Alana Barton

Reading the Word and Reading the World: The Impact of a Critical Pedagogical Approach to the Teaching of Criminology in Higher Education

Critical pedagogical approaches are underpinned by the principal that education is an inherently political process which should be concerned with enabling students to be reflective, independent, and critical thinkers. In this paper we argue that facilitating the development of a critical consciousness is an integral part of the teaching of critical criminology in higher education. We contend that it is essential if students are to recognize the broader social and political contexts of their own, and others’, lived experiences and thus be able to challenge political oppressions and domain ideologies. By drawing on a pilot study conducted with final‐year undergraduates from a university in the north west of England, the paper will demonstrate how a critical education (critical in terms of subject content, and teaching practice) can better enable students to develop both academically and, as importantly, with regard to their personal, social, and political consciousness.

Show me the prison! The development of prison tourism in the UK:

This paper presents an analysis of the historical development and interpretation of prison tourism in the UK Britain and the influence of this on current representations of prison museums via prison museum websites. While there has been significant examination of various prison museums overseas there has been comparatively little published on these institutions in the UK Britain. In response to contending pressures, prison museums have endeavoured to present a balanced and objective depiction of past prison systems whilst their promotional websites, which serve to draw in customers, frequently rely on ‘popular’ depictions. These representations raise important questions as prisons cannot be seen as neutral or apolitical, neither those in the early 21st century nor those of the past. Despite these pressures, prison museums have great potential to increase public understanding of the prison; this paper promotes a more ethical, multi-perspective and politically diverse interpretation within prison museums.

Drugs Throughcare in a Local Prison: a process evaluation

This paper discusses the implementation process of a throughcare project for short-term and remand prisoners with substance misuse problems in a local prison. The aim of the Project was to assess the needs of such prisoners and refer them on to outside agencies on release. The introduction of a new group of workers into such a highly structured environment as a prison without adequate preparation and induction and at a sensitive time, led to considerable difficulties in the short term. Despite this, the Project saw more than 1000 inmates in its first 9 months of existenceÂthe great majority of whom were heroin users, and about half of whom had not been in contact with any drug agencies/services in the community. While the effectiveness of the Project within the prison cannot be faulted, its success in getting prisoners to contact agencies on release remains unclear. The relevance of the Project to the CARAT scheme is noted.

From empowering the shameful to shaming the empowered: Shifting depictions of the poor in ‘reality TV’:

Poor-blaming and poor-shaming have become intrinsic parts of the neoliberal order. For neoliberal discourse to enter and to dominate wider public ‘common sense’, vehicles of ‘populist language’ are required and the mass media has taken a central place in propagandising neoliberalism through their narration of poverty. This article focuses on so-called ‘reality TV’ and its neoliberal framing of the poor, particularly since 2007 and specifically in its generation of support for, and acquiescence in, ‘austerity’. We argue that what these programmes provide is a representation of poverty which is politically expedient but socially divisive. As criminologists, we suggest that this representation symbolises the intensification of what Cohen (2002: xxi) noted as the prominence of ‘“welfare cheats”, “social security frauds” and “dole scroungers” as fairly traditional folk devils. Further, we argue that an intensification in the denigration of the poor and the marginal in these programmes can be traced across three phases, from 2009 onwards, defined by their key features. Whilst not neatly discrete, these phases mirror the neoliberal political shift from welfare to punishment. They manufacture ‘epidemic problems’ that are seen to require urgent remediation. Yet the status and nature of these problems are defined through deception and the forms of intervention required are determined through individualised and moralised neoliberal prescription.

Agnotology and the Criminological Imagination

In this chapter we reflect upon the concept of ‘agnotology’ and its usefulness for the expansion of a zemiological criminology. Initially presented as an analytical tool in the fields of science and medicine, agnotology explores the social and political underpinnings of forms of ignorance and their role in both generating and securing acquiescence in mass harms and crimes of the powerful. Typically originating within state-corporate symbioses of ideology, policy and practice, ‘crimes of the powerful’ include harms inflicted through health and safety violations, ‘security’, criminal justice, social and economic policies, war, disaster and environmental destruction. In each case real harms are obscured, denied or otherwise neutralised. Two cases of mass harm are presented here as examples. First, we discuss corporate constructed agnosis over the use of asbestos that has allowed corporations to kill hundreds of thousands yet avoid criminal justice. Second, we reflect on the Holocaust and the role of agnosis in this most extreme form of state-generated harm. Despite its scale, and in contrast with the attention from other disciplines, criminology has remained remarkably taciturn about this crime. We conclude that the central zemiological purpose of an imaginative criminology—the understanding of and struggle against major harm—cannot be undertaken without systematic and rigorous attention to ignorance.

Book Review: Maeve McMahon (ed.) Assessment to Assistance: Programs for Women in Community Corrections Lanham, MD: American Correctional Association, 2000. 362 pp. (incl. index).

conclude from their analysis of almost 800 replications of the Teaching Family Model across North America that sites that received a combination of preservice and in-service staff training, ongoing staff consultation, staff evaluations, programme evaluation and administrative support were more likely to survive for more than five years. Successful implementation is clearly, therefore, a resource-intensive issue, though one which, as McGuire and Hollins argue in their respective chapters, is increasingly being brought to the fore by the demands of accreditation in the UK and in other jurisdictions. Many of the contributions on this volume are of interest in their own right, though the volume as a whole lacks conceptual coherence. In particular, there is an uneasy balance between the ‘case studies’ and the more general contributions, with the rationale for the inclusion of the latter not always being immediately evident. For example, while the chapter by Walsh and Farrington on benefit–cost analysis is of intrinsic interest, its relationship to the preceding and subsequent material is not clearly articulated. The result is an absence of overall cohesion coupled with a tendency towards the inclusion of material (for example, the results of meta-analyses and the ‘principles of effective practice’) that treads relatively well-worn ground. The primary purpose of this book, according to the editors, is to communicate what is known about effective offender programmes to support change at policy and practitioner level. In this respect, it promises more than it actually delivers. This may appear unfair criticism given the relative dearth of research on programme implementation and this book does make a welcome contribution to an under-developed but important area of knowledge. However it would have benefited from an overview chapter that synthesized the key messages from the analysis of programme implementation in diverse contexts and from varied perspectives. What for example, are the critical issues that affect programme implementation in prisons and in the community and what are the core features of successful implementation that transcend programme setting or type? These, ultimately, are the questions to which practitioners and policy makers require answers if previous mistakes are to be avoided and programmes successfully introduced and sustained.