Crime, Critique, and Utopia ed. by Margaret Malloch and Bill Munro (review)

With one exception, the essays collected in this volume were prepared for the thirty-eighth conference of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control. The exception—Loïc Wacquant’s “From Penal Dystopia to the Reassertion of Social Rights”—originally appeared as a chapter in his Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009). Wacquant’s chapter also appears to be exceptional in another regard, for it seems to be—the index is not entirely reliable on this point—the only essay in Crime, Critique, and Utopia never to use the word utopia or utopian. The chapter has much to say about crime, to be sure, and even more to say in criticism of contemporary attempts to combat crime, especially but not exclusively in France. It thus speaks to two, but only two, of the three themes announced in the title of this volume; and in that respect his essay is not at all exceptional.

In fact, the connection to utopian thought and practice is tangential, at best, in at least two of the volume’s other nine chapters. In one of them, Sarah Armstrong sets out a strong indictment of the way that statistical projections of prison populations have been taken to justify increasingly lengthy prison sentences. Projections of growing numbers of prisoners lead governments to construct more prisons, in other words, which then generates pressure to keep those prisons filled. As Armstrong puts the point, “More prison capacity means more prisoners” (155). Despite her claim to “have come to this perspective through the method of Utopia,” however, it is hard to see how utopian method is either necessary or helpful here—and especially hard to see when Armstrong immediately qualifies her claim by noting that “similar ideas are beginning to bubble up from policy and statistical debates” (155). Utopia also plays a tangential part in Michael Löwy’s chapter, which provides an interesting account of a strain of Jewish messianism in Erich Fromm’s early works but concludes only that Fromm’s “radical indictment of Stratfjustiz [criminal justice] is inseparable from a radical challenge to class domination, the state, and father authority, and therefore from an implicit utopian emancipatory horizon” (69; emphasis added).

Readers of this journal are more likely to appreciate the explicit connection that the introduction and the six remaining chapters draw among utopianism, crime, and its critique. These chapters explore this connection in various ways, the most comprehensive of which are Margaret Malloch’s survey “Crime, Critique, and Utopian Alternatives” and Lynne Copson’s “Towards a Utopian Criminology.” Malloch’s conclusion, moreover, is one that most of the contributors to this volume would surely endorse: “Our critiques of criminal justice should lead us to propose alternatives that go far beyond current limited responses to ‘crime,’ focusing instead on the eradication of social systems based on inequality and sustained by practices of criminalization” (40). Copson is more circumspect in this regard: “Insofar as the discipline of criminology can be considered committed to the notion of the understanding and, if not eradication, then at least containment and adequate addressing of crime, it can be considered particularly apt for analysis via the utopian method” (131; emphasis added). This method, as formulated by Ruth Levitas, holds what Copson takes to be the promise of a “genuinely ‘utopian criminology’” that unites normative evaluation with scientific analysis. In addition to Levitas, Copson draws on the works of Lyman Sargent, Tom Moylan, and other writers familiar to regular readers of Utopian Studies. In that respect, and in the useful connection she establishes between utopian thought and contemporary criminology, Copson’s is probably the most satisfying essay in the volume.

Within their own parameters, however, all of the essays have something worthwhile to say. Like Löwy, Bill Munro is primarily concerned with thinkers linked to the Frankfurt school—in his case, with Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer...