NCJ Number
179912
Journal
Current Issues in Criminal Justice Volume: 8 Issue: 1 Dated: July 1996 Pages: 26-38
Date Published
1996
Length
13 pages
Annotation
This analysis of shifts in government frameworks for discussing and addressing issues argues that this shift from an emphasis on the social to an emphasis on individuals, families, and communities is also reflected in major shifts in core areas of criminological theory and practice.
Abstract
Political frameworks from the 1980's to the 1990's were broadly ordered under an overarching discourse of the social and thus focused on social problems, social injustices, and social intervention. In contrast, post-social analyses of the last two decades focus on people as autonomous individuals who are responsible for their actions and fates. Three topics that exemplify the transformation of discourse about the social are: (1) the place of the community and the local, (2) the centering of individual responsibility and empowerment and its implications for governing offenders, and (3) the enhanced value given to crime victims. Advantages of thinking of the future of criminology in these post-social terms are its encouragement of more flexible and agnostic thinking related to the political contingencies involved and the way it encourages scholars and others to consider the future of criminology as political and thus as conditionally open. Footnotes and 44 references