Review of Jock Young, The Criminological Imagination: Cambridge, UK & Malden, USA: Polity, 2011. ISBN-13:978-0-7456-4106-5 (hardcover), ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4107-2 (paperback), 252 pages, $21.73 (paperback)

Asian Criminology (2014) 9:161163

DOI 10.1007/s11417-012-9151-1

BOOK REVIEW

Review of Jock Young, The Criminological Imagination

Cambridge, UK & Malden, USA: Polity, 2011.

ISBN-13:978-0-7456-4106-5 (hardcover), ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4107-2 (paperback),252 pages, $21.73 (paperback)

Jianhua Xu

Received: 1 August 2012 /Accepted: 2 August 2012 /Published online: 17 August 2012 # The Author(s) 2012. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

Half a century ago, American sociologist C. Wright Mills pointed out that the sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise (Mills 1959:6). In his classic The Sociological Imagination, Mills identified in particular two factors endangering the sociological imagination in his times: grand theory and abstracted empiricism, both of which, he argued, made academics lose contact with social reality.

Five decades later, in the concluding piece of his trilogy,1 The Criminological Imagination, Jock Young traces how abstracted empiricism has expanded on a level which would have surely astonished Mills himself, and how in criminology reality has been lost in a sea of statistical symbols and dubious analysis (p.viii). Indeed, as Stan Cohen comments on the back cover of the book, the terms criminology and imagination do not naturally belong together.

In this book, Young first identifies the rise of a new genre of criminological writing which, he argues, has stifled imagination in criminology since the mid-1980s and which has become dominant in contemporary mainstream criminology. He outlines a typical example:

The introduction usually presents two theories in competitionfollowed by an extensive discussion of measures, the practicalities of measurement become more important than what is being measured, while the data themselves are usually outsourced from some past study, or bought in from a survey firm, an obligatory regression (sic) analysis follows, an erudite statistical equation is a definite plus, and then the usually inconclusive results are paraded before us (p.16).

Young goes further to criticize such positivist research, arguing the more quasi-scientific the rhetoric, the more sophisticated the statistics, the more that they are distanced from what they are studying, the more secure they feel (p.13).

For me, the most interesting part of Youngs book is that his diagnosis of the problems in...