Critical Criminologies Page 1 of 27 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, CRIMINOLOGY AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE (oxfordre.com/crimi nology). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). date: 02 June 2020 Subject: Crime, Media, and Popular Culture, Criminological Theory, Critical Criminology, Inter national Crime, Race, Ethnicity, and Crime, Women, Crime, and Justice Online Publication Date: May 2020 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.549 Critical Criminologies Walter S. DeKeseredy Summary and Keywords There is no single critical criminology. Rather, there are critical criminologies with differ ent histories, methods, theories, and political perspectives. However, critical criminology is often defined as a perspective that views the major sources of crime as the unequal class, race/ethnic, and gender relations that control our society. Critical criminologists op pose prisons and other draconian means of social control. Their main goal is major radi cal and cultural change, but they recognize that these transitions will not occur in the current neoliberal era. Hence, most critical criminologists propose short-term anticrime policies and practices and fundamental social, economic, and political transformations, such as a change from a capitalist economy to one based on more socialist principles. Keywords: class, critical criminology, gender, inequality, Marxism, power, race radical criminology, criminological theory, international criminology, sexuality Introduction Until the mid-1980s, critical criminology was mainly informed by strands of Marxist thought and was labeled radical criminology. There are now at least 15 types of critical criminology and new ones will likely emerge. All critical criminologists do not think alike, follow a party line, or speak with the same voice. What binds them together is what El liott Currie (2008) refers to as “a willingness to apply a critical line not only to the work of their more conventional counterparts in the discipline but their own as well” (p. vii). This article reviews critical criminologies that have different origins, use multiple meth ods, and reflect diverse political beliefs. Critical Criminology Defined Arguably, the term critical criminology was coined by Taylor, Walton, and Young (1973B). Although the term has been in use for more than 40 years, many criminologists are not exactly sure what it means. This applies not only to scholars who are not critical criminol ogists but to people who are firmly embedded in the tradition. To make matters more complicated, there are various definitions of critical criminology and there is no widely