ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates what makes public criminology “public.” It recognizes that there is not one public, but, instead, multiple publics and that the role of public criminology is to engage those publics in a dialog. It reviews the ways such engagement has occurred historically through minimal pronouncements in the public sphere, to the hazardous collaboration with government agencies, to direct but diffuse engagement through “newsmaking criminology.” It criticizes public criminology for limiting its conception of “publics” to passive actors in need of criminological insight and influence. Instead it proposes an active agency model of the human subject as knowledge producers and suggests that in such an approach the role of public criminology should be to include the knowledge of non-academics as part of a knowledge democracy. Finally, the chapter argues that public criminologists should form partnerships with its various publics through a process of deliberative democracy targeting their efforts toward strategically impacting the existing political process.
