Richard Quinney's the Social Reality of Crime: A Marked Departure from and Reinterpretation of Traditional Criminology

ON THE OCCASION OF THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PUBLICATION of THE Social Reality of Crime (Quinney 1970a), the November 2010 Meeting of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) in San Francisco featured a panel to discuss the legacy and continuing relevance of this pathbreaking book. (1) Richard Quinney authored over 30 books and nearly 80 articles in his lifetime and recently ranked among the top 10 most-cited scholars in criminology (Wozniak 2011,223). The Social Reality of Crime has continued to be popular and influential up to current times. The issues and concerns it raised are featured in widely adopted contemporary textbooks in introductory sociology (Schaefer 2010; Witt 2010), criminology (Brown, Esbensen, and Geis 2013; Siegel 2007), and criminological theory (Lilly, Cullen, and Ball 2011; Void, Bernard, and Snipes 2002). As Richard Quinney (2000a, xi) noted: In the preface to my book, The Social Reality of Crime, published in 1970,1 stated that my purpose was to provide a reorientation to the study of crime. It was my intention to create a new theoretical perspective for criminology, drawing from past criminology but informing the new perspective with the sensibility that was forming at the end of the 1960s. In a new introduction to the fourth printing of the book (Quinney 2008, ix), Javier Trevino wrote: Three decades after it was published, Richard Quinney's The Social Reality of Crime remains an eloquent and important statement on crime, law and justice.... At the time of its appearance in 1970, the theory of the social reality of crime--as a critical reinterpretation of criminology--not only liberated the field from being a recitation of the policies of the police, courts, and corrections, it also, and more importantly, represented a marked departure from the traditional analysis of crime that viewed criminal behavior as pathological in nature. In this spirit, the following commentaries add further perspective to the legacy of The Social Reality of Crime for present and future analyses of crime. Francis T. Cullen: The Social Reality of Crime--The Lessons Learned When Chuck Reasons kindly invited me to participate in the ASC panel celebrating Richard Quinney's seminal work, I must confess that I was honored--of course-- but also perplexed. I was not one of Richard's students, nor am I typically seen as someone who lives in the critical-peacemaking end of the discipline--though I do occasionally hang out there. So, I quickly redirected Chuck's attention to my good friend and Quinney scholar, John Wozniak. Chuck thought that including John was a great idea and said, "Good, now you can both be on the panel!" This inability to avoid participating in the session occasioned acute anxiety, because I immediately panicked about what the hell I could say. But Chuck's invitation had the unanticipated--and positive--consequence of prompting me to revisit Richard's The Social Reality of Crime. This book resides on a shelf in my office--as it has for over three decades-- just several feet from where I sit at my desk. The difficulty with age is that books that I read in graduate school as exciting new contributions have been transformed at my current career stage into historical works! But as I revisited The Social Reality of Crime, I not only recalled how important this volume was on my first read, but also realized how so much of its content continues to ring true and to illuminate today's crime and justice issues. Indeed, Richard's erudition in this treatise is extraordinary, ranging from philosophy to the sociology of law to criminology. It is a book that contains many lessons. Younger criminologists, in particular, should be encouraged to enjoy an excursion through its chapters. Although the book may be "old" in years, they certainly will find many "new" ideas to weigh seriously in it. …