Elliott Currie

Against marginality Arguments for a public criminology

Despite its accumulated theoretical and empirical heft, the discipline of criminology has had distressingly little impact on the course of public policy toward crime and criminal justice. This article addresses the sources of that troubling marginality, with special emphasis on the powerful disincentives to greater public impact that operate within the discipline itself and the research universities that mainly house it—including the pressure to publish ever more narrow research in peer-reviewed journals at the expense of efforts at synthesis and dissemination that could serve to educate a broader public. Achieving a greater voice in the world outside the discipline will require a concerted move toward a more explicitly public criminology, and seeing to it that the work of such a criminology is more reliably supported and rewarded within the universities and the profession as a whole.

Crimes without Criminals: Witchcraft and Its Control in Renaissance Europe

THE SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF DEVIANT behavior has begun to focus less on the deviant and more on societys response to him.l One of several implications of this perspective is that a major concern of the sociology of deviance should be the identification and analysis of different kinds of systems of social control. Particularly important is the analysis of the impact of different kinds of control systems on the way deviant behavior is perceived and expressed in societies. By playing down the importance of intrinsic differences between deviants and conventional people, and between the social situation of deviants and that of nondeviants, the focus on social response implies

Confronting crime: Looking toward the twenty-first century

We have reached what may be an important turning point in the development of criminological thought and of social policy toward crime. The “conservative revolution” in criminology has lost considerable credibility, along with the entire set of minimalist strategies toward the disadvantaged that dominated social policy throughout much of the recent past. A space has opened for the development of a “social environmental” or “human-ecological” approach to crime, which combines a variety of interventions on the individual and family level with an array of broader policies aimed at controlling the social and economic forces that place individuals, families, and communities at risk in the first place.

America's problems : social issues and public policy

Professors Currie and Skolnick place special emphasis on the underlying economic causes of social problems and the social policies that fail to address them. The texts research-oriented approach introduces students to the empirical aspects of sociology by discussing how research is done and how data is compiled and analyzed. A comparative perspective on major topics exposes students to American social problems in context to other nations. This edition provides in-depth coverage of current social and political issues, such as downsizing, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, and the crisis in health care.

Missing Pieces: Notes on Crime, Poverty and Social Policy

A long and impressive criminological tradition links crime to what social scientists call ‘persistent poverty’-and, in particular, to the corrosive effects of inadequate labor markets on a variety of social institutions. But few anticrime policies have seriously confronted those conditions, even at the height of the Great Society of the 1960s. With only scattered exceptions, those policies have sought to enhance the individual capacities of children and youth without substantially altering the surrounding economic institutions. An anticrime strategy for the next century that is both more effective and consistent with what we know about the roots of crime must involve measures that more directly address the labor market itself. Among other things, these measures include direct public job creation, systematic efforts to up grade wages, and greater support for labor organization.

The Sustaining Society

I have a lot of friends who have told me lately that they no longer read newspapers. This isn’t because they get their news on the internet now, but because they can’t stand to read news at all because the news is so grim. I haven’t gone that far, but I am sympathetic. It’s undeniable that reading the paper today is a fairly gruelling experience, because the news seems to be full of almost nothing but accounts of the various crises that afflict much of the planet. In particular, the global economic order most of us live under - so-called ‘free-market’ capitalism - seems to lurch from crisis to crisis and indeed often seems to be in a state of perpetual emergency.

Crime and Market Society: Lessons from the United States

Enormous changes are taking place in Europe — East and West — and, of course, not only in Europe but around the world. How we deal with those changes in the 1990s — the decisions we make about social and economic policy — will shape our global future far into the twenty-first century. So it is especially critical that we engage now in a full and global debate about the choices before us. At the heart of the debate — here in England, in Europe both East and West, in Latin America — is the issue of the role of ‘market forces’ — the balance of public and private, of the pursuit of common ends versus individual gain as organising principles of social life. In the United States, I am afraid, at least among our more conservative pundits and the mass media, the debate is generally regarded as largely settled, the choices already made. The enormous changes rocking Europe today are seen as one expression of the worldwide vindication of conservative social policies and economic values: of the triumph of ‘free markets’. From this perspective, the only people who have reservations about the presumed victory of those policies and those values — as a former US secretary of the treasury, William Simon, said recendy — are a ‘handful of soreheads who don’t know how to compete’. Well, that’s one American view: I would like to offer another, and considerably less celebratory one. For lost in the celebration, in the United States at any rate, is any sustained concern about the social consequences of the much-heralded ‘unleashing’ of market forces.

The Dark Ghetto revisited: Kenneth B Clark's classic analysis as cutting edge criminology

In this article we revisit one of the classic works of the 1960s on crime and delinquency in poor communities: Kenneth B Clark’s Dark Ghetto. Our exploration reveals its insights to be extremely relevant today both in understanding the roots of the self-destructive violence that tears at those communities and in thinking about how to combat the structural conditions and individual mentalities that generate it. Beyond the specific theoretical and methodological lessons that can be gleaned from Dark Ghetto, Clark’s work serves as a much-needed illustration of how theoretical insights derived from intensive qualitative research that is attuned to political, historical, and economic realities—and their human consequences—can enhance criminological theory, and align with progressive movements for social change.

Criminology and responsibility: Enduring themes in the work of Jock Young:

When I was first asked to contribute some thoughts on Jock Young’s work to this symposium, I thought I would focus on ways in which his ideas had evolved over time. But the more I began to re-immerse myself in this extraordinary body of writing, the more I was struck by the things that had remained constant throughout more than four decades of an astonishingly productive career. Several themes recur over and over in this work: the language shifts somewhat from time to time, as does the specific focus of Jock’s concern (and sometimes his wrath). But those central themes remain remarkably consistent—and enduringly important. Much of Jock’s best and most influential work involves an ongoing set of arguments about the elements of a truly responsible social science, and about the ever-present—and perhaps increasing—threats to it. Those arguments were enormously relevant when I first became aware of them in the 1970s: they are, if anything, even more so in the 21st century. They were rooted in deeply felt convictions about what social science is for—or should be for—and what conceptual and empirical tools were required to meet those responsibilities.

The Violence Divide: Taking “Ordinary” Crime Seriously in a Volatile World

Almost twenty-five years ago Jock Young described crime as a “moral barometer” of society—a “key indictor as to whether we are getting things right, achieving the sort of society in which people can live with dignity and without fear” (Young 1992, p. 34). Today, the pattern of violent crime around the world provides a particularly troubling reading of how far we are from “getting things right” in our contemporary global society, and it cries out for serious attention and action. But whether we will see that sustained attention, much less social action, on the scale we need in the coming years is by no means certain.