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This chapter provides a context for The Emerald International Handbook of Activist Criminology. It offers an overview of the small, yet burgeoning literature dedicated to ‘criminology activism’, which includes engagement with public criminology and various brands of critical criminology, as well as zemiology or the study of social harm beyond narrow state-centric definitions of crime. Among other things, the chapter considers the role academics might play in addressing social and criminal injustice, and the new opportunities afforded to both academics and activists – including citizen journalists and media professionals – by digital technologies and social media when intervening in campaigns for justice and formal criminal legal processes. To answer the question, why now, the chapter argues we are currently in the midst of an unprecedented period of upheaval requiring action from activists and academics alike, including criminologists engaged in social scientific research operating beyond the delusions of objectivity and value-neutrality, that is, politically engaged research aiming to remedy not only the absence of meaningful state intervention in crime and harm but also expose the role of corporations and the state itself in prosecuting and perpetuating crime and harm.

Inquiries, commissions, reviews and the promise of broader data collection about racial and gender disparities are now the reflex defensive responses from state institutions charged with grievous social harm, particularly in the UK. Recommendations from these exercises are rarely implemented. As criminologists, our ability to produce and analyse data that evidences or better illuminates social harm has long been a key offer of the discipline to activism.

How are we to respond to the very institutions activist criminologists seek to challenge immediately offering this very activity, invariably protracted and ineffectual, as a reflex response to activist challenge? This chapter explores this tension. Grounded in the work of groups struggling to end police stop and search, it considers the strategy impasse around research and data production that faces grassroots activists and their accomplice researchers. The chapter proposes new routes for collaboration and action across activist and criminologist communities that may help move past the ‘data trap’. In short, it seeks to answer: do activists need more evidence?

This chapter examines the prisoners’ strike which took place throughout Great Britain in August 1972. The strike, the first of its kind in British penal history, took place against a background of sub-standard conditions in British prisons, with an outdated prison estate, overcrowding, ‘slopping out’, and a prison department preoccupied with secrecy. The strike was not a sporadic protest, rather it occurred during a year of social and political unrest both inside and outside prisons, and was led by an organisation of prisoners and ex-prisoners – the Union for the Preservation of the Rights of Prisoners (PROP). While the government recognised the need for improvements in prison conditions, it refused to recognise the right of prisoners to organise. An analysis of the 1972 strike and the role of PROP can inform contemporary penal reform and abolitionist debates among scholars, practitioners, activists, prisoners and ex-prisoners.

Professional boundary violations – intentional blurring, minimising or exploiting of institutions’ ethical and legal frameworks – have the potential to cause significant harm to prisoners, staff, prison systems and the public. There has been little empirical research on the nature, extent and impact of boundary violations in UK prisons. The purpose of this paper is to synthesise and critically review studies which have sought to explore, measure and predict boundary violative behaviour, with a view to direct future research and inform prison policies and practices.

Four internet-based bibliographic databases were used for this review. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied. Twenty studies published between 2001 and 2022 were included in this review.

There is a lack of comprehensive self-report measures around prison boundary violations. Staff and prisoner characteristics, as well as prison-specific conditions, are linked with boundary violations. Staff training, improved working conditions and amnesty programmes as well as bolstered surveillance and restricted cross-sex staff deployment were among recommendations to reduce boundary violations. “Insider” researchers offer insight and access opportunities, but they also pose ethical implications. Current studies have research design, participant sampling and measurement scale limitations which compromises the applicability of findings. Prisons need robust policies on defining, reporting, punishing and recovering from boundary violations. Collaboration between prison institutions and academics, using individuals with experience of both professions, is essential to understand, predict and reduce boundary violations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first review of empirical studies on professional boundary violations in prison.

This chapter will discuss some of the issues involved in navigating learning delivery involving sensitive topics to students from diverse and ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds. It will examine the ways in which biographical narratives can be employed to promote openness, negate stigma, create ‘safe spaces’ and help develop an atmosphere of trust. For students who may have previously encountered some of the issues being taught, they can be encouraged to draw on their personal lived experience to aid learning for their peers and add an often raw and sometimes deeply moving authenticity to the classroom. Of course, there must be care taken to avoid emotional harm and the ethical issues of such an approach will also feature in this reflection.

The purpose of this research is to analyze the role of gender in the commission of white collar crimes and investigate it in five countries: Norway, Portugal, America, India and Iran.

Descriptive analytical method is used in this article.

A total of five observations were examined about the rank and percentage of women's participation in white-collar crimes, namely, from Norway (rank 3, 7%), USA (rank 26, 5%), Portugal (29th rank, 13%), India (rank 135, 11%) and Iran (rank 143, 5%). As is visually obvious, there seems to be no relationship between the level of gender equality and the percentage of women involved in white-collar crimes. However, according to Hobbs, in most research, the issue of gender and its effect on the occurrence of white-collar crimes have not been addressed, but by using the limited statistics and limited information available, it can be concluded that a small number of women have committed this crime. According to global crime reports, only 15 out of 200 prosecutions for white-collar crimes involve women.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this article is original and has been submitted only to this journal and has not been submitted to another journal at the same time.

The struggle against torture and institutional violence has to be practiced in numerous scenarios: in the very places of deprivation of liberty, against workers, administrations and judges who try to hide it or justify it, but also, it’s a struggle against an academy that, too often, has decided to look the other way. In order to be activist, criminology must leave the classroom and enter the places of deprivation of liberty. It must engage with victims and survivors and it has to make political and social denunciations, organising itself and weaving networks with other social organisations that fight for the same goal. Unfortunately, it also has to fight against the very obstacles that the criminal justice system institutions pose; the denunciations and persecution of these same institutions and some police and prison workers groups and unions; the dirty war against terrorism and political dissent; and the criminalisation of some mass media and also of the academic world, where activism against this phenomenon is a minority and marginalised. These two sides of the same coin, involvement in anti-torture activist movements, as well as persecution and criminalisation when challenging state power, is what the authors of this chapter have experienced in Catalonia and Spain. While we fight against torture outside the classroom, we also carry out activism inside the classroom, teaching what other academics do not want to engage with, and pointing out the political elements of criminology and the action of the penal system. In this chapter, the authors highlight the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in custody and prison, and in the context of police activity in Spain. Then, the authors explain the structures of denial (political, judicial and academic) that allow its perpetuation and impunity. The text ends with a journey through the configuration of activist criminology in Spain that unites critical analysis from a legal sociology perspective with collective and activist intervention.