Contemporary Criminology and Criminal Justice Theory

This book casts a critical eye on scholarship in the field of criminal justice, and offers some new orientations to help develop explanations for twenty-first century criminology and criminal justice studies.

"This book is solid and represents a needed corrective in our field: Advancing it theoretically through the development of criminal justice theory. Skoll articulates difficult material in a very accessible manner . . .It is exciting to come across a book that is absolutely needed in our field, and that pushes the disciplinary envelope through applying and synthesizing an intellectually sophisticated body of literature." - Peter Kraska, Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Department of Crime and Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University

"In this essential book, Skoll's aim and accomplishment is to rearrange our perceptual fields, to challenge the anesthetizing effects and dogma of common sense, and to invite us to see differently so that we might act differently. So much of law and public policy turns on questions of competing metaphors and analogies, and challenging any controlling analogy is always a risky business . . .We enter an open space of rethinking and negotiation, a space of ethical reflection and political struggle, a space where we must rely not on rules so much as on our moral intuition, our queer questions, our commitment to the dignity of persons, our belief in equality and fairness. Skoll cuts with laser-like precision to the intellectual roots of our thinking about criminal justice, upends layers of mystification and myth that currently dictate criminal justice policy, and opens a window allowing fresh and startling winds to blow. You will never again see the cop on the corner, the court, or the cage in the same way." - William Ayers, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Education

"Skolls Contemporary Criminology and Criminal Justice Theory is unafraid - unafraid to expose the malignant intellectual vacancy that echoes through much of contemporary criminology and criminal justice, unafraid to situate this theoretical hollow squarely in its historical and political context, unafraid to recall radical alternatives to the present situation, and unafraid to imagine new ones." - Jeff Ferrell, Professor of Sociology, Texas Christian University, and Visiting Professor of Criminology, University of Kent, UK

GEOFFREY R. SKOLL is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, Buffalo State College, USA. He has a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology and MSW in clinical social work. Previous publications include Walk the Walk and Talk the Talk: An Ethnography of a Drug Abuse Treatment Facility (1992). His current interests focus on social theory, terrorism, and the death penalty in comparative perspective.