Harold Pepinsky

Harold Pepinsky is an American criminologist who, together with Richard Quinney, is credited as a co-founder of peacemaking criminology, a perspective that frames crime, criminal justice and the broader problem of violence in society as connected forms of harm that should be confronted through nonviolent means rather than through punitive control. Pepinsky and Quinney set out this approach in their co-edited 1991 volume Criminology as Peacemaking, drawing on religious, humanist and conflict-resolution traditions to argue that reducing crime requires addressing the social injustice and oppression that peacemaking criminologists saw as its underlying causes, rather than relying primarily on deterrence and incarceration. The perspective positioned itself explicitly against both mainstream criminology's focus on individual offenders and critical criminology's focus on structural conflict alone, proposing instead that criminal justice practice itself should model the nonviolent, restorative values it sought to promote in society.