Kill method - a provocation

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009
Kill Method: A Provocation
Jeff Ferrell, Texas Christian University
As criminologists we face two contemporary crises. The first is the unfolding crisis of global capitalism and state governance, and with it the spiraling social harms of dislocation, incarceration, impoverishment, and environmental degradation. Amidst these spiraling harms will surely emerge, sadly, a further host of phenomena demanding the critical attention of criminologists: new forms of acquisitive violence, new crimes attuned to economic and existential uncertainty, new moments of down-market corporate malfeasance, new strains on social and environmental sustainability, and new patterns of state surveillance and control. Perhaps this crisis holds the promise of progressive change—but if Marx and Merton were even half right, it most certainly contains the sorts of contradictions out of which new forms of crime and predation will emerge.
The second crisis is the crisis of criminology. Criminology is today crippled by its own methodology, its potential for analysis and critique lost within a welter of survey forms, data sets, and statistical manipulations. Worse, criminology has given itself over to a fetishism of these methodologies. Methods such as these are not only widely and uncritically utilized by contemporary criminologists—they are detailed and reified to the point that, for many criminologists, they have now replaced crime and crime control as the de facto subject matter of the discipline. The crisis of criminology doubles back on itself; criminology first embraces methods wholly inadequate and inappropriate for the study of human affairs, and then makes these methods its message.

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Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, Vol 1 (1) 2009
This second crisis precludes criminology’s progressive engagement with the first.
Over the past few decades surveys, statistics, and other