Reimagining Criminology as a Science of the Normal: On the New Rules of the Criminological Method

• In Event: New Rules of Criminological Method: Passion, Perversity and Pathology

Abstract

The old rules of the criminological method were always straightforward. The deviant lay outside and away from the normal, it was the duty of the criminologist both to help understand the nature of the distance that separated the deviant from the normal; while also supporting the return of the deviant to the status of the normal by establishing how best a return could be effected. This is what the modern bio-political project was all about. This paper examines the consequences that followed when criminologists followed the old rules and found them to be absurd. It looks at what happened when criminologists began to discover the deviant to be quite normal whilst at the same time discovering normal things to be quite pathological. It studies the epistemological crisis that would lead critical criminology to forsake criminology as a consequence. Far from wanting to abandon criminology as a failed paradigm however this paper suggests that critical criminology had created a series of new criminological rules which not only justify holding on to the concept of criminology as a viable science but as that science best equipped to make sense of late modern societies in which the normal is precisely pathological where the pathology in question is deeply normalised.

Author

• Simon Hallsworth, University of Suffolk