Toward a Public Criminology

• In Event: Values in Criminal Justice Policy, Values in Our Research

Abstract

My work attempts to better understand a particularly insular and difficult to reach institution: the contemporary US prison and the prisoners, prison workers, and the prison leadership within. Mass incarceration, and now mass deportation, as our criminal justice policy and practice has pushed issues of how we confine and who we confine into our politics for the first time since the prison reform era of the early 70s. As I step into our prisons to conduct research, as I form questions, as I analyze findings, as I assemble my results into written work, and as I read and review the work of my colleagues, I keep three guiding principles in mind. 1) that every component of our criminal justice system (including private prisons) is a public enterprise and must therefore be transparent and knowable in order to produce an informed citizenry who can then collectively engage the questions of who, how, when, where, and why we lock people up; 2) that as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, we “must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land with great violence upon the body;” and that 3) I must always ask if I am protecting or privileging the powerful in the reporting of my findings to the detriment of the marginalized and powerless. Here I must ask myself if my research practice actually protects problematic institutions and the officials within and if so what I can do to maintain confidentiality for my respondents while simultaneously working for institutional accountability. Thus, with these guiding principles in mind, my presentation will discuss my push for a critical, public criminology that serves to reveal the social facts which adhere to our criminal justice policy. These social facts may be exactly what is needed to produce an informed citizenry who can engage criminal justice policy and practice in a meaningful way that reduces that damages perpetrated by the U.S. as the world’s leading incarcerator.

Author

• Jay Borchert, University of Michigan