Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist: Working the Margins of Law, Power, and Justice

By Gregg Barak

Over the past five decades, prominent criminologist Gregg Barak has worked as an author, editor, and book review editor; his large body of work has been grounded in traditional academic prose. His new book, Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist, while remaining scholarly in its intent, departs from the typical academic format. The book is a a first-person account that examines the linkages between one scholar's experiences as a criminologist from the late 1960s to the present and the emergence and evolution of radical criminology as a challenge to developments in mainstream criminology. Barak draws upon his own experiences over this half-century as a window into the various debates and issues among radical, critical, and technocratic criminologies. In doing so, he revisits his own seminal works, showing how they reflect those periods of criminological development.
 
What holds this book together is the story of how resisting the crimes of the powerful while struggling locally for social justice is the essence of critical criminology. His seven chapters are divided into three parts—academic freedom, academic activism, and academic praxis—and these connected stories link the author's own academic career in Berkeley, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; Chicago; Alabama; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and across the United States. Barak's eventful scholarly life involved efforts to overcome laws against abortion and homosexuality; to formalize protective practices for women from domestic violence and sexual assault; to oppose racism and classism in the criminal justice system; to challenge the wars on gangs, drugs, and immigrants; and to confront the policies of mass incarceration and the treatment of juvenile offenders.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781978814141

Book preview

Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist

Critical Issues in Crime and Society

RAYMOND J. MICHALOWSKI AND LUIS A. FERNANDEZ, SERIES EDITORS

Critical Issues in Crime and Society is oriented toward critical analysis of contemporary problems in crime and justice. The series is open to a broad range of topics including specific types of crime, wrongful behavior by economically or politically powerful actors, controversies over justice system practices, and issues related to the intersection of identity, crime, and justice. It is committed to offering thoughtful works that will be accessible to scholars and professional criminologists, general readers, and students.

For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.

Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist

WORKING THE MARGINS OF LAW, POWER, AND JUSTICE

GREGG BARAK

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Barak, Gregg, author.

Title: Chronicles of a radical criminologist: working the margins of law, power, and justice / Gregg Barak.

Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2020] | Series: Critical issues in crime and society | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019040813 | ISBN 9781978814127 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978814134 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978814141 (epub) | ISBN 9781978814158 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978814165 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Barak, Gregg. | Criminologists—United States—Biography. | Critical criminology—United States.

Classification: LCC HV6023.B36 A3 2020 | DDC 364.92 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040813

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2020 by Gregg Barak

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Foreword by Raymond J. Michalowski

Introduction

PARTI ACADEMIC FREEDOM

1 Coming of Age at the Berkeley School of Criminology

2 Life as a Young Criminologist

PARTII ACADEMIC ACTIVISM

3 Doing Public Criminology

4 Doing Newsmaking Criminology

5 Doing Multidisciplinary Criminology

PARTIII ACADEMIC PRAXIS

6 Integrating Criminology

7 Globalizing Criminology

Appendix

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

FOREWORD

Raymond J. Michalowski

AT THE 1991 American Society of Criminology (ASC) meeting in San Francisco, a group of self-identified critical criminologists gathered in a hotel room occupied by former ASC president Bill Chambliss. They had come together for the third annual social of the ASC’s Division on Critical Criminology. They talked, played music, sang songs, and famously received a noise complaint—from the hotel next door. The important point here, though, is that the group fit into a hotel sleeping room—remember that.

When the Division on Critical Criminology gathered to socialize in 1991, it was relatively new. Its origins reached back only to 1988, when Bill Chambliss was the ASC president and I was the program organizer for the ASC annual meeting. One of our goals for the conference was to schedule a meeting time for radical, critical, and feminist criminologists to come together to discuss whether or not to request the creation of an ASC division that would better reflect the concerns of criminologists working at or beyond the margins of what were then (and in many ways still remain) the dominant criminological frameworks.

The meeting was cochaired by Bob Bohm and Susan Caringella-MacDonald. Under their leadership, two important things transpired. One, the group reached an agreement to request division status. The other, in many ways more consequential, decision was to name it the Division on Critical Criminology.

Names matter. They are the constitutive building blocks of reality. Naming, however, never takes place in a vacuum. Names are always an expression of antecedent understandings, agreements, and tensions. In this case, the selection of the word critical to give this dissident branch of criminology a formal identity reflected both exogenous and endogenous forces.

The key exogenous force was a widely held belief that the ASC leadership would never approve a division named radical criminology, even though this school of thought, in all likelihood, characterized the majority of those in the room. The problem with the term radical criminology was twofold. First, it originated at, and remained closely associated with, the Berkeley School of Criminology. It was there that a core of left-of-center criminologists in the 1960s created a center for radical inquiry into questions of crime and social justice, a center that became increasingly attractive to many students at the University of California, Berkeley, including Gregg Barak. In the academy, however, it is often the case that nothing fails like success. The growing attractiveness of radical criminology at Berkeley inspired the hostility of more centrist criminologists and administrators. They moved successfully to reorganize the Berkeley School of Criminology in ways that would effectively eliminate what they saw as a threatening growth of radical theorizing, pedagogy, and practice at that school.

The second reason many anticipated that the proposed Division of Radical Criminology was a nonstarter was rooted in the epistemological tension between radical and orthodox criminology in the wider discipline. As a school of thought, radical criminology challenged the most basic assumption on which mid-twentieth century criminological orthodoxy was based: that laws and institutions for enforcing them are, in the final instance, an expression of societal consensus. In 1979, the American Society of Criminology published a special edition of its journal, Criminology, devoted exclusively to radical criminology. While bookended by two somewhat sympathetic treatments of radical criminology as window dressing, the core of the edition consisted of articles that were written by high profile criminologists excoriating radical criminology as an infantile disorder (Klockars 1979, 477), mere sentimentality (Toby 1979, 516), or some other insult to the value-free model of twentieth-century social science. While anti-orthodox versions of criminology, particularly feminist and race theory, had gained a bit more legitimacy by the late 1980s, many of those debating the selection of a division name were aware that much of the leadership of the ASC remained hostile to the idea of any criminology that called itself radical.

The endogenous factor affecting name choice was the multiplicity of intellectual perspectives in the room at the time. Many there, myself included, researched, wrote, and engaged in praxis closely linked to radical criminology, with its roots in Marxian political economics, ideals of and theories about racial and gender equality, direct community action, and strong socialist leanings. Others were focused more closely on questions of gender, feminist theory, and the struggle against heteronormativity. Still others fell into a heterogeneous third group characterized by a liberal-left model of criminal justice reformism.

In view of this diversity, the group chose a big-tent solution by adopting the adjective critical, even though, I would argue, the term had little representation in any particular school of thought within criminology at the time. It would not be until the 1990s that critical theory as represented by the Frankfurt School, postmodernist thinkers, and the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies would become part of critical criminology—in a big way—with the emergence of cultural criminology. This theoretical development has made the term critical criminology, perhaps, more apt in the present than in its origins.

In hindsight, the decision to use the name "Division on Critical Criminology was probably a good one. It enabled those criminologists whose work centered around a critique of domination" to find collaborators, develop networks and build friendships within the larger, more anomic discipline of criminology (Michalowski 1996).

Remember that hotel room? In 2018, an academic generation after the founding of the Division on Critical Criminology, critical criminologists overflowed a meeting room in the Marriot Marquis Hotel in Atlanta where the newly renamed Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice held its social. Critical criminology had gone from filling a sleeping room to filling a large meeting room. As Gregg Barak details in here, what had been a small group of radical criminologists centered around the Berkeley School of Criminology grew into a visible and viable wing of criminology overall, containing many more variants than the small group who started the ball rolling at Berkeley and the somewhat larger group who came together to give the movement an organizational identity in 1988. In recent years, critical criminology has grown to the point that meetings are held with scholars and activists who are specifically identified with radical and critical inquiry and social justice praxis.

Though not formally titled as such, Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist is a memoir—in this case, the narrative of a life in criminology. As Gilmour (1997) tells us, Every memoir reflects not only the individual, but also the social, not only the personal but also the communal, not only the local but also the universal. In this way, the story told in Chronicles is not simply about its author but also about the evolution of criminology’s dissident wing from its origins to the present. As memoir, the book also stands in contradiction to the popular image of personhood because it does not rely on a fully unified concept of the self (Ng 2008, 34). Rather, like all memoirs, Chronicles asks us to engage with the complexities of understanding the constantly shifting self, situated in changing contexts. Here we meet multiple iterations of Gregg Barak as he engages with the academy, struggles for social justice, and incorporates changes in criminological theory at different times and in different social contexts. Chronicles brings to the table a story of repression, rejection, survival, and growth—not just the story of one radical criminologist but also the story of how these dynamics shaped the wider critique of dominant ideas about who criminals are, why they are this way, and what should be done about them.

Gregg Barak is uniquely situated to tell this tale. He was present at the birth of radical criminology in Berkeley, and he remains an active radical criminologist today. His suitability to tell this tale is not based on mere longevity. Few criminologists have devoted a half-century to integrating the multiple theoretical strands of radical and critical criminology with one another, as well as integrating these theoretical understandings with community-based struggles for social justice. It is a task that calls for someone to shuttle, on the one hand, between divergent theories about social life and on the other hand, between the often far too distant worlds of academic scholarship and community organization. Gregg Barak is one of those few.

Between his early years as an undergraduate in the Berkeley School of Criminology during the heady and troubled late 1960s and his current professorship at Eastern Michigan University, Gregg Barak built a complex reservoir of experience. Among his many roles, he has been an expatriate professor in Europe, a criminal justice policy planner and program developer, a political candidate, an administrator in both private and public institutions of higher learning, a public action researcher, a social movement activist, a book editor, a mass media commentator, and a mentor to younger scholars and activists. This diversity of experience gives him a lens, both broad and sharp, through which to observe the evolution of radical and critical criminology. He uses that lens here to illuminate the surface and subterranean forces in the academy and in the wider society that have brought the criminology of human liberation to its present place of theoretical diversity and organizational quasi solidarity.

Of the many themes covered in Chronicles, one that, in my mind, links them together is Gregg Barak’s lifelong commitment to integration, and I mean that in many senses of that word. As an activist he frequently engaged in struggles to challenge the inequalities imposed on people of color, particularly by the justice system. That is, he sought to integrate everyone into an equal justice that had been largely reserved for whites. As a faculty member and administrator in a historically black college he took integration in a different direction, becoming the learner more than the learned. As a thinker and writer Gregg Barak has been relentless in his efforts to integrate the many different theoretical strands of critical criminology that have emerged since the 1970s into coherent, unified frameworks for advancing radical inquiry into the practices of justice.

The search for integration told here is not just the story of one criminologist. It is the story of how critical criminologists might build a shared intellectual movement that can confront growing trends toward hyperindividualism, heteronormativity, elite impunity, nationalism, white supremacy, and ultimately fascism, without losing the specific foci that makes one type of critical (or radical) criminology different from another. What Chronicles has to tell us about this challenge makes it a valuable book for anyone interested in what criminology, particularly its critical versions, has to offer the world today.

REFERENCES

Denton-Borhaug, Kelly, and Daniel Jasper. 2014. Memoir as Contemplative Practice for Peace and Justice. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 5, no. 2: 114–130, http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/525/658.

Gilmour, Peter. 1997. The Wisdom of Memoir: Reading and Writing Life’s Sacred Texts. Winona, MN: St. Mary’s Press.

Klockars, Carl B. 1979. The Contemporary Crises of Marxist Criminology. Criminology 16, no. 4: 477–515.

Michalowski, Raymond. 1996. Critical Criminology and the Critique of Domination: The Story of an Intellectual Movement. Critical Criminology 7, no. 1: 9–16.

Ng, M. N. 2008. Mapping the Diasporic Self. Canadian Literature 196: 34–45.

Toby, Jackson. 1979. The New Criminology Is the Old Sentimentality. Criminology 16, no. 4: 516–526.

Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist

Introduction

DATING AS FAR BACK as the seventeenth century, the study of criminality and its control could be characterized by two types of Western criminology. Over three centuries, the pedagogues and philosophers from the global North who expressed their views about criminal behavior were modernist criminologists who practiced either classical or positivist criminology. This playing field of modern criminology came under criticism in the 1960s from postmodernist scholars who for a decade or more were known interchangeably as new, radical, or critical criminologists. As the established vocabularies of criminology were confronted by critiques of domination and repression, the spheres of modern and postmodern criminologies started to grow. By the early 1990s, the field of criminological inquiry and praxis had become home to several coexisting traditional and alternative criminologies. More recently, the crossbreeding of older and newer ways of thinking about crime and justice has become a thriving enterprise. In 2019, a nonexhaustive listing of the different types of criminologies included the following:

African Criminology

Anarchist Criminology

Appreciative Criminology

Asian Criminology

Biological Criminology

Chaos Criminology

Chinese Criminology

Classical Criminology

Conflict Criminology

Conservation Criminology

Constitutive Criminology

Convict Criminology

Critical Criminology

Cultural Criminology

Developmental Criminology

Environmental Criminology

European Criminology

Experimental Criminology

Feminist Criminology

Functionalist Criminology

Global Criminology

Gothic Criminology

Green Criminology

Humanistic Criminology

Indigenous Criminology

Integrative Criminology

International Criminology

Life-course Criminology

Marxist Criminology

Narrative Criminology

Neurocriminology

Newsmaking Criminology

Peacemaking Criminology

Positivist Criminology

Postcolonial Criminology

Postmodern Criminology

Psychosocial Criminology

Public Criminology

Queer Criminology

Radical Criminology

Realist Criminology

Rural Criminology

Southern Criminology

Visual Criminology

Founded in 1939, the American Society of Criminology (ASC) remained an academic association without any divisions or specialized sections for forty-two years. The Division of International Criminology was the first to form in 1981, followed by the Division on Women and Crime in 1982 and the Division on Critical Criminology in 1990, which changed its name twenty-five years later to the Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice. Before the turn of the twenty-first century, two other divisions were formed, the Division on People of Color and Crime in 1996 and the Division on Corrections and Sentencing in 1999. One decade would pass before the next Division of Experimental Criminology was formed in 2009, followed by the Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology and the Division of Victimology in 2012, the Division of Policing in 2014, the Division on Terrorism and Bias Crimes in 2015, the Division of White Collar and Corporate Crime in 2016, and the Division of Biopsychosocial Criminology and the Division of Communities and Place in 2017. In 2018 the Division of Rural Criminology was established, bringing the total number of divisions to fourteen. Moreover, the executive director of the ASC, Chris Eskridge, has informed me that other divisions are in development, including the Division of African Criminology, the Division of Chinese Criminology, the Division on Cybercrime, and the Division on Innocence and Wrongful Convictions. I imagine that the Division of Southern Criminology cannot be far behind.

Inquiring minds might have some questions: Why the crisis of confidence in modernism and a distrust of grand theories and ideologies, especially in the social sciences? What accounts for these disciplinary trends in the development of postcrisis criminology? What explains the rupture with or departure from the modern practices of criminology? What forces have been driving criminologists and other social scientists to search for alternative ways of practicing their disciplinary trades?

Although history is complicated and nonlinear, internationally two phenomena emerged with the turn of the twenty-first century that rearranged much more than the playing fields of criminology. One of these was ontological: the arrival of globalism as a material reality. The other was epistemological: the adoption of postmodernism as a philosophical reality. Together, these forces brought forth the Age of Enlightenment 2.0, which perhaps was best captured in Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Closer to the home of criminology, there was the 1967 article by Howard S. Becker in Social Problems, Whose Side Are We On? His article went viral long before there was an Internet. The article obliterated the myth of value-free, neutral, and objective social science. Less than a decade later, Alvin W. Gouldner argued in his classic treatise, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), that sociology should turn away from seeking to produce objective knowledge in favor of understanding the subjective nature of sociology and of knowledge. Gouldner also wanted sociologists to pay closer attention to how both sociology and knowledge are historical products.

Before I continue with my overview of criminological development, I want to be clear about what I am not saying. First, I am not suggesting that criminologists no longer believe research can be conducted from an impersonal or an objective stance. Quite the contrary: in order to be down with scientific neutrality, the majority of criminologists have doubled down on the ethos of value-free objectivity. Most of these social scientists focus almost exclusively on what is, avoiding the topic of what ought to be, because policy discussions are viewed as inseparable from questions of value. In this type of labor, criminologists often use large data sets and employ sophisticated mathematical models that increasingly make these social scientists’ work irrelevant to law and public policy. Second, I am not implying that criminologists are restricted to practicing one kind of criminology to the exclusion of other kinds or that we may play in only one type of criminological sandbox. Most criminologists play in two or more of the available sandboxes, much as they often teach in two or more areas of the discipline. Over the course of five decades I have played in as many as twelve sandboxes. I have spent the vast majority of my time playing in critical, feminist, global, integrative, Marxist, newsmaking, and peacemaking sandboxes. Finally, while I find the proliferation of criminologies interesting, I prefer disciplinary cohesion to disciplinary fragmentation. For that reason, I do not necessarily equate the creation of more criminologies with an improved criminology.

Back to our story: By the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, scholars throughout the academy were coming to appreciate Kuhn’s thesis that the facts and the truths found by the scientists were inextricably connected to the paradigms and vocabularies that the scientists were using. Almost overnight, social scientists were finding conventional ways of doing and thinking about their research as narrow, parochial, and of limited value. Scholars were thus searching for other models of human interaction that were usually less akin to mathematics and physics and more in tune with literature and the arts. As a consequence, rather than continuing to proffer new, value-free theories or refine the older impartial ones, a large minority of criminologists exited for newer, if not necessarily greener, criminological pastures. Many of these criminologists entered the postmodern arena where they began doing critical criminology and telling a variety of crime and justice stories from the perspectives of value-laden consciousness. Those social and cultural narratives brought forth more nuanced approaches to probing and dissecting the numerous terrains of law, crime, and justice. Many of these fresher approaches or newer specializations remain obscure and unfamiliar to conventional and critical criminologists alike. I suspect that, until criminological propagation slows down or freezes, as the parameters of our discipline expand most criminologists will continue to lose familiarity with—let alone command over—the varieties of criminology.

Regarding the propagation of criminologies and the numerous categories of criminology identified so far, allow me to reframe the discussion by summarizing differences in the prevailing views on crime and criminality from the global West and North. Over most of its history, the field of criminology has been the object of two contradictory approaches to thinking about crime and criminality: consensus and conflict. Each of these perspectives reflects a combination of beliefs about individual character and social structure, the distribution of power throughout society, and the workings of the law in social action. It is hoped that this conceptual overview will assist readers, as they get further into the book, to make sense out of the differences in criminological practice. Pragmatically, this conceptualization reduces the unwieldy taxonomy of forty-four criminologies into a more manageable dichotomy of mainstream and alternative criminologies. The former criminologies typically ascribe to the consensus viewpoints of law and order while the latter criminologies typically ascribe to the conflict viewpoints of law and order.

Consensus-oriented criminologists utilize a legalistic definition of crime. They argue that society consists of individuals who are functionally in a state of equilibrium and who possess a broad set of shared values and norms. The consensus views stem from the ideas of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason. These include the concept of a social contract and the principles of equality and the rule of law. Following the utilitarian insights of Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, crime becomes behavior that a society as a whole has formed a consensus about and wishes to prohibit by means of criminal laws. The roots of criminalizing felonious actions and even misdemeanors are to be found in strongly held emotional feelings and states of collective consciousness. Criminologists who agree with the consensus view of crime generally limit their investigations of harmful and injurious behavior to what the criminal law prohibits. These criminologists are also more likely to practice one or more of the criminologies derived from the modern spheres of positivist and classical criminology.

Conflict-oriented criminologists utilize a social definition of crime. They argue that in addition to equilibrium and consensus, modern societies are characterized by Hobbesian divisions and conflicts based on multiple identities of culture, status, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and gender. All of these differences are inseparable from the material relations of the means of production as well as the distributions of social capital and private property. These conflict views stem from nineteenth-century Hegelian and Marxian ideas about the influences of privileged interests over universal interests. Accordingly, like most laws, the criminal laws are hierarchal and reflect the will of powerful people and organized interests that are able to control the substantive content of the law as well as its procedural administration. Criminologists who agree with the conflict view of crime generally do not limit their investigations to individual violators of an arbitrary or subjective criminal law. In addition, these criminologists query harmful or injurious lawful behaviors committed not only by individuals but also by organizational, corporate, and state institutions. Conflict criminologists not only expand their queries beyond the prohibitions of the criminal law but also are more likely to practice one or more of the criminologies derived from the spheres of postmodern criminology.

As incorporated within this criminological memoir, crime refers to any acts, omissions, and processes that cause individual harms or social injuries. These acts, omissions, and processes need not be prohibited by the criminal law, or even unlawful for that matter, but in most instances they are. This definition of crime also assumes that the perpetrators of these acts, omissions, and processes are aware of or should have foreseen the consequences of their behavior. Influenced by radical, insurgent, critical, anarchistic, humanistic, and feminist criminologies, this nonlegalistic definition and this dialectical view of crime alter not only our perceptions of the reality of crime but also our understanding of social harm and social injustice. Finally, in resonance with Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic’s Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism (1996), my definition of crime adopts an affirmative postmodernist perspective that necessitates the reframing of the social discourse on crime, punishment, and justice.

In The Sociological Imagination (1959), C. Wright Mills argues that the classic task of the social analyst is to grasp the relationship between biography and history. I echo Mills when I contend that the task of the criminological autoethnographer is to grasp one’s own engagement and that of other criminologists in relation to the development of criminology as a whole. In different words, the academic metanarrative that holds this book together cannot be detached from the analyses of other research, practice, and scholarship that criminologists are producing. Let me also say that I believe there are other criminological autoethnographies waiting to be written. As for the past, I am aware of only one other example that qualifies as belonging to the genre of autoethnography: Adventures in Criminology (1999) by Sir Leon Radzinowicz. His work spans seventy years. His story begins in Italy and primarily encompasses comparing crime and legal systems in the United Kingdom and Europe. Although our geographical reference points are not the same, Radzinowicz and I do share some thirty years of overlapping social history. We also share in common an affinity for historical and comparable approaches to understanding crime and justice. Of course, as would be the case also with those as yet unwritten memoirs, the personal life experiences informing any two autoethnographies are vastly different.

As criminology is part of the behavioral and social sciences, criminological memoirs are so rare in part because the academic canon of writing for our disciplines, unlike the humanities or law, denigrates first-person conscious narratives of storytelling. The absence of autoethnography in our discipline also has to do with the reluctance of book publishers to disseminate this form of knowledge production. I have written this memoir for at least three reasons: first, as an attempt to alter the insular view of what academic book publishers view as constituting criminological knowledge; second, to encourage baby boomer criminologists to write more autoethnographies; third, to provide lessons that I hope will be useful for other criminologists, especially those at the beginning of their life’s work. On a personal level, I have written this memoir as a way of making it easier for me to step away from the fast-paced treadmill of crime and social justice that has occupied my past half-century. Like any memoir, this one has been written selectively and with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight. While some of the stories I share are exotic, most of them are rather mundane. As this book is much more a criminological memoir than a personal memoir, the reader should regard the author as a prototype of criminological interest rather than a person of criminological interest.

Warning: Autoethnographies by design are aesthetic and evocative. They seek to incorporate conventional techniques of storytelling, such as character, scene, or plot development that engage readers. Autoethnographic reporting may also consist of chronological or fragmented stories of progression. When telling these crime and justice stories, I may also, for example, alter my authorial point of view by moving back and forth between first-person narratives when I am part of the interaction, second-person accounts when I want to bring readers into a scene, and third-person descriptions when I am establishing context or distance, sharing information about comparative findings, or presenting points of view other than my own. Hence, the autoethnographic approach to the study of criminology challenges the traditional canons of the social and behavioral sciences. It does so primarily because autoethnographies treat the examination of crime, punishment, and justice as a socially conscious and political act. Often viewed as a journalistic or literary liability, the authorial mobility of the memoir, if not anathema to third-person objectivity and normative social science, is an affront to the customary dissemination of criminological knowledge. After all, the genre of memoir has no obligatory footnotes or references to cite. Nevertheless, within the body of the text I will continue to selectively identify works that inform my accounts, as I have done in this introduction. Here and there, I have also succumbed to convention and included full citations of articles from peer-reviewed journals.

A PREVIEW OF FIFTY YEARS OF CRIMINOLOGICAL WORK

Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist has three related parts: Academic Freedom, Academic Activism, and Academic Praxis. Chapter 1, Coming of Age at the Berkeley School of Criminology, spans my time as an undergraduate and graduate student at Berkeley, 1967–1973. While portraying the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s and beyond, I also describe the multidisciplinary nature of my undergraduate and graduate studies at Berkeley. Much of this chronicle revolves around the struggle between the old and new criminology in general and the rise and demise of radical criminology in particular. Finally, I elaborate on the killing of the Berkeley School of Criminology and the denial of new admissions in 1976.

Chapter 2, Life as a Young Criminologist, spans the years 1974–1979. Though the chapter discusses my first academic appointment in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, and my third academic appointment in Europe, the primary focus is on my second academic appointment at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), including my criminological practice on and off campus in relation to some contradictions of the dictum What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas. Much of this chronicle provides a thorough review and analysis of my firing and subsequent lawsuit against UNLV. This legal case resulted in my leaving the university with a large sum of money in my pocket. I also received the classic nonapology apology by UNLV that appeared above the folds of the front pages of the Las Vegas Sun and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Chapter 3, Doing Public Criminology, spans the years 1980–1985. The chapter begins briefly by revisiting my year of transition after Europe, when I did contracted research in Portland, Oregon, and subsequently collected unemployment and hung out in San Francisco prior to beginning my fourth academic appointment and my first appointment as a middle-level administrator in Aurora, Illinois. This chapter also shines a light on the rapid ascension of criminal justice education in the United States and my rationale for seeking out managerial posts as a means of obtaining academic security. I then explore the reciprocal relations among managing, disseminating, and producing criminological knowledge. The remainder of the Aurora chronicle covers my forays into spreading criminological knowledge both on and off of campus. These forms of public criminology included running for political office, addressing the social problems of homelessness and gangs, and sheltering women and children from domestic violence and sexual assault.

Chapter 4, Doing Newsmaking Criminology, spans my years in Alabama, 1985–1991. While the focus of chapter 3 was on local politics, activism, and issues of crime control and social justice, the focus of chapter 4 is on state and national politics in relation to the same basic kinds of crime and justice issues. After describing the post–civil rights era and the cultural adjustment to living in the heart of Dixie, the chapter turns to a discussion of the paradigmatic crisis in criminology as I saw it in 1986. As one type of applied response to this criminological crisis, I share from a three-part series that I wrote in real time about the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s investigation into Montgomery’s police-community tensions for the Montgomery Advertiser. I expound on these and other newsmaking experiences of mine that occurred across the state of Alabama. Next, the chapter describes and explains why I developed the first and only master’s of criminology degree at a historically black college or university (HBCU) in the shadow of the longest desegregation higher education lawsuit in U.S. history. The chapter ends by revealing that my community-based activism in Illinois and Alabama became the primary source material for much of my scholarly production in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Chapter 5, Doing Multidisciplinary Criminology, captures most of my university and scholarly activities during the 1990s. After the family relocated to southeast Michigan, I became an administrative head running the department of sociology, anthropology, and criminology at Eastern Michigan University. The chapter contrasts this administrative post