Fragmented to Death: The Study of Violence and the Utility of Criminology

Abstract

This essay examines the current state of the field of criminology and argues that by under-representing corporate violence, over-representing street crime, and not often addressing political crime, criminology as a field is doing a disservice to our students. Further, the study of group violence and "new wars" could be enriched by the viewpoint of sociologists and criminologists.Academics are not known for clarity. Indeed, many within and outside of the field complain about the obfuscation of sociological writing and ponder whether the field makes common sense needlessly complex and revelatory (at least according to some of my Introduction to Sociology students). However, in this essay, I argue for simplification: Violence is violence. Specifically, by conceptualizing criminology, the study of "new wars," and political crime as wholly different fields of inquiry, we create pillars of knowledge, theories, and information that are insulated from one another to the detriment of understanding the fundamental human problem of violence. The method and type of violence are important and need examination, but not to the point where specialization has made it so people from various fields who are studying violence in whatever form are not aware of or communicating their theories, research, and findings.By focusing on the phenomenon of violence as a point of inquiry more broadly -and not getting bogged down by the method of the violence or the field of study, be that sociology, criminology, psychology, or political science -we can achieve two worthy goals. First, white-collar crime 1 has consistently not been treated as a serious problem, and looking at the violence in its wake may help correct that. This tendency continues to go on despite the fact that white-collar crime kills and injures many times more people a year than street crime. This is a problem on the policy front (lack of enforcement or sometimes even laws to combat it) and also within the field of sociology and criminology. Because we do not tend to conceptualize corporate crime as violence, at least on the curricular and research level, we continue to ignore a pervasive and devastating social problem and do nothing to help people understand it or fight it. Further, what we do focus on is street crime, a type of violence believed to be to be a bigger problem within poor communities and people of color. We, as scholars, consistently reproduce the racism that led to both the structured inequality and the stereotyping in the first place. By putting so much of our research and teaching into street crime, we reify the destructive narrative that people of color and poor people are dangerous and responsible for their problems even while we often critique the school-to-prison pipeline and other features of the "New Jim Crow" (Alexander 2010).Second, sociologists and criminologists have something to offer those who study political violence, while those who are interested in street crime could better understand growing globalization and the intersection of "crime" and ...