Journal of Criminal Justice 36 (2008) 563–572

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Journal of Criminal Justice

What is good criminal justice theory?

John P. Crank ⁎, Blythe A. BowmanSchool of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Nebraska, Omaha, NE 68182, United States

⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 402 213 9194.E-mail address: jcrank@mail.unomaha.edu (J.P. Cran

0047-2352/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. Aldoi:10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2008.09.005

a b s t r a c t

a r t i c l e i n f o

This article assesses currentappeals to empirical validatare consistent with a scientimodel of social science. Bo

work in criminal justice theory and identifies two criteria for theory—that whichion, and that which appeals to historical tradition. Appeals to empirical validationfic model, while appeals to historical tradition are consistent with an interpretiveth models are described and the way in which each contributes to theory in

criminal justice is discussed.© 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Nabokov once said of Invitation to a Beheading “I know a fewreaders who will jump up, ruffling their hair,” to which Nafisi (2004,p. 22) replied, “Well, absolutely.” Anyone reading Invitation wouldlikely agree. It challenges, feigns, shifts in one directionwhile blurringinto another, its characters come in and out of existence, and theending is...well…explaining the ending is like describing a dream tosomeone who has never had one. It is a tactile, plastic work, a workthat shouldmake anyone in the justice fields uncomfortable about heror his work.1

Is Invitation good theory? It is certainly good fiction. There is norule that says that theory cannot be fiction; indeed, in a sense alltheory is fiction in its original meaning, in that it places into reliefpatterns of human behavior as those patterns are imagined by thetheorist. As Gadamer (1976) noted, theory in the social sphere isalways an alienation—an interpretation abstracted from the processesit seeks to represent. There are not concrete things out there thatrepresent the stuff of criminal justice research—stuff like justice, dueprocess, or police culture—that exist independently of the conceivingmind. The line between theory and fiction, however rigorously drawn,will always be highly interpretive.

How, then, does one know if a writing is also a good theory? Arethere a set of rules that one can look to that will tell what a goodtheory is? Certainly, rules abound for theoretical construction. Yet, theimposition of rules on theory carries a dispensation—that whatever isoutside the rules is not-theory and should not be considered alegitimate source of ideas on how to theorize a topic. For justiceresearch, especially at this early stage of theoretical development, isthere “not-theory” to discard as the field moves forward? To say whatcannot be theory is close to saying what body of ideas cannot beconsidered as justice.

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l rights reserved.

The issue of theory goes to the heart of the field of criminal justice.Should the field be thought of as the study of the U.S. criminal justiceapparatus, with theory rigorously located within that focused inquiry?Should the field have a more open-ended inquiry, looking at thedifferent kinds of meanings that justice can have? Further, theory hasimplications for methods—should one stay within the scientificboundaries, intent on the criterion of statistical regularity in thevalidation of theory development? Should one look at theory morelocally andmore interpretively, tying it more closely to theworld of itsactors, or as Geertz (1994) put it, a more thickly descriptive approach?

An attempt to codify theory is not an innocuous project. Whenthinking about rules for the selection or construction of theory, onemust be beware of the implications of canon—the notion that a selectbody of works embody the important meanings of the field. Canon isalways a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it provides its scholarsand students with a sense of the identity and great works of a field. Onthe other, it tends to fix a field, locating it in space and time andproviding a boundary on its identity that might inhibit flexibilityand adaptation. Definitions of theory carry the same potentiallimitations—by adopting a set of formal procedures for definingwhat constitutes theory, one creates an area of non-theory that mightbe fertile for understanding or expanding justice practices.

This article is about theory in the field of criminal justice. Thatcriminal justice is an academic field is itself an open question. Thedistinction between the discipline of criminal justice and criminologyis not established in any sort of academic sense. The core identity ofthe field of criminal justice—whether it be policy oriented, inter-disciplinary, a criminology, or a field organized under the umbrella ofjustice broadly conceived—is up in the air (see Crank, 2003). Yet, in thecurrent era, a number of writers are developing theory specificallylocated under a criminal justice rubric. Whether criminal justice has“come of age,” as Clear (2001) has asked and ignited controversy withthe question, the development of a body of theory appropriate for afield of criminal justice is proceeding apace.

This article looks at theory as it pertains to criminal justice broadly,by contrasting scientific social science theory to interpretive (also

Fig. 1. Snipes and Maguire’s (2007) five-pronged test to identify criminal justice theory.

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called hermeneutic) theory. Interpretive approaches are consideredbecause they have historically provided the most wide-reachingchallenges to scientific notions of social science theory (Gadamer,1981; Geertz, 1994; Giddens, 1976). By “playing” the two approachesto theory building against each other, one acquires a sense of thestrengths and weaknesses of each. The outcome of this “play” is not adiscredit of either approach, but is intended to foster a keenerunderstanding of the nature of the kinds of knowledge that the field ofcriminal justice develops as it forms theoretical identity.

This articlewill “play” issues in the social science of criminal justice asfollows. First, it will look at four works specifically written for criminaljustice theory in the recent past. Second, it will consider the scientificmodel of social science, which appears to be the dominant model incriminal justice today, and at a hermeneutic model of social science,selected for this article and discussed in detail because this model posesbasic questions to the scientific model traditionally understood. Third,this article looks at convergences between the two perspectives. Thissection is presented to move the discussion beyond an “either-or”conclusion regarding scientific and interpretive bases to knowledge,describing similarities consistentwith theway other social sciences haveadapted their fields to both philosophies of social science. Theconclusions are presented as a “classroomdiscussion” in order to providea broad statement of the contribution of both perspectives to theory.

Contemporary works on criminal justice theory

The development of criminal justice theorymarks a passage. It is thetransition of the academicfield of criminal justice through its normative,nascent and inchoate youth, and—one hopes—toward some notion ofacademic maturity. It might be best to think of the formal developmentof theory in criminal justice as a stage inwhich it develops the scholarlycapacity to reflect on itself. This stage is embodied in a corpus of ideasthat, hopefully, helps criminal justice become something more than aspecialized sociology, a branch of political science, a psychology of thedark side, or at worst, a multidisciplinary field absent core identity andconstrained to the fringes of academic recognition.

Four works have been written that specifically aim at the develop-ment of criminal justice theory. Two might be called scientific,2 in thesense that they tend to view theoretical development in terms of rigor inempirical hypothesis testing. Two can be described as interpretive,which means that they seem to be based on their author's personalestimations of the general theoretical traditions of the field, with a focuson big ideas with rich historical traditions.3 The scientific models arethose of Bernard and Engel (2001) and Duffee and Maguire (2007). Theinterpretive models are those of Crank (2003) and Kraska (2004, 2006).

The first perspective on theory-building considered here is Bernardand Engel's (2001) meta-theoretical model for theory construction. Thefield of criminal justice, the authors noted, has been focused on practice,and further scholarly progress of criminal justice as a scientific field willdepend on its ability to develop theoretically. What theoretical regime,they ask, would provide a way for the field to advance? Bernard andEngel presented a model for theoretical growth grounded in scientificnotions of criminal justice and organized in terms of empirical validitytesting. Existing criminal justice theories should be grouped first by thedependent variables. They argued that dependent variables were ofthree types: behaviors of criminal justice agents, behaviors of criminaljustice organizations, and characteristics of the justice system and itscomponents. The effects of independent variables, drawn from differenttheoretical perspectives, should then be empirically compared for theirrelative explanatory power. Theories that provide little explanatoryvalue could then be discarded. Theoretical unification, it is hoped, couldbe achieved through this kind of empirical testing.

A second scientific perspective on criminal justice theory-buildingis found in the work of Duffee and Maguire (2007). Their edited workconsidered here is organized normatively; first, as an overview ofcriminal justice theory, then of those organizations responsible for U.S.

criminal justice process—policing, the courts, and corrections. Scho-lars in each area wrote chapters assessing the general state of theoryin each organizational area.

Unlike Bernard and Engel (2001), who provided a meta-theoreticalconception of theory building, the chapters in Duffee and Maguire's(2007) work generally provide an empirically grounded notion oftheory development.4 This means that theory emerged from con-tinuities identified in the systematic assessment of findings fromempirical research conducted in each area.5

Two factors, Duffee and Maguire (2007) observed, affect how oneshould think about criminal justice theory: (1) the boundaries of thefield of criminal justice, and (2) what kind of social sciencemethodology should be used for theory-testing. The boundaries—that region that marks criminal justice identity, are described asfollows:

Criminal justice theory seeks to explain and examine thevariations in, and the causes of, aspects of governmental socialcontrol systems, which select the criminal sanction over otherforms of social control and shape the nature of the criminalsanction to be employed. (p. I-24)6

Importantly, the authors did not limit the definition of theory to U.S.criminal justice systems, practices, or attitudes. This allows for a quitebroad notion of justice practices to enter into the ambit of appropriatetheoretical inquiry. Additionally, the definition states a focus ongovernmental-level criminal justice systems, so it does not appear toallow for theory that focuses on non-state actors such as AmnestyInternational.

With regard to methodology, Duffee and Maguire (2007) aresolidly in the ranks of the scientific model of social science methods.This is suggested by chapter two, in which Snipes and Maguire (2007)offer a five-pronged test to identify criminal justice theory, adaptedfrom Dubin (1978). It is presented in Fig. 1.

The five-pronged test in Fig. 1 accomplished several purposes. Itbounded the arena of interest to official responses to potentiallycriminal behavior. That potentiality must be reasonable. The entitycarrying out the official response must be a part of the criminal justicesystem. Additionally, the theory must fit the model of accepted socialscience standards.

Crank (2003) presented a sharply different notion of criminaljustice theory, questioning both the boundaries in contemporarycriminal justice practice and the use of scientific methods. An open-ended notion of justice, not a more focused identity of Americancriminal justice, should be the central organizing concept of the field.Crank argued that justice could not be conceived only in terms ofcrime control practice. There are simply too many competing claimsand beliefs regarding the meanings and purposes of justice. Justice isat its core problematic: an open-ended inquiry whose meaningscannot be fixed. The role of social science inquiry was not to findcommon ground, but to explore the many forms justice can take (seeWarnke, 1999). With regard to the field of inquiry, Crank provided noboundaries at all. Crank can be said to ground his work in a challenge

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to what he viewed as the conflation of the term justice with U.S.criminal justice practices, taking the position that it is a “black box”term—a term, according to Latour (1987), whose meanings becometaken for granted, but when considered closely are subject to broadand contested interpretations.7

Kraska (2004, 2006, p. 6) looked at theory in terms of “orientationsof understanding.” He selected the term “orientations” becausethey were ways of thinking that “orient our thinking about criminaljustice and crime control in specific ways.” His works identified theimplications of eight different orientations for thinking about thenature of the criminal justice system—each telling the story ofcriminal justice from a different point of view or reference. Thepurpose of these orientations was to show that the field's diversity ofthought was a theoretical strength. Kraska also referred to orienta-tions as metaphors (see Morgan, 1986) because they highlightedcertain aspects of scholarly thinking about criminal justice. Hisconcept of orientations is quite similar to the interpretive notion oftraditions in that both represent schools of thinking carried byparticular groups, and so his way of organizing theory is consistentwith an interpretive notion of theory building.

Kraska framed the boundaries of theory by locating the purposes ofanalysis towhat he called the criminal justice “apparatus.”He selectedthe term apparatus rather than the more commonly used criminaljustice “system,” in order to include non-state actors and othergroups such as the media who are associated with justice practice.Apparatus was a finesse on the term “system,” typically used as anumbrella term to describe the tens of thousands of organizations thatmake up U.S. penal practices. Apparatus also served to broaden thefocus of analysis. Through the use of terms such as “apparatus” and“orientations,” Kraska sought to keep the field boundaries open andflexible.

These four theoretical works vary on two dimensions pertinent tothis article—whether they find theory to be good because it is ofsustained interest to particular communities of interest, or because itcan be empirically validated. Crank and Kraska derived theirconceptions of criminal justice theory from broad, open conceptionsof justice. Both, additionally, selected perspectives that they perceivedto represent current trends in the field of criminal justice, thoughCrank expanded his theory stable with perspectives adapted fromother social sciences. Their work can be said to appeal to recognizabletheoretical traditions in criminal justice or a related field. That is, thesetheories had gained legitimacywithin scholarly communities involvedin the development of the field of criminal justice, and they “fit” theauthors' notions of the more important ways justice was conceptua-lized. This can be called theoretical development by appeal totradition. Appeals to tradition are always interpretive—they find thevalue of a perspective in a community of interest. The meaning of acorpus of ideas in a work are consequently the interpreted productproduced by the intent of the author, the traditions of interpretationthat have been appended to thework over time, and the perspective ofthe reader.

For example, both Crank and Kraska selected critical theory,typically traced to the writings of Marx. Critical theory has been ofsustained interest by a scholarly community that has established itselfas a source of critique of Western capitalism.8 The body of work thatmakes up this historical tradition contains not only the originalwritings of Marx, but subsequent works that have interpreted Marx,and work on conflict theory, class, and political economy. For example,Reiman's (2004) assessment of ideology, class, and criminal justice,now in its seventh edition, is a current work that falls solidly withinthis tradition and shows that critical writings continue to receivesupport within an academic community of interest in the field ofcriminal justice. Finally, student and instructor discussions in theclassroom, or contemporary monographs, are the most currentactualization of the way in which that corpus of work and attachedmeaning find life for current readers.

These works differ on two important dimensions. Bernard andEngel (2001) and Duffee and Maguire (2007) located their ideas ofgood theory in clearly defined notions of criminal justice, through theuse of crisp theoretical definitions, and by assessing empiricalresearch. This approach can be described as an appeal to empiricalverification. Legitimacy of theory was based on the extent to whichhypotheses could be empirically validated. Conceptual terms areclearly defined and have measurable empirical referents. When oneconsiders critical theory in this way, one finds its value in the extent towhich it has been empirically tested and not rejected. That it might besupported or advocated by a community of interest, independent ofempirical testing, is irrelevant. The history of the works associatedwith the Marxian tradition is important only insofar as that historyclarifies its conceptual definitions, empirical linkages, and testingprocedures.

Notions of good theory, as this article interprets them from thesefour works, are difficult to reconcile in terms of each other. If onefollows the lead of Snipes and Maguire (2007) and of Bernard andEngel (2001) because of their emphasis on scientific rigor, does thismean that the only good theory is that which falls within the ambit ofthe scientific model of social science? Put differently, should amethodological issue—the ability to measure concepts—drive whatone finds to be acceptable theory?

On the other hand, if one prefers Crank (2003) and/or Kraska(2004, 2006) for their appeal to tradition, is one opening the door forany old thing to be studied as theory that dares to call itself such andhas a following? For example, can one call liberal and conservativepolitical ideologies theories, even recognizing that they make use of acoded and partisan language?

Herein is a most interesting puzzle. From what high captain'sperch can one choose which is a better way to theorize criminaljustice? What standpoint outside of theory can one take to decidewhich is the best way to think about theory? These questionspush the inquiry toward the philosophy of the social sciences toexamine these different theoretical perspectives. Perhaps philoso-phy of social science can help answer the question—which is bettertheory?

Theoretical implications of different models of social science

The scientific model of social science. The first two works, Bernardand Engel (2001) and Duffee and Maguire (2007), were based in ascientific model of the social sciences. The empirical model of sciencehas been widely studied in the philosophy of science. Popper (2000)famously provided central elements of the scientific model of theory,widely studied and recognized for their general applicability,presented in Fig. 2.

The empirical conception of science presented in Fig. 2 is integralto the physical sciences. This model is not politically neutral. To thecontrary, its elements represented—and continue to represent—foundational challenges to hierarchical bases of knowledge. Scientifictheory emerged as an Enlightenment challenge to the centralhierarchies of the Middle Ages, church and state. Its challengestemmed from its notion of “truth.” That which one takes as truth,the products of scientific research, can be derived from one's ownobservations. If the church says something about what it means to behuman, one can measure it and see if it is true. If the government tellssomeonewhat it is doing, well, that person can go out and gather datato see if it is true from their (scientific) point of view.

The scientific model of social science is strongly democratic. It stripsauthority over knowledge from the state and church and relocates it inthe individual citizen. It should never be thought of as politicallyneutral, because it is at every step a challenge to the knowledgeproduced, legitimated, and controlled by central state hierarchies.

The challenge of science to hierarchies of church and statecontinue to be vibrant in the current era. For example, the scientific

Fig. 2. Popper's model of empirical science.

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theory of evolution has been the subject of a great deal of debate bythose who believe that evolution and divine human origins areincompatible notions. In 2005, the Kansas Board of Education votedsix to four to approve public school science standards that cast doubton the scientific theory of evolution. It was the third time in six yearsthat the board had rewritten standards regarding the teaching ofevolution. The new standards were drafted with the assistance ofadvocates of “intelligent design,” a view of history that the universe isso complex that it must have been created by a higher power (CNN.com, 2005).

Intelligent design is widely supported in the United States. AGallup poll in 2006 found that over half of all Americans rejectedscientific evolution and believed that “God created man exactly howBible describes it” (Editor and Publisher, 2006). President George W.Bush in 2005 endorsed the teaching of intelligent design in schools(CNN.com, 2005). One can see in these challenges to evolution thatEnlightenment notions of science continue to be controversial.9

The scientific model has been central to theory development in thesocial aswell as the physical sciences. One can refer back toTimascheff's(1967) widely cited definition of sociological theory to find a definitionconsistent with the scientific model of social science. Timascheff wasselected because his work marks the critical time in the early history ofAmerican sociologywhen it began themove toward scientifically-basedempirical theory. According to Timascheff (1967):

A theory is a set of propositions complying, ideally, with thefollowing conditions: one, the propositions must be couched interms of exactly defined concepts; two, they must be consistentwith one another; three, they must be such that from them theexisting generalizations could be deductively derived; four, theymust be fruitful—show the way to further observations andgeneralizations increasing the scope of knowledge. (p. 10)

Popper's scientific model of science applied to social science isevident in Timascheff's description of theory. Timascheff (1967) notedthat “every theory...must be subjected to verification” (p. 10).Observation enables evaluation: generalizations—the root conceptsof theory—“are drawn from facts observed in the field or in closelyrelated fields” (p. 5). If theories postulate different outcomes,observation methods must be used to decide which theory is mostcompatible with the “testing experience.” This is a notion of socialscience theory grounded in empirical observation and subjected totesting and falsification.

The goodness of the four criminal justice works can be assessed interms of the scientific model of social science theory. The works of

Duffee and Maguire (2007) and of Bernard and Engel (2001) areorganized in terms of the scientific model. From the vista of thescientific model of the social sciences, they are good models for thedevelopment of theory. Kraska (2004, 2006) and Crank's (2003, 2004)works, on the other hand, appear less well scientifically organized.Kraska seems somewhat out of focus, concerned primarily with bigideas and showing incidental regard to their testability. Crank, on theother hand, appears to be positively misguided, arguing that criminaljustice theory should be organized around an immeasurable andopen-ended idea of justice, and that the recognition of the limitationsof standpoint theory undercuts even the possibility of commonidentification of a neutral terminology for scientific testing.

The hermeneutic model of the social sciences. The works of Crank(2003, 2004) and Kraska (2004, 2006) are more consistent with ahermeneutic approach to social science because the selection oftheories appeals to tradition and to communities of interest. Thehermeneutic philosophy rejects fundamental elements of the scientificapproach. One such fundamental element in empirical science is thenotion that a field can develop a neutral or objective language—ascientific discourse—through which it can translate the world into anobject of its research. The problem is that, to have a neutral language,the language must be tied to things—it must represent things—in somesort or underlying reality on which all can agree. In the social world,however, these things do not exist. Giddens (1976) observed that therewas not, at the level of reality substrate, a layer of social knowledge thatis “certain.” The perspectives of social scientists were instead a productof their historical traditions. Social scientists used social meaningsthrough a discourse that they are already inside of, peering outwardfrom their discourse to make sense of the intentions of whatever groupthey were interested in, oftentimes reinterpreting that group's behaviorinto the discourse already understood by social science. There was agreat deal of knowledge production, but no understanding.

Abstract concepts find meaning by an appeal to local sensoryexperiences. Consequently, the meanings of concepts are always aproduct of local sensory data, not universal truths. Attempts to findobjectivizing, neutral definitions of social concepts always push socialscientists back on their culturally understood meanings—and awayfrom any objective social reality. When someone asks what a crime is,for example, one might provide an example to which that person canrelate. Its meaning is rooted in concrete sensory experience. All thewords in the social science of criminal justice have meanings that areonly sensible locally and practically, finding their meaning withinparticular traditions, and they exist by appeal to what the senses show.This problem can be called Giddens' (1976, p. 135) caution: there is no“theoretically neutral observation language.” Knowledge, in otherwords, is always knowledge from a point of view; it represents one'shistorical perspective. Giddens' caution emphasizes the local basis ofsensory knowledge. Social knowledge is always rooted in localexperience and finds its meaning within particular communities ofinterest. Consequently, there is no independent, objective source thatone can turn to that will provide an impartial, neutral interpretation ofthe world.10

Giddens thus shifted social thought in a hermeneutic direction,and the hermeneutic model will be considered at this point as analternative to the scientific model. Hermeneutics, also called inter-pretive social science, has provided a notion of theory that challengescentral assumptions of the scientific model. If there is no neutrallanguage, how can one account for what one witnesses?

Consider the following thought experiment, intended to illustratethe interpretive challenge to a scientific social science. Imagine anapple falling from a tree. A scientist could, with a great deal ofmathematical precision, write and test an equation that wouldprecisely predict the velocity of the falling apple at any point in itstrajectory. Suppose, however, that there is a complication. What if therate at which the apple fell depended on the attitude of the apple?

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Imagine an experiment in which the scientist measures the velocityand finds that it changes. Sometimes it is fast, and sometimes it isslow. Suppose the apple was itself intentionally changing the rate atwhich it fell, and the scientist could not accurately assess the speedwith which the apple fell unless she took into account what the applewas thinking while it was falling?

This certainly makes physics a lot more complicated! Now thescientist cannot predict the behavior of the apple without knowingwhat the apple is thinking. She certainly cannot predict its futurebehavior with any accuracy, because she will never know ahead oftimewhat the applewill be thinking at some hypothetical future pointin time. What does she do to understand the apple's behavior? Well,she can ask the apple what it is thinking. Did it want to fall? Does itblindly accept its fate or rage against the dying of the light? Does itknow how to adequately express what it is thinking? Will, moreover,the scientist understand its answer? What if the scientist does notunderstand the language of the apple?

This is the interpretive issue writ in apples —one can only knowwhat the behavior of other people means by including the way theythink about their behavior into assessments of them. Can the scientistask one of them and find out? Should all of the apples? Is the scientisteven sure that their attitudes and behavior are related? What if theapples disagree about the reasons for what they did?

To know why the apple acted as it did, the scientist would have toknow what the behavior means for the apple. Meaning is alwaysmeaning for a subject, and to determine that meaning one must findout what the subject is thinking (Taylor, 1994). A theory of applebehavior has to be based on what the apple is thinking—a scientistcannot apply some objective notion of science to the apple to explainit. After all, it is its behavior, not the scientist's, that one seeks toexplain. The apple best understands its behavior, and a scientifictheorywill be the strongest to the extent that it fully comprehends theapple's reasons for its behavior. The apple has to tell the scientist that.

This is immensely complicated when one takes into considerationthat the meaning of the apple's behavior only exists in broader fieldsof meaning—the traditions in which it learned and practiced itsbehavior. The apple seems to be acting socially—its behavior seemstied to the behavior of other apples around it. Understanding themeaning of the actions of the apple, consequently, can only occur bylocating its individual behavior in that broader field of behavior. Thismeans that meaning, for the apple, is always contextualized—it occurswithin a broader field of meanings. To understand human action in thefield of criminal justice—the “apples” that constitute the subjectmatter of the justice fields—the scientist has to figure out whatbehavior means to the actors in it, recognizing that those meaningsare always intersubjective and find their meanings in an intersubjec-tive field of meaning. The scientist needs to know the meanings asapples see them, and the scientist needs to tie thatmeaning to broaderstructures of meaning (Taylor, 1994). This is certainly a lot morecomplicated than studying atoms!

Structure of meaning—webs of significance, to borrow Geertz'sfabulous phrase—are more than some dictionary notion of agreementor consensus. Taylor emphasized that common understandings of theworld have to already be in place before consensus can occur.Common understandings require shared language and sharedexperience. This means, in the language of hermeneutics, that peopledevelop shared meanings because they are similarly situated in aparticular historical tradition. These terms—structures of meaning,webs of significance, and historical traditions, all mean similar things,except that the idea of a historical tradition also means that themeanings individuals have of themselves as social beings, is located inparticular places and times. The less one as a scientist knows of them,the further one is from that historical tradition, the less oneunderstands it.

That social scientists find meaning within a historical traditioncomplicates interpretation, and it brings one back to Giddens' caution.

Not only is it interpreting what another person is doing, it isinterpreting it from one's historical tradition. This interpretation—call it self—faces another—call it other. So, even while self is trying tolearn the meaning of other's sense-making, self also is historicallysituated, using self's sense-making to make sense of other.

In the social sciences, self is a field of inquiry. Other can be anotherperson, a text, a culture, or a law—any human creation that carriesmeaning. The core issues of self and other—that encounter oftraditions—are the same. The model of hermeneutic inquiry is aboutlearning about the other. The metaphor used to describe thedevelopment of knowledge is called the “hermeneutic circle.”According to this metaphor, self approaches other with an opennessand a willingness to accept that the view of the other is potentiallytruthful—that indeed it may be more truthful than self's. Self changesin the process of interaction with other. Other also changes in theprocess of interaction with self—self's interpretive tradition isexpanding to account for the truths as other's tradition is expandingto account for self's. Knowledge, then, emerges in a constant, ongoingrepositioning and closing of self and other. The process of repositioningof self and other, as knowledge accumulates, is called the hermeneuticcircle.11

Hermeneutic theory

Hermeneutics provides a different way to think about theory.Below, by looking at the interplay between a hermeneutical and ascientific criminal justice, this article provides for consideration of therelative strengths and weaknesses of both hermeneutic and scientifictheory of criminal justice.

Good theory is located in historical traditions. If theory is notgeneral—that is, it does not seek explanation of some aspect ofhumankind generally—one should not conclude that it producesrelativistic or arbitrary results.12 Knowledge, Gadamer (1976, 1981)argued, is located in interpretive communities and carries ahistorical tradition. By historical tradition is meant that texts arethe product of a social setting with its own particular language,values, these meanings have intersubjective validity within identi-fiable communities. The knowledge that develops from interpreta-tion is local shared sense-making about behavior. Good theory, inthis sense, is theory that provides an explanation of collectivesense-making, and is good to the extent that it reproduces andprovides insight into the way a group finds meaning in its life-circumstances.

Knowledge is always—hermeneutically speaking—located in his-torical traditions. Notions of truth, right and wrong, and indeed themeaning of language is itself seen as historically situated. For a socialscience, this means that the language it uses to describe its area ofstudy is also historically situated. This has particular implications forthe social science of criminal justice. What is the historical traditionfor the discourse of criminal justice, and does that history haveimplications for a social science of criminal justice? The answer,discussed below, is that much of the social science of criminal justicetakes its language from the contemporary practice of criminal justicein the U.S., and consequently carries the motivations and purposes ofthe state in its use of that language.

The discourse of criminal justice practice, with its use of terms suchas personal responsibility, deterrence, crime, just desserts, is not anobjective language. Its “reality substrate” is the practice of U.S. criminaljustice organizations, and its language is the discourse of whatcharacterizes U.S. crime control practices. This discourse imparts itsown theories of criminal behavior, typically organized aroundprinciples of personal responsibility, often behaviorally indicated bya willingness to admit to guilt. These theories are the rhetorical basisfor decision-making across the crime control continuum, from thediscretionary decision to arrest, to pre-sentence reports at sentencing,

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to treatment opportunities in an institution, to parole hearings forearly release. Criminal justice practice, in this everyday sense, is aboutthe application of an interpretation of the law to a theory of theindividual's behavior, framed in terms of crime and crime control.

A central feature of crime control discourse is that it is normativelydominant. This means that it asserts itself over any other individual'snormative systems with which it comes into contact. As Cover (1986)noted with regard to the judiciary, criminal justice practice is notinterpretive—it does not seek knowledge about the other. It isdeliberately destructive—it aims at the destruction of the normativeworld of the “other.”

The discourse of crime control practice, consequently, is not and cannever be an objective rendering of human behavior. It represents theway in which the state organizes and acts upon its definitions ofbehavior, to suppress other ways of thinking and justifying humanbehavior. Scientific approaches to criminal justice, however, tend to usethe language of crime control as if it were an objective rendering ofhuman behavior. As Crank and King (2007) noted, to the extent thatsocial scientists treat the language of the state as if it were an objectivescientific language, they are co-opted in and tend to reinforce the crime-control purposes of the state, whether or not they agree with thosepractices.

How, then, does a criminal justice researcher separate herself fromthe language of the state? One refocuses her research back on themeanings provided by the “other,” the inquiry shifts from a practicebased on the state's interpretation of the meanings for the other'sbehavior—lack of responsibility, parenting problems, offending rates,uniform crime rates, victimization, predatory behavior, or the like—andinto a direct inquiry of the other as to the reasons for their behavior.

Recall the “apple” thought experiment: the behavior of “apples” isto be understood in its own terms—the intersubjective relationshipsbetween group members, or their “webs of significance”—that givethe meanings for their actions. The behavior of those caught up injustice system practices cannot be understood in the language ofcriminal justice, which is an imposed language andwill destroy, over arelatively short time, an understanding of the justice issue. The actualreasons for particular actions that may have propelled someone tobreak the law—the issues of justice, morality, or economics—will bereplaced with a discourse that destroys that individual's local “truths.”To the extent that the field of criminal justice research relies on thestates discourse to develop its scientific perspective, it participates notin the collection of truth, but in the legitimation of its destruction.

Within an interpretive scheme, a researcher is not seeking a singleright and wrong outcome—a single underlying social reality. Truth issocially mediated. It is always local and resides within a group's sharedtraditions, and local truths are part of an interpretive community'sway ofcoming to termswith its commonproblems.Hence, efforts to understandtheir discourse represents the closing of the hermeneutic “circle” bycomprehending what their social and everyday world means in theirterms. The process of inquiry and the development of a narrative alwayslocate a researcher as a person seekingmeaning as it is understood by thegroup of interest, even when deconstructionist methods are used. Assuggested by the “apple” example, meaning is interpreted in the contextof the researched—their web of significance—and how those individualsimbue actionwithmeaning. Otherwise themeanings scientists bring arein the end only themeanings they already had, and as Gadamer correctlynoted, only an alienation from the world researched.

If good theory is not universalistic in orientation—if social scientistsabandon the notion that they should seek certain knowledge aboutcrime, crime control, or criminal behavior, for example, thenwhat is itthat they are trying to learn? The answer to this question is anotherprinciple of interpretation. The purpose of knowledge is to carry on theconversation, the next point of discussion.

Good theory carries on the conversation.Here, the discussion returnsto the hermeneutic circle, previously described as an ongoing

conversation between self and other. The understanding that self isable to ultimately achieve—the merging of the horizons, Gadamerfamously observed—is an expansion of self's effective history toinclude the “text” of the other.13 In the future, someone who shares asimilar interest will have the advantage of incorporating self's viewsinto hers, since self will have become part of the tradition of the text.

Thewriting of this article on theory is an example of this point. Theauthors wrote this article to try to think through a writing strategy tocompare scientific and interpretive social science during a historicalperiod when the field of criminal justice seems to be undergoingtheoretical maturation. The motive is to open the field to the broadercreative activity available in the other social sciences, the humanities,and in other places in theworld that practice quite different notions ofjustice than those observed in the U.S. The authors cannot, however,possibly know how or even if “future person” will interpret this workwithin her particular historical perspective. This is because theauthors can never know the shared meanings of the world she willinhabit.What will the field of criminal justice look likewhen she scansacross the passages of time to the work being carried out in this era—ifthe field even exists? Will she see an interpretive turn in criminaljustice as a side-bar, or will it take on importance in “future-place?”What new knowledge and collected truths might she have forunderstanding justice? All such knowledge is beyond reach, as asocial scientist, because the authors cannot “climb into the heads” offuture people and understand their meanings as they will experiencethem.

For this reason, good theory resists prediction. Social scientistscannot freeze-frame time for the meanings they give to things andthen assert that they have it right for all time—what an act ofintellectual arrogance that would be! The goal of theory, conse-quently, is not to develop predictive ability but to “carry on theconversation.”

To “carry on a conversation” carries a great deal of meaning (seeRorty, 1979; Warnke, 1987). Rorty (1979) asserted that carrying on theconversation is the essential work of science. Science cannot come tofinal answers, but science can find new and fresh ways to understandits domains. This notion extends readily to the field of criminal justice.

By conceiving of criminal justice as a conversation, scholars couldengage in an ongoing dialogue about what different and potentiallyfruitful forms justice could take. The field of criminal justice grows byseeking new ways to think about the practice of criminal justice. Thisnotion is echoed in Warnke's (1993) discussion of conversation andjustice:

The subject of a hermeneutic conversation, so conceived, isneither principles of justice to which everyone could agree northe truth of opinions. It is rather the possibility of differentinterpretations of a tradition and of the practices, experiences, andopinions it includes. (p. 137)

Ongoing dialogue—the conversation between different views ofjustice—is important because “the issue is no longer as much one ofrightness or wrongness but one of continuing revision and reform”

(Warnke, 1993, p. 137). This hermeneutic notion of justice bothenables an ongoing questioning of contemporary practices andprovides a forum for understanding differences in practice asinterpretive differences rather than as moral shortcomings.

Good theory is empirical. By empirical is meant that knowledge isderived from observation or experience. To be empirical means thatone relies on sensory experience to develop knowledge of the world.Scientific method is often tied to empirical analysis: the practice ofexperimentation relies on sensory experience and is empirical.

Similarly, the knowledge of a hermeneutic or interpretive socialscience is also empirical. Knowledge, interpretively understood, is tiedto effective history—that part of history that people use on a daily

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basis to deal with routine problems. Human action, located in theintersubjective worlds acted out by ordinary people, is the properfocus of study. Interpretation is at harmony with scientific theory onthis point—it is opposed to “armchair” theorizing, and locates goodtheory in the ability to associate meaning with observable behavior.

The process of theory building, however, is different betweenscientific and hermeneutic notions of social science. In scientifictheorizing, the findings of empirical analysis are generalized back to aset of abstracted concepts. This notion of theory is framed in a discoursewhosemeanings are those of the research or scientific community.Withinterpretive theory, on theotherhand,findings are framed in adiscoursewhosemeanings, to the extent possible, are drawn from the communitybeing studied. One can state, then, the two philosophies of social scienceare in agreement on what empirical knowledge is and why it isimportant. They disagree on the way in such knowledge is attained andon subsequent interpretations aimedat generalizingfindings. To explorethe way interpretation looks at the attainment of knowledge and theability to generalize from it, the authors turned to Geertz's interpretivework in the field of anthropology.

Geertz's (1994) discussion of the meanings of local culture in hisarticle “thick description” is a widely-cited application of interpreta-tion to the field of anthropology. By thick, Geertz indicated thatcultural description goes “all the way down to the most immediateobservational level” (p. 229). Any reading of culture that distances itfrom the observational level will “divorce it from its applications andrender it vacant” (p. 223). The focus of empirical research should,consequently, be at the local or observational level.

Geertz (1994) argued that interpretation served to expand thediversity of ways one thinks through human cultures:

The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not toanswer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answersthat others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, andthus to include them in the consultable record of what man hassaid. (p. 231)

Keeping interpretation grounded in the language and actions oflocal traditions had implications for theory: it needed to be closer tothe world of observation than is often seen in scientific notions ofsocial science. Theory, because of this, was constructed fromimmediate generalizations from cultural data. The product of thisway of constructing theory was not to “codify abstract regularities,” asGeertz viewed scientific theorizing, but to “make thick descriptionpossible” (Geertz, 1994, p. 228). In interpretive terms, thick descrip-tion is a method that aids in understanding the “other” as completelyas possible.

A student of criminal justice might challenge Geertz's notion ofthick description, not with regard to its aptness for knowledgeproduction in the field of anthropology, but whether such a local wayof theorizing is adequate for studying the beliefs and practices ofcriminal justice in the U.S. The challenge to criminal justice is todevelop a “thick description” of criminal justice practices that islocally based, yet broadly insightful regarding practices in the U.S.Consider LaFree and Russell's (1993) observation that all roads inAmerican criminology lead to race. Students of criminal justice,reviewing literature on race, might ask: is the criminal justice systemracist? How can “thick description” help to answer to this question?

Consider Lemann's (1992) study titled “The Promised Land” as awork built around thick description, though its overall purpose was todescribe broad social changes. This study provided a detaileddescription of the African American migration from the rural Southto the urban North from 1900 to 1960, called the “great migration.”Detailed historical references and oral histories provided an immedi-ate, practical sense of the way in which individuals at the timeexperienced the great migration. A discussion of machine politics inChicago in the early 1960s provides a historical picture, at the level of

individual actors, of the broad shift of the democratic party from itsracist character prior to 1960 to its civil rights focus after 1967.

As large and important as it was, the great migration is only onepart of the broader puzzle regarding the relationship between raceand crime. Is it possible to grasp such large social themes affectingcriminal justice within a way of thinking about theory and researchframework designed to illuminate local truths? Questions such as “isthe criminal justice system racist?” cannot even be framed withoutemploying a very broad, sweeping terminology.

The answer to such questions is that, even at such a broad level,interpretation plays a role. The meanings associated with migration,or with racism, are developed from the way in which they are viewedby the actors who experienced them. The gathering together of manyindividual narratives provides meaning to historical events as theywere understood by their participants. Indeed, it is primarily throughthe interpretive work, the thick descriptions provided by oral historiesand interviews, that one can make sense of it.14 One can apply Taylor'sobservation made earlier—general notions are understood only byappealing to concrete events. It is only by studying events at that levelthat one gains interpretive knowledge—the events as lived by thosewho experience them.

The central point taken from this is that, when trying to explainbroad social events, one is engaged in a quite different activity fromgeneralizing theory. Lemann (1992) developed a sweeping perspec-tive, but he focused on a specific event—the great migration—as it wasexperienced by its participants. It is his “thick description” that givesmeaning to the great migration, and that meaning is provided by theparticipants he interviewed.

Convergences

The history of hermeneutic and scientific models of social scienceis dense with disagreement and conflict. Indeed, one can argue that,from the early work of Gadamer forward, hermeneutics has aimed atchallenging scientific notions of social science. When the twophilosophies of social science are compared for their practical (asopposed to philosophical) implications for theory development,however, they are not—at the level of research implications—sopolar. To the contrary, they tend to complement each other in someways, and caution each other in other ways. A review of convergencesbetween the two perspectives is consequently presented in thissection.

1. Both models represent a substantial advancement in social scientificmaturity over normative criminal justice research. Academic criminaljustice in the U.S., Morn (1995) reminds, emerged from policetraining in the early twentieth century and consequently has alwayscontained powerful normative characteristics. That means that theway it organized its teaching tended to mirror the organization ofcrime control practices in the U.S. It also meant that the focus ofmuch of its early research was in relatively straightforward notionsof function—to what extent can knowledge produced by academiccriminal justice contribute to the varied goals and purposes ofcriminal justice organizations, with those goals representing suchdiverse ends as crime suppression and rehabilitation. Criminaljustice theory, under this model, was that body of knowledge thataided the practice of criminal justice.Both the scientific and the hermeneutic models for theory buildingcarry the capacity for critique of such normative approaches. Thescientific model, as it is presented in the works in this article, is abroad-ranging effort to develop theory to understand the behavior ofcriminal justice organizations. Explanations of criminal behavior or ofthe behavior of those caught up in the crime control complexrepresent an incorrect specification of the dependent variable—which is the behavior of criminal justice organizations. Similarly, theinterpretivemodel looks at normative practices, not from thepoint of

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effectiveness, but what they tell one about the meanings and socialconstructions of justice organizations and their participants.

2. Both models are radically democratic. The scientific model of socialscience is democratic, in the sense that the goals of research are thedevelopment of knowledge about crime control practices accordingto the interests of the researcher. Hence, conflict theorists may beinterested in the way in which political economy variables affectsocial control which carries an implicit (and sometimes explicit)critique of the organization of political and economic power in theU.S. Similarly, “thick descriptive” research on police organizations,such as VanMaanen's (1978) “asshole” may reveal informationnot particularly attractive in its descriptions about attitudes andbehaviors of police officers. Importantly, both models of theoreticaldevelopment invoke methodologies that focus the researcher toreal world activities, and that require for the determination of theirideas of appropriate social science development by criteria externalto the observer. In the case of scientific social science, that criteria isrepresented by standards of validity and reliability, and in the caseof hermeneutic social science, the criteria is integrity—the extent towhich an explanation comprehensively explains what it seeks toexplain.

3. Both emphasize the empirical and distrust “armchair theorizing.” Thediscussion of hermeneutics above emphasized the grounding ofhermeneutic inquiry in the concrete traditions of particularcommunities of interest. Geertz's (1994) work in anthropologywas presented as a “thickly descriptive” example of empiricallybased efforts to understand the focus or a research project.Similarly, scientific notions of social science focus on the groundingof theory in “empirical” research. Gibbs (1972) described thelinkages between the “real world” and broader conceptual schemasin terms of epistemic statements, which were inductive linkagesthat allowed vertical generalizations from real world observations,through data, to empirical hypotheses, and to conceptual hypoth-eses. Indeed, both perspectives find theory only meaningful to theextent that it can be tied to concrete observations.

4. The primary challenge to hermeneutics and scientific social science inthe field of criminal justice is positivistic social science. Positivisticsocial science is that form of scientific social science, associatedwith Comte, that places moral value in the pursuit of underlyingsocial “truth.” A mathematical social science could identify “truth,”thus it could be used to predict human behavior for the bettermentof humankind. That in turn would enable social scientists to setgoals and achieve progress.

The goal of early positivistic science was the identification of broadtheories aimed at explaining human activity conceived broadly, anduncovering the truths of that activity. “True” concepts could beidentified if social scientists gathered enough information. Strongprediction could be attained by studying the same concepts inmultiple settings, and an understanding of human behavior, imma-nent and apart from its empirical setting, could be acquired. Withprediction, one could control behavior that was inappropriate, bymanipulating in a human setting the various local indicators ofgeneral theoretical concepts.

This positivistic notion of social science, though looking much likethe scientific model of social science, differs on important dimensionswhen one looks at contemporary criminal justice theory conductedunder the scientific model. After a great deal of research in the field ofcriminal justice, few strong universal predictors of behavior haveemerged. Moreover, none of the criminal justice models for predictingcrime, including models based on previous criminal activity, workvery well, in the sense that they explain a large quantity of thevariance across fields of activity.

One also witnesses a variety of social scientific works that areopenly resistive to general prediction and to any notion of behavioralcontrol of human subjects. For example, research conducted into

institutional theory of organizations, popular in the study of policeand correctional organizations, argues that the behavior and valuescarried by criminal justice organizations in the value structures ofprincipal audiences, especially those in local communities, not inimmanent notions of human behavior. In this way, institutional theoryseems to bridge both hermeneutical and scientific social science.Another example is seen in contemporary class theory, with its strongtraditions of Marxist influence, that has often focused its work onwhat can only be called an open rejection of the authority of the statein human affairs.

The hermeneutic approach is openly resistant to the normativemodel. It is grounded in notions of multiple truths rather than onetruth, with such truths characteristic of the particular traditions oflocal communities. For this reason, truth is never immanent, but isalways tied to some group's traditions. The predictive power of anyscientific model is thus rejected, because the ideas and traditionsthat mark the future cannot be known to present actors. Thus, in theplay of research work, both hermeneutical and scientific socialscience have proven themselves to be highly rebellious to normativecriminal justice and to support for state crime control practicesgenerally.

Conclusion: elements of good theory

Today's class is nearly finished, and everyone is restless. Students'eyes flicker toward the clock. One can hear hallway chatter and rustle.In the back of the room, a graduate student raises his hand as the classlurches to its finish. “I have just a quick question. So is Invitation to aBeheading good theory or not?”

It's a good question, and like all good questions, the answer is yesand no. If the instructor applies the scientific model of social science toit, Invitation is not good theory. It does not provide a scientificsensibility from which one can derive empirical hypotheses. Onecannot even be sure what questions to ask of Invitation in order toderive empirical hypotheses.

It certainly bears on the practice of criminal justice. Many criminaljustice students will enact the will of the state as if it were their ownwill. They should understand the way that rough force and blunt edgeis experienced by those on whom the state takes a dislike. Are theyready for the arbitrary outcomes that sometimes accompany thecriminal sanction? Can they fathomwhat it does to the human psycheto put it in a cage for decades?

Invitation invites quite good literary theory. A great deal ofcommentary has been written on it (see Connolly, 1998). It is full ofdescriptions of coarse, banal art perhaps intended to convey a discourseof totalitarian regimes. The story unfolds and collapses in on itself as itunfolds. The animate living and the stony background confuse eachother, sometimes changing roles. The end is unclear, ambiguous, anddramatic. The story line seems to end as one knows it must, but when itdoes, one do not knowwhat happened.Well, one knows—thewords arethere, plain enough—but the meaning is not in the words. It is hiddenbehind them. Invitation is, in short, everything empirical hypothesistesting, using a scientific notion of social science should not be.

From the perspective of interpretive social science, Invitation looksmuch more promising as theory. In the interpretive field, one wouldread Invitation, one would review the traditions that have emergedaround it—a literary tradition is, from the point of view of interpreta-tion, part of the work. One would ask what it tells about thetotalitarian Soviet Union and its manner of policing. One would askwhat the purpose of the author was, and what purposes have beenseen by other writers who wrote in similar traditions—perhapsTolstoy, and certainly Dostoevsky. Is there a non-totalitarian way tothink about the prison experience? Can one use Invitation to betterunderstand the empirical traditions of Soviet penal practices?

Finally, one could look at this material and ask what “themes,” orbroad sensibilities and central issues—underlay Invitation the work,

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and how can those themes be related to contemporary criminal justicepractices. This is the general method of the hermeneutic circle—expanding horizons to understand the other—and as one does so, oneincreasingly merges their horizon with the horizon of the traditionsencompassed by the work. It is this search for common themes—thepatterns that allows one to make sense of the work and its traditionsin terms of the justice institutions—that give rise to an understandingof Invitation that is indeed theoretical. So yes, Invitation is good theory,but to recognize it as such one has to view the field of criminal justiceas an interpretive social science. It is not good theory because it is abrilliant work of fiction. It is good theory because it is fecund—itstimulates ideas, it forces one to think in unaccustomed ways, and itlocates one within the important justice issues of recent times. To useit as theory though, one has to tie it, in some practical way, to the penalpractices prevalent in the Soviet Union in the era in which it waswritten. Standing alone, it is better conceived as literary theory, notsocial science theory. Applied to social traditions empirically specifiedin time and space, then one can use it as theory.

Another student looks around, then raises her hand. What, then, isgood theory? How does one know it when one sees it? A few studentssigh—they are ready to go. There is no right answer, of course. There isno truth, but there are many truths. That's the central point of thisessay. If one were to distill the previous discussion, bring it to aconclusion that said what good theory was, one can identify twogeneral characteristics of good theory.

First, a good theory has integrity. Integrity means that a way ofthinking through a problem—a theory—associates itself with criteriafor its own evaluation. Within the interpretive literature, integrity isthe notion that a way of thinking—a theory, in this case—is able toprovide a more complete explanation of its domain of interest thanany other explanation. The question of integrity is this: does thetheory provide not only a way of giving meaning to the world but alsofor assessing whether the meanings it provides are accurate? Here,one should take Kuhn's (1962) central lesson to heart—all theories arelimited in time and place, and all eventually will be replaced by newways of thinking. There is no “right” theory in an absolute sense, butthere can be many right theories.

Integrity is often cited as a criterion for assessing the goodness ofinterpretation. How can one know if one interpretation is better thananother? One looks at the breadth of its explanatory power, when itfocuses on the meanings that infuse behavior. Interestingly, when thisvery hermeneutic notion of integrity is applied to a scientific model ofsocial science, it holds up quitewell. A scientific model has a great dealof integrity. It carries with it mutually agreed upon criteria for provingor disproving the explanations it provides. Scientific social science is,in a sense, good interpretation.

If scientific social science is to appeal to interpretation forlegitimacy, it must work within the constraints to good interpretivetheory imposed by interpretation—that it is recognized as the ex-pression of a tradition that provides local truths, rather than theguarantor of a broader or more fundamental notion of truth, andthat its truths are not independent of its empirical settings and thelocal meanings that append to those settings. Even with theseconstraints, the works by Bernard and Engel (2001) and Duffee andMaguire (2007) are high in integrity. The notion of empiricalhypothesis testing, whether or not one agrees with it, is a widelyheld, mutually agreed upon set of conventions for assessing thetruth of theories.

Secondly, good theory is fecund. Fecundity is the ability tostimulate the imagination. Good theory is that which can excite theway one thinks through justice and criminal justice issues. Somethingis fecund if, over time, it continues to generate interest, whether or notit has been empirically rejected.

Why are some works fecund and others not? In this article, theauthors argue that an idea is fecund because it is tied to some problemfaced by a community of interest. A theory, then, is fecund because it

shows how some group or individual conceptually organizes somereal world problem faced by that community of interest. Even if atheory may seem to defy empirical investigation—and it may or maynot—it is fecund if it stimulates interest over time. Marx's work hasbeen fecund—it is tied to the industrial revolution, another profoundlyfecund idea—and it stimulates interest in the inequalities of wealth ina capitalist system. The issue of race in criminal justice is fecund,because many constituent groups consider it to be of considerableimportance and because issues of racial differencing and exploitationhave haunted the U.S. since its founding.

The organization of theory by Crank (2003) and Kraska (2004,2006) appear to be consistent with the criteria of fecundity. Kraskaselected his “orientations of understanding” because they were areashe had found, through his career, that they were the most widely usedgeneral categories of explanation for criminal justice behavior. Crankselected five general categories that he said reflected contemporarythought, and also had been of interest in other social sciences. Thework of both Kraska and Crank seem to fall clearly into the category offecundity—they represent ideas that have been around for awhile, andhave been sustained by communities of interest independently ofassessments of their internal coherence.

For the young field of academic criminal justice, the integrity of itstheories is of central importance. To acquire legitimacy in a scholarlycommunity, the field must focus empirically on its domain of interest.By addressing issues of integrity the theory developed in the field willsurvive legitimacy challenges. Integrity, as recognized in terms ofscientific rules of social science and in interpretive principles of em-pirical completeness of explanation, legitimizes criminal justicetheory in a scholarly community concerned with empirical applic-ability. Integrity is particularly important when it is applied to one ofGiddens' (1976) criteria of good science—it is unflinchingly critical ofits own work.

Fecundity ensures that the field continues to seek important ideas,even though it does not sometimes seem to know what to do withthem. Fecundity insures that the field keeps open to important ideas,or put interpretively, that it seeks the richness of ideas that make upimportant justice issues in the world. Integrity facilitates intellectualhonesty, and fecundity helps the field stay focused on important ideas.

Notes

1. Vladimir Nabokov's (1989), Invitation to a Beheading, New York, Vintage (reissueedition). Cincinnatus' story is one of the great Russian novels of life in a totalitarianregime. Cincinnatus bears on the field of criminal justice because the story line is aboutprison and execution. All the interpretations of those events, however, are highlyinterpretive, and there is substantial literary disagreement on central meanings in thenarrative. The essential question here is—should one seek a definition of criminaljustice theory so encompassing.

2. The use of scientific techniques in the social sciences is frequently called“positivist.” This term, however, carries a great deal of intellectual baggage andideological conflict, so will not be used until later in the article, where positivism iscompared to contemporary notions of scientific criminal justice.

3. These categories are not mutually exclusive. Hypothesis testing for theoreticaldevelopment is clearly a very big idea, providing the framework for the scientificrevolution that characterized the Enlightenment. Both positivist and interpretivetraditions, however, have each staked out their intellectual territories in ongoingdebate in the philosophy the social sciences (see e.g., Martin & McIntyre, 1994), and areaccordingly distinguished here.

4. Chapter four (Castellano & Gould, 2007) is an exception and focuses on theneglect of justice in criminal justice theory.

5. This article not saying that it is Duffee and Maguire's intent to producegrounded theory. Instead it is saying that their theory is generated from a mass of thefindings produced by a mass of specific research efforts.

6. The opening four chapters each provide different notions of boundaries, and theauthors suggest that the reader develop her own notion of criminal justice theory andwhat it ought to be.

7. That justice should be the organizing domain of academic criminal justice alsowas advocated by Castellano and Gould (2007), whose work appears in one ofthe works considered here, Duffee and Maguire (2007). The authors begin with aquestion—whether the American justice system, and in particular U.S. penal practices—are just. The question cannot be answered in a meaningful way if the boundaries of thefield are defined by state-based justice systems. The question propelled justice theory

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into the realm of values, acknowledged by the authors. They argued that justicescholarship should recognize and assess the ideological bases for current justicepractices. Only through an inquiry grounded in notions of justice could one thinkmeaningfully about the broader purposes and ethics of justice practice in the U.S.

8. Does the appeal to historical tradition predetermine the conclusions drawn asregards a particular tradition's conceptualizations of justice? The answer is a qualifiedyes. Central to hermeneutic notions is that key concepts and ways of thinking find theirmeaning within historical traditions, and that, to understand those meanings one mustlearn to think in the manner of thought characteristic of those traditions. For example,MacIntyre's (1988) work on justice locates “justice rationalities,” or ways of thinkingabout justice as it ties to socially expected ends, to specific historical periods andwriters who were characteristic of those periods. It is a qualified yes, in that anyinterpretation involves both self and other, and so other's justice is qualified by self'sability to comprehend other's justice.

9. One should not be sanguine that science, based in scientific method, willcontinue to hold sway over authoritarian bases of knowledge located in church andstate. It is not clear that the principle accomplishment of the Enlightenment—theoverthrow of hierarchical authority as the source of knowledge about the world—willendure.

10. Any language one turns to simply is an interpretation of the first interpretation,and may not be an interpretation to everyone's satisfaction. As Warnke (1987)observed, any language that used to try to enjoin common ground with anotherlanguage is really an assertion of one perspective over the other. It is still, however, aperspective grounded in some tradition. Moreover, there is an infinite regress in theproblem of attempts to find a common language—one ends up appealing to anotherlanguage to explain how their language better explains another language, and then oneneeds another language to explain that explanation, ad infinitum.

11. Gadamer (1976) insisted that self is always already inside the hermeneutic circle.What he meant by this was that a person is always making sense of the world withwhich she is interacting and changing as a result of the sense-making.

12. Warnke (1987, p. 80) noted that “Indeed, on Gadamer's view this historicalexperience limits the potential arbitrariness of my understanding for, insofar as myunderstanding of a given object is rooted in a whole history of interpretations of thatobject, I am protected from an entirely idiosyncratic interpretation of it.”

13. By effective history, Gadamer meant that part of one's background that isbrought to bear on problems at hand. One doesn't have access to their full culturalhistory—only that part of it into which one has been socialized, and then only a part ofthat is used on a routine basis. That latter part is their effective history.

14. This does not mean that one cannot understand the consequences of racist actsdifferently, or that one cannot have the wisdom of hindsight when one looks at theconsequences of acts called racist. Interpretively speaking, self always brings self'shorizon to bear against the horizon of those with whom self interacts, with theexpectation that self has something to learn from other, however uncomfortable thatknowledge might be. Self in this sense does not impose its interpretation on the“other” even when self suspects that other is racist or the victim of racism.

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