Constitutive criminology

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Constitutive criminology is an affirmative, postmodernist-influenced theory of criminology posited by Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic in Constitutive criminology: beyond postmodernism (1996), which was itself inspired by Anthony Giddens' The Constitution of Society (1984), where Giddens outlined his theory of structuration. [1] [2] In this theory, crime is conceived as an integral part of the overall production of society and is a co-production of human agents and the cultural and social structures they continuously create. This theory defines crime as the harm resulting from humans investing energy in relations of power that denies or diminishes those subject to this investment, their own humanity. From the perspective of constitutive theory, a criminal is viewed as an "excessive investor" while the victim is known as a "recovering subject". [3]

Contents

History of theory

Founded by Dragon Milovanovic and Stuart Henry, with contributions from Gregg Barak and Bruce Arrigo, this constitutive theory was based on postmodernist concepts of social theory applied to crime and criminal justice, and formed a new sub-field of critical criminology. Constitutive criminology was introduced via Stuart Henry's studies on control in the workplace and crime in the late 1980s. [4] The central tenet of constitutive theory is that crime and its control cannot be removed from the structural and cultural contexts in which it is produced. One main goal of this theory is to redefine crime as the outcome of "humans investing energy in harm-producing relations of power". [5] It identifies two types of harm: reduction and repression. [6] Offenders are described as "excessive investors investing energy to make a difference to others without those others having the ability to make a difference to them", whereas victims are described as those "who suffer the pain of being denied their own humanity, the power to make a difference". [6] [7]

Influences

Constitutive criminology draws on a vast array of concepts and theories that have come to shape its present standing. It uses ideas from well-known critical social theories (particularly structuration theory and social constructionism), and has roots within chaos theory and postmodernism. [8] A handful of other scholars have strongly influenced constitutive criminology, pushing the theory in new directions while also developing their own analyses.

Roots of constitutive theory

Henry and Milovanovic drew upon many diverse theories, but the following had a critical impact in their work:

  1. Symbolic Interactionism is the theory that human interaction and communication is facilitated by gestures, words, and other symbols with conventional meanings. [9]
  2. Social Constructionism describes the ways in which social phenomena are created, established, and then turned into human tradition. [9]
  3. Phenomenology, founded by Edmund Husserl in 1900 and applied to the social world by Alfred Schutz, believes in suspending all prior assumptions about causality and consequences in order to investigate the essence of meaning of immediate lived experience. [10]
  4. Ethnomethodology, rooted in Schutz's social phenomenology and developed by Harold Garfikel, is the method of commonsense understanding of the organization and structure of society by nonspecialists. [10]
  5. Marxist Theory, built on the philosophy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, states that crime and control have the potential to affect the other at the same moment in time from opposite directions with different goals inherent in the construction of each. [11]
  6. Poststructural Theory maintains that meanings and intellectual categories are always unstable and ever-changing, even though they appear to be real with independent existence from the humans that create them. Part of the challenge of postmodernism is to engage in constant critique through a process of deconstruction. [9]
  7. Structuration Theory, introduced by Anthony Giddens in 1984, claims that not only is society socially constructed, but that it is formed by human agents through their everyday activities. [9]
  8. Discourse Analysis covers the many different ways to analyze written, spoken, or signed languages, and any other important semiotic events. [11]

Constitutive criminology also has roots in chaos theory, structural coupling, strategic essentialism, topology theory, relational sets, critical race theory and intersections, autopoietic systems, and dialectical materialism.

Works of Henry and Milovanovic

In 1989, Milovanovic approached Stuart Henry with a request for a six-page, double-spaced response on why he felt that the "Critical Criminologist" (by Marty Schwartz) did not do justice to postmodernist critical theory. After agreeing to contribute to Milovanovic's newsletter (The Critical Criminologist) Henry published a small work under this new title in 1989. From that point on, the two criminologists have teamed up and produced many works on their new theory, Constitutive Criminology.

Works by year

Main concepts

Constitutive Criminology, influenced by postmodernism, tries to understand the co-production of crime by humans in their everyday life with products, institutions, and the ever-widening societal structure. [12] Henry and Milovanovic based their theory on their analysis of human nature and society and around the postmodernist view of the constitution of crime. This intellectual theory covers views about the individual and human behavior, society, crime and its victims, as well as our social structure. [13]

Human agents and behavior

From the perspective of this theory, the human agent is viewed as an active creator of his or her social environment, while at the same time the social environment is concurrently producing those who created it by shaping their thoughts, meanings, and actions. For the human subjects and their environment to simultaneously evolve, transformations throughout their surroundings are made by interactions with other agents. [14] Henry and Milovanovic's concept of a "recovering subject" states that a human will never fully realize their potential through their actively produced world, and the human subject is never a completed product of his environment. [15] "Humans view themselves as more acted upon than acting", wrote Giddens in 1984. With each human agent feeling relatively insignificant on such a vast planet, many subjects forget their role in creating the social world that objectifies that world. [16]

Justice practices

With the strategy of deconstructing the ways discourse disempowers some and privileges others, and engaging in reconstruction though the use of non-privileging "replacement discourse", Henry and Milovanovic believe human societies can reduce the frequency of harm through reducing the capacity of excessive investors to dominate and dehumanize others, while trying to accomplish a mass social transformation. [17] The first point of attack in this transformation is to change the discourse that facilitates expressions of power contained in mainstream culture. For this goal to be met, large-scale social groups (which include the news media) must help in this transformation. The media, as it becomes ever more popular, has a very strong influence on today's popular culture, producing discourse that helps perpetuate power and domination as a reality and spreads politically created social problems such as assault, alcohol abuse, or robbery. This in turn causes the social world to act in more harmful ways. As the media portrays crime news in harmful ways, Henry and Milovanovic urge other criminologists to produce a less harmful discourse for the social world to see and begin to understand. [18]

Knowledge

Constitutive criminology uses the postmodernist view of knowledge as being political, subjective, and placed in order of rank. Knowledge can be used to take control of someone or something, while lacking values and a neutral point of view. According to Henry, "Use of knowledge is an expression of power or resistance to power." [19] He also sees knowledge as a consultation repeatedly being built and used by humans to make claims for the sole use of politics within one's actions. Knowledge and its conditions have always been unifying concerns within this theory, while subjects are slowly becoming more and more alike due to the media and the avalanche of propaganda that follows. [20]

Related Research Articles

Postmodernism is a mode of discourse that is characterized by philosophical skepticism toward the grand narratives offered by modernism; that rejects epistemological certainty and the stability of meaning; and rejects the emphasis on ideology as the means of maintaining political power. Postmodernism dismisses claims that facts are objective as naïve realism, given the conditional nature of knowledge. The investigative perspective of Postmodernism is characterized by self-reference, epistemological relativism, and moral relativism, pluralism, irony, and eclecticism; and dismisses the universal validity of the principles of binary opposition, the stablility of identity, hierarchy, and categorization.

Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical movement that arose in the second half of the 20th century as a critical response to assumptions allegedly present in modernist philosophical ideas regarding culture, identity, history, or language that were developed during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment. Postmodernist thinkers developed concepts like difference, repetition, trace, and hyperreality to subvert "grand narratives", univocity of being, and epistemic certainty. Postmodern philosophy questions the importance of power relationships, personalization, and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. Many postmodernists appear to deny that an objective reality exists, and appear to deny that there are objective moral values.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of sociology</span> Overview of and topical guide to sociology

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the discipline of sociology:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Discourse</span> Field of theory which examines elements of conversation

Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. Following pioneering work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our experience of the world. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into power. Within theoretical linguistics, discourse is understood more narrowly as linguistic information exchange and was one of the major motivations for the framework of dynamic semantics, in which expressions' denotations are equated with their ability to update a discourse context.

Postmodernity is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century – in the 1980s or early 1990s – and that it was replaced by postmodernity, and still others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity. The idea of the postmodern condition is sometimes characterized as a culture stripped of its capacity to function in any linear or autonomous state like regressive isolationism, as opposed to the progressive mind state of modernism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Critical criminology</span>

Critical criminology is a theoretical perspective in criminology which focuses on challenging traditional understandings and uncovering false beliefs about crime and criminal justice, often but not exclusively by taking a conflict perspective, such as Marxism, feminism, political economy theory or critical theory. Critical criminology frequently takes a perspective of examining the genesis of crime and nature of 'justice' within the social structure of a class and status inequalities. Law and punishment of crime are viewed as connected to a system of social inequality and as the means of producing and perpetuating this inequality. Critical criminology also seeks to delve into the foundations of criminological research to unearth any biases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sociological theory</span> Theory advanced by social scientists to explain facts about the social world

A sociological theory is a supposition that intends to consider, analyze, and/or explain objects of social reality from a sociological perspective, drawing connections between individual concepts in order to organize and substantiate sociological knowledge. Hence, such knowledge is composed of complex theoretical frameworks and methodology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marxist criminology</span>

Marxist criminology is one of the schools of criminology. It parallels the work of the structural functionalism school which focuses on what produces stability and continuity in society but, unlike the functionalists, it adopts a predefined political philosophy. As in conflict criminology, it focuses on why things change, identifying the disruptive forces in industrialized societies, and describing how society is divided by power, wealth, prestige, and the perceptions of the world. "The shape and character of the legal system in complex societies can be understood as deriving from the conflicts inherent in the structure of these societies which are stratified economically and politically". It is concerned with the causal relationships between society and crime, i.e. to establish a critical understanding of how the immediate and structural social environment gives rise to crime and criminogenic conditions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Integrative criminology</span>

Integrative criminology reacts against single theory or methodology approaches, and adopts an interdisciplinary paradigm for the study of criminology and penology. Integration is not new. It informed the groundbreaking work of Merton (1938), Sutherland (1947), and Cohen (1955), but it has become a more positive school over the last twenty years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Postmodernist school (criminology)</span>

The postmodernist school in criminology applies postmodernism to the study of crime and criminals. It is based on an understanding of "criminality" as a product of the use of power to limit the behaviour of those individuals excluded from power, but who try to overcome social inequality and behave in ways which the power structure prohibits. It focuses on the identity of the human subject, multiculturalism, feminism, and human relationships to deal with the concepts of "difference" and "otherness" without essentialism or reductionism, but its contributions are not always appreciated. Postmodernists shift attention from Marxist concerns of economic and social oppression to linguistic production, arguing that criminal law is a language to create dominance relationships. For example, the language of courts expresses and institutionalises the domination of the individual, whether accused or accuser, criminal or victim, by social institutions. According to postmodernist criminology, the discourse of criminal law is dominant, exclusive and rejecting, less diverse, and culturally not pluralistic, exaggerating narrowly defined rules for the exclusion of others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Left realism</span>

Left realism emerged in criminology from critical criminology as a reaction against what was perceived to be the left's failure to take a practical interest in everyday crime, allowing right realism to monopolize the political agenda on law and order. Left realism argues that crime disproportionately affects working-class people, but that solutions that only increase repression serve to make the crime problem worse. Instead they argue that the root causes of crime lie in relative deprivation, although preventive measures and policing are necessary, but these should be democratically controlled.

Stuart Henry is professor emeritus, Criminal justice and former director of the School of Public Affairs, San Diego State University (2006–17). He has also been visiting professor of criminology at the University of Kent's School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research from 2008 to 2013 and visiting research scholar in sociology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, 2017.

The double hermeneutic is the theory, expounded by sociologist Anthony Giddens, that everyday "lay" concepts and those from the social sciences have a two-way relationship. A common example is the idea of social class, a social-scientific category that has entered into wide use in society. Since the 1970s, held to be a distinguishing feature of the social sciences, the double hermeneutic has become a criterion for demarcating the human/social from the natural sciences.

Quantitative methods provide the primary research methods for studying the distribution and causes of crime. Quantitative methods provide numerous ways to obtain data that are useful to many aspects of society. The use of quantitative methods such as survey research, field research, and evaluation research as well as others. The data can, and is often, used by criminologists and other social scientists in making causal statements about variables being researched.

Radical criminology states that society "functions" in terms of the general interests of the ruling class rather than "society as a whole" and that while the potential for conflict is always present, it is continually neutralised by the power of a ruling class. Radical criminology is related to critical and conflict criminology in its focus on class struggle and its basis in Marxism. Radical criminologists consider crime to be a tool used by the ruling class. Laws are put into place by the elite and are then used to serve their interests at the peril of the lower classes. These laws regulate opposition to the elite and keep them in power.

Mary Francesca Bosworth is an Australian criminologist who is interested in imprisonment, race, and gender. She is the author of a number of books, including Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women’s Prisons (1999), Explaining U.S. Imprisonment (2010), the edited book What is Criminology? (2011), the edited book The Borders of Punishment (2013) and Inside Immigration Detention (2014). Mary Bosworth is UK Editor-in-Chief of the journal Theoretical Criminology.

Punishment and Social Structure (1939), a book written by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, is the seminal Marxian analysis of punishment as a social institution. It represents the 'most sustained and comprehensive account of punishment to have emerged from within the Marxist tradition’ and ‘succeeds in opening up a whole vista of understanding which simply did not exist before it was written'. It is a central text in radical criminology, and an influential work in criminological conflict theory, cited as a foundation text in several major textbooks. It offers a broader (macrosociological) level of analysis than many micro-analyses that focus on the atomized and differentiated individual.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Criminology</span> The study of crime and criminal actions/behavior

Criminology is the study of crime and deviant behaviour. Criminology is an interdisciplinary field in both the behavioural and social sciences, which draws primarily upon the research of sociologists, political scientists, economists, psychologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, social workers, biologists, social anthropologists, as well as scholars of law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anarchist criminology</span>

Anarchist criminology is a school of thought in criminology that draws on influences and insights from anarchist theory and practice. Building on insights from anarchist theorists including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin, anarchist criminologists' approach to the causes of crime emphasises what they argue are the harmful effects of the state. Anarchist criminologists, a number of whom have produced work in the field since the 1970s, have critiqued the political underpinnings of criminology and emphasised the political significance of forms of crime not ordinarily considered to be political. Anarchists propose the abolition of the state; accordingly, anarchist criminologists tend to argue in favour of forms of non-state justice. The principles and arguments of anarchist criminology share certain features with those of Marxist criminology, critical criminology and other schools of thought within the discipline, while also differing in certain respects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gregg Barak</span> American criminologist, academic, and author

Gregg Barak is an American criminologist, academic, and author. He is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University, a former visiting distinguished professor in the College of Justice & Safety at Eastern Kentucky University, and a 2017 Fulbright Scholar in residence at the School of Law, Pontificia Universidade Catholica, Porto Alegre, Brazil. He is most known for his research in the fields of criminology and criminal justice.

References

Citations
  1. ↑ O'Brien p. 25
  2. ↑ Henry, p. ix, 1996
  3. ↑ Henry p. 8
  4. ↑ Curran p. 2
  5. ↑ O'Brien p. 26
  6. 1 2 O'Brien p. 27
  7. ↑ Henry, p. 116, 1996
  8. ↑ Giddens p. 67
  9. 1 2 3 4 Henry/Milovanovic p. 19
  10. 1 2 Henry/Milovanovic p. 18
  11. 1 2 Henry/Milovanovic p. 20
  12. ↑ Giddens p. 114
  13. ↑ Giddens p. 166
  14. ↑ Einstadter p. 8
  15. ↑ Henry/Milovanovic p. 75
  16. ↑ Giddens p. 5
  17. ↑ Henry/Milovanovic p. 107
  18. ↑ Einstadter p. 6
  19. ↑ Henry/Milovanovic p. 133
  20. ↑ Giddens p. 338
Sources
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