Summary and Review

abolitionist criminology: arguments and research examining the harms of criminal justice institutions of police and prisons and the attempts to dismantle them and re-think systems to deal with transgression.

bloody legislation: a group of laws passed by the state apparatus in the 18th and 19th centuries that enable the capitalist class to develop and control and expropriate the working class from the land and criminalise certain behaviours.

capitalist mode of production: an economic system characterised by (a) two social classes, private owners (of factories, goods, etc.) and workers, who exchange their labour for wages; (b) goods that are produced and sold for profit; and (c) competition between owners and between workers.

carceral feminism: feminism that advocates for police and prison responses to things like gendered violence, sexual assault, child abuse, etc..

computational methods: research methods that involve using computers to model, simulate and analyze social phenomena, and to assess patterns and trends working with big data. Big data could be anything from corporate databases or datasets from the government that could not feasibly be examined by humans using discourse or content analysis.

convict criminology: an approach to criminology that privileges the voices and standpoint of persons who have been criminalised or who have been system-affected.

critical criminology: a branch of criminological thought that examines how crime and criminal justice agencies are used as a form of social power that benefits some groups over others.

critical discourse analyses: method of research to explore the connections between the use of language/text and the social and political context within which it occurs.

disciplinary power: how individuals shape their conduct to line up with expert knowledge and rules of discourse.

discourses: the general domain of all statements and classifications about something/anything, like the discourse of child development or discourse of victimhood, and a system of categories that structures the way we perceive reality.

freedom of information/FOI requests: a tool to use in social science research to investigate state and criminal justice practices that accesses state records that would not otherwise be disclosed.

governmentality: the set of practices (rationalities, techniques, knowledges) via which people are (self) governed but also the means by which someone else’s activities are shaped.

hegemony: the dominance of one group’s ideas over another group’s ideas and when the dominant group controls the thinking of other groups, or when the ideas of the dominant class become the ideas of everyone.

historical ethnography: a method of research where a researcher examines a culture or society or social practice by immersing themselves in the history of experiences for the group or individual they are interested in.

institutional ethnography: a method of research where a researcher examines a specific institution via an in-depth study of all of its elements and practices to identify power relations that structure an experience in the institution and how the institution itself is organised.

instrumental Marxist: the argument that the state system always operates as an arm of, or instrument of, capitalism, or the state apparatus and criminal law exists as a direct result of capitalism to uphold capitalism and the capitalist mode of production.

Keynesianism: a theory of economics arguing for increased government spending (on things like education, employment insurance, etc.) and lower taxes (for businesses) to stimulate demand, meaning employers will invest more and employ more people thereby maintaining economic growth and stabilising the economy.

lumpenproletariat: in addition to the capitalist and working class, Marx identified the lumpenproletariat – a group that was defined as an unorganised, non-political underclass.

monetarism: a set of government policies that controls the amount of money in circulation as a way to stabilise the economy.

negative reforms: reforms that diminish the power of the state and diminish the power of carceral institutions.

neo-liberalism: governmental reform focused on free-market capitalism – policies that frees the market for capitalists including deregulation, privatisation, and free trade.

penal welfare state: government programs that focus on helping criminal offenders to stop offending by providing treatment or to provide for the welfare of prisoners.

police abolition: an emergent element in critical criminology that advocates for the eradication of police.

police reform: making changes or slight modifications to the existing structure of policing but keeping the original purpose of police.

positivistic paradigm: an orientation to the study of society that focuses on what can be observed – in criminology this means a focus on identifying and studying causes of crime that could then be corrected, which is strongly associated with crime control.

post-structuralist: a set of theoretical ideas that examines language, text and culture and how these establish social spaces/creates our reality, as opposed to structuralism’s contention that the social is a patterned, rigid, and material set of structures.

power: the diverse ways in which our actions control and are controlled by our relations (structural and otherwise) to others.

prison abolition: an emergent element of critical criminology that advocates for the eradication of prisons but also the whole set of sanctions, rules and punishments involved in institutional as well as community corrections.

qualitative methods: collecting and analysing data that is non-numerical and focused on the detailed understanding of the subject being researched which can include in-depth interviews, observation, and other non-numerical data.

repressive state apparatuses: bodies of government/states granted with the legal right to use physical force to control the masses.

social formation: a society or a social structure (e.g., a nation, a city, family, etc.) made up of a complex of concrete economic, political, and ideological relations, bound together and characterised by their historical relation to the economic relations (e.g., capitalism) they are located in.

social structures: organised patterns of social relations and institutions such as class, family, law, race, gender.

structural Marxist: the argument that law works to ensure capitalist accumulation and to maintain conditions where the generation of wealth is possible based on the idea that states act on behalf of capital, not at its behest, and ideology is spread out among numerous social structures.

the carceral: the multiple networks of diverse techniques and the power of normalisation to regulate human behaviour that we see in prison as it extends into the entire social body.

the unfinished: an abolitionist concept capturing the idea that abolition is ongoing and requires constant struggle and analysis.