ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how debates around public criminology, an aspirational vector of criminology’s intellectual life, have proceeded largely in an insular fashion without engaging broader and deeper intellectual traditions of social justice. I take up the problem of how oppressed groups, who make up the directly impacted of criminal justice, have been omitted in such discussions and the implications for criminology of activist scholars having pursued their knowledge work elsewhere. I argue criminologists have largely missed—and can benefit from studying—the work of a different kind and far more pervasive “public criminology,” one that occurs without any need for the construct itself. It, quite simply, does the work of social justice.
