Beyond the Seductions of the State: Toward Freeing Criminology from Governments’ Blinders

Criminology is haunted by state-structured biases. We discuss five. ( a ) With the spatial boundaries and the binary deontology they use to count crime, governments draw researchers into ecological fog and sometimes fallacy. ( b ) All legal systems encourage criminologists to promote untenable implications of socially stratified criminality. ( c ) To degrees that vary by time and place, the scope of criminological research is compromised by methodological nationalism. ( d ) State agencies use chronologies that repeatedly draw researchers away from examining the nonlinear temporalities that shape variations in criminal behavior. ( e ) State agencies produce data that facilitate explaining the why of crime, but scientific naturalism would first work out what is to be explained. We recommend a criminology that begins by describing causal contingencies in social life independent of governments’ labeling of crime.