Toward a Radical Ecology of Urban Violence

This article examines explanations of violent crime from a critical criminological perspective. Some readers may get no further than the title of this chapter because criminologists generally believe that critical criminology is theoretically abstract, anti-empirical, and devoid of policy implications. To be sure, these criticisms apply to some types of critical criminology. Today, however, numerous empirically situated, policy-relevant, theoretically cogent critical analyses of crime exist (see Lynch, Michalowski & Groves, 2000).