Power, Politics and Pandemic: How the COVID-19 Experience Calls for an Upstream Criminology of Public Health

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

Abstract

This paper argues for the plausibility of four claims. First, the root concern of criminology is public health, whether it is focused on retail violence, the consequences of drug use and drug policy, or harms generated by states, corporations, and elite actors. Second, disciplinary boundaries have obscured the natural affinity between the fields of public health and criminology, despite their common focus on the consequences of harmful social structures. Third, the Trump administration’s assault on regulation and its refusal to lead in combating the pandemic demonstrated clearly how malign intersections of social structures, institutional arrangements, and elite actors can generate upstream threats to public health. Fourth, criminologists concerned with the role of powerful organizations and individuals in the wholesale production of harm would benefit from closer engagement with public health theory and practice. We conclude by offering a model for a criminology of public health discipline.

Authors

• Raymond J. Michalowski, Northern Arizona University

• Rebecca Annorbah, Northern Arizona University