Critical Criminology and the Concept of Crime (From Criminological Perspectives: A Reader, P 299-306, 1996, John Muncie, Eugene McLaughlin, and Mary Langan, eds. -- See NCJ- 161531)

• NCJ Number: 161546
• Author(s): L H C Hulsman
• Date Published: 1996
• Length: 8 pages
• Sale Source: Sage Publications Ltd
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom
• Note: *This document is currently unavailable from NCJRS. Abridged from "Contemporary Crises," V 10, N 1 (1986), P 63- 80.

Annotation

Noting that concepts of crime depend on formulations of criminal law, this essay argues that the concept of crime should be abandoned; and alternative conceptual tools should be developed.

Abstract

The development of a radical and critical understanding of crime, criminalization, and criminal justice is hampered by the continual return to a state-constructed category as its key empirical referent. This essay suggests the development of alternative conceptual tools that can be recognized and used without recourse to the formal, narrow, and inflexible processes of criminal justice. Such a critical criminology would continue to describe, explain, and demystify the activities of criminal justice and its adverse social effects. This activity should, however, be more directed to defining activities of this system than is currently done. To do this, it would be necessary to compare in concrete fields of human life the activities of criminal justice and their social effects with those of other formal control systems (legal ones, like the civil justice system, and nonlegal ones, like the medical and social work systems). The activities of the formal control systems regarding a certain area of life should be compared with informal ways of dealing with such an area of life. In such a task, critical criminology can be stimulated by the developments in legal anthropology and in a more general way by sociology in an interpretative paradigm. This implies abandoning behavior and deviance as a starting point for analysis and adopting instead a situation-oriented approach. The proposed critical criminology should illustrate how in a specific field problematic situations could be addressed at different levels of the societal organization without having recourse to criminal justice. Studies should also be conducted on how to abolish criminal justice. This would involve analyzing how to liberate organizations such as the police and the courts from a system of reference that ignores the variety of life and needs of those directly involved. One of these strategies should be to contribute to the development of another overall language in which questions related to criminal justice and public problems can be discussed without the bias of current crime-control vocabularies. 4 references