33 elliott currie the roots of danger violent crime

33
Elliott Currie, The Roots of Danger: Violent Crime in Global Perspective (1st edn, Pearson 2008).
34
W.S. DeKeseredy and P. Olsson, 'Adult Pornography, Male Peer Support, And Violence Against Women: The
Contribution ofthe “Dark Side” Of the Internet', Technology for facilitating humanity and combating social deviations:
Interdisciplinary perspectives (Jensen 2007).
35
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (Penguin 2008).
36
Lorne Tepperman, Deviance, Crime and Control (2nd edn, Oxford University Press 2010).
37
Ian Taylor, Crime in Context: A Critical Criminology of Market Societies (Polity 1999).

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crime’; the nature of criminal victimization; and the concurrent restructuring of
crime control practices 38 which are only recently being taken up. Critical
Criminology entered the new age with its old canons intact, and these old tenets
of Critical Criminology in a new century 39 may not be able to deal with the
fundamental ‘dislocations of justice’ that take place in every part of our social
order, at a global scale.
Critical Criminology continues to unduly focus on “the crime problem”, and
the over-all procedures and practices of penalty and criminalisation, thereby
making Critical Criminology ill-prepared to reply to the present-day
developments. Crime cannot be understood as being the preserve of regional
governments or one particular nation-state. Activities that occur in one corner
of the world can directly impact the other parts.
The emergence of punitive penalty, issues involving and impacting various
minority groups and women, the resurrection of private policing, evidence of
many targeted tough law and order mechanisms, active citizenship, etc 40 are a
few recent examples of the emergence of new situations posing challenge to
Critical Criminology and have compelled scholars to put forth concerns
regarding the need to embrace such global developments.
Critical Criminology seems to follow a very authoritarian-state-centred analysis
which limits the scope of rigorous investigations into understanding the
contradictions related to the due processes and the inherent biases of liberal
democratic governance. The governmental landscape is vigorously changing
and Critical Criminology’s incapability to sociologically understand various
uncertainties and dangers that define this change complicate the issue.
Critical Criminology may be a unity that is constantly shaped and reshaped by a
range of strategies that are spread across the empirical, epistemological and
38
Robert Reiner, An Honest Citizen's Guide to Crime and Control (Polity Press 2007).
39
Jack Young, 'Critical Criminology in The Twenty-First Century: Critique, Irony and The Always Unfinished', Critical
Criminology: Issues, Debates, Challenges (Willan 2002).