Public criminology is an approach to criminology that disseminates criminological research beyond academia to broader audiences, such as criminal justice practitioners and the general public. Public criminology is closely tied with “public sociology”, and draws on a long line of intellectuals engaging in public interventions related to crime and justice. Some forms of public criminology are conducted through methods such as classroom education, academic conferences, public lectures, “news-making criminology”, government hearings, newspapers, radio and television broadcasting and press releases. Advocates of public criminology argue that the energies of criminologists should be directed towards "conducting and disseminating research on crime, law, and deviance in dialogue with affected communities." Public criminologists focus on reshaping the image of the criminal and work with communities to find answers to pressing questions. Proponents of public criminology see it as potentially narrowing "the yawning gap between public perceptions and the best available scientific evidence on issues of public concern", a problem they see as especially pertinent to matters of crime and punishment.
The general response to public criminology has been positive, however several authors have voiced a number of concerns: one set of concerns focuses on the ability of public criminologists to effectively impact policy decisions; another set of concerns suggests that initial forays into public criminology have been blind to the political-economic structures that shape Criminal Justice Systems; a third concern centers on the barriers that remain for participating in public criminology.
Background
The first use of the term “public criminology” can be traced to a publication by Eamonn Carrabine, Maggy Lee, and Nigel South. More recent criminologists, building on Michael Burawoy's notion of public sociology, have developed the concept. For example, Uggen and Inderbitzin have expanded the scope of the term by suggesting it should place greater emphasis on work that informs public understandings about issues such as crime, punishment, criminal law, and criminal justice. Their work was in part motivated by the belief that there is a problematically wide gap between criminological research and public opinion and in part by a belief that the approach can inspire a future generation of criminologists to address the problem. In this sense, Uggen and Inderbitizin believe that public criminology can open a dialogue between academic criminologists and the public in a way that can reshape public debates and policy while bringing new perspectives on crime to the table. Ian Loader and Richard Sparks have also expanded Burawoy's ideas regarding public criminology in Public Criminology?, which grounds concerns of public engagement in larger questions about criminology's value to wider society. The Routledge Handbook of Public Criminologies, edited by Kathryn Henne and Rita Shah and published in 2020, offers a more contemporary take on public criminology, addressing the wide range of public criminological practices, scholarly debates, and emergent political challenges.
Historical antecedents
While the term "public criminology" itself is relatively recent, many scholars acting under that moniker trace their efforts to a longer line of intellectuals engaging in public interventions related to crime and justice. For example Uggen and Inderbitzin find inspiration in the work of Clifford R. Shaw, who studied the relationship between neighborhoods and crime in Chicago starting the 1920s. His research formulated what is now known as Social Disorganization theory, which links crime rates in a neighborhood to other ecological characteristics. In the course of his research he involved residents of the communities in order to both learn from them and communicate his own research findings to them. As a result of this dialogue, Shaw founded the Chicago Area Project which was geared to reduce conditions that resulted in high delinquency.
