Critical Criminology最新文献

Can gangsters be good, or can good people use gangster methods? In Indonesia, as in many other countries, the scale between these two is fluid. This article concerns the life history of Farry Malonda, who balanced these two extremes throughout his career. Farry's past activities as a fulltime preman -a tough guy, a criminal, not adverse to using violence- landed him a reputation that helped him to develop legitimate business activities and social involvement. His activities combine trade, the championing of indigenous rights, nationalism and a public drive for social justice, which has gained him a broad societal position. Whether he acts as a 'good person' is important to Farry, and he wants it to be clear that he is not a gangster. Words matter, and this article demonstrates that ambiguous conceptualizations of criminals-cum-security providers may not easily be captured in such a single universal concept.

This article examines how individuals navigate life in criminalized territories. Drawing on ethnographic research in Medellin, Colombia's second-largest city, it explores the trajectories of three young men whose lives are deeply intertwined with the criminal elements controlling their neighborhood. Focusing on their 'life stories'-the significant events and experiences influencing their paths-and their relationships with illegal actors, this anthropological work provides a nuanced understanding of how criminal organizations wield power and maintain governance. Complementing the prevailing approaches to what is generally referred to as 'criminal governance', which is often based on quantitative and second-hand data, it shows that this phenomenon is driven not only by rational and predatory dynamics, but also by intimacy and reciprocity. Building on these insights, it proposes the concept of criminal hegemony to understand, from a ground-up perspective, how criminal governance is continuously (re)shaped and negotiated.

This article centers on the process of (gang) desistance of Jermaine, a man with a substantial criminal record who has been a member of the Dutch Crips gang for over a decade. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research, Jermaine's process of desistance is outlined. This life story illustrates how much desistance should be understood as a struggle, accompanied by periods of relapsing into old patterns of (criminal) behavior. In addition to these more practical challenges in terms of act-desistance (Nugent and Schinkel, 2016), Jermaine's story showcases the importance of identity in the process of desistance. Above all, Jermaine's story indicates that for some, desistance means that the old criminal or gang identity does not need to be cast aside, but that it becomes part of the new identity of the desister.

Failure is taboo. Yet as researchers we often encounter failure in the field and engage in confessional conversations with colleagues about 'what went wrong'. Failure is regarded as an unfortunate and unproductive part of research. Better luck next time. In this paper I offer an autoethnographic narrative, tracing the attempt to find Ramón to conduct a longitudinal life history. A 20-something member of a group of street youth increasingly involved in gang and criminal activity when last we met, efforts to reconnect with Ramón more than a decade later were unsuccessful. I reflect on this apparent failure and how it provoked an unexpected appreciation of luck in ethnographic research.

This article reflects on my attempt to co-write the life history of Dino, a former member of two gangs in São Paulo, Brazil. While introducing constraints, co-writing prolonged my ethnographic fieldwork, and enhanced reflexivity by allowing access to the rewritings and translations that Dino elaborated, which led to a better understanding of what telling his story meant to him and what he thought was important about it, thereby revealing important elements of his gangster identity, but also of racial dynamics of gangs. These led to our fictionalizing his story, which-in contrast to much research on gangs in Latin America that is often characterized by a fundamental inequality between researchers and their interlocutors-allowed for a fairer and more transparent ethnographic "pact" between Dino and myself. This allowed us to both preserve our ethical senses of self and to maintain our relationship, and improved the life history that we crafted together.

El Salvador's U.S.-inspired war on gangs and mass incarceration is lauded by many globally as the needed punitive solution to end gang violence. However, critical gang studies challenge this view, emphasizing gangs' embeddedness within social, economic, and political systems that shape and sustain their violence. In this oral history, I expand critical gang studies' discussion on relationality by incorporating a gendered analysis of interdependence related to familial love. From 2022 to 2024, I documented the life history of Arquímedes, a prominent Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) leader in El Salvador, through the perspective of and interviews with his cousin, Alicia. I argue that women relatives of male gang members' complex practices of solidarity reveal how patriarchy shapes dynamics across scales, fueling gang and state violence as a practice of protection for family and nation. Failing to address patriarchy condemns security efforts to ongoing violence as part of state measures to attain peace.

This article explores the rarely told story of the mother of a drug dealer and gang leader. Through the relational biography of Virginia and her son, we will grasp the importance of family networks and their role in exercising violence, giving rise to contexts of what we call "lethal reciprocity" in the neighborhood. Virginia´s story reveals the sinuosity of the exercise of power in her community through her filial bond with her son. Amid chronic vulnerability, her maternal position in the neighborhood allows her to obtain certain advantages by knowing how to manage her son's capacity for violence, the basis for some of her son's decisions and actions. At the same time, her position as a mother of this figure simultaneously places her in a position of vulnerability, of permanent risk in front of her son´s enemies, and victimization of her persona and loved ones. This tension, a dialectic between privilege and vulnerability, runs through her whole life experience.

This article uses speculative fiction as a method for exploring the potentialities of queer abolition utopias. Abolition utopias aim to strike a balance of hope and need, offering innovative alternatives to prison while also addressing the current penal and social realities of marginalised groups. Queer abolition utopias, informed by the literature in queer criminology, centres the experiences of LGBTQ + people in these innovative alternatives. This article presents 3 pieces of short speculative fiction (1) Finding Harmony House, (2) Glasgow East Community Forum, (3) Our Long weekend at Leuchars Lodge. All 3 stories centre an LGBTQ + character(s) who are facing a particular challenge or challenges in their life, and how said alternatives might play a role in their moving forward.