Public Criminology

Some scholars use the plural term public criminologies to indicate that there are multiple publics and many possible interpreta¬tions of how to bridge the gap between academic criminology and public discourse. Those with the interests and skills to carry criminological theories and research into the public debate offer an important service. They may debunk myths and help to reframe the cultural image of the criminal, they may offer social facts on crime and punishment and bring context to highly sensationalized cases, they may work with communities to compile data and answer pressing questions, and they may bring the best available evidence to conversations and debate on issues of criminal justice public policy. Meaning of the research to larger publics, it seeks to narrow the yawning gap between public perceptions and the best available scientific evidence on issues of public concern. We’ll start with a pessimistic view. Of course we should make closer connection between science and public, but can we rely on data gathered from public sources? Chapter 1 is there to warn people to be careful when interpreting acts of others. In second Chapter children participated in a mock courtroom experiment, in which they were asked to recount either a true or fabricated event. Detection rates were above chance for truth (65.00%) and below chance for lies (45.00%). Chapter 3 begins by examining the historical and institutional factors that have contributed to the continuing subjugation of Indigenous knowledges and meth¬odologies. A discussion of the connections between the hegemony of Western science, the construction of race, and the colonial project follows. This chapter is in this book because of the importance of methodologies conceived in other parts of the world, to get closer to the general public and population, we must respect scientific achievements from places they originated from. Imagi¬native criminology engages substantively and theoretically with cultural artefacts such as film, fiction, music, dance, art, photog¬raphy and cultural institutions. Imaginative criminology movement offers a challenge to an orthodox criminology that is guided by the coercive and constraining bureaucratic categories of criminal justice administration and the criminal law, making it closer to the public. Chapter 5 reports examples of qualitative studies (from ethnography, hermeneutical sociology of knowledge, ethnomethodology/conversation analysis, discourse analysis and narrative analysis) especially of deviant subcultures, reporting conflicts to the police, police inquiries and interrogations and criminal court procedures. And the next chapter prompted by the need to expand the criminological enterprise makes a case for a critical criminology of education, one that takes a governance approach. It seeks to illustrate what such a criminology might entail by developing an analytic framework with which to analyze the educational field. Youth criminal and anti-social behavior associated with knife-carrying is widely reported and structures political and media discourses which classify street culture. In our Chapter 7 we argue that a particular symbolic construction of social space, as experienced and constructed by weapon-carrying young white men in Glasgow. Chapter 8 reflects on two themes from Chambliss’s work: the debate between state-centered and more pluralistic views of law, and the “dialectical” approach to the analysis of state crime. Chapter 9 makes the case that criminology has much to contribute to an understanding of theistic violence. Using the terrorist attacks in France 2015 as a touchstone, this Chapter explores the current state of criminological engagement with these issues. Chapter 10 presents the findings of an ethnographic exploration of heroin use in a disadvantaged area of the United Kingdom while Chapter 11 explores the central role of documentary filmmaking as a methodological practice in contemporary criminology. It draws from cultural criminology to develop emerging, open-ended practices for conducting ethnographically inflected audiovisual research that crafts sensory knowledge from aesthetic experience. Chapter 12 analyses the factors behind the paradoxical result of the Brazilian gun-control referendum. It adopts a qualitative approach to explore the dissemination of ideologies surrounding crime, gun control and security. While Chapter 13 provides an in-depth study of the Act on Municipal Administrative Sanctions 1999 (MAS), which is the first major piece of legislation regulating antisocial behavior in Belgium. MAS provides municipalities with an instrument to sanction antisocial behavior and conduct perceived to disturb public order. Newsmaking criminology argues that criminologists should interpret, influence, and even shape the direction of newsworthy information about crime and justice to the extent that they aggressively make their presence known by engaging the media. Chapter 14 calls for an ex