I have a feeling that 2016 will be a good year for critical criminology around the globe as we sit waiting, like Billy Bragg and Mao, for the great leap forward(s). Critical criminology, including sub-disciplines such as cultural criminology, has found something of a new international direction in recent years having first emerged in the late 1960s out of the National Deviancy Conference (NDC) in the United Kingdom. When I was a young law and criminology student in the 1970s the NDC still had a purchase and its critical connections to the overall discipline of criminology were still vibrant towards the end of that decade. A conference at York University in the UK, the original site of the first National Deviancy Conference, in 2011 celebrated the development of a new NDC which reconvened successfully in 2014 at Teesside University in the UK in 2014. The Teesside Centre for Realist Criminology (TCRC) is a glowing testament to these exciting developments and under the leadership of Steve Hall and Simon Winlow the engine behind the cutting edge ‘ultra-realist’ criminology now being established. I am proud to be a member of its excellent international advisory board. Hall and Winlow’s Revitalising Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra Realism, published in Routledge’s superb New Directions in Critical Criminology series is my favourite critical criminology book of 2015 and their book Riots and Political Protest: Notes From the Post-Political Present with James Treadwell and Daniel Briggs a close second. The term ‘critical criminology’ comes originally from founding members of the NDC Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young’s second book, an edited collection called Critical Criminology now republished in Routledge’s ‘revivals’ series. Their first book, The New Criminology recently republished unabridged in a fortieth anniversary edition with a new introduction, had as its subtitle the declamatory ‘For a Social Theory of Deviance’. Much has changed in new and critical criminology since that time and hard battles between the debilitating left idealism of the early project and varieties of realism ever since have moved the whole thing onwards and upwards. Better criminological theorising is desperately necessary as post-crash global society hits the buffers with effects like increased domestic violence and racist attacks and global precariousness. There is now a healthy organisational basis to critical criminology internationally. The American Society of Criminology (ASC) has a Division on Critical Criminology, the British Society of Criminology (BSC) has a Critical Criminology Network which has a first meeting on ‘the future of critical criminology’ coming up soon, and here in Australasia the Australia and New Zealand Critical Criminology Conference holds its 10th annual event next year. Canada too has a thriving critical criminology; a few years ago when I was Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) in Ontario a dozen of us on the staff of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science were critical criminologists. A great deal can be done with such a critical mass. As I say, waiting for the great leap forward(s).
