Abstract
Phil Scraton, Power, Conflict and Criminalisation, Routledge: London, 2007; 265 pp. including index: 9780415422413, $57.95 (pbk)
This is a book about praxis. By praxis I refer to ‘thinking about’ and ‘acting on’ critical change. This is change that demonstrates how the self/society binary intimately reflects meaning that is lived – sometimes painfully or tragically or desperately – through the mutuality of human agency and social structure. However, the mutuality that Scraton seeks to instantiate includes the place of citizen justice, collective well-being, and societal accord, culled from ‘personal reflection on three decades of empirical research, teaching, and writing’ (p. xv). This is change that requires ‘“being there” at that moment [and bearing] witness to an act of unacceptable yet institutionally normalized degradation’ (p. 5). From this perspective, Scraton describes his project as ‘critical social research’ that speaks truth to power; one that is itself ‘a form of resistance [as] a necessary prerequisite and healthy manifestation of democratic societies’ (p. 17). This is the crucible in which Power, Conflict and Criminalisation must be evaluated. And, in my estimation, it brilliantly succeeds.
The body of research from which Scraton draws includes some of the most contentious and complex crime and justice issues that Great Britain and Ireland have confronted during the past three decades. Examples include inner-city uprisings forcibly and unreasonably constrained by way of policing marginalized communities (pp. 20–36); deaths in custody violently and punitively linked to discretionary powers vested in correctional institutions (pp. 37–80); school shootings in which the media needlessly sensationalize offenders as monsters absent relevant contextual analysis, and law enforcement personnel covertly deny aggrieved parents respect and decency in the de-briefing of their child's senseless killing (pp. 81–104); the criminalization (and commodification) of wayward youth that disturbingly pathologizes and wrongly politicizes adolescent antisocial conduct as a campaign strategy for ‘law and order’ (pp. 126–147); and self-harm and suicide in women's prisons chillingly dismissed through institutional de-feminization, vilification, degradation, and humiliation. Scraton unearths and deconstructs the politics of other human/social atrocities (e.g. 9/11, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, pp. 190–217) through the lens of engaged critical social research. But, through each journey, through each instance of bearing witness, his sense of the sociological imagination remains constant. Consider the following concluding statement describing the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster: deep political and ideological assumptions, coupled with professional self-interest and survival, combined to demonize the victims, to deny their ‘truth’, to disqualify their experiences and to undermine justice. The state's failure to address its deep rooted and endemic practices of demonization, denial, and disqualification, amounts to disturbing complacency. (p. 80)
One can find little fault in this thoughtfully reasoned and empirically sourced position, especially when built around the profound suffering of everyday citizens whose engagement with institutional rhetoric and decision making renders them susceptible to entrenched ‘authoritarianism’ (p. 239). But efforts to outline a theoretical direction for overcoming this ‘captivity’ recently have been penned. In my own work with Dragan Milovanovic (2009), the question of harm at the human agency – social structure divide extends from the kept to their keepers, from their managers and their watchers. The institutional choices and actions that Power, Conflict and Criminalisation examines remind us that we are all imprisoned by the symbolic and linguistic, material and cultural intensities that interdependently and dynamically co-produce and are shaped by the self/society mutuality. In other words, a critical criminology of resistance begins as an exercise in deconstructing the images, texts, embodiments, and replications of each that sustain harms of reduction (denials of being) and repression (limits to becoming) for one and all. Reclaiming the virtue of an emergent citizenship – restoring it and transforming it – is a praxis strategy that fosters this ‘revolution’ in resistance (Arrigo et al., 2011).
Power, Conflict and Criminalisation is a welcome addition to the literature on the sociology and politics of crime and justice policy. It is to be read, digested, and read again. Scraton's volume reminds us that in order to overcome power we must name it, renounce it, and, in the final analysis, humanistically transform it. This requires thought and action and it is his praxis invitation to us all.