For the last three decades Jock Young's work has had a profound impact on criminology. Yet, in this provocative new book, Young rejects much of what criminology has become, criticizing the rigid determinism and rampant positivism that dominate the discipline today. His erudite and entertaining examination of what's gone wrong with criminology draws on a range of research - from urban ethnography to sexology and criminal victimization studies - to illustrate its failings. At the same time, Young makes a passionate case for a return to criminology's creative and critical potential, partly informed by the new developments in cultural criminology. A late-modern counterpart to C.Wright Mills's classic The Sociological Imagination, this inspirational piece of writing from one of the most brilliant voices in contemporary criminology will command widespread attention. It will be essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of criminology, and the social sciences more generally.

This book brings together a series of writings on the problems facing contemporary criminology, highlighting the main theoretical priorities of critical analysis and their application to substantive case studies of research in action. Its main aim is to establish the conceptual and practical foundations for a new generation of studies in criminology, and to set a new agenda for critical criminology. Each chapter will critically assess the main conceptual and empirical problems they have encountered in their research, and to bring to life the key theoretical debates within the discipline. This book will be essential reading for students seeking an understanding of the nature of the discipline of criminology and criminological research.

This book discusses the concept of 'agnosis' and its significance for criminology through a series of case studies, contributing to the expansion of the criminological imagination. Agnotology – the study of the cultural production of ignorance, has primarily been proposed as an analytical tool in the fields of science and medicine. However, this book argues that it has significant resonance for criminology and the social sciences given that ignorance is a crucial means through which public acceptance of serious and sometimes mass harms is achieved. The editors argue that this phenomenon requires a systematic inquiry into ignorance as an area of criminological study in its own right. Through case studies on topics such as migrant detention, historical institutionalised child abuse, imprisonment, environmental harm and financial collapse, this book examines the construction of ignorance, and the power dynamics that facilitate and shape that construction in a range of different contexts. Furthermore, this book addresses the relationship between ignorance and the achievement of ‘manufactured consent’ to political and cultural hegemony, acquiescence in its harmful consequences and the deflection of responsibility for them.

This book offers an original and challenging reading of the crimino-legal complex' - criminology, criminal justice, criminal law, the media and everyday experiences - in the light of cultural studies and feminist theory. Through an exploration of the crisis engendered by the failure of the crimino-legal complex to solve the problems of crime and criminality, Alison Young exposes the cultural dimension of its institutions and practices. She analyzes the far-reaching effects of the cultural value given to crime, showing it to be rooted in a powerful nexus of the body, language, the community and everyday life. Imagining Crime examines a number of key events and issues which have signalled shifts in the representation of crime. These include: criminology's resistance to feminist intervention; the pleasures of reading detective fiction; ambiguities of victimization and social justice in the city; sacrificial structures in the law's response to conjugal homicide; policing the ethnicity of the illegal' immigrant; defensive responses to the limits of representation in the Bulger affair; the governmental strategies of campaigns against single mothers; and the fatalism of the spectacle of HIV/AIDS in criminal justice policy.

In spite of its widespread use within criminology, the term ’criminological imagination’, as derived from C. Wright Mills’ classic The Sociological Imagination, has yet to be fully developed and clarified as an analytic concept capable of guiding theorizing or empirical enquiry. This volume, with a preface by Elliot Currie, engages with and reflects on this concept, exploring C. Wright Mills’ work for criminological enquiry. Bringing together the latest work of leading scholars in the fields of criminology and sociology from around the world, C. Wright Mills and the Criminological Imagination investigates the emergence and lineage of a criminological concept indebted to Mills’ thought, adapting and applying it to a specifically criminological context. With attention to theoretical concerns and, as well as the application of the criminological imagination in concrete empirical research, this volume sheds new light on the methodological and analytical aspects of the criminological imagination as a multifaceted concept and explores the possibilities that it offers for the emergence of an imaginative criminological practice. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in sociology and social theory, criminology, criminal justice studies, law and research methods.

This book brings together a series of writings on the problems facing contemporary criminology, highlighting the main theoretical priorities of critical analysis and their application to substantive case studies of research in action. Its main aim is to establish the conceptual and practical foundations for a new generation of studies in criminology, and to set a new agenda for critical criminology. Each chapter will critically assess the main conceptual and empirical problems they have encountered in their research, and to bring to life the key theoretical debates within the discipline. This book will be essential reading for students seeking an understanding of the nature of the discipline of criminology and criminological research.

This text argues for the usefulness of fictional realities for criminological theorizing and analysis. It illustrates that a creative and critical social scientific practice requires craft norms rather than commercial norms that threaten to completely colonize higher education.