THE CRIMINOLOGICAL IMAGINATION by JOCK YOUNG
| Published date | 01 June 2012 |
| Author | ADAM EDWARDS |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2012.00584.x |
| Date | 01 June 2012 |
THE CRIMINOLOGICAL IMAGINATION by JOCK YOUNG,
(Cambridge: Polity, 2011, pp. 252. £55.00 (hbk) £16.99 (pbk))
The Criminological Imagination is the final text in a trilogy of Jock Young's
essays on the current state of criminological thought, building on insights
from the previous two.
1
The title of the book is an explicit reference to C.
Wright Mills's account of the sociological imagination in the United States
during the 1950s.
2
Fifty years on, it is argued, little has changed. Young
argues the social scientific landscape in the United States continues to be
dominated by a tendency toward either abstracted empiricism or Grand
Theory. In their own way, both of these tendencies frustrate the real promise
of social science, which Mills believed to be an understanding of the
intersection of history and human biography to reveal the public issues
behind personal troubles. Mills summarized the research programme for a
sociological imagination in terms of three sorts of questions: (i) What is the
structure of a particular society as a whole and how does it differ from other
varieties of social order?; (ii) Where does this society stand in human history
and what are the mechanics by which it is changing?; and (iii) What varieties
of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period?
3
The Criminological Imagination discusses why this programme needs
reasserting in the early twenty-first century, especially in relation to the crime
problem, and what theoretical and methodological resources exist to support its
realization. In doing so, the book moves from a restatement of Mills's
programme, through a criticism of current tendencies in the study of crime and
control to an account of how a criminological imagination can be rescued.
With wit and verve, Young depicts the contemporary criminological
expression of these tendencies in paleontological terms. The `datasaur,
Empiricus Abstractus' (p. 15) wanders aimlessly from dataset to dataset, and
research grant to grant, ravenously consuming empirical facts, giving little
thought to their digestion. By contrast, the `theorodactyl' soars:
high above reality in an endless quest for a fashionable perch, gliding from
theory to theory, detected from below only by the trail of references it leaves
behind, mouthing near incomprehensible sentences with a hint of a French
accent yet strangely like the datasaur, unsure of where it is going and what it is
there for (p. 218).
Conversely, Young promotes `cultural criminology' as an approach that is:
informed by sociology, which concerns itself with meaning and power, and
which understands that human beings create cultural solutions to their life
problems in social structures which are largely not of their own making
(p. 222).
312
1 J. Young, The Vertigo of Late Modernity (2007) and The Exclusive Society: Social
Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity (1999).
2 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959).
3 id., p. 13.
ß2012 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2012 Cardiff University Law School
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