The idea of a critical criminology: Irony, scepticism and commitment

Radical criminology, observes Stanley Cohen, is predicated on an unmistakable paradox or irony: it brought about not the end of academic institutionalized criminology, but rather its emphatic rejuvenation. To acknowledge this is to recognize that it has inspired a number of studies profoundly deeper in significance and incomparably wider in scope than anything attempted by criminologists four or five decades ago (a point made luminously explicit in Jock Young's chapter in this volume: esp., at pp. 259–260); that it has redefined the subject matter of criminology, placing social control at its very centre; and that it has convinced even the most intransigently ‘correctionalist’ of criminologists that, in Roger Hood's words, ‘criminal behaviour as a social entity does not exist independently of the apparatus which defines it, which classifies it, labels it and interacts with it’ (Hood, 1987, p. 530). Radical criminology, for all its brazen iconoclasm, has achieved a secure, perhaps even a canonical, status as a central theoretical force in contemporary criminology.