Criminology and Justice Studies

Sentences that come directly from the article are in quotation marks. CSUN students, faculty, and staff can access most articles through the University Library using CSUN credentials. Please use the library’s interlibrary loan services if an article of interest is not available.

Barnes, M. L. (2016). Empirical methods and critical race theory: A discourse on possibilities for a hybrid methodology. Wisconsin Law Review, 2016(3), 445–476.

Barnes traces the origins and assesses the progress of the empirical methods and critical race theory (e-CRT) movement. E-CRT rethinks race scholarship “in a manner that reflected the theoretical orientation put forward by critical race scholarship and also embraced the methodological contributions of social science research.”

Blount-Hill, K.-L., & St. John, V. (2017). Manufactured “mismatch”: Cultural incongruence and Black experience in the academy. Race and Justice, 7(2), 110–126. https://doi.org/10.1177/2153368716688741

Studies bear out that “African Americans are drastically underrepresented in criminology and criminal justice doctoral programs and that, once admitted, they have lower-than-average rates of completion. Through auto-ethnographic narratives, this article “explores the ways in which criminology and criminal justice have adopted and reinforced a professional culture that may be incongruent with that of most Black academics.” Borrowing from CRT tenets, the authors examine how the field “imposes criteria for success counter to the cultural orientation of many African Americans.”

Bridges, K. M. (2002). On the commodification of the Black female body: The critical implications of the alienability of fetal tissue. Columbia Law Review, 102(1), 123–167. https://doi.org/10.2307/1123632

Through a CRT lens, Bridges analyzes the impact that a market in fetal tissue will have on Black women, who are more likely to participate in such a market due to their precarious economic situation, their higher abortion rate, and the effects of internalized oppression.

Brooks, R. L., & Newborn, M. J. (1994). Critical race theory and classical-liberal civil rights scholarship: A distinction without a difference? California Law Review, 82(4), 787–845. https://doi.org/10.2307/3480932

By comparing CRT’s treatment of civil rights law with the accounts given by two types of “classical-liberals”: “traditionalists” and “reformists,” the authors account for CRT’s value in modern civil rights discourse.

Chang, R. S. (1994). Toward an Asian American legal scholarship: Critical race theory, post-structuralism, and narrative space. Asian Law Journal, 1, 1-84.

“Traditional civil rights work and current critical race scholarship fail to address the unique issues for Asian Americans, including nativistic racism and the model minority myth.” Chang argues for a post-structural basis for Asian American legal scholarship, which acknowledges the tremendous diversity among the disempowered but which also recognizes that it is through solidarity that Asian Americans will gain the freedom to express their diversity.

Coleman, L. G. (2015). Exploited at the intersection: A critical race feminist analysis of undocumented Latina workers and the role of the private attorney general. Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law, 22(3), 397–433.

Undocumented Latina workers experience wage theft and other workplace exploitation at alarmingly high rates. Coleman applies a critical race feminist analysis to the workplace exploitation of undocumented Latina workers “by exploring cultural narratives that may impact how workers experience workplace exploitation and how they respond to exploitation.” Given the importance of private enforcement of this country’s wage and hour statutes, Coleman positions “private attorneys general, and their role as storytellers, as critical to the enforcement of Latina workers’ rights and argues that the collaboration of organizations and attorneys is necessary to achieve that end.”

Crenshaw, K. W. (2011). Twenty years of critical race theory: Looking back to move forward. Connecticut Law Review, 43(5), 1253–1352.

Crenshaw revisits CRT history through a prism that highlights its historical articulation in light of the emergence of post-racialism. She posits that “the post-racial turn presents conditions that are both parallel to and distinct from those that prevailed during CRTs formative years, and that the challenge of a contemporary CRT is to synthesize a transdisciplinary critique and counter-narrative to the post-racial settlement.”

Crichlow, V. J. (2017). The solitary criminologist: Constructing a narrative of Black identity and alienation in the academy. Race and Justice, 7(2), 179–195. https://doi.org/10.1177/2153368716687624

This article uses a narrative approach to explore Black identity and alienation in the academy. Using CRT as a framework, Crichlow discusses “the dearth of Black criminologists and the potential consequences of the underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities in higher education. Crichlow also discusses the difficulties of navigating a tenure-track career in criminology and criminal justice while deconstructing the burden and responsibility of representing ‘Blackness’ in a predominantly White field.

Crosby, S. D. (2016). Trauma-informed approaches to juvenile justice: Critical race perspective. Juvenile and Family Court Journal, 67(1), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/jfcj.12052

This paper explores “trauma-informed approaches from a CRT perspective to address issues of systemic racial injustice in the juvenile justice system. Current and emerging models for trauma-informed juvenile justice and implications for practice, policy, and research are discussed.”

Gascón, L. D., & Roussell, A. (2018). An exercise in failure: Punishing “at-risk” youth and families in a South Los Angeles boot camp program. Race and Justice, 8(3), 270–297. https://doi.org/10.1177/2153368716678289

Juvenile correctional boot camps “seek to transform youth labeled ‘at-risk’ into productive members of society.” While these military-style programs have been in decline since the early 2000s, the Los Angeles Police Department “continues to embrace them as a key disciplinary practice and vestige of the ‘get tough’ era in U.S. juvenile justice reform.” This study interrogates the treatment of boot camp participants by police and demonstrate how racial exclusion remains central to juvenile social control.

Nagra, B., & Maurutto, P. (2020). No-fly lists, national security and race: The experiences of Canadian Muslims. British Journal of Criminology, 60(3), 600–619. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azz066

The authors conducted 70 in-depth interviews with Muslim community leaders to explore Canadian Muslims’ experience of the no-fly list. They find the Canadian no-fly list “targets Muslim communities, restricts mobility, separates individuals from family and friends, diminishes professional and economic opportunities, and stigmatizes those labelled a security risk.” Drawing on the preventive security literature and CRT of counter-terrorism, this research demonstrates how no-fly lists “erode fundamental aspects of justice, and reproduce racial hierarchies.”

Parks, G. S., & Jones, S. E. (2008). “Nigger”: A critical race realist analysis of the N-word within hate crimes law. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 98(4), 1305–1352. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1248382

The authors analyze the assessment of the N-word within hate crimes law. Employing a Critical Race Realist methodology, the authors analyze Black and White usage of the N-word within popular culture and discuss the findings with research on implicit (subconscious) racial bias. The authors argue that “whereas the N-Word is used by Blacks in a more race neutral manner within popular culture, its usage among Whites immersed in Black culture is nil.”

Rose, J. B. G. (2017). Toward a critical race theory of evidence. Minnesota Law Review, 101(6), 2243–2311.

Rose applies a critical race evidentiary inquiry to stand-your-ground defenses, flight from racially targeted police profiling and violence, and cross-racial witness identifications. Rose further examines “the structural causes of the modern dual-race evidentiary system and offers suggestions about how critical evidentiary analysis by the bench, bar, and academy—including a reinterpretation of Federal Rule of Evidence 403—could make evidence law more equitable.”

Slakoff, D. C., & Brennan, P. K. (2019). The differential representation of Latina and Black female victims in front-page news stories: A qualitative document analysis. Feminist Criminology, 14(4), 488–516. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085117747031

The authors examined front-page crime stories from four different U.S. newspapers using Altheide’s approach to qualitative document analysis. They found that “stories about White female victims received more repeated coverage and were more likely to contain sympathetic narratives than stories about Latina/Black female victims. In contrast, Latina/Black female victims were more likely to be portrayed as risk-takers and ‘bad’ women, and their victimization was normalized through descriptions of their unsafe environments.”

Tehranian, J. (2012). Towards a critical IP theory: Copyright, consecration, and control. Brigham Young University Law Review, 2012(4), 1237–1295.

This article identifies and builds on “critical intellectual-property” scholarship to introduce a framework for studying “how copyright transcends its small corner of the legal universe by shaping social structures and regulating individual behavior as part of a larger hegemonic project. It examines the link between intellectual-property rights and knowledge-power systems.”

Wing, A. K. (2016). Is there a future for critical race theory? Journal of Legal Education, 66(1), 44–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26402418

The author discusses areas where CRT is vibrant now, and considers what we need to do in the future.