Abstract

This article develops a set of reflections emerging from a seminar held by Tony Platt and the author, Jonathan Simon, in 2012 at UC Berkeley and San José State University. A "Radical Need for Criminology" today is to frame punishment and the criminal justice system into a broader critical vision of society, a theoretical effort to recover from some contributions of the sixties and seventies. In the article the attention is focused on two texts dealing with the crucial political dimensions of the relation between crime and minority groups, its ideological implications and its consequences on the process of criminalization in the US. The "Ten Point Program" of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (Newton and Seale) and Griffin's Rape: The "All-American Crime" are here re-read and presented for their capability to offer criminological sparks about the selective practices of institutional control agencies and the racialized representation of violence against women.