Text Box: Mick Hallett University of North Florida I had the pleasure recently of taking up the topic of “publishing critical scholarship” with my roommate at the 2000 ACJS Meetings in New Orleans, Hal Pepinsky. During the course of a pretty much non-stop, weekend-long, dialogue on critical criminology, peacemaking, histories of abuse, and how we critical criminologists suffer from our own version of “Impostor theory” (the notion that critical scholars are not really somehow worthy scholars)—I finally decided (at a courtyard restaurant no less) to “get it down” on my hotel bill, napkins, & other scraps. Despite the wine (or, actually, because of it), I got most of it down & refined it later. Given the recent dialogue in the Critical Criminologist on the topic “Issues in Publishing Critical Scholarship,” I offer this small contribution. ON MAINSTREAM CRIMINOLOGY VERSUS PEACEMAKING CRIMINOLOGY MH: First I’d like to get into the essential difference you see between a critically-oriented peacemaking criminology and “mainstream” criminology. To me the dominant “mainstream” theory right now is Gottfredson & Hirschi’s (1990) “lack of self-control” thesis. What do you think of the thesis? HP: To me, self-control means being able to follow your own heart. Self-control research, such as Hirschi's self-report work, has implicit demand characteristics. "Good" students will report more conformity than students who are already in trouble in school. It is often upper middle class kids—those who seemingly have the self-control vaunted by these studies—who actually have a lack of self-control. They’re the ones being controlled, who have to follow Daddy’s patriarchal program which criminologists tend to serve too. Children from "good" families are so often forced to silence in themselves what is really in their minds and hearts. I was one of those children, I might add. I don’t believe and never have that forced obedience teaches self control at all or that a lack of observable deviance in a group is necessarily a valid measure of self-control or of social control. If anything, self-control as control theorists have operationalized it might measure how little self-control "respectable" children have and how much they are actually being controlled by others. Generally speaking, children are pressed hard to conform to feel and believe what adults think they ought to feel and believe. MH: Many well-meaning and sympathetic people read Criminology as Peacemaking (Pepinsky and Quinney, 1991) and conclude that it is nice but that it is impractical. What do you say to those who suggest Peacemaking is too utopian or impractical? HP: I think that getting victims safe and listening to victims is our first priority. Now that’s practical—not going off in search of Text Box: "perps" on some ill-fated mission to teach them lessons they will never learn through our methods anyway. Not that we even catch most offenders. I measure progress by asking, "What steps can I take next? What is working now? What steps are people taking now to end violence?" Many of the writers in Criminology as Peacemaking document these steps, as in the Quaker Alternatives to Violence Project offering examples of proactive, non-punitive, peacemaking strategies. MH: Presumably because of the “lack of practicality” argument, it has been suggested that Peacemaking Criminology has the “most on the line” right now, relative to the other critical perspectives (Feminism, Left Realism, Post Modern Criminology). What is the largest barrier Peacemaking Criminologists face? HP: Fear. Let me qualify that a little. It’s not fear itself—it's allowing yourself to be driven by fear. Clearly, the antidote to this fear is working to develop a community where you find safe enough company—that you can trust enough to pay attention to what matters to other people whose lives are most on the line. To let them speak honestly for themselves, and then be guided by what you hear. That’s what I mean by empathy. To have people reveal what scares them most—in a safe enough place where they can trust enough to articulate their fears and have others respond. That’s what criminology ought to be—and not be about trying to make the system work. That takes time away from survivors. Mainstream criminology thrives on the fallacy that we can achieve functional crime control in a dysfunctional society. I bristle at the idea that peacemaking criminology is a thing that has to be proved to criminologists. For one thing, what I call peacemaking criminology need not be what others do in that name. For another, I get more out of building a theory of how to respond to personal violence which makes sense to and works for survivors than I do trying to satisfy criminologists' demands. ON RITUALISTIC ABUSE MH: I know you’re aware of some people’s criticism of your “unscientific” interest in “ritualistic abuse.” What about this? HP: I acknowledge that, although I have heard people report what ritual torture they honestly recall having suffered, I and even they themselves understand that what they describe could be seen as too bizarre to believe. A therapist I went to in the course of being clinically depressed by what I was hearing—and the corroborating evidence I was seeing in many cases—advised me not to try to prove what I believed about ritual abuse to anyone else. I see organized sadism as it manifests itself in what gets called “ritual abuse and mind control programming” as the most serious problem of violence that I know. In the second chapter of the Geometry book (Pepinsky, 1991) on "violence as unresponsiveness," I have a section titled “Violence as Silence." Text Box: Are Peacemaking Criminologists Impostors?: An Interview with Hal Pepinsky