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Visual criminology has established itself as a site of criminological innovation. Its ascendance, though, highlights ways in which the ‘ocularcentrism’ of the social sciences is reproduced in criminology. We respond, arguing for attention to the totality of sensorial modalities. Outlining the possible contours of a criminology concerned with smell, taste, sound and touch—along with the visual—the paper describes moments in which the sensory intersects with various phenomena of crime, harm, justice and power. Noting the primacy of the sensorial in understanding environmental harm, we describe an explicitly sensory green criminology while also suggesting the ways that heightened criminological attention to the non-visual senses might uncover new sites and modes of knowledge and a more richly affective criminology.

This article responds to green criminology. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of the coal-producing region of Appalachia and the processes of mountaintop removal mining, the article engages contemporary philosophy, ecocriticism, and “dark ecology” to suggest that green criminology rethink its linguistic categories and epistemological assumptions. The article employs an analysis of some examples of horror cinema to suggest criminological engagement with “ecologies of horror” and the “horrors of ecology” that condition life in the shadow of harmful modes of resource extraction. It concludes with some thoughts on the potential of a “dark” green and green-cultural criminology.

This paper engages the cultural politics of criminal classifications by aiming at one of the state’s most powerful, yet ambiguous markers—the ‘gang.’ Focusing on the unique cases of ‘crews’ and collectives within the ‘straight edge’ and ‘Juggalo’ subcultures, this paper considers what leads members of the media and police to construct—or fail to construct—these street collectives as gangs in a seemingly haphazard and disparate fashion. Juxtaposing media, cultural, and police representations of straight edge ‘crews’ and Juggalo collectives with the FBI’s Gang Threat Assessment, we detail how cultural politics and ideology underpin the social reality of gangs and thus the application of the police power. This paper, furthermore, considers critical conceptualizations of the relationship between police and criminal gangs.

The immediate aftermath of Earth Day 1970 ushered in a host of environmental legislation: in the United States alone, the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, National Forest Management Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and Toxic Substances Control Act were all passed with bipartisan support in the 1970s. [...]in 2020, we are bearing witness to disappearing Arctic ice, dying coral reefs, floating plastic garbage patches, floods, greenhouse gas emissions, intensifying storms, raging wildfires, a precipitous sea-level rise and searing summer heat—as well as mourning the loss of human and nonhuman life in the Deepwater Horizon explosion off the coast of Louisiana, which occurred ten years ago this April (on almost the exact day of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day) and set into motion the biggest oil spill in the history of the United States (Editorial Board 2020). The result has been an area of scholarship which has blossomed to encompass and speak to a diverse range of interests and concerns, including air and water pollution, climate change, deforestation, the extraction and metabolization of natural “resources,” harms to animals other than human animals, environmental (in)justice and relationships between “nature” and “culture.” Continuing the theme of nonhuman animals, James Gacek and Richard Jochelson, in “Animals as Something More Than Mere Property: Interweaving Green Criminology and Law,” further probe the edges of human–animal relations by discussing and describing the development of laws governing human ownership and management of nonhuman animals, arguing that the studies of law and green criminology, when interwoven, “have the potential to reconstitute the animal as something more than mere property.”

The phrase ‘water is the next oil’ is widely used to describe the exorbitant profits produced as a result of its growing commodification (Zabarenko 2009). As McGee (2014) observes, ‘Companies proclaim water the next oil in a rush to turn resources into profit—Mammoth companies are trying to collect water that all life needs and charge for it as they would for other natural resources’.

In this article, we will respond to recent calls for a ‘green cultural criminology’ by attempting to open the way for new visual explorations of environmental harms and crimes, and by suggesting some methodological perspectives that can be advanced by the use and analysis of the photographic image. To demonstrate the power, potential and possibility—as well as some potential limitations—of a green cultural criminology with images, we draw on two ethnographic studies carried out in Huelva (Spain) and central Appalachia (United States). The described methods have the advantage of (1) bringing together the multiple and complex experiences of those who live in polluted areas; (2) considering the cultural meaning given to experiences of ecological change and destruction; and (3) exploring how those experiences are represented, communicated and understood. We conclude with a call to use qualitative visual approaches for carrying out research in an emergent green cultural criminology designed to develop a complex understanding of the multiple forms of environmental harms and crimes.

On 5 January 2015, park rangers in the southernmost region of South Africa’s famed Kruger National Park—a park roughly the size of Israel—encountered a group of three armed men. Suspecting that the men were in the park to kill rhinoceros illegally in order to harvest and sell their horns on the global black market, the rangers confronted the men. According to the accounts of the rangers, the three men opened fire, leading to a brief shootout. When the dust settled, two of the suspected poachers lay dead while the third had escaped into the brush of the park. Speaking at the funeral for Vusi Nyathi, one of the slain men, Nyathi’s nephew, Julio Mabuya, said as he dug his uncle’s grave ‘it feels wrong’. Explaining his uncle’s decision to hunt in the Kruger bush, Mabuya illuminated one of the central confounding problems not only of illegal hunting in Africa but also of the logics and practices of anti-poaching initiatives and (neo)colonial relations with the continent more broadly: ‘the money is there’ (Serino 2015). This chapter will describe the various intersections of capital, poaching, conservation, police, accumulation, and pacification through an examination of some contemporary movements in conservationist responses to animal poaching in Africa—increasingly referred to as a shift towards ‘warrior conservation’.