2023

Crime and justice studies faculty and alumni contribute to new book

"Abolish Criminology" features contributions by abolitionist professors, artists, poets, imprisoned and formerly imprisoned scholars from around the country

Cover of "Abolish Criminology" (2023) designed by Dara Kwayera Imani Bayer

Four UMass Dartmouth faculty and two alumnae contributed to the recently published Abolish Criminology, which presents critical scholarship on criminology and criminal justice ideologies and practices, alongside emerging freedom-driven visions and practices for new world formations.

Crime and justice studies (CJS) Professor Viviane Saleh-Hanna co-authored and co-edited the book with Jason M. Williams and Michael J. Coyle, also writing Chapter 1: "A Call for Wild Seed Justice" and Chapter 3: "The History of Criminology Is a History of White Supremacy."

Contributions from CJS faculty include Assistant Professor Toniqua Mikell, "Trans Black Women Deserve Better: Expanding Queer Criminology to Unpack Trans Misogynoir in the Field of Criminology," Assistant Professor Vanessa Lynn Lovelace, "Abolish the Courthouse: Uncovering the Space of 'Justice' in a Black Feminist Criminal Trial," and Associate Professor Erin Krafft, "Marxist Criminology Abolishes Lombroso, Marxist Criminology Abolishes Itself."

Biology BS '18 and MS '20 alum Charlemya Erasme authored, "Biology and Criminology Entangled: Education as a Meeting Point," and CJS alum Tatiana Lopes DosSantos '21 wrote the final chapter, "Civil Lies."

Description:

Abolish Criminology serves the needs of undergraduate and graduate students and educators in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. It will also appeal to scholars, researchers, policy makers, activists, community organizers, social movement builders, and various reading groups in the general public who are grappling with increased critical public discourse on policing and criminal legal reform or abolition.

The book introduces readers to a detailed history and analysis of crime as a concept and its colonizing trajectories into existence and enforcement. These significant contexts buried within peculiar academic histories and classroom practices are often overlooked or unknown outside academic spaces, causing the impact of racializing-gendering-sexualizing histories to extend and grow through criminology’s creation of crime. These extend how the concept is weaponized and enforced through the criminal legal system. Abolish Criminology offers written, visual, and poetic teachings from the perspectives of students, professors, imprisoned and formerly imprisoned scholars, and artists. This allows readers to engage in multi-sensory, inter-disciplinary, and multi-perspective teachings on criminology’s often discussed but seldom interrogated mythologies on violence and danger, while bringing to light their wide-reaching enforcements through criminology's research, theories, agencies, and dominant cultures.