1968: Protest and the Growth of a Critical Criminology

Abstract

In the 1960s criminologists evolved an appreciative reading of many acts labelled criminal and deviant, many adopting the Marxist label—especially in the wake of the mass wave of radicalisation that occurred in the USA and Europe in 1968, the year of the Paris general strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King. Focusing primarily on the UK experience, this chapter describes how a distinctive ‘critical criminology’ emerged in the 1970s before adopting a more left-realist viewpoint in the following decade that led to the marginalisation of Marxism within the discipline. Both the growth and the decline of this approach mirrors the broader societal changes resulting from the realities of a global year of mass struggle in 1968 that widened the horizons of those involved in a wave or mass radicalisation and which was followed by a series of political crises in the mid-1970s which tested the politics and feasibility of the new radicals and led to disillusion and the return of the Right by the end of the decade. The American struggle is analysed in greater depth in a later chapter but here we will look briefly at events in France and Britain, with a more detailed case study of 1970s Italy. It is argued that the current renaissance of protest movements in tandem with a growing awareness of the scale of the crimes of the powerful has revalidated the Marxist approach.