BEYOND POSITIVISM - LEARNING FROM CONTEXTUAL INTEGRATED STRATEGIES

Good criminologists are interpretively flexible, searching to read sit uations from the different angles illuminated by multiple theories. Pl ural understandings of a crime problem stimulate a disparate range of action possibilities that can be integrated into a hedged, mutually re inforcing package of preventive policies. Positivist criminology has i ts uses in informing the kind of research-policy interface advanced. I ts limitation is that it focuses on short-term, decontextualized polic ies that are intentionally disentangled from integrated policy package s. This when it is long-term, dynamically responsive, and contextualiz ed, integrated assaults that are more likely to bear fruit. Some sugge stions are made on how to reform criminology so that its creative and evaluative focus is more directed at what Bateson in 1972 called ''sys temic wisdom. '' The alternative is to settle for a positivism that al most inevitably leads to a policy analysis of despair about the intrac tability of the crime problem. That ''nothing works '' is not an empir ically established fact, but an artifact of the epistemology of a scie nce with a particular structure. This structure can be reformed.