Trapped in dichotomies and individualism: The Western criminal legal system’s failure to capture complexity
February 2nd, 2026
The English-language article “Trapped in Dichotomies and Individualism: The Western Criminal Legal System’s Failure to Capture Complexity”—written by Marguerite Schinkel and Sarah Anderson and published in 2026 in the journal Punishment & Society—offers a radical critique of the cognitive and cultural assumptions underlying Western penal systems.
Through the analysis of qualitative interviews collected in two studies conducted in the United Kingdom with repeatedly criminalized individuals, the authors show how the systematic reliance on dichotomies—such as criminal/non-criminal, guilty/innocent, victim/offender—and on a strongly individualistic view of penal action produces an extreme simplification of lived experiences, generating forms of epistemic injustice and obscuring the relational, historical, and structural dimensions of harm.
Positioned within the debate on the decolonization of criminology, the article calls into question the assumption of Western criminal justice as a universal model, opening space for alternative ways of understanding and responding to conflict and harm that go beyond the dominant punitive and binary logic.
The article can be accessed at the following link.