Presidential Panel: The Trump Aftermath: The Future of Criminology in a Divided Nation

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract/Description

The ongoing political fallout from the 2020 Presidential election, the COVID-19 pandemic along with conflicts over public health responses to it, and the ongoing impacts of Trump-era political practices and regulatory rollbacks pose challenges and opportunities for criminological inquiry as we move deeper in to the 21st century. Although Trump administration is (perhaps temporarily) ended, its impact on the economic, legal, political, and intellectual life of the United States and the world, and the deep divisions it crystallized in U.S. society, will reverberate well into the future, with significant implications for crime, justice and criminology. This panel examines how the transformation of the American political and regulatory landscape created new possibilities for both retail and wholesale crimes by elites. These include transforming white nationalist rhetoric into accepted political discourse, legitimizing political violence, operating a presidential administration as a criminal enterprise, politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic with devastating health consequences for millions of Americans, and normalizing white-collar crime as routine political practice. The presenters examine how the aftermath of these practices set the stage for creating a criminology that is more fully and effectively focused upon crimes and social harms emanating from centers of political and economic power.

Sub Unit

• Area I. Presidential

Individual Presentations

• The Trump Presidency’s War on White-Collar Crime: Post-Election Scenarios for Criminology and the Country - Henry Pontell, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY

• State-breaking as Organizational Crime: Prosecuting Political Criminal Enterprise in the Presidential After-Life of the Trump Administration - John Hagan, American Bar Foundation; Bill McCarthy, School of Criminal Justice

• Power, Politics and Pandemic: How the COVID-19 Experience Calls for an Upstream Criminology of Public Health - Raymond J. Michalowski, Northern Arizona University; Rebecca Annorbah, Northern Arizona University

• Existential Threat or Enlightenment Now: Is Steven Pinker Right About Trump? - Francis T. Cullen, University of Cincinnati; Teresa C. Kulig, University of Nebraska at Omaha

Chair

• Raymond J. Michalowski, Northern Arizona University

Discussant

• Laureen Snider, Queen’s University