Jock Young The Criminological Imagination Analysis

In The Criminological Imagination Jock Young’s main argument is meant to criticize the overly quantitative and positivist nature of modern criminology and point out the limited qualitative imagination within the discipline. Young considers his book a success if he can “create a moment of hesitation and contribute somewhat to the growing skepticism with regards to the widespread desire to quantify every aspect of the human condition” (p.ix). Young describes how criminal justice scholarship has lost touch with reality through an approach that is overly focused on complex statistics and analysis and less on the context in which events occur. The result of such a loss leads us to a state where “the tools of the trade become magically more important …show more content…
He mentions the extraordinary burgeoning of the criminal justice system. The operations of the criminal justice system require enormous budgets. Police, corrections, preventative techniques, and evidentiary procedures are expensive. This has increased the desire for evaluation research. Following in suit the university programs in criminal justice have grown extravagantly. The war on everything (drugs, terrorism, domestic violence) mentality has led some to believe that the answer to our crime problem lies in greater forces within law enforcement agencies. This mentality requires the use of hard evidence in the form of numbers more so than understanding the natural context of the war itself. The crime control industry has significant influence over research within …show more content…
The first is that male working class crime has been used to depict all criminality. The second is the depiction of crime in advanced industrial countries is used to describe crime in general. The book realizes, through an essay by Colin Summers, that traditional criminological generalizations are false when one looks at police behavior, crimes of the powerful, crimes of the poor and of political oppositionists in the context of global imperialism. The third is that criminology has become Americanized (p.79). It is important to realize that America is unusual when compared to other industrialized advanced countries. The factors that shaped America the way it is have a dramatic effect on its crime rate and the generation of criminological theory. It is doubtful that the United States has given us many theories that are applicable in the same way to vastly different countries. As criminology as an academic discipline grows worldwide cultural and critical criminology may be more appropriate in certain places than an American influence of