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Cited by 165Criminal Justice and Corrections AnalysisCriminal Justice and PenologyTorture, Ethics, and Law

New abolition, criminology and a critical carceral studies

Brown, Michelle, Schept, Judah·2017·Punishment & Society
DOI 10.1177/1462474516666281
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Abstract

Criminology has been slow to open up a conversation about decarceration and abolition in comparison with other disciplines, including history, geography, and gender, race, and critical ethnic studies. Scholars from these areas and actors on the ground—close up to confinement—have done most of the organizing against mass incarceration and theorizing of alternative possibilities. Why those experiences—and the theoretical traditions that inform their work—have been less recognized and developed in criminology is of pivotal concern as more criminologists move forward with the political project of decarceration. The extent to which criminology can sustain an alternative or abolitionist politics remains an open question. Amid growing conversations about decarceration and shifting rhetorics on punishment, we address some of the obstacles that limit criminology as a site from which to engage the abolitionist project, asking where criminologists might turn for interventionist models that move away from imprisonment and the violence of the carceral state. In this article, we advocate for and discuss the contours of critical carceral studies, a growing interdisciplinary movement for engaged scholarly and activist production against the carceral state. We discuss the imperatives for criminological engagement with critical carceral studies and sketch some of the terrain on which the discipline can contribute to the project, including important work to counter criminological discourses and knowledge production that reify and reproduce carceral logics and practices.

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  • The ways that political scientists-in particular, settler political scientists-publish and speak to academic and public audiences, teach and mentor new scholars, and advise or inform stakeholders about carceral power can reproduce or counter its logics and legitimacy.

    “The ways that political scientists-in particular, settler political scientists-publish and speak to academic and public audiences, teach and mentor new scholars, and advise or inform stakeholders about carceral power can reproduce or counter its logics and legitimacy (Brown and Schept, 2017;Schept, 2015).”

    From Decolonizing Research on the Carceral in Canadian Political Science (2023) · cites this paper as Brown and Schept, 2017

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Authors
Brown, M., & Schept, J.
Affiliations
  • University of Tennessee at Knoxville (US)
  • Eastern Kentucky University (US)
Corresponding author
Brown, Michelle
ORCID
Brown, Michelle
Venue
Punishment & Society
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2016-09-07
Volume
19
Issue
4
Pages
440-462
ISSN
  • 1462-4745 (ISSN-L)
  • 1741-3095
DOI
10.1177/1462474516666281
OpenAlex
W2513877875
Cited by
165
References
124
Citations by year
2026: 8 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 26 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 47 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 13 · 2017: 4
FWCI
25.73
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)
Locations
Punishment & Society (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
  • Social Sciences › Law › Criminal Justice and Penology
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Torture, Ethics, and Law
Keywords
decarceration, abolition, mass incarceration, carceral state, criminology, punishment

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