Gregg Barak

Cultural literacy and a multicultural inquiry into the study of crime and justice

In the emerging post-melting pot era, increasing tension and antipathy between racial and ethnic groups are present. These tensions also are emerging in public and political discourse, and are expressed in such terms as Eurocentric, Afrocentric, cultural literacy, politically correct, and multiculturalism. In this essay I argue that a “cultural literacy” in criminology and criminal justice, such as those developed by Terence Thornberry (1990) and by Larry Siegel and Marvin Zalman (1991) tends both to reproduce itself and to impede the development of scientific inquiry in the discipline. This is the case because such cultural literacies cannot form constructs of crime and justice that are abstract enough to transcend the traditional definitions of crime and the administration of crime control. A preliminary African-American literacy is introduced here as one of the many potential multicultural literacies capable of reshaping and advancing the study of crime and justice.

A reciprocal approach to peacemaking criminology Between adversarialism and mutualism

In the process of characterizing the dialectics of adversarialism and mutualism, a case is made for a reciprocal approach to peacemaking criminology. As part of the rationale for a reciprocity of making war or making peace, critiques are leveled at both ‘peacemaking’ and ‘warmaking’ criminology. The purposes of this essay are, on the one hand, to reinvigorate peacemaking criminology that is often too isolated and marginalized from hegemonic interaction to influence struggles for positive peace and social justice. On the other hand, the article seeks to expose the kinds of reflective thinking and social analysis that a peacemaking criminology must confront if its goals of overcoming or neutralizing a warmaking criminology are ever to materialize at home and abroad.

Mediatizing law and order: Applying Cottle’s architecture of communicative frames to the social construction of crime and justice

Whether one is studying the interactions between ‘law and order’ or between ‘crime and justice’, one should also at the same time be studying the social construction of these phenomena as they are mediated through mass communications and popular culture: ‘Understanding the construction of newsmaking requires an examination of the conscious and unconscious processes involved in the mass dissemination of symbolic consumer goods’ (Barak, 1994: 3). In this Research Note, I argue that exploring these complex social relations lies within the framing of the public articulation of what is meant by ‘law’, ‘order’, ‘crime’, and ‘justice’. More specifi cally, I contend that a very promising avenue for unraveling the social construction of ‘law and order’ or of ‘crime and justice’ may be found within Simon Cottle’s (2006) ‘communicative architecture of television news’. As David Altheide (1987) pointed out 20 years ago in his analysis of US and UK television coverage of terrorism, there are basic distinctions between ‘event-type’ frames associated with regular evening news broadcasts and the ‘topic-type’ frames associated with interviews and documentary presentations. For example, the former tend to focus on visuals and the aftermath and tactics of terrorism, while the latter are more likely to include materials about purposes, goals, and rationales. This is certainly no less the case today, whether we are talking about the coverage of terrorism in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Europe, or North America. At the same time, in the contemporary world of globalism a mixture of event and topic as well as other frames for representing ‘terrorism’ or ‘counterterrorism’, can be discerned (Altheide, 2006; Kavoori and Fraley, 2006). For example, Cottle (2006) examined television news programming in six countries – Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, India, Singapore, and South Africa – in the two-week period between 13–26 September 2004. His rather large sample of televised news programs comprised 27 television channels, 4 international satellite providers, 56 different news programs, and 560 broadcast news programs. The sample itself consisted of 1662 terror-related news items, 17.2 percent of the total news sample of 9662 broadcast news items gathered during the sample timeframe. And, while his study period was not

Crime and Crime Control in an Age of Globalization: A Theoretical Dissection

This article examines theimpact of globalization on both crime and crimecontrol at the national and global levels. Tomake conceptual sense out of the transformingnature of these activities at the turn of the21st century, a threefold analysis ispresented: (1) an overview of the threetraditional developmental models of crime andcrime control – modernization, world system,and opportunity; (2) a characterization ofcrime and crime control in relationship to themore recently emerging models of globalization;and (3) a discussion of the implications of thedialectical relations between the models ofdevelopment and the models of globalization.Assessments of the models and other provisionalconclusions are drawn based on a survey of bothcrime and crime control in 15 developed,developing, and post-traditional nation-states.

Revisionist history, visionary criminology, and needs-based justice

Although there may be some value in debating the question of whatever happened to radical criminology, I believe that it is more productive to think in terms of radical and/or critical continuities in pedagogy, research, and practice that have survived time and can be linked to current efforts in visionary criminology and transformative justice. Examining changes in the study of crime and justice from such a perspective, it can be argued that the antiestablishment criminologies of the year 2003 are not any more marginal, and in fact may be less marginal today than when radical criminology first burst onto the scene in the early 1970s.

How They Got Away with It: White Collar Criminals and the Financial Meltdown

influences a neighborhood’s criminal activity independent of structural neighborhood conditions, that offending is highest in commercial areas that provide opportunities for crime, and that people do not travel far to offend. New findings demonstrate that spending time in commercial areas significantly increases offending only for youth with medium and high crime propensity, and that much of the violence that adolescents self-report involves fights at school or involving sports, rather than violence connected with other crimes or attacks against strangers. As well, high crime propensity youth were significantly more likely to say they would use violence in their responses to vignettes that asked how they would act in situations where criminal provocation was present (even at low levels) and monitoring was low. It is the presence of provocation, rather than a lack of monitoring that appears to play the more important role in respondents’ predictions of offending future. The authors went to considerable effort to enhance the book’s appeal: they wrote the chapters in a style that allows readers to read them independently of each other and in the order that appeals most to them; they provided rich descriptions of their data, measures, and methods of analysis; and although they used a number of sophisticated methodological (e.g., thematic and kernel density mapping) and analytical techniques (e.g., negative binomial path models that integrate linear and non-linear regression in the same model), they started with simple models before taking the reader through the results of the more sophisticated mapping and analyses. The authors do not address a number of questions that their study invites, such as the origin of variation in criminal propensity across individuals and settings, and the theoretical meaning of the large effect associated with commercial land use relative to the structural and cultural variables central to many ‘‘neighborhood effects’’ arguments (e.g., social disadvantage, ethnic diversity, and collective efficacy). They also rely on previously used, but weak measures of collective efficacy—these items assessed what people believe about their community rather than what occurs in it. They occasionally make unnecessary analytical shortcuts (e.g., using weak tests to determine the size and importance of mediation effects relative to total effects) and some chapters could have been more streamlined. None of these concerns represent major shortcomings, and they do not detract from the importance of Breaking Rules’ major finding that the likelihood of crime increases with the convergence of crime-prone people in criminogenic environments. This finding has a number of implications for theorizing about, responding to, and preventing crime; it also makes Breaking Rules an important book for many audiences, including academics, policymakers, and others concerned with the origins of adolescent crime.

Social Justice and Social Inequalities

Social justice is a philosophical and transdisciplinary concept that has no particular or distinct disciplinary home. Social justice in theory and practice is part of the general evolution of justice in human civilizations, which is a part of the ongoing struggles against the repression of any people and on behalf of the liberation of all people. The applications of social justice are best understood in relation to the applications of equal justice and restorative justice.

People’s justice for everyone

In taking on this invitation to respond to ‘Deep thoughts with Dennis Sullivan,’ let me say from the beginning that I have been in general agreement with the thinking and writings of both Dennis and Larry Tifft since the publication of The Struggle to be Human: Crime, Criminology, and Anarchism in 1980. This recent essay by Sullivan is no exception to my general agreement with his orientation to the world of justice. Hence, for the purposes of my reply permit me to extract some key sentences from his essay, which should provide a launching pad of sorts for my focused remarks to follow:

Book Review: Riedel, M., & Welsh, W. (2008). Criminal Violence: Patterns, Causes, and Prevention (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 380 pp

It is often recommended that a book review criticize something, and almost all books have one thing or another that could be improved. But to do so with Professor Levin’s book would run the risk of becoming overly picky and just criticizing for the purpose of filling an expected requirement. Serial Killers and Sadistic Murderers is interesting, well organized, and a pleasure to read. This book has achieved its goal, and for that the author should be congratulated.

Handbook of Restorative Justice: A Global PerspectiveHandbook of Restorative Justice: A Global Perspective, edited by SullivanDennis and TifftLarry. New York, NY: Routledge. 2008. 574 pp.

constituted a ‘net-widening’ effect, violating children’s rights and extending police powers in unlawful ways. The author extends this analysis to the global level in Chapter Ten (Nasty Things Happen in War) in which he argues that the current United States administration promoted the spread of democracy as a moral justification for mass destruction, civilian casualties and limitations on individual freedoms in the “war against terrorism.” Second, in several other chapters the author presents case studies on how law enforcement and prison management officials are complicit in efforts to obfuscate the facts surrounding controversial deaths. Chapter Three (Lost Lives, Hidden Voices), for example, alleges that correctional staff at several youth detention centers disregarded prisoner complaints of brutality and blamed the high incidence of self-harm and suicide on individual inmates’ failure to cope with the terms of their imprisonment. In Chapter Nine (Self Harm and Suicide in a Women’s Prison), two case studies of in-custody deaths led to an indictment of prison management’s failure to respond to the specific needs of female inmates. In Chapter Four (Negligence without Liability), a similar condemnation of police protocols involves the non-disclosure of evidence with regard to the death of fans arriving at a soccer game. The author’s point seems to be that critical researchers should challenge the official claims of state authorities because they seek to protect their own interests. A third set of chapters examines how the media, in partnership with law enforcement agents, co-construct the problem of lawlessness in the wake of high profile crimes. Chapter Five (Licensed to Kill) discusses the Dunblane school shooting in Ireland; the media portrayed the person responsible for the violence as perverted and demented, which, the author argues, shifts attention away from the larger public issue of gun control, as well as the allegation that the police failed to properly inform the parents of the victims after the incident. Chapter Six (Children on Trial) involves the James Bulger case, in which two ten-year-old boys were accused of murdering a child; they were convicted and sentenced. The author claims the media hype surrounding this event supported a narrative that unsupervised children were a threat to adult authority. Here, in the tradition of labeling theory, individual acts of deviance lead to the process of criminalization of social groups. In these cases, an important outcome for critical research is that police practices were called into question for withholding information and violating due process. To summarize, Power, Conflict and Criminalisation is a provocative contribution to the critical studies literature. I found the text to be lacking in several respects, however. First, it is densely written and, at times, verbose, which makes the content less accessible to a general audience. Second, in the introductory chapter the author discusses the challenges for critical researchers when they have a stake in the outcome of the research: to challenge the status quo. In order to put his “oppositional agenda” (p. 10) into practice, however, he endorses covert research as the only means to access people in power (p. 17). The call to “change the world, not just study it” (p. 10) does not exempt researchers from abiding by the ethical and legal standards of data collection, including informed consent from all study participants. Unless critical researchers can develop sound methodological tools to reconcile their ideology with good social science, their “voice” will continue to be marginalized in the academy.