A celebrated young novelist gives interviews about her horror fiction. She is eccentric, funny and extremely popular. She is also the founder and commander of an organization that bombs government facilities, and the two careers are not a double life: the books are the argument and the organization is the application. Her position, stated plainly, is that the state agency hunting her kind is not enforcing an order but manufacturing one, and that the category it enforces was written to be enforced. Whatever you think of her methods, that sentence is a summary of an actual school of criminology, and a fairly accurate one.
// The theoryThe question the field was refusing to ask
The New Criminology (1973), by Ian Taylor, Paul Walton and Jock Young, is a demolition of everything that came before it and a demand rather than a theory. Its authors argued that positivism—the search for the causes of criminality inside the offender—had accepted the state's definition of crime as given, and had therefore spent a century producing technically competent answers to a politically loaded question. Their alternative was a “fully social theory of deviance” that had to account for seven things at once, from the wider origins of the deviant act to the reaction it provokes and the political economy that shapes both. Richard Quinney's The Social Reality of Crime (1970) supplied the sharper formulation: crime is a definition of behaviour conferred by authorised agents, and those definitions describe the interests of the segments of society with the power to shape policy. William Chambliss did the empirical work that made it concrete, tracing the English vagrancy statutes to the labor shortage that followed the plague — a law about idleness that was, on inspection, a law about wages.
The category precedes the criminal
The move that separates radical criminology from everything around it is one of ordering. Mainstream criminology takes the offense as the starting point and works backwards to a person. Radical criminology takes the category as the starting point and asks how it came to exist, because until it existed nobody could be inside it. This is not a claim that harm is imaginary — the tradition's own weakest defenders muddied that, and it cost them. It is the narrower claim that the criminal law is a selection from among the harms a society could prohibit, and that the selection is neither random nor neutral: it has authors, and the authors were in the room. Applied here, the point is exact. The CCG does not encounter a pre-existing legal category of ghoul and enforce it; the category, the register, the wards, the detention facility and the profession of ghoul investigator are one apparatus that produces its subject as it processes it. Eto's claim is that this apparatus is not a response to the danger but a producer of it, and the series repeatedly proves her right in ways the CCG never registers.
// The subjectThe author as the first weapon
What makes Eto a better case than a straightforward insurgent is her second job. She does not merely fight the definition; she competes for the narrative that sustains it, publishing fiction that puts human readers inside the experience the official account denies exists. That is the part radical criminology understood earliest and best — Stanley Cohen's work on moral panics and Stuart Hall's Policing the Crisis (1978) showed that a category is not imposed by statute alone but assembled out of press coverage, expert commentary and public fear, and that the assembly can be traced. Hall's team followed the British mugging panic of the early 1970s and demonstrated that the alarm ran ahead of the offense figures rather than behind them. Eto works that channel deliberately, from the other side. She is what the tradition rarely gets: an antagonist who has read its argument and drawn the operational conclusion from it.
And the series does not let her off, which is why the file is worth writing. Her organization kills people who had no part in designing the apparatus, recruits the desperate, and produces exactly the escalation the CCG needs to justify its next expansion. That is not an incidental flaw in her plan. It is the oldest objection to the tradition she embodies, arriving on schedule.
Eto Yoshimura
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// The crackThe romance that its own side had to demolish
Radical criminology was dismantled most effectively by one of the men who wrote it. Jock Young spent the following decade arguing against his own book, and the resulting left realism is the most serious criticism there is. Its charge is that the radical tradition, in its enthusiasm, slid into treating the offender as a proto-rebel and the harm as a construction — and that this was not merely wrong but politically illiterate, because the victims of ordinary crime are overwhelmingly poor, of the same class and the same street as the offender. A criminology that could not say anything useful about a burglary was a criminology that had abandoned the people it claimed to speak for. Three further problems. The tradition is strong on law-making and weak on behavior: knowing who wrote a category tells you nothing about which individuals will end up inside it, which is why radical accounts are almost always paired with something else. Its empirical output was thin relative to its theoretical volume, and much of the durable evidence in this area — Chambliss on vagrancy, Hall on mugging — is historical and interpretive rather than replicable in the ordinary sense. And the framework is vulnerable to being used by anyone: “the real criminals are the people who made the law” is a universal solvent, available to a tax evader as readily as to a labor organizer, and the tradition has no internal rule that stops it. What survives is substantial: the criminal law is authored, its authorship is traceable, and a discipline that studies only the people it catches is describing a filter rather than a phenomenon.
Right about the apparatus, not the bombing
Eto is right about the apparatus and it does not make her right about the bombing. Both halves have to be held, which is the difficulty this archive keeps running into. The state in her story does manufacture the category it polices, does produce by its own methods the violence it points at, and does have, in its own institutions, the most organized cruelty on display — Cochlea is in this archive for exactly that reason. And she builds an organization that kills people who wrote none of it, on a calculation that their deaths will force the structure to show its face. That calculation has been made in the real world many times and the historical record on whether it works is not kind to it. Understanding why the argument is attractive is the only way to answer it.
Three key ideas
- Taylor, Walton and Young (1973) inverted the discipline's question: not why people break the law but why the law is what it is. Quinney: crime is a definition conferred by authorized agents, describing the interests of those who shape policy. Chambliss traced vagrancy law to a labor shortage.
- The category precedes the criminal. The claim is not that harm is imaginary but that the criminal law is a selection with authors — and an apparatus that registers, wards and detains produces its subject as it processes it.
- Left realism, written by one of the original authors, is the strongest objection: the tradition romanticized the offender while the victims of ordinary crime are poor and local. It is also weak on behavior, thin empirically, and usable by anyone.
Sources · to keep reading
- Taylor, I., Walton, P. y Young, J. (1973). The New Criminology. Routledge.
- Quinney, R. (1970). The Social Reality of Crime. Little, Brown.
- Chambliss, W. J. (1964). “A Sociological Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy”, Social Problems, 12(1).
- Hall, S. et al. (1978). Policing the Crisis. Macmillan.
- Cohen, S. (1972). Folk Devils and Moral Panics. MacGibbon and Kee.
- Young, J. (1999). The Exclusive Society. Sage.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Eto Yoshimura?
Eto Yoshimura (“Sen Takatsuki”) is a villain from Tokyo Ghoul, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. She signs books with her face on the jacket and commands Aogiri Tree in a mask.
Why does Eto Yoshimura (Sen Takatsuki) become a villain?
Eto Yoshimura and radical criminology: the novelist who argues that the order is the crime. The file on the tradition that stopped asking why people break the law and started asking who writes it.
Which criminological theory explains Eto Yoshimura?
Eto Yoshimura's case is analysed through Radical criminology / New criminology. In 1973 Taylor, Walton and Young published The New Criminology and inverted the discipline's question. Until then the field investigated why some people break the law; they demanded that it investigate why the law is what it is, who writes it and whom it protects, and argued that a criminology which declined that question was working for the order it claimed to study. Eto Yoshimura is that argument given a body. Her organization commits attacks and her literature explains them, and what she argues is precisely the radical thesis: that the category “ghoul” was written by someone, that it was written so it could be applied, and that the apparatus applying it is the most organized violence in the story.
