Cutting the Edge: Current Perspectives in Radical/critical Criminology and Criminal Justice

by Ross; Jeffrey Ian

• ISBN13: 9781412807555
• ISBN10: 1412807557
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2009-04-15
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Understanding crime, criminals, and criminal justice from a radical/critical perspective is indispensable in today’s academic, applied research, and policy sectors. Neglect of this approach leads to narrow-mindedness and the probability of repeating past mistakes or reinventing the wheel. Reading Cutting the Edge will encourage individuals and organizations, especially students and instructors, to think in innovative and new ways experimenting with new policy initiatives designed to improve not only criminal justice, but social and human justice as well.This second edition is completely revised and includes new chapters as well. The studies chosen demonstrate the difference between critical criminology and other approaches used to study and explain criminological phenomena. The authors do not approach the inequalities of the criminal justice system as phenomena that should be studied, but as wrongs that must be righted. Their scholarship is influenced by their deeply held beliefs that differences in the definitions of crime and in the processes of arrest, conviction, sentencing, and correctional treatment are immoral and the product of inequality, and the unequal distribution of power in our society.Cutting-edge critical criminology combines concerns about fairness in punishment, tools of class analysis and the insights of feminism, postmodernism, and ethnography. The authors included here wield these newer tools with elegance and enthusiasm. Written with passion by experts in the field, the book engages the mind as fully as it engages the emotions.