“Liberation” Criminal Justice: Critical and Radical Theories

Abstract

Whenever social scientists start breaking theories into two opposing ategories, look out! Control and containment are just around the corner. Consider how “conflict versus consensus” defangs challenges to the received wisdom of sociology. Marxian thought in criminal justice now has to fit into either “instrumental” or “structural” approaches. These dichotomies should be seen for what they are—damage control. Concluding his 1987 book Against Criminology, Stanley Cohen cited Thorsten Sellin to the effect that as social scientists, criminologists cannot afford to allow nonscientists to fix the terms for studying crime. “But this is nothing like the problems when we ‘scientists’ try to fix these terms and boundaries ourselves” (Cohen 1987/1988:273). Understanding what liberation criminal justice could have been has to start before the control efforts were successful. Historically, that means going back to the cusp of the crisis from 1968 through 1972 and linking it to its beginnings in the postwar period.