Alternative Criminologies

This book celebrates a kaleidoscopic process of permanent critique and a diversity of social and scientific knowledges. Bringing together 39 leading experts, this collection unites fresh and insightful theoretical positions with innovative empirical research and marks an important juncture for criminologies and their imagined futures.

This book celebrates a kaleidoscopic process of permanent critique and a diversity of social and scientific knowledges. It examines complex and global crime issues in light of the many alternative scientific, artistic, empathetic, campaigning and otherwise imaginative criminologies that attempt to understand and/or fundamentally change why crime and justice take the forms they do. From cutting edge topics such as crimes against humanity, the criminology of mobility, terrorism, cybercrime, corporate crime and green criminology; to gendered perspectives on violence against women, sexualities and feminist and queer criminologies; to key issues in penology such as mass incarceration, the death penalty, desistance from crime, risk and the political economy of punishment; Alternative Criminologies demonstrates the breadth, the variety and the vibrancy of contemporary perspectives on crime, criminalization and punishment. Bringing together 39 leading experts from around the world, this international collection unites fresh and insightful theoretical positions with innovative empirical research and marks an important juncture for criminologies and their imagined futures. This second edition builds on the strengths of the original volume through careful revision and expansion. Several chapters include refined terminology and conceptual clarifications, updated literature and references, new empirical material, and revised case studies and examples. Contributors also reflect on significant global and regional developments shaping crime and justice in the years following the publication of the first edition, with the volume further extended by two new chapters: one on Southern and Decolonial criminologies, and another examining criminology and criminal justice in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Alternative Criminologies remains essential reading for students of criminology and criminal justice.