Session 2:

Abolish the Military Industrial Complex

Wednesday 14 April 2021 ~ 1:50 - 3:05pm Pacific

Recording available here (52 mins)

What is to be done with the police?

Matt Clement

The first police forces were created to maintain public order when rulers realised the dangers of using their armies to maintain social control. Repressing riots and demonstrations with armed troops led to a series of bloody massacres in England in the late 1700s and early 1800s. To continue on this path risked provoking a popular uprising,as Thomas Carlyle wrote in the wake of the slaughter of 19 people and the wounding of hundreds more in Manchester in 1819: ‘the number of the slain and maimed is very countable, but the treasury of rage, burning hidden or visible in all hearts ever since…is of unknown extent.’ (Carlyle 1843)

The idea behind the formation of the ‘new police’ then was that an institution created from amongst the general population and carrying out the fight against crime in the day to day would be more likely to gain popular consent, and thus be able to maintain public order when crowds gathered. Although there were always ‘over-criminalised’ groups within the general population who bore the brunt of violent and discriminatory policing, majority support for the police’s role endured. Nowadays, the proportion of the population questioning police legitimacy is far broader, especially amongst younger people raised in the post-2008 years of austerity and racism. Realist policies of ‘community policing’ are being challenged by ‘idealist’ visions of abolition and opposition. Matt Clement examines the lessons of history for what is to be done about the police today.

Matt Clement lectures Criminology at the University of Winchester, UK. He has recently written about state violence, social movements and strategies of tension for Critical Criminology, Social Justice & the European Journal of Criminology. His influences are Marxism and the sociology of Norbert Elias. Matt also wrote A History of Riots Protest & the Law: The sound of the crowd (2016).

Abolish Prisons and Police by Making Justice Tribal Again: A Historical Sketch of the Evolution of Criminal Justice From Tribal Law to the Carceral State

Austin Pedersen Lawrence

In order to understand how to abolish the carceral and policing institutions of the state, one must first clearly understand how the creation of criminal justice evolved from tribal, to monarchal, to Enlightenment and then late modern democratic forms of sovereign authority, to produce the current institutional forms of policing and incarceration. This paper outlines a historical narrative broadly describing this transition, in the context of British-descended legal traditions, by focusing on the meanings of victimization and punishment, and their relationship to the balancing of the debt of criminal harm. Such an understanding is useful for theorizing how to articulate polylegal systems of criminal justice and for developing models for how criminal justice can be produced without public police or prisons.

Austin Pedersen Lawrence bio coming soon!

Violent Symbiosis: Criminology and Criminal Justice’s Role in Legitimizing Racialized Police Violence

Ryan Phillips, Brian Pitman, and Stephen T. Young

The protests fueled by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor during the summer of 2020 provided another catalyst for conversations about racialized police killings in the United States. For at least the second time in a decade, the nation’s attention shifted towards calls for police reforms. The conversation we seek to expand on is the role that the academic discipline of Criminology and Criminal Justice (CCJ) plays in legitimizing police and perpetuating harm. CCJ exists in a symbiotic relationship with the criminal legal system; police terrorize poor communities of color while CCJ provides them legitimacy through reform-minded research and policy suggestions. We utilize a historical analysis to demonstrate the development of the relationship between CCJ and police. In the US, the field’s development begins with August Vollmer, former police chief of Berkeley and the “father of American policing.” Using his military experience, Vollmer sought to professionalize policing using “science”. By tracing Vollmer’s early role in the development of the field through to the current state of funding and research, we demonstrate that CCJ is inextricably linked to racialized police violence. The point of our analysis is to challenge the structures of our work in the discipline, the university, and the community.

Ryan Phillips is a doctoral candidate in Criminology and Criminal Justice at Old Dominion University. He earned his MS and BS at Eastern Kentucky University. His primary areas of study are Marxist criminology and critical prison studies, with a specific focus on the role ideology plays in legitimizing the carceral state.

Brian Pitman is an assistant professor in sociology at the University of Maine, teaching courses and doing research primarily in criminology and criminal justice. He received his PhD from Old Dominion University in 2019, his MA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, and his BS from the University of North Carolina-Pembroke.

Stephen T. Young is an Assistant Professor in Criminal Justice and Criminology at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. He earned his PhD in Criminology and Criminal Justice at Old Dominion University, and his MS and BA from Marshall University. His primary areas of concentration are critical rural criminology.