Displaced Expertise

Abstract

The long-standing relationship between criminal justice policy and the advice of criminologists has been ruptured in the past two decades. Three interrelated factors help to account for this displacement of criminological thought: (1) the rise of neo-liberal forms of governance which have made traditional forms of criminological knowledge and preferred sites of intervention increasingly superfluous to the practice of governance; (2) the ascendancy of a highly symbolic public discourse about crime; and (3) the transformation of the criminal justice system by new technologies of detection, capture and monitoring. While criminologists continue to influence the development of specific criminal justice policies, the combination of these three developments pose additional hurdles for our ability to shape criminal justice policies in a rational manner.