Kritická kriminologie
Critical criminology

Summary/Abstract: This essay is intended as an introduction for Czech readers to critical criminology, which emerged in the late 1960s in the United States and Western Europe. It covers the labelling approach, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and conflict theories, and primarily provides a critique of etiologic criminology, which investigates the causes of criminality. The criticism lies in that “criminality” and “criminals” do not have an ontic character, but an ascribed one. It also faults etiologic criminology for not acknowledging all the institutions responsible for producing definitions of crime. Critical criminology examines the entire feedback control system and comes to the conclusion that the criminal justice system targets clients in an extremely selective way, despite the fact that putative criminal modes of behaviour are of universal distribution. This unequal and unfair assignment of the criminality label, along with its negative consequences for “offenders”, is the main social criticism here.

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