one - Judging offenders: the moral implications of criminological theories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2022
Summary
Introduction
This is from An intimate history of killing, Joanna Bourke's controversial and unsettling account of military combat in the 20th century:
The massacre had begun just after eight o’clock on the morning of 16 March 1968, when 105 American soldiers of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade of the American Division, entered the small village of Son My in the San Tinh District, Quang Ngai Province, on the north-eastern coast of South Vietnam near the South China Sea. By the time Calley and his men sat down to lunch, they had rounded up and slaughtered around 500 unarmed civilians. Within those few hours, members of Charlie Company had ‘fooled around’ and laughed as they sodomized and raped women, ripped vaginas open with knives, bayoneted civilians, scalped corpses, and carved ‘C Company’ or the ace of spades on to their chests, slaughtered animals, and torched hooches. Other soldiers had wept openly as they opened fire on crowds of unresisting old men, women, children, and babies. At no stage did these soldiers receive any enemy fire or encounter any form of resistance save fervent pleadings…. After the massacre, the men of C Company burned their way through a few other villages, eventually reaching the seashore where they stripped and jumped into the surf. (Bourke, 1999, p 160)
These gruesome details – and, indisputably, the devil is decidedly in the detail here – are by now notorious, as is the name to which this massacre is commonly referred: My Lai. War crimes and massacres are tangential to the subject matter of criminology. There are historical reasons for this, relating to the circumstances of criminology's birth and its dependence on state patronage (see, especially, Garland, 1994). But there are no good intellectual reasons for it. War crimes are moral abominations; but they are also of course crimes, and are thereby part of the subject matter of criminology.
I begin with war crimes and massacres not because I want to argue that criminology is deficient in neglecting to address them (although this is certainly the case; see Maier-Katkin et al, 2009), but because they vividly bring into focus and dramatise the problem I want to explore in what follows. The problem centres on how social scientists write about and understand the perpetrators of human suffering and injustice.
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- Information
- Values in Criminology and Community Justice , pp. 5 - 20Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2013