PEACEMAKING CRIMINOLOGY
Radical individual, structural and cultural changes constitute the solution to the crime problem (Richard Quinney, Hal Pepinsky and Casey Groves.
Peacemaking criminologists see crime as only one of many different types of violence, scuh as war, racism and sexism that contribute to human suffering.
It is informed by anarchism, humanism, Christian socialism, liberation theology, Eastern meditative thought, penal abolitionism, feminism and Marxism. This diversity of roots is the perspective’s strengths and weakness. They still need to form a coherent and uniform philosophy.
The current criminal justice system is a failure because it is rooted in the same problem it wants to eliminate –violence.
They call for a non violent criminology, one that can reject repressive measures and which can embrace humane, progressive, community-based strategies, such as mediation, reconciliation, alternative dispute resolution and other non penal means of making our society safer (make peace on crime). For example, restitution programs are considerably less violent than prisons and all the other War on Crime solutions.
Every move toward peace must start with an individual working to change herself and then moving out to affect the community at large. This is where peacemaking criminologists are at work.
A major result of peacemaking criminology is that it alerts politicians, the media and criminal justice actors that there are alternatives to ceaseless wars on crime.
Deep skepticism about knowledge claims. Truth is a form of domination because it represents a way of looking at things that is imposed by those with more power. Reality is not easily knowledgeable, complex, hard to read and contradictory.
So, any truth claims are a form of tyranny and reject any claims by anyone who purports to know what is right. Thus, our search for knowledge must come from an understanding that anything is related to everything else. We also need to be careful that we are not imposing our values (truth) on other people. While, for example, progressives have always tried to speak for oppressed peoples, postmodernists warn about trying to speak for these people, rather they speak for themselves.
They rarely offer guidance on policy. They have argued against any broad, general theory on anything, at best suggesting that local people everywhere need to develop their own definitions of their experiences to work out their own methods of resistance to oppression.
Postmodern criminologists are concerned with the production of meaning in the area of crime. They argue that such meaning is co-produced by those who engage in crime, those who try to control it and those who study it. They define crime as the power to create pain or harm in any context, so that law is not just a definer of crime, it is also the maker of crime. This is because it conceals some people’s harms by reflecting power relations, and it manifests crime through its own exercise of power over others.