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...within an academic field, its relationship to the criminal-justice field, and its location within the expansive and expanding domain of neo-liberalism. These conditions, we argue, have dire consequences for criminological praxis, as they tend to shape criminological practice toward either "administrative" complicity in (Young 1999) or "self-inflicted irrelevance" (Wacquant 1995) to the criminal-justice system. Our aspiration is to reinvigorate critical reflexivity as criminological practice, following in the footsteps of those critical criminologists who first assailed criminological doxa and forced a rethinking of the discipline. The time has come (again!) for an honest reflection on our scholarly self-absorption, our political impotence, and our disconnection from the people and social movements we study.
Criminology in the criminal-justice field
Criminology and the criminal-justice field are often treated as separate domains. This perceived separation is evident in the cosmology of the positivist criminologist who imagines an objective criminology that stands outside of the criminal-justice system and provides guidance and understanding to the actors within. In this vision, the role of the criminologist is that of a knowledge broker who poses and answers aetiological and ontological questions about crime and criminality. However, this distinction between criminology and the criminal-justice system was always more imagined than real. Criminology is built on the foundation of the ordained logic of the criminal-justice system, and the practice of criminology often serves to reinforce and reproduce the contours of the criminal-justice field. In this sense, criminology has been, and continues to be, a dominated science, since its tools, instruments, and objects do not derive from an autonomous intellectual engagement with the social world but are instead predetermined by the logic of the criminal-justice field.
These and other problems of positivist criminology were identified in the 1960s through a constructionist critique, which emphasized the subjective experience of crime and criminal justice but held little regard for the structural conditions in which so-called deviant interactions are defined and take place. Critical criminologists chastised constructionists for this oversight; however, they often erred by returning to the spirit of positivism, demanding legal recognition of new "crimes" and thereby reinforcing the rules of the criminal-justice game through their (albeit contrarian) attachment to its illusio (see Bourdieu 1990, 1998). An awareness of this problematic complicity led many to disconnect from critical engagement with the criminal-justice system, and to a realization that the force of the criminal-justice field was such that it tended to draw in all objects within its orbit. That is, it was argued that criminological paradigms informed by feminism and Marxism (or, more recently, restorative justice and peacemaking criminology) operated within the truth regime of law and thereby failed to adequately counter or transform its hegemony (see Smart 1989).
This uncovering of the carnivorous nature of law is credited to the "postmodern" turn in criminology; however, this critical advancement is offset by the tendency within this theoretical perspective toward nihilism and indifference. Simply put, criminologists have been left unsure of how to engage their subject matter politically, or of whether or not political engagement is even a valid objective. These are not frivolous or unimportant concerns, but, in these times of scholarly disconnection and disenchantment, they are also symptoms of the seeming futility of scholarly political activity. As Loic Wacquant (1995: 21) writes, "To become 'postmodern,' as the most intrepid of our new classroom radicals like to call themselves, is to try to make a (professional) virtue out of a (social) necessity by concealing one's political impotence behind a discourse that is as grandiloquent as it is unreal." We will return to this argument later in our discussion.
This very brief, and extremely cursory, sketch of the relationship between criminology and the criminal-justice field has received more thorough attention elsewhere (see Cohen 1993; Pires and Acosta 1994). But, with this background in mind, we would like to explore in more detail two dimensions of the academic practice of criminology that are pertinent to the question of criminological political engagement and praxis: criminologists' activities within the criminal-justice field and criminologists' predicament within the academic marketplace.
A dominated discipline
As mentioned earlier, criminology is a dominated discipline within the field of criminal justice, where funding, cases, and even "victims" and "offenders" are transformed into resources to be exchanged, distributed, or treated as "gifts." Here, criminologists compete for a stake in the game and thereby come under the symbolic violence of the field. The "gift" of access to criminal-justice resources (e.g., incarcerated individuals, criminal-justice data, funding) is indeed a poisoned one, as it carries the taint of the unquestioned, and seemingly unquestionable, logic of "criminal justice," requiring the criminologist to forego critical questioning of the structured and structuring meanings and practices that constitute the criminal-justice field if they want their projects to be favourably vetted by criminal-justice gatekeepers. Thus, the criminal-justice field is not above "policing criminological knowledge," as Joane Martel (2004) illustrates in her analysis of the mechanisms employed by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) and other state agents to obstruct and delegitimize research on women's experiences of prison segregation. With the door closed to disruptive research, the criminal-justice field can reproduce itself with little risk of disruption. This stability is also ensured through the market-like conditions of the field, in which there is a growing cadre of competitors offering various other forms of crimerelated "expertise" (such as physical scientists and others with technological skills; see Haggerty 2004), who are happy to offer their services if criminologists are unwilling to accept the gift of research access.
The relations of domination between criminology and the criminal-justice field are by no means certain, and need to be re-established on an ongoing basis with the complicity of criminologists. In this sense, the relations are open to disruption through a critical awareness of the rules of the criminal-justice game and through steps toward ensuring the autonomy of criminology as an actor outside this field that intervenes within the field only in strategic and premeditated ways. But the criminal-justice field has so long dominated criminology that such disruptive activity is rendered difficult. Indeed, a set of institutions, qualifications, and modes of rationality has been established that makes positions alternative...
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