False Promises of Criminology and the Promise of Justice

• NCJ Number: 93955
• Author(s): K Couse; G Geller; J Harding; P Havemann; R Motonovich; R Schriml
• Date Published: 1983
• Length: 78 pages
• Sponsoring Agency: University of Regina; University of Regina
• Sale Source: National Institute of Justice/
• Language: English
• Country: Canada
• Note: Paper presented June 1-3, 1983, Learned Societies Conference, Vancouver, Canada, Revised version of a paper presented at the American Society of Criminology 34th Annual Meeting, Toronto, November 4-6, 1982.

Annotation

This paper explains and analyzes the coming of criminology to Canada, critiques the medical and systems models intrinsic to state-sponsored criminology, and subjects positivist and critical criminology to a logical, idealogical, and feminist critique.

Abstract

Through an historic evolution, criminology has been institutionalized as part of the state-supported crime control bureaucracy for the purposes of (1) defining the problem of crime, (2) identifying the causes of crime, and (3) evaluating the responses of the crime control bureaucracy in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. In its bureaucratic role, criminology experiences the tension between being a product of the bureaucracy and adopting a critical posture toward it. Professionalization and bureaucratization have inevitably prevailed. The contemporary criminological enterprise in Canada has inherent problems which relate to the movement from legalism to medicalization; creating illogical and false analogies between criminology and other professions like medicine; the failure to distinguish law from justice and the consequential neglect of human rights and civil libertarian issues in both the old and new criminology; the patriarchal makeup of criminology, both old and new, resulting in a neglect of the needs and causes of females; and the crime dominated focus of the new criminology despite its claims to liberate from positivism. What is needed is a broad-based study of justice which encompasses the broader socioeconomic structures that affect the degree tow hich justice is received by all members of society. This involves a critique of the processes by which goods, facilities, services, amenities, freedom, and power are organized for redistribution. Such a perspective has led the school of Human Justice of the University of Regina to reorganize traditional courses so that criminological assumptions are juxtaposed with juridical ones and both subjected to an idealogical critique from a perspective of social justice. A total of 433 bibliographic listings and 119 notes are provided.