The Criminological Imagination By Jock Young

The Criminological Imagination Book Review

Jock Young’s book “The Criminological Imagination” very clearly spells out the author’s feeling that orthodox criminology has lost its way and has been swallowed up into obscurification through bogus, post-modern positivism. Young postulates, the cost of this phenomena is the loss of critical thinking and objectivity in the field of criminology. Young contends criminology can be rescued from obscurity if returning to its orthodox beginnings by reducing the impact of neo-liberalism with critical imagination, and not simply succumbing to empirical data to try to explain everything. Young contends, doing so seems to simply cloud the view, thus giving rise to a host of incomplete and overly politicized theories.

The writer further contends Young’s noting the mathematical models was intentional, and designed to effectively illustrate his point of their ineffectiveness because they are difficult to absorb. Despite such difficulty, the writer contends Young did immediately create some useful insights. Foremost was the ideal of what Young metaphorically termed, the “datasauer also known as Empiricus Abstractus” (Young, 2011). What the writer noted was Young’s critique of modern criminology’s ineffective and improper overuse of empiricism to predict criminal behavior is a flawed concept due to variation fluctuations and data manipulation. The writer noted that Young (2011) used as evidence to demonstrate deficiencies the very thing he argues against in noting the level of explanatory power in multivariate models over-estimates prediction levels (p.