Reviews
| Date | 01 August 2002 |
| Published date | 01 August 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.35.2.253 |
253
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME 35 NUMBER 2 2002 PP.253–266
REVIEWS
Critical and Radical Discourses on Crime
By George Pavlich
(2000) Ashgate,Aldershot, 204 pp. ISBN 1 84014 731 8,Hardback.
Readers unnerved by narratives that refuse the hierarchical orderings of social
scientific, disciplinary, power-knowledge constellations will find little comfort
in what follows”(Pavlich, p. 16).
“No one breathed a word about what they had seen, although the affair soon
became a matter of national notoriety. As if by unspoken agreement, they all acted
as though they were opera-goers who, arriving fashionably late, had missed the
overture”(Dibdin, Cosi Fan Tutti, p. 5).
My favourite crime fiction detective is Aurelio Zen, the creation of Michael
Dibdin. Zen is neither hero nor anti-hero. Shall we say, he is indifferent. The world
in which he operates is one of shadows of meaning and shifting appearances (or
perhaps what Pavlich would call traces and silhouettes). A world where definitions of
the situation are constantly fluid and always potentially something else; where
crime and justice are never self-evident. I was tempted to review Pavlich’s book in a
style reminiscent of Zen, particularly in Cosi Fan Tutti, where the promise of resolu-
tion which underpins the crime detective genre, is constantly confounded by the
difference between appearances, perceptions and “reality”. To do so is not to make
light of what is, in the final analysis, a matter of serious intent.
The Promise
The promise of Critical and Radical Discourses on Crime is a critique which allows
justice or emancipation to emerge. However, this is not a justice that is “ever deliv-
erable as a present outcome; rather it is one that forever beckons, mirage-like, from
the elusive sands of the future” (p. 1). It is not a justice which can be prescribed in
a blueprint of some future state of being.
The Threat
The book derives from a concern that technocracy reigns supreme over most crimi-
nological discourses, despite and perhaps even with the unwitting support of radical
criminology. Radical criminological discourses reached their height in the 1960s
and 70s with calls for the abolition of prisons, the democratisation of police forces,
human rights definitions of crime, abolitionism and so forth. Since then the space
for critique which challenges the fundamental bases of existing criminal justice
systems has significantly narrowed, and some discourses which claim the mantle of
radical critique are themselves pragmatic, technocratic discourses which accept
unambiguously the “reality” of crime.
According to Pavlich, revolutionary demands have been replaced by differing
positions on how to solve the crime problem. The utopian project of radical criminol-
ogy has been jettisoned for an accommodation with correctionalist and technocratic
“
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