ABSTRACT
Many would consider this view of social order, the law and the criminal justice system to be too simplistic and a denial of the reality that most people experience and, moreover, the individual nature of criminality cannot simply be regarded as a construction of the state. Critical criminologists have nevertheless posed a number of important questions and have attempted to critically interrogate dominant and orthodox perceptions of crime and criminal behaviour arguing that crime should not be perceived as a problem of individual offenders in society but as a process related to the wider economic and social structures of power. This is nevertheless a problematic analysis. Most criminal behaviour is not targeted against the dominant social order, while the criminal law is not just directed at keeping the less powerful in their place. Indeed, many of the weaker and poorer sections of our society need both the law and its agents in the criminal justice system to protect them from criminal elements living in their midst (Hopkins Burke, 1998b) and other former radical criminologists were to come to recognise that reality and eventually came to reconsider their stance and the very meaning of radicalism. These subsequently highly influential ‘left realists’ came to constitute the second variant of the former radical tradition – terming their former radical colleagues as ‘left idealists’ – and are themselves the focus of attention in Chapter 16.
