While discussions of public criminology have been alive for some time, it is notable that such debates have often taken place not in the public realm but behind the elaborate entry-systems of academic publishing. Conversely, public debate on crime has become populated by a cast of entrepreneurs and agitators who perform a type of non-academic criminology that exerts profound influence on public perceptions. At the same time, criminologists have increasingly carried the task and promise of public criminology into the world – in communities, schools, prisons and beyond. Against this backdrop we must question what it now means to take criminology public – asking not only what constitutes public criminology, but who it is for and where it is done.

In the long years that have elapsed since Ian Loader and I wrote Public Criminology? (Loader and Sparks, 2010), many things have changed, but not quite everything. This paper briefly examines three persistent, though far from static, questions. As the objects of criminological inquiry change and diversify, how should our understanding of its public roles also shift? In that uncertain context, is there still a central place for interrogating the legitimate exercise of public powers? Can we foster spaces of deliberation on questions of order, security and justice that rekindle some sense of hope for democratic renewal?