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Cultural Criminology: An Invitation… to What?

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Abstract

Since the mid 1990s, a strand of criminology emerged that is concerned with the co-constitution of crime and culture under the general rubric of ‘cultural criminology’. In the titles Cultural Criminology Unleashed and Cultural Criminology: An Invitation, criminologists spearheading this brand of criminology make claims for its originality and its status as a subversive alternative to conventional criminological approaches to studies of crime and deviance. The basis for the ‘new’ cultural criminology is its ostensible ability to account for the culture and subcultures of crime, the criminalization of cultural and subcultural activities, and the politics of criminalization. This paper offers a comparison of cultural criminology to 1960s and 1970s labeling theory to assess whether or not cultural criminology has developed a grammar of critique capable of resolving fundamental contradictions that haunt critical criminology and contesting contemporary administrative criminology. Points of comparison are made through ontological categories of power and criminal identity and a consideration of the epistemological categories of the respective bodies of literature.

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Notes

  1. In addition, Katz (1988) and O’Malley and Mugford (1994) are oft-cited as part of the paradigmatic shift towards an engagement in discussions of the intersection of culture and crime.

  2. Even the addition of Katz (1988) is in line with the realist position, insofar as the bad ass is real and dangerous (see, Melossi 2000: 310).

  3. In a recent defense of symbolic interactionism, Dennis and Martin (2005) have suggested that past attacks on symbolic interactionism and ultimately labeling theory, have been from a position exterior to this theoretical and methodological approach and as such, traditional conceptualizations of structure are imposed on the framework and fail to understand the anti-dualistic, pragmatic heritage of symbolic interactionism (see Melossi 1985 on this point with regards to labeling theory).

  4. Secondary deviation is the mode by which the deviant identity is created. Secondary deviation follows eight stages (Lemert 1951: 77): the first is the primary deviation and the attendant societal penalt(y/ies). The third step is further primary deviation that is followed by harsher penalties and social rejections. The fifth step is further deviation with hostilities and resentments instigated upon those that are conducting the penalizing. The sixth and crucial step is a crisis is arrived at in the tolerance quotient that in turn is articulated by a formal action by the community stigmatizing the deviant. This is followed by an intensification or strengthening of the deviant comportment as a rejoinder to the stigmatization and formal penalties. The resultant of these occurrences is the ultimate acceptance of the deviant social identity or label by the person and efforts are made to adjust based on the associated role. In the process of the secondary deviation, there is a continual dialectic between the labeled subject and the audience labeling him/her. As such, labeling theorists aver that the secondary deviation would not occur if not for the initiation of the labeling process. As an outcome of this labeling process, there are manifold implications for the identity of the person labeled as deviant.

  5. This concept has affinities to Tannenbaum’s (1938) ‘dramatization of evil’ in terms of the labeled subject conforming to the cultural expectations of the role.

  6. Cultural criminology has also engaged in participatory action research, photographic fieldwork, and more traditional approaches such as interviewing and discourse analysis (see for example, O’Neill 2004; Jackson-Jacobs 2004).

  7. Prior to discussing instant and liquid ethnography, Ferrell et al. (2008) praise the work of early ethnographers like Anderson and Thrasher for their embedded, long-term ethnographies. Advocacy of instant ethnographies seem at odds with such nostalgia.

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Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Pat O’Malley, Neil Gerlach, Aaron Doyle, Kevin Walby, Nicolas Carrier, Julie Gregory and the anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel by Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S5B6, Canada

    Dale Spencer

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Spencer, D. Cultural Criminology: An Invitation… to What?. Crit Crim 19, 197–212 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-010-9112-x

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