Abolish Criminology: Book Panel and Discussion

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract/Description

Abolish Criminology was published in August 2024. A few authors presented papers at ASC 2023 to introduce the book. Remaining authors from this powerful anthology will present chapters this year.

Abolish Criminology presents critical scholarship alongside emerging freedom-driven visions and practices for new world formations. The book deconstructs crimionlogy's main ideological strains to uncover peculiar contexts, colonizing mythologies, and obscured histories required for more accurate understandings of criminology as a deeply violent, high-impact field.

Abolish Criminology offers an accessible, critical study of criminology in written, visual, and poetic forms through the perspectives of university students, professors, imprisoned and formerly imprisoned scholars, poets, and visual artists. This allows readers to engage in multi-sensory, inter-disciplinary, and multi-perspective teachings on criminology’s often discussed but seldom interrogated mythologies on violence and danger, while bringing to light the wide-reaching enforcements of violence through criminology's research, theories, agencies, and dominant cultures.

Abolish Criminology serves the needs of undergraduate and graduate students and educators in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. It will appeal to scholars, researchers, policy makers, activists, community organizers, social movement builders, and reading groups who are grappling with increased critical public discourse on policing and criminal legal reform or abolition.

Sub Unit

• Area X. Critical Criminology / 74. Abolition

Individual Presentations

• Abolish Criminology: An Introduction - Viviane Saleh-Hanna, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth; Jason M. Williams, Montclair State University; Michael J. Coyle, California State University, Chico

• The History of Criminal Justice as the Academic Arm of State Violence - Brian Pitman, Lander University; Stephen T. Young, Marshall University; Ryan Phillips, Marshall University

• The History of Criminology is a History of White Supremacy - Viviane Saleh-Hanna, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

• The White Racialized Center of Criminology - Holly Simms-Bruno, University of Indianapolis

• Marxist Criminology Abolishes Lombroso, Marxist Criminology Abolishes Itself - Erin K. Krafft, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Chair

• Toniqua Mikell, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Organized by a Division or external group?

ASC Abolition working group.