Newsmaking, Peacemaking, and Translational Criminology

For NET purposes, group these three perspectives under one shared premise before separating them. Each rejects the idea that a criminologist's job ends at publication, that a well-supported finding or a well-reasoned ethical argument left to sit in a journal has done its work.

Where they differ is audience: newsmaking criminology addresses the general public through news media, peacemaking criminology addresses the practice of justice itself, and translational criminology addresses the frontline practitioner deciding what to do on a given shift.

A second shared point worth remembering for objective questions is that none of the three is a causal theory of why crime happens. Each answered a specific practical bottleneck the discipline was failing to clear on its own: newsmaking answered a media environment outpacing academic correction, peacemaking answered a punitive turn in sentencing its founders judged unsustainable, and translational answered a funding and accountability environment that wanted proof research had actually changed practice. None of them replaces the causal theories covered elsewhere in the syllabus.

Gregg Barak introduced newsmaking criminology in a 1988 article and developed it further in his 1994 edited collection Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime. His starting claim is that most people never encounter crime directly, they learn about it secondhand from coverage shaped by deadline pressure and a beat that leans heavily on police and prosecution sources.

Newsmaking criminology's answer is for criminologists to become active participants in the news process itself, through interviews, accessible commentary, and televised discussion, so a statistically literate account competes directly with the anecdotal one.

The exam-relevant contrast is with infotainment criminology, the blending of factual crime reporting with entertainment values, true-crime documentaries and tabloid coverage built around one sensational case are examples. The direction of influence is the key distinction: newsmaking criminology is the criminologist shaping the coverage, infotainment criminology is entertainment values shaping how crime itself gets defined, with any expert appearance reduced to a supporting role lending credibility to a story already decided.

Barak also extended the perspective beyond street crime into corporate and state wrongdoing, arguing that the same media incentives that overreport dramatic street offences underreport harder-to-visualise white-collar and institutional harm, skewing public understanding of crime in two directions at once.

Peacemaking criminology takes its clearest early statement from the 1991 edited volume Criminology as Peacemaking, compiled by Richard Quinney and Harold Pepinsky. Its central claim is that a justice system built on retribution and coercive punishment tends to reproduce the suffering it is meant to end.

In its place it proposes three linked commitments: nonviolence, refusing to answer harm with further harm; care, treating the wellbeing of offenders, victims, and communities as inseparable rather than competing goals; and connectedness, the recognition that everyone involved in a crime remains part of the same community and its future.

Quinney's own path ran through radical and Marxist criminology, where he had argued crime and its definition are products of class conflict and state power. Peacemaking criminology keeps that suspicion of state punishment as an instrument of control but breaks from radical criminology's structural framing by grounding its alternative in personal and spiritual transformation, drawing explicitly on Buddhist mindfulness, Christian nonviolence, and the Quaker peace tradition, rather than political revolution.

In practice, peacemaking criminology has overlapped most with restorative approaches, victim-offender dialogue, and community-based sentencing that keeps offenders connected to their communities. Critics call its language of care and connectedness difficult to operationalise into testable claims; its defenders reply that peacemaking was never meant as an empirical theory of crime causation but as an ethical corrective to a punishment-centred field.

Translational criminology borrows its name from translational medicine, the movement to move laboratory discoveries into clinical treatment faster and feed clinical experience back into the research questions laboratories pursue next. John Laub, a life-course criminologist, brought the analogy into criminology while serving as Director of the National Institute of Justice from 2010 to 2013, launching the magazine Translational Criminology in 2011 to carry the idea to a practitioner audience.

The problem it addresses is the research-practice gap, a persistent lag between what research has established and what police departments, courts, and correctional agencies actually do. A tactic can be repeatedly evaluated as effective for years before it becomes standard practice, while a practice evaluation has failed to support can stay in routine use because no channel carries the negative finding back to the people applying it.

The proposed fix is explicitly two-way, research informing practice through plain-language summaries and agency partnerships, and practice informing research, since frontline patterns generate the next generation of research questions.

The National Institute of Justice's CrimeSolutions database, which rates evaluated programmes by strength of evidence for practitioners to search directly, is one institutional expression of this model. Because a comparable function exists internationally, this is best understood as part of a wider evidence-based practice movement rather than a purely domestic initiative.