REFLECTIONS FROM NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY
CONFERENCE
May 9, 2016
Many, many thanks to Lo Presser, Michelle Brown and all the folks from
the sociology department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, for
organizing and hosting the first biennial Conference on New Directions in
Critical Criminology this past May 6-7. It
was uplifting to spend time with and hear old friends I hadn’t seen in several
years, from Tony Platt whom I have known and learned from for over 40 years, to
young activists and politically engaged students. A central part of many of the presentations
was defining one’s place in the realm of criminological research and
action. Now, back home, I find myself
doing the same, within the realm of the “new directions in critical
criminology” that I heard presented in Knoxville.
What I heard and learned about the positions various conference
participants assumed in criminology carries me back to the distinction Karl
Marx drew between two forms of “emancipation” in his essay “On the Jewish
Question”:
All emancipation is a
reduction of the human world and relationships to man himself. Political
emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil
society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a
citizen, a juridical person. Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in
himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a
species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his
particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own
powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power
from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation
have been accomplished.
A good deal of the critical
criminology I heard presented was focused on political emancipation, that is,
on giving voice and clout to women’s, black and brown pain, fear, and anger,
individually and collectively—to resist oppression—in Marx’s terms, for
political emancipation.
Like Marx, I believe that human
emancipation entails political emancipation.
Unlike Marx, I believe that human emancipation can follow political
emancipation in moments in our personal relations, which with experience can
generalize from one personal social context to another. My primary experience of the phenomenon came
in victim-offender mediation, where routinely I found that when “offenders”
(including someone who just happened to be picked out for starting a fight)
felt safe to lay out what they had done and “anything else you want to say to
_______,” and for victims to describe what had happened to them and to ask any
questions of _______ they wanted, their conversation morphed into creating
their own agreement, often without any prompting from us mediators. That is the process I call “peacemaking,”
transferable, I believe, to any social context, from policing, prosecuting and
guarding, to adult-child relations. In
Marx’s terms, it is a moment of political emancipation’s evolution to human emancipation
for all involved.
I have inferred that Norway’s
reduction of incarceration from 1960 US levels in 1840, to approximately
current, internationally low levels by the end of the century, represents a
cultural tipping point that grew from isolated local levels at the peak of the
Viking Empire, some 25 generations earlier.
It rested on long-established open, democratic government. At our stage of global communication, perhaps
my own punitive and patriarchal US will reach an overall tipping point in less
time. But in my political culture of
demanding “solutions” to our problems of violence and victimization, my
commitment to understanding and spreading the experience of transforming
conflict into cooperation rests on celebrating and enjoying the moments I am a
part of it, knowing that the culture I die in will, on the whole, be about as
punitive as it is today, living in hope for human progress toward
power-sharing, expecting no solutions.
I did find that I shared this
cultural orientation with some participants, notably with my co-presenter,
Denise Bentley, director of Tennessee’s youth courts programs, structurally for
example in having among peer judges teens who had been in trouble with the law
themselves. Culturally, I heard it in
descriptions of how the judges worked with those charged to help build their
lives and relations—to take them out of social isolation. I heard peacemaking in the stories of how
cases emerged and the peer volunteers did and felt about their work. I am not the first to discover that relations
can be authoritarian in formally democratic institutions and groups, and
cooperative in formally hierarchical organizations. That includes whether people hold formal, as
in state, or informal, as in private, power over others, or share it instead. Formally, I prefer power over others to be
held publicly rather than privately, because the law gives us access to what state
actors do, while records and operation of privatized places remain private. Whether emancipation is political or
cultural, it requires access to the voices and experience of those with less
power, so that they may be heard and attended.
I was a state actor for my entire 39-year career. I held the grading power over students, the
power to diminish some over others. I
tell myself that if I could, as I think I did, substantially transform the
power of my knowledge in the classroom over “my” students, then cultural
transformation of exercises of power over others can begin anywhere. Love and peace, hal
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