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Book Review: ‘Critical Criminology. Visions from Europe’

This is an impressive, critical and wideranging narrative which will both delight and divide academic criminologists on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. It also sets out to give new meaning and purpose to activists in penal reform. Rene van Swaaningen sets himself the challenging task of tracing the development of critical criminology in Europe and to rescue it from the resurgence of neoositivism or actuarial criminology which has gained so much momentum in Europe during the last two decades in response to wider political and economic pressures, and which has received strong ideological support from New Right American theorists such as James Q. Wilson. Conventional criminology was taken to task in the late 1960s and early 1970s as doing little more than either re-asserting the free will of offenders or explaining their behaviour in terms of individual pathology. This unsociological approach took defmitions of what was criminal for granted, saying little or nothing about the rule-making process itself, or the crimes of the powerful, concentrating instead on minor property offences, many of which were arguably the consequence of a manifestly unequal and therefore unjust social order. According to van Swaaningen, this alternative and potentially liberating discourse quickly floundered, ending up as little more than rhetorical nihilism as empirical studies of actual crime and the need to engage with the criminal justice system and the real problems facing ordinary communities in inner city areas were eschewed. This abdication not only resulted in space being left for the resurgence of the neo-classicism and actuarial justice in changing social and economic times, it also led to an auto-critique by some critical criminologists of their own epistemological lineage. The sometimes bitter debate between the so-called Left Realists against the Left Idealists was enjoined. Of course, this story is not new, and in a more straightforward textual sense has been told elsewhere, and in an equally opinionated way, for example by Colin Summers in 'The Sociology of Deviance; An Obituary' (1994, Open University Press, Milton Keynes). However, van Swaaningen's account is infmitely richer for several reasons. First, although not necessarily foremost, van Swaaningen traces the lineage of European critical criminology in all its richness and diversity. There is a good deal on the precursors of European critical criminology such as William Bonger and Clara Wichmann and, moving into the post-war period, details of Fritz Sack, defmed here as the father of German critical criminology. These names and perspectives are woven together with other more well-known strands in the critical criminology's intellectual tapestry, such as the Scandinavian contribution of