In recent years, social movements have been redefining ideas of justice by exposing the social roots of crime and demanding the abolition of prisons and policing. This book provides a historical complement to such efforts, and informs the field of Critical Criminology. Anarchists like William Godwin, Peter Kropotkin, Lucy Parsons, and Emma Goldman were among the earliest modern thinkers to critique criminal justice and professional criminology. They identified the sources of social problems within structures of inequality and recognised how mainstream criminologists' would-be solutions to social problems were themselves the causes or enablers of crime.
