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    Administrative Criminology

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    FranklinBarrientosRamirez
    1) Administrative criminology has emerged as the dominant paradigm in academic criminology due to increased federal funding for criminal justice programs since the 1970s. These programs have a more applied, vocational focus aimed at training law enforcement professionals. 2) This has led to the decline of more progressive, sociological approaches to criminology found in departments like Indiana University in the 1960s. Pioneering sociologists in criminology have passed away or left such departments. 3) Journals like Social Justice have remained important outlets for alternative, critical perspectives on issues like racist drug laws and mass incarceration that are largely ignored in mainstream, administrative criminology.

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    Administrative Criminology

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    FranklinBarrientosRamirez
    368 views5 pages
    1) Administrative criminology has emerged as the dominant paradigm in academic criminology due to increased federal funding for criminal justice programs since the 1970s. These programs have a more applied, vocational focus aimed at training law enforcement professionals. 2) This has led to the decline of more progressive, sociological approaches to criminology found in departments like Indiana University in the 1960s. Pioneering sociologists in criminology have passed away or left such departments. 3) Journals like Social Justice have remained important outlets for alternative, critical perspectives on issues like racist drug laws and mass incarceration that are largely ignored in mainstream, administrative criminology.

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    1) Administrative criminology has emerged as the dominant paradigm in academic criminology due to increased federal funding for criminal justice programs since the 1970s. These programs have a more applied, vocational focus aimed at training law enforcement professionals. 2) This has led to the decline of more progressive, sociological approaches to criminology found in departments like Indiana University in the 1960s. Pioneering sociologists in criminology have passed away or left such departments. 3) Journals like Social Justice have remained important outlets for alternative, critical perspectives on issues like racist drug laws and mass incarceration that are largely ignored in mainstream, administrative criminology.

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    368 views5 pages

    Administrative Criminology

    Uploaded by

    FranklinBarrientosRamirez
    1) Administrative criminology has emerged as the dominant paradigm in academic criminology due to increased federal funding for criminal justice programs since the 1970s. These programs have a more applied, vocational focus aimed at training law enforcement professionals. 2) This has led to the decline of more progressive, sociological approaches to criminology found in departments like Indiana University in the 1960s. Pioneering sociologists in criminology have passed away or left such departments. 3) Journals like Social Justice have remained important outlets for alternative, critical perspectives on issues like racist drug laws and mass incarceration that are largely ignored in mainstream, administrative criminology.

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    of 5

    Against Administrative Criminology

    Author(s): John F. Galliher


    Source: Social Justice, Vol. 26, No. 2 (76), 25th Anniversary Commemoration (Summer 1999),
    pp. 56-59
    Published by: Social Justice/Global Options
    Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29767136 .
    Accessed: 05/01/2015 21:01
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    Against Administrative Criminology


    John F. Galliher

    Progressive Voices
    OR APPROXIMATELY

    in an Academic Wilderness

    THREE DECADES

    SOCIAL JUSTICE HAS PERSISTED

    IN PUBLISHING

    papers dealing with fairness in law, crime, and other cultural practices. The
    vision of the journal has always been at odds with the dominant paradigms
    JL.
    found in academic criminology. Through most of this history, I have been a
    member of the editorial board and have always been proud of this association.
    The journal has not been alone in offering an alternative vision for the study
    of crime and law. Troy Duster (1995) delivered a passionate and devastating
    criticism of the racism inherent in thewar on drugs, including the significantly
    more severe punishments for offenses involving crack as opposed to powder
    cocaine. Such patterns resulted in a prison-building boom and an ever-increasing

    proportion of arrest and incarceration of black males. Some criminology, noted


    Travis Hirschi (1993), lacked a sense of intellectual history and showed a
    consequent movement toward shopworn and outmoded biological explanations of
    criminal behavior. This was often coupled with a theoretical vacuum and in?
    creased federal funding. Hirschi called this type of research "administrative
    criminology," consistent as itiswith the requirements of government bureaucrats.
    For these reasons, and others, Stanley Cohen (1988) concluded thathe was
    "against criminology." Cohen assumed thatthe scope of criminology consists of
    addressing only three questions: "Why are laws made? Why are they broken?
    What do we do or what should we do about this?" (Ibid.: 9). He laments the fact
    that there is a "political timidity" (Ibid. : 52) whereby the firstquestion regarding
    theorigins of laws is largely ignored in favor of behavioral research asking merely
    why people break existing laws. "If 80% of students on a campus smoke
    marihuana, thequestion should not be 'Why do theydo it?' but 'Why have those
    inpower allowed such a law to remain?'" (Ibid.: 47). Thus, "the concept of crime
    ismeaningful only in termsof certain acts being prohibited by the state... [and] drug
    taking, homosexuality, and abortion would be very different if theywere not

    'criminalized'" (Ibid.: 40). Mainline criminology thus "managed the astonishing


    feat of separating the study of crime from the contemplation of the state" (Ibid.:
    4). The question that remains is, how did American criminology get into these
    straits?
    John Galliher
    Columbia, MO

    is a professor in the Department of Sociology,


    65211; (e-mail: [email protected]).

    University

    of Missouri-Columbia,

    56 Social Justice Vol. 26, No. 2

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    Against Administrative Criminology

    57

    A Short History of the Saddest Science


    Cohen addresses this question by focusing on the institutional domains of
    criminology, which in turn:
    are shaped by their surroundings: how academic institutions are orga?
    nized, how disciplines are divided and subdivided, how disputes emerge,
    how research is funded, and how findings are published and used. In
    criminology an understanding of these institutionaldomains is especially
    important,forour knowledge is situated not just, or even primarily, in the
    pure academic world, but in the applied domain of the state's crime
    control apparatus (Ibid.: 67).
    In the following paragraphs we will see how patterns of funding, both in and
    outside of academe, have influenced the organization and division of academic
    criminology.
    Akers (1992) noted that until themid-1960s, all criminology was taught in
    sociology departments and all criminology textswere written by sociologists.
    Undoubtedly influenced by the urban riots of the 1960s, beginning in the early
    1970s, thefederal government began to sponsor criminal justice programs through
    the Law Enforcement Assistance Association LEAA (Cronin et al., 1981). At
    colleges and universities, large and small, such programs quickly emerged to take
    advantage of this newfound largess. Initially these programs had little research
    impact, but were designed to trainpolice officers already on thejob (Ibid.). Soon,
    applied training emerged for undergraduate majors interested in preparing for a
    law enforcement career. Farrell and Koch (1995) have illustrated this applied
    orientation, both in theirexperiences in teaching such programs and in a review
    of criminal justice textbooks.
    Akers (1992) traces the phenomenal growth of these programs. In themid
    1960s, therewere only 39 bachelor's programs in criminal justice, 14master's
    programs, and no doctoral programs. A decade later, therewere 376 bachelor's

    programs, 121master's programs, and six doctoral programs in criminal justice.


    By 1990, over 1,000 colleges or universities were offering degrees in criminal
    justice, with 95 of themofferinggraduate programs and 13 offering thedoctorate.
    It would be easy to exaggerate the impact of these patterns, because even
    before this spate of government funding, regressive and repressive forceswere at
    work in academic criminology, perhaps best reflected in deterrence research that
    often sought information on themost effectivemeans of controlling the urban
    underclass (DiChiara and Galliher, 1984). Although most of these criminal justice
    programs and faculty are clearly applied in emphasis, representing administrative
    criminology, some faculty and some programs have been more progressive.
    As thewar on drugs took on steam and as theprison-building program moved
    intohigh gear, thiswas not loston undergraduates at universities and colleges, who

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    58

    Galliher

    flocked to such programs in hopes of securing some type of law enforcement


    employment after graduation. Employment opportunities have abounded at the
    local, state, and federal levels in policing and corrections. The interests of
    undergraduates, and their tuitionmoney, were not lost on university administra?

    tors; increasingly, universities have developed such programs and allowed them
    to grow. Thus, these programs needed to recruit new faculty. To meet these
    staffing demands, some criminal justice departments developed graduate pro?
    grams. Research programs in these departments also have thrived with the
    assistance of theNational Institute of Justice.
    Some prominent sociology graduate trainingprograms shed the criminology
    specialty, finding themselves out of stepwith academic changes. When I arrived
    at Indiana University in 1962,many graduate students therehad been attracted to

    the study of criminology and deviant behavior due to the legacy of the lateEdwin
    Sutherland and a distinguished faculty thatincluded Alfred Lindesmith, who was
    a prominent and persistent critic of federal drug control policies, and also Albert
    Cohen, Austin Turk, JohnGagnon, and Charles Tittle. The Indiana graduate
    student corps justifiably felt that the criminology program therewas among the
    best in the nation, perhaps only taking a back seat to the one at theUniversity of
    California, Berkeley. Yet, what a difference threedecades can make. Lindesmith
    has passed away and the others have resigned. Indeed, the Indiana University
    sociology department no longer teaches criminology, leaving it to the campus
    Forensic Studies Program. It should be noted that sociology at Indiana and
    elsewhere has been indifferent to losing criminology due to the vocational

    emphasis in this specialty (Akers, 1992). To add insult to injury, theprogressive


    and prestigious School of Criminology at theUniversity of California, Berkeley,
    was closed in the 1970s by thenGovernor Ronald Reagan forbeing too far to the
    left (Geis, 1995).
    Without Social Justice, academic criminology would be leftwith few outlets
    for progressive analysis of racist police, oppressive drug laws, and a prison
    building program thatfinds theUnited States as the leader in theproportion of its
    citizens who are imprisoned. JustasHirschi and Cohen have observed, it is an easy
    choice to be "against criminology/' especially "administrative criminology."

    REFERENCES
    Akers, Ronald L.
    1992
    Cohen, Stanley
    1988
    Cronin, Thomas
    1981

    "Linking Sociology
    Forces 71: 1-15.

    and Its Specialties:

    The Case

    of Criminology."

    Against Criminology. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books.


    E., Tania Z. Cronin, and Michael E. Milakovich
    Indiana University Press.
    U.S. v. Crime in the Streets. Bloomington:

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    Social

    Against Administrative Criminology 59


    DiChiara, Albert and John F. Galliher
    1984
    'Thirty Years of Deterrence Research: Characteristics, Causes, and Conse?
    quences." Contemporary Crises 8: 243-263.
    Duster, Troy
    1995
    "The New Crisis of Legitimacy inControls, Prisons, and Legal Structures."
    The American Sociologist 26: 20-29.
    Farrell, Bill and Larry Koch
    1995
    "Criminal Justice, Sociology, and Academia."
    The American Sociologist 26:
    52-61.
    Geis, Gilbert
    1995
    "The Limits of Academic Tolerance: The Discontinuance
    of the School of
    Criminology at Berkeley." Thomas G. Blomberg and Stanley Cohen (eds.),
    Punishment and Social Control. New York: Aldine De Gruyter: 277-304.
    Hirschi, Travis
    1993
    "Administrative Criminology." Contemporary Sociology 22: 348-350.

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