ABSTRACT
Critical criminology has seen the delineation of several new and competing perspectives. These include left realist criminology, socialist-feminist criminology, peacemaking criminology, and poststructuralist criminology. This chapter addresses core themes that will lead to the establishment of the necessary and logically ordered elements of a constitutive criminology. Labeling theory tried to cover some of this ground, particularly in its notions of role engulfment and deviancy amplification. Constitutive criminology, then, is concerned with identifying the ways in which the interrelationships among human agents constitute crime, victims, and control as realities. Constitutive criminology, then, recognizes human agents’ power to undermine the structures that confront them and asserts that agents both use and are used in the generation of knowledge and truth about what they do. Agents’ ability to undermine and invert structures of control, to episodically render them edifices of subordination, is one of the major missing dimensions of conventional and critical criminology.
