Irreducibly social: Why biocriminology’s ontoepistemology is incompatible with the social reality of crime

Abstract

Professing interactionist bio + social terminology, contemporary biocriminology asserts a break from its biologically essentialist past. Assurances notwithstanding, whether biocriminology has undergone a decisive paradigm shift rejecting notions of biological criminals and bad brains remains uncertain. Unfortunately, discussions of biocriminology's assumptions are mired in politics, obscuring important scientific issues. Motivated to clarify misunderstanding, I address the ontoepistemology of biocriminology from a scientific realist perspective. Drawing on familiar notions of crime as a social construction, I explain how and why biocriminology's ontoepistemology is inconsistent with the social reality of crime for scientific not ideological reasons. I explain that recognizing crime as a social construction does not imply that crime is not real or objective and cannot be studied scientifically. On the contrary, the irreducibly social nature of crime requires that scientific realists reject assumptions of “biological crime” as well as the biologically reductionist epistemology on which biocriminology depends.