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.