インフォーマル・ジャスティスとその批判者

「批判的」犯罪学の現段階

抄録

The emergence or reemergence of informal, decentralized alternatives to American courts for dispute resolution, both civil and criminal, is a highly complex and contradictory phenomenon. This 'informal justice' arose at a time of growing hostility toward professionals and bureaucrats, but it was sponsored or supported by them. Although it is said to be decentralized, its very decentralization is centrally controlled. Although it is said to be informal, it is actually created and constrained by highly formal rules and lines of authority. Informal justice is presented as a community's institution, but the'community' itself exists only in reformer's imagination. Ironically, at a time when actual communities were weakened to lose their traditional informal institutions, state officials, corporate leaders and legal reformers began to quest for a 'community'. As informal justice proliferates, some scholars challenge it. They criticize, among other things, its political character and ask questions about its contradictions, its structural relations to the state, and its meaning in the wider society. They argue that it is unnecessary, it is a failure in its own terms, it is sinister, or it is impossible. These criticisms, however, are true not only for this specific case of informal justice. They could be reproduced almost identically from the late 1970s' evaluations of decarceration, community control and diversion. At the core of their criticisms is the demystification that, on closer examinations, actual processes have turned out to be the opposite of alleged values and even the very key terms. Stranded by such a demystification, some 'critical' criminologists adopted a pessimistic view of any reform programs. At its extreme, misreading Foucault's influential work Discipline and Punish and captured by its images of 'all-surveilling Panopticon' or 'dispersal of discipline', they make up the concept of social control that is nothing more than George Orwell's 1984 or Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Such confusing state is, however, in part a product of the dominant approaches employed in the literature of 'critical' criminology, that is, functionalism, economic reductionism and the so-called 'net-widening' thesis.