The Institutional Foundations of Contemporary Australian Criminology

Abstract

The foundations of modern Australian criminology were formed in a conservative social milieu in which a professionalising project for the discipline was pursued by allying it with academic lawyers and state criminal justice and correctional officials. Nevertheless, the fact that criminology is 'tainted' by the inclusion of disreputable social sciences (i.e. sociology), has meant that its protagonists have succeeded only in creating a quasi-profession, formally autonomous as a knowledge, but in practice policed by state officials and members of the legal profession. Despite various 'police actions' and organisational constructions designed to constrain the critical potential of the discipline, and despite the belated development of sociology as an academic discipline in this country, Australian criminology has begun to generate a genuinely critical discourse during the 1980s.