Streets of terror: marginalization, criminalization, and authoritarian renewal

In: Social justice: a journal of crime, conflict and world order, Band 31, Heft 1/2

Abstract

Notes that the inevitable consequence of authoritarianism was and remains, the net-widening process of criminalization. The focus on violence, often exaggerated through sensationalist media reporting, "makes it easier to mobilize popular measures of support for containment". The assertion is that criminalization does not happen in a vacuum. Each definitional moment in the roll call of acts ascribed meaning as crimes has to be interpreted and analyzed in its historical, social, political, and economic context. Thus, criminalization is influenced by contemporary politics, economic conditions, and dominant ideologies, reflecting and responding to the determining contexts of social class, gender, sexuality, race and age. (Original abstract - amended)