Extending explanations of crime

By the 1980s, theoretical work had more widely acknowledged that the social world was highly fragmented, devoting considerable effort to finding new conceptual frameworks and tools for challenging and deconstructing older analytical frameworks. In the period between the 1970s and 1990s explanations of crime became increasingly sensitive to the differences in patterns of offending, victimisation, and criminalisation on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality in particular. In general terms this could be understood as being a turn towards post-modernism, which adopted a sceptical attitude towards modernist assumptions about human subjectivity as well as the possibilities of discovering an objective "truth". While modernist theory attempted to explain the authentic experiences of the subject (or "individual"), post-modernism understood the subject as being a nonessential or decentred, the product of multiple and contradictory power and discursive forces that impinge upon the body and shape its conduct (Sarup 1989). Post-modernism provides a framework for deconstructing privileged or fixed reference points as is evident in modernist explanations of crime (Henry & Milovanovic 1996: 26). Within criminology this de-constructive work has been forged by critical criminological traditions which attempt to explain crime and its control in terms of "human struggles for power in history and the ritual construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of normative boundaries" (Pfohl2009: 404). The chapter begins by considering these explanations with a focus on the inter-relations between class, race, and gender. Critical explanations of crime straddle frameworks that understand the "individual" as being an ideological construct subjected to the oppressive relations of class, race and gender, and post-modern frameworks that explain this in terms of how individuals are constructed through multiple networks of discourse and power that are, in turn connected to historically specific systems of knowledge.