Bearing Witness to Crime and Social Justice

by Richard Quinney.

Albany:State University of New York Press. Issued: January 1, 2000;

289 pp. $57.50 $18.95 paper. ISBN: 0-7914-4749-60-X

With this book, Richard Quinney provides us with his own selection of his past
papers that reflect what a student of crime (and beyond) should be aware of.
The readings are articles and book chapters that span Quinney's career and
carry us through a series of positions marking the author's progression as: 1)
the radical thinker and scholarly critic; 2) the social epistemologist arguing in
favour of a constructivist stance in the study of crime; 3) the peacemaker; and
4) the spiritual sage. The common thread across these chapters is found in the
author's relentless struggle to question and propose otherwise. Such an
approach is primarily applied, as was evident throughout Quinney's career,
against the status quo and, as is often overlooked, against himself. The struggle
is one that places the researcher into a persistent battle to seek something new
- something else. The overall approach is straightforward and highlighted in a
series of basic existential assumptions: 1) I am what I see; 2) we learn much
about life by studying crime; and 3) "we and the criminal are one and the same"
(p.xiv).
Chapter 1, although written in 1971, remains one of the more complete reviews
of criminological thought and research. It is still amongst the best papers for
introductory students and inspiration-seeking old-hands alike in that it teaches
us and reminds us of our oft-ignored roots in a manner that sways from the
tiresome and systematic approach maintained in the far too many introductory
textbooks.
Chapter 2 is the opening segment to The Social Reality of Crime (1970).
Quinney lays down the first steps in attributing the problem of crime as an
extension of capitalist exploitation, moral perversion, and social regulation by
dominant groups in American society. The fuller demonstrations that extend
from this chapter in the original publication are indeed lacking here. However,
the author does pursue his critique of capitalism throughout chapters 3 to 7.
Chapter 3 is a wonderful take-down of one of the primary symbols of American
justice and popular culture, the Lone Ranger: "How could you know that you
were actually protecting the economic interests of Eastern capitalists?... Lone
Ranger, the outlaws were rebels (without a revolutionary consciousness) who
were threatening the territory of the financiers, railroad men, and large
landowners. The cavalry was your real enemy" (pp. 88-89). This attack, in
typical Quinney fashion, is followed by a description of the cleansing process that
he went through in deconditioning himself of the values and counter values of

"frontier individualism" that has justified America's movement towards expansive

control through economic force in all areas elsewhere. Chapter 4, from A
Critique of Legal Order (1975), provides an explicit method to developing a
radical criminology: "Only in a negation of the present can we experience
something else" (p. 104). Chapter 5 reprints a 1978 paper that reverts the
attack on capitalism within the realm of criminology itself. The duality within the
field guides the essay: "As bourgeois criminology has served the capitalist class
under capitalism, Marxist criminology will serve the working class under
socialism" (p. 124). (On the other hand, why must we, as criminologists or as
members of society, serve anything or anyone?) The assault against the
American establishment is aimed at the notion and practice of justice in Chapters
6 and 7, the opening chapters in Quinney's most formidable contribution, Class,
State, and Crime (1977/1980). "Capitalist justice" and the "criminal justice
movement" that supports it are extensions of a system (the "capitalist order")
that "assumes a hierarchy of rights and competitive social relations" (p. 138).
Quinney counters with a prophetic form of justice that expels the idea of higherordered control and bases itself on the inspiration that humans develop a
personal responsibility and devotion to the historical account and struggle to
change. The direct link between the production of crime and the progression of
capitalism is neatly framed within a conflict process situating domination and
repression on one side and accommodation and resistance on the other. The
advent of the latter side's response to the former is the criminal process.
The common thread linking each chapter is at one the attack against capitalism
and the systematic solution in the socialist alternative. Here, Quinney's
criminology takes the reader beyond the critical stance. His most stimulating
writing comes when he aims against an object. In this sense, Quinney was
striking in his anti-capitalist stance, but less revealing in his visions towards a
criminology based in a socialist reality. Because his arguments were primarily
critically driven, he consistently proposed an alternative to the system in place.
Hence, the shift from the socialist to the peacemaking alternative (Chapter 9) is
consistent with his stance against capitalism, while softening the tone in
proposing a new systemic alternative (a position which is in considerable
increase today). This anti-capitalist stance is what keeps Quinney's legacy
particularly alive beyond scholarly circles (regardless of which alternative one
opts
for).
This prophetic approach is continued in Chapter 10 as the author combines his
major influences after three full decades of experience: Marx; the theologian
Paul Tillich; Sutherland (the man who dared to rethink the way we thought of
crime - see Chapter 8); Emily Dickinson ("Tell the Truth but tell it slant", p. 172);
Eastern philosophers that guide one to question established images and profess
that "change rules the world forever" (p. 175)p Willie Nelson... Such influences
and the numerous extensions that Quinney took them through in his thinking of
crime
are
countered
against
a
multitude
of
nemeses.
Quinney's brand of criminology is clearly not a mainstream one. His may never
be a mainstream criminology. The approach professed in this collection and

throughout the author's career is one that positions the criminologist as a moral
philosopher (this idea is thoroughly spelled out in Chapter 10). Quinney's work is
a personal legacy and one which the author is assured will be carried out in the
observations, thoughts, and actions of some future witnesses who will come to
appreciate and apply the ideas expressed by this predecessor: "someday the
report will be found, and perhaps it will be valued and of use" (p. 208).
Most social scientists are taught to learn the main ideas of early thinkers in their
discipline. Quinney's work constitutes the basis of a new form of (American)
criminology that evolved throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. In
this sense, this work should be made familiar to present and future students of
crime in as much as leaders of early classical and various positivist doctrines.
Here is a document containing the key expressions of a criminologist and social
thinker who bases his reputation on what he felt was right and took the risks by
consistently countering the powers that be. All criminologists must have at least
some Quinney in them in order to arrive at a fuller understanding of their main
objects of interest.

Rishi Shrivastava
BA.LLB ;2nd year
Kiit School Of Law