Allegorical criminology

Thus far, I have demonstrated that criminological criticism is a method by means of which allegories can be mined for their critical criminological insights, insights into the causes of harm (Chapters Three to Five), and that criminological criticism is also a critical criminological methodology, that is, there is no compelling reason to dismiss insights derived from allegories (Chapter Six). I expressed these insights in terms of ideas, arguments, hypothesis, and theories and I shall focus on the latter two in this chapter, as being the most useful to critical criminologists in their pursuit of harm reduction. Let me be clear about precisely where my argument for a new methodology is before I proceed. I have reached a point where I have a hypothesis and a theory each derived from an allegory. The hypothesis, from Butler's (1993) Parable of the Sower, is: the fear of crime plays a more substantial role than the actual crime rate in social disintegration. The theory, from Miéville's (2009) The City & the City, is: the segregation of different groups of people in the urban environment contributes to the individual's failure to recognise members of a different group as fully human, which in turn contributes to urban violence as perpetrated by both the dispossessed and the state. Regardless of the fact that they have been derived from allegories, they should be taken as seriously as any other and, prima facie, both the hypothesis and the theory appear to have great critical criminological potential. The question is now how I, as a criminological critic, get from the hypothesis and the theory to actually reducing the harms caused by the fear of crime and by urban segregation or, more realistically, to placing others in a position where they can reduce these harms. This gap between theory and practice raises a further question: is the reduction of harm the only way to do critical criminology?

To answer this question, I turn to sociology, specifically to Michael Burawoy's (2005) now famous Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association in 2004. Burawoy suggests that there are four divisions of sociological labour: professional sociology, policy sociology, critical sociology, and public sociology. Professional sociology is concerned with ‘the creation, elaboration, [and] degeneration of multiple research programs’ (Burawoy 2005: 12).