Bo o k Rev i ew

Ex pan din g t h e C ri m i n o l ogi c a l Im a gina tion: Critica l Rea d ings

in C rimin o l og y
Alana Barton, Karen Corteen, David Scott and David Whyte (eds),
Willan Publishing, 2007
226 pp, £19.50
ISBN: 1-843921-56-1

Crime Prevention and Community Safety (2007) 9, 308–310.

doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpcs.8150047

T
his collection of essays is a call to arms for criminologists to
adopt a critical perspective in their research. The editors, along
with several of the contributors, challenge criminologists to follow
C. Wright Mills’ famous exhortation to sociologists to expand the
imagination of a discipline that can all too easily become conservative
and mired in the administration of state policy. In the Introduction, the
editors note that huge increases in government funding to criminology
have led many researchers to “jump on the bandwagon” (p. 2) and par-
ticipate enthusiastically in state-sponsored projects. This is problematic
because such research does not necessarily examine crime in its social
context. It also restricts criminologists to topics that are of government
interest and that fall within official definitions of the concept of “crime”.
Walters’ chapter develops this argument further by highlighting the
tendency for criminologists to shy away from criticizing contemporary
criminal justice policies. In the 10 years since Labour came to power,
over a thousand new crimes have been introduced and Britain has the
highest imprisoned population in Western Europe. The “entrepreneurial”
modern university leads criminologists to need to demonstrate the “rele-
vance” of their research, which must produce knowledge that can be used
by the government or private companies in order to attract funding. This
can result in scholars abrogating their responsibility to provide a criti-
cal or independent voice. Walters recommends that criminologists should
forego Home Office research grants and instead produce what Scraton
(2001) has termed “knowledges of resistance” (p. 28) with which to
criticize the powerful.
The other contributors offer various examples of the directions critical
criminologists might take. Coleman argues that urban crime prevention

Crime Prevention and Community Safety 2007, 9, (308–310) © 2007 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1460-3780/07
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Crime Prevention and Community Safety
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measures redraw class divisions along the lines of risk and morality. The
“business friendly” city results in the exclusion of the “visually unacceptable”,
such as homeless people, from its centre. Social marginalization impacts on
the criminalization of other populations, such as drug users. Malloch details
how certain people, for example minority ethnic women, have become part of
a “suspect population” likely to be targeted by police in the drive to protect
communities from drug-related crime. White, middle-class people involved
in the sale, purchase or production of illegal drugs are less vulnerable to
police attention and imprisonment. In the United States, the racial divide in
the “war on drugs” was cemented in legislation through harsher penalties for
the possession of crack cocaine than cocaine. Crack cocaine was more likely
to be the drug of choice for socially and economically marginalized black
Americans; cocaine for white professionals. This resulted in the increased
criminalization and incarceration of black Americans.
Ballinger and Corcoran consider the punishment of women offenders, albeit
of different types and in different geographical and temporal settings. Ball-
inger examines the cases of three women executed in the 20th century who
were tried along with their male partners, where their partners were acquitted
despite the existence of evidence that suggested their culpability. Ballinger
argues that the criminal law acted (and acts) as a silencing mechanism,
preventing certain truths and accounts from being heard. She suggests that the
men were seen as only partially deviant; their masculinity did not conflict with
standing accused of murder, whereas the women were perceived as especially
deviant and transgressive.
Corcoran’s examination of women political prisoners in northern Ireland
analyses the intersections of identity relevant to these women’s experiences.
Her particular focus is on northern Irish prisoners’ campaigns for political pris-
oner status from the 1970s onwards, a designation that does not exist in the
English penal system. She argues that it is important to recognize that women
have multiple affiliations that comprise their identities; not only as women, but
also as Catholics, Protestants or working-class people. Female political prison-
ers were small in number, which made organized resistance against the prison
regime harder than for men, although not impossible.
In the final two chapters, Davis and Stanley move beyond criminology’s
traditional concern with offenders as individuals. Davis contends that “disas-
ters” disproportionately affect marginalized populations, but the experiences
of those directly involved are often not heard. Instead, disasters are classified
as such by official bodies and experts. The primacy given to expert perspec-
tives frequently means that catastrophes and disasters are not constructed as
“crimes” (even where the acts or omissions of governments or corporations
may have contributed to their occurrence). Consequently, justice is not pur-
sued for victims and their relatives. Stanley’s contribution ensures that the
collection ends with a jolt. She delineates the atrocities and gross human

Book Review
 Crime Prevention and Community Safety
310

rights violations that happened in East Timor during its occupation by Indo-
nesia. Multiple actors, including the governments of the United States, Britain
and Australia, the international news media and the World Bank, participated
in these violations, either by providing support for the Indonesian regime or by
looking in the other direction while the Timorese population suffered.
The contributions to Expanding the Criminological Imagination both
critique the state of contemporary British criminology and suggest approaches
that could help criminology to move beyond its status as a subject “embed-
ded” in the state. This is a useful text for researchers to acquaint themselves
with recent developments in critical criminology and for lecturers to find
inspiration for teaching critical topics. Some academics will no doubt take
issue with the recommendation to shun Home Office grants and perhaps either
Walters or the editors in their Introduction could have acknowledged that it is
possible to gain such grants for research into certain areas, like the reduction
of domestic violence, that fit some critical criminologists’ interests. However,
this volume will stimulate debate among criminologists of all kinds, which is
exactly its purpose.

Lizzie Seal
Department of Social Sciences,
University of Wales, Newport,
Allt-yr-yn Campus, PO Box 180,
Newport NP20 5XR, Wales, UK
E-mail: Lizzie.Seal@newport.ac.uk

Lizzie Seal