Abolish Criminology presents critical scholarship on Criminology and Criminal Justice ideologies and practices, alongside emerging freedom-driven discourses that encourage a vision and practice of new world formations.
The book introduces readers to a detailed history and analysis of crime as a concept and its colonizing trajectories into existence and enforcement. These significant contexts buried within peculiar academic histories are often overlooked or unknown in academic and public discussions, and representations of crime and the criminal legal system. The book offers written, visual, and poetic teachings through which readers, students, and educators can engage with the often discussed but seldom understood concept of crime and its enforcement through the criminal legal system's research, theories, agencies and dominant cultures.
Abolish Criminology serves the needs of undergraduate and graduate students and educators in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. It will also appeal to scholars, researchers, policy makers, activists, community organizers, social movement builders, and various reading groups comprised of the general public grappling with the increased critical public discourse on policing and criminal legal reform or abolition.
About the Author: Viviane Saleh-Hanna is Professor of Crime and Justice Studies and Black Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Her scholarship anchors Black feminist hauntology, abolition, anti-colonialism, wholistic justice, structurally abusive relationships, and freedom dreams inspired by Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison and growing scholarships and writings on Afrofuturism.
Jason M. Williams is an Associate Professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University. He's an activist scholar specializing in racial and gender disparity, and mistreatment within the criminal legal system. He's a nationally recognized and quoted qualitative criminologist with publications on re-entry, policing, and social control, and engaged in community-grounded research.
Michael J. Coyle is Professor in the Department of Political Science and 'Criminal' Justice, California State University, Chico. He is the author of Talking Criminal Justice: Language and the Just Society (Routledge 2013) and the forthcoming Seeing Crime: Penal Abolition as the End of Utopian Criminal Justice.
