Review - Critical Criminology: Visions from Europe

• Date: 24 May 2019
• Published date: 24 May 2019

REVIEW • RESENSIE

Critical Criminology:

Visions from Europe

by Rene van Swaaningen

Sage, London 1997

xv,

281 pp

The South African Constitution, with its liberal sources and legal intentions, is

so far removed from the anger demonstrated by families in suburban

fortresses and the person on the Garankua taxi, that serious commentators

on criminal justice may be at a loss on how to realistically think through the

ideological maze of the law and order debate. In the aftermath of the 1999

election, and the memories of political slogans on lamp-posts, it is refreshing

to find a book which looks at the history of how people argue about crime,

while taking the reader to a new understanding about criminal justice which

reconnects with a vision of social justice.

Unfortunately, it is not about how South Africans have figured out crime,

but Van Swaaningen, a Research Fellow and Reader in Criminology,

Penology and Criminal Justice at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, offers a

text which refocuses on social theory, while taking cognisance of how crime

affects people's lived experience. The book addresses the issues of victims,

tolerance, punitive mentalities and foremost, how the intellectual discipline

of criminology comes to exist through theories, institutions, personalities, as

well as the discourses of the criminal justice system and the public concern

about the crime. By linking the debates in law and criminology with the

political and social circumstances in several European countries, the text

covers the origins of critical criminology, raises the question whether the

nineties focus on managerial effectiveness in the criminal justice system does

not threaten due process, and whether an effective justice system is possible

without addressing underlying issues of fairness in society.

The book argues for the importance of a comparative criminology, and

shows that the 'sociologisation' of progressive lawyers can benefit the justice

229

(1999) 12 SACJ 229

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