Reflexivity in Criminological Research

Abstract

The discipline of criminology can and often does involve doing research for the powerful, those social control agents and organisations responsible for the creation and maintenance of definitions, labels and boundaries of crime and markers of criminality. According to Barbara Hudson (2000, 177),[o]f all the applied social sciences, criminology has the most dangerous relationship to power: the categories and classifications, the labels and diagnoses and the images of the criminal produced by criminologists are stigmatizing and pejorative. The strategies of control and punishment which utilize those conceptions have implications for the life-chances, for the opportunities freely to move around our cities, and for the rights and liberties, of those to whom they are applied.