Ghost Criminology and specters of abolition

Abstract

Criminology needs to reckon with its ghosts; to wager with the harrowing traces that lurk in its textbooks, its archives and its institutional sites of inquiry. The racist, colonial foundations of the criminological enterprise, combined with the deathly logics of the carceral state, compels critics from within and outside the discipline to argue for criminology’s demise. And, perhaps, rightly so. ‘In keeping with antiblackness’, Brown (p. 92) writes, criminology is ‘an archive of nonbeing’. What, then, does a ghost criminology have to offer? In this review, I read Ghost Criminology for its capacity to advance an abolitionist current in, around and against the discipline. The spectre of abolition is conjured by an analytic thread and ethical commitment that runs through the collection, that insists on treating death and destruction not as aberrations in the administration of law and ‘justice’, but central to its functioning. Proceeding from this standpoint, Ghost Criminology develops new theoretical orientations, conceptual tools and methods to undermine the pervasiveness of carceral logics in the discipline. I also attend to some other important avenues for future spectral inquiry, namely queer hauntologies and ghostly sound/prisonscapes. By drawing together pockets of the discipline that are frequently ‘dismissed as unscientific or irrational’ (p. 14), the editors of Ghost Criminology engage questions about how violence lives on in places long after it is assumed to have concluded. They collate a range of provocative works that attend to repressed knowledges, transgressive practices and the lingering effects of past atrocity that negate ‘simple linear progressions’ (Young, p. 249) of time or otherwise ‘confuse and stir’ (p. 15) spatial and temporal boundaries. Throughout the collection, scholars attend to the myriad ways in which State power ‘disowns its own violence’ (p. 17), including through ‘perpetual acts of destruction, denial and obfuscation’ (Biber, p. 176). As in other disciplines, ghostly matters in criminology are therefore not simply theoretical or aesthetic, but profoundly political, demanding responsibility and accountability to the dead. Over its first two parts, Ghost Criminology builds a critique of the foundational violence of the US police. Contributions by Brown, Linnemann and Turner and McClanahan cumulatively advance the argument that, despite the sensationalised media coverage and the insistence of police reformers, police killings are not exceptions to the rule, but ‘single points in uninterrupted lines of police violence and terror’ (McClanahan, p. 216). Buoyed by the twin structures of capital and white supremacy, McClanahan shows how the police are a killing power that are ‘always about the blood and breath of both its practitioners and its subjects’ (p. 220). From the cops’ ‘blue brotherhood’ to the haunting chants of ‘I can’t breathe’, the police have respiratory anxieties with 1156698 CMC0010.1177/17416590231156698Crime Media CultureReview Symposium book-review2023