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Text Box: The Critical Criminologist

Text Box: The debate over mainstream criminology, its pre-eminence in faculties, its privileged access to research funding, its overbearing presence at national and international “learned” conferences, and its purposeful manipulation of academic discourses, is necessary and complex. In raising the crucial issue of gate keeping, to the point of disqualification of knowledge via mainstream journals, Lynch and the Schwendingers trigger a range of other fundamental questions with which they are more than familiar. The issue of the “mainstream club” as the primary site of definition, discourse and dissemination has troubled critical analysts since C. Wright Mills deconstructed Talcott Parsons. Certainly it has been a dilemma throughout my 25 years as a teacher, researcher, writer and campaigner. Do you join the club, even as an “associate” member, in the belief that you can subvert, rather than be subverted? Or, do you attempt to create an alternative paradigm, another discourse? Is the latter course simply an expression of left idealism through which you turn your back on all occupied territory? Liberal democracy is well attuned to allowing, permitting and even facilitating protected areas for those who resist the mainstream. So, as critical criminologists, we remain free to research, to write and to teach but only at the periphery, rarely at the core. Yet the essential problem remains. The “core” is the “core,” mainstream is mainstream, because of

Text Box: the inherent and inherited power relations of the industrial-military-state complex underwriting and underwritten by its heavily invested academy. We know precisely what a detailed study of mainstream journals, their editorial boards, their review processes and their citations, will throw up. There would be no surprises here. A quick anecdote. Thirteen years ago Kathryn Chadwick and I published In the Arms of the Law (Pluto, 1987) and an article “Speaking Ill of the Dead: Institutional Responses to Deaths in Custody,” (Journal of Law and Society, reproduced in Law, Order and the Authoritarian State). The publications were the product of eight years of in-depth qualitative research into deaths in prison and in police custody. At a campaign conference in London, run by Inquest (the group which brought together those bereaved by custody deaths), a young researcher from a renowned department of criminology rushed up, enthusiastic about our work. It had been “inspirational;” she would visit for a “full interview.” We agreed. Silence followed. Several years later that researcher, doctorate now complete, published a range of material on the topic. We met: “You never did make it for that interview.” “No. I feel really bad about that. You see, my supervisor told me that the department was seeking substantial Home Office

Text Box: A Response to Lynch and the Schwendingers Phil Scranton

Notice	3
Beyond Discontent	4
Position Announcement	5
Call for Manuscripts and Nominations	6
Call for Papers, Critical Criminology	7
State Legitimacy and Political Crime: Bush v. Gore	8
Message from the Chair, Call for nominations, CC Awards	11
Prison Activists	12