Introduction: Critical Criminology for the 21st Century
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Author | VALERIA VEGH WEIS |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12446 |
The Howard Journal Vol60 No 3. September 2021 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12446
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 283–289
Introduction: Critical Criminology
for the 21st Century
VALERIA VEGH WEIS
Research Fellow, Zukunftskolleg, Universität Konstanz; Professor of
Criminology, Buenos Aires University and National Quilmes University,
Argentina; Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow, Freie Universitat,
Berlin, Germany; Vice-President of the Latin-American Institute of
Criminology and Social Development
We are amid a global pandemic; poverty is rising and the powerful are get-
ting richer through mechanisms that exploit, oppress, and deprive others.
Meanwhile, mainstream criminology remains oblivious to this dreadful sit-
uation and sticks to micro-studies on regression analysis, street crime desis-
tance and prison control. Before the world collapses, shall we revisit criti-
cal criminology (CC) to call attention to structural violences and injustices?
How should CC look in the 21st century?
CC was born in the 1970s and achieved an unprecedented global im-
pact. Its contributions appeared in the USA, Europe, and Latin America
simultaneously and not only as isolated individual theoretical productions
but as the result of networks of scholars seeking to connect their research
endeavours with actual social change. The Union of Radical Criminologists
in the USA, the National Deviancy Conferences in Europe and the Mara-
caibo School in Latin America became spaces to think about crime and
punishment from a radical perspective and to engage with social move-
ments working on the front line.
Building upon the lessons of the labelling approach, CC proposed to
go beyond the traditional boundaries on the study of crime and control
to draw a connection between the function of the criminal agencies and
the characteristics of the capitalist system of production. From a material-
ist analysis, critical criminologists started to study the unequal role of penal
institutions incorporating the study of broader mechanisms of social con-
trol. The intersections among crime, class, race, gender, ethnicity and age
and the different responses that marginalised groups received from the
criminal justice system were set at the centre of the field.
In The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance, the most well-
known work in this trend, Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young offered
a review of previous criminological thought from a materialistic perspective
283
C
2021 The Authors. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice published by Howard League
and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which per-
mits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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