Gregg Barak

Eastern Michigan University | EMU · Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology

In the contemporary age of financialization, more and more citizens of the world are living in debt bondage and finding themselves subject to those financial institutions that are endangering the global political economy. At this turning point in global capitalism, even if the “one percent” provided “clean slates” for the debtors of the world, whic...

Why are crimes of the suite punished more leniently than crimes of the street? When police killings of citizens go unpunished, political torture is sanctioned by the state, and the financial frauds of Wall Street traders remain unprosecuted, nothing succeeds with such regularity as the active failures of national states to obstruct the crimes of th...

In this article I make a case for the study of multinational corporate crime (MCC) as a sub-area of criminological investigation. After discussions on defining deviancy both down and up and on the need for seriously examining the workings of MCC and its control, the rest of the article uses three illustrations to describe the routinized noncriminal...

This article is not about controlling high-risk securities frauds through improved identification and enhanced enforcement of existing (or new) administrative, civil, and/or criminal laws. Instead, it is about demonstrating the futility of these strategies and revealing the structural necessities for developing other strategies of social control. I...

Social justice is a philosophical and transdisciplinary concept that has no particular or distinct disciplinary home. Social justice in theory and practice is part of the general evolution of justice in human civilizations, which is a part of the ongoing struggles against the repression of any people and on behalf of the liberation of all people. T...

Across the world, most people are well aware of ordinary criminal harms to person and property. Often committed by the powerless and poor, these individualized crimes are catalogued in the statistics collected annually by the FBI and by similar agencies in other developed nations. In contrast, the more harmful and systemic forms of injury to person...

Vincenzo Ruggiero’s latest book, The Crimes of the Economy, as the title suggests is a book about the crimes of the economy not to be confused with economic crimes per se. More specifically, it is a book about the history of the capitalist economy and the crimes that have accompanied this form of economic development, a story that is too rarely sha...

After a jury acquittal, the prosecutor explains the loss to the assembled media by saying that the jurors demanded too much of the government. They “wrongfully” acquitted the defendant only because the television show Crime Scene Investigation (“CSI”), or one of its many spin-offs and copycats, overly influenced them. According to the prosecutor, t...

CRIMES BY THE CAPITALIST STATE: An Introduction to State Criminality (CBCS) was the first book devoted entirely to the study of state crime, to call for the development of a criminology of the state, and to present several case studies of state crimes from North America, Latin America, Europe, and Down Under. Some of the state crimes covered in thi...

Part I of this article defines the "CSI effect", given that the phrase has come to have many different meanings ascribed to it. It emphasizes the epistemological importance of first describing the effect of the "CSI effect" as observed in juror behavior documented in a new study conducted in Wayne County (Detroit), Michigan, and then looking at cau...

As part of a larger investigation of the changing nature of juror behavior in the context of technology development, this study examined important questions unanswered by previous studies on the “CSI-effect.” In answering such questions, the present study applied multivariate and path analyses for the first time. The results showed that (a) watchin...

Research and theorizing on state crime has come to play an important role in the fields of criminology and criminal justice for understanding the worst of crimes: those of powerful state agencies and agents. Since William Chambliss’ (1989) ASC presidential address, scholars of state crime have made advances in theoretical modeling and analyzing cor...

Newsmaking criminology refers to the conscious efforts and activities of criminologists to interpret, influence or shape the representation of `newsworthy' items about crime and justice. In this reflexive and evaluative thought piece, I critically assess the value of this criminological intervention from the vantage point of the person who coined t...

Many prosecutors, judges and journalists have claimed that watching television shows like CSI have caused jurors to wrongfully acquit guilty defendants when no scientific evidence is presented. This is the first empirical study designed to investigate whether the CSI effect exists. This survey of 1027 persons called for jury duty in a State court l...

In the process of characterizing the dialectics of adversarialism and mutualism, a case is made for a reciprocal approach to peacemaking criminology. As part of the rationale for a reciprocity of making war or making peace, critiques are leveled at both ‘peacemaking’ and ‘warmaking’ criminology. The purposes of this essay are, on the one hand, to r...

Although there may be some value in debating the question of whatever happened to radical criminology, I believe that it is more productive to think in terms of radical and/or critical continuities in pedagogy, research, and practice that have survived time and can be linked to current efforts in visionary criminology and transformative justice. Ex...

Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding is the first book to provide an integrative, systematic approach to the study of violence and nonviolence in one volume. Eminent scholar and award-winning author Gregg Barak examines virtually all forms of violence—from verbal abuse to genocide—and treats all of these expressions of violence as in...

This article examines theimpact of globalization on both crime and crimecontrol at the national and global levels. Tomake conceptual sense out of the transformingnature of these activities at the turn of the21st century, a threefold analysis ispresented: (1) an overview of the threetraditional developmental models of crime andcrime control – modern...

Ce commentaire souligne les difficultes actuelles rencontees en matiere de conceptualisation, de recherche et de traitement du crime d'Etat. L'absence de consensus quant a la definition d'un crime d'Etat, ainsi que les reticences de la part des services relevant de l'Etat expliquent en partie certains blocages. Il fournit egalement une serie de rec...

In the emerging post-melting pot era, increasing tension and antipathy between racial and ethnic groups are present. These tensions also are emerging in public and political discourse, and are expressed in such terms as Eurocentric, Afrocentric, cultural literacy, politically correct, and multiculturalism. In this essay I argue that a “cultural lit...

This paper explores issues related to the analysis of a type of criminality frequently ignored in criminological literature: crimes of the state. It explores the potential of critical criminology to deal with state criminality via investigation of such issues as state interventions, overlapping activities of criminal versus non-criminal organizatio...

This paper is a limited attempt to synthesize the older and newer trends in radical criminology — to integrate the issues of criminalization, decriminalization, and victimization. The object of our endeavor is homelessness and how society responds to it. In the paper, we first examine the dialectics of criminalization, homelessness, and economic cr...

Although academicians in criminology and criminal justice have come to appreciate the importance of the media in constructing ideological images of crime and punishment, apparently they have not considered how to use mass communications for the purposes of informing, interpreting, and altering those images to reflect more realistically the social,...

This essay argues, on the one hand, that over the past decade or more, the individual and collective actions of women resisting domestic violence have helped to alter not only the ways in which women are labelled deviant but also the ways to which their victimization is responded. On the other hand, it argues that these personal and political chall...

Thesis (D.Crim.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1974. Photocopy of typescript.