Bentham in the Anthropocene: Imagining a sustainable criminal justice

Abstract

In a recent discussion on criminology in the Anthropocene, debate has centred on the question of whether criminology should be abandoned in favour environmentally conscious security studies ( Shearing, 2015; South, 2015; Floyd, 201 In pressing for retaining criminology, Rita Floyd has argued that criminalisation is an important technique for ensuring compliance with environmental legislation (Floyd, 2015: 280-282). For all that criminalisation may have an important symbolic impact, as White (2008) has argued, its success as a strategy in eliminating or reducing unwanted actions is hardly encouraging.