There is increasing pressure on the humanities to justify their value and on criminology to undertake interdisciplinary research. In this book, Rafe McGregor establishes a new interdisciplinary methodology, ‘criminological criticism’, harnessing the synergy between literary studies and critical criminology to produce genuine interventions in social reality. McGregor practices criminological criticism on George Miller’s ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’, Prime Video’s ‘Carnival Row’ and J.K. Rowling’s ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’, demonstrating how these popular allegories provide insights into the harms of sexism, racism and class prejudice. This book proposes a model for collaboration between literary studies and critical criminology that is beneficial to the humanities, the social sciences and society.

Literary Theory and Criminology demonstrates the significance of contemporary literary theory to the discipline of criminology, particularly to those criminologists who are primarily concerned with questions of power, inequality, and harm. Drawing on innovations in philosophical, narrative, cultural, and pulp criminology, it sets out a deconstructive framework as part of a critical criminological critique-praxis. This book comprises eight essays – on globalisation, criminological fiction, poststructuralism, patriarchal political economy, racial capitalism, anthropocidal ecocide, critical theory, and critical praxis – that argue for the value of contemporary literary theory to a critical criminology concerned with the construction of a just and sustainable reality in the face of climate change and other mass harms. This is the first criminology book to engage with literary theory from the perspective of criminology and provides a guide for criminologists who want to deploy literary theory as part of their research programmes. It supersedes existing engagements with poststructuralism in the philosophical criminological tradition because it entails neither a constructionist ontology nor a relativist epistemology. It shows criminologists how literary theory offers the tools to first deconstruct and then reconstruct meaning and value. Literary Theory and Criminology is essential reading for all critical criminological theorists.

This book sets to explore the key issues and future prospects facing critical criminology, bringing together a set of leading authorities in the field from the UK, Australasia and the USA. A key concern of the book is to review the possibilities and strategies of pursuing critical criminological scholarship in the context of an increasingly dominant administrative criminology paradigm, reflected in the rise of neo-liberalism, a 'governmentalised' criminology of risk, crime control and situational crime prevention.

This book critically explores the development of radical criminology through a range of written Ancient Greek works including epic and lyrical poetry, drama and philosophy, across different chapters. It traces the development of political power and the concepts of law, legitimacy, crime, justice and deviance in the Ancient Greek world and the political struggles that propelled that development, using the conflict perspective as a conceptual tool of the sociological analysis of reality. Theoretical discussions of crime and justice typically stem from the better known works of Plato or Aristotle although this book explores the works preceding these. This book will appeal to those interested in the (pre)history of criminology and the historical production of criminological knowledge.

The main objective of the second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology is twofold: (1) to provide original chapters that cover contemporary critical criminological theoretical offerings generated over the past five years and (2) to provide chapters on important new substantive topics that are currently being studied and theorized by progressive criminologists. Special attention is devoted to new theoretical directions in the field, such as southern criminology, queer criminology, and green criminology. The diverse chapters cover not only cutting-edge theories, but also the variety of research methods used by leading scholars in the field and the rich data generated by their rigorous empirical work. In addition, some of the chapters suggest innovative and realistic short- and long-term policy proposals that are typically ignored by mainstream criminology. These progressive strategies address some of the most pressing social problems facing contemporary society today, which generate much pain and suffering for socially and economically disenfranchised people. The new edition of the Handbook is a major work in redefining areas within the context of international multidisciplinary critical research, and in highlighting emerging areas, such as human trafficking, Internet pornography and image-based sexual abuse. It is specifically designed to be a comprehensive resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and policymakers.

The concept of critical criminology – that crime and the present-day processes of criminalization are rooted in the core structures of society – is of more relevance today than it has been at any other time. Written by an internationally renowned scholar, Contemporary Critical Criminology introduces the most up-to-date empirical, theoretical, and political contributions made by critical criminologists around the world. In its exploration of this material, the book also challenges the erroneous but widely held notion that the critical criminological project is restricted to mechanically applying theories to substantive topics, or to simply calling for radical political, economic, cultural, and social transformations. Now fully updated and expanded in a new edition, this book offers further coverage of new directions in critical criminology, covering topics such as: Green criminology Indigenous criminology Intersectionality Narrative criminology Rural critical criminology Queer criminology Zemiology Critical research methods Contemporary critical criminological policies Written in a clear and direct style, this book is an essential source of reference for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of criminology, deviance and social control, criminological theory, social policy, research methodology, and criminal justice.

Transatlantic policing is experiencing an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy, epitomised by public responses to the murders of George Floyd and Sarah Everard during the COVID-19 pandemic. Legitimacy is lost when the police either fail to protect the public or rely on coercion rather than consent to achieve that protection. Recovering Police Legitimacy challenges conventional criminological, political, and public solutions to the problem by approaching it from the bottom up, beginning with policing as a practice constituted by a unique set of excellences, skills, and characteristics. The author draws on his experience as a police officer and on the serial fictions of James Ellroy, David Peace, and Nic Pizzolatto to characterise the practice in terms of heroic struggle, edgework, absolute sacrifice, and worldmaking. These characteristics provide an analytic tool for revolutionising our understanding of the relations among policing as a situated practice, public protection, and police legitimacy and for identifying the different levels at which legitimacy is undermined. His conclusion is that recovery is possible but will be slow in pace and incomplete in scope. Written accessibly for students, police officers, policymakers, scholars, and anyone with an interest in police legitimacy, this is a groundbreaking study of a pressing social problem.