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Annual Review of Criminology

Volume 8, 2025

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

  • Jack Katz1 and Nahuel Roldán2
  • 1Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA; email: [email protected] 2Department of Social Sciences, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • Vol. 8:53-73 (Volume publication date January 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on October 09, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

Criminology is haunted by state-structured biases. We discuss five. () With the spatial boundaries and the binary deontology they use to count crime, governments draw researchers into ecological fog and sometimes fallacy. () All legal systems encourage criminologists to promote untenable implications of socially stratified criminality. () To degrees that vary by time and place, the scope of criminological research is compromised by methodological nationalism. () State agencies use chronologies that repeatedly draw researchers away from examining the nonlinear temporalities that shape variations in criminal behavior. () 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.

Keyword(s): collective efficacy, ecological fallacy, history of criminology, methodological nationalism, methodology for criminology, neighborhood effects
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2025-01-29
2025-06-14
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