12. Cultural Criminology
12.8 Critiques
Dr. Steven Kohm
Sometimes cultural criminology has been accused of romanticism by portraying criminals and deviants as cultural heroes who are fighting back against oppression through purposeful acts of transgression and deviance (Hall & Winlow, 2007). In response to this criticism, cultural criminologists would argue that mainstream criminology, particularly positivist, rational choice variants that reduce human action to a cost-benefit analysis, focuses too much on statistical equations and mathematical models and lacks any empathy for the plight of criminals. In fact, cultural criminologists have suggested that this can make criminology boring and take away from what makes crime and criminology fascinating to students and the general public alike.
Cultural criminology is also criticised for placing less emphasis on wider social structures and giving more attention to individual human action. However, proponents argue that this ignores the objective of cultural criminology to critique power. Cultural criminology takes up a critical position against power resulting from broader structures that produce inequality, such as capitalism. For example, cultural criminology examines the way violence reflects power relations in society. Certain forms of violence may be deemed entertainment when filtered through the lens of media and popular culture, while acts of state-perpetrated violence or abuse in times of war, such as in the aftermath of 9/11, may be deemed justified and culturally appropriate given the threat posed by foreign terrorists. For cultural criminology, “violence, it seems, is never only violence. It emerges from inequalities both political and perceptual” (Ferrell et al., 2008, p. 13). A cultural criminological analysis of power examines how we understand particular acts of violence. For instance, some cultural criminologists have called for a new visual criminology that analyses the way images are central to the meaning of crime and violence (Brown, 2014; Rafter, 2014; Brown & Carrabine, 2017). Some of the most iconic and horrific photographic images of violence are captured in times of war. However, the meaning assigned to these images exemplifies the work of power. For example, stark black and white images of liberated World War II concentration camps evoke horror and outrage over the atrocities committed by the Nazi state against humanity. These images unambiguously attest to the total corruption of the Nazi state and confirm that genocide must be understood as the crime of all crimes (Rafter, 2016). Alternatively, shocking digital photographs of American soldiers sexually humiliating prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were invested with a very different meaning. Rather than suggesting a political culture of criminal corruption and state sanctioned torture among the occupying US military, public outrage focused only on the individual soldiers caught smiling for the camera. Carrabine (2012)