Observations about the history of critical criminology in Australia (original) (raw)

2011, Faculty of Law School of Justice

This paper provides some schematic genealogical observations of a rich and varied field of scholarship in Australia loosely badged as critical criminology. Those working in the critical criminology tradition have been centrally concerned with the social construction, variability and contingency of the criminal label and the power effects that flow from state definitions of deviance. The paper selects scholarship being undertaken around four topics-Indigenous criminalisation, feminist concerns about crime, youth crime and the creation of a new class of criminal through border controls-to exemplify the richness and diversity of this current research. We are well aware that it is a somewhat invidious exercise to single out certain bodies of work like this from the broad and diverse inquiries that constitute contemporary critical criminology in Australia. Our selection has been guided in part by the desire to relate salient connections with the historical, geo-spatial, national, political and social context from which critical criminological work in Australia springs. We eschew a certain style of analysis tacitly conducted in terms of the failed or blocked realisation of some general principle ('full sociality', social equality, non-patriarchal society) in favour of a wide and open definition of what may count as critical work in criminology. We also consciously refrain from assuming that critical research is qualitative or discursive, and non-critical research quantitative. The paper concludes with some comments about the possibilities for promulgating the criminological imagination. Origins of Critical Criminology in Australia and Metropolitan Thinking Critical criminology in Australia, as elsewhere, had its origins in the particular international political and intellectual conjuncture of the 1960s and 70s: the rise of the New Left and the counter-culture, the Vietnam war moratorium, anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, second wave feminism, antiinstitutional movements around prisons, psychiatry and other social control institutions, and the renaissance of Marxism and radical social theory in the universities (Cohen 1998:115). 'New', 'radical' or 'alternative' were the preferred qualifying labels announcing this break in criminology in its early days. In common with its kindred movements, it offered a sweeping critique of the prevailing capitalist social order, the 'repressive tolerance' of liberal institutions and modes of thought and 'old left' and social democratic traditions. It sought nothing less than their root and branch transformation. In Australia this was and remained a strongly politically engaged criminology, particularly around the prison and prisoners' movement and other criminal justice campaigns and issues (Zdenkowski and Brown 1982), including police killings and deaths in custody (