Journal Article

From critical criminology to the criminological imagination: An interview with Jock Young

Jock Young, Maximo Sozzo, David S Fonseca

2016

Overview

I am sitting on the subway crossing the Manhattan Bridge on the D train, the express train from Brooklyn to Manhattan. You emerge out of the converted lofts of Dumbo, past the Watchtower building of Jehovah's Witnesses, below you is a small park with a pebbled beach, on one side the iconic view of the Brooklyn Bridge and further on the gigantic commercial towers of downtown Manhattan. On your right side the East River turns lazily past the Williamsburg and the Upper East Side glistens in the sun. It is one of the greatest sights of the world. But nobody on the subway is looking, no one is looking out of the windows: my nearest companion is asleep, people are folded into their newspapers, America Oggi, Novoye Ruskoye Slovo, Sing Tao, Korea Times, El Nacional, as well as The Post and the Daily News. Someone (I guess) is listening to the Grateful Dead on the headphone, somebody else (inevitably) hip hop, polka, country and western, the greatest hits of 1960s. An English-looking gentleman listens to the last week's BBC news from a podcast. A young black man, eyes closed, is swaying to rap on his leaky headphones, mouthing the lyrics. Two kids hunched over their PSPs fighting some battle light years away in another galaxy at the edge of the universe. A Jewish woman mumbles the Torah, the book grasped tightly in her lap. Someone is into a heated conversation on his cell phone ('I told him don't give me that shit'). Two girls gently dance together to Reggaeton on a joined Ipad. Everyone is elsewhere, another place, another time, another sentiment, in dream and in trance, another feeling: everyone is going to work but no one is at work apart from the grey-suited man with red suspenders, anxiously reading the Wall Street Journal. By now we are approaching China Town at a fifth floor level, the perspectives wobble and clash, the Empire State building is in the distance, the Chrysler Building to the far right, immediately Chinese graffiti dance on worn out buildings. But I am the only one looking out of the window, three years in Brooklyn and still a tourist. (Young 2007: 173)

• Publisher: Queensland University of Technology. Crime and Justice Research Centre,Queensland University of Technology
• Subject: Attitudes / Crime prevention / Criminology / Critical criminology / Sociologists