol-
ars have established and defended a queer criminology that provides a nourishing
resource for (queer) criminological scholarship (see Ball, 2014, 2016; Ball et al., 2014;
Dalton, 2016; Dwyer et al., 2016; McDonald, 2016; Tomsen, 2006, 2009; Woods, 2014).
We are guided by their work in taking their insights and identifying the points of intersec-
tion, similarity, and departure in formulating this notion of crip criminology. Ahmed
(2017: 15–16) writes that citation ‘is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came
before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we devi-
ated from the paths we were told to follow’. To follow a crip perspective in some senses
betrays all that is normative about criminology as a discipline; thus, queer theorists have
laid a path that is a little easier for us to follow. As authors, we are appreciative of this
field and the ways in which it has enabled us to think of criminology and crip in new and
different ways.
In thinking with and through the problem of ableism and disablism in criminology, we
are inevitably confronted by the realities of our own dis/abled bodies in relation to the
category of ‘disabled’. Despite what follows, we are critical of the need to position our-
selves in terms of our dis/abled selves. Campbell (2019: 145) suggests that:
To continue reading
Request your trial