Chasing Windmills

WindmillsCriminology in the United States has contributed much to the theoretical and empirical advance of criminology worldwide.However, along with its great contributions have come the opposite.To the latter can be added Conservative Criminology, a wide-ranging collection of accusations and claims against the perceived liberal bias of criminology in the United States, with the ancillary assumption that all that is not ideologically conservative is of no value theoretically and empirically to a scientific understanding of crime and, in turn, of criminal justice policy and practice.If one leans far enough to the right (or the left), the world does indeed seem to be that proverbial 'stacked deck of cards', but perception does not make the presumption true.Wright and DeLisi assert that only 'evidence-based' criminological research should be accepted, and then fail their own test on the very first page.They conclude that 'conservative faculty...report high levels of job and professional discrimination -something their liberal colleagues typically deny' (p. 1).Their evidence apparently comes from a 2012 article by Inbar and Lammers in a journal called Perspectives on Psychological Science (volume 7, number 5, pp.496-503).This article surveyed faculty in the specialization of social and personality psychology.It reported on only perceptions but slips at one place into talking about perceptions as actual incidents.Further, on a scale with scores ranging from 1 ('not at all') to 7 ('very much') about respondents' willingness to discriminate against those they disagree with ideologically, the averages across four possible types of discrimination was between 2.1 and 2.9, well below the midpoint.Immediately following this citation, Wright and DeLisi make the extraordinary claim that '...empirical studies from a variety of sources find statistical evidence that being branded 'conservative' frequently results in loss of jobs, reduced professional status, and having your scholarly work impugned' (pp.1-2).No other evidence is provided, i.e. no citations to back up this assertion.It required less than 45 minutes of my time and less than one page (plus two lines of the next page) of text to find this false colouring of reality.

Computer Science · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Psychopathy, Forensic Psychiatry, Sexual Offending

• The Ties That Bind

  Open Access•Story Edison, Dana L Haynie•Criminal Justice and Behavior•2024

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