Critical criminology on the European continent: Its history, rise, fall and resurrection

This article traces the history of critical criminology in Europe, while not disregarding American developments. First the question 'What is critical criminology?' is answered, and then the development of critical criminology in Europe is discussed from the precursors and the intellectual tradition, through the tougher successor of interactionist criminology, impulses from political economics to structuralist elaborations of control and strain theory. Other factors, such as legal theoretical impulses, penal reform and criminal justice politics, social psychology and critical criminology are also taken into account. After that, the author expands on crises in critical criminology and the critical perspectives in the 1980s and 1990s: left realism, feminist criminology, from structuralism to postmodernism. The last question posed is the necessity of critical criminology in the late 1990s.