Louk Hulsman: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

Another tradition, well established within radical criminology and penology, is that of penal abolitionism among whose leading exponents are writers like Louk Hulsman (1986) and Nils Christie (1977). Hulsman, for example, argued that the notion of crime at first appears to refer to clear and fixed forms of behaviour but on closer interrogation slides away into a plethora of different activities and meanings which have nothing in common other than the fact that the criminal justice system treats them as crimes.

(The) "categories of 'crime' are given by the criminal justice system rather than by victims or society in general. This makes it necessary to abandon the notion of 'crime' as a tool in the conceptual framework of criminology. Crime has no ontological reality. Crime is not the object but the product of criminal policy. Criminalisation is one of the many ways of constructing social reality" (Hulsman 1986 pp 34-5)

The idea of 'crime' as an essentially coercive imposition by the state on an incommensurable diversity of problematic situations fits well with the spirit of deconstruction. Along with the pretensions of 'crime' to act as a yardstick for the commensuration of harmful acts must go any totalizing grand narrative of justice or rationality, and of the criminal justice system as capable of enforcing any other than purely local norms, of disguising under a rhetoric of universal justice and citizenship, that which is tenuous, negotiated and constantly reconstituted. Crime can no longer be given meaning as the violation of identifiable 'natural rights', nor can it be the object of some theoretical explanation. The issue is rather the avoidance of the suppression of particularities and differences and, given the diversity of such, there can be no definite rational content to a criminal law but rather a process of constant accommodation of differences and the resolution of conflicts. If the latter could be more efficiently performed without law and criminal justice, as abolitionists argue it could, then there is no reason for not allowing it to be so. Meanwhile the subject matter of criminology itself vanishes into the shifting plurality of 'problematic situations' involving diversified and non-commensurable principles and amenable to no generalised solution. Hulsman's abolitionism firmly straddles the main themes of the postmodern perspective.

Behind the appropriation of deconstruction in contemporary radical criminology lies, of course, a politics. In the abolitionist case it is an anarchist libertarian one, that individuals should be able to sort out their own problems free of the shackles and discourses of the state and criminal law. In the case of feminist postmodernism the task is to liberate what Smart terms the 'multiplicity of resistances', those voices, in particular of women, which have been forced into silence by the theories and discourses of mainstream criminology. Both abolitionism and feminist postmodernism would reject much of the mainstream approaches to criminal justice and criminality as oppressive. They are quite right to do so. However, whether the particular approach to deconstruction that they adopt actually achieves their intended aim is another matter.