SOC 225 Ch. 12 PDF

The downtrodden, the marginalized, and the impoverished make up the majority of individuals who are arrested by the police; they also represent the greatest number of inmates in our jails and take up the bulk of spaces on the court docket. It seems that we inhabit an unjust world made up of enormous...

The downtrodden, the marginalized, and the impoverished make up the majority of individuals who are arrested by the police; they also represent the greatest number of inmates in our jails and take up the bulk of spaces on the court docket. It seems that we inhabit an unjust world made up of enormous concentrations of wealth and power on the one hand and masses of powerless people on the other. This situation raises many questions: Is this the best Canadians can hope for? If so, does this indicate a diminishment of political dreams and the loss of hope for social justice? If it does not, how do we move to a more just state? As you read this chapter, keep in mind the face of suffering—whether it be that of the homeless person Canadians hurry by on their way to enjoying a $4 Starbuck’s coffee or the one in a news story about a starving East African child so easily flipped past on a 60-inch LED HD television—and ask what you are willing to give up to ameliorate social, economic, and political suffering. All of this points to the dilemmas that critical criminology forces us to face. As citizens fully socialized into the social order, we rarely critically engage with our world, instead taking it for granted. Inspired by promises of “freedom” and “justice,” critical criminology draws attention to hidden and overlooked injus- tices scattered throughout our world. Critical criminology attempts to highlight inequalities, discrimination, and suffering and to relate these to the discipline of criminology. Social problems abound but are easily dismissed as someone else’s responsibility. Critical criminology attends to the processes through which the social world restricts human freedom and choice. It attempts to assemble and create more “just” worlds with less misery or none at all: “the possibility daily withheld, overlooked or unbelieved” (Bauman 2000). What Is Critical about Critical Criminology? Critical criminology promises to offer something critical. But what does this mean? To be certain, everyone is critical—at least to a certain extent. We cast judgment on movies (“Pirates of the Caribbean was the greatest movie of all time!”), clothing (both our own and, especially, that which belongs to others), and music (“Nicki Minaj does not sing particularly well”). Is this the pursuit in which critical scholars are engaged? Certainly not. However, defining exactly what meets and what fails to meet the “critical” bar is far more difficult than it might seem. If everyone is critical and capable of critique, what sets critical criminology apart? Some schools of criminology have adopted an administrative approach to the question of crime and have produced policy-oriented knowledge directed towards regulating disruptions and disorders (Young 1998). The products of this main- stream criminology/criminal justice (programs such as zero tolerance and broken windows policing) appeal to politicians, who promise an eager electorate that they will be “tough on crime and the causes of crime.” Such scholarship is critical to the extent that it challenges existing criminal justice orthodoxy by suggesting that we focus on minimizing criminal opportunities rather than explaining criminal motivations. However, governments and criminal justice organizations can safely adopt this brand of “critical scholarship” within their existing infrastructure with- out fear that these suggestions and programs will significantly change existing mandates or practices. Government agencies are now promoting and, in some cases, soliciting this type of administrative scrutiny of policy and programming, viewing it as a path towards more efficient governance and control. By contrast, the promise implied by “critical criminology” ensures a type of critique that prefers “to take the system to task rather than tinker with its parts” (Ratner 1971, n.p.). Hogeveen and Woolford (2006) maintain that critique should not fall into the trap of conceiving of programs that work well within the existing criminal justice system; instead, critical criminologists should extend cri- tique and thought beyond these limits. Indeed, criminal justice institutions that receive critical criminological scholarship favourably would invite their own destruction (Pavlich 2005). Critical criminologists, then, practise a transformative brand of critique that confronts inequalities and social suffering with promises of more just outcomes. So “critical” in critical criminology implies transformation through promises of justice. But what does it mean to be “critical”? That is, if critical criminology is transformative, does this imply that transformation and critique are identical? No. Critique is a means to a transformative (just) end. Thus, while we now know that the goal of critical criminology is justice, we are yet unaware of what “critical” means. When we attempt to understand a thing, etymology (the origins of words) is often a productive starting point. George Pavlich (2000, 25) notes that “criticism... crisis and critique relate to the Greek word Krinein which is associated with images of judgment (judge, judging), but also with deciding, separating out, discerning, selecting, differentiating, and so on.” Interestingly, early medical officials closely associated notions of critique with Krises, which involved the art of diagnosing crisis stages in the development of an illness. Traces of this image have survived in common medical diagnoses of patients said to be in critical condition (Pavlich 2000). Over many years the broad meaning of the word critical has been reduced to such a degree that it is now almost exclusively associated with the act of judging. Take the television program American Idol as an example of how Western understandings of critical and critique have become whittled down to judgment. The program masquerades as a singing competition that features three “experts” who have been tasked with cutting down the hundreds of thousands of applicants to a select few while providing feedback on individual performances. In many ways, Simon Cowell, the curmudgeon among the three judges in the earlier seasons of the show, embodied the modern vision of critique as judgment. His comments have included: “That’s atrocious; that’s simply not good enough,” and “If your lifeguard duties were as good as your singing, a lot of people would be drowning.” Judgmental critique derives its critical ammunition from the veracity of the criterion (or critical standard). Continuing with the American Idol example, Cowell held the contestants up to a set of normative criteria for what counts as great singing. It was the criterion that allowed him to render judgment (“That was atrocious”). Mainstream criminologists engage in a similar critical enterprise. For instance, many criminologists employ criteria such as recidivism rates as the standard against which to assess programmatic and legislative success or failure. Such judgmental criteria can then be employed to evaluate policing, correctional, and court practices. However, as you learned in Chapter 4, recidivism rates (the criteria) are not as robust and self-evident as once believed. Policing practices and a host of administrative conditions, including how long following their release offenders are tracked, are apt to artificially increase or reduce the criteria—the very foundations of much criminological judgment. Critique typically implies that we are judging some thing against a normative standard held out as the epitome or the ultimate. Thus, when we claimed that Nicki Minaj does not sing particularly well, how did we render this assessment? We arrived at this judgment using Andrea Bocelli as our normative frame. Clearly, we must conclude—even if we prefer pop music to the operatic version—that the latter can sing better than the former. This process and strategy fixes the critic as an expert judge who, because of a certain expertise (in music, in crime, etc.), is “deemed capable of authoritatively judging the true from the false, innocent from guilty, good from bad, progressive from regressive, and so on” (Pavlich 2000, 74). Critique, as it is currently practised in criminology and elsewhere, is typically judgmental and reactive. Forms of critique that seek to challenge the criminal justice status quo are not always appreciated. However, Pavlich (2000) claims that there was a time when critical genres in criminology had considerable influence among politicians and policymakers, especially after the publication and subsequent dissemination of Taylor, Walton, and Young’s (1973) highly touted The New Criminology. Disen- chanted with administrative brands of social science, administrators for a time looked to more radical brands of criminology for inspiration. In the spirit of 1960s radicalism, insight derived from critical questioning of the status quo was evident in governmental discourse and practice. Pleas to abolish prisons, insights into the crime-producing tendencies of the modern criminal justice process, and prison- ers’ rights discourses were prominent (van Swaaningen 1997). But the heyday of radical criminology was quite brief. Today, administrative and liberal strains figure most prominently at criminological conferences and in scholarly journals. The reason why “critical voices beyond the language of pragmatic technocracy are decidedly muted,” especially when compared to critical debates from less than three decades ago, is that critics have “failed to address that which distinguishes their radical precepts from proponents of administrative criminology: critique” (Pavlich 1999, 70). In recent years, drawing on the insights of philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben (among others), critical criminologists have called for an approach that goes beyond judgment. Instead of employing one or another yardstick by which to judge the success or failure of criminal justice policies, these scholars employ an art of critique that involves destabilizing seemingly well-anchored relations in an effort to form new patterns of being that do not pander to established social logics or rely on reactive judgments (Hogeveen and Woolford 2006). A nonjudgmental critical criminology would not render judgments about existing policies, programs, institutions, or societal structures. Rather, it would suggest “other” (just) ways of being in the world. “It would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invert them sometimes—all the better” (Foucault 1997). It should be noted that there are other approaches to destabilizing critique that are not represented in this chapter. Our focus is primarily on the Continental European social theoretical tradition and its influence in Canada. Other approaches, such as feminist (see Chapter 6), critical race, and Indigenous are also prominent and share a concern for directing critique towards societal patterns of domination. Critical criminological critique attempts to move beyond complicity in government intrusion into the lives of the least powerful. It does not seek ways to better manage the poor and dangerous classes. Rather, it promises justice to those who are marginalized and discriminated against. Not justice that seeks to punish, however; instead, it promises justice through emancipation. How willing are you to address suffering in your social world? As we hope you will learn from the rest of this chapter, following the notion of criticism set out in this section, the critical criminologist is not “critical” because he or she is bad-tempered or unconstructive; rather, the negativity of criticism is intended to open your mind to new ways of thinking about and being in the world. Critical Criminology in English Canada Critical criminology in Canada was invigorated in 1973 with the publication of The New Criminology by British criminologists Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young. In this wide-ranging critique of conventional criminology, Taylor, Walton, and Young identified starting points for a “new” criminology and criticized conventional criminology for supporting the political and economic status quo, for ignoring the structural causes of crime, and for focusing instead on biological and psychological factors. Taylor, Walton, and Young (1973, 270) recommended in contrast a “fully social” criminology that 1.... understands crime within its wider socio-cultural context. Crime is not merely an event that occurs between individuals; it takes place within broader social-structural and cultural conditions. Along these lines, a ghetto drug dealer is not just an individual seeking easy money—he may also be the product of a deindustrialized inner city that has been bled of all opportunities other than McJobs because capital investment has fled to the suburbs. He may also be immersed in patriarchal cultural conditions that associate masculinity with money, power, and violence, allowing him to obtain respect and credibility through drug dealing. These are just some of the structures that may influence his decision making. 2.... examines the structural and political-economic dimensions that produce criminal behaviour. Crime is not the result of “bad,” abnormal, or poorly socialized people; rather, it stems from structural conditions that produce unequal opportunities, stigmatized populations, real and relative deprivation, and other concepts that criminologists often credit as motivations for crime. For example, stigma and labelling occur not only at the micro-level when authorities and significant others impose labels on offenders and contribute to their secondary deviance (see Chapter 13), but also as the result of structural conditions that make certain individuals more likely to choose to commit crime, more likely to be caught, more likely to be punished, and therefore more likely to be labelled. This is all part of what Taylor, Walton, and Young (1973, 274) call a “political economy of social reaction.” 3.... probes the relationship between crime and the prevailing mode of production. Crime occurs within societies defined by specific systems of economic production. What is defined as a crime, and the way crime is punished, often depends on this mode of production. For example, vagrancy was criminalized in Britain during the 17th century in part because cheap labour was required for the factory system (Chambliss 1969) to feed the profits of the ruling class and sustain the capitalist mode of production. 4.... questions the role of power and conflict in shaping crime and criminal justice. Crime is not simply the reflection of a societal consensus; instead, it is defined by the powerful and punished in a manner that suits their interests. Therefore, criminologists must not simply accept state-defined crime as a given. They must also question its origins and the ways in which power is implicit in its formation and application. 5.... engages in a materialist analysis of the development of law in capitalist societies. Law is not simply a matter of societal consensus but is a function of the material conditions that define our society. Therefore, the law will contain contradictions because it is a reflection of dominant material interests. For example, gambling is illegal in a private club but not in a government-run casino. Other forms of gambling, such as betting on “futures” in the stock market, may be encouraged by the government. Similarly, certain drug habits, such as alcohol and coffee, are tolerated if not encouraged. In contrast, others, such as cocaine and heroin, may be viewed as unproductive and criminalized. 6.... takes a dialectical approach to analyzing how individuals both influence and are influenced by dominant social structures. The New Criminology was not simply a shift to an objectivist standpoint holding that human action is fully determined by social structures. Instead, human agency and social structures each affect the other, meaning that though human actions are influenced by their cultural and political-economic conditions, humans can also act to change these conditions. This approach inspired several Canadian criminologists to critically assess the liberal foundations of Canadian criminology. For example, R.S. Ratner (1984) argued that Canadian criminologists had not risen to the challenge of the New Criminology and were guilty of ignoring social structures, failing to challenge state definitions of crime, and naively believing that the institutional apparatus of the criminal justice system could easily be adjusted to address systemic inad- equacies and injustices. Critical criminology soon spread to other venues. In 1985, Thomas O’Reilly- Fleming edited The New Criminologies in Canada; this was followed in 1986 by a special edition of the journal Crime and Social Justice dedicated to Canadian critical criminology (edited by R.S. Ratner) and a conference in Vancouver on the “Administration of Justice” organized by Brian MacLean and Dawn Currie. By the late 1980s, Canadian critical criminologists had banded together to form the Human Justice Collective, a loose network of scholars assembled around their concerns about the narrow focus of mainstream criminology. These schol- ars desired a criminology that was more sensitive to the criminogenic impacts of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and other social structures (Dekeseredy and MacLean 1993). Out of the Human Justice Collective was born Journal of Human Justice. In the first issue of this journal, R.S. Ratner (1989, 6) defined critical criminology as follows: Although varied conceptions abound, we are all united around those premises that underscore the central role of power and conflict in shaping “criminal” outcomes, the range of vested interests that influence “crime,” the need for a dialectical analysis of crime and social control that integrates materialist and idealist factors, the crucial importance of the state and the equally important need to debunk state definitions of crime, and the necessity of devising a praxis that is not conditional on the imminent collapse of capitalist society. This unity, however, was to be short-lived: funding challenges, personality conflicts, and scholarly differences made it difficult to sustain the Human Justice Collective and its journal. Initially, it had been intended that Journal of Human Justice would fund itself through members of the collective adopting it as required reading in their courses. However, classroom use diminished, which placed the journal in a difficult financial position. In addition, personality conflicts had erupted within the collective, leading to disputes among members. In 1995, under these conditions, one of the editors, Brian MacLean, transported the journal to the Division of Critical Criminology at the American Society of Criminology. This move allowed for the journal’s continued survival but also marked the end of its Canadian identity. The growing eclecticism of critical criminology has produced a group of scholars who are difficult to unify under a single label. Initially, a key rift devel- oped between two groups defined as “left realists” and “left idealists” (Young 1979). Left idealists were said to begin their inquiry into crime from abstract premises (e.g., Marxist theory) rather than empirical work. For this reason, they were criticized by realists for minimizing the harm that crime causes to the work- ing class and for romanticizing criminals as a potentially revolutionary force. In contrast, left realists worked through local surveys of crime and victimization to try to move beyond partial criminological understandings, which typically focused only on one aspect of crime: the offender, the state, the public, or the victim. Their objective was to take the fear of crime among the working classes seriously and to answer and oppose the work of “right realists,” who under the Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney governments had spread the popularity of punitive sanctions and administrative approaches. However, left realism did not achieve a sustained following among critical criminologists. Some viewed the reform-based agenda of left realism as compromising the critical thrust of critical criminology by participating in and legitimating the discourses of conventional criminal justice (Pavlich 1999). The diversity of critical criminology in Canada would later expand with the popularity of neo-Marxist and post-structuralist theories imported from Continental Europe. The perspectives discussed in the rest of this chapter all derive from these origins and represent a shift in critical criminological theorizing away from distinctly political-economic perspectives. Although the premise remains that state-defined law must be challenged rather than replicated through criminological study, a great diversity of methodology and conceptualization now defines the Canadian critical criminological scene, which has also been significantly shaped by the work of several of the feminist scholars discussed in Chapter 6. Governmentality and Power: Foucault and Criminology Michel Foucault did not regard himself as a significant contributor to the discipline of criminology. On the rare occasion when he did comment on criminology, he complained that its “garrulous discourse” and “endless repetitions” only served to relieve judges, police officers, and magistrates of their guilt for delivering pain and suffering on the guilty (Foucault 1980, 47). Despite Foucault’s disdain for the discipline, many scholars have applied his work towards understanding crime and its control. His penological treatise on the “birth of the prison”—Discipline and Punish—continues to inspire fresh criminological theorizing. More recently, scholars have used his work on governmentality. Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, in 1926, and died in 1984 of complica- tions from HIV/AIDS. A philosopher and historian who wrote about the history of sexuality, prisons, governance, psychiatry, and knowledge systems, he is heralded for his unique work on power. Power, for Foucault, is evident only when it is exercised. He did not see it as something that states or individuals can hold, accumulate, possess, or monopolize. In other words, can you show us what power looks like? Some claim often that money or wealth is power. Foucault would argue otherwise. For Foucault, money becomes power only when it is used or otherwise put into effect. A further characteristic of the Foucauldian notion of power is that it is not solely negative or repressive. He embraces a more positive theory of power: not in terms of good or beneficial, but rather as creative. He argues that “we must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censures,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of object and rituals of truth” (1979, 194). Thus, rather than viewing power in a manner that exaggerates its negative elements, Foucault urged scholars to focus on what is created when power is exercised. What is the outcome when power is employed? A third characteristic of the Foucauldian understanding of power is the emphasis he placed on micro-powers that are disseminated throughout the social world. Almost everywhere we turn, everywhere we go, power operates on our bodies and souls. It seems that power is perpetually influencing our behaviour, often without our awareness. Consider your daily trip to university or college. Assuming that you are driving a vehicle of some sort, think about all the ways your behaviour is controlled while you drive. Traffic lights, signs, painted lines, photo radar, and the presence or absence of police all affect how we go about our drive. Foucault was convinced that to intimately understand the operation of power, we must shift our focus from the state to the dispersed spaces in which power operates. This is the essence of what Foucault called discipline. Discipline operates at the smallest level of detail and attends to the intricacies of human behaviour through the surveillance and observation of individual functioning so as to increase the efficiency and usefulness of human actions. When thinking about discipline, it is the everyday and the mundane that are important. Fully understanding power involves examining it at its main point of application: the body. Remember back to when you were learning how to write using a pencil. Recall the teacher standing over you correcting your finger placement. S/he would watch you (surveillance) and correct your mistakes to make certain you used the implement in the most efficient manner possible (positive power). To maximize the utility of our bodies and to allow hierarchal control and correction, this meticulous exercise of power is infinitely multiplied throughout the social world. As such, discipline requires that individuals be organized in space and time. Consider the timetable from public school. It provided a general framework for activity and organized our days. The timetable structured not only our use of time but also the space we were to occupy at certain points in the day. The bell organized our behaviour. What happened when the bell sounded? Being conditioned to move according to the sounding of the bell, students would get up to leave while the teacher attempted to quell the mass exodus. Thus time, space, and signals coexisted to discipline not only our minds but also our bodies (Minaker and Hogeveen 2009). Foucault’s analysis of discipline was criticized (a) for abandoning the state in its analysis and (b) for tending (supposedly) to characterize human subjects as “docile” (inactive) bodies rather than active agents (Garland 1997). Foucault’s later work on governmentality addressed many of these concerns (see Box 12.1). For Foucault (1982), governmentality “must be allowed the very broad meaning which it had in the 16th century. Government did not refer only to political structures or the management of states; rather it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or states might be directed; the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick” (221). Therefore, the study of governmentality should cast its gaze widely and address such broad questions as “how to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others, by whom the people will accept to be governed, and how to become the best possible governor” (Foucault 1991, 45). Government(ality) entails “any attempt to shape with some degree of deliberation aspects of our behaviour according to particular sets of norms and for a variety of ends” (Dean 1999, 10). Critical scholars have used Foucault’s writings on governmentality to understand a wide range of state and nonstate domains of governance. They have raised important insights about legal change and the centrality of law in the regulation of populations. They have also argued that critical criminology has been limited “by its emphasis on the state, and state-centred constructions of criminality, and by its failure to come to terms with how social injustices are reproduced through private institutions and modes of expertise that operate on the margins of the state and in the shadow of the law” (Lippert and Williams 2006). For example, Lippert and Williams have looked to the margins of legal governance to explore how the rise of private security affects our social world. These authors maintain that critical scholarship should focus “less on how the machinery of the state is brought to bear on the production and control of individual subjects and offenders, and more on the myriad technologies of governance and their operation across diverse social fields” such as immigration and the policing of financial disorder (706). Governmentality, then, draws scholarly attention to mechanisms outside the traditional state governmental machinery that structure and contour human behaviour. Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of private security firms that police a variety of venues, including the local mall, construction sites, and, as the upsurge in alarm companies continues, private dwellings. By attending to the growth of private security, “the governmentality literature presents a unique opportunity to expand the theoretical range and conceptual reach of critical criminology, and to enhance its capacity to reveal and interrogate forms of injustice and domination crafted on the margins of the state” (714–15). Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction Is Justice Deconstruction, if such a thing exists, should open up. For Agamben and most others, sovereignty refers to a singular entity: to a head of state or some similar figure who can decide on the state of exception. Jacques Derrida (2005), in one of his last writings before his death in 2004, argued for a more open and wide-ranging definition. In keeping with the deconstructive ethic within which he worked throughout his life, Derrida attempted to open the concept of sovereignty to other ways of thinking and relating. For him, sovereignty was intrinsic to each and all of us, insofar as the sovereign function is “anchored in a certain ability to do something” (Balke 2005). Derrida was intent on undoing language and, in the process, peering behind discourse to reveal how it does not have a determinable meaning. He wanted to show that all language exceeds the boundaries of the taken for granted (e.g., sovereignty). Deconstruction attempts to reveal what is really going on in and through language. According to Derrida, we always say more than the surface of our language reveals. But what is deconstruction? Derrida often defined it in negative terms by referring to what it is not rather than what it is. For example, he argued, “deconstruction is not a method or some tool that you apply to something from the outside” (Derrida, in Caputo 1997, 9). But what is it? We might say that deconstruction has to do with opening up given linguistic arrangements to the mostly silent background suppositions that give words and phrases their meaning. Given Derrida’s reticence, perhaps showing deconstruction at work would aid us here. As an example, let us consider the word “promise.” What does this mean to you? When you promise your mother you will be home tonight for dinner, what are you doing? On the face of things, you are giving her an assurance that you will sit down with her to eat this evening. Unless you are truly irresponsible, there is no reason to doubt the truth of your assurance. Humans typically relate to presence, to what is uttered. Nevertheless, what is unspoken in language (the perversion of the promise) is as important to determining meaning as what we hear from another. What would happen if you did not show up? Your mother would be upset that you broke your promise, and others would certainly feel let down by your absence. Such perversions of the promise are as fundamental to its meaning as carrying through with the promised event. For a promise to be such, the statement must have the potential of falling through. If it does not, if what is assured is already guaranteed, there is no promise, only perfect conjugation of the assertion (“I will be home for supper”) and the event. Again using the above example, when you promise your mum you will come to dinner while sitting at the table with fork and knife in hand, you have not promised anything. If we had only to consider the presence of speech, we could take everyone at their word and there would be no need for contracts, warranties, or oaths. Typically, however, when we hear language we do not attempt to read its hidden meaning; instead, we relate to what is laid out before us. However, and this is the important part, when speaking and writing we say much more than what is present on the page or in conversation. Deconstruction, then, attends closely to the unspoken elements that enable the central, or privileged, structure of a given meaning formation (Pavlich, 2007). Underlying all language is a trace: the silent or absent element of language that provides words with an essential part of their meaning. The trace can be likened to a footprint or a comet. That is, when we observe a comet in the sky we are struck by the presence of the comet and/or tail. However, what is absent here is the comet’s nucleus and essence, which is composed of rock and ice. When we observe a comet we are not privy to its essence—the nucleus remains hidden. The same can be said of language. No element, no idiom, can function as a sign without at the same moment referring to another that is simply not present but that gives meaning to it (Derrida 1981). While we are at liberty to separate out presence and trace for the purposes of reducing the promise to its constituents, we (obviously) do not typically perform this operation. Opening language up to its silent constituents (the trace) is at deconstruction’s core. However, before we pass such analysis off as banal wordplay of little utility to real social problems, let us consider the implications of “community” under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Community-based sanctioning and interventions occupy pride of place in the act. The preamble, for example, states: WHEREAS members of society share a responsibility to address the devel- opmental challenges and the needs of young persons and to guide them into adulthood; WHEREAS communities, families, parents and others concerned with the development of young persons should, through multi-disciplinary approaches, take reasonable steps to prevent youth crime by addressing its underlying causes, to respond to the needs of young persons, and to provide guidance and support to those at risk of committing crimes. (YCJA, preamble) Without the insights of deconstruction, we are apt to quickly read over the term community and be off to the next of the act’s many sections. Calls for community responsibility for youth crime may be laudable. However, given that the very essence of community is exclusionary, perhaps such enthusiasm should be tempered. That is, we cannot have a community—a school, a neighbourhood, a class, a town, or what- ever other configuration—without exclusion. Those who belong define themselves in opposition to the excluded. If everyone were included under this or that community rubric, the term community would cease to hold meaning. “Community” designates divisions between and among people. Under the YCJA it is the young offenders— their deviance and criminality—who provide impetus for the creation of community in the first instance. For example, Youth Justice Committees, which are made up of community members who hear and adjudicate relatively minor crimes committed by youths, find their meaning and definition in the wrongdoings of young people. A crime committed by a young offender brings this community together. Because of his or her contravention, the young person becomes not only the rationale for the formation of community but also, by virtue of the offence, its antithesis. Pavlich (2005) maintains that this is the very essence of community: “communities are iden- tified—implicitly or explicitly—by exclusion.” Before declaring this a meaningless play of words, let us remember the repulsive consequences that may accrue when exuberance for and devotion to community has spilled over its limits: ethnic wars of annihilation have been waged, genocide has been carried out, and prisons have become overcrowded with the residues of such intolerance (Hogeveen 2006). Communities may derive their raison d’être in relation to a particularly devi- ant and troubling other. A string of car thefts or a proliferation of graffiti in a geographical space may inspire previously disorganized citizens to band together against this provocation. Writes Hogeveen (2005): Recent efforts to rid (affluent) neighbourhoods of prostitutes, the use of CCTV on busy city streets, broken windows policing, and gated neigh- bourhoods are poignant examples of community inspired attempts to exclude the ‘other’ while shoring up a privileged lifestyle. This regulation of the ‘other’ may contribute to and assist in shoring up the creation of community, but it also holds the insidious possibility of contributing to exclusionary practices which limit, rather than encourage, wider and more inclusive patterns of harmony. (295; see also Pavlich, 2005) Through the examples of promises and community, we can see that deconstructive critique involves “opening up” things to examine what lies behind and beyond presence. However, there is one word that cannot be deconstructed: justice. In common parlance, we use the term justice in a variety of ways: we have a justice system; there are Justices of the Peace; Canada boasts a federal Department of Justice; “justice” is used in law and legislation to imply the impartiality of the system (e.g., the Youth Criminal Justice Act); and there is even a village in Manitoba called Justice (northwest of Brandon). But by far the most commonplace understanding of justice (see Box 12.3) is vengeance. Here, justice refers to an ethic of punishment that delivers obvious signs of unpleasantness to offenders. We live in an era during which war, prison overcrowding, and vigilantism are justified in the name of justice. For example, the US government constructed Osama bin Laden as a moral monster and a lunatic for crimes perpetrated on the United States. All the while, the civilian and military death toll from the American campaign for “justice” in Iraq continued to mount. The costs in dollars and human life are spiralling out of control, while domestic atrocities and oppressions are glossed over by a nation seeking justice. If these are all instances of “justice,” how can Derrida say it does not exist? It is because Derrida seeks a different kind of justice, one that goes beyond “right, a justice finally removed from the fatality of vengeance” (1994, 21). One of Derrida’s most faithful followers, John Caputo (1997), puts the situation this way: “Justice is not a present entity or order, not an existing reality or regime; nor is it even an ideal eidos towards which we earthlings down below heave and sigh while contemplat- ing its heavenly form. Justice is the absolutely unforeseeable prospect (a paralyzing paradox) in virtue in which the things that get deconstructed are deconstructed” (131). For Derrida, then, “justice appears as a promise, beyond law, and is itself incalculable, infinite and undeconstructable” (Pavlich 2007, 989). It is not a thing or a person that we can hold up as exemplary, nor is it a criterion for future genera- tions. To maintain that Canada is a just nation or that we ourselves are just would be to conclude that our work is done. It would be the height of injustice to think that justice exists here in tolerant Canada in the midst of the unimaginable suffer- ing of Indigenous people, the tragic abuse of female partners, and the expanding extremes of poverty and wealth... and we could go on (Caputo 1997). But, you may conclude, the law is just... right? On the contrary, there are situations in which the application of law was legal but unjust (e.g., Arar, Menezes). This is not to say that law is unnecessary or that it is wrong in its conception. Only that law can be unjust in its application and in its fundamental opposition to justice. Criticisms of Critical Criminology Given the diversity of critical criminological theorization, criticisms tend to be more specific to particular critical criminological approaches, rather than general and applicable to all forms of critical criminology. That said, there are a few complaints that are often heard with respect to critical criminology. The first, and the one possibly most glaringly felt by readers of this chapter, has to do with the sometimes obscure and abstract nature of critical criminological theorizing. Does critical criminology fetishize theory and disguise meaning behind difficult language? Critical criminologists would argue that such terminology is necessary to push criminological thought in new and transgressive directions, beyond the mundane, taken-for-granted meanings of regular language. A second criticism follows from the first and is perhaps the more serious one for critical criminologists: What are the practical implications of critical criminology? If critical criminology is to be more than ivory tower navel-gazing, it must have implications for the real world of crime, crime control, and social justice. And some find it difficult to discern a call to action in the theoretical language of contemporary critical criminology. Yet all of the critical criminologists with whom we are familiar aspire towards such real-world change. Their dedication is not to theory for the sake of theory, but rather to using theory to think about the worlds of crime and victimization in new, more just terms.