David Gordon Scott is a British criminologist, abolitionist and author. He is a criminologist at The Open University in Milton Keynes.
Scott's research interests span the field of criminology, particularly focusing on socialist ethics, abolitionism, social harm, liberative justice, harms of capitalist states, and state-corporate harm.
Scott is the Co-Founding Editor of the Journal Justice, Power and Resistance. He is also known for his contributions in documentaries including Punishment: A Failed Social Experiment and the BBC Ideas Viewpoint – What Would A World Without Prisons Be Like?
Early life and education
Scott received a B.A. honors degree in Applied Social Science in 1994 and a post-graduate master's degree in Crime, Deviance and Social Policy in 1996 from Lancaster University. Later, in 2006, he completed his PhD under the supervision of Barbara Hudson from the University of Central Lancashire, and his thesis was titled Ghosts beyond our realm: A neo-abolitionist analysis of prisoner human rights and prison office culture He has also earned a certificate in Adult Education teaching from City and Guilds and became a Fellow of higher education academy.
Career
Scott joined Edge Hill College of Higher Education as a Temporary Lecturer in Criminology and held an appointment as a lecturer of sociology at the New College of Further and Higher Education in Durham from 1996 till 1998. Afterwards, he was appointed as a lecturer in criminology at the University of Northumbria. He was then promoted to a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in 2000 at the University of Central Lancashire, a position he held for 13 years.
During his work span at the University of Central Lancashire, Scott has served as an International Ambassador at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, Université de Savoie and the Catholic University of Lyon in France and the UCLan Cyprus Campus.
In 2009 he was appointed as an International coordinator of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control. Subsequently, in 2012 he held a brief appointment as a Coordinator of the Working Group on Prison, Detention and Punishment. Afterwards, in 2014 he co-founded an independent academic publisher named EG Press and worked as a Director there until 2018. He is currently serving as the Chair of the ‘Weavers Uprising Bicentennial Remembrance Committee’.
Scott is the Co-Founding Editor of the Journal Justice, Power and Resistance. He is also known for his contributions in documentaries including Punishment: A Failed Social Experiment and the BBC Ideas Viewpoint – What Would A World Without Prisons Be Like?
Research
Scott's research is focused in the field of criminology with a specific interest in the impacts of punishment and prison. He has authored books, book chapters, blogs and journal articles in this field.
Critical Criminology
Scott was trained in, and has subsequently contributed to, the intellectual tradition known as critical criminology, especially in his co-edited books Expanding the Criminological Imagination/ and Demystifying Power, Crime and Social Harm. He argues that whilst poverty and social and economic inequalities are important contexts in relation to street level property offences, excessive power is the most criminogenic factor in the generation of serious social harms. He argues that the most dangerous and deadly harms facing the people and planet are created by the rich and powerful and maintains that the 'criminological imagination' should focus primarily on avoidable and deadly harms generated though acts of commission or omission by corporations, capitalist states and other powerful individuals and groups.
When researching the Grenfell Tower fire, June 14, 2017, where 72 people lost their lives, Scott drew upon the concept of social murder to emphasise the responsibilities of the powerful. He argued this in his film Grenfell Tower and Social Murder, which he co-made with Hamlett Films for The Open University in 2017.